FANTASY AMERICA: THE UNITED STATES AS
Transcription
FANTASY AMERICA: THE UNITED STATES AS
FANTASY AMERICA: THE UNITED STATES AS SEEN THROUGH FRENCH AND ITALIAN EYES by MARK HARRIS M.A., The University of British Columbia, 1992 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Programme in Comparative Literature) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA April 1998 © Mark Robert Harris, 1998 In presenting degree freely at this the available copying of department publication of in University of for this or thesis this British reference thesis by partial for his thesis and for her DE-6 (2/88) Columbia of I the gain shall that agree may representatives. requirements agree I further purposes financial permission. T h e U n i v e r s i t y o f British Vancouver, Canada Columbia, study. scholarly or fulfilment It not be is that the Library permission granted by understood be for allowed an advanced shall for the that without head make it extensive of my copying or my written - i iAbstract For the past two decades, scholars have been reassessing the ways in which Western writers and intellectuals have traditionally misrepresented the non-white world for their own ideological purposes. Orientalism, Edward Said's ground-breaking study of the ways in which Europeans projected their own social problems onto the nations of the Near East in an attempt to take their minds off the same phenomena as they occurred closer to home, was largely responsible for this shift in emphasis. Fantasy America: The United States as Seen Through French and Italian Eyes is an exploration of a parallel occurrence that could easily be dubbed "Occidentalism." More specifically, it is a study of the ways in which French and Italian writers and filmmakers have sought to situate the New World within an Old World context. "Among the (More Advanced) Barbarians" (a.k.a. Chapter One) examines the continuities and discontinuities of French travel writing in America from the days of the Jesuits to the heyday of the existentialists. Certain motifs and idees fixes—the uniqueness of American racism; the "magic" of New York—are first identified and then examined. "A Meeting of the Mafias" (Chapter Two) is more cosmopolitan in scope, tracing the ways in which French, American, and Italian crime fiction have historically influenced each other, as well as the relationship of the policier to differing notions of the nation-state. "The Ruins of Rome" (Chapter Three) demonstrates how Italian intellectuals have looked to the United States for new World Solutions to Old World problems. This chapter encompasses two major sub-themes: the positive possibilities for Italy of "Fordismo" (the American industrial model) and American literature (which was believed to promote political, as well as cultural, liberty). "Lurching Towards the Millennium" picks up the threads of the first three chapters and places them in the contemporary context of globalization, a process which threatens to replace the hegemony of the nation state with the omnipresence of corporate power. The cultural model of Quebec is introduced at this point as a New World/Old World paradigm that embodies the chimerical contradictions of a globe on the brink of a new millennium. -ii i- Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 CHAPTER I CHAPTER II Among the (More Advanced) Barbarians 11 Mid-Atlantic Melodrama; or, A Meeting of the Mafias 91 CHAPTER III The Ruins of Rome 194 CHAPTER IV Slouching Towards the Millennium 243 Conclusion 344 Bibliography 362 Appendix I Who's Afraid of Jerry Lewis? 384 Appendix II Pity for John Wayne 389 Appendix III Hypocrisy American Style 392 - iv- Acknowledgements As John Donne almost said, no graduate student is an island—which is to say, this Ph.D. dissertation could not have been completed without the aid of a great many people. First of all, I would like to thank the Killam Foundation, the federal government, and the UBC funding agencies for the generous financial help they provided during the writing of this thesis. Secondly, I would like to thank my doctoral committee for the unique and varied insights with which they broadened and enriched my work. Dr. Marguerite Chiarenza, the committee's chair, served as a cool and calming voice of reason when things seemed most hopeless, as well as an eagle-eyed proofreader. Dr. Steven Taubeneck proved equally knowledgeable about university procedure, and made sure that I didn't wander too far afield from my central point. Dr. Patricia Merivale's vast erudition, meanwhile, provided me with an endless supply of pertinent literary leads. I would also like to thank Professor George McWhirter and the students in his translation class for their helpful suggestions in regard to the English-language renderings of the dissertation's appendices. Dr. Eva-Marie Kroeller's contribution should likewise not be under-valued, since she initiated me into the mysteries of Comparative Literature and introduced me to two committee members. Dr. Thomas Salumets, her worthy successor as program head, proved to be no less helpful. I would also like to thank the library staffs of the Pacific Cinematheque and the Italian Cultural Institute for granting me access to out-of-print texts which would otherwise have been extremely difficult to obtain. Similarly, my appreciation extends to the helpful folks at Manhattan Books who kept me regularly supplied with the latest French and Italian tomes. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Carola Ackery, who stood by me during the months following my nearly fatal automotive accident in April, 1997. If not for her selfless care, it would have taken much longer than it did for this dissertation to get back on track. Consequently, it is to her that this project is gratefully dedicated. 1 TNTRODUCTION In the 73 volumes of The Jesuit that stands out from all the others. Relations, Amid there is one passage endless accounts of pagan souls lost and won, of the hardships and torments endured by Christian missionaries in the land of the heathen, of the endless committed by French drunks and English Protestants, description that owes more to the fantastic itinerant monks, merchants, soldiers there is a single tradition of Herodotus and John Mandeville than it does to the dispassionate, of perfidies and sea hardheaded journals captains. "[Les] deux monstres," spotted by Father Pierre Marquette, SJ, during the course of a seventeenth-century river journey in the American Southwest, "ont des Cornes en teste Comme des cheveils; un regard affreux, des yeux rouges, une Barbe comme d'un tygre, le corps couuert d'ecailles, et le queue si Longue qu'elle fait tout le tour du corps passant par dessus la teste et retournant entre les jambes elle se termine en queue de Poisson" (The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. V o l . 59 140). As we shall see in Chapter One, many of the Jesuits' letters to their religious superiors were written in a style that seems to anticipate the anthropological tone of Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes tropiques. Even so, while reading these texts it is important to bear in mind that even the clearest-eyed observations leave room for monsters. Proto-ethnology, zoology, and botany are never far removed from the realm of magic and wonder. Fantasy America: The United States as Seen Through French and Italian Eyes is predicated on this peculiar split in human consciousness. 2 It takes as its starting point the idea that there is an element of magical thinking Italian in the national perception of other societies. artists colossus of and intellectuals the New misrepresentations Orientalism onto its World which—as did not the impose same Edward upon humiliating Said so nonetheless colonies, characterized by the object otherness the of their economic prejudices eloquently and Culture and Imperialism—expansionist non-white If French and and complains in Europe projected observation rather than by any was "genetic" points of cultural similarity. In other words, America was always seen as something larger than Europe or as something smaller; it could be "inferior" or "superior". What it could not be was the same. National impinge on history, collective local distortions Probably the only peoples whose extreme other nations customs, and frustrated rooted wishes always in psychological projection. immune to this cultural debility are those geographical isolation blinds them to the existence of and other mores.The three countries covered by this study obviously do not fall into this exceedingly rare category, although they do enjoy differing degrees of otherness and affinity. French and Italian, for instance, are both Latin-based languages, while the structure of English owes most to the ancient Germanic tongues. On the other hand, both French and English are, in Gilles Deleuze's sense of the term, "imperialist" languages, while Italian is not. Even so, it should not be forgotten that Latin, the language of ancient Italy, was once the universal tongue of the Pax Romana, and must therefore be ranked as the Western World's basis that it was Hellenic Greek). first imperialist system of discourse spoken mainly in Asia Minor—one (if—on the does not count 3 As it is with language, American their sociocultural Italo-American so is it with most things. While Franco- affiliations can more counterparts, these contradictory and ambiguous. For every often be perceived comparisons than are often conclusion reached, one could have arrived at a counter-conclusion which was almost as sound. What's more, the ties of influence and observation do not always flow in a bilateral direction. In societies that every day grow more global and less tribal—a description which currently encompasses all but a few communities in Africa and Asia—increasingly complex needed to properly explain the flow cases, definitive boundaries of pontification academic ideograms of progression/regression. exceeds speculation. even To speak the isolated In many most on such are generous matters is to commit the intellectual sin of hubris. In order to avoid the worst of these excesses, I have decided to limit my study of French and Italian perceptions of America to models which at least two of the concerned parties —one of which must always be the USA—have shared to a significant degree. For this reason, the reader will find little or no comment on such subjects as opera, science fiction, Renaissance painting, Impressionism, rock 'n' roll, collections aphorisms, peplumi, thousand Instead, Broadway musicals, rhythm and blues, other I have locally decided production. Respectively, and—for want of relation, American epic book length poetry, commedia popular manifestations to focus philosophical on three of primary these are the travel book, the a better term—the commentators are areas or less or a creativity. of artistic polar/policier, cultural survival essay. more essays, dell'arte, national of silent In this partners. 4 Though constantly spoken of, they almost never speak of those who so confidently define them. "Among the (More Advanced) Barbarians," the first of America's four chapters, deals with French Fantasy intellectual attitudes towards the United States, from the Counter-Reformation era (when the Jesuit Fathers first set an enduringly Gallic cultural stamp on the New World) to the late 1960s (when aging existentialists poststructuralists took this and more youthful newly-imperial republic to task for its foreign and domestic policies). This was the period when virtually all Gallic observers political saw convictions travellers. Some the United States as or of personal these "other," regardless predilections accounts appear in of individual the form of of the literary travel journalism, others in the guise of fiction. A l l are, to a greater or lesser extent, realistic. Readers in search of a "fantastic" New World akin to the one depicted in J . G . Ballard's science-fiction novel, Hello America, will surely be disappointed. For my purposes, the words "Fantasy America" refer to certain carefully defined outsiders' "takes" on their country of study—nothing more. By adhering to this policy, I hope to underscore the fantastic elements which underlie the surface naturalism of the texts and films under discussion. For reasons of topicality and source availability, the lion's share of critical attention will be focused on postwar works of film and literature. For historical reasons, early Italian impressions of the New World are not included here. La Nouvelle parcel of the ancien until 1870, France, after all, was once part and regime. Because the Risorgimento was not complete the Italian government was never in a position to acquire North American colonies (even if the newly "discovered"—to its long- 5 term inhabitants, it was never truly "lost"—continent the Italian mariner, Amerigo Vespucci). was named Whatever after expansionist impulses the brainchild of Cavour and Garibaldi might have felt during the last decades of the nineteenth towards the last few acres century were, of Africa of necessity, directed which were not already under European control. In other words, French voyagers to the United States were imbued with denied a vestigial proprietory interest to their Italian counterparts. which No matter how was to "other" the be New World might appear to Parisian travellers, the ubiquity of French place names could not help but remind them of a very distant familial relation. Conversely, the very size and success of America had to appear on some level as a symbol of cultural defeat, an emblem of "Anglo- Saxon" hegemony, the economic consummation of anglophone self- aggrandizement that began with the Hundred Years' War (if the words "Englishman" and "American" House and Whitehall, they seem mutually exclusive sound far more convergent in the White in the Elysee Palace). The French intellectual elite's deep-seated suspicion of perfidious Albion reborn as the crude but vital U S A did not, however, entirely preclude feelings of love, admiration, and curiosity. Quite the contrary. America's limitless and vast spaces, mechanical ingenuity, democratic wealth, industrial capacity, motion pictures, music, literature were at least as much adored as they practices, automobiles were derided. Above all, the new nation was a paradox. "Barbaric" though it was, this upstart colony in some ways seemed superior to the Old World at a time when the natural superiority of Europeans over all other peoples was almost not, universally held—at least by Europeans. America was 6 therefore, the kind of exotic Middle Eastern backwater that Victor Hugo and Gerard de Nerval explored in their more flamboyant century fictions. ersatz Asian parables It was, lands designed rather, more like the which to admirable but Voltaire conjured up underscore the social, nineteenth- a century religious entirely earlier in and political shortcomings of continental Europe. In some ways, French writing about America can be seen as a sort of convergence of these two styles of "Occidentalism". Italy's interest in the U S A was far more selective and pragmatic. As we shall see in "The Ruins of Rome", my argument's third chapter, for Italian intellectuals possible most solutions open specificity of America was primarily seen as a storehouse of for endemic all Italian problems. While statistically European nations to outside influences, was implicitly assumed to be too strong to suffer the Italian significant alteration. Regardless of whether one read Georges Simenon or Renato Oliveri, John Steinbeck or Carlo Levi, Calabria would still be Calabria, Tuscany Tuscany, and so on. In the foreward to his bestselling popular history, The Italians, Luigi Barzini wrote that, for Italians "the most fascinating subject of all [is] why are we the way we are" (Barzini xv). To write about Italy was notoriously hard, he claimed, because of "the absurd discrepancy inhabitants' quality of between achievements quantity through many and dazzling centuries their national history...." (Barzini searching, the presence shadow the x). and In this array the of the mediocre endless of America can only appear as a distant selfecho, or beacon, despite the fact that, post-1945, the United States has meddled more directly in Italian internal affairs than it has in the political ambitions of the French. Ironically, the nature of this paradox 7 can more profitably be explained in Chapter Two than it can in Chapter Three. As its title suggests, "A Meeting of the Mafias: or, Mid-Atlantic Melodrama" is primarily concerned specifically, it deals with the with "cops and fictional representation robbers"; of more same in the novels and feature films of French, Italian and American cineastes and authors. It is no accident that it is also the chapter most marked by sociological bias, since its author will attempt to prove that many, if not all, of a given society's underlying social structures are reflected or revealed by its attitudes towards social deviance. According to this logic, Inspector Javert, Philip Marlowe, and Vittorio de Sica's anonymous bicycle thief say more about deep French, American and Italian societal assumptions than would a similar array of Rolands, Leatherstockings, and Infernal poets. The fine points of a nation's imagination are at least as revelatory of hidden assumptions, fears and yearnings as are its economic infrastructure and political mythology. This belief is, of course, very widely shared by genre critics. For the duration of Chapter Two, I must count myself among them. "A Meeting of the Mafias" is the one section of this study where French, American and Italian influences effect, I have enjoy almost equal status. To achieve this eliminated from consideration Deleuze would call "le roman a enigme," that is the genteel detective story whose guiding geniuses were, what are, and probably always Gilles will be, Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Since the roman a enigme is a quintessentially English style, it has been dispensed with here. On the other hand, because what I do describe is so beholden to the stylistics of film noir, I am obliged to mention some of the Germanic influences on 8 the American and French crime story (Expressionist influence on / gialli being weak to non-existent). Essentially, deals with three sorts of policier: and the sociological crime "Mid-Atlantic Melodrama" the underworld saga, the film drama (the latter an almost Italian—and in some ways anti-generic—phenomenon). noir, exclusively These styles are among the most widely scattered in the domain of international cinema, so Chapter Two's conclusions made on behalf of Fantasy are correspondingly broader than those America's less cosmopolitan quarters. "Slouching Towards the Millennium", the dissertation's concluding chapter, is also the most contemporary. It deals with historical moment wherein American cultural influence the present has assumed a position so commanding it threatens to occlude all rival visions. In the once culturally secure, closed circuit of France, U.S. sounds and images are no longer just arrogantly seductive exotica, but an integral part of a no longer national mass media. Italian cinema, for many years the most vital and desperate commercially successful for international exposure in Western it must Europe, package is new now so films like venerable classics and peddle them to film societies around the globe in the probably vain hope local that such tactics distributors. Under the will attract the attention implacably expansionist aegis of of Jack Valenti, the big studios represented by the Motion Picture Producers of America conglomerate have effectively banished all but a token number of subtitled features from U.S. and Anglo-Canadian screens. Meanwhile, in post-GATT Europe, Francois Mitterand's former minister of cultural affairs, Jack Lang, still struggles to put meaningful films together by the desperate different expedient countries. of As yoking the together possibility of backers from presenting an five or six authentically 9 French or Italian cinematic face to the world diminishes in the presence of the Hollywood juggernaut, it is becoming increasingly difficult to add even a vaguely European visage to the cultural mix. If Jean Baudrillard is to be believed, the barbarians are no longer simply at the gates, but actually in the living room, mixing drinks and flicking the converter. What's more, they're inter-marrying with channel the locals to the point where the genealogy of certain works is difficult to determine. Luc Besson's most Le Cinquieme element (1997), for example, expensive European feature known almost exclusively ever released, yet by its U.S. release title, is reputedly everywhere The Fifth Like a Freudian parent, American influence is now so deeply in the European subconscious the it is Element. embedded it might well prove impossible to ferret out. While Chapter Four will include a number of recent literary sources, including Julia Kristeva and Philippe Labro, it will focus more particularly European attached on the changed perspectives mass media in general, appendices for related and and film documents). survival problems in particular (please The now dated of see Gallic enthusiasm for be-bop, Alfred Hitchcock, Jerry Lewis, and le roman noir will be reconsidered in the similar vein, the seemingly subtle light of post-modern affectlessness. downgrading and redefining of Italy's In a unique, insuperable problems will be reassessed. Following what might, at first glance, appear to be a somewhat dubious distribution of analytical emphasis, fully half of Chapter Four is taken up with the ways in which Quebecois poets, novelists, and cineastes have tried to make sense of their uncomfortable closeness to the United States and their painful separation from the ancien regime. 10 By maintaining their Zeitgeist the Old and New France, Worlds, mid-way between the dominant myths of the postmodern inheritors of la nouvelle I would argue, shed invaluable light on the problems we have discussed thus relentlessly far. At the present time, political power is being bled away from nation states and ruthlessly transfused into the "veins" of large corporations. The governments of France, Italy, and other industrialized countries are all signatories to a new generation of free trade agreements which read like documents treaties in which the rights of nations programs, cultural industries, interference are corporations to sentiment is declared make moving to protect and social welfare secondary unrestricted away of absolute surrender, from to the profits. the their own benefits rights from of political outside deracinated Increasingly, larger medicare nationalist structures and settling into the smaller but more welcoming territory of "regions". For all these reasons, I have granted Quebecois perceptions of the USA/France conundrum a great deal of space in my summary chapter. True "Italianness", cose all'italiana. Luigi Barzini believed, lay in what he called These were the relatively few national characteristics that distinguished his countrymen from their European neighbours. But "What exactly are these cose all' italianal" he asked rhetorically (Barzini xv). To answer this question he wrote attitudes and trends, the strengths and weaknesses, the strokes and bad historical luck which resulted situation. While the queries posed an entire book devoted in this by Fantasy to the of good unique psychopolitical America are nowhere near so straightforward, in some respects they are quite similar. Before discovering how the three subject cultures shape and define another, one must first understand what makes France French, one America 11 American, and Italy something about notoriously elusive Italian. In the process, both trail the nature of hopefully, cultural one will learn production of international cultural influence. speaking, this study will probably raise more questions and the Practically than it answers. On the other hand, I have tried to make these queries as stimulating as possible so investigation that they in the future. might serve as springboards to further 12 CHAPTER ONE: A M O N G T H E (MORE ADVANCED) BARBARIANS Politically, France never poured much will into the preservation of its North American colonies. In La Naissance d'une race, Abbe Lionel Groulx, the influential Quebecois nationalist, ruefully noted this fact: "Dix mille immigrants! Voila tout ce que la France a jete sur les rives de Saint-Laurent pour y fonder une race et creer un pays" (Groulx 22). The figure of 10,000 colonists, after more than two it should be noted, was centuries of nominal colonization. At times, total juddered around zero. During beginning of the the total achieved one particularly low the point at the seventeenth century, a Jesuit observer describes the plucky Heberts as "...l'unique familie de Francois habituee en Canada" (The Jesuit intellectuals Relations of the and Allied time did not Documents, Volume 5 42). discourage the crown's French lack of imperialist resolve in this corner of the globe. As the Abbe Groulx sadly noted in his nationalist lamentations, Voltaire—the man who coined the famously dismissive phrase "quelques arpents de neige" in relation to la Nouvelle France— "...appellera un jour le Canada 'le plus detestable pays du nord....'" (Groulx 81) To some extent this disdain was shared by Europe's other colonial powers. South American silver and Caribbean sugar were the overseas commodities and the which were eighteenth in particular demand between centuries. Even England, the sixteenth in temporary control of most American possessions north of the Rio Grande following its victory in the Seven Years War, was somewhat dubious about the value of its conquests. In Le Temps du monde, Fernand Braudel points out that, at 13 the time of the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, "L'Angleterre aurait prefere au Canada (enleve a la France) et la Floride (qui lui cede l'Espagne) la possession de Saint-Domingue" (Braudel 354). On the other side of the treaty table, such a trade, however, was totally unacceptable to a "France desireux sucrieres, firent que de conserver Saint-Domingue, la reine des ties les 'arpents de neige' du Canada revinrent a l'Angleterre" (Braudel 354). Ironically, as J . M . Gautier notes in his introduction to Rene de Chateaubriand's immensely popular century "American" novel Atala, late eighteenth/early nineteenth the French public's interest in actually reading about America dramatically waxed even as the country's ability to influence events on that continent travellers' books, such as Moeurs et Description voyage fait generale de dans des waned. Sauvages Americains and la Nouvelle France, VAmerique Enlightenment bestsellers. precipitately septentrionale, Early Histoire avec le journal were notable d'un Age of Much of this success can be attributed to the "sensational" elements contained in these accounts penned by explorers and—especially—missionaries. Jesuit militants never tired of telling their superiors about the "nakedness" and "savagery" of the "lost souls" whom they were attempting to save. Even clothed Indians seemed shamefully bare to these Catholic zealots. As one Jesuit disapprovingly sniffed, even the natives' winter furs "...n'empfeche pas qu'on ne voye la plufpart de leurs corps" (The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Volume 5 24). If their descriptions calculated these not of Indian "licentiousness" to provoke too missionary wanderers many explicitly felt no such were cloaked in terms concupiscent compunction in thoughts, regard to scenes of physical torture. With a cold-blooded detachment that would 14 have done credit to Claude Levi-Strauss, one observer described the following sadistic procedure in almost surgical terms: "...ils leurs percent les bras au poignet auec des baftons pointus, & leurs arrachent les nerfs par ces trous" (The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Volume 5 30). French fascination with the "horrific" novelty of America can be found with equal facility in this revealing but anachronistic (the speaker, all, is a Florentine nobleman speaking in 1535) Alfred de tournent Musset's curiosite monstreuse speech fragment from historical play, Lorenzaccio autour de moi avec des yeux louches, after (1835): comme apportee d'Amerique...." (de Musset "Ceux qui autour d'une 153). "Monstrous curiosities": for a long time that phrase defined the nature of the French reading public's fascination with America. It was precisely the kind of semi-legendary land that John Mandeville might have visited a century or two earlier. In any event, it was altogether different—which is to say, both weaker and coarser—than Marco Polo's China. In Tzvetan appertained comprends to the Todorov's class ni langue of ni les words, the "...inconnus, coutumes, early des American etrangers si etrangers "Other" dont je que j'hesite, ne a la limite, a reconnaitre notre appartenance commune a une meme espece" (La Conquete de l'Amerique 11). Despite these initial impressions towards eighteenth the new World began to and motivations, change towards century. In the wake of Napoleon's French the attitudes end economically of the motivated dumping of France's last major American possessions, "les Francais," J . M . Gautier reminds us, "pouvaient regretter 'd'avoir perdu ce nouvel Eden auquel ils avaient laisse le doux nom de Louisiane....'" (Chateaubriand 4). Around the same time, "...au XIXe siecle, l'exotisme americain laisse la 15 place aux mirages de 1'Orient" (Chateaubriand 4). [This change was not absolute, however. According to biographer Henri Troyat, even Honore de Balzac—arguably the major French writer of the early 1800s who was least demonstrably impressed by the American mirage—was inspired by the sylvan romances of James Fenimore Cooper to turn the insurrectionaries in his historical novel Les Chouans into peasant "Peaux-Rouges" in the "Bocage normand" (Troyat 126).] On one level, Gautier's contention is absolutely true; on another, it is somewhat misleading. If the romance of America was in the process of giving way simultaneously monstrous to the Romance of Orientalism, the New metamorphosing shape in Gallic into a new imaginations. and America only the World was slightly less horrible and magical was about to be replaced by America the modern and implicitly dangerous. As Fernand Braudel observed "Accarian de Seronne voyait, des 1766, in Le temps du monde, se lever un 'Empire americain': 'La Nouvelle-Angleterre, ecrivait-il, est plus a redouter que l'ancienne.-..' Oui, un Empire independant de l'Europe, annees plus prosperite tard (1771) qui menace sur-tout de 'un Empire, dit-il quelques dans un avenir tres prochain la l'Angleterre, de l'Espagne, de la France, Portugal et de la Hollande.' C'est-a-dire que s'appercevaient deja du les premiers signes de la candidature a venir des Etats-Unis a la domination de l'economie-monde europeen" (Braudel 354). This change, however, occurred gradually, and in a decidedly nonlinear fashion. The immense popularity of Atala was in large measure responsible for this. A relatively small part of Chateaubriand's magnum opus La Genie conservative du christianisme, a polemic in favour of an ultra- interpretation of Roman Catholicism, Atala relied heavily 16 on the Jesuit Relations for descriptive passages and background colour. While opinions differ as to whether Chateaubriand ever actually set in America—the late nineteenth-century French literary critic Bedier remained firmly convinced that he did not—the to rely on missionary chronicles religious convictions. dissertation, Father work was nous author's decision conditioned almost entirely free Marquette's contributions appealing to Chateaubriand. In 1675, laquelle not entirely Joseph by his As already mentioned in the introduction to that massive descriptions. was foot nous embarquames of were this "fantastic" particularly this Jesuit wrote "La Riuiere sur s'appelle MesKousing, elle est fort large, son fond est du sable...elle est pleine d'Isles Couuertes de Vignes; sur les bords parroissent de bonnes terres, entremeslees de bois de prairies et de Costeaux, on y voit les chesnes de Noiers, des bois blancs, et une autre espece d'arbres dontz les branches armees de longues espines" (The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Volume 59 Such reports exactitude mingle the same seductive mixture of 106). ethnological and Eurocentric romance that one finds first in Atala, then—a century and a half later—in Tristes tropiques. Regardless and of Chateaubriand's own familiarity with the Mississippi river, Marquette's description would be repeated almost narrative power was far more evocative imagination could conceive. would this literary Jesuitical verbatim in Atala because than anything the author's own Not until very late in the twentieth ethnology be its largely expunged from century French consciousness. Equally appealing to Chateaubriand and his successors were the already cited Jesuit accounts of the Indian science of torture. These gory tableaux were an absolute godsend to the interlocking genres of 17 melodrama and grand guignol. This interest would doubtless have turned the first Americans into one-dimensional villains if the Indians' "innate" propensity for physical cruelty had not been counterbalanced by the great tenderness all which, the Jesuit fathers disapprovingly noted, "savages" displayed towards their undeserving young: "Toutes les nations Sauuages de ces quartiers, & du Brafil, a ce qu'on nous temoigne ne fauroient chaftier ny voir chaftier vn enfant: que cela nous donnera de peine dans le deffein que nous avons d'inftruire le ieuneffe" (The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Volume 5 220). Chateaubriand's integration of these sentimental opposites in Native protagonists contributed greatly to the invention of the "noble savage," a type much beloved by Rousseau and other eighteenth century progressives. The Indian was not a demon, after all; he was a sort of capricious child or innocently murderous kitten. Ultimately, neither the Jesuits nor Chateaubriand were fated to mark out the boundaries of French discourse vis-a-vis the United States. For one thing, questionable Missionary sylvan filtered judges emphasis romance out intervention American their of Native on moral were such key on ultra-Catholic religious character uplift and views Protestant historical events as of the thirteen them intention. and Classical fascination culturally-determined blinders behalf made the decisive revolted successfully French naval colonies Revolutionary War, and Britain's earlier Acadians. Being the first European to see that with during expulsion of the the the New World in its true colours was an honour historically reserved for Alexis de Tocqueville, a literary traveller who is observations as much esteemed for his nineteenth-century by contemporary American scholars as Stendhal's writings 18 of the same period are by modern Italian academics. when Romanticism was Tocqueville gradually effacing reinvigorated the still studies with some much-needed Classicism in Europe, virgin scientific The author's most famous book, De was predicated on four interlocking Around the time field of de Franco-American detachment. la democratie en Amerique, ideas. The first of these concepts related to democracy as a political institution; the second addressed the nature of revolution; the third concerned the relationship of individuals to institutions within the binding framework of social style and national character; the fourth—and to modern readers, the least convincing—was the thesis that God worked on the doings of men within the confines of a fatal circle of freedom and necessity. Unlike many later French travellers, de Tocqueville was favourably impressed by the things that he saw in America. He wrote admiringly of the checks and American system of government, the average citizen, of the balances that were of the intelligence innovative genius of essential to and worthiness the of U.S. engineers and manufacturers, of the relative freedom of American women, and of the unparalleled skill of Yankee clipper ship captains, the astronauts of their day. With great foresight, he saw the future parcelled out between American and Russian spheres of influence, and accurately predicted America's coming war with Mexico. If he was not quite so prescient in regard to the War Between the States, he nonetheless pointed out many of the less obvious evils of Southern slavery, and the friction that these ills caused within the body politic. De Tocqueville has never put American backs up; indeed, he tends to make U.S. readers preen with gratified pride. 19 As a starting point for French travellers in America, however, Tocqueville's occasional criticisms of the new struck a deeper chord among his fellow numerous praises. disdain frequently enthusiasms. les This was democraties, prodigeux" first—and at least partly because a faint current of flowed les il est lecteurs moins have countrymen than did his more beneath the onrush Comparisons such as the following aristocraties, republic seem to de sont difficiles malaise of his diegetic are ubiquitous: "Dans et peu nombreux; dans les de leur plaire, et leur nombre est (De la democratic en Amerique. Tome II 264). Not for the certainly not for the last—time, de Europe's quality with the New World's quantity. Tocqueville contrasts Although generally in favour of an expanded franchise in his native France, and a theoretical advocate of democracy, this articled republican is clearly troubled by the cultural cost such a transition might entail; in this regard, his views eerily prefigure the twentieth-century forebodings of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Developing on their own on the fringes of civilization, "Les Americains n'ont point d'ecole philosophique qui leur soit propre, et ils s'inquietent fort peu toutes celles qui visisent l'Europe, ils en savent a peine les noms" (De la democratie en Amerique. Tome II 13). De Tocqueville grimly noted the absence of elegant public buildings and heroic statuary in U.S. town squares: "Les seuls monuments des Etats-Unis sont les journaux" (De la democratie en Amerique. Tome I 159). Although abundant everywhere, American newspapers were not, it seems, of particularly high quality. For every admission of political inferiority in this book, there is a qualifying expression of cultural superiority. The statement below is a good example of the former: "Les Americains forment un peuple democratique qui a toujours dirige par 20 lui-meme les affaires publiques, et nous sommes un peuple democratique qui, pendant longtemps, n'a pu que songer a la meilleure maniere de les conduire" (De la democratie en Amerique. Tome II 31). A prime sample of the latter runs as follows: "L'aristocratie est infiniment plus habile dans la science du legislation que ne saurait l'etre la democratie" (De la democratie en Amerique. Tome I 181). De Tocqueville's views on American racial problems were fated to make the most lasting impression on French literary travellers. of his non-dogmatic Christian beliefs Because and aristocratic background, de Tocqueville's appreciation of American religious toleration and economic egalitarianism is greatly exaggerated. It is, for instance, hard to imagine period American Catholics, for the most part impressed into the worstpaying jobs and largely shut out of the liberal professions, the following statement: "Aux Etats-Unis, point parce que la religion est universellement de agreeing with haine religieuse, respectee et qu'aucune secte n'est dominante...." (De la democratie en Amerique. Tome I 138). It is equally difficult to conceive of cellar-dwelling industrial workers accepting the ensuing formula as fact: "En Amerique, cependant, ce sont les pauvres qui font la loi, et ils reservent habituellement memes les plus grands avantages de la societe" (De pour eux- la democratie en Amerique. Tome I 30). So clear-sighted in so many ways, de Tocqueville was strangely blind to the existence of an American class system. The religiously outcast and the working poor could only react to those cheerful over-assessments with mocking scorn. Contemporary Black and Native readers, on the other hand (assuming same then existed), could only reject their plight as part of a the psychological literate communities of Frenchman's summation of survival mechanism. To 21 acknowledge that things were truly as bad as this foreigner claimed was to run the risk of slipping into suicidal despair. There was writings likely a strong "noble savage" element in de Tocqueville's about America's original inhabitants. Indeed, that they contributed to the nineteenth eighteenth n'avaient century jamais orgueilleuses, de myth: "Les admire de plus plus century annealing of an fameuses courage plus intraitable amour de it seems highly republiques ferme, antiques d'ames l'independance, plus que n'en cachaient alors les bois sauvages du nouveau monde" (De la democratie en Amerique. Tome I 22). Indians, de Tocqueville sadly noted, were steadily being pushed westward by America's small but genocidal army. Steadily, they were losing their land: "Les Indiens l'occupaient, mais ne le possedaient" possession of (De vast la democratie territories en and Amerique. lacking Tome major immediate vicinity, America was a land of few I 24.) enemies in In their soldiers but an almost infinite number of militiamen. No one would intervene on the Indians' behalf; their ancient world was doomed. If American slaves were in no danger of being immediately exterminated, in all other respects their social situation was even less enviable: servitude; lTndien "Le negre aux Amerique. place vecus; est limites Tome place extremes I 248). aux dernieres de la liberte" bornes (De de la democratie For Black Americans, there was to run: "Les Indiens mais la destinee des mourront dans l'isolement la en literally no comme ils ont negres est en quelque sort en lacee dans celle des Europeens" (De la democratie en Amerique. Tome I 262). The fates of Blacks and Indians, though diametrically opposed, were inextricably interlinked: "Ces deux races infortunes, n'ont de commun ni 22 la naissance, seuls se ni la figure, ni le langage, ressemblent" (De ni les moeurs; leurs malheurs la democratie en Amerique. Tome I 246 - 247). A cloud of dark irony surrounds their respective dooms: "Le negre voudrait se confondre avec l'Europeen, et il ne le peut. L'Indian pourrait jusqu'a un certain point y reussir, mais il dedaigne de le tenter" (De la democratie en Amerique. Tome I 248). the Emancipation Proclamation was More than thirty years enforced, before de Tocqueville wrote of the anti-Black racism found in the so-called abolitionist states—a racism more intense and bitter than any to found in the slave-owning states—and already Southern of the nascent inner city ghettoes, which he believed to be more continental dangerous than the meanest urban environment in Europe. Despite his unavoidable Eurocentric bias, de Tocqueville's gifts of observation his were nothing almost short of extraordinary. In conjunction untrammelled admiration for the governmental with apparatus of American democracy, this republican aristocrat was totally appalled by the universal enforced engendered: et de veritable la democratie spirit of longer which the myth of freedom "Je ne connais pas de pays ou il regne en general d'independance (De conformity 1776 liberte de discussion moins qu'en Amerique" en Amerique. Tome I 199 - 200). In his eyes, the had already ossified revolutionary citizens into a rigid catechism could, like well-trained which no- parrots, only repeat by rote. This perhaps explains why "...en Amerique le suicide est rare, mais ailleurs" vein, gladly de on assure (De la democratie Tocqueville suffer que la demence the noted slightest commune que partout en Amerique. Tome II 125). In the same with est plus amusement, word of Americans criticism about their would country not to 23 emerge from even a well-intentioned foreigner's lips. American cultural insularity, he felt, was at least equal to the nation's geographical isolation. A number of the French traveller's ideas would assume their full importance only after the passage of a century or more. As U.S. judicial practice becomes increasingly savage and repressive at the end of the second millenium, an era when penological practice is becoming more enlightened in most of the other nations in the developed world, it might well be because of this underlying belief: "En Europe, le criminel est un infortune qui combat pour deroler sa tete aux agents du pouvoir... En Amerique, c'est un ennemi du genre humain, et il a contre lui l'humanite tout entiere" (De la democratie en Amerique. Tome I 78). The history of the U.S. TV "cop show," both fictional and reality-based, amply bears out this statement. Still, despite his atypical willingness to see others as others saw themselves (what other privileged Frenchman was appreciative of the American myth of the as unreservedly self-made man?), de Tocqueville's Old World origins occasionally shone through. When he wrote, for instance, "J'aimerais mieux qu'on herissat la langue de mots chinois, tartares ou hurons, que de rendre incertain des mots francais," he was speaking from the pulpit of linguistic purity epitomized by the Academie Francaise. At bottom open-minded, de Tocqueville's cultural inheritance did not allow him to feel fully at ease in a semi-barbaric land that he otherwise very much admired: "...ce qui me repugne le plus en Amerique, ce n'est plus 1'extreme liberte qui y regne, c'est la peu de garantie qu'on y trouve contre la tyrannie" (De la democratie en Amerique. Tome I 198). If America was the hope of the future, it was 24 also a threat to the glories of the past; as a land of universal liberty, it was paradoxically a threat to the higher form of individualism that Europe's collapsing class system had once bestowed on its appointed thinkers and artists. That the United States could fill this cultural void with the same dexterity with which it expanded the gains of the industrial revolution was something the author obviously doubted. By the late 1840s, at least half of French pre-conceptions about America had already been formed. For the armchair Parisian traveller of 1848, America was a republic that France had helped to colonize and liberate from the yoke of the British crown; if Quebec—"quelques arpents de neige"—was not much missed, Louisiana—"ce nouvel Eden"— certainly was, thanks to the popular mythologizing of Rene de Chateaubriand; literary images of the place were indelibly coloured by the published journals of the early French explorers and missionaries,• a situation which the borrowings of later writers actively encouraged; except for the poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the United States was seen as a land of little literature and even less philosophy; material wealth, both natural and manufactured, was ubiquitous, it seemed, and engineering skills both abundant and ingenious; the wilderness was filled with doomed noble savages, and the Southern plantations with slaves who were made to seem far more oppressed than their fellow indentured Africans dancing to the whip of French colonial masters. In his private journals Victor Hugo wrote, "L'Americain republicain est libre, vend, achete, revend et marchande et brocante des vieillards, des femmes, des vierges, et des enfants. II punit de prison qui apprend. a lire aux petits negres, il tire, au beau milieu d'une ville dite libre, des coups de fusil au negre fugitif; il dresse des chiens a chasser aux 25 hommes; citoyen. il trouve II est cela tout democrate et simple. II negrier" est marchand d'esclaves (Choses vues Tome 11 et 333). Contemporary U.S. mores, if they were known at all, were invariably seen through de Tocqueville's prism. American women were in some ways freer than their continental counterparts, but also colder and more sexually inhibited. American menace to be feared democratic theory seemed as much a as it did a model to be followed by well-educated French deputies. For the most part, this image would remain fixed until shortly after the First World War. In Extreme French literary attitudes towards the Occident, United States, a history of Franco-American scholar Jean Philippe Mathy wrote, "The main assumption of this study is that many Tocqueville French to intellectuals' Beauvoir, are rooted ethos derived from the models practice born in the perceptions in a humanistic of intellectual Renaissance of America, and aristocratic excellence and refined in the from and critical age of French classicism" (Mathy 7). One finds this point of view expressed in its most extreme form in the following decription of Chactas, the "good" Indian hero of Atala, converse a classical Frenchman in all but name. "[Chactas] avait avec les grands hommes de ce siecle et assiste aux fetes de Versailles, aux tragedies de Racine, aux oraisons funebres de Bossuet, en un mot, le Sauvage avait contemple la societe a son plus haut point de splendeur" (Chateaubriand 31). A national as well as a religious chauvinist, for Chateaubriand the qualities of culture and human worth were clearly determined by each individual's proximity to the apogee of human civilization, an apex which was unequivocally, univocally French. His position could not be further removed prejudices of cultural relativism. from the more tolerant 26 Chateaubriand, case. Nevertheless, watered-down it must it is version, be admitted, probably fair his attitudes was to a not claim remained entirely that, in at typical least place in a until the beginning of the twentieth century. During this literary interregnum, the two French writers who most radically expanded Gallic perceptions of the U.S. were Jules Verne and Charles Baudelaire. According to one American critic, the author of Fleurs 1855 du mal added the word "americaniser" (Mathy 274). Since Baudelaire was Les to the French lexicon in such a pivotal figure in the evolution of the crime story, his role as a cultural cross-pollinator can more fruitfully be discussed in Chapter Two than it can here. Jules Verne's contributions, on the other hand, deserve to be considered posthaste. What most strikes fiction stories alternately banal instance, describes speed that a the efforts blockading Verne situated and prophetic work steamship contemporary readers largely about the proto-science in the United realism. Les Forceurs the English-speaking unknown in States de is their blocus, for world, of a hard-headed Scottish capitalist to steer a high (17 knots-per-hour) Charleston harbour. The nothing but scorn for abolitionists, past ironically dismissing the Union named gunboats Playfairs them as "...ces have hommes qui, sous le vain pretexte d'abolir l'esclavage, ont couvert leur pays de sang et de ruines" (Les Forceurs de blocus 38). With their eyes set on the main prize of profits, the Playfairs are notably reluctant to admit "...que la question de la servitude fut predominance dans la guerre civile des Etas-Unis...." (Les Forceurs de blocus 38). Although Captain Playfair does eventually rescue a heroic abolitionist from a Confederate prison— 27 an action primarily motivated by the mariner's daughter—he returns to England father's firm a handsome fictional writings that discuss pragmatic with a cargo 365% profit. Even love for the prisoner's of cotton today, that earns his it is hard to find the U . S . C i v i l W a r in less romantic, more terms. The W a r Between the States is also one of the narrative engines propelling one of Verne's more famous speculative fictions, De la Terre a la Lune. Even more than Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, this novel is replete a with Verne's eerie powers vessel to the moon artillerymen what complex," should D. comme metaphysciens--de more formidable excellence descendant ennemi (De to invent de of these power NASA travel of historical of England's century forebears of emerged. seemed That Americans perfectly logical to musiciens du sont Allemands (De la Terre a la Lune 12). One of the Army gunners le si funestes In those fabulation. et monde, les is "...l'homme par Nordiste colonisateur, aux Stuarts, le et l'implacable Cavaliers de la mere patri'e" passages, the A t a time industrial revolution author when still gave the makes steam- the U n i t e d as the workship of the world, Jules Verne was on the world-controlling wet-behind-the-ears of retired C i v i l W a r mecaniciens du Sud, les anciens 24). to send dub "the m i l i t a r y - i n d u s t r i a l sont ex-Union Rondes a la Lune passing to Nouvelle-Angleterre, K i n g d o m pride of place already nineteenth premiers naissance" la leaps space Italiens de ces Tetes la Terre driven les des gentlemen enormous ces by a group was out of which "Les Yankees, ingenieurs, the Eisenhower the matrix be the first Verne: is determined and industrialists, Dwight of pre-cognition. T h e decision United States. economic What's more, torch he to the still- attributed that 28 triumph to America's inheritance of the most aggressive, in British culture, the Round Head ferocity that led puritan streak to the rise of Cromwell and the fall of the Stuarts. Here, in embryo, we see the origins of the modern French usage of the phrase "les anglo-saxonnes" a description that implicitly fuses England and the United States into one seamless socio-historical entity, a body politic implicitly hostile interests of France, and one which is seemingly Canada, Australia, and the many other to the entirely detached from small nations comprising anglophonia. In this phrase we see admiration and realism locked in an eternal battle with paranoia, fear and hate. Despite reflects this theoretical immense projection, familiarity with however, the Verne's quotidian account realities of contemporary American life. The trip to the moon is facilitated by the calculations of the ville ou fut fondee observatory in Cambridge, Massachussetts, la premiere Universite des Etats-Unis, est "Cette justement celebre par son bureau astronomique" (De la Terre a la Lune 38). Hans Pfaal, Edgar Allan Poe's fictional visitor to the Moon, is wittily treated as an historical personage (much of this book was conceived as satire). Most presciently of all, Verne describes the struggle between the states of Florida and Texas for the honour of being the lunar-directed launch site. Less than a hundred years later, when Apollo IX did indeed speed to the Moon, the rocket was of course fired from Cape Canaveral, Florida, while its pilots listened to commands from Mission Control in Houston, Texas! What's more, the journey was completed in only slightly less time than the 11 days stipulated by Verne. The American passages in Le tour du monde en 80 jours might have been less imbued with prophecy, but they (1873) were no less 29 keen on logistical presentement accuracy: "New reunis York par un ruban de et San Francisco sont metal non done interrompu qui ne mesure pas moins de trois mille sept cent quarante-vingt-six milles" (Le Tour du monde en 80 jours descriptions 194.) lurk many lesser, Within Verne's broad, "trunklike" "rootlike" details: "Ce wagon etait un 'sleeping car', qui, en quelques minutes, fut transforme en dortoir" ( L e Tour du monde en 80 jours passengers 196). What Phileas Fogg and his fellow see from moving train windows is a country in the process of creating itself. They "...passent par des villes aux noms antiques, dont quelques-unes encore" avaient des rues et des tramways, mais pas de (Le Tour du monde en 80 jours 244). Only maisons when describing encounters with Mormons and skirmishes with Sioux does Verne depart from the fantastic generally plot realistic coupled to tone of extremely groundwork for the infant genre his text. This plausible unique mixture— detail—would of science fiction, a genre French would shortly abandon, a popular form that would be perfected by les anglo-saxonnes in general and les lay the that the subsequently Americains in particular. It is one of the abiding ironies of Franco-American relations that certain Gallic quintessentially cultural innovations American—especially are subsequently regarded as by the French. Where would the so-called Hollywood musical be, for instance, if not for the early sound films of Rene Clair? For a variety of reasons, not all of them modest (high culture est fait chez nous; popular culture est importe d'outre- mer), this situation appeals to Parisian intellectuals. In a strange sort of way, it whenever States. draws they another focus on seductive the veil alternately over cultivated French eyes brash and admirable United 30 Needless to say, the event that would most radically transform existing Franco-American cultural relations was the First World War. On a per capita basis, the French Army suffered heavier casualties than any other major participant in that sanguinary conflict. What's more, most of the battles were fought on French soil, a circumstance which resulted in as much damage to the nation's environment and physical plant as it did to its reserves of able-bodied cannon fodder. The factor that eventually tilted the balance in favour of the Allied Cause was the commitment trenches of ever following America's Hungarian, greater numbers Washington's and Ottoman empires was decisive. Great War with the prestige American declaration actual military role in the contribution proved to be of troops of war in defeat of the German, relatively Thus, 1917. minor, its America the While Austro- logistical emerged of a major military power, to from the the certainty that it had replaced Great Britain as the workshop of the world, and a foreign policy that had finally emerged from the carapace of isolation. These advantages had been were won at relatively very American casualties completely undamaged. With the possible little minor, cost and exception its to themselves. landscape was of Canada and the other dominions, the United States was the only nation to emerge from the First World War in better shape than it went in. Inevitably, this historical turn-around produced conflicting emotions in France. For the first time, Americans in Paris were counted not by the hundred, but by the hundred thousand. Gone were the days when the few brash New Worlders lucky enough into the pages of French literature generally to worm their way fell into the category of rich potential marriage partners, such as the "richissime Americain" to 31 whom Albertine was briefly betrothed in a suppressed passage of A la recherche du temps perdu (Albertine disparue 292). In the immediate post-war period, following demobilization, American writers and artists congregated in the City of Light because the views were pretty, the costs were low, sex was easy and Prohibition non-existent. same to time, American movies 1914, the giant French Around the started to inundate French screens. film combines of Gaumont and Prior Pathe controlled approximately 60% of the world motion picture market. Since the same chemicals that went into the manufacture of celluloid were also used in the production of high explosives, French cinema lost its commercial edge to Hollywood during the Great War, an advantage. it would never regain. Less grudgingly, the French also began to listen to American popular music, particularly jazz. Black U.S. musicians often treated better on the Champs Elysees than Broadway. In a French context, the cult of negritude they were were on served a double purpose. France's acceptance of Black American artists and of Antillean and African writers such as Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor was a way of affirming moral superiority over the New World giant that so aggressively challenged France's post-1789 claim to be acknowledged as the homeland of secular freedom. How could America truly be the land of liberty if that liberty only extended to whites? At the same time, it allowed French intellectuals to put the harsher realities of the nation's "off-stage" colonial practice on the back burner. Only in very recent years have Gallic authors belatedly acknowledged the skin colour of most Parisian street sweepers. To admit that racisme ordinaire was as prevalent in Marseille as it was in Memphis was to subtly undermine 32 France's claim to being regarded as the only true, the only legitimate, the only universal republic. Thanks to these circumstances, French reaction to American advances on all fronts could not help but be mixed. Gallic gratitude for U.S. military blindness assistance was to France's decisive undercut by that country's seeming but Pyrrhic contributions to Germany's defeat. The thought that la Belle France might now owe more to General Pershing and his "doughboys" than American patriots once eighteenth-century Lafayette's propre. assistance volunteers was of Admiral de Suffren's totally unacceptable did to the warships to the national Love of American popular culture could not entirely and amour disguise the fact that its progress was often made at French culture's expense. Even worse, Paris were contact even when they knew the local language well. British jounalist Tony Allan singularly expatriate indifferent to American Parisians, authors in eschewing love with personal made much of this fact in his nostalgic history, The Paris, of Glamour Years: 1919 - 1940, quoting art critic Clive Bell to the effect that "Some [these expatriates] had French mistresses—kept mistresses; but very few of them had French friends" (Allan 9). In this context, Franco-American coming-of-age one of the most contact memoir, is this Joseph brief anomalous Kessel's Gallic Dames narrative de describes books about Californie. the A author's journey across America as he left the battlefields of World War One to participate in the Allied Powers' ill-fated attempt to overthrow the newly-founded Bolshevik regime in 1918. Kessel and his comrades were cheered by American crowds as their train puffed its way across the U.S. mainland. For once the reader is not faced with "doughboys" being feted by adoring Frenchmen, but by "poilus" groups of Yanks. alors etait being hailed by grateful With undisguised pride, Kessel wrote, amoureuse de la France" (Kessel 31). "L'Amerique Being young and military, Kessel's communication skills were obviously not aided by the presence of large numbers of bilingual academics, the balm bestowed on most later French writers of substance. "II est temps de dire," he ruefully admits at one point, "que pour tout anglais je connaissais celui que Ton apprend a lycee" (Kessel 37). Although he had by this time forgotten most of his high school English, his linguistic facility was still considerably greater than that of his fellow volunteers: "II me restait bien peu de ces notions lorsque je debarquai en Amerique. Mais je crois que j'en savais encore plus done de la majorite de mes camarades. Je devais done, bon gre mal gre, leur servir d'interprete" (Kessel 37). Although Kessel was much cheered by the reception he received from the women of America, the omnipresence of puritan strictures continuously rankled: "La prohibition, si elle n'etait pas encore en vigeur en Amerique, regnait impitoyablement ces batiments de guerre. On nous offrait du cafe au lait comme boisson de table" (Kessel 21). Later, in San Francisco, he would frustratedly discover that "On sait qu'il interdit par la loi...d'amener une femme chez soi dans un est hotel americain" (Kessel 42). Like most period French tourists, the author was impressed by everything from skyscrapers to New Year's Eve parties, by the things that were quintessentially non-French. On the other hand, he is delighted when one of his women friends from Saint Louis (a town he seems to assume is as francophone as New Orleans) "...parlait un francais adorable de grace. 34 Je retrouvais la langue de la Bruyere et de Fenelon...." (Kessel 84). For Kessel, America was clearly a land as wonderful as it was incomprehensible, as pleasurable as it was irritating; it was a paradise whose perfection was spoiled by the buzzing of bluenosed flies. Behind this mixture assumption: of envy and Americans might admiration have lurks a produced this single unspoken opulence, but they don't know how to enjoy it. Just as youth is proverbially wasted upon the young, so, it would seem, is America upon the Americans. In any event, Joseph Kessel did not see the United States as being in any way inimical to the health and well-being Ahead of his time nineteenth-century first prominent in this novelist literary domination of the globe. as in so many of his own country. other things, and travel writer Stendhal was Frenchman to worry about the early perhaps U.S. the cultural Shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, he wrote, "En 1900, l'Europe n'aura qu'un moyen de resister a l'enorme population et a la raison profonde de l'Amerique: ce sera de donner a l'Asie Minore, a la Grece, et a la Dalmatie, la meme civilisation; c'est-a-dire le meme degre de liberte dont on jouit dans la Pennsylvanie" (Stendhal 277). To survive America, in other words, Europe would have to become more like its good points de facto into its Kessel, helas, enemy, to incorporate more of the interloper's own modus vivendi. For French authors after the political pre-emptive strike option had already passed. European autocracy did not end until 1918, and then as the that-broke-the-Triple-Entente's-back of America was Joseph hands the U.S. feathermilitary. now the dominant socio-political force on the planet, an unavoidable current that pulled all others in its wake. The only nations to resist this pull successfully were those that slipped into some form of 35 totalitarian structure. Of these new political styles, Soviet-style Leninism could uniquely afford to pose as a true polar opposite to U.S.style capitalism. metastatizing nations--of hybrid Europe's capitalist fascist growths, states while appeared the more like democratic/colonialist which France was one of the most important—were equally products of "free enterprise" economics. For all practical purposes, Europe no longer controlled the world, as it had since 1800. In true Hegelian fashion, power about had travelled westwards once again. If this changed reality could be felt on some level everywhere in non-Soviet Europe, it was still possible to soften its impact in a number of tactical ways. Most schools of European thought between the were singularly free of U.S. influence. American culture international avant did garde. not Outside of literature and jazz, command On the wars level a dominant place in the of high culture in particular, European intellectuals continued to feel like top planetary dogs. Theodor W. Adorno was famously dismissive of both Hollywood and syncopated music; Andre Gide wrote as if U.S. culture were as marginal to European mainstream as Tagalog poetry. perdu, unquestionably the greatest In A triumph la recherche of du twentieth the temps century French fiction, the most significant mention of the U.S.A.—if one excludes the repressed manuscript claim that Albertine, at the time of her death, was engaged to "un richissme Americain" (Albertine disparu 292)— occurs in the following disquisition on the generally humble provenance of American family names: Montgommery, Berry, '"...beaucoup Chandos ou Capel d'Americains qui n'ont de s'appellent rapport avec les families de Pembroke, de Buckingham, d'Essex, ou avec le Due de Berry'" 36 (Sodome et Gomorrhe 471). America might have been mighty, but in most matters it seemed both far away and of much less important than Germany, Russia, or England, the nation's traditional rivals in political brinkmanship. In retrospect, this attitude seems very much like wishful thinking; at the time, however, it was entirely sincere. These factors should be borne in mind when considering betweenwar French literary impressions of the United States. That this cultural scene was constraint largely largely dominated by Catholic conservatives is lost on non-French literary scholars. a defining While French, like English and German, is one of the world's privileged "international" languages, has it is its left-wing, been most successfully experimental and secular literature which exported. The vast quantity of non-fiction produced by the likes of Paul Claudel, Paul Valery, Francois Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and a hundred lesser figures—many of whom were both passed viciously anti-Semitic unnoticed by the outside and rabidly fascist—has world. This unfortunate imbalance largely inevitably skews virtually all outside attempts to obtain an objective image of the time, a portrait in which foreground and background were judiciously balanced. when It is a limitation which must constantly dealing with the literature's be borne in mind better-known but less representative texts. In Extreme Occident, Jean-Philippe Mathy plausibly contends that French criticism of the U.S. in the 1920s was largely conservative and humanist, while that of (negative) or right-wing the (the 1950s so-called and '60s was either left-wing liberal Atlanticists). Following the events of 1968, meanwhile, the Gallic tone generally changed to one of postmodernist praise. These generalities are useful tools so long as 37 one bears in mind the perennial tendency of French intellectuals to change steeds in mid-stream. At various times in his career, Andre Gide, for instance, was an anti-Semitic reactionary, a Protestant polemicist, a Catholic semi-convert, homosexual a pagan philosopher, a thorough-going atheist, apologist, a militant Communist, a much-reviled a anti- Communist, an anti-colonialist, a Vichy accommodator, and a vocal critic of France's Second World War collaboration with the occupying Third Reich. To define Gide by any one of those labels would be misleading; he was all of them and then some. Georges Duhamel was probably the most lucid and articulate of between-war French commentators on the American scene. A now largely forgotten member of the Academie Francaise, Duhamel was once an important literary personage. Even today, Scenes de la vie future can stand as one of the least sympathetic studies of the United States ever written. Duhamel crossed the Atlantic with a chip on his shoulder, and he missed no opportunity to coax his hosts into knocking it off. Even his port of arrival reflects this unfailingly antagonistic attitude. Unlike most French writers, who disembarked from plane or ship in New Duhamel decided to start his journey in New Orleans, la plus des villes local americaines customs, just York, francaise In this way he could acclimatize himself to the as Borgia princes once accustomed themselves to poison by consuming ever larger quantities of arsenic at dinner. Before jumping into the American melting pot, Duhamel pointedly held his nose. The author's suspicions were deeply rooted in his circular mistrust of both technicians therapeutique pour and machines: V allegement "Comme de nos les poisons miseres, la employes plupart en des 38 inventions humaines meme du plus ou noble, malhabiles, morf propres de a nous donner du bonheur sont encore susceptibles, se (Duhamel 12.) transformer ou du entre les mains en instruments de plaisir, scelerates souffrance et de Following this line of reasoning, America, being ineptly run, must be considered as some sort of giant torture chamber. It is also a supremely dangerous deconcerte trouve moins que le futur: moins certaines depayse rues chez de Chicago'" dystopia-in-embroyo: "Le passe un occidental les adulte, troglodytes de nous normal et cultive Matmata que se dans (Duhamel 16). Without the slightest hint of irony, Duhamel turns "the normal, cultivated Western adult" into "the normal, cultivated Frenchman." In this comparison of New World and Old, Duhamel doesn't even pretend to be impartial. Kipling Indians more Americans. bridles benefit of the Everything about when his ship is doubt the than Duhamel country fumigated alcohol is removed from the ship's in seems to gave the would give the irritate him. He Havana; he smoulders when stores the moment its prow passes Prohibition's nautical limit. Americans love hypocritically ban alcohol. They seriously Stream for their own uses even though would surely freeze Europe. Even worse, to guzzle, he sneers, consider diverting the such a far-fetched yet Gulf procedure these technocratic barbarians might actually pull off such a demented coup. What a country! Ironically, many of Duhamel's period complaints now sound like the on-air whining of conservative U.S. talk show hosts. He is appalled, for example, coverage chacun by America's obsession with calories. Universal medical leaves him equally cold: "Le jour que nous possedons, contre de ces rigoureusement fleaux, un vaccin efficace dont 1'application sera obligatoire, nous ne souffrirons plus des maladies, nous 39 souffrirons des contraintes exigues par les lois, nous souffrirons de la sante" (Duhamel 34 - 35). America in the 1920s was already an overregulated society so far as this Frenchman was concerned. Unlike derive most of cultural comfort instance, "...sort dejeuner sortaient pictures, de miserables, from de and countrymen, Hollywood l'abattoir d'ilotes, ahuries fellow l'abattoir newsreels divertissement his a des par leur besogne et leurs les (Duhamel collectively passe-temps Movie comme cochons" vaudeville un movies. musique a Duhamel did not music, for saucisses du 44). Motion comprised illettres, soucis" even de "...un creatures (Duhamel 49). 1 As for America's indigenous music, it was beyond the pale. "O jazz!" he groaned, "Strychnine supreme" (Duhamel 129). Americans, Duhamel complained, were hard to find: me cache les Americains" (Duhamel 56.) most Americans were rendered formless This was because, apparently, by Americanism: "Plutot qu'un peuple, je vois un systeme" (Duhamel 57). something that has impressed "L'Amerique virtually The immensity of the land, all French travellers from Jacques Cartier's first visit to the present, left this toughest of all critics suspicious as well as unmoved: "Un building s'eleve de deux ou trois etages par semaine. Tetralogie, In turn, II a fallu vingt ans a Wagner pour construire la une vie a Littre pour edifier son dictionnaire" (Duhamel 50). he attacked the rationales buying, and luxurious washrooms. the fact that Americans were behind organized sports, credit For Duhamel, nothing could disguise not free men but slaves—slaves of Ironically, one could easily imagine Karl Marx denouncing movies in much the same terms—albeit with a little more compassion—if that strain of opium had existed in his day. When condemning America, French jeremiads from the right are often indistinguishable from left-wing jabs. 1 40 moralists, doctors, jurists, "et meme [des] electriciens" (Duhamel 59). He was offended by the fact that the face of an Indian and a buffalo were printed on coins in this unfree land that never wearied of touting its illusory liberties: "O ironie! Deux races vivantes et libres que vous avez aneanties, en moins de trois siecles" (Duhamel 62). For his own purposes, he re-packaged many of de Tocqueville's criticisms of America without paying even nominal lip service to the more numerous points of admiration that his illustrious predecessor had emphasized. Root beer, needless to say, was risible: "C'est de la biere des racines, de la biere pour rire, bien entendu" (Duhamel 65). Women were somewhat better font-elles, les jambes appreciated—especially dames below the waist: "Comment americaines, pour ce procurer, toutes, ces delicieuses qu'elles memes montrent si genereusement" (Duhamel 76 - 77). Like Celine, Georges Simenon, and so many francophones after him, the American "gam" could strike a favourable chord in this flinty Frenchman's heart long after the appeal of the Empire State building had started to fade. much indulged compelled female's to in Unsurprisingly, this by literary draw attention to form of fetishism Frenchwomen, this was but even they particular part of the not felt American anatomy. In addition to the cult of the Yankee leg, Duhamel added the demonization of Chicago to the canon of American commonplaces in the French literary imagination. "Chicago!" he railed. "La ville tumeur! L a ville cancer!" emphasized the The author's system's description cruelty and of the inhumanity Chicago stockyards without expressing the slightest sympathy for the animals being sacrificed on the altars of the food industry. 41 In the same vein, racism is mentioned in a way that manages to make the Americans look doubly bad, since it links modern refinements of the time-honoured technique highway mayhem. Mrs. Lytton that American highways of lynching to the new mechanics tells French her bad- tempered rack up "...deux cent ciquante mille of guest accidents par an, dont cinquante mille mortels," coyly adding "J'en ai pris ma petite part. Mais rien que des negres...." (Duhamel 79). Duhamel mounts a left-leaning horse to more effectively ideological lance. No more Jean-Paul Sartre's La sur vos inflammatory Putain respecteuse Once again drive home his statement can be found in or Boris Vian's J'irai cracker tombes. Ultimately, though, what America represented for Duhamel was the final triumph of the ants: "...la civilisation des fourmis du depuis des siecles de siecles. Pas de revolutions chez les insectes" (Duhamel While the clearly author still has some hope for Europe's future, they 216). are short-term: "L'Amerique peut tomber, la civilisation americaine ne perira pas: elle est deja maitresse du monde" (Duhamel 217). Louis-Ferdinand Celine was also a man of the right, but no one has ever deigned to dub him either a Catholic, a humanist, or a conservative. A right-wing anarchist with strong fascist Syndrome gift for abuse, and tumultuous as tendencies and a Tourette's Celine's legendary Duhamel's were distastes were as patrician and volatile restrained. He approached America the same way he approached everything else...with a passionate loathing that owed nothing to received wisdom or common sense. The American passages in novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit, Celine's semi-autobiographical first amount to scarcely more than a tenth 42 of that sprawling, peripatetic text's free-wheeling bulk. The rest of the book unfolds on the "opening round" battlefields of the First World War, in the depressing jungles of colonial Africa, and in the even more squalid suburbs of industrialized France. Even so, Celine's acidic quick sketches of New York City and the automobile factories of Detroit would make an impression on the minds of French literary travellers in America no less indelible than the ones already bequeathed to posterity by de Tocqueville and Chateaubriand. You can despise Celine, but you cannot forget him. As contemptuous of the U.S. obsession was Georges Duhamel, Bardamu, the with health and safety as author's alter ego, disdainfully sneers, "II s'appelait le 'Surgeon general' ce qui serait un bon nom pour un poisson" (Celine 190). Nevertheless, legs of American women—another thanks to his obsession passion with the shared with Duhamel—the United States must always in some sense be seen as a land of desire in the eyes of Celine/Bardamu: "En fait de jambes j'ai rarement vu mieux, encore un peu masculines et cependant deja plus delicates, de chair en eclosion" (Celine 192). Emblematic of une this beaute sometimes concrete, sometimes formless erotic yearning is New York City itself, a polis where every building is a symbolic erection: "New York c'est un ville debout" situated (Celine and often 186). Unlike French cities, which are modestly quietly beautiful, Gotham "ne se pamait pas, elles attendent le voyageur, tandis que celle-la-la pas baisante du tout, raide a faire peur" (Celine between which they 186). If, in contrast to the phallic skyscrapers walk, American women albeit in a not entirely acceptable exist in a very uncontinental sort are unusually beautiful— "masculine" way—they of purdah. Bardamu nonetheless is frankly 43 appalled by this curiously puritanical state of affairs. From the perspective of his private bench, he observes that "Elles les femmes ne regardaient guere que les devantures des magasins, tout accaparees par l'attrait des sacs, des echarpes, des petites choses de soie, exposees, tres peu a la fois dans chaque vi trine... On ne trouvait pas beaucoup de vieux dans cette foule" (Celine 196). In a young land, it seems, there are only young people. Women are set What's more, it is appetites of continental apart from men, and youth from strongly suggested that the American men are far less vital age. unsublimated physical than those counterparts. At one point, Bardamu relies of their largely on the largesse of a prostitute who has taken a shine to him: "Elle possedait d'amples les ressources, cette amie, puis-qu'elle se faisait dans cent dollars par jour en maison, tandis que moi, chez Ford, j'en gagnais a peine six. L'amour qu'elle executait pour vivre ne la fatiguait guere. Les Americains font ?a comme des oiseaux" (Celine 230). Despite his impoverished status and total lack of patrician airs, Bardamu/Celine substitute, the is only slightly more Hollywood movie: keen on "Le cinema that ne supreme me sexual suffisait plus, antidote benin, sans effet reelle contre l'atrocite materielle de l'usine" (Celine 229).Unlike Georges Duhamel's old-fashioned dismissal of Hollywood from the hoary heights of Mount Parnassus, Celine's rejection is as up-to-date as the street-level disdain of a William S. Burroughs literary junkie: movies are an inadequate drug that fail to provide the consumer with sufficient the poor is release. Like Duhamel the wealthy, appalled by the ubiquity of U.S. beggars: "C'etaient des pauvres de partout" (Celine 193). When poverty obliges sojourner a Ford to seek employment in factory, he Bardamu this finds French himself 44 surrounded by fellow-foreigners: "Dans cette foule presque personne ne parlait l'anglais" (Celine 225). Since the operative word in the novel's title is "voyage", it seems only proper that Bardamu's U.S. journey should have an Odyssey-like quality to it. Celine's alter ego tries to track down his war-time American mistress solely for the purpose of borrowing money: "Ce fut bien uniquement pour des raisons d'argent, mais combien urgentes et imperieuses, que je me mis a la recherche de Lola" (Celine 212). A rich society woman who tended to wounded Allied soldiers during the Great War, Lola servants: takes great pride in the "'II faisait radical pedigree partie alors d'un societe of secrete one tres of her redoutable pour 1'emancipation des noirs... C'etait, a ce qu'on m'a raconte, des gens affreux... L a bande fut dissoute par les autorites...'" (Celine Although suppressed by the powers that be, Lola's domestic to manufacture bombs in his lethal by the spare time, without ever 220). continues making them addition of powder: '"II n'en finira jamais de faire la revolution. Mais je le garde c'est un excellent domestique! Et a tout prendre, il est peut-etre plus honnete que les autres qui ne font pas la revolution..." (Celine 220). Celine's symbolic representation of Lola as a castrating racist is far more subtly modulated than Duhamel's poisoned pen portrait of Mrs. Lytton, the homicidal society woman whose only worry about running down Blacks on the street is related to the damage their dismembered chassis. In the benevolence, bodies might first instance, do to economic her automobile's oppression is beautiful combined with a combination which Herbert Marcuse would later as the dominant mode of repressive tolerance. define In the 1940s, Boris Vian and Jean-Paul Sartre would also conflate negative white American female sexual and protagonists, cracker Duhamel's characteristics generally Celine's. Still, if the female J'irai racial in anti-heroes a form in La in disagreeable much Putain cruder than respecteuse and sur vos tombes seem, on a superficial level, to owe more to criminally blase unquestionably Mrs. Lytton, their primary influence is Lola.2 Bardamu's insensitive attempts to cadge money from his reluctant benefactor would also bear long-range fruit. At the time of his request, Lola is preoccupied with saving her mother from galloping liver cancer. Although it would clearly be in his girlfriend's pet fantasy, this best interest hardheaded to humour his doctor-in-embryo play along. When asked if he doesn't believe ex- refuses the disease is curable, Bardamu replies "—Non, repondis-je tres nettement, tres categorique, cancers du foie Lola now continues l'argent sont absolument inguerissables" to les (Celine 222). Although despises him and wants him to leave post-haste, Bardamu to press his outrageous que vous m'entendez vous complications, m'avez promis repeter ses suit: "Lola, pretez-moi je vous prie tout heredites, ce ou bien je que je coucherai sais sur le ici et vous cancer, ces car il est hereditaire, Lola, le cancer. Ne l'oublions pas" (Celine 223). As Henry Miller pointed out in The Books in My Life and development wellsprings elsewhere, of his of his Celine own own was literary the ethos, greatest the sulphurous creativity. reminded of the many occasions in Sexus, Black key influence that One can't Spring, on the opened the help but and Tropic be of Lola, it might be worth mentioning here, is the most popular literary derivation of the name Lilith, according to Jewish folklore, Adam's disobedient first wife. For a more detailed consideration of her fascinating persona, please see Chapter Two. 2 46 Capricorn where the cheerful narrator tries obviously grief-stricken without feelings. Celine's misanthropic to cadge funds from the the slightest concern for the "mark's" narcissism, his gift for torrential, irrational literary utterance, would be adopted by Miller to suit his own New World needs. Since Boris Vian would subsequently his will in J'irai "bestseller", this cracher sur Americanized vos tombes, Vian's bend Miller to one out-and-out Celine would return to his place of cultural birth, just as Bardamu would return to France.3 Immediately after the Second World War, the "problem" of United States seemed more insoluble ever. In 1918, the the French nation could console itself with the thought that its army had made the largest single contribution to the defeat of the Triple Entente; in 1944, on the other troops, hand, France had to be forcibly liberated by Allied spearheaded by American tanks, following four years of defeat and Nazi occupation. The upstart New World giant of 1918 super-power of 1945, the world's nuclear repository. Against complete the battered foundry, bank, was now the cocky armoury, and U.S. hegemony, there stood sole only but still unbowed hulk of the Soviet Union, the Stalinist juggernaut which had destroyed the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front 3 In addition to the Miller connection, one should probably here make note of a much more indirect, difficult to determine case of cultural cross-pollination. After Bardamu himself, the most important character is unquestionably Robinson, the improbably-named Frenchman whom the narrator first meets on a murky battlefield. Like a bad penny, Robinson keeps turning up, in France, Africa and the United States. A character of exactly the same name also appears in Franz Kafka's Amerika, a character who plays precisely the same role. Even his name is suspect. A suspicious American in that book declares that '"I don't even believe that his name is Robinson, for no Irishman has ever been called that since Ireland was Ireland...'" (Kafka 173). In Frederic Vitoux's definitive La Vie de Celine, Amerika is not cited as a source of inspiration forVoyage au bout de la nuit. On the other hand, that could be because of the popular belief that Celine was a self-taught idiot savant, an ignorant loser who extracted poetry solely from personal experience and paranoia. In any event, the AmerikalVoydge connection is clearly worth further study. 47 at a cost to the Russian people of 10 - 15% of their pre-war population and 50% of their physical plant. Russia the Heroic, however, was counterbalanced by the gloomy spectre of Russia the Horrific, the prison camp country that was intoxicated dictator. Europe's former pressure from themselves their of Already either imperialist both their shattered presided over by a brutal, paranoid, and self- former participate in Washington's Stalin's T-34s, powers Eastern economies, exhausted were and it being Western colonial was or in put power possessions. necessary In for to ally under ruins, increased blocs to order to rebuild these Marshall Plan; to protect they were obliged physical divest countries themselves from themselves with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an umbrella group entirely dependent American all military purposes—foreign films, books countries machinery, manpower and—for and records in an unchecked or as on practical policy. After five years of Nazi embargoes, American poured flood. into France Never before absolute. Never before had and other had the absolute strength in relation to the old continent daunting to European New World's of Europe, seemed as the threat of cultural absorption seemed quite as great. French intellectual take these historical reaction factors to into the postwar U.S. must consideration. The obviously long French intellectual romance with Stalinist politics can only be understood in the context of a once great, now humbled nation trapped between a rock and a hard place. accomplished writers felt, as easily with soft that felt to be Cultural extinction could be drinks and T V sets, as it could with socialist itself many French realism and mandatory Russian lessons. Being schooled in the French tradition ofrealpolitik, which is to 48 say, the guiltlessly of national amoral consideration ofinternational events in terms self-interest routinelyemployed by without recourse Anglo-Saxon to the obfuscatory governments whenever rhetoric they feel the need to disguise their international events in terms of national selfinterest without recourse to the obfuscatory employed by Anglo-Saxon governments disguise whenever rhetoric routinely they feel the need to their less admirable actions—Gallic writers, philosophers, and journalists soon realized that America, by virtue of its nuclear arsenal and peerless arms industry, was likely to keep Russian troops off Champs Elysees in the foreseeable future. Thus, with the the effective blocking of one particuar foreign peril, they felt free to deal with the nearer, more immediate threat represented by American neo- colonialism. These basic facts had as much to do with the conduct of the French intelligentsia working class, as did a mainly sympathy Bolshevik for the proletariat country's that gave industrial the French Communist Party 30% of the vote during every national election. The heroic conduct of the Soviet Red Army and of French Communist partisans during the Second World War likewise gave the P C F a longerlasting allure than its Anglo-American counterparts; unlike the Americans and the British, the French felt no need to disguise the fact that the Russians had destroyed 58 - 75% of the Third Reich's military machine believing (the that figures vary); they France had in any could not significant delude way themselves contributed to into the recent Allied victory. In many ways, Russia's over-the-horizon existence was immensely reassuring. As long as Bolshevism existed as a viable alternative, U.S. cultural control would never reach 100%. this comforting illusion, intellectual acceptance To maintain of the growing evidence 49 that pointed to Stalin's great mistakes and crowded prison camps and organized famines, murderous paranoia, to to purge trials and mass legal murder was accepted at a much slower pace in France than it was in any other Western European country, with the probable exception Italy. For the economic French, the "workers' paradise" represented more salvation; it was also an effective shield against the of than prospect of U.S. cultural absorption. One sees all these forces Temps modernes, at work in the early editorials of the intellectual journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the mid-1940s. The magazine's the motivations behind America's pronounced as events in Italy U.S. economic attached, assistance Marshall Plan became and Greece increasingly only came with suspicions of garrotting political perquisites left-wing believed in Revolution or the or socialist by universal the sun conviction, culture kings Temps no less sensitive to perceived French than were their Gaullist and republican opponents. monarchist that strings groups. Though opposed to French colonialism on principle, Les editorial board was more suggested strings which invariably settled around the necks of modernes' Les virtually inaugurated of the all by French either seventeenth the and Whether thinkers French eighteenth centuries. Inevitably, this Universal Culture spoke with a French accent. In January of 1945, Sartre was intellectuals to visit the seemingly time, existentialist the one of the very first French invincible United States. At that philosopher was a moderate supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal policies, and an unaligned socialist. Four years earlier, he had somewhat controversially published an essay on Herman Melville in the first wartime issue of Comoedia, an arts- 50 oriented newspaper which occupying German forces generation, plenty, not he saw had been financed (Lottman 252). and backed by the Like most Frenchmen of his America first and foremost as a land of material a place where the economic privations of occupied France did pertain. entering Sartre into enjoyed sexual the liaisons nation's with a opulence number of and hospitality, American women, including "Dolores," the lover who came closest to supplanting Simone de Beauvoir as his principal "long-term companion". As de Beauvoir put it in the third volume of her autobiography, "Sartre etait etourdi par tout ce qu'il vu. Outre le regime economique, la segregation, le racisme, bien de choses dans la civilisation d'outre-Atlantique le heurtaient: le conformisme des Americains, leur echelle de valeurs, leur mythes, leur faux optimisme, leur fuite devant la tragique; mais il avait eu beaucoup de sympathie pour la plupart de ceux qu'il avait approches; il trouvait emouvantes les foules de New York, et il pensait que les hommes valaient mieux que le systeme" (La Force des choses 45.) Even this brief "honeymoon period", though, was shot through with visceral revulsion at the pandemic conformism which first Sartre, and later de Beauvoir, professed echoed to find everywhere in the U.S. In this regard, they clearly Alexis de Tocqueville, that earlier champion of liberty whose mind was always above the fray. Perhaps because they were used to it by now, this quintessentially French reservation does not seem to have unduly disturbed Sartre's American hosts. His criticism of the U.S. State Department, on the other hand, came Twenty years later, Sartre would refuse close to getting him deported. to lecture in the United States on the grounds that this once insurrectionary republic had become the homeland the of international imperialism. Strangely, despite 51 completeness of his ideological disaffection, the philosopher did not devote any of his major writings to the problem of the U.S., with the notable exception references of La Putain respecteuse A The few Sartrean to America which do in fact exist must be sought speeches, interviews collected in the and minor journalism, not in the important essays in Situations. Many nations were of interest to this tireless literary traveller, including Germany (the land where he completed his philosophical training before the war), Spain, Portugal, Italy, Brazil and Israel. The United States was not one of them. Even Sartre's attraction to American artistic techniques have waned after the late 1940s. claim in Simone de Beauvoir appears to Although Kate and Edward Fullbrook and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking Twentieth Century Legend, their revisionist re-evaluation of the important literary couple of the breakthrough novel La Nausee was A Farewell to Arms, twentieth-century, that of a most Sartre's strongly influenced by Hemingway's the validity of their contention is more or less irrelevant to our concerns, since it seems highly likely that this alleged admiration would have been cast aside at roughly the same Sartre a legitimate abandoned literary technique—which Fullbrook 84). with it American narrative fiction a is to as say, around twentieth 1949 century (Fullbrook and Indeed, his very praise of U.S.-flavoured writing carried certain literature condescending "lay precisely dismissal. in its For him, pragmatic, the A title which French bureaucratic prudery once respecteuse. insisted value of action-oriented nature, in its depthlessness and one-dimensionality" (Mathy 4 time that 130). on printing as La p 52 Albert Camus also visited the United States in the late 1940s. Like Celine and Duhamel, he beauty of American women, but also experienced terrifying inaccessibility, Frenchmen had confessed to him the "expressed impotent with afterwards" with Simone Bowery, (Lottman de popular "Camus embodiment Camus he halls, for - 386). of was enthralled American fell in garish almost limitations of U.S. "American techniques this love and after which the event, (Lottman soon to become identical writing. The were useful seeing 383). with gawdy it Although York audience pockets: as the Sartre's his bitter intellectual foe, on and views the advantages Algerian-born author when they At one of his New receipts, by crime" political ally was expressed the Almost made up this loss to their guest out of their own himself sometime women, 385 Beauvoir, dance a thief stole the cashier's generously at what he called their American nightclubs with floor shows" (Lottman 388). lectures, astonishment and [one of his friends] knew of cases where become contemporaneously "Chinatown, subsequently one was believed describing that a man without apparent interior life, and Camus admitted to having used these techniques. But to generalize such use would be an impoverishment, for nine tenths of what makes the richness of art and of life would thereby be lost" (Lottman 418). Thus, '"The American literature we read, with the exception of Faulkner and of one or two others who like Faulkner have no success in the United States, is useful as documentation but has little to do with art'" (Lottman 418). Camus's preference the home front was for American artists a sentiment who were disdained on to be dutifully repeated by countless French critics, writers, philosophers and filmmakers during the past half 53 century. To "discover" a despised American is in some way to make him less American and more French. This transmutational process probably began with Baudelaire's appropriation of Edgar Poe; it continues even now. To return for a moment to La that strikes the '40s. drama is Putain respecteuse, the first thing contemporary North American reader about its strangely deracinated indeed visited the United States before this mid- quality. Although Sartre had composing this play, he seems every bit as indifferent to place as was the young Brecht before he fled Germany. the Passages such as the following do not inspire confidence author's gagner understanding un match Americans from quintessentially corporate de the British pays des of U.S. rugby" cultural mores: (Sartre Deep South game is 35). getting clearly anglo-saxonnes To shameful path by which Lizzie, venaient have worked up over of the myth a little too far. An respectueuse a prostitute de football-mad pushing melodrama on the subject of lynching, La Putain the "lis in from a the agitprop describes New York, eventually manages to win the respect of her adopted Southern town by falsely claiming that a local black man attempted to rape her. While she is initially arguments reluctant to participate in this subterfuge, are brought to bear that she is eventually to a murderous, socially-sanctioned so many forced to submit lie. She is reminded repeatedly that she is not in New York any more, and that Black folks aren't much liked in her new home. As one well-heeled redneck domestiques de couleur. Quand on m'appelle puts it, '"J'ai cinq au telephone et que l'un d'eux decroche l'appareil, il l'essuie avant de me le tendre" (Sartre 33). In a place where racism apparently burns as brightly as a Klan cross, 54 the second most tongued devil who prolonged entreaty Satanic of the plays "good brainwashing. I say Southerners is cop" during "second the the most", Senator, a silvercourse because that breaks through the Northerner's resistance of Lizzie's the letter of was reputedly written by his wife. In part, it reads '"...il a tue un noir, c'est tres mal. Mais j'ai besoin de lui. C'est un Americain cent pour cent, le descendant d'une de nos plus vieilles families, il a fait ses etudes a Harvard, il est officier—il me faut des officiers—il emploie deux mille ouvriers dans son usine—deux mille chomeurs s'il venait a mourir—c'est un chef, un solide rempart contre le communisme, le syndicalisme et les Juifs" (Sartre 55). Again we see the ghost of Duhamel's Mrs. Lytton. She is, however, only slightly worse than everyone else in this particular corner of hell. Sartre's critique of America is painted in the broadest, crudest strokes imaginable. It is a polemic that allows only the most reprehensible, disagreeable aspects of American life, each one magnified to maximum power, to appear upon the stage. Aside from its political signification, La putain respectueuse is as geographically and sociologically vague as a play by Beckett or Ionesco. J'irai of the cracker more sur vos tombes seems to have been inspired by one controversial moments in this extremely controversial "melo". After playing Judas by signing her name to the document that falsely condemns him, her conscience by Lizzie attempts to assuage her guilt and appease by offering the innocent fugitive her revolver, a means which he might legitimately half-decent existentially intentions, defend himself. Despite though, the Black victim refuses meaningful gift: the whore's to accept this 55 LENEGRE Je ne peux pas, madame. LIZZIE Quoi? LENEGRE Je ne peux tirer sur des blancs. LIZZIE Vraiment! lis vont se gener, eux. LENEGRE Ce sont des blancs, madame (Sartre 71). Frantz Fanon and other radical theorists would later condemn this "Uncle Tom" passivity as objectively reactionary, even if it did reflect the "Jim Crow" mentality of Southern Blacks prior to the birth of the U.S. Civil Rights movement. The playwright obviously agreed with them; in her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir explained why the drama was revised for the cinema in a way that allowed the oppressed Black man to take up arms for himself "Sartre, d'ailleurs, niveau des and—by extension—tous les damnes de la terre: comprenait masses, l'espoir est le point de vue des communistes: un element d'action; la lutte est au trop severe pour qu'elles s'y risquent si elles ne croient pas a la victoire" (L a Force des choses 129 - 130). A fellow Saint-Germain-des-Pres habitue with strong feelings against U.S.-style racial prejudice was Boris Vian, a bohemian polymath who belonged for a time to the existentialist eventually losing his first wife philosopher's inner circle, to that legendary womanizer, following 56 Michelle's decision to "defect" to Jean-Paul's unofficial harem. many talents, France's Vian was premier jazz trumpeter, a good enthusiast (please A man of simultaneously critic, a noted Samaritan see to attached experimental visiting bebop appendix), a writer, a musicians, cabaret talented a artist, film and a punster and word game master who was almost as handy in English as he was in French. Of all unquestionably the one most the French writers sympathetic of his day, he was to American popular culture, as well as the one with the best sense of humour. In his capacity as France's number one jazz interpreter, it was Vian's enviable duty to squire the major Black musical celebrities who visited Paris around the City of Light. According to Noel Arnaud, "...tous les grands musiciens noirs, de passage a Paris, seront, comme le Duke, les hotes du Club Saint-Germain-des-Pres et de Boris Vian: Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Max Roach, Kenny personal familiarity certainly greater knowledge novelist willingly etc" with Black (Arnaud almost Wright. acknowledged Because of viewpoints French literary peers, exclusively Like 148). American than those of his came Richard Clarke, from the mouth virtually all white that the masters of jazz this, was almost since of his their expatriate musicians, he his art were darker-hued than he. At that time, this was one of the few angles by which non- biased European observers could properly appreciate the depth of Black talent even organs as it was and ideology of submerged and blocked at every institutional racism. Vian clearly turn by took the these lessons to heart. J'irai professed cracker sur vos tombes, like Vian's later mock-potboilers, to be a French translation of a novel penned by the light- 57 skinned mulatto, "Vernon Sullivan". Since Boris and Michelle Vian did in fact translate Raymond Chandler's novel French in 1948, The Lady in the Lake the Sullivan mask was fairly easy to maintain, even if Vian did write his instant bestseller in ten quick days. Because position into in the jazz community, the fantasy of being of his a light-skinned "Negro" who could "pass" was a fantasy that obviously appealed to him. He was also apparently inspired by an article that he'd read in an American monthly: "Tous les ans 20 000 Noirs transforment en Blancs. C'est ce qui ressort d'un recent article d'Herbert Asbury du 'Colliers'" (Arnaud 152). In his bogus preface, Vian asserted that Sullivan's preference the Black half of his heritage filled him with "une espece de mepris les 'bons Noirs'..." and his admiration for "des noirs aussis Blancs" (J'irai cracher sur vos admitted the book's indebtedness tombes 9). More for pour 'durs' que les pertinently, Vian to the writings of James M . Cain, as well as to the novels of Henry Miller, a then obscure American author whose more erotic books were sold only in France during the 1940s and '50s. In addition to those cited sources, penultimate of the novel's chapter are strongly reminiscent of the the denouement Hemingway's largely the last lines For Whom the Bell borrowed from the fiction, Native Tolls, pages of of while the book's thematics were Richard Wright's most famous Son. Except for its last nine pages, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes is written in the first person singular. Lee Anderson, the novel's narrator, is, like "Vernon Sullivan", a light-skinned Black who can pass for white; because of the novel's origins, he is also a mask behind a mask. Imbued with a virility equal to his thirst for vengeance—Lee's family has 58 suffered severely extremely from the ravages hardboiled hero buys of Southern a bookstore in racism—the the small book's town of Buckton, then proceeds to check out the local scene. His musical, as well as his sexual, gifts soon win him the favours of the local "good-time girls": "J'aurais toutes les filles les unes apres les autres, mais c'etait trop simple...." (J'irai cracher sur vos tombes 41.) Instead he focuses his attentions on the upper class Asquith sisters, Jean and Lou, the belles of Prixville slang, (considering this the might well be author's familiarity a pun in the vein with Anglo-American of Dashiell Hammett's Poisonville). Every bit as promiscuous as Buckton's uncultured females, they are even more obnoxiously racist. When Lee—whom Lou erroneously assumes to be white—insists that Duke Ellington is a greater composer than George Gershwin, the Asquith sister typically responds, "—Vous etes bizarre... Je deteste les Noirs" (J'irai cracher sur vos tombes 118.) To keep Christianity his which spirit he mean believes and has hard, Lee crippled the rejects will of the pacific his "good" brother, Tom: "...je crois qu'on ne peut pas rester lucide et croire en Dieu, et il fallait que je sois lucide" (J'irai cracher sur vos tombes 43). The vengeance noxious which Lee mixture of mutilation and Spillane's standards, subsequently impregnation, murder) would never mind wreaks betrayal, seem James does as much to keep the book's American bookshelves the 1990s as M. to shock is torture, even Cain's. (translated) did its Black rage and explicit sexuality in the 1940s. power rape, excessive misogyny of on Jean and Lou (a sexual by Mickey Such graphic pages off graphic depictions the of In some ways, the book's greater than that of the more extreme fictions of Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade. Seeing the book as a two- 59 pronged attack instance, by on Jean-Paul Sartre and Michelle Vian—in creating respectueuse, a text far more incendiary than the La Putain in the second by symbolically slaughtering an "unfaithful" woman—in no way softens the reader's double reaction of indignant outrage and horrified admiration. If there is such a thing as a maudit, vast gulfs heat of J'irai instance, Vernon Sullivan volumes is to be struck by that separates their muted impact from the cracher sur vos tombes. Elles is almost as misogynistic anti-female comments ne rendent attitudes compte, are more ironically phrased, reflecting in drag, these braggarts obliviously "Je risque rien, je dis. Moi je rendent pas compte 79).5 lightly handled, The book's although the for as badly ambivalent—sexual as on the "bad" behaviour of the women in their lives. dressed outlook: pas sulphurous in tone, but in this case the text's on the (male) heroes "all-American"—and comically when roman this is definitely it. To read subsequent the first assert their suis heterosexuel'" Even macho (Elles ne hardboiled elements are equally novel's climactic castration scene is strongly reminiscent of Jim Thompson's more ghoulish endings. As for Et on tuera tous les affreux, the roman noir elements are now shot through with pulp science fiction and espionage elements: "Prendre un coup sur la tete, ce n'est rien. Etre drogue deux fois de suite dans la meme soiree, ce n'est pas trop penible... Mais sortir prendre l'air et .se retrouver dans un chambre inconnue, avec une femme, tous les deux dans le costume d'Adam and Eve, 9a commence a etre un peu fort" (Et on tuera tous les white 5 American affreux 7). males in the It is interesting to note that virtually all Vernon Sullivan books are treated A good colloquial English title for this bagatelle would be Chicks Don't Count. as 60 sexual incompetents, latent homosexuals, confused puritans, and absurd virgins. Most French writers, at one time or another, have played this ego-building card; even Simone de Beavoir, surprisingly, once played it in L'Amerique au jour le jour. In any event, the Vernon Sullivan series declined rapidly after its explosive debut. Lynching seemed to be something of a magnet to French writers of the late doom-laden 1940s. Even Jacques scenarist, took a few Prevert, that light-hearted poet and potshots at the phenomenon second collection of poems, Histoires. in his "Le Lunch", for instance, describes the extra-judicial execution of a black "maitre d'hotel" who was hanged from a bridge for having the effrontery to gaze down "le decollete/ de la maitresse de maison" (Prevert 53). Although the widespread French mistrust of American females is less pronounced here, it is still implicit. How strange that in the land of popularized the that commodities within notion the Claude Levi-Strauss—the man females framework of were male essentially who exchange civilization—American women should be made to appear so often as active agents of racism-inpractice, rather than as just a tendentious excuse trumped up by bloody-minded Klansmen with a marked taste for New World pogroms and ratissages.. racist than their Without arguing that white American women were less male counterparts at which there is absolutely no evidence—it mid-century—an argument still seems most unlikely that they were more virulent in their expressions case, their translation still-binding of social anti-Black "demonization" of white of racial autocracy. In any limitations sentiments for generally into violent Southern women must therefore prevented the action. The be explained in psychological, rather than sociological, terms. Just as the New Yorker 61 represented the "good" American, so did the Southerner stand in his for his evil doppelganger. This division of American men into two separate types seems to have been doubly applicable in the case of American women. From the late '40s texts of Sartre, Vian, and Prevert, it would be virtually impossible for the uninformed reader to determine how much pleasure the authors had derived from their encounters in and with the New World. If the land they visited was the land of Cockaigne, the land they described was the land of Mordor. To find a more "binocular" vision of mid-century America, one must turn to the writings of Simone de Beau voir, the first important Frenchwoman to write about the United States. Describing her New World adventures in three separate books, de Beauvoir was as generous with her praise as she was scathing in her criticism. Collectively, L'Amerique au jour le jour, Les Mandarins, and La Force des choses comprise the richest French chronicle of American life since de Tocqueville's De la democratie en Amerique. is recognized even in the United States—always This achievement a good sign. In a recent New York Times Book Review article, "The Existential Tourist," Douglas Brinkley was fulsome in his praise of the first and least celebrated of these volumes: "For women and men, who want to experience vicariously Jack Kerouac's open road with less macho romanticism and more existential savvy, 'America Day by Day', hidden from us for nearly 50 years, comes to the reader like a botle of vintage cognac, asking only to be uncorked" (Brinkley 27). polemics regularly weapons fail to faze mounts her to bad food, Even de Beauvoir's periodic left-wing this unabashed American admirer: "Although she soapbox she to denounce everything exudes maternal kindness from atomic to everyone she 62 meets, regardless of his or her narrow politics or jingoistic world view" (Brinkley 27). Indeed, it would probably not be pushing the comparison too far to say that de Beauvoir's books about America are almost warmly embraced by Americans as Stendhal's pen portraits of as Italy were by Milanese, Romans, and Neapolitans. In postwar terms, she sets the standard by which all other French interpreters of America must be judged. Ironically, L'Amerique book at all. Les Temps au jour modernes le jour was never intended to be a printed de Beauvoir's travel diary of her first trip to the United States, and that was supposed to be that. As she confessed in her autobiography, "Je ne me premeditais pas d'ecrire un livre sur l'Amerique, mais je voulais la voir bien; je connaissais litterature et, couramment" malgre Breton, for instance, conduct L'Amerique accent consternant, (La Force des choses 137). give her an advantage to mon the parlais anglais Her linguistic fluency that most of her contemporaries would lacked; Andre spent the war years in New York without learning simplest au jour je sa le jour English conversation. Although stylistically is the roughest of de Beauvoir's three major American travel narratives, it is also the most detailed, exhaustive, and interesting. one The author's American adventures, thread in the broader tapestries of Les choses. after all, were only Mandarins and La Force des What's more, de Beauvoir's journalistic impressions of the land were often subservient to the "main story," her intense and emotionally fulfilling affair L'Amerique with American au jour le jour Thus, nothing importance. contemplation of America, author effectively gets circa in and radical, disguises the 1945-1947. the way of As she Nelson Algren. U.S. writer's de Beauvoir's recalled in her 63 memoirs, "J'etais prete a aimer l'Amerique; c'etait la patrie de capitalisme, oui; mais elle avait contribue a sauver l'Europe du fascisme; la bombe atomique lui assurait le leadership du monde et la dispensait de rien craindre; les persuadee conscience those livres de certains liberaux americains m'avaient qu'une grande partie de la nation avait une sereine et claire de ses hopes responsabilites" would be Beauvoir would describe (La Force des choses 138). Many of dispelled by her first even her growing U.S. journey, disillusionment but with de great gusto and skill. Characteristically, de Beauvoir clearly felt more than a little guilty about the pleasure she derived from her first U.S. safari. At the very beginning of her first "American" book, she writes, grand pays industriel sans visiter ses techniques, usines, "...j'ai traverse sans voir ses ce realisations sans entrer en contact avec la classe ouvriere. Je n'ai pas penetre non plus dans les hautes spheres ou s'elaborent l'economie des appeasement U.S.A" does not la politique et (l'Amerique au jour le jour 7). This tone of last long. Soon she is rhapsodizing about Broadway, the Great White Way where "...la lumiere en a lave toutes les souillures; c'est une lumiere surnaturelle qui transfigure l'asphalte...." (L'Amerique au jour le jour 13). After years of privation in occupied Paris, de Beauvoir is struck dumb by the giddy opulence drug stores and soda fountains. Though slightly of American more reserved about the value of the U.S. fashion industry (not without justice, she felt that "independent" American women slavishly dressed de Beauvoir gorges herself on Hollywood to please their men), movies and milkshakes, marvelling all the while at the fat luxuriance of the Sunday edition of The New York Times. She visits New York's Spanish library; she smokes 64 marijuana with Greenwich Village bohemians; she listens to Billy Holliday. Above all, she is impressed by the warmth of the people: "Ce qui rend si agreable la vie quotidienne en Amerique c'est la bonne humeur et cordialite des Americains" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 30.) In these early pages, American "minuses" can seem almost like "pluses": "L'arrogance des Americains n'est pas volonte de puissance, c'est volonte d'imposer le Bien...." (L'Amerique au jour le jour 71). Again and again she contrasts American counterparts: "Peut-etre les ways of behaviour with their French amities sont-elles en France plus solides et plus profondes: je n'en sais rien; mais en tous cas chez nous le premier accueil n'a jamais cette chaleur" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 53). As defensive the preceding element in statement de makes Beauvoir's clear, there relativistic is a certain pronouncements. America might be big and grand, but in some essential way it is and must be spiritually inferior to Europe. Though de Beauvoir dedicated L'Amerique au jour many places le jour to "Ellen and Richard Wright," and visited in their company, she felt no qualms about writing the following passage: "Hemingway ou Wright, si on les compare a un James Joyce, par example, n'apportent rien--ils racontent des histoires, c'est tout. Si nous aimons ces livres, c'est par une sorte de condescendance...." (L'Amerique au jour le jour 58). American literature, in other words, is useful to European authors in the same way that Benin sculpture was to Pablo Picasso; in each case, a "sophisticated" European derived inspiration from talented but primitive "idiots savants". This feeling of ownership extends even to that most American of arts, syncopated music: "Le public americain a plus ou moins assassine le jazz, mais il l'aime encore" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 54.) U.S. intellectuals, de 65 Beauvoir complained, were totally uninterested in any living writer (such as Sartre or herself): "lis detestent tous les ecrivains vivants parce qu'eux-memes ne sont ni ecrivains ni vivants...." (L'Amerique au jour le jour 59.) This apparently, bias in favour directed inward as of the well as intellectually deceased outward. Much later was, in her journey, de Beauvoir would meet "...un professeur de l'universite qui me parle de Dewey, le seul philosophe (L'Amerique au jour le jour 280.) connu et reconnu en Amerique" Culturally speaking, America is still Europe's junior partner, but has the perversity to refuse to admit it. For dramatic effect, the American mouths: author "II sometimes existe, me puts disent-ils, americaine, heritiere de la culture europeene directement...." cultural such une sentiments authentique into culture a laquelle elle se rattache (L'Amerique au jour le jour 58.) Like so many French critics before and since, she comments on America's indifference to its greatest artists (which is to say, the American artists who are regarded as such by French observers). According to de Beauvoir, one cocktail party intellectual stammers, '"Edgar Poe...je crois bien que c'est un auteur francais....'"^ Fortunately, not all her comparisons are either invidious or judgmental; many are made in a spirit of genuine inquiry: "Ce n'est pas la coutume ici de travailler dans les endroits ou Ton boit: c'est le pays de specialisation" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 23). Much of the material she transmits is both recondite and chilling. Her passages on drug abuse and youth violence fairly echo with sad prophecy. If anything, she even more prescient on the origins of Black seems anti-Semitism. Even in 6 A North American reader cannot help wondering how the academic "rube" in question might have responded if de Beauvoir had mentioned 'Edgar Allan Poe." This usually shrewd literary tourist seems totally oblivious to that possibility. 66 1945, she ridden reminds us, city. strangling In his Washington, D . C . was Chicago, a fifteen-year-old eleven-year-old friend. De America's most boy was crime- convicted Beauvoir visits the chair waiting at the end of the Windy City's Death Row, of electric emotionlessly explaining, "Quand on execute un condamne, il y a quatre gardiens qui sont designes pour presser quatre de ces boutons: un seul donne la mort et personne ne sait lequel" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 368). Petrified by the Black Dahlia murder, the women of Los Angeles "ont peur de se promener apres minuit" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 123). This now all too familiar apprehension introduced to the rich was and apparently famous, de then unprecedented. Beauvoir is overawed by their celebrity. At a Hollywood party, she with femme "la de Chaplin qui est, comme When anything but shakes hands d'habitude, enceinte" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 300). Such dry wit is quite common in this book by a writer who is often accused of being totally humourless. By the same token, de Beauvoir's impatience with bien pensant thinking is as sharp as it is merciless: "Chez les blancs 'eclaire' il y a a New York un snobisme de la musique et de la litterature noire" L'Amerique au jour le jour 320). The author's artistic reactions are generally insightful: "Ce que j'ai senti souvent en ecoutant leur jazz, en parlant avec eux, c'est que le temps meme dans lequel ils vivent est abstrait" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 385). In the same way, her brief film reviews are generally sound. After viewing Mr. Verdoux, director "...on a l'impression qu'il for instance, de Beauvoir said of its a ete intimide malgre lui par son audace" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 271)7 De Beauvoir's substitution of "Mr" for "M" in the title of Charlie Chaplin's film is symptomatic of what has always been the most unintentionally funny aspect of 7 67 As she toured America, de Beauvoir brought with her the intellectual baggage of previous French tourists. Following in Georges Duhamel's Chicago, even as footsteps, she she dismissed visited as bogus the the stinking stockyards haughty of academician's claim that one couldn't see the landscapes of America on account of all the billboards. De Beauvoir's fascination with drugstores, soda fountains, and other prototypical "fast food" outlets had almost certainly been primed by Celine's earlier celebration of New York's automat.8 In New Orleans, like so many Parisian pilgrims before her, de Beauvoir listened to a local who spoke "...la francais que la Louisiane a herite du XVIIIe siecle" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 223). A trip to Niagara Falls invokes the shade of Atala's avant que paysage fussent creator: "Assurement, au temps de Chateaubriand, baties les usines et les pavilions touristiques, ce devait etre saissant" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 93). Nearby, she found a body of water that was "fantastic" in beauty: "Le lac est French writing about America. English language spelling mistakes, misquotations, errors of agreement, idiomatic usage and capitalization are so ubiquitous in even the best French publications that anglophone readers must sometimes wonder if these untranslated passages have been proofread at all. These problems are exacerbated by an attribution of cultural habits that are totally alien to Americans. Thus, in Elles ne rendent pas compte, we read of an abstemious young man "...qui ne bois que du Perrier" (Elles ne rendent pas compte 77). In 1953 America, the non-alcoholic beverage of choice would obviously have been Club Soda. Even more comically, Jules Verne has U.S. C i v i l War veterans bellowing "Hurrah! Hip! Hip! Hip!" in the place of the standard "Hip! Hip! Hurrah!" (De la terre a la lune 32). While more recent writers, such as Pascale Quignard and Philippe Djian, tend to reproduce a more idiomatically exact English than did their francophone predecessors, this problem has been by no means resolved. 8 At the time she was writing, Celine was in exile, facing a death sentence in his native France for intellectual collaboration with the enemy. O f all living French writers, Celine was unquestionably the one she could least afford to cite favourably. 68 beau comme un paysage de Jules Verne...." (L'Amerique au jour le jour 93).9 When predecessors, not following in the footsteps de Beauvoir preferred to go where of her illustrious Americans feared to tread. In this way, she visited Harlem, entirely on her own, despite her friends' entreaties not to. Here, she clearly felt, was the New World's New World. Of white America's ghetto fears, she wrote: "Qu'un bourgeois trop riche ait peur s'il aventure dans les faubourgs ou Ton a faim, c'est naturel [d'avoir peur]. II se promene dans un univers qui refuse le sien et qui un jour en triomphera. Mais Harlem est avec ses bourgeois et ses proletaires, ses une societe riches et ses complete, pauvres qui ne sont pas ligues dans un action revolutionnaire, qui souhaitent s'integrer a l'Amerique et non le detruire" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 40). De Beauvoir's Harlem is remarkably similarly to the urban playground of "Gravedigger" Jones and "Coffin E d " Johnson, the fictional policemen created by Black expatriate (he lived in France for many years, permanently settling in Spain) author Chester Himes. The Harlem that both of them described now swatch before exists no more than does the of prosperity-altered America: "Le Nevada est following le pays le plus desert, le moins peuple et le plus pauvre des U.S.A." (L'Amerique au jour le jour 153). L'Amerique observations. contemporary subsequently De au jour Beauvoir plight of le jour provides U.S. is a exceedingly penetrating screenwriters—a rich account plight in of which replaced by even worse perils. She makes veiled such the was allusions By the last decades of the 20th century, America will seem increasingly "science fictional" to French intellectuals such as Jean Baudrillard. More about this anon. 9 69 to cultural figures who might well be Gore Vidal, Dwight Macdonald and George Stevens. She explains why Jewish neighbourhoods can flourish in New York but not in Chicago, the Illinois city where competing Irish and Polish proletarian clans attack each other with an imperishable hate. She mentions the quotidian horrors of Jim Crow laws, without dwelling unduly on expression. lynching, She this charts detestable the first social steps taken system's by most American extreme politicians during the early stages of the Cold War, and feels the cold breath of McCarthyism breathing down her neck. She speaks of Philip Wylie and the cult of "Momism," of an up-and-coming Black preachers named "le rev. A . Clayton Powell" (L'Amerique le jour le jour 62), and of a notably non-monolithic culture: "II y a un regionalisme intellectuel, en Amerique; Henri [sic] Miller n'a pas beaucoup d'importance a New York, mais sur cette cote ouest ou il habite on le tient pour un genie" (L'Amerique le jour le jour 147). When de Beauvoir loves a place, she's not afraid to let you know it: "Nulle part la poesie du passe americain que dans les rues du vieux Boston...." Even her occasional "bloopers" are more amusing than annoying. It seems most unlikely, for instance, she saw "une eglise de XlVe siecle" in Texas since that the European colonization of the United States did not begin until le seizieme siecle. (L'Amerique au jour le jour 212). Still, despite her guiding sympathy for America, and regardless of the new intellectual territory which she staked out, Simone de Beauvoir fits seamlessly into the tradition of French literary tourism. Like de Tocqueville, de Beauvoir lamented the lack of true individuality in the United States: "En Amerique, l'individu n'est rien. II fait l'objet d'un culte abstrait...." (L'Amerique au jour le jour 100.) Her feminist views in 70 no way incline her towards a sympathetic view of American womanhood. She scorned what she saw as the coed's cult of frivolity, and disapproved clearly of the fact that 50% students were still virgins: "Les college-girls ont evidemment jour 334.) of female university exterieurement si faciles de fortes defenses interieures" (L'Amerique au jour le Putting her own unique spin on the standard French male critique of Yankee puritanism, de Beauvoir attributed this unfortunate state of affairs to non-stop war between the sexes: "Un des faits qui m'a ete tout de suite sensible en Amerique, c'est qu'hommes et femmes ne s'aiment attributed the .ubiquity of alcohol in America—a criticism exactly opposite to the one pas" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 333). She made by Georges Duhamel 20 years earlier—to America's need to break through the body. was puritan straightjacket of anti-sexuality and hatred of the Like Claude Levi-Strauss, de Beauvoir's European sensibility overwhelmed by the very size of New World towns: "Les d'Amerique sont trop grandes; a la nuit leur dimensions se villes multiplent, elles deviennent les jungle ou il est facile de s'egarer" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 144). It would be all too easy to imagine Duhamel or Celine sneering at violemment 330). "les toilettes feminin, [qui] presque m'ont sexuel" etonne par leur (L'Amerique au jour caractere le jour 1 0 Like both her predecessors and her successors, the author initially "hung out" mainly with fellow way clannish, Americanism though. of the French people in America. She was In particular, she despised local Petainists, disgraced the political no vulgar anti- exiles who Perhaps the strangest plank in the French cultural superiority package is the rather peculiar notion that primitive sanitation in some way bestows seriousness of purpose on a non-flushing nation. 1 0 71 insisted that "cette attitude est la installe dans ce pays" (L'Amerique expressing disdainful this sentiment, statement that seule pour un au jour le jour 24). however, must possible de have Shortly after Beauvoir comes made her Petainist Francais up with a "opponents" turn green with envy: "Si meme les intellectuels dits de gauche sont si fiers des boites de lait condense que leur gouvernement nous dispense, comment s'etonner de l'arrogance de la presse capitaliste...a l'egard de la France..." (L'Amerique le jour le jour 48). She is as appalled by Uncle Sam's lack of interest in France's universal culture as was that staunch conservative humanist, Georges Duhamel: "Le pire est que beaucoup de Francais sont complices de cette attitude; nos capitalistes font une active propagande anti-francaise en Amerique; peut-etre est-ce leur servilite qui autorise certains Americains a parler de la France a une Francaise avec ce ton accusateur: le ton des officiers allemands quand ils disaient en occupant un village: 'Voila ou nous ont conduits vos politiciens et vos Juifs" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 281.) Here as elsewhere, so many French she expresses the underlying belief common to intellectuals that the idea of France is somehow separate from its political misdemeanors, while the idea of America is not. Though de Beauvoir would later play a major role in the French intellectual resistance obligation to justify to the War in Algeria, in America she feels no France's postwar crimes in Indochina and Madagascar, never mind the still-festering wound of Vichy. In the City of Light, ghettos: she can think of no analogous "Fiche au coeur de New York, emblematic Harlem simile pese for U.S. sur la bonne conscience des blancs comme le peche original sur celle d'un Chretien" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 40). When de Beauvoir learns that the U.S. 72 State Department has forbidden the overseas distribution of The Oxbow Incident because said western Beauvoir, like any one dealt with the subject of her noose-haunted of lynching, de contemporaries, reports this fact as if contained some almost cabbalistic eagerly secret. If de Beauvoir understands why so many American leftists abandoned Stalin in 1936, she clearly still regards this defection best, and possibly of mauvais foi. is quite happy to compare as a form of naivete at Like an American tourist in Asia, she an unfamiliar place to a familiar one: "[Rockport est] St. Tropez moins colore...." (L'Amerique au jour le jour 304.) Rapidly wearying Beauvoir goes to see aperta primarily americain" of her trans-Atlantic Roberto Rossellini's "[pour] (L'Amerique le plaisir de neorealist film, Roma: voir un film au jour le jour 335). total, but it will prove to be permanent: playground, qui ne de citta fut Her disaffection pas is not "Aimer l'Amerique, ne pas l'aimer: ces mots n'ont pas de sens. Elle est un champ de bataille...." (L'Amerique au jour le jour 389). De Beauvoir decides to return to her patrie: "II va falloir reapprendre la France et rentrer dans ma peau" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 389.) If America is France's "Other", it is an Other that can make Insiders seem Other to themselves, it would seem. According to de Beauvoir, only in France can a French citizen fully occupy his or her mental skin. With the exception of her affair with everything de Beauvoir had L'Amerique au jour le jour. Some of her subsequent the aforesaid balance to Mandarins, the incidents more did to say about sometimes, lopsided aspects Nelson America however, of her Algren, virtually was said in re-imaginings of provide original text. a certain In Les for instance, de Beauvoir's grasp of American politics—or, 73 rather, of the perception Americans—had grown disappointed the by of by American leaps capitalist and politics bounds. super-power's shared While world by she view, most is she still is no longer surprised by it, as one can tell from the following speech by one of the novel's few major American characters: "—Je ne comprends pas ce prejuge contre l'Amerique, dit Bennet.... II faut etre communiste pour ne voir en elle que le bastion du capitalisme: c'est aussi un grand pays ouvrier; et c'est le pays du progres, de la prosperite, de l'avenir'" (Les Mandarins 383). Bennet's defensiveness, of course, is almost identical to de Beauvoir's own in L'Amerique au jour le jour, albeit with the political polarities reversed. It seems highly unlikely that the author could have written this speech without coming to terms with her immediate war insecurities. confused with complaint pas softening a weakening makes l'impuissance, n'aurez This clear: dis-je; le of of attitude should not, ideological rigour, as "—Tous les intellectuels droit de vous indigner le jour however, the ou be following americains c'est ga qui parait un curieux post- plaident complexe. Vous l'Amerique sera completement fascisee et ou elle declenchera la guerre'" (Les Mandarins 534). As the author pointed out in her memoirs, the Korean war had in fact increased her hostility to U.S. foreign policy, and possibly to the United States tout court: "Depuis la guerre de Coree, mon aversion pour l'Amerique n'avait pas diminuee" (La Force des choses 395). Towards the belatedly conceded, end of her first travel book, the "Nous avons d'autres d'etre malheureux, d'etre inauthentiques, fagons que author les Americains voila tout: les jugements j'ai portes sur eux au cours de ce voyage ne s'accompagnaient sentiment somewhat que d'aucun de superiorite" (L'Amerique au jour le jour 389). As we have just seen, this claim is more than a little questionable. Its good faith, though, is not. After the Second World War, French intellectuals would try to extend their imaginations to the point where they could apprehend America the way it really was, instead of just re-confirming inherited hopes and fears. Claude Much Levi-Strauss and the new of the impetus science of for this came from structuralism. For this reason, it probably behooves us to say a few words about the great anthropologist's first impressions of America. Before "discovering" America in the early 1940s, Levi-Strauss had "discovered" Brazil six years before. Thanks to the exigencies of the Second World War, his first U.S. port of call was not New York but Puerto Rico. Thus, his second American encounter, like his first, took place in a "Latin" corner of the New World. This chance circumstance was to permanently colour his perception of cultural difference, distance and similarity: "Le hasard des voyages offre souvent de telles ambiguites. D'avoir passe a Porto-Rico mes premieres semaines sur le sol des Etats-Unis me fera, dorenavant, retrouver l'Amerique Espagne. Comme aussi pas mal d'annees plus tard, d'avoir visite premiere universite anglaise sur le campus aux edifices neogothiques en ma de Dacca, dans le Bengale oriental, m'incite maintenant a considerer Oxford comme une Inde qui a reussi a controler la boue, la moissure et debordements de la perceptive tourist was vegetation" (Levi-Strauss 36). This les extremely singularly impressed by the artificial "antiquity" of America: "En visitant New York ou Chicago en 1941, en arrivant a Sao Paulo en 1935, ce n'est done pas la nouveaute qui m'a d'abord etonne, mais la precocite des ravages des temps" 1 1 most was (Levi-Strauss 107). overwhelmed the anthropologist about the New World, What however, the very un-European vastness of the place. As he wrote in his most famous book,Tristes tropiques, "...je l'ai ressentie devant la cote et sur les plateaux du Bresil central dans les Andes boliviennes et dans les Rocheuses du Colorado, dans les faubourgs de Rio, la banlieue de Chicago et les rues de New York" (Levi-Strauss 86). To feel at home in this new environment, the exiled Frenchmen felt the need to re-calibrate his sense of scale and space: "...sans doute, objectivement, New York est une ville, mais le spectacle qu'elle propose a la sensibilite europeene est d'un autre ordre de grandeur: celui de nos propres pay sages; alors que les paysages systeme americaines encore plus vaste d'equivalent" (Levi-Strauss By trying geographical, to rather nous pour quoi eux-memes nous ne dans possedons un pas 86.) explain than et entraineraient French discomfort sociological, terms, in the Americas in Levi-Strauss hopes to demystify the problem. His matter-of-fact attitude is far removed from Jean-Philippe Mathy's more sociological approach to the phenomenon. For him, the dilemma is indisolubly linked to the fall of the regime: "The advent of a market society was the ancien undoing of the traditional intelligentsia" (Mathy 7). Since America is the market society par excellence, by extension it became the devil incarnate, Old Europe's new Carthage, its demonized "Other". In this new vacuum, the French felt threatened universal "in their role republic of letters...," as the self-proclaimed a position to which the Obviously, Levi-Strauss is speaking exclusively here construction; the ruins of pre-Colombian America are amongst planet. 1 1 leaders Gauls of a first of post-European the oldest on the 76 appointed themselves, Mathy believes, in 1558 (Mathy 35). Even now, this is a role which has not been entirely abandoned. In La defaite pensee—"new philosopher" Alain Finkielkraut's 1987 behalf of this long-vanished of the piece inheritors might ignorant be cri de coeur "universal" culture—the ideological Herder and de cultural relativists Maistre, and their and undemocratic regimes, but "born again" barbarism's principal economic with an American accent. relativism, Finkielkraut A propos complains, "Le of on villains political Third World beneficiaries— working almost entirely offstage, it must be admitted—would speak de la appear to Levi-Strauss's cultural roi est nu: nous autres, Europeens de la seconde moitie du X X e siecle, nous ne somme pas la civilisation mais fugitive perissable" et une culture (Finkielkraut 87). preceding statement at following: "Dans le proces desormais au reservaient tout naturellement banc particuliere, des face value variete et de Any temptation immediately non Leon Blum plus l'humain to dispelled intente a la barbarie, les accuses, procureur" (Finkielkraut 81). is une take the by the Lumieres siegent a la place que leur ou Clement Atlee: celle du To invert Yeats's famous words, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity. Finkielkraut's fear of New World/Third World barbarism will, by now, sound remarkably familiar to readers of this chapter: culturelle a deux betes noires: l'individualisme et le (Finkielkraut 105). "L'identite cosmopolitanisme" The indignant philosopher never condemns America by name; by the same token, he never invites it to share the dock with the "individualistic, cosmopolitan" confederacy supremacy, over which it would France nations still of Europe, the apparently presides. seem, resides in that nation's intellectual This moral unique refusal to 77 indulge in cultural chauvinism of any kind: "Au siecle des nationalismes, la France—ce fut son merite et son originalite—refusa 1'enracinement de 1'esprit" (Finkielkraut 138). The thought that French "universalism" is in fact a particularly strident and arrogant form of does not seem to have occurred to him. cultural nationalism Only in America, and possibly, at times, in England, does one find equivalent intellectual hubris. A much number of French writers, of course, quieter, more matter-of-fact "absorbed" America in a manner. Marguerite Yourcenar spent much of her life in the state of Maine, but the experience adoptive homeland was not reflected in her writing. While of her one finds much material about Japan and ancient Greece in the Pleiade edition of her complete works, restricted to two and the Yourcenar's U.S. appreciations announcement references are more or less of Anne Lindbergh's undervalued talent that "un petit groupe d'amateurs eclaires" had mounted the first-ever Poussin exhibition in New York (Yourcenar 468). Maine was expatriates: things to her a place what the Greek islands are to so many literary to digest the events of the past and write that have little to do with the immediate present. about Of important French writers, only Andre Breton—who occupied war-time New York as if it were a quarter of Paris filled with an unusually large number of anglophone tourists—and Paul Claudel—the conservative Catholic playwright who was France's ambassador to Washington in the 1920s— were less preoccupied with the meaning of the New World than she. 12 While it is true that she was somewhat more garrulous on the subject of America in her letters to her friends, even there Yourcenar's attitudes towards the New World were more than a little ambivalent, both before and after she accepted U.S. citizenship in 1947. Her first description of the U.S. in her published correspondence is typically Eurocentric: "J'aurais aime vous parler de l'Amerique...il faut pourtant vous dire que I'ete indien est admirable, et que le paysage, en automne, arbore la livree de Peau-Rouge, l'epiderme cuivre d'Atala" 1 2 78 Yourcenar's overwhelming interest in times past and places distant most likely accounts for the veil of silence she drew across her U.S. sojourn. She was, in any case, something of a recluse. charge could be levelled against Saint-John Perse, however. No such A high ranking French diplomat and Free French hero who was stripped of his citizenship by the Vichy government in 1940, Marie-Rene Alexis SaintLeger Leger (the with poet/ambassador's Winston Churchill real name) and Franklin Delano corresponded regularly Roosevelt, worked for Archibald MacLeish at the U.S. Library of Congress, was best friends (Lettres a ses amis et quelques autres 56). Elsewhere, while describing the topography of the Maine Island where she spent the better part of her life, Yourcenar insisted that this New World earth "ressemble un peu, je crois, aux Ardennes, si seulement les Ardennes et leurs forets etaient au bord de la mer" (Lettres a ses amis et quelques autres 193). O f the American Northeast in general, the author explained that "Cette region s'appelle la Nouvelle-Angleterre, mais ressemble plutot aux pays scandinaves" (Lettres a ses amis et quelques autres 432).Though generally considered to belong to the political right, Yourcenar, like so many other French intellectuals of all political persuasions, expressed great sympathy for the plight of U . S . Blacks—she translated James Baldwin's early writings, as well as many "Negro" spirituals—and insisted that she was singularly free from anti-Communist prejudice. In 1960, without much enthusiasm, she voted for John F . Kennedy, primarily because of "la basse propagande anticatholique" (Lettres a ses amis et quelques autres 189) employed by the Republican camp. References to American writers are still painfully few and continentallyoriented. What follows is the closest thing there is to a specific recommendation: "Je vous ai parle d'un court roman americain qui me parait interessant a traduire a cause de ses vertus d'actualite: A N T H E M d'Ayn Rand" (Lettres a ses amis et quelques autres 72). Like Yourcenar herself, A y n Rand was a European intellectual adrift in America. More than 700 pages will pass before she praises another U . S . writer, Edith Wharton, and then only obliquely. On the other hand, this very Gallic Yankee was seemingly struck by certain random elements in popular U.S. culture. She would repeatedly praise Bob Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind," for instance, describing it as ' T u n des plus beaux poemes de notre temps" (Lettres a ses amis et quelques autres 622). Carlos Casteneda's "Don Juan" books, Adele Davis's nutritional tomes, and Ralph Nader's anti-consumerism broadsides were likewise singled out for occasional praise. At times, Yourcenar's critiques of the New World sound "typically French": "les grandes nations technocratiques ne sont pas de grandes nations intellectuelles" (Lettres a ses amis et quelques autres 505). More commonly, though, they reflect her own state of "stoic" isolation: "...je me fais, je 1'avoue, une idee...peu favorable de la litterature americaine, en particulier, et de la litterature contemporaine en general...." (Lettres a ses amis et quelques autres 505). 79 with the attorney-general of the United States, lived in various parts of the country between 1940 and 1950, was inspired to write much of his best poetry during this long period of exile, and was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters at the very end of his protracted and highly rhyhmic, productive repetitive amorphous prose deities and precluded the presence Neiges, and Vents. stay. The poetry even deliberate loaded vaguer obscurity with oblique natural of his work-- invocations to forces—more-or-less of specific place names and characters in There is nothing unusual in that. What is Exil, textually far more surprising is the lack of concrete detail that one finds in his correspondence, speeches and short articles. In communication with an American critic, he wrote, "...J'aime et j'admire la litterature americaine dans son evolution provide a single (Oeuvres proprement example completes 555.) americaine...."—and then neglects of a work or writer of whom he to approves In homage to T.S. Eliot—the Anglo-American poet who had assured Leger's warm U.S. reception with the aid of an exquisitely rendered translation of his best-known work, Anabase — Saint-John Perse translated the first few lines of The Hollow Men into French, but readers will look in vain for a concrete appreciation of this or any other Eliot poem. To be fair, in one letter the author/diplomat did come close to praising a 1944 Allen Tate collection of verse for specific reasons, but his letter to e.e. cummings is mainly polite hot air. Its opening (Oeuvres phrase is typical: "De vous, completes 1041). Leger was poete ne et tres princier...." always willing to encrust his prose with bombastic "antiquity". His "Hommage a Jacqueline Kennedy" began as follows: "Quand les Furies du drame antique font irruption sur la scene moderne, cherchant encore la mesure de l'etre humain a la 80 limite de l'humain, il semble qu'elles veuillent epargner, pour la mieux supplicier, une victime d'elite entres toutes choisie, et comme prise en temoignage, pour repondre l'epreuve" (Oeuvres diplomat liked de la force completes everything 535 about humaine - 536). the du plus Seemingly, United States atroce this de poet- except its unfortunate adhesion to the real world. Belgian-born novelist Georges Simenon lived in the U.S. for a decade, and did indeed situate a number of his books in his new place of residence. Inspector were somewhat Maigret's first impressions depressing, as befits of the "Big Apple" a noirish text: "II pleuvait. On roulait dans un quartier sale ou les maisons etaient laides a en donner la nausee. Etait-ce cela, New York" (Tout Simenon 545). Maigret is annoyed by America's irritating lack of apartment house concierges telephones with double ear-pieces. capacity of American bars Conversely, he is and the miracle of intriguingly, at this time (circa 1947) delighted room service. by and the Rather the inspector's U.S. hosts believe that his French nationality means the visiting flic must hate whiskey, an assumption which leads one to suspect that this particular beverage had not yet caught observant. He enters New themselves, Dijon...." on in Paris. As always, "...avec (Tout [des] Simenon York neighbourhoods maisons 597). alter ego that are is very cities unto pas plus haut qu'a Bordeaux ou a Like Celine, Maigret's creator would discover "...la Cinquieme Avenue et ses desquels il s'arreta" (Tout Simenon's magasins Simenon 570.) Like de luxe aux vitrines Simone de Beauvoir, Francois Combe, the displaced French actor hero of another novel, Trois chambres a Manhattan, Simenon would be struck by "...les lumieres de Broadway, avec de la foule noire qui coulait sur les trottoirs" (Tout 81 Simenon 203). American Simenon was as susceptible to the exotic charm of the Southwest as anyone: "Tucson est la plus charmante caricature de 1'image que tous les Europeens se font de la 'conquete de l'Ouest': le desert, les villages fantome, l'influence mexique si proche, le spectre des missions espagnoles et celui de Geronimo... Tout y est. Dans la vieille ville reconstitute on ne serait pas etonne d'assister d'une diligence" (Assouline 549 - 550). a l'attaque Although a man of the right who had fled France to escape the taint of being considered one of the Nazis' intellectual collaborators, even Simenon was eventually driven from the shores of his once adored America by the rise of McCarthyism. As his principal biographer put it, "Ce torrent de boue, de haine et d'injustice acheve de dissiper ses dernieres illusions sur une democratie qu'il avait quelque peu idealisee" (Assouline 579). In the early simpler: it distractedly was 1940s, of course, quite approve of possible the for the moral question seemed much anti-Nazi United States without French refugees in any way to being interested in the country itself. This state of mind certainly applied to Andre Breton's Surrealist circle, which tended to treat New York like a Gallic outpost on Mars. It was also true of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the aviator/novelist who was, at that time, one of the most admired authors in the world. Virtually all of Saint-Exupery's polemical writings during the years 1941 - 1944 were devoted to the evils of Nazism, the need for occupied Frenchmen to overcome their political differences, the moral necessity of fighting for Free France without psychologically succumbing to General de Gaulle's self-aggrandizing caudillismo, and—a very distant fourth priority—America's moral responsibility to rescue the world from an evil political system that was inherently inimical to its own. While 82 living in disagreeable safety his regardless of their political loyalties, 1940, opposed to with America, expressed as solidarity in those particular bete noire was whinged from those of the his author fellow countrymen had actually fought who—biens pensants repeatedly who, for France in all, of whom his the dictatorial "pope" of Surrealism—merely comfortable armchairs. Even while travelling on a troopship to North Africa with the Allied invasion fleet, Saint-Exupery tended to see America as a means, not an end: "Les cinquante soldats de mon convoi partaient en guerre pour sauver, non le des Etats-Unis, mais 1'Homme lui-meme, le respect de mille citoyen l'Homme, la liberte de l'Homme, la grandeur de l'Homme" (Saint-Exupery 398). These "universal" virtues were not, of course, universal at all; they were, rather, the humanistic patrimony of Within relations, situate. the overall Jacques An framework Maritain is one orthodox Catholic of 1789. Franco-American intellectual of the more difficult individuals to philsopher, Maritain backward-looking reactionary like Paul Claudel, modernist Simone like Weill, Georges Bernanos, nor a left-leaning a was neither a a machine-hating anti- Christian/Marxist hybrid like believer like Francois Mauriac. A regular visitor to the United States, in the mid-1950s Maritain wrote a book on his impressions of the country in his hosts' language, English. Prior to this, however, between interviews his two he had often participated in cultural exchanges favourite countries, using as his preferred forum. During the radio broadcasts and Second World War, he was a propagandist for the Free French cause, a propagandist who never tired of reminding his fellow Frenchmen of the ties of amity that bound them to America: "Dans ce message je vous dire que le peuple de France 83 tient toujours americain...." une place (Oeuvres privilegiee completes. dans coeur du 387). O f all French perhaps the one most loath to over- of America, he was generalize. In a pre-war interview, he explained, "Je ne suis pas l'ecole de M . Claude Farriere, auquel les Etudes reprochaient d'avoir juge seulement Reflexions readers dans sur choses le pays" flatteuse completes. recemment avoir passe quelques completes. Vol. de VII jours 1083). In Maritain began the book by assuring his study "...on ecrire Internationale, ne trouvera...aucune allusion sur ce sujet, et plus j'aurais meme pour V o l . X 768). apres (Oeuvres je devais jamais la politique toujours de Chine, l'Amerique, that in this politique...si sur des peuple VIII interpreters Vol. le que j'aime la particulierement bien des choses les pays a a dire, le plus" et pas (Quevres As you have no doubt already guessed, those two countries were America and France. Most of what Maritain has to say about the U.S. is extremely flattering to the national amour propre; Southern though it's not American entirely racism being somewhat ignored. In general, Maritain materialism and the country's preference His few sound American for the future over the good statement is "Au premier coup d'oeil gently chiding past. blistering jeremiads; basically, he accuses Americans of being too thought: like of than true. The following more approves even Jansenism to be criticisms soft-pedaled, fairly typical of il semblerait meme this line of que l'Amerique croit a la maniere de Jean-Jacques Rousseau en la bonte de la Nature, en la bonte naturelle de 1'Homme" (Oeuvres completes. Vol. X 867). Clearly, such a put-down carries about as much sting as one of Sophie Portnoy's autocritiques. While generally avoiding trans-cultural specifics, professed to believe in "...une mysterieuse affinite, une Maritain singuliere et 84 profonde sympathie, qui rendent leur destines historiques convergentes" (Oeuvres completes. Vol. X 768). In this respect, less anomalous. centre Party at least, Maritain's socio-cultural allegiances seem Politically, he is an Atlanticist, one of those right-of- French intellectuals and the American existentialists side occasionally who of even the in Cold socialist, opposed their both French Communist undisguised War. Both the the preference Gaullist and were a not Atlanticists for the non-Gaullist, insignificant factor in the intellectual life of post-war France. The most prominent member of this faction Raymond Aron. common to champion negative In U.S. journals of the see of Aron portrayed democracy (pro-Communist) Manichean duality whose as theoretically the of unquestionably 1970s and '80s, "positive" presence policies was it was (pro-American) effectively blocked the While this Jean-Paul Sartre. the French left imbued hard quite with a political power it never in fact enjoyed, on the mythological level it did fill a certain void. Sartre could be dismissed as all theory and no sense; Aron, on the other hand, was as unimaginatively pragmatic as Benjamin Franklin himself. No State Department official could read the following passage and not preen: "La Revolution americaine fonda la Republique et les guerres libertes, et donnerent decadente la Revolution francaise dechaina un quart de siecle de laissa des en lecons 354.) heritage aux une nation Bolcheviks" The rationale for dechiree. (Plaidoyer Plaidoyer Les pour can Jacobins l'Europe found in the introduction to Aron's study of post-war U.S. foreign policy: "Je deteste la tyrannie stalinienne impose a cent millions d'Europeens au lendemain de la guerre menee au nom de la liberation des peuples" (Republique 85 Imperiale 13). When one reads both statements together, the gist of Aron's pro-Americanism becomes clear. The author wants to live in a prosperous, non-Communist Europe; in order to do so, the United States must appear strong and its moral authority more valid than that of its opponent. In the post-war world, no Frenchmen, with the possible exception of hardcore Gaullists, seriously believed that France was still a great power that could independently determine its own political destiny. To survive, one had to choose between champions. Sartre chose Russia, Aron the United States. In both cases these alliances were made primarily out of interest in the future of Europe and the cultural survival of France. Within this mindset, the Soviet Union was no more real than the U.S.A.; both were powerful abstractions that provided the background for the more serious business of foreground life. Each one was neither entirely real nor entirely fictitious. One of the last traditional French travellers to the New World was Michel Butor. Like Saint-John Perse, Butor wrote about the U.S. mainly in verse, although his verse was amorphous. that Mobile, describes publications as concrete as the older poet's was for instance, is a sprawling 500-page prose poem a day printed in the in life small of rural 50 states. towns lie Catalogues of ethnic cheek-by-jowl beside historical vignettes of doomed Indian messiahs and runaway slaves. As in Leger's work, repetition is important, but in this case it is used to represent uneasily the homogenization co-exists with the of America, nation's a homogenization heterogeneity. memory of Jackson Pollock, abstract impressionism's painter, Mobile kaleidoscopic Dedicated best-known that to the action can be read as a kind of splintered prism, a drunken, image of a nation in perpetual motion. In structure, the 86 work bears some resemblance to Ezra Pound's Cantos, even though its high-speed, are removed sometimes from deliberately Pound's superficial reference-rich verse. lines light-years Announcements of the author's own presence in America are few and often funny, as when, in a catalogue section devoted to local birds, he refers to "Butors americains...." (Mobile 373). Only rarely does the verse turn lyrical: merjles flammes des grands des hotels,/les raffineries signaux dans les derricks,/oublie commonly, it historical passages are des avions ta blancheur involves unsurprisingly, derriere details relating replete with dans damiers le cieljle lumineux bruit du vent dans la nuit" (Mobile 468). chasing to nous,/les details Native de chasing and "La More details. The African-Americans, Tocqueville's doomed, fatalistic romanticism. In the d'eau par same "traditional" vein, seconde Butor opened 6 810 Niagara Falls. litres with quotes from Chateaubriand to explain the eight tones of voice which would be employed in this "etude of 000 Various pairs of newlyweds say stereophonique" their piece as the honeymoon town passes through the four seasons of the year. "Quentin," a visiting professor of French at the University of Buffalo and almost certainly the author's alter ego, laments his sexual solitude in such a place: "Et moi qui suis loin de ma femme vivante, separe d'elle par toute l'epaisseur de l'Atlantique" (6 810 000 litres d'eau par seconde 273). Various pairs of Black gardeners function as a kind of Greek chorus throughout the work. Butor gives Chateaubriand the book's reproducing the title and sub-title of the early last word, nineteenth- century author's best-known work: "Atala, ou les amours de deux sauvages dans le desert" (6 810 000 litres d'eau par seconde 281). 87 l'epaisseur de l'Atlantique" (6 810 000 litres d'eau par seconde 273). Various pairs of Black gardeners function as a kind of Greek chorus throughout the work. Butor gives Chateaubriand the book's reproducing the title and sub-title of the early last word, nineteenth- century author's best-known work: "Atala, ou les amours de deux sauvages dans le desert" (6 810 000 litres d'eau par seconde 281). Butor is a transitional figure in the history of French travellers in America. While Philippe Djian, Philippe Labro, Philippe Sollers, Kristeva, writers either Pascal Quignard, will continue in to regale America somewhat Jean Baudrillard, or and many French readers among Americans, with their other their Julia French adventures, grounding will be different. For the "children of Marx and Coca Cola," France and America will no longer be the mutually exclusive entities they once seemed to be. McDonalds business With Euro fast-food virtually by Disney outlets the encroaching putting minute, on the centuries-old and airwaves Eiffel bistrots and movie Tower, out of screens completely dominated by U.S. (sub) cultural product, France is no longer the reassuring Beauvoir so fortress gratefully to which retreated. Georges By the Duhamel same and token, Simone America, de now fighting for economic supremacy against Japan, Southeast Asia's "young tigers," and an economically bullish European Economic Community, is no longer the island of isolation it once was. In Chapter Four we will continue this discussion within a radically changed historical context, a time when the largest corporations are in many ways more powerful than long-established painfully obvious powerful companies that William "in cahoots" Gibson's nation states. It is now dystopian near-future of with organized crime while ordinary 88 citizens struggle to survive in continental power blocs with no obvious political authority no longer belongs to the realm of science fiction. Like cyberspace and cybercrime, these are quotidian realities which will have an incalculable impact on the first half of the twenty-first century. For foreign our descendants, places in the search of notion exotic of national experience travellers might well visiting seem as impossibly quaint as a visit to the beach without recourse to powerful sunblocks. To find anything unique might appear as improbable as discovering Dr. Livingstone in the jungle. By, say, the year 2050, no twist of the Amazon river might be more than fifty miles away from the nearest home austere entertainment temples, centre, churches, while pagodAS, the doors of even and minarets might the most well be presumably, the overshadowed by the ubiquitous golden arch. At some point within the foreseeable hundred years, future which I have described will be radically changed by any number of unforeseen social next revolutions. natural catastrophes, How this metamorphosis economic will upsets, and occur, however, and whether it will be for the better or the worse, is still, at the time of this writing, anyone's Thus guess. far, we have restricted our investigation primarily to the upper end of Franco-American travel literature; in Chapter Two, we will both broaden and lower our sights, fiction in France, America, zeroing in on the history of crime and—for the first time—Italy. Within the context of this study, France and the U.S. should be thought of as past and present phases of global cultural power. Italy, for a variety of reasons, provides an interesting contrast to these poles. As "creative" as America and France, Italy has failed to exercise cultural hegemony over 89 the world since the Fall of the Roman Empire, even though it has probably contributed more to the arts than any other nation. Open to, according to some critics, an alarming degree of outside influence, it is also intensely Because Italy its insular, cosmopolitan and provincial at the "greatness" and "weakness" are so hopelessly makes the ideal sounding board for two same time. intertwined, more resilient powers who, nonetheless, fear that they, too, might "break". The relationship ship of social history to the creation of distinct crime genres stories of will an considered economically founded on the are sure also be strength conservative, some detail. socially of a loosely-commanded, to differ from those of established in an equally The detective egalitarian society arms-bearing militia revolutionary, but more polity founded on the bones of an ancient monarchy, while the police fictions of both are sure to seem alien to the lives of a people whose immersion in local culture is immense, but whose experience of a viable, universally-recognized political authority is extremely If the comparisons between these contrasting limited. cultures are not always simple, obvious or linear, this is all to the good. Cultural crosspollination has become the defining mode of late twentieth century life, after all, and, like every "biological" process, it is somewhat messy. For this reason, expanding with its the while shapes of parameters analysis province's empires the in of chapters of this Quebecois unhappy role as wilt and four (the sociocultural dialogue self-perceptions an outpost a troubled present macro-nationalisms two where in latter section still further, regard to of both Old and New micro-nationalisms and wane) must be wax "romantic", the World wildly while chapters one and three can afford to be "classical". Only in this way can 90 we hope to achieve a three-dimensional view of what goes, is going, has already gone. 91 Chapter Two: Mid-Atlantic Melodrama: or. A Meeting of the Mafias Determining dates of cinematic origin is almost as difficult as pinpointing precise moments of evolutionary change in the history of the world. As Tag Gallagher wrote of the cowboy movie in his truculent essay, "Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the 'Evolution' of the Western", the linear progression of form championed by Thomas Schatz and other genre critics is largely illusory. Between 1909 and 1915, Gallagher sneered, "there were probably more westerns released each month than during the entire decade of the 1930s" (Grant 205). Most of these movies are now lost, and film historians are generally unfamiliar with the few that remain. Thus, they are ignorant of the period fact that, by the time of the First World War, "cliches [were] already an issue" (Grant 206). As it was with the western, so it is with the detective story. While D.W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) is sometimes described as the world's first true gangster movie, it almost certainly benefitted from the innovations previously pioneered by numerous nowforgotten genre pieces. Motion picture "firsts" generally refer to the successful launch dates of subsequently imitated conventions and ideas, concepts which would typically have been worked out long before their formal induction by the film industry as a whole. While one can, with some assurance, enumerate the inventors of technological cinema, it is far more dificult to identify the medium's ideological and aesthetic milestones. What 92 this means, essentially, is that cinematic history, like all history, is written not just by but for the "victors" (a word which, in early filmmaking idiom, is often synonymous with "survivors"). This is something readers should keep in mind while processing these reflections on the relationship between the American crime story and its French and Italian equivalents. Attempts to nail down precise turning points in the history of film noir and poetic realism, of the polar and the mid-Atlantic gangster movie, are foredoomed to failure by the incomplete archives and commercially-driven memory of the motion picture industry itself. Boxoffice successes are almost always remembered; boxoffice failures are often forgotten. This disclaimer means that the widescreen policier not begin with The Musketeers probably did of Pig Alley, or, more obscurely, with The Italian, a 1915 vintage potboiler which Michel Ciment described as "une premiere version miniature du Parrain II de Coppola...." (Ciment 21). Indeed, that honour might not even belong to a French short released in 1901. According to Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, On considere generalement L'Histoire du crime, attribue a Ferdinand Zecca, comme le premier 'polar' de I'histoire du cinema francais, 'drame en six vues" du la catalogue Pathe de 1901, long de 115 metres, qui evoque successivement I'assassinat d'un banquier, I'arrestation du meutrier dans un cafe (mauvais lieu), la confrontation du meurtrier et de sa victime a la morgue, le meurtrier dans sa cellule (cette scene est fameuse aussi par les incrustations dans le haut de I'ecran qui illustrent les reves, ou les souvenirs, du prisonnier), I'arrivee du bourreau et la toilette du condamne, enfin I'execution sur la bascule a Chariot—ce dernier tableau aurait choque par son realisme, au point que les exploitants I'auraient souvent supprime pour eviter des ennuis avec avec les polices municipales en un temps ou il n'existait pas encore de censure ministerielle (Jeancolas 90). 93 Five years later, Georges Melies, the father of fantasy filmmaking, lensed Les Incendiaires, an atypically realistic look at an arsonist whose mania leads him to the scaffold. Two years after that, Victorin Jasset shot Nick Carter, a 9-part serial that was inspired by American detective stories then being published in French translation—a tradition which would assume major importance after the Second World War. One of Carter's principal foes was Zigomar, a criminal mastermind who preceded Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse by almost two decades. Advanced intellectual circles were particularly keen on Fantomas (1913), "The Surrealists [being] struck by Feuillade's vision of a 'defamiliarized reality'" (Abel 75). For early twentieth-century poet Michel Bouzat, the masked master criminal was "Mon frere en Sade/mon assassin/superbe et malfaisant/mon bouquet tragique/ma grande ombre/ma tache pourpre/indelible" (Fantomas 1201). That Fantomas, Zigomar and their affiliated friends and enemies were the natural by-products of France's commercially-driven entertainment industry, owing nothing at all to the dictates of "high" art, made them seem all the more appealing to members of an artistic avant-garde with deep cultural reservations about both the classic and romantic canons. They rejoiced in the fact that Feuillade's name "commence comme feuilleton" (Dufreigne 15). Such Gallic precocity is anything but surprising. Until the outbreak of the Great War, French studios controlled more than 60% of the world motion picture market. In their heyday, studio heads Louis Gaumont and Charles Pathe were far more powerful than the American moguls who would succeed them as captains of (celluloid) industry in 94 the 1920s and '30s. For twenty years Paris established leads which Hollywood and New York could only hope to follow. At the turn of the century, the City of Light was, like Berlin and Vienna, one of the principal germinators of new cultural ideas. As T.J. Clark emphasized in The Painting of Modern Life, Paris was the place where the creation of les grands magasins and the classes needed to service these innovations opened the floodgates to a rash of new diversions. "It began," he suggested, "with the feuilleton, the chromolithograph, and the democratization of sport, and soon proceeded to a tropical tobacconists, diversity football, of forms: museums, drugstores, news movies, cheap agents romantic and fiction, lantern-slide lectures on popular science, records, bicycles, the funny pages, condensed Frangaise" books, sweepstakes, swimming pools, Action (Clark 235). While searching for material to adapt to the screen, early French filmmakers proved particularly susceptible to the charms of the serialized newspaper novel. Les Mysteres de New York (1915) was quite shamelessly inspired by Eugene Sue's feuilleton, Les Mysteres de Paris (1842). In Le Cinema frangais, film historian Georges Sadoul said of Louis Feuillade, the unchallenged king of the cinematic chapter play, that his thrillers had adopted "avec une verve facile, les methodes utilisees par Emile Zola dans ses Rougon modestly, contemporary Macqart..." (Sadoul 16). More French film critic Thierry Jousse expressed his enthusiasm for Feuillade's 1915 serial Les Vampires (in which the anagrammatical Irma Vep made her onscreen debut) in the following terms: "La force, encore presente, de cette serie est de nous plonger directement dans I'atmosphere de la Belle Epoque, d'un temps ou le 95 roman populaire croisait le serial et les journaux pour composer un recit de violence, d'aggressions nocturnes, d'assassins en cagoule noire, de femmes mysterieuses, d'orgies de cabarets" ("Les Vampires" 120). During the early years of the 20th century, onscreen crime in American movies typically occurred in comedies (where kidnappings were popular) or westerns (where shoot-outs and punch-ups were preferred). Although organized crime was already well-established in American cities, it was seldom at the centre of movie plots, being used primarily as a temptation with which to lure poor-but-honest country boys off the straight-and-narrow-path. In 1910, memories of the "wild West" were not only still vibrant, but virtually current. No one could be sure the last Indian war had been fought; train robberies were still occasionally committed, while nothing, technically, stopped Western outlaws from holding up banks on horseback. The chronological proximity of the cowboy's heyday contributed greatly to his cinematic allure. Despite occasional sorties in the direction of the mob—Josef von Sternberg's 1927 silent feature, Underworld, being the most distinguished of these—the Hollywood studios would not constitute the gangster movie as a separate genre until the early 1930s, at a time when the novelty of sound recording equipment allowed directors to reproduce the chatter of machinegun fire and the squeal of getaway tires. In the words of Italian film historian Giuseppe De Santis, during the early days of the Great Depression "L'America...era preoccupata...di creare una nuova formula destinata, insieme all'altra che portava alia rabata la vita dei gangsters, a sostiture con successo il glorioso 'Western'..." (De Santis). Michel Ciment, on the other hand, taking a 96 longer (1992) view of U.S. cinema, sees the genres as complementary, rather than successive: "Le cowboy et le gangster sont les deux grands figures legendaires de l'Amerique. Ils incarnent une nation, jeune et puritaine, qui na?t dans la violence et reduit volontiers les problemes a des contrastes simples: blanc et noir, bien et mal" (Le crime a I'ecran 15). Such a view is, of course, entirely compatible with D.H. Lawrence's definition of "the essential American soul [as] hard, isolate, stoic and a killer" (Lawrence 68). It is also, as we saw in the last chapter, entirely in keeping with the standard French view of the United States, a sometimes paranoid, sometimes prescient, sometimes deadly accurate perspective in which the fatally effete refinement of aristocratic European culture is at the mercy of the harsh but vital barbarism of the New World. In France, meanwhile, criminal demographics differed greatly from the American norm. In the early 1900s, delits flagrants were as urban as they were rural—which is to say, "Sicilian"—in Italy. At the turn of the century, Joseph Bonnot's gang of anarchists pioneered the motorized bank robbery in the streets of Paris. It was his near contemporary exploits that fascinated the French public, not the fading memories of Jesse James and Billy the Kid. While crime-hinged plots might have played a limited role in early Italian melodramas (particularly in the so-called "arcade movies," which flourished in Naples during the late 1890s and early 1900s), the industry as a whole generally preferred to define itself in terms of such epic celebrations of Roman antiquity as Cabiria (1913) and Quo Vadis (1912). While these early features might have acted as a catalyst on the cinematic sensibilities of D. W. Griffith, the American 97 man of the theatre who almost singlehandedly defined the parameters of commercial narrative moviemaking, they did not—indeed, they could not—endow Italy with a healthy, multifaceted film industry. As in other areas of popular culture, the nation found itself obliged to import "escapist trash". In his Quaderni dal carcere, one of the topics imprisoned Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci returned to again and again was the absence of an indigenous, home-grown popular literature. "Perche la letteratura italiana non e populare?" he asked rhetorically (Gramsci 2108). The absence of indigenous crime novels was a subject which seemed to particularly vex him, despite his elaborate and frequently ingenious attempts to explain the situation in terms of the specifics of Italy's recent past. "Una certa fortuna ha avuto in Italia la letteratura popolare sulla vita dei briganti," he complained, "ma la produzione e di valore bassisimo" (Gramsci 2121). Crime novels, Gramsci continued, were usually written by conservative foreigners. Even Hungarian and Australian novelists, he complained, fared better in his country than did local authors. By relying so heavily on French popular literature, he worried, Italians might pick up certain ideas which were alien to their cultural tradition-such as the time-hardened Gallic prejudice against all things English. Of crime novel aesthetics, he wrote, "In questa letteratura poliziesca ci sono queste due corrente: una mecanica- d'intrigo-l'altra artistica...." (Gramsci 2129). On the one hand, he endowed the policier with impressive antecedents, seeking its origins in the works of Balzac, Hugo and Poe. On the other hand, he was clearly attracted to its lack of high art "respectability": "II romanzo 98 poliziesco e nato ai margini delle letteratura sulle 'cause celebri'" (Gramsci 2128). Of course, having access to books and periodicals, within the claustrophobic universe of Mussolini's prison system, but not to films, Gramsci had very little to say about the state of Italian cinema. Nevertheless, many of the notebook charges he makes against Italian popular literature could just as easily have been advanced against Italian popular film. Thinly-veiled envy is often present when Gramsci writes about French popular culture. Why this should be so is more or less selfevident. Of all continental powers, France was unquestionably the most successful when it came to entertaining its citizens with home-made divertissements. While the Third Republic was certainly not immune to the seductive blandishments of Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley, it was anything but a cap-in-hand cultural dependent. What's more, France was an exporter of popular culture as well as an /mporter. Jean Gabin could hold his own on the home—and, to a much lesser extent, global—front against Clark Gable, just as Edith Piaf could sing Billy Holliday to a European draw, while France's achievements in the "higher" arts were literally non-pareil (even if, as in Hollywood, many of the nation's most distinguished cultural workers were actually foreign-born). Despite the undeniable artistic accomplishments of Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, on the multi-laned highway of cultural imperialism, France was the one continental nation with the generic versatility to give at least as good as it got. In a pinch, it could satisfy most, if not all, of its cultural needs—a form of national self-sufficiency which American entertainment conglomerates have been attempting to erode with ever 99 greater missionary zeal for the past half century. (This is a subject we shall return to, at greater length, in Chapter Four). The Third Republic was able to maintain this enviable position because of its versatility. Its publishing houses produced pulp as well as belles lettres, just as its recording studios were equally receptive to the airs of Edith Piaf and Claude Debussy. Like the Americans, their principal rivals and de facto antagonists, the French successfully bridged the gap between "high" art and "low". For every Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau there was a Georges Simenon or Francis Carco. By mid-century, there would also be Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Boris Vian, authors who deliberately popular literature obscured the boundaries between and "art", even if their works were read almost exclusively by aficionados of the latter. Why this should be so is a subject we shall return to later. According to Gerald Mast, "The French film in the first decade of sound may have been the most imaginative, the most stimulating of its generation: a subtle blend of effective, often poetic, dialogue; evocative visual imagery; perceptive social analysis; complex fictional structures; rich philosophical implication; wit and charm" (Mast 199). This favourable assessment, it seems, was visible to more than just posterity. In Mists of Regret, his book-length study of French poetic realism, Dudley Andrew writes, "A survey of the New York Times reviews for the whole decade [of the 1930s] shows not only the large number of films that played in the city (170 are reviewed) but also how highly they were valued: a great majority are praised, often for outscoring Hollywood in artistry, taste, and maturity of content and execution" (Andrew 13). These reviews "repeatedly [gave] the 100 impression that something about French mores, tradition, education, or language [destined] its better films to be serious, candid, atmospheric, and strangely dark" (Andrews 13). This strange darkness, born at the anxious intersection where the brave new hopes of Leon Blum's National Front government encountered fatalistic premonitions of the coming war with Nazi Germany, was what poetic realism was all about. Making its precocious debut in the early 1930s in the form of Jean Gremillon's early masterpiece, Petite Lise, the movement coalesced out of a number of La unlikely antecedents. Perhaps the most Gallic of these is the belief, shared by Alain Resnais and many others, that "Emile Zola is the father of French cinema...." (Andrew 27). "Curiously," Dudley Andrew notes, "Zola's impact in this era stems not from his status as novelist (storyteller in prose) but from the presence in his novels of two extremes: 'photographic naturalism' on the one side, and the visionary, heavily metaphoric imagery that, on the other side, he uses to paint his melodramas" (Andrew 162). While Andrew's emphasis on the great naturalist's importance to French cinema cannot be disputed, this influence was far complicated than the previous statements suggest. In The Through more French Their Films, Robin Buss points out that the ubiquity of Zola adapatations resulted in a chronological anomaly known as contemporain vague," a Never Never Land Paris where Fords could "le co-exist with hansom cabs, and gas jets with electric lights (Buss 31). For a similar—albeit aesthetically inferior—parallel to this trend, one must look to the "B" westerns of the 1930s and '40s, low budget genre pictures where Roy Rogers and Gene Autry would alternate between 101 horses and station wagons when it came time to pursue decidely anachronistic villains. Besides conflating historical epochs when cinematically adapting the great naturalist's novels, French filmmakers shared an equally uncertain attitude in regard to Zola's political positions. If the author of "J'accuse" was the fearless champion of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the dauntless opponent of obscurantist oppression who might well have been murdered for his public stance, his "entomological" literary eye did not win him many friends on the left. Marxist critics, such as Georg Lukacs, repeatedly compared the author of Germinal unfavourably to Honore de Balzac, the great exposer of early capitalism. No matter how far he stuck out his neck on behalf of the downtrodden, the fact that he had written "...il y a une determination absolue pour tous les phenomenes humains" could be neither forgotten nor forgiven (Zola 23). In La Roman experimental, Zola stated his position as follows: "Sans me risquer a formuler des lois, j'estime que la question d'heredite a une grande influence dans les manifestations intellectuelles et passionelles de I'homme" (Zola 24). What he wanted to do was "substitue a I'etude de I'homme abstrait, de I'homme metaphysique, I'etude de I'homme naturel, soumis aux lois physico-chimiques et determine par les influences du milieu...." (Zola 24). By reducing mankind to little more than a natural outgrowth of interlocking social and biological forces, Zola offered little hope to those who saw in humanity a less deterministic circumstances, was quite blank slate which, under the capable of "re-writing" itself for right the common good. On a certain level, social pessimism must always be seen as a form of conservatism. 1 02 In any event, it is hard to imagine a more perfect way to simultaneously alienate both wings of the French intelligentsia. By denying the metaphysical individuality of men and women, Zola distanced himself from the Catholic right. At the same time, his belief in social laws more rigid and absolute than those promulgated by Charles Darwin and Emile Durkheim made a mockery of collective struggle. Biology, it seemed, would always get the better proletarian will-to-power. of the Even the delayed announcement that "Je suis un republicain de la veille" could not undo the damage he had already done to his progressive image (Zola 299). Fortunately, psychologie as Jean Mitry reminds us in Esthetique et du cinema, the seventh art "est forme structurante autant que forme structuree" (Mitry 27). Taking Mitry at his word, for almost eighty years French filmmakers have re-cast Emile Zola in their own, usually less forbidding, image. We have already seen how Louis Feuillade managed to superimpose the aesthetics of the Macquart novels on a subject as unlikely as Fantomas. Rougon On the other hand, in his version of la Bete humaine (1938), Jean Renoir cut out the book's middle class characters entirely, focusing exclusively on its diegetic proletarians. Nevertheless, having said all this, one is still hard pressed to explain away the fatalism endemic to films pitched in the key of poetic realism without recourse to Zola. With very few exceptions, poetic realist cinema was made by left-wingers: anarchists, socialists and members of the French Communist Party. How could they accept a metaphysics which seemed to assume the permanent nature of the current hierarchical order? Even after consciously rejecting Zola's 103 social determinism, poetic realist cineastes seem to have absorbed it subliminally. How else can one explain the snug sanctuary of friendship, marriage, and community aboard the Seine river barge in Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1933), or the fleeting independence of the worker-owned publishing house in Jean Renoir's Le Crime de M. Lange (1936)? Cinematic attempts to establish a new and more equitable social order were tentative, progressive and usually doomed to failure. filmmakers rejected with their The Zola which heads held almost unlimited sway over their hearts. With the coming of sound, screenplays assumed new importance in the making of movies. Before the invention of the boom mike and the camera blimp, snappy dialogue was expected to galvanize all scenes where the viewers could actually see the actors' mouths move. No longer could scenarios be roughed out on the back of place settings during lunch hour. Synchronous sound required professional writers, not amateurs. Consequently, Hollywood's major studios recruited literary talent from the major New York publishing houses, as well as from the Broadway stage. William Faulkner, Lillian Hellman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and John Steinbeck were all employed from time to time as contract screenwriters. As a rule, these literary imports looked down upon this sort of work, travelling to Hollywood only when impending bankruptcy made $500 weekly paycheques seem irresistable. It was the time of the Great Depression, and movies were where the money was. This disdain was fully returned by the studios. Only rarely were literary writers permitted to produce screenplays of their own choosing. More commonly, they would be used to embellish the dialogue of dull contract writers, to add sparkle to lacklustre scenes. To 104 producers, screenwriters were universally known as "schmucks with Underwoods." For French writers, things were very different. In the snidely superior Scenes de la vie future, French Academician Georges Duhamel might have scornfully asserted that "Je donne toute la bibliotheque cinematographique du monde, y compris ce que les gens de metier appellent pompeusement leurs 'classiques', pour une piece de Moliere, pour un tableau de Rembrandt, pour une fugue de Bach," but he was in the minority (Duhamel 51). More typically, Nobel Prize winner Andre Gide resented the fact that Roger Martin du Gard, another Gallic winner of the world's most celebrated literary prize, got to write the first draft script of La Bete humaine in place of his own august self. While French writers would regularly whine about the ways in which literature was deformed by the seventh art, it seldom inveighed against the idea itself. From their vantage point, the cinema seemed to be so far behind the book and the play in terms of cultural importance, it usually failed to arouse their fears, even if it occasionally incurred their displeasure. (For somewhat different reasons, Hollywood producers felt much the same way about TV until the late 1940s, when the new medium began to dangerously encroach upon their economic turf). Unsurprisingly, a distinguished caste of professional screenwriters grew up under this regime. The most accomplished of these were Jacques Prevert, Marcel Pagnol, and Charles Spaak. Of the three, Prevert—with the possible exception of Cesare Zavattini, the only scenarist in film history whose contributions to films generally more highly praised by critics than were those of were the 105 directors for whom he worked—unquestionably exercised the greatest influence on the development of poetic realism. This is a subject to which we shall return at the proper time. This said, one should not allow these differences in cultural attitude to obscure the fact that the relative aesthetic success of French and American cinema in the 1930s was in large part due to the high quality of their scenarios. Thanks to the awkwardness of early sound equipment, Depression-era movies were seldom distinguished by their visuals. Consequently, actors had to shoulder the burden dropped by the cinematographers, and this was only possible when the words they were given were up to cinematic snuff. Whether admired or despised by themselves or their employers, screenwriters now made the difference between success and failure. In the particular case of the crime film, this verity was even truer than usual. As Paul Schrader pointed out in his famous essay "Notes on Film Noir", one of the principal pre-requisites behind this enduring '40s style was the "influence...of the 'hard-boiled' school of writers. In the thirties, authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy and John O'Hara created the 'tough,' a cynical way of acting and talking that separated one from the world of everyday emotions—romanticism with a protective shell" (Grant 174). According to Dudley Andrew, a similar school of French tough guy writing fecundated the French film industry around the same time: "Between the wars a publishing boom at Gallimard, Grasset, Plon, Flammarion, and smaller houses sanctioned serious popular fiction coming from the pens of a new brand of professional writer... None of these could be called intellectual, nor did any of them aspire to be 106 intellectual in their lives and work, writing of workers, peasants, sailors, and criminals on the run" (Andrew 155). So far as the history of the French crime film was concerned, by far the most important of these were critic/screenwriter Andre Lang once Pierre Mac Orlan—whom famously described as "un bourgeois sauvage" (Lang 233)—the slang-friendly Francis Carco, and the prolific Belgian author, Georges Simenon. Mac Orlan's penchant for underworld heroes with poetic souls eventually resulted in the publication of a screenplay and several articles devoted to and inspired by the life and works of Francois Villon, the 16th century dean of Gallic artist/thugs (a taste he shared with the aforesaid Carco, a fellow Montmartre flaneur). Le Quai des brumes (1927) and La Bandera (1931), his two most influential novels, would serve as blueprints for two of the best widescreen examples of French poetic realism. In place of "realisme poetique", Mac Orlan preferred the term "le social" to describe his tales which engendered fantastique '"disquiet and mistrust'...in the manner of nocturnal street photography rather than eldritch lore" (Andrew 15). His plots also linked desperate acts to desperate financial straits in a way that was at least as Balzacian as it was Zolaesque. Francis Carco was Mac Orlan's almost exact contemporary, and dealt in very similar material set in the same milieu. Stylistically, however, his books were much more experimental. The author's "deft handling of slang immediately created for Carco an authority as well as fixed his popular Jesus-la-Caille regarded as image-expedient, yet restrictive" (Weiner 82). (1919), Carco's most important book, is generally French literature's first successful experiment with 107 underworld argot. Idiomatically translated, the title could be read as A Certain Sort meaning of Fag, since jesus invert, and caille was was a a 19th turn-of-the-century century term mercantile word referring to style or flavour. While nowhere near as slangily dense as Albert Simonin's 1953 masterpiece, Touchez pas au grisbi!, la-Caille Jesus- is nonetheless written in decidedly non-standard French. A typical passage runs as follows: "L'coup des bourriques. Menard et le gros Dupied empoignaient le mome. Je ne les ai pas vus entrer, et v'la bien la preuve que c'etait une combine: ils devaient etre planques dans le placard" (Carco 15). Certain recurring motifs in French crime fiction—the importance of female loyalty, and its presumed scarcity; the emotional emphasis on male bonding, whether explicitly homosexual or not; the debased sociology and exchange economy of fille and mec within the apache sub-culture—were codified in Jesus, even if Carco could not take credit for inventing them. More or less contemporaneously, in 1930 Georges Simenon gave birth to his most enduring creation, Inspector Jules Maigret, a decidedly un-American detective who was "plebeien, stable, instinctif, apolitique, buveur, mefiant, fumeur routinier, chaste, neutre, de pipe, bourru, securisant, mangeur, discret, sedentaire, peu liant..." (Assouline 208). Maigret would glide through la France profonde of the 'tween-war years in the same way that Mac Orlan and Carco would nostalgically recreate the a p a c h e - h a u n t e d Montmartre of la belle epoque. Between them, they would create an indigenous French universe of crime, a universe which could accommodate any number of imported American underworld constellations. Foreign traditions welcomed precisely because local traditions were so strong. would be 108 For political reasons, French filmmakers of the 1930s could not be too specific about the relationship between poverty and crime. In 1937, for instance, Jean Renoir was obliged to hide his enthusiasm for the Popular Front behind a historical tableau set in the French Revolution at a time when the Popular Front government it implicitly praised was still in power. Nevertheless, French filmmakers did manage to side, in most cases, with economically oppressed whites (oppressed North Africans, villainous/comic extra status of course, were still in the relegated many adventure films to set in France's Saharan and Magrebhi colonies). To a certain extent, this was as true of right-wingers as it was of militants on the left. This attitude actually preceded the early books of Pierre Mac Orlan, and the other mecs durs authors of the 1920s and '30s. As Georges Sadoul reminds us, it truly begins in 1901 with "les premiers grands succes de Ferdinand Zecca. lis introdusaient a I'ecran la vie des 'basses classes': proletariat et criminels" (Sadoul 11). Like the American film industry during the 1920s, '30s and '40s, French cinema was profoundly affected by the legacy of Middle European Expressionism imported by emigre German cineastes. Lotte H. Eisner, in L'Ecran inescapably "German" this demoniaque, movement Though sought to demonstrate how really was, the post-war proliferation of "film noir" techniques and thematics—most of which were derived from Ufa-style Expressionism—tends to dilute this claim. No matter how imbued with Sturm und Drang ideology, certain "Teutonic" ideas proved to be eminently exportable. "Dans les films allemands," she wrote, "I'ombre devient I'image du destin"—an alchemical process which would later be reproduced on the sound 109 stages of Paris and southern California. (Eisner 95). They would be equally influenced by G.W. Pabst's Joyless Street, "la quintessence des visions germaniques de la rue, des escaliers et des corridors, plonge dans une demi-obscurite; c'est aussi la consecration definitive I'architecture 'Ersatz' de de studio, derivant de I'expressionisme" (Eisner 174). While Expressionist echoes would ring with equal effect through the cinemas of France and the United States, the two countries' methods of appropriating this technique were very different. In the 1920s, Hollywood was already systematically attempting co-opt successfully industry competing was its national first target film of cultures. opportunity, The to Swedish film Scandinavia's once- thriving movie business being effectively gutted by the loss of Victor Sjostrom, Mauritz Stiller, Greta Garbo, and other luminaries. Basically, the American studios did not care—as, indeed, most of them still do not—how these cultural immigrants fared in their new surroundings. If they learned to accommodate themselves to the American factory system, well and good; if they did not, Hollywood producers had the satisfaction of knowing they had at least removed potentially dangerous economic competitors from the world market. For Hollywood, it was a win-win situation. Thanks to the rise of Hitler, the steady trickle of German emigres soon became a flood. Many of the masters of film noir, the most Expressionist of all American film styles, got their start in Ufa's giant enclosure. Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard; Fritz Lang's Scarlet (1944) Street (1945) and The Big Heat (1954); Otto Preminger's Laura (1944): without these seminal features, the movement would never have gotten off the ground. 110 In France, things were Hollywood, it was traditional a little different. On the trail to for anti-fascist and/or Jewish-German filmmakers to make pit-stops in Paris, interrupting their journey long enough to shoot a film or two, their salaries being used to finance the fateful move to filmmakers the United absorbed the States. By doing this, legacy of poetic these exiled realism, even as they deepened the already pronounced strain of Expressionism running through French cinema, a strain left by the many Franco-German coproductions undertaken in the 1920s and early 1930s. As Georges Sadoul reminds us, "La [premiere] guerre [mondiale] entraine un renversement totale de la situation [economique], au profit des EtatsUnis, et en second lieu, de I'Allemagne" (Sadoul 144). To survive this new world order, "French producers were forced to take a slightly partisan position, aligning themselves with the Germans in a 'European' effort to stave off Hollywood domination" (Andrew 172). If German and Central European directors did not make the same "splash" in France that they made in America, Middle European film technicians did. Marcel Carne's moody masterpieces did not succeed solely on the strength of his directorial eye and Jacques Prevert's brilliant scripts; they were equally beholden to Alexandre Trauner's brooding sets and Joseph Kosma's haunting scores. These two irreplaceable collaborators were both born in the Austro-Hungarian city of Budapest. At the same time, the French cinema received an influx of Russian immigrants that was considerably greater than the one absorbed by Hollywood. In Dudley Andrew's words, "Numerically the Russian presence in the [French] cinema went far beyond the German" (Andrew 177). Director Dmitri Kirsanoff and cinematographer Boris Kaufman 111 both carved infrastructure vogue for enviable positions for themselves of the French film industry. within the What's more, "A certain Dostoevsky had infiltrated Paris with the well-educated Russian and German emigres" (Andrew 162). For "Dostoevsky", Punishment." fictional malignant one should probably read "Crime and That book, it should be recalled, enriched the realm of archetypes with police agent Inspector Porfiry, in world literature. perhaps the French culture, most having already produced Hugo's mercilessly "just" Inspector Javert, as well as Vautrin, Balzac's arch-Nietzschean criminal turned police- commissioner, was obviously in an ideal position to insinuate the sly sleuth from St. Petersburg into its imaginative universe. Georges Simenon was one period writer who fell completely under the great Russian's sway. In a recent article, Manuel Vasquez Montalban writes, "Dans le cycle Maigret, presque tous les criminels ont quelque chose de Raskolnikov et le commissaire apparait comme le juge que tout criminel souhaiterait avoir pour avouer son delit" (Montalban 105). In 1935, Andre Lang scripted and Pierre Chenal directed what is generally considered to be the best screen version of Crime and Punishment—not least because it was shot in an Expressionist style. In the process, the parameters of the French crime movie were further refined. The "high" art of Zola and Dostoevsky could now happily co-exist with the "popular" writing of Simenon and Mac Orlan; Ufa-style Expressionism, with its emphasis on striking cinematography and entirely artificial sets, could be re-cast in a Franco-Russian mold. This rich gumbo of influences and motifs could, as we shall soon see, only be enriched by the addition of American ingredients. Almost from the beginning, its 112 style was as much international as it was national. Such forms can only benefit from the widening of the cultural gene pool. Across the Atlantic, German Expressionism came to America in a slower, more gradual manner—a manner inseparable from the steady consolidation of Nazi power. The gangster films of the early 1930s had as much to do with the teething problems of sound film as they did with any native or imported aesthetic. Screeching tyres and yammering tommyguns provided sounds that did not need to be lip-synched. Inspired by the urban gangster wars engendered by Prohibition, they allowed Hollywood filmmakers to make movies whose central figures were amoral villains. Howard Hawks's Scarface Leroy's Little Caesar (1930) and Mervyn (1931) were both thinly disguised biographies of Chicago's most notorious citizen, Alphonse Capone. The vast majority of these onscreen mobsters were of Sicilian origin, a fact that had more to do with the Italian mob's victory over rival Irish, Jewish and Polish gangs than it did with any nativist bias. William Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931) was somewhat unusual insofar as it depicted an American veteran's entry into crime as the result of his inability to find remunerative work in the wake of the First World War. In general, though, American mobsters were "foreign". They were also rich, and—as the Great Depression deepened—this wealth became a cause for concern among motion picture moralists. Tuxedoed banquets in the company of beautifully dressed showgirls came to seem increasingly alluring to unemployed Americans as the bread lines lengthened. Thus, gangster films per se were no longer made, having been replaced with the more acceptable "G-man" pictures, underworld dramas where the heroes were not "foreign" gangsters but 113 native agents of the FBI. Along with Mae West's double entendres, Maureen O'Sullivan's nude swim in Tarzan and His Mate (1934), and the eponymous giant ape's violent and sexual indiscretions in King Kong (1933), gangster movies were one of the prime reasons why Hollywood chose to shackle itself artistically with the set of self-imposed restrictions which would be known to posterity as the Hays Code. While French cinema was certainly no stranger to censorship, it never suffered from such chafing constraints—ironically, not even under German occupation. Still, as we read in French Film, "[Louis] Feuillade began by celebrating master criminals who stop at nothing, but the pressures of censorship made him turn later to the figure of the avenger" (Armes 23). This would appear to be a close approximation of the anti-crime strictures Feuillade was wont of the Hays Code, until we recall that to have his masked villains slaughter entire roomsful of social luminaries, an anarchistic excess which Hollywood gangsters, even in their heyday, would never have been permitted to contemplate, never mind enact. Extremely strict in regard to politics and national "honour", French censorship was much more laissez-faire in matters of crime—particularly when the crimes in question happened to be passionels. Marcel Carne, curiously, was the French director who suffered most from film censorship's obscure whims. A nude shot of Arletty was excised from all prints of le Jour se leve (1939) by the bluenoses of Vichy, and it still cries out to be re-inserted. This is perhaps the least "French" of Carne's run-ins with the authorities. More typical is the filmmaker's run-in with "Commandant Calvet", a military officer who, after seeing a workprint of Le Quai des brumes, a bleakly poetic portrait of a deserter on the lam from the colonial 114 infantry, "demandait prononce seulement et que, lorsque les pile soigneusement pele-mele que le mot [deserteur] le soldat se debarrasse ne soit jamais de ses vetements, et les pose sur une chaise, il au lui de la jeter dans un coin de la piece...." (La Vie a belles dents 90). Prior to the contemporary American hysteria over the issue of flag-burning, such fussy concern with the miniutiae of national honour would have seemed vaguely absurd, even to a Hays Code censor. Since Gabin was doomed to die for his "sins", anyway, a little sloppiness with his uniform, one might have thought, could easily have been forgiven. In the early 1930s, most of the major "German" —technically, most of them were Austrians—working in directors Hollywood (Erich von Stroheim; Josef von Sternberg) had been established in Hollywood for many years. Expressionist influence on von Stroheim was correspondingly weak—he was, after all, a disciple of Zola—while von Sternberg's was strong but indirect, stemming largely from his 1929 visit to Berlin, the trip that saw him accomplish the double coup of directing Der Blaue Engel, the first first-rate talking picture, a n d "discovering" its star, Marlene Dietrich. Of Hollywood's early Germans, he alone can be considered a true progenitor of film noir. Because there was never any question about who did what, where, and why, the gangster movie was generically cut off from the mystery story and detective thriller; it was a frowdunnit not a whodunnit, having more in common with the war movie and western than with its more obvious generic relations. Gangster fiction, as epitomized by the writing of Rowland Brown—an author reputed to have "underworld connections"—followed its own set of ruthlessly simple laws (Peary 30). Poverty was of dramatic use only insofar as it 11 5 provided a motivation for criminals to climb socially; onscreen, the pleasures of being criminally on top of the world vastly outnumbered the inevitably violent wages of sin climactically meted out to mob anti-heroes by the Puritan strictures of the Hays Code. In other words, gangster films in their early '30s American guise were separated from their European roots to the point where they could pass as nativist phenomena, even if—according to the rules of heartland amour propre, as well as period criminal demographics—most of its underworld anti-heroes were international not. The genre would become truly only after it had been cross-fertilized by film noir, a crime story/Expressionist hybrid which was brought to fruition by the window of cinematic opportunity perceived by German refugees— deracinated, embittered, frustrated and on the run from Hitler—in the years immediately preceding and following the Second World War. Fury (1936), and You Only Live Once (1937), Fritz Lang's first two American features, are now often described as the ur-films of the noir stylistic. In the process of directing them, Lang furthered the postwar internationalization of crime movies in a way that could not then have been easily imagined. Before embarking on a more specific study of the French and American policier, however, it would probably be best to consider more fully the importance of German Expressionism to both cinematic genres. While Edvard Munch and a number of other late 19th and early 20th century painters and playwrights have been described as protoExpressionists, the movement was imbued with new power by the empire-wrecking carnage of 1914-1918. If Dadaism and Surrealism were expressions of French disaffection with the conduct and 116 aftermath of the First World War, post-war Expressionism was—in this respect at least—their spiritual sister. As Lotte H. Eisner wrote in L'Ecran demoniaque, "Mysticisme et magie, forces obscurs auxquelles de tout temps les Allemands se sont abandonnes avec complaisance avaient fleuri devant la mort sur les champs de bataille" (Eisner 15). Neither playful hostile to nor outward-looking, contemporary Gallic Expressionism was schools of artistic implicitly expression: "L'expressionisme, declare Edschmid, reagit contre le 'depiecement atomique' de I'impressionisme qui reflete les chatoyantes equivoques de la nature, sa diversite inquietante, ses nuances ephemeres; il lutte en meme temps contre la decalcomanie bourgeoise du naturalisme et contre le but mesquin ...de photographer la nature ou la vie quotidienne" (Eisner 97). For physically and emotionally scarred veterans such as artist Oskar Kokoschka and filmmaker Fritz Lang, "il serait absurde de...reproduire [le monde] tel que[l]...." (Eisner 97). For them, external objects and events were useful only insofar as they helped to reveal their protagonists "fantaisie secrete" (Eisner 97). Since it was the ideal method for exploring the more obscure corners—not to mention plumbing the more sinister depths—of the soul, psychoanalysis was, .of course, all the rage. In film after film, "[les] ombres manifeste une inspiration freudienne...." (Eisner 97). Expressionists were likewise strongly drawn to the Talmudic myth of Lilith, Adam's disobedient first wife, the metaphysical symbol of conflict and strife, of war within the very heart of the patriarchal family, a great beauty armed with the talons of a bird of prey, a female fury who "[at] times...is an angel who rules over the procreation of mankind, at times a demon who assaults those who sleep alone or those who travel lonely roads" (Borges 149). 117 Appearing first in the plays of Frank Wedekind—which were later brilliantly adapted for the screen by G.W. Pabst in the late 1920s, their seductive protagonist being physically embodied by American screen idol, Louise Brooks—the figure of the evil temptress or femme fatale would eventually become one of the emblematic figures of film noir. It is surely not coincidental that so many "bad girl" names (Lulu; Lili; Lolita; Lola Lola) begin with a capital "L," a circumstance which turns them all into de facto homonyms of Lilith, the seductive beauty with claws that rend. Of course, in practice this separation from all things French was not as absolute as it was in theory. Fritz Lang, for example, was immensely fond of "les figures a cagoules qui viennent tout droit des VAMPIRES de Feuillade...." (Eisner 162). In German films, "...comme chez Feuillade, comme dans tous les serials, les kidnappers emportent ficelee leur victimes" (Eisner 162 - 163). If the ubiquity of postwar Franco-German co-productions exposed French filmmakers to the tics as well as the abilities of their German confreres, they returned the favour four-fold. Even so, the Gauls learned a lot. Inspired by the post-1917 German practice of shooting every scene on an artificial stage, French set designers began to build trompe I'oeil street scenes and interiors that rivalled the most lavish accomplishments of Ufa, then the best-equipped studio in Europe, if not the world (an advantage which—unfortunately import/export for the Weimar republic's notoriously dismal balance—did not translate into a commanding German position in the international movie mart). Alexandre Trauner and Lazare Meerson shone in this metier, while the sets of Jacques Feyder's 1934 118 historical comedy La Kermesse heroique were so sumptuous they attracted for a time the sort of tourist who is irresistably drawn to "mad" King Ludwig's castles in Bavaria. Imagination, intelligently employed, more than made up for the modest budgets with which most Gallic filmmakers were obliged to work. French cinematographers studied the psychologically revealing camera angles pioneered by Karl Freund, and came up with their brilliantly crafted own counterparts. scripts established high literary Carl Mayer's standards which French screenwriters, with growing success, struggled to surpass. The knowledge that "shadows can become the image of Destiny" subtly inflected the ubiquitous nocturnal sequences that were as much a part of poetic realism as they were of film noir. Indeed, in the aftermath of World War Two, the fatalistic scripts and dark camera angles of such gloomy features as Le Jour se leve and Le Quai des brumes were widely regarded as nothing less than cinematic fifth columnists, defeatist movies that fatally sapped French morale on the battlefield, creating the mood which allowed morose poilus to be ground to powder by the optimistic storm-troopers of the Third Reich during the shameful summer of 1940. Neither neorealist studies of poverty nor sentimental romances'— the motion picture genres which one would ordinarily expect to provide the most universally convertible forms of cinematic currency, given the ubiquity of global misery and the probably genetic human need for love—have proven to have the wide-spread appeal of the crime film. As Claire Vasse put it in her essay, "L'enigme 'cinema': La Nouvelle Vague et le polar", "Le genre policier est certainement la chose du monde cinematographique la mieux partagee" (Vasse 105.) French crime films 119 were visibly affected by foreign influences even in the 1930s, and— more surprisingly still, even in the works of Jean Renoir, that most "typically French" of French directors. As Charles Tesson would have it, "Autant Toni, construit sur une symetrie de meme nature, est un film dont la forme narrative doit beaucoup a l'Amerique du melodrame, celle de Griffith et surtout de Chaplin...autant La Bete humaine est un film place sous la signe croise de Lang et de Murnau. Lantier est le frere de M (le 'ich kann nicht' de la pulsion criminelle) et la sequence de barque de I'Aurore, celle ou le mari tente d'etrangler sa femme puis renonce, est la sequence cachee dont La Bete humaine sera la traversee du miroir en deux temps" (Tesson 67). Like most fictional genres, the crime story precedes the invention of the motion picture camera by many centuries. If Gilles Deleuze was right when he claimed that "I'Ancien Testament n'est pas un epopee ni une tragedie, c'est le premier roman...," then the killing of Abel is literature's first murder mystery, and Cain fiction's first "tra?tre...le personnage essentiel du roman, le heros" (Dialogues 53). If one broadens the definition of crime to include transgression, then humanity's first delit flagrant must fall on the shoulders of Adam and Eve—on the symbolic level, the Ur parents of hairless apes. What this means, basically, is that most Western narratives deal with characters who have breached divine or secular laws or both. Even so, the invention of the policier proper is generally credited to Edgar Allan Poe. In his short stories "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter", the American author introduced world literature to its first private detective, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin: "This young gentleman was of an excellent—indeed of an illustrious 1 20 family, but, by a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in the world or to care for the retrieval of his fortunes" (Tales of Mystery and Imagination 180).) A bibliophile, Dupin is flatteringly French: "Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries, and in Paris these are easily obtained" (Tales of Mystery and Imagination 180). If one excludes Benjamin Franklin and the political "superstars" of the American Revolution, Edgar Allan Poe was probably the first American to be lionized by the Gauls. After excising the author's middle name—endearing him forever to French readers as "Edgar Poe"— Baudelaire proceeded to translate the American's texts with a verve that most critics now regard as superior to the narratives which inspired them. Thus, Poe came to be regarded in Parisian literary circles as one of the first and greatest of the Symbolists, while in his native Baltimore the poet is thought of primarily as the author of various obscure 19th century horror stories. In translating him, Baudelaire was at least half conscious of casting his American "idol" in his idolator's image. In "Edgar Poe: Sa vie et ses oeuvres", the French poet was pleased to introduce his public to "un homme qui me ressemblait un peu, par quelques points, c'est-a-dire une partie de moi-meme...." (Baudelaire 348). In reality, it would probably be fairer to say that Poe shared certain similarities with Baudelaire, rather than the other way around. The French Poe is pre-eminently an urban writer, whereas the American original grew up in a largely agrarian society. It was only after he was thoroughly "Gallicized" that global readers were free to mistake the streets of Baltimore for the streets of Paris. Out of 121 place in his homeland, the author of "The Raven" was turned into a de facto European by the author of "The Albatross". The "fake" Poe of the French is now, ironically, of immeasurably more cultural importance than the "real" Poe of his unappreciative and uncomprehending fellow countrymen. Those who continue to be perplexed by the French "canonization" of Clint Eastwood, Blake Edwards and Jerry Lewis would be well-advised to bear in mind that the U.S. citizens in question were all treated to a "Baudelairean" make-over—that is to say, they were first situated in a pre-existing Gallic Zeitgeist—before receiving their official laurels. If their path to the podium had not been paved with influential essays by Andre Bazin, Georges Benyaoun, and other acknowledged cultural authourities they would never have been so honoured. Even so, the "outsider" quality of French perceptions often provides insights which an "inside" American perspective precludes. Thus Tzvetan Todorov writes, "On sait...que Poe a donne naissance au roman policier contemporain, et ce voisinage n'est pas un effet de hasard; on ecrit d'ailleurs souvent que les histoires policieres ont remplace les histoires de fantomes" (Introduction a la fantastique 54). When seen in this light, Poe's double importance as precursor of the "new" and perfector of the "old" seems perfectly self-evident. This insight would, in the 20th century, effectively obscure the line between horror and detective stories in popular French literature. Thus, Jacques van Herp could claim in "Le monde de Harry Dickson", an appreciation of the texts Belgian fantasy author Jean Ray wrote about "le Sherlock Holmes Americain," that the imaginative universe invoked by these tales was in many respects identical to that of Belgium's best-known realistic mystery master: "On pense irresistablement a 122 Simenon. Chez tous deux apparaTt le meme gout des heures indefinies, de la pluie, au pave gras, des maisons lepreuses, et une identique puissance d'evocation. Ainsi qu'un meme refus a jouer le jeu au policier classique" (La Heme 278). Boileau and Narcejac, the most popular French mystery writers of the post-war period, composed the original stories for Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 psychological thriller, and Les Yeux sans visage, Georges Franju's 1960 surgical horror movie. From the vantage point of a "properly" educated French film critic, the co-authors did not change genres, just as—for an American critic—they obviously did. Ironically, despite their respect for Poe in general and Auguste Dupin in particular, the French have not made much use of the tradition he represents. According to Tzvetan Todorov's "Typologie du roman policier", Dupin and his descendants belong primarily to the genre "que nous pouvons appeler 'roman a enigme'" (Poetique de la prose 57). To a greater or lesser degree, Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot all belong to this genteel—and quintessential^ English—subcategory of amateur detecting. Although it is arguably the most popular crime format in the world, it has very little to do with the American and Italian literary traditions, and even less to do with the French. American private detection, it should be emphasized, is a metier and not an avocation. Consequently, the "English" style to which an American gave birth and which a Frenchman subsequently valorized will play the smallest possible role in the following pages. Dostoevsky's Inspector Porfiry, with his subtle, insinuating, almost priestly methods of imbuing criminals with the need to confess, was, as we have already seen, the "eminence bleue" behind (Jules) 123 Maigret. In equal and opposite measure, Raskolnikov became the model for countless criminals who must struggle with their conscience as well as the law. In the policier, the high-ranking plainclothesman and the tormented outlaw are by far the most important characters. Private detectives of the Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe variety are generally as alien to the French fictive tradition as they are to the Italian (except, of course, for retired police officers, who continue to exercise their office in an unofficial capacity long after they have been pensioned off; obviously, Maigret phenomenon). is the most important manifestation of this On the very rare occasions when private detectives do show up in French crime films and novels, they generally lack glamour and existential purpose. The detective agency that Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), director Francois Truffaut's onscreen alter ego, works for in Baisers voles does nothing but poke its nose into the mundane affairs of the adulterous and the mildly dishonest—just as real detectives do. Of the 40 films cited as the all time best French policiers by a select panel of French film critics, only one, Claude Miller's Mortelle randonnee (1983), employed a private eye as its principal protagonist. The real polar action would always take place in Surete squadrooms and underworld caves. For indigenous archetypes, the French have recourse to two "home-grown" models. Respectively, these are Victor Hugo's Inspector Javert—Jean Valjean's implacable nemesis, a government functionary who pushes justice to the frontiers of inhumanity and sin—and Vautrin, Balzac's master-criminal-turned-master-Wc. In his prison diaries, Antonio Gramsci reflected on both of these fictional creations. "II tipo di Javert dei Miserabili e interessante," he 1 24 wrote, "dal punto di vista della psicologia popolare: Javert ha torto dal punto di vista della 'vera giustizia', ma Hugo lo rappresenta in modo simpatico, como 'uomo di carattere...." (Gramsci 2129). Javert, the diarist felt, would eventually mutate into superior judicial beings— such as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown. Although a prisoner himself—albeit a political one—Gramsci appreciated the fact that French and English detective story writers did not, as a rule, romanticize crime. Conversely, he felt that Vautrin was a little off the beaten path of fictional criminal development: "Balzac con Vautrin, si occupa del delinquente, ma non e 'tecnicamente' scrittore di romanzi polizieschi" (Gramsci 2129). Far from being a son of privilege, Hugo's incorruptible punisher of the weak was born behind bars himself: "Javert etait ne dans une prison d'une tireuse de cartes dont le mari etait aux galeres. Engrandissant il pensa qu'il etait en dehors de la societe et desespera d'y jamais. II remarqua que la societe maintient rentrer irremediablement en dehors d'elle deux classes d'hommes, ceux qui I'attaquent et ceux qui la gardaient; il n'avait le choix qu'entre ces deux classes: en meme temps il se sentait je ne sais quel fond de rigidite, du regularity et de probite, complique d'une inexprimable haine pour cette race du bohemes dont il etait. II entra dans la police. II y reussit. A quarante ans il etait inspector" (Hugo 169). This description of a man who was forcibly shaped by society is probably the closest Hugo ever came to exploring what would subsequently be described as Zolaesque determinism. It is interesting to note that Javert shares his fictional universe with Jean Valjean, the convict-turned-capitalist-turned philanthropist-turned-fugitive- 125 turned hero, a Romantic self-creator who is redeemed by the charity of a saintly bishop and who incarnates in his person the absolute antithesis of the naturalistic robot. The tension between these two extremes has provided the locus for many a succesful policier, dramas in which the principle of freedom- is embodied by the criminal, while the dead hand of sociological fatality hangs heavily over his legal nemesis. By juxtaposing Javert and Valjean, Hugo unwittingly created a paradigm which underscores the difference between French and Italian attitudes towards crime. Unfairly, almost obscenely, persecuted on account of his poverty-driven misdemeanors, Valjean is the last word in guiltless criminals, an Italian neorealist hero avant la lettre. Caught between his robotic devotion to the state and his tragically human background, Javert, on the other hand, seems quintessentially French, a polar commissaire par excellence, a mixture of surface ruthlessness and concealed understanding who is at least a century ahead of his time. Later authors have continued to refine the dramatic polarities of these archetypal antagonists till the present day. That policemen come from humble, often "criminal" backgrounds, and align themselves with the very classes and values that made their early lives a living hell is an idea that would be further developed in 20th century French and American popular fiction—just as it would on the actual streets of New York and Paris. In book after book, Inspector Maigret wonders what his future might have been like if only his family could have afforded to keep him in medical school. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, different in so many ways, are united in their detestation of "the rich". Javert infused some much-needed ambiguity into a genre 1 26 which, at its worst, reduces important moral issues to crude black and white dualities. Although of earlier provenance than Javert, Balzac's protean Vautrin is clearly cut from the same narrative cloth, even though his limitless ambition would seem to owe more to the author's socialclimbing businessmen. While making his "Human Comedy" debut in Le Pere Goriot (1830), Vautrin explained his nature in the following terms: "Voulez-vous connaitre mon caractere? Je suis bon avec ceux qui me font bien ou dont le coeur parle au mien. A ceux-la tout est permis, ils peuvent me donner des coups de pieds dans les os des jambes sans que je leur dise: Prends garde] Mais, nom d'une pipe, je suis mechant comme le diable avec ceux qui me fracassent, ou qui ne me reviennent pas. Et il est bon de vous apprendre que je me soucie de tuer un homme comme 9a dit-il en lancant un jet de salive" (Le Pere Goriot 106 - 107). A reader and admirer of the murderous, bisexual Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini, Vautrin thinks of himself as a poet of crime. A practically-minded believer in the will-to-power, he dreams of becoming a wealthy slave-owner in America—an ambition which Hugo's cockroach-like Miserables. Thenardier will eventually accomplish in Les When angered, his physiognomy changes like the features of Cuchulainn in Celtic myth: "Horrible et majestueux spectacle! sa physionomie presenta un phenomene qui ne peut etre compare qu'a celui de la chaudiere pleine de cette vapeur fumeuse qui souleverait des montagnes, et que dissout en un clin d'oeil une goutte d'eau froide" (Le Pere Goriot 185). Ready and able to commit murder when it suits his purposes, Vautrin is also modern fiction's first uncloseted homosexual. Behind prison walls, he consummates his desires with younger 127 convicts. In the outside world, he sublimates them in his attempts to push seemingly heterosexual young men of promise into the forefront of post-Napoleonic French society. By frankly orientation acknowledging his underworld protagonist's sexual at a time when even heterosexual liaisons had to be described with a great deal of circumspection, Balzac unwittingly endowed French crime fiction with a unique and precocious advantage. Le Pere Goriot and its two sequels created a generic precedent which prioritized male/male relations within le milieu criminel. While explicitly gay mobster connections remained comparatively rare, what was once described as "feudal homosexuality" would play an important role in the polars of artists as diverse as Francis Carco and JeanPierre Melville. Unlike so many of the artistic developments mentioned in this work, this one seems somewhat "flukey," a wild card that could not have been predicted by any deterministic philosophy. This anomaly should be kept in mind when reading passages where events seem to unfold with the inescapable finality of Calvinist theology. In the midst of even the most ordered universe, it seems, predestination will always play a role. Be that as it may, we must now return to the main thread of our story. Known by a variety of names, Vautrin/Jacques Collin is a master of aliases. When his Lucien de Rubempre project collapses, the archcriminal is coerced into joining the police force in lieu of returning to the pentitentiary or the galleys. As we learn in "La derniere incarnation de Vautrin", "Apres avoir exerce ses fonctions pendant environ quinze ans, Jacques Collin s'est retire vers 1845" (Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes 641). Unsurprisingly, Marcel Carne, by universal consent 128 the most "poetic" director of policiers, "Depuis...un certain nombre d'annees...[a songe] a porter a I'ecran la vie extraordinaire d'un des personnages les plus etonnants qu'ait compris Balzac dans sa Humaine: Comedie Vautrin" (La vie a belles dents 378). Remarkably, the supremely fictional character of Vautrin (and—as literary scholarship might eventually prove—of Javert as well), was modelled after one of history's more improbable figures. In A Criminal History of Mankind, we learn that a certain Eugene-Francois Vidocq was turned into a police spy by an officer known as M. Henry. A veteran of many crimes and escapes, the captured felon was, like Vautrin, forced to choose between prison and "betrayal". Vidocq practiced his turncoat metier with unprecedented skill: "[he] was allowed helpers, all chosen by himself—naturally, he chose criminals. There was fierce opposition from all the local police departments, who objected to strangers on their 'patches', but Henry refused to be moved. Vidocq's little band was called the Security—Surete—and it became the foundation of the French national police force of today" (Wilson 471). After being forced into retirement in 1833 "because a new chief of police objected to a Surete made up entirely of criminals and ex-criminals. [Vidocq] immediately became a private detective—the first in the world—and wrote his Memoirs. He became a close friend of writers, including Balzac, who modelled his character Vautrin on Vidocq" (Wilson 471). If one were to compile a detective genealogy, one could say with some surety that Vidocq begat Vautrin who begat Javert who begat Porfiry who begat Maigret. On a parallel line of development, Auguste Dupin begat Sherlock Holmes who begat Father Brown who begat Hercule Poirot who begat Miss Marple. These are not, however, Western 129 narrative's only criminal family trees. To seek out the third major line of descent one must travel to the United States. Hardboiled detective fiction a la americaine is generally said to have originated in Black Mask magazine, a pulp fiction periodical which, shortly after its launching in 1920, ceased to be an imitator of Argosy and other "all story" magazines of that period, preferring to focus exclusively on tales of crime. Dashiell Hammett's Op" entertainments first appeared in Black "Continental Mask, as would Raymond Chandler's early fictional efforts a decade later. Intriguingly enough, neither author had picked fiction as his first career choice. If the economy had been better, they would probably never have submitted manuscripts to magazines. Hammett was a veteran of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the questionable company— since the 19th century, Pinkerton men had been hired out to large corporations as ultra-violent strike-breakers—which served as the model for the Continental, the organization that employed the author's anonymous "alter ego". Red Harvest, the early "Op" novel which Bernardo Bertolucci has been trying to adapt cinematically for more than two "Italianate" decades—no doubt style of on account governance—depicts of its fictional a small town setting's which is controlled by corruption from top to bottom. Employed by a rich old man in Personville—known to the locals as Poisonville—the Continental Op proceeds to play one tainted faction against another, choreographing a dance of death eerily similar to the one that would be orchestrated 34 years later by Toshiro Mifune's rootless samurai in Yojimbo writer/director harrowing Akira Kurosawa's of a bandit-ridden epic black comedy (1961), about the 19th century Japanese village whose 130 leaders make the fatal mistake of assuming that the ronin they have hired is really on their side. If anything, the Continental Op's approach to "house cleaning" is even more cynical. As he sneeringly promises his employer, "you'll have your city back, all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again" (Hammett 134). In Yojimbo, one of the earliest shots is of a dog running through the streets with a severed arm in its mouth. No wonder Bertrand Tavernier referred to Hammett as "[un des] auteurs de romans policiers explicitement marxistes...." (Montalban 107). Parenthetically, Woody Haut suggested that "It is no coincidence that Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest was published on the eve of the Wall Street Crash" (Haut 1). In Red Harvest, even the crooked find it hard to survive. The following exchange is fairly typical: '"...What do you think of that? I pick up six hundred berries like shooting fish, and have to bum four bits for breakfast.' "I said it was a tough break but that was the kind of world we lived in" (Hammett 63). As the above passage clearly denotes, Dashiell Hammett knew how to express himself in period slang with an economy and a clarity which were much emulated. Over and above his political engagement was the instinctive knowledge that less is sometimes more. Aside from the dated argot and occasional concessions to pulp magazine sensibilities, Hammett today can be comfortably compared to such contemporary connoisseurs of "cool" crime as Barry Gifford and James Ellroy. "Popular Although his disaffection with the modern world preceded Front" politics, it could also outlive them. Dialectical materialist though he was, Hammett did not deny his readers a certain 131 metaphysical dimension. Thus, in a manner seductively reminiscent of the Catholic legitimist Balzac's take on Vautrin, in The Maltese Falcon Hammett describes Sam Spade, his most famous protagonist, in the following quasi-Miltonic terms: "He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan" (Hammett 225). Although equally suspicious of the motives of the rich, Raymond Chandler's wary heroes were more traditionally cast in the role of disaffected knights errant. Even the names of his detectives remind one of the author's proper British public school education. The author's first private eye protagonist, was called "Mallory", sharing the moniker—give or take an "I"—of the author of La Morte d'Arthur, while his second would be named after the most famous Elizabethan playwright after Shakespeare. Marlowe's sense of the ubiquity of evil is as vast as Sam Spade's or the Continental Op's, but his apprehension of it is more cosmic than socio-economic. Typically, Chandler—an embittered alcoholic who had failed as an oil executive—writes, "Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy car tyres. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered... A city...rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness" (The Long Stylistically, Chandler was as romantically Goodbye 232 - 233). florid as Hammett was icily precise. In novels and movies, Philip Marlowe would complete the composite figure which Sam Spade began. Between them, these two fictional archetypes would come to define what readers/viewers now expect from hard-bitten private eyes. To a "t", they fit Lawerence's "hard, isolate, stoic and a killer" prescription. As Michel Ciment 132 pointed out in his book-length study of the American crime film, "Coince entre la police et la truand, le prive est un etre seul qui ne peut compter sur personne" (Le Crime a I'ecran 58). Of himself, Philip Marlowe said, with a seductive mixture of pride and self-pity, "I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been to jail more than once and I don't do divorce business... The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with...." (The Long Goodbye 79). Often ex-cops themselves, with an instinctive affinity for those outside the law, "hardboiled dicks" are uniquely privileged catalysts who travel without obstruction between the social classes, moving up and down the social ladder according to the dictates of each case. Though, as we have seen, Vidocq invented the profession of private detective, there has never been much space for such an individual in the French fictional firmament, and still less in the Italian. In "L'americano, pistolero disincantato II mio Ambrosio colto, con la cervicale", an article published recently in the cultural pages of the Milanese daily // Corriere della Sera, Renato Oliveri—creator of Commissario Ambrosio, the closest thing Italy has to a successful author of /' gialli— contrasted the characteristics of his flagship hero to those of Raymond Chandler's most famous creation. At first glance, the Milanese municipal employee would seem to suffer invidiously from the comparison. Thus, we learn that "Marlowe perche non siano beve regolarmente dolci, e caffe nero senza zucchero. liquori, In questo, sul caffe, Ambrosio gli somiglia." ("L'Americano, pistolero disincantato. II mio Ambrosio colto, con la cervicale" 26.) On the level of ballistics, "Marlowe usa pistole automatiche Colt di vari calibri. Si ricorda particolare una Smith & Wesson speciale cal. 38, probabilmente in con una 1 33 canna di quattro pollici. d'ordinanza, e non Ambrosio e un buon ha invece tiratore" una Beretta ("L'Americano, disincantato" 26). On the field of sex, "L'atteggiamento verso le donne e considerato dal suo calibro ideatore pistolero di 'normale', Marlowe da vigoroso e sano. Non e sposato, tutti Io sanno. Invece Ambrosio lasciato da sua moglie Francesca e ha da anni un rapporto con Emanuela, infiermiera al Policlinico di Milano" 9 uomo e stato soddisfacente ("L'Americano, pistolero disincantato" 26). Both men suffer from melancholia, but Ambrosio's is said to stem from his physical separation from his girlfriend. The Italian's loneliness, in other words, is both explicable and curable. He is not happy with his slightly isolated position in a very social society. The very sanity of his surroundings precludes the elevation of individual alienation to the level of heroic status that is the measure and reward of America's hardboiled heroes. Although the most famous practitioners of their craft, Chandler and Hammett did not single-handedly define the sub-genre in which they worked. Indeed, from a contemporary perspective it seems most unlikely that hardboiled fiction would have developed in the way that it did if not for the hugely influential "failure" of an unsuccessful "art" novel. With the exception of some of his posthumously published works, To Have and Have Not is unquestionably the most critically despised of Ernest Hemingway's novels (even Across the River and Into the Trees enjoys a better press). First published in 1937 out of the author's need for money, the book seems rushed, disjointed, and abominably constructed. From the perspective of hardboiled fiction, on the other hand, it is a formative masterpiece on the level of The Maltese (1930), The Big Sleep (1939) and The Postman Always Rings Falcon Twice 134 (1935). Its central figure, Harry Morgan, although imbued with the fatalistic stoicism common to all Hemingway heroes, is also ruthless, paranoid, bitter, a murderer, untrustworthy to his friends, and a cripple. He mutters contemptuous comments out of the corner of his mouth like one of Humphrey Bogart's big screen heroes (it was not for nothing that the cinematic interpreter of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe was chosen to play a far-less-dirty Harry in Howard Hawks's 1944 screen version of To Have and Have Not). He is also very much a man of the "Dirty Thirties". After losing everything in the Depression to a string of "bad luck", boat captain Harry Morgan explains things to a prospective crew mate: '"...What they're trying to do is starve you Conchs out of here so they can burn down the shacks and put up apartments and make this a tourist town... I hear they're buying up lots, and then after the poor people are starved out and gone somewhere else to starve some more they're going to come in and make it a beauty spot for tourists.' '"You talk like a radical,' I said. '"I ain't no radical,' he said. 'I'm sore. I been sore a long time'" (Hemingway 97). To Have and Have Not describes scenes of violence with the coldblooded objectivity that would later be perfected by Jim Thompson an— on a more debased level—by Mickey Spillane: "He was trying to come up, still holding onto the Luger, only he couldn't get his head up, when the nigger took the shotgun against the wheel of the car by the chauffeur and blew the side of his head off. Some nigger" (Hemingway 7 - 8). 1 35 Riddled with prejudice and free with racial epithets—"Cubans are bad luck for Conchs. Cubans are bad luck for anybody. They got too many niggers there too"—Harry Morgan is nonetheless willing to give credit where credit is due (Hemingway 258). People constantly surprise him, for better or worse. If he stereotypes co-workers on the basis of skin colour, he fully expects them to return the favour when it comes to him. He is also almost clinically paranoid. He breaks the neck of an illegal Chinese labour importer whom he thought "was the easiest man to do business with I ever met" primarily because he also "thought there must be something wrong all the time" (Hemingway 55). Harry's former friend Eddy, now a pathetic "rummy" and hanger-on, escapes a similar fate by sheer dumb luck. In 260 pages, Harry manages to lose everything: his boat, his arm, his life. His philosophy can be summed up by the bitter words, '"No matter how a man alone ain't got no bloody fucking chance'" (Hemingway 225). Harry Morgan set the mold years before "dans le film noir, apparu dans les annees 1940...Ton rencontre la prefiguration du personnage contemporain de loser ' (Garbarz 95). 1 Although obviously written primarily for profit, To Have and Have Not is not without its modernist literary techniques. Narrators, some of whom are only peripheral to the plot, change from chapter to chapter. An "unnnatural act" involving Harry's "flipper" reminds one strongly of Popeye's "corncob rape" in Sanctuary, the William Faulkner novel that appeared around the same time and for much the same reasons. Marie, Harry's ex-hooker wife, rhapsodizes about her husband's unique manliness in a couple of medium-length monologues that are essentially pocket-sized distillations of Molly Bloom's soliloquy. For 136 all its coarseness, the major thematic strains and motifs of "lost generation" literature are very much present in To Have and Have Not. The fourth major founder of hardboiled literature was James M. Cain. Typically, when The Postman Always Rings Twice first appeared in 1935, it was appreciated more by the French and Italians than it was by the Americans. Pierre Chenal adapted the book for the screen in 1939, while Luchino Visconti used it as the source of Ossessione, his first feature, in 1942, four years before Tay Garnett directed the first American version. Albert Camus claimed to have used The Postman as a blueprint for his existentialist masterpiece, L'Etranger (1942). Elio Vittorini, meanwhile, was particularly impressed by the book's utter lack of introspection: "Cain non da che facce e fatti da vedere, e non permette di vedere o intravedere altro. I fatti interiori da impliciti negli esteriori..." (Diario in pubblico 93). For the first time, Cain shifted the reader's locus of interest not to compromised heroes, but to villains tout court. Although convention still required them to somehow pay for their sordid deeds, Cain's novels managed to turn their readers into conceptual accessories after the fact. The antisocial fun of Fantdmas could now be made explicit in a more quotidian fashion. This "breakthrough" would shortly be exploited by Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, and the other inheritors of the Hammett-Chandler-Hemingway-Cain tradition. As we shall see shortly, it was these "adepts" rather than their more famous "gurus" who would capture the imagination of French filmmakers in the postwar world. To understand how this could have occurred, one must first return to the France of the 1930s. 137 As in the United States, the policier was a film genre that was well adapted to the new and still unperfected technology of the "talkie". Jean Renoir enjoyed his first commercial success with La Chienne (1931), a black comedy about an unequal romantic triangle that leads to murder and the execution of a pimp who is guilty of everything except the crime for which he is guillotined. A year later, Renoir made La Nuit du carrefour, the first of dozens of movies to feature the intuitive detective methods of France's most popular detective, Inspector Maigret. Even though this project was seemingly damaged by the persona! problems the director was experiencing at that time—"Selon [Georges Simenon], Renoir qui etait en train de se separer de sa femme...etait deprime. II buvait plus que de raison. C'est ainsi qu'un jour completement ivre, il a oublie de tourner un certain nombre de sequences"—the end result was still impressive enough for Jean-Luc Godard to declare it "le plus grand film policier dis je, le plus grand film frangais d'aventure." frangais, (Assouline 241 que - 242; Pai'ni 54). Renoir made a number of other crime movies during the 1930s, but their sociological emphases can more profitably be discussed in the paragraphs devoted to Neorealism. The parameters of the French crime film were further expanded in 1937 with the release of Julien Duvivier's nostalgic chef-d'oeuvre, Pepe le Moko. Although the film is said to have been "inspired by the non-romantic Scarface" (Peary 320), Duvivier's tale of the last days of a doomed Parisian gangster in exile is a high- water mark in the history of screen romanticism. Jean Gabin, the greatest French actor of 1930s vintage French cinema, plays Pepe like a poete maudit with 1 38 strong fashion sense. Secure in his refuge in the Casbah, this European criminal faces immediate capture or summary execution the moment he sets foot in the more respectable quarters of Algiers. His sense of nostalgia is heightened when he becomes fond of the Parisian-born mistress (Mireille Balin) of an older, wealthy tourist (Charles Granval). Pepe's best friend/arch-enemy Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux), an Arab officer in an otherwise all-white police department, welcomes this development since it increases the chances of Pepe falling into his devious clutches. While bewitched by infatuation—as much by memories of his own past as by the new woman in his life—the Casbah-trapped gangster behaves shoddily towards his greatest underworld ally (Gabriel Gabrio) and loyal gypsy mistress (Line Noro). His legendary reputation and de facto invulnerability seem less and less important when set beside the passage of irrecoverable time. Pepe le Moko is distinguished by many background shots of the real Algiers and its equally real Casbah. Duvivier's camera zeroes in on the town's diverse inhabitants—his emphasis on racial mixing verges on visceral disgust vis-a-vis miscegenation—and records the names of some of its stranger byways, such as "La Rue de I'lmpuissance". Initially Pepe is so sure of his Casbah refuge, he gallantly shoots invading policemen in the legs in lieu of killing them. Ultimately, the only thing that can kill him is his love for Paris. Duvivier's gangsters are all imbued with the apache-flavoured misogyny that we first found in Jesus-la-Caille. "Je n'ecoute jamais aux femmes," is a typical put-down. Inter-male loyalty is of paramount importance, while Slimane's interest in his French nemesis is at least latently homosexual, a fact underscored by Pepe's "butch" teasing of 139 the policeman whenever he's in this rather effete Arab's presence. Pepe and Gaby's talk about Paris foreshadows the Bogart/Bacall doubles entendres in The Big Sleep (1946). While not as common as in many French crime films, underworld slang is still judiciously used. As one older reprobate explains, "Je n'ai jamais employe les mots d'argots sauf aux gens pour qui la langue francaise est morte." Duvivier's innovations would be carried still further by the greatest screenwriter/director team of the late 1930s, Marcel Carne and Jacques Prevert. Today best known for Les Enfants du paradis (1945), a large-scale historical romance which was recently voted the best French sound picture of all time by a panel of practicing French film critics, Carne and Prevert jointly created the most acclaimed examples of poetic realism in 1938 and 1939. Like Pepe le Moko, both Le Quai des brumes (1938) and Le Jour se leve (1939) starred Jean Gabin in the leading role. Although extremely charismatic, in all three films Gabin's fictional personae stem from humble origins. In each feature he kills at least one person, and in all of them he dies. As Jacques Prevert wrote in his bittersweet "Poeme de Jacques Prevert a Jean Gabin", "On ne meurt qu'une fois/dit un diton/on meurt souvent,/on meurt tout le temps,/repond Jean Gabin sur I'ecran...." (Jean Gabin 258). Marcel Came enjoys the unenviable distinction of being the only major filmmaker in the world who is suspected of being creatively inferior to his favourite scenarist. More equitably, Edward Barton Turk argues that the success of their joint efforts was the result of a "clash of two strong creative forces, from the interaction of two incompatible visions" (Turk 45). One thing the two men did have in 140 common was an understanding of poverty: both were mainly self- educated, having emerged from humble circumstances. Although a strong fatalistic streak ran through Prevert's scenarios, this first- generation Surrealist's public persona was very different. A populist poet, chain-smoking bon vivant, and flaneur with a gift for maintaining prolonged heterosexual relationships as well as countless easy-going friendships, Jacques Prevert seemed in many ways to be the exact opposite of the withdrawn, crabbed, homosexual Carne. Prevert's infectious sensuality, it was said again and again, was relentlessly leached out of the frame by Carne's dour mise-en-scene. This could perhaps be explained by "the premature death of [Carne's] mother [which] influenced [his] dark conception of love and women" (Turk 11). On the other hand, these unlikely collaborators loved "les memes comediens. lis ont la meme sensibilite, le meme amour du peniches dans la brume, de la pluie sur les paves de ce Paris ou ils ont connu les meme annees difficiles" (Andry 96). What's more, if Prevert was the one with the "ear" (for marvellously evocative dialogue), Carne was the one with the eye (for splendidly visual effects). Like so many French directors, Came was a retired film critic whose most famous article was "Comment descend le cinema francais dans la rue?", a brief on behalf of realistic urban set design and location shooting. He was a great admirer of German cinema in general, and of F.W. Murnau's work in particular. At the risk of over-simplifying the procedure, one might say that he cut Prevert's breezy Surrealism with some much-needed Expressionist rigour, finding the proper balance between romance and tragedy, poetry and grit, in stories that could all too easily have grown lopsided in the cinematic telling. Without this input, it seems most 141 unlikely that the ingredients needed for realisme poetique would ever have properly gelled. Poetic realism is said to create "a fantastic, stylized world in which myth and reality merge in one...." (Garbicz and Klinowski 288). Although usually regarded as the quintessential^ French film style, it was not immune to foreign influences, American as well as German. "Pictorially," one American critic claims, "Le Quai des Brumes shows the influence of Josef von Sternberg's silent film The Docks of New York (1928)" (Turk 104). In recent years, French film scholars have become increasingly intrigued by the sway exercised by Edward Hopper's realistic urban paintings on American popular culture in general, and on hardboiled Hollywood cinema in particular. In "Cinema, cinema: Regard sur Edward Hopper", Jean-Pierre Naugrette observed that, "A regarder de pres les tableaux d'Edward Hopper (1882 - 1967), on a tres vite I'impression que les liens entre peinture, litterature et cinema sont si etroitement, si finement tisses qu'il est pratiquement impossible de dire qui a commence le premier, qui a influence qui, ou est la cause, ou est I'effet" (Naugrette 55). As an example of this confused line of descent, Naugrette noted, "On sait par example que Hopper admirait beaucoup Hemingway... Hemingway a inspire Hopper, qui a inspire les cineastes...." (Naugrette 55). From the perspective of 1997, one could probably say much the same about Robert Brassai's snapshots of nocturnal Paris in regard to French popular culture. Although nowhere near as well known in the 1930s as his American comrade-in-arts, the Hungarian-born Brassai's richly evocative, intensely "narrative" black and white portraits of 142 prostitutes and pimps, night clubs and bordellos, abandoned streets and dark canals, were soon absorbed by the commercial French film industry, and brought to the peak of formal perfection by the cinema of Carne and Prevert. The fictional world of Pierre Mac Orlan and Francis Carco had finally been turned into cinematic flesh. Le Quai des brumes was not the first crime film the Prevert/Carne team turned its hand to, but this moody thriller was fated to be the most influential. More than 20 years after that landmark was released, Pierre Leprohon would observe that even the film version of Pasolini's Una vita violenta would seek "le decor sordide de la zone peripherique, le 'miserabilisme' deviation faussee du neo-realisme, le sens du social eher au film italien, deviennent alors le pretexte d'affabulations souvent purement romantiques toutes proches—et poesie en moins—du romantisme prevertien de Quai des brumes et des Portes de la nuif (Leprohon 200). Pierre Mac Orlan's original novel was largely set in the years immediately preceding the First World War, being capped by a brief post-war epilogue. A group of disparate individuals seek refuge in Montmartre's famous "Lapin Agile" on a cold winter night, and gunfire is briefly exchanged with a gang of shadowy underworld types who want to kill one of the inn's besieged habitues. With the coming of the dawn, these chance acquaintances drift off to their various fates—most of them tragic. The mood of the novel is expressed by the following aphorism: "...le cafard n'a pas de patrie, il ne connait qu'une direction: Le Sud" (Mac Orlan 51). In 1960 Frangois Truffaut would, at the end of his second feature, Tirez sur le pianiste, choreograph a snowy death similar to the one suffered by Jean Rabe on page 142 of Mac Orlan's 143 text. Edward Barton Turk described the author as "France's Liam O'Flaherty", and believed that Mac Orlan's "two major themes—escape and destiny—[were] a response to the gruesome forces unleashed by World War I" (Turk 97 - 98). In the case of Came and Prevert, Gilles Deleuze's assertion that "[l]a ligne de fuite est une deterritorialization [et les] Francais ne savent bien ce que c'est" most definitely does not apply (Dialogues 47). For the Prevertian hero, as embodied by Jean Gabin in Carne's films as well as Pepe le Moko, life was always elsewhere. Nevertheless, despite the trench-flavoured nostalgia of Mac Orlan's prose, the film version of Le Quai enjoyed only a passing connection to its source novel. As Carne recalled in his autobiography: L'action du Quai des Brumes se passait a Montmartre du siecle, plus particulierement au Lapin Agile. Comment reconstituer le vieux Montmartre, celui de la rue des Saules et du cimetiere Saint-Vincent, a Neubelsberg, ou le film devait etre tourne? (La Vie a belles 93). Originally conceived as a Franco-German co-production, the film was eventually moved to the port city of Brest. Iconic movie star Jean Gabin played Jean, the military deserter who, as we have already seen, was required to refrain from specifying the precise nature of his contravention of military justice, and to stack his uniform neatly on a chair prior to assuming civilian garb. Prevert's biographer Marc Andry described Le Quai as "le film cle d'une epoque inquiete. Les brumes. La pluie. Un amour impossible. L'etrangete d'un implacable destin dans un enfer pave d'intonations surrealistes" (Andry 118). Co-star Michele Morgan helped to establish the norms of noirish fashion five years 1 44 before the stars of Casablanca slipped into matching white trenchcoats. She was helped in this endeavour by Coco Chanel, the famed fashion designer who insouciantly insisted that "Un film comme celui-la n'a pas besoin de robe: un impermeable, un beret, voila tout" (Andry 118). Cinematographer Eugen Schufftan was happily able to fuse Carne's Expressionist taste with Prevert's Surrealist sensibilities. Although Le QuaFs plot is very similar to that of Pepe le Moko, it is the latter film which stands as the signature example of poetic realism. Ironically, Le Quai des brumes' romantic fatalism would eventually be condemned as a contributing factor to the 1940 collapse of French battlefield morale. To both Vichy and maquisard judges, the film's "defeatist" dialogue and unsavoury characters were more than a little suspect. Even when the film first came out, Jean Renoir—then at the height condemned of his alignment with the French Communist Party— Le Quai as "fascist," avoiding a bloody nose from the outraged Jacques Prevert only by lamely explaining, "—Jacques, tu me connais!... Jamais je ne dirai qu'un film auquel tu as travaille est un film fasciste... Non, j'ai voulu dire que certains personnages appelaient la trique fasciste...." (La Vie a belles dents 110). When first introduced onscreen, Jean Gabin is shown clambering into the cab of a truck while hitchhiking in the fog; this opening would re-appear Ossessione. four years later in Luchino Visconti's first feature, Its look also reminds the late 20th century cinephile of Raoul Walsh's monochromatic nocturnes in the 1940 melodrama, They Drive by Night, just as Walsh's film in turn makes one think of Edward Hopper. When Gabin is gunned down from a moving car at the end of Le Quai, the origins of this scene clearly belong to Scarface, Little Caesar, 145 and the other early gangster epics, but the shadowy decor and full shot mise-en-scene flash forward to Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, and other mid-'40s //7ms noirs. "The French film noir," Raymond Durgnat reminds us, "precedes the American genre. French specialists include Feuillade, Duvivier, Carne, Cloizot, Yves Allegret...." (Palmer 84) In Hollywood, he whimsically points out, Pepe le Moko became not only "Algiers ("Come with me to the Casbah") [but] also Pepe-le Pew [the amorous French skunk featured in numerous Warner Brothers cartoons]." (Palmer 84) Algiers was not the only Hollywood re-make of a French policier, either. In Fritz Lang's Hays Code-hobbled hands, Renoir's La Chienne was re-cast as Scarlet Street (1945). Hollywood's need to re- make French films in American garb was established long before the end of the Second World War. Even so, the discovery of American film noir had a profound effect on the French film industry. In Michel Ciment's words, "Si la figure du gangster domine les annees trente, I'avenement du detective prive caracterize le debut de la decennie suivante" (Le crime a I'ecran 53). Although John Huston's 1941 version was technically the third cinematic adaptation of Dashiell Hammett'sThe Maltese Falcon, this seminal work did not make a smooth, sequential transition to the French screen, despite its subsequent status as "le paragon d'un nouveau genre, le 'film noir"'(Le crime a I'ecran 53). Thanks to the cultural blockade imposed on France by the triumph of German arms, Hollywood movies were not screened in either Vichy or the Occupied Zone between 1940 and 1944, and very few were seen in 1945. Thus, between mid-July and August of 1946, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), Farewell, My Lovely (1944) and several 146 less important noirish works were projected for the first time onto Parisian screens. Despite the artistic quality and commercial success of wartime polars—some of which made Positifs previously mentioned "Top Forty List"—these American imports had a huge effect on French intellectual life. Italy was equally impressed by these tough new works, although from a somewhat different perspective. Giuseppe De Santis, for instance, an Italian film critic who would later carve out a respectable career for himself in his homeland's postwar film industry, believed that "II realismo del cinema americano assunse le tinte nette e crude che quella societa agitata, sconvolta e ancora in crisi di crescenza suggeriva: inoltre erano gli anni solenni e tragici della crisi mondiale...." (De Santis 47). For most Italian observers, Hollywood's depiction of onscreen violence had more to do with bleak social conditions than it did with changing popular aesthetics and/or morbid metaphysics. During the floodtide of Neorealism, things could hardly have appeared otherwise. Up until 1945, the crime genre belonged primarily to the English, the Americans, and the French, with strong stylistic contributions being provided by the Germans and, in a far more indirect way, the Russians. Since three of these nationalities do not thematically concern us, we have been restricted thus far to talking about French and American generic contributions. From here on out, however, our theoretical diptych becomes a triptych. Italian cinema—although not Italian literature—will become a major part of our cross-referential evolutionary pattern. The reason why can be expressed in one word: Neorealism (the gritty inheritor of poetic realism, the movement which 147 fizzled in 1946 following the disastrous public and critical reception of Came and Prevert's Les Portes de la nuit). For most of Western Europe, film noir and Neorealism were synchronous phenomena. In the cinema of Milan and Marseilles, one could scan Paisa (1946) and The Maltese Falcon on the same afternoon. Despite the vast stylistic and ideological differences between these two forms, for a variety of reasons they appeared to be complementary. If not for the sociological input of the Second World War, they would never have symbiotically evolved in the way that they did. Of course, behind Neorealism and film noir lay several other movements, such as poetic realism—which was itself indebted to German Expressionism and the Russian novel. Both before and after the war, aspiring filmmakers. Italian worked with prominent French Michelangelo Antonioni, for instance, was "imposed" as an assistant director Visiteurs directors on Marcel Came, who was then shooting Les du soir (1942), an experience which the coercive cultural climate of the Axis occupation doomed neither man to enjoy. Luchino Visconti's experience with French cinema, on the other hand, was both more extensive and purely voluntary: "Visconti prende conoscenza dei film di Vigo, che lasceranno in lui qualche traccia, ed 'aiuta' Renoir per Les basfonds [sic], Une partie de campagne, Tosca. questa scelta vediamo in Ossessione, Le consequenze di dove non e difficile anche un passaggio visto con I'occhio del regista della Bete ritrovare humaine" (Verdone 75). Many Italian filmmakers considered poetic realism to be Neorealism's direct progenitor. It should be emphasized, however, that their conception of poetic realism owed very little to the films of 148 Carne and Prevert, despite that filmmaking team's penchant for the proletariat and impeccable working intellectuals class credentials. For Italian Toni, the 1934 feature about poor immigrant workers in Marseilles that Renoir made at Marcel Pagnol's Mediterranean film studio, was the key proto-Neorealist work, not Le Quai des brumes. According to Peter Bondanella, the very "term 'neorealism' was...first applied not to postwar Italian cinema but, instead, to the French films of the thirties in an article written by Umberto Barbaro in 1943," a full year after the release of Ossessione, the film which most critics now regard as the first true brick in the Neorealist edifice (Bondanella 24). Although Italy had been under Fascist control since 1922, very few either Italian cineastes were II Duce or his party. Within the ideologically committed ultra-modern to confines of Cinecitta and the Centro Sperimentale, they made inconsequential movies of the "white telephone" variety while writing enthusiastic articles about foreign motion pictures in the pages of Cinema Bianco and e Nero, dreaming all the while of better times at home. Occasionally, they were required to make patriotic propaganda movies, but even these commissioned efforts were notably light on nationalist fervor. What's more, Roberto Rossellini—the only major postwar Italian filmmaker to have worked regularly on jingoistic morale builders—was first off the mark with Roma, citta aperta (1945), the flag-bearer of Neorealism to the world and the first openly anti-fascist Italian film. Ironically, when the critics of Cahiers du cinema and other French film journals took the rough-and-ready aesthetics of Rossellini's ecumenical Resistance movie to heart, they didn't realize that many of his decisions were based on necessity and not artistic choice. Because 149 all the studios in Rome had been damaged by Allied bombers, the Italian director was obliged to take his camera into the streets. A shortage of funds resulted in the employment of many non-actors, and the "raw" quality of the lighting in Roma, citta aperta was the result not only of shooting outdoors with insufficient artificial illumination, but also of the different grades of black and white film stock which Rossellini was forced to purchase on the black market. Even the "elliptical editing", which so much impressed the young Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, was more the result of want than narrative innovation. In Open City and Paisa, the the "enemy" was openly identified with Nazi troops who had occupied Italy since the fall of 1943. Nevertheless, Manichean-style dualism was exceedingly rare in Neorealism. The movement's main thrust began with Vittorio De Sica's / Bambini ci guardano (1943) and peaked with the director's 1948 masterpiece, Ladri di biciclette, both works being scripted by Cesare Zavattini, Neorealism's most influential ideologue. In Strapparole, the indomitable screenwriter/theorist wrote, "Ogni cinema che mira a un rapporto stretto neorealismo, con partecipa i gravi problemi a questo dell' movimento uomo coi moderno, modi del propri. II neorealismo e ormai la coscienza del cinema" (Zavattini 474). Because of its emphasis on the problems of ordinary people—of the poor and underprivileged wing. At times, classes—Neorealism's politics were this sensibility invariably transcended personal left- ideological conditioning. Roberto Rossellini, for instance, came from a wealthy bourgeois family, made films on demand for the ruling fascists, and was subsequently a vocal apologist for the Christian Democratic party. 150 While these biographical details did earn the director a number of critical brickbats in his native Italy, no one—not even Guido Aristarco, the doyen of PCI film critics—could deny his claim to being the true father of Neorealism. Although aforementioned many Bicycle (1946) and Germania policiers. neorealist Thieves, films dealt with crime—the for instance, as well as Sciuscia Anno Zero (1947)—few if any could be called It is perhaps not entirely accidental that Anglo-American distributors habitually mistranslate the words Ladri di biciclette. The whole point of the film may be culled from its title, since Zavattini ahd De Sica are adamant in their insistence that poverty can make bicycle thieves out any of us; contextually, the romantic individualism of bicycle thief just won't wash. If America, France and England are the crime fiction capitals of the world, this is at least in part because of the relative stability of these three countries. For Englishmen, Frenchmen and Americans, the state enjoys a solidity and a legitimacy that is alien to younger, more fragile polities. While Italy, as a recognizable national entity, has existed longer than any other European state with the exception of Greece, as a modern country its existence is much less assured. As of this writing, the Risorgimento is only 127 years old. In 1870, citizens of the new Italy had to make sense out of a state that had once been known as the Roman Empire prior to fragmenting into an archipelago of wealthy city-states which were constantly being occupied and attacked by Turks, Austrians, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Normans, Moors and anyone else with a strong national image and sense of national purpose. While Tuscan was the official language of this strangely artificial new 151 country, most people spoke dialects that were as different from the recognized tongue as Catalan is from Spanish. Northern, central and southern regions were more different from each other than Norway is from Denmark. Attempts to strengthen the sense of national purpose by means of colonial adventures usually ended in disaster, whether on the plains of Adowa (1896) or in the desert sands of El Alamein (1942). Above all, there was the problem of Sicily. After 99.5% of Sicilian voters cast their lot in favour of union with Italy in 1860, the government in Rome proceeded to treat the most occupied and invaded of all Italian provinces like a sort of colony. The Mafia, once a secret society of 13th century Sicilian knights whose anti-Norman battlecry, "Morte Ai Francesi, Italia Anela," allegedly provided the acronym for this most famous of all illegal organizations, began to evolve into its present form as the result of a "series of exploitative administrations strangers [which] helped to create general among Sicilians" (Schneider and Zarate increasingly in the hands of gabelotti, "gombeen a men", cynical agents mistrust of 10). Land was the Sicilian version of Ireland's who made profits for absentee landlords at the expense of the peasantry. Mafiosi, therefore, however brutal and self-interested they might appear to outside eyes, could sometimes assume the shape of a viable alternative to the status quo. Mafia elements, then known to yellow journalists as "the Black Hand", began emigrating to the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth-century. After New Orleans Police Chief Dave Hennessy was assassinated by Mafia gunmen in 1890—because he believed his brother to have been murdered by Black Handers in Houston, this Southern policeman was presumed by his pre-emptive killers to be thirsting for 152 revenge—an outraged mob lynched eleven suspects of Italian origin while they languished in jail, awaiting trial. This ferocious example of American vigilante justice convinced period Mafiosi that they would be well-advised to confine their criminal activities to their own neighbourhoods. Thus, "Italo-American gangs remained secondary to Irish—and later Polish and Jewish—gangs in the first two decades of the [20th] century" (Schneider and Zarate 73). It was the 1920s and the implementation of Prohibition that provided Italian gangsters with their "edge". By the early 1930s, the Irish, Jewish and Polish mobs of America had been decisively defeated in a long series of vicious, long-term turf wars. "Bugs" Moran, Dion O'Bannion, Dutch Schultz, "Mad Dog" Vincent Coll, and most of the other headline-grabbing mobsters of the Prohibition era were either killed or put out of business. The few that remained (Bugsy Siegel; Meyer Lansky) made common cause with the new streamlined syndicate perfected by Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, and Vito Genovese during the decade preceding the Second World War. When they died, they were generally not replaced (Nash 538). From the 1880s onward, the Mafia was at least a bi-national corporation. In 1908, Joseph Petrosino of the New York Police Department was sent to Sicily to explore U.S./ltalian underworld links, and was subsequently assassinated in the streets of Palermo for his pains (Nash 57 - 59). Only in the 1920s and '30s did the criminal organization suffer real discomfort at the hands of Mussolini's security forces (Schneider and Zarate 58 - 61). 153 Nevertheless, even the Fascist secret police were unable to eliminate this problem entirely. Today, rumours persist that the American Army was given a much easier time than the British during the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily thanks to a "sweetheart deal" worked out between the State Department and exiled Cosa Nostra kingpin, Lucky Luciano. After the war, the devastation wrought on Palermo provided an excuse to put money in Mafia pockets. "Of the 4025 construction licenses granted between 1957 and 1963, 80% had been issued to only five persons." (Schneider and Zarate 92). Padded construction bills provided the funds required to take the lucrative North American heroin trade out of the hands of France's Union Corse. Tax fraud was near universal, since "Four Mafia families [controlled] the 334 tax offices in Sicily leased to them by the state" (Schneider and Zarate 103). Because Sicily is an autonomous region within Italy's body politic, local banks are not accountable to the country's central bank—an ideal circumstance for money-laundering (although Italy's tough-new anti-mafia laws will hopefully close this loophole in the near future). For all these reasons, the Sicilian Mafia, as Arnd Schneider and Oscar Zarate convincingly argue in Mafia for Beginners, has always been stronger and more powerful than its better-known U.S. counterpart. What's more, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra is outnumbered by the Neapolitan Camorra and the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta (Usher 22). Collectively, the united Southern crime syndicate is truly a force to be reckoned with, especially since, until very recently, it was supported to the hilt by Italy's long-serving Christian Democratic Party and their State 1 54 Department/CIA allies. It is now generally acknowledged that post-war Italy was kept under "A one-party system [which] had ruled for nearly 40 years by large-scale political and corporate racketeering, with the shady connivance of American and Italian secret agencies, and by a coalition with the Mafia" (Schneider and Zarate 119). Only in very recent years have these once unbreakable cabals begun to unravel. If I have tried to explore Italy's criminal history at some length, it is only because understanding the country's cultural reaction to crime is incomprehensible without it. Criminal counter-governments have been a part of local life since the Medieval/Renaissance days of the condottiere and briganti. In many ways, they were seen to be both more indigenous and more stable than the various unrepresentative regimes that came and went with dismaying regularity. In / Promessi century Italian sposi, the greatest and most influential of 19th novels, we do not encounter any Vautrins or Raskolnikovs. Indeed, armed villains are described in a manner that borders on melodrama: "Avevano entrambi intorno al capo una reticella verde, che cadeva sulP omero sinistro, terminata in una gran nappa e dalla quale usciva sulla fronte un enorme ciuffo: due lunghe mustacchi arriciati in punta; una cintura lucida di cuoio a quella attacate due pistole..." and so on and so on, for another 50 hair-raising words (Manzoni 10). The author's stock villains are as colourful and impersonal as a flamboyant natural disaster. Manzoni's real interest lies with Renzo and Lucia—the young lovers harassed and pursued by the godless Don Rodrigo—the heroic priest Padre Cristoforo, and the legendary bandit prince, I'lnnominato, who "turned from his wicked 155 ways and lived." When Renzo runs afoul of the law he is no more volitionally responsible than he was when he contracted the plague. Even in a work as conservative as this, the Protestant/Jansenist notion of prideful sin—the basis of so much detective fiction—is notably absent, just as the polarities between "normalcy," as embodied by society and the state, and "deviance", as made manifest by rebellion and crime, are singularly weak. As Cesare Pavese bitterly noted in his private journal, "L'origine di tutte le violenze tra uomo e uomo, e for all that tra uomo e donna, sta in questo che rarissimamente ci si trova d'accordo sul valore di un fatto, di un pensiero, di uno stato d'animo eio che per uno e tragedia per I'altro e gioco" (II Mestiere della vita 97). Despite the centrality of Roman Catholicism to its culture, and despite the lingering patriotism, (historically Italy memory of the is a country well-merited) parcel of where—thanks lack ecclesiastical authorities—moral Roman Empire's power and of trust in to the the population's temporal and relativism has long been part and popular thought. The artistic, scientific, and economic advances of the Renaissance did not result in an equally progressive political system. Frenchmen might regard 1789 as the dawn of the modern age, just as Americans are wont to connect the events of 1776 to the global triumph of democracy, but for Italians the slow progress of the Risorgimento provides no such self-aggrandizing dates. The ability to prove that the world was spherical and revolved around the sun did not result in the unification of even two city states. The end result of relentless foreign occupation was a cynicism that in some ways resembles the political disaffection of some of the more beleaguered Central European nations. In such an atmosphere, belief in 156 abstract virtues is hard to come by. Thus, when Italian director Tinto Brass, was asked what he thought about Giustizia, the filmmaker's response was jarringly blunt: B- Non esiste. \-Dovere? B- Non esiste neppure questo (Pisaro 156) On the other hand, as Cesare Pavese put it, "La politica e I'arte del possibile. Tutta la vita e politica" (Pavese 161). By extension, the problem of crime in general, and of the Mafia in particular, is the ultimate political dimensions. In problem, Cinema a Italian! headache degli anni of perhaps '70, insuperable film historian Uno Micciche phrased the Mafia film problematic in the following fashion: "Questa complessa e dolorosa materia—su cui la Commissione parlamentare antimafia dovrebbe fare definitivemente luce tra qualche mese e che affligge la Sicilia da decenni—non e certamente 'filmabile'" (Micciche 81). Paradoxically, if the Mafia was "unfilmable," its home ground was all too lens-worthy. In the previous century, "Giovanni Verga non ha solamente creato una grande opera di poesia, ma ha creato un paese, un tempo, una societa...." (De Santis 49). What this meant, essentially, was that Verga had turned Sicily into a sort of picturesque outpost of "Orientalism". Most of those who either wrote about Sicily or set movies in its territory, were Northern tourists or, at best, immigrants. Sicilian dialect was very seldom used in these works, but local characteristics and customs were very broadly—some might say sterotypically—reproduced. Thus, Pietro Germi, a filmmaker fated to 157 make his reputation with satirical comedies predicated on the absurdities of Sicilian social customs, felt compelled to explain to a French interviewer how he believed that "mes films, on pourrait les imaginer realises en Amerique ou en Russie ou en Angleterre—a part certains, lies des situations strictement locales, comme les films siciliens" (Germi 65). Rome, in other words, might be like everywhere else but Palermo was not. In Roy Armes's words, "In many ways...Sicilian films are best regarded not as works in a pure realistic tradition but as stylized Italian equivalents to the American Western" (Armes 140). Since the Italian "Wild West" had never been entirely pacified, it could not, of course, be treated as a purely mythological phenomenon. Since Sicilian culture was even more venerable than mainland Italian culture, there was also the problem of age. A whiff of impropreity clings to the notion of younger countries colonizing older frontiers. A specifically political approach was also out question, as Pierre Leprohon acknowledges in Le Cinema of the italien: "La probleme du banditisme sicilien donnera matiere a de nombreux films qui ne pourront toujours I'aborder avec la franchise necessaire" (Leprohon 129). Even when, in the late 1940s, Italian filmmakers did deal more directly with crime than was customary in the better-known works of Neorealism, the diegetic material never quite gelled into a full-scale policier. Late '40s films such as Alberto Lattuada's // Bandito a n d Carlo Lizzani's // Gatto might have been set in underworld milieus, but the connections made between the prevalence of crime and the devastation wrought by the Second World War and more than twenty years of Fascist misrule rendered these narratives incapable of 158 transporting the viewer to the semi-abstract cinematic plane inhabited by Scarface, Maigret and Sam Spade. On the other hand, as Ray Armes points out in Patterns of Realism, in the first of the two films, a bleak picaresque about a returning war veteran whom bad luck steers into a life of crime, "There are certain similarities with the defeatist atmosphere of prewar French works, like Carne's Quai des brumes, but the Prevert poetry is missing" (Armes 103). Armes, like many foreign and domestic film critics, cites Giuseppe De Santis's Riso amaro (1950) as the prime example of compromised Neorealism. "There is," he writes, "an epic sweep and plenty of violent action in Bitter Rice; quarrels in among the girls in the rice fields, a seduction thunderstorm, a gun battle amid rotting carcasses in the plant and a spectacular suicide" (Armes a refrigeration 130). Despite the film's serious subject matter, "someone in the course of the production saw the commercial possibilities of a film featuring several hundred nakedthighed young women" (Armes 129). Many of the more "commercial" Neorealist film plots sound suspiciously like opera. Senza instance, a 1948 work directed by Alberto pieta, for Lattuada, follows the doomed romance of Jerry, a black American military deserter who commits suicide after his Italian lover Angela dies as an unfortunate consequence of his criminal activites. In early postwar Italian crime films, Le Quai des brumes often seems to run head-on into Carmen. Later in this chapter we will see how operatic motifs would eventually "solve" the problem of filming the "unfilmable" Mafia. They also helped to make poverty seem more palatable, the sordid hotel room of the outlaw on the run being far less discomfiting to motion picture 159 audiences of modest means than the squalid apartments of unemployed bricklayers. Before pursuing this argument, however, we must return to the intellectual milieu of postwar France. As we saw in the last chapter, French feelings towards American culture were now exceedingly mixed. On the one hand, there were positive memories of the Liberation and limitless enthusiasm for new Hollywood movies, experimental and jazz. Contrapuntally, there was much worry about the fiction long-term implications of the Marshall Plan, strong working class loyalty to the victors at Stalingrad, and a violent intellectual reaction against the first stirrings of McCarthyism. Despite his admiration for Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos and Duke Ellington, Jean-Paul Sartre produced Le Putain respecteuse in the mid-1940s, a depiction of a Klan-dominated Deep South that was even grimmer than the "Jim Crow" reality that invoked it. Even Boris Vian, the St.-Germain-des-Pres cultural barometer who, in Jean Cau's words, "aimait le jazz, l'Amerique...les 'Series noires' de Marcel Duhamel'," (Croquis de memoire 47) achieved his greatest commercial success in these years with J'lrai crachez vos tombes, a temporarily sur banned novel allegedly written by the lightskinned American mulatto "Vernon Sullivan". With tongue pressed firmly in cheek, Vian disingenuously professed to be merely the translator of this book about a Southern American Black man who can "pass" for white and who exacts a terrible revenge on two racist Southern belles (Croquis de memoire 47). Mixing the styles of Richard Wright's Black Boy (1939) and Henry Miller's phallus-driven erotic fantasies, Vian said of the fictitious Sullivan and his equally fictive motives "...sa preference pour les Noirs inspirait a [lui] une espece de 160 mepris des 'bons durs'," since he temperamentally sides with "des Noirs aussi 'durs' que les Blancs" (Vian 9). While J'irai cracher sur vos tombe scontinues to be a contentious text on account of its ferocious misogyny, the book is also an eerie foreshadowing of certain Black militant fictions of the 1960s and '70s, notably Melvin Van Peebles's genre-bending "blaxploitation" epic, Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asss Song (1971). In France, more even than in the United States, it was realized that "With its reputation for corruption, racism, poverty, backward and primitive sexuality, the South [was] an ideal setting for pulp culture crime fiction" (Haut 149). J'irai cracher sur vos tombes was far more sexually explicit than any American crime movie or novel could then have hoped to be, but the book's dark sexual undercurrents were very much in the American vein. Of course, since Vian's unique take on the hardboiled novel was set in the United States rather than France, it was initially seen as less threatening Salammbo by Gallic censors, just as the erotically decadent had once been considered less injurious to public morals than was the relatively chaste Madame Bovary, primarily because the action of the first Flaubert text was situated in ancient Carthage while the events of the second unfolded in contemporary—which is to say, mid-1 nineteenth-century—France. In "Chronique d'une imposture: L'erotic thriller'", Michel Cieutat noted that "les films noirs des annees quarantes et cinquantes, par respect pour les romans de Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler ou James M. Cain dont ils etaient les adaptations...ont ete les premiers des thrillers a mettre en relief la force matrice du sexe dans le comportement de leur personnages, etre profondement impregnes de 161 I'etat d'esprit propre autant a I'air de la Depression (epoque ou furent ecrits les romans) qu'a celui qui annoncait puis succedait au second conflit mondial (periode ou furent produits ces films)" (Garbarz 97). During the war years, lone wolf detectives achieved new onscreen status because "Coince entre la police et la truands, le prive est un etre seul qui ne peut compter sur personne" (Le crime a I'ecran 58). Because American soldiers overseas were said to be almost universally anxious that their wives and girlfriends—liberated from the home for the first time, and working in the high-paying defence industry jobs that were once exclusively reserved for men—would betray them at their earliest possible opportunity, the image of the femme fatale arose from the miasma of turn-of-the-century coffeehouse chatter and became a dominant figure on American screens. Perhaps for related reasons, the latent homosexuality which Leslie Fiedler believes to be at the heart of 19th century American fiction began to integrate itself in precisely those films that favoured demonic female protagonists. In his biography of the Austrian-born American filmmaker, Kevin Lally writes, "[Billy] Wilder has called Double Indemnity a love story, but he's not talking about the relationship between Walter and Phyllis— rather, it's the bond between Walter and his mentor" (Lally 137). When female "praying mantises" are present, it would seem that their male counterparts can do little but huddle together for comfort—just as they would do in foxholes and trenches when under hostile fire. Once again we are reminded of Lilith, the Talmudic demon/angel who preys on men who are young, lonely, and far from home. When French cinephiles "discovered" film noir in 1946, virtually all of the ingredients that went into it were already well known to 162 them. One can find all of the seven noirish characteristics cited by Paul Schrader in his essay "Notes on Film Noir"—a majority of scenes lit for night; a visual preference for oblique and vertical lines; equal lighting emphasis on actors and settings; a tendency to promote compositional tension at the expense of physical action; "an almost Freudian attachment to water"; a love of romantic narration; a complex chronological order—in Le Quai des brumes and Le Jour se /eve. Even so, these darkly-textured American films appeared to reflect something new. In the 1930s, it should be recalled, Jean Gabin usually came to a sorry end on account of his love for a woman—but his death was almost never the woman's fault. The notion of the femme fatale was therefore alien to Popular Front cinema. When dark forces took human shape, they were most likely to do so in the form of Jules Berry, the actor who played this trick in Jean Renoir's Le Crime de M. Lange in 1936, Le Jour se leve in 1939, and Carne's governments might Les Visiteurs du soir in have been more reluctant 1942. French than their American counterparts to grant political rights to their female constituents, but French society as a whole was far less prone to all-male social gatherings. Underworld society, conversely, was virtually all male, with the exception of background wives, mob molls and affiliated whores. Male/male relationships were therefore in such paramount dramas, but the more overtly homosexual formulas devised by Francis Carco in Jesus-la-caille would obviously be unacceptable to mid- century French viewers and censors alike. An American compromise was therefore required. 163 If anything, the French craze for Americans romans noirs w a s even stronger than its penchant for the filmed variety. In his introduction to the new, now-famous Gallimard book line known as la "Series noir", Marcel Duhamel warned his readers that "L'amateur d'enigmes a la Sherlock Holmes n'y trouvera pas souvent son compte. L'optimiste systematique non plus." (Le crime a I'ecran 158) Just as, by a weird stroke of synchronicity, Albert Camus physically resembled Humphrey Bogart, so did the Existentialist novel resemble its hardboiled predecessor. Horace McCoy's and James M. Cain's fictions have both been claimed as key influences on the composition of L'Etranger (1942). These two narrative streams were more than merely compatible; they actively fed and augmented each each other. "En presque trente ans (1952 - 1981), 61 auteurs ont ete adaptes, et cela 117 fois...." (Bertes 90). Ironically, "Le champion absolu est James Hadley Chase (au moins 15 titres adaptes)...." (Bertes 90). Chase, of course, was an English author whose knowledge of American mores was limited to what he had learned from American movies. Nevertheless, Lemmy Caution, his most popular creation, would thrice be put to good use by Jean-Luc Godard. As a rule, French cineastes—very likely la "Series noire's" staunchest fans—preferred to tackle the less illustrious of America's hardboiled talents. According to Catherine Berthe, "Les adaptations de Hammett, Chandler ou Cain avaient donne lieu a des chefs-d'oeuvres difficile a egaler...." (Bertes francaise semble etre tiraillee 91). Consequently, "La Serie entre noire la parodie et le realisme...." (Bertes 93). In the case of Cain, an Italian, rather than an American, 1 64 definitively explored what Joyce Carol Oates once described as "a world immense with freedom, women hellish and infantile...money, power, the tantalizing promise of adventure" (Tough Guv Writers of the Thirties 110). Instead, French filmmakers enjoyed their greatest successes with William Irish, David Goodis, Charles Williams, Jim Thompson, and other hardboiled authors whom the American mainstream more or less forgot. Lionel White and Charles Williams would continue to inspire French filmmakers long after they had ceased to exercise the imaginations of their fellow countrymen. As the subject of the next few paragraphs once said, II est difficile aux Francais de mesurer la solitude dans laquelle vivent aux Etats-Unis les ecrivains qui ont choisi la litterature populaire. Les amateurs francais de Serie noire, sans lire forcement tout ce qui est traduit dans notre langue, parviennent vite a reconnaitre le talent de tel ou tel romancier et a le faire savoir. Le telephone arabe fait le reste, et c'est ainisi que les noms de David Goodis, Dolores Hitchens, William Irish, Dorothy B. Hughes, Henry Farrell, Jim Thompson, Joseph Harrington, Harry Whittington...circulent de bouche a oreille et se font une reputation parmi les specialistes (Le Cinema selon Francois Truffaut (419 -420). Francois Truffaut—the critic-turned-cineaste whose visceral distaste for the gangster genre is reflected by his observation that, in Scarface, director Howard Hawks "a dirige Paul Muni de maniere a le faire ressembler a un singe, les bras en demi-cercles, le visage grimacant"—was as sympathetic to noirish losers as he was hostile to criminal social climbers (Les Films de ma vie 96). While the director's 1966 feature, La Mariee etait en noir, might have been a visual homage to the techniques of Alfred Hitchcock, his source material was provided 165 by William Irish (the pen name of Cornell Woolrich). Truffaut appreciated the fact that, in Irish's dyspeptic universe, "Au lieu d'avoir des gangsters dans un milieu social bien defini, on avait des histoires qui ressemblent a des cauchemars. Irish c'est presque toujours des histoires d'amour empeches, histoires effrayantes, qui reposent sur une idee de fatalite" (Le Sounding like Cinema selon Francois Truffaut 183 - 184). a latterday Baudelaire in the presence of his personal Poe—in 1969, he would turn a second "Irish" novel into La Sirene de la Missisippi—Truffaut [David] once described Woolrich as "un poete, tout comme Goodis," another American authors (Le of the filmmaker's Cinema selon favourite Francois Truffaut hardboiled 184.) He appreciated the fact that neither Irish nor the author of Down (1956), the dour novel that would eventually be transformed There into Truffaut's darkly comic second feature, Tirez sur le pianiste, were very specific about locale. "Parce qu'on voit ces livres-la—les romans d'lrish, de Goodis, que j'aime beaucoup egalement—comme des contes de fees pour adultes," the director explained. "Et je les adapte dans le meme esprit que Cocteau tournant La Belle et la Bete, enfin en jouant un jeu moins ouvertment feerique" (Le Cinema selon Francois Truffaut 185). Truffaut prided himself on his ability not only to find visual means of reproducing English language "tough guy" prose, but also to insure that those methods were truly French as well: "Ainsi, quand je devais affronter un 'probleme Irish', j'avais des chances de trouver la 'solution Irish'" (Le Cinema selon Francois Truffaut 244). As a critic in the 1950s, the director had questioned the existence of "unfilmable" scenes, and his crime movies provided him with the perfect opportunity to put his theories to the test. 166 Each of Truffaut's five true polars—because they're more about adultery than murder, one should exclude from consideration La douce and La Femme Peau d'a cote —is a re-imagining of an American hardboiled novel. Une belle fille comme moi was inspired by Henry Farrell's Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me, while Vivement Dimanche was hived off a Charles Williams story. Of this quintet of cinematic adaptations, Tirez sur le pianiste is unquestionably the most successful. While book and movie both deal with a talented insensitivity concert triggered the pianist who suicide of believes his momentary his self-sacrificing wife, the moods of these works could not be more different. Eddie Lynn, Goodis's variation, is a wounded veteran of Merrill's Marauders who won medals for killing Japanese soldiers in Burma; Charlie, meanwhile, Francois Truffaut's much milder model, is a French pianist of Armenian descent who reads self-help books in order to overcome his timidity. The American pianist's Philadelphia is a joyless urban backwater; Charlie's Paris, on the other hand, though imbued with melancholy, is a city where complete strangers josh with each other, a place dripping with Prevertian romanticism. To make ends meet, Charlie and Eddie both tickle the ivories in out-of-the-way neighbourhood bars, and both parties will unwittingly cause the death of barmaids thanks to their unsavoury family connections. The barmaid whose love pulls Charlie out of his snail's shell of emotional romantic conflation of Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca temporarily isolation is a and a feminized version of Gavroche, Victor Hugo's immortal street urchin; Eddie's doomed muse is neither romantic nor soft in any way, being the sort of embittered, street-savvy woman who'd stab "roosters where it really 167 hurts" with a hatpin whenever it came time to fend off a pass. (Shoot the Piano Hardboiled Plaver 13) If, as Woody Haut claims in Pulp Fiction: Fiction and the Cold War, Goodis's women are either wives or waifs, in Down There the waif is a wife and the wife is a waif. Still, despite its utter lack of alcoholic self-pity, and despite the presence of Groucho Marxist gangsters, funny songs and a decidely nonNeorealist appropriation of elliptical editing, Tirez sur le pianiste is somehow even sadder than Down There. Although he was only 29 when he directed the film, Truffaut repeatedly told interviewers that the movie was really about the onset of middle-age. Truffaut, haunted by memories of his own unhappy childhood, clearly related to Charlie as. a fellow sufferer who was trapped by his own genetic heritage. It seems likely he related most strongly to the fictional passage where Eddie Lynn's violent anger over the suicide of his wife finally sputters out, a rage which will soon be replaced by passive, nostalgic despair: "The wild man was gone, annihilated by two old hulks who didn't know they were still in there pitching, the dull-eyed shrugging mother and the easy-smiling, booze-guzzling father." (Shoot the Piano Plaver 87) Noir's obsession with the past, unsurprisingly, was one of the factors that most attracted French writers and directors to it. In the homeland of Proust and Bergson, it could hardly have been otherwise. French intellectuals were equally partial to policiers that shied away from simplistic moral judgements. Georges Simenon, for instance, the one francophone crime writer who was as revered by French detective story aficionados as were any of his anglophone peers, would "presente le plus souvent le coupable comme un irresponsable de naissance, une victime de la societe" (Assouline 812). By means of judicious 168 borrowing, popular French cinema and literature was able to fuse the otherwise incompatible myths of Hugo and Zola. Since many American crime novels were also obsessed by the idea of escape, the formula could be still further broadened to accomodate the sympatico visions of Pierre Mac Orlan and Jacques Prevert. While he might not be most adapted, Jim Thompson would seem to be the hardboiled American author who is most accessible to nonAmerican directors. Alain Corneau, whose 1979 feature Serie noire was taken from Thompson's very different novel A Hell of a Woman, explained this situation in the following terms: "A part Kubrick ou Stephen Frears, Hollywood continue a ne pas etre tres excite par I'adaptation des livres de Thompson, contrairement aux Europeens. D'ailleurs Thompson est beaucoup plus connu en Europe, et en France principalement, a cause de ce phenomene. Avec Thompson, on est un peu comme avec le jazz a une certaine epoque, quand les Americains ne suivent plus ou ont de mal a s'y interesser, alors que les Europeens aiment beaucoup ca et ont une vision differente. Or ce n'est pas du tout parce que Thompson devient europeen, mais parce qu'il fait une analyse spectrale de l'Amerique qui correspond a la maniere dont les Europeens ont tendance a regarder l'Amerique." (Singer 97). In practice, this usually means that the bleaker the vision of an American crime writer, the more likely he or she is to be taken seriously by French artists and critics. In their eyes, to be disparaged, dismissed and ignored at home is to become a sort of pulp fiction Alexander Solzhenitsyn living on the fringes of some problem-plagued U.S. town. For Parisian intellectuals, le roman noir is pre-eminently exiles, both internal a literature of alienation written by and external. The lack of recognition which 169 hardboiled novelists receive in the United States is seen as further proof of the prophetic authenticity of their literary statements. To be despised is to be Edgar Poe; to be Edgar Poe is to be Charles Baudelaire; to be Charles Baudelaire is to be the father of modern literature. No wonder the French admire them. Like so many hardboiled American writers, Jim Thompson was not "destined" to be a popular artist. Raised in the American Southwest, Thompson's easy-going father won and lost fortunes at poker and oil speculation. As a teenager, the future noir novelist and screenwriter worked as a bootlegging bellhop when Prohibition was in full flower, as well as a reporter and wildcat oil rigger. For a time, he was a left wing organizer, and his years in Hollywood were not happy. From earliest youth, he was the observer—and sometimes the victim—of cons and scams. His obsession with physical mutilation—the heroes of at least three of his many novels are literally castrated—was perhaps motivated by memories of his unhappy Uncle Ned, a farmer "who had to submit to the gradual trimming away of his leg." (Bad Boy 31) Thompson got into the bottle early, and was only fully pulled out of it when his body was laid in the grave. As a stylist, Thompson tended to mix the laconic exactitude of Dashiell Hammett with the poetic wisecracks of Raymond Chandler. In The Grifters, for instance, a conman is said to be "so crooked he could eat soup with a corkscrew"—in terms of utter admiration. Memorable terms of phrase are ubiquitous in Thompson's novels: "I was sweating like a chippie in church;" "The way she hung over the table you would have thought she was the cloth" (A Hell of a Woman 92; A Hell of a Woman 31.) Of all American crime novelists, Thompson was also the 170 one most smitten by modernism. Like Ernest Hemingway in To Have and Have Not, he was wont to change narrators from paragraph to paragraph, and even when he didn't the dominant voice's reliability was constantly compromised by the unstable flux of the speaker's sanity. In A Hell of a Woman, Frank, the book's first-person narrator, is a self-pitying "loser" who periodically commits impulsive murders— although he will usually pretend that he was doing something else. Every second sentence refers to the bad luck he's faced all his life, or else to his inability to escape from equally bad women: "Three goddamned tramps in a row...or maybe it was four or five, but it doesn't matter. It was like they were the same person" (A Hell of a Woman 99). Before doing away with a bipedal obstacle, Thompson's anti-hero feels compelled to pre-demonize the soon-to-be-victim: "I think maybe he was a Nazi or maybe a Communist—one of 'em that slipped over here during the war" (A Hell of a Woman 101). Even after committing murder, this clinical paranoid feels more like the victim than the aggressor: "It had to be true. Something had to be true besides what— what was true." (A Hell of a Woman 167). Of course, Frank will eventually get his comeuppance when, at long last, he finally meets a woman who really is as "bad" as he believes her entire sex to be. In his 1979-vintage feature Serie noire, Alain Corneau transferred Thompson's small town Hell of a setting to the suburbs of Paris. He also, as befits the French crime tradition, made the narrative slightly more Dostoevskyan. In Positifs oft-cited polar poll, the film would be deservedly voted the third best French crime movie of all time. 171 Thompson also provided Bertrand Tavernier with a means of exploring some of the darker aspects of the French colonial experience. As we saw in the last chapter, the French intellectuals who were so solicitous of America's exploited Blacks were often strangely blind to the African and Arab street sweepers who eked out a miserable existence closer to home. Coup de torchon (1983) pivoted on the direct transposition of the eponymous Florida hamlet in Thompson's Pop. 1280 to an outpost of French colonial Africa. In Thompson's text, "Un agent de la loi raconte au lecteur ces crimes avec parcimonie, et un sens du non-sens qui inscrit presque dans la litterature de I'absurde; au cours de ce voyage, il demolit les valeurs morales comme la familie, I'Etat, la religion, les rapport de dependance, la societe capital" (Montalban 107). Pushing the chronological clock back to 1938, "Tavernier francise le sherif en le transformant en policier des colonies, plonge dans une ambiance coloniale plein d'hommages au cinema des annees trente" (Montalban 109). Coup de torchon unfolds against the backdrop of the Munich accords, and the lazy, smalltown policeman portrayed by Philippe Noiret, his adulterous wife, his battered mistress, his racist colleagues, and the various canaille whom he shoots out of hand are all representative of a dying world that deserves grave. to slip into the Most of the film was shot in Steadicam, the hand-held shots being used "en partie comme une reference a la facon de filmer dans le cinema colonialiste representation du des monde annees trente, de Jim Thompson en ou partie comme Ton n'a la jamais I'impression d'etre sur la terre firme, sur un champ mine" (Montalban 109). In Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1958), an anti-war movie coscripted by Jim Thompson, the filmmakers were obliged to substitute 172 French characters for American; in Coup de torchon an equal and opposite alchemy occurs. Much of the attraction of hardboiled fiction for French filmmakers lay in the genre's extremely imaginative argot. To find a suitable French equivalent for Jim Thompson's unique speech rhythms, Georges Perec, the experimental novelist who composed the script for Serie noire, entirely...from found himself cliches, quotations obliged to construct it "almost and set phrases...." (Bellos 653). What's more, "...every phrase uttered [would be] repeated elsewhere in the film" (Bellos 653). Georges Simenon, who, in the late 1940s, won the top mystery writer prize from Ellery which Queen's marked "la premiere fois qu'un auteur Magazine—an de langue event frangais I'emporte aux Etats-Unis sur un terrain ou les Anglo-Saxons passent pour des maitres incontestes"—tended to compose his policiers in a fairly standard French, give or take the odd Belgicism (Assouline 564). As a stylist, he was far removed from the half-Rabelaisian, halfTourette's Syndrome-driven verbal explosions of a Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Nevertheless, thanks to earlier writers such as Francis Carco, French crime fiction was endowed with an authentic underworld idiom. In the post-war years, it would be adapted and embellished by policier specialists such as Albert Simonin, whose 1953 novel Touchez pas au grisbi! included a sixteen page glossary of the specifically criminal slang that he worked into a text which contained few standard French words apart from pronouns and articles. While such works would never replace the American models, they were hugely influential. Jacques Becker's 1954 film version of Touchez pas au grisbh,starring the iconic Jean Gabin, was recently voted the best French polar of all time. More 173 commonly, though, argot heavy crime movies fall into the popular Henri Verneuil "B movie" category—such as Le Clan des Siciliens (1971)—or, more recently, the angry-ethnic-youth-in-the-suburbs expose, such as Mathieu Kassowitz's Cesar-winning second feature, La haine (1995). This submission to American mores, though carried out with seeming enthusiasm, was inevitably accompanied by certain misgivings. For one thing, it meant that France was drifting ever further away from the central place in world culture and politics which post-Enlightenment intellectuals had accorded it. It also rubbed abrasively against the French concern for the "purity" of the national language, a purity made manifest Frangaise. In his meditation in the form "De la superiority of the Academie de la litterature anglaise/americaine", Gilles Deleuze explained, with a mixture admiration and horror, of how the English tongue was "une langue hegemonique, imperialiste. Mais elle est d'autant plus vulnerable au travail souterrain des langues ou des dialectes qui le minent de toutes parts, et lui imposent un jeu de corruptions et variations tres vastes" (Dialogues 72). Once again, Anglo-American culture is paid the backhanded Gallic compliment of being more vibrant thanks to its New World crudity, barbarity and linguistic promiscuity. The interlopers' "undeserved" victory can therefore be attributed largely to their nonGallic refusal to "play fair." In French policiers, characters are constantly making metaphors that relate to American crime movies. In Boris Vian's Elles ne rendent pas compte, a car chase is "[c]omme dans les films de gangsters... Ecoute les pneus" (Elles ne rendent pas compte 152). In a provincial police station visited by Georges Simenon's most famous hero, 174 meanwhile, a detective wannabe "avait son chapeau en arriere comme dans les films americains" (Les Vacances de Maigret 28). Indeed, even Commissario Ambrosio, the best known of Italian literary detectives, is constantly likening aspects of his cases to Woody Allen or Jane Fonda movies, even if his ultimate cultural loyalty, as Raffaele Croni believes, is to "un understatement inglese" (Maledetto Ferragosto 10). Renato Olivieri, Ambrosio's creator, is likewise clearly familiar with Georges Simenon's sympathetic approach to crimes passionels. other hand, the ubiquity of African women in Olivieri's Somalian model in Maledetto Ferragosto isole Seychelles" in Dunque Marranno—are fiction—the ;"[la] ragazza...orginaria della almost certainly echoes of French attempts to re-capture echoes of their colonial pasts by re-casting the On the motifs Southern American melodrama (Dunque and dramatis Italian respective personae of Maranno 20). Oliveiri's plots often sound like elaborate riffs on the single paragraph, black-type descriptions of murder that so often favourite newspaper, valiant attempts Corriere to Italianize appear in the pages of his della sera. a distinctly Nevertheless, despite his non-Italian genre, Oliveri's limited success reminds us irresistibly of Gramsci's frustration with his homeland's lack of popular literature. "Ogni popolo," he wrote in his prison notebooks, "ha la sua letteratura, ma essa puo venirgli da un altro popolo, cioe il popolo in parola puo essere subordinate all' egemonia intelletuale e morale di altri popoli" (Gramsci 2253). Happily, this state of affairs would not apply to crime movies in the 1950s and '60s. During that decade, the film noir would burn itself out in Hollywood—Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) is generally regarded as the last true descendant of this distinguished '40s style— 175 while the outlaw anti-hero movies of the late 1960s—pre-eminently, Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969)—were gradually taking shape as the moralistic strictures of the Hays Code fell one by one. In France, after Marcel Carne and Jacques Prevert's attempt to resuscitate poetic realism failed when audiences rejected their first post-war effort, Les Portes de la nuit (1946), a wave of underworld nostalgia quickly replaced it. Jacques Becker's Casque d'or (1952) highlighted a meticulously reconstructed apache Montmartre even more venerable than Francis Carco's, while his 1954 adaptation of Touchez pas au grisbi! re-made star Jean Gabin in the image of an ageing underworld kingpin who must come to terms with his own mortality and declining physical powers, as well as battle opposing mobs and the police. Except for the "B movie" bottom of the market, polars did not generally concern themselves with the doings .of the Union Corse, international France's indigenous Mediterranean mob, a gang of criminals who controlled the flow of heroin into the Americas untill they were edged out by the Sicilian Mafia in the mid1950s. Like its wars in Algeria and Indochina, France's real c r i m e problems were left largely untouched by French filmmakers until long after they had ceased to stick in the national craw. The man who really steered the French crime film into new waters, though, was Jean-Pierre Melville. An eccentric known for sleeping by day and making movies by night, this sometime collaborator of Jean Cocteau seemed ideally situated to create a noirish world of his own. Bob le flambeur (1955), a "heist movie" about a degenerate gambler whose plans to rob a luxurious casino are spoiled when he finally gets lucky at cards, was Melville's first genre entry, even if he 176 refused "le label policier a ce film qui'il prefere definir comme une comedie des moeurs" (Rouyer 100). At bottom, Bob was a nostalgic love poem to the vanishing Montmartre of Jacques Prevert, Francis Carco and Pierre Mac Orlan. His later films, however, would all be predicated upon the assumption that "la trahison est le moteur de Taction" (Rouyer homosexual 102). What's more, following in the latently footsteps of hardboiled American fictions, Melville's signature movies were all "'films d'hommes' ou les femmes n'ont qu'un role episodique et secondaire, sans que pour autant apparaissant necessairement comme des femmes fatales, ce qui les differencie des grands films noirs Hollywoodien qui en sont la modele" (Martin 73). Melville's Americanophilia is perhaps best exemplified by the following anecdote. In 1958 he planned to make a political thriller that was inextricably linked to the constitutional structure of the Fourth Republic. When that regime fell, to be replaced by the Fifth Republic with General De Gaulle at its head, the film no longer made sense. Then the filmmaker noticed that the set he had built for "un President de conseil francais" was more-or-less identical to Louis Calhern's flat in John Huston's 1950 underworld drama, The Asphalt Jungle ( "Jean- Pierre Melville decide de partir pour New York" 80). Pierre Grasset, the director's set designer, suggested they transport their production across the Atlantic, and Melville eagerly agreed. The experience was to have a profound experience on the filmmaker, insight into the relative strengths of his providing him with bi-national cultural inheritance. As Thierry Jousse would have it,, "en passant de I'autre cote de I'Atlantique, il regie une bonne fois pour toute la question de sa relation a l'Amerique. II existe une Amerique reelle, celle de Deux 1 77 hommes dans Manhattan, et une Amerique fantasmee, celle des policiers des annees 60-70 et on ne peut absolument pas les confondre. Autrement dit, cette decision d'aller tourner a New York...permettra a Melville de se liberer de toute idee saugrenue d'aller s'installer' a Hollywood et, par la meme occasion, de reinventer, tranquillement dans les rues de Paris...." ("Jean-Pierre Melville decide de partir pour New York" 80). This knowledge would bear rich fruit. If Le Samourai, Melville's 1967 masterpiece about a trenchcoated hitman who pushes stoicism to the edge of catatonia, was consciously modelled after Frank Tuttle's 1942 noir, This Gun for Hire, its originality would later allow John Woo, the greatest living Hong Kong director of policiers, "introdui[re] les constantes de son style avec des personnages qui doivent tout a Melville, que Woo considere comme son maitre" (Saada 69). In the same fashion, Thierry Jousse, when watching Melville's 1963 tough guy epic Le Doulos on TV a few years ago, "eu la nette impression qu'il anticipait tres largement un film recent parmi les plus importants, en I'occurrence Miller's Crossing des freres Coen" ("Le Doulos" 46). A particularly direct gift to tough guy French cinema arrived in the form of Jules Dassin. Chased out of McCarthyite Hollywood on account of his left-wing politics, Dassin became a cinematic gypsy who benefitted the film industries of each of the nations in which he temporarily resided. Rififi chez les hommes (1955) was the definitive French heist movie of the 1950s, a film that counterpoised prolonged, carefully choreographed scenes of a complicated burglary's planning and execution with shorter, more jagged shots of its bloody aftermath. Its influence continues to be felt on both sides of the Atlantic. As 178 Francois Truffaut wrote in his book The Films in My Life—this text does not appear in Les Films de ma vie, a source work whose diegetic material sometimes differs from that of its "translation"—"Dassin shot the film on the street during high winds and rain, and he reveals Paris to us Frenchmen just as he revealed London to the English (Night and the City) and New York to the Americans (Naked City)" (The Films in My Life 209). Truffaut might well have added "and would eventually reveal Athens to the Greeks (Never on Sunday)." We have already seen how Hollywood furthered—and continues to further—its fortunes by enriching competing its human national assets with the film industries. more talented members of In a small way, Jules Dassin reversed this entropic process. One of the major influences on the harder '50s in crime films, both French and American, was Mike Hammer. Mickey Spillane's sociopathic alter ego: "Ce detective peu sympathique n'a pas de valeur morale ni sociale, et n'est pas un justicier...quand il tue, c'est pour se defendre...." (Garsault 82). In Kiss Me Deadly (1953) we learn that "There's no such thing as innocence,' says Hammer. 'Innocence touched with guilt is as good as you get'" (Kiss Me Deadly 221). While nobody seems to have much liked him, Hammer's brutal self-interest would, in one way or another, come to mark the more sophisticated creations of Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Luc Godard and Arthur Penn. Like the atomic bomb, he was a sign of the times that could not be ignored. In the early 1960s, the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague would take to the policier in a big way. Before directing 7/rez sur le pianiste, Truffaut wrote the screen treatment for Jean-Luc Godard's first feature A bout de souffle (1959), an intellectual picaresque about 179 a likable cop killer, his lust for American women and cars, and his narcissistic identification with Humphrey Bogart's hardboiled persona. Unsurprisingly, the film was dedicated "a Monogram Pictures". In "La Paresse" (1961), Alphaville (1965), and Germany Nine Zero (1992), Godard would resurrect that most overexposed of borrowed "American" tough guys, James Hadley Chase's two-fisted, hard-drinking Lemmy Caution (played in all instances by expatriate American actor, Eddie Constantine) and use him for everything from a paragon of laziness to a futuristic James Bond, from a defender of humanism to a psychopathic killer, from a mythic hero to a mute observer of the post-Communist world. With typical Godardian insouciance, Made in USA (1966) was based on a Donald Westlake crime novel which the director did not even deign to read. Although set in "Atlantic City" and loaded with American names and cultural archetypes, the film has nothing to do with New Jersey's underworld milieu. In Annie Goldmann's words, "En realite c'est un film politique: les U.S.A., c'est la France...." (Goldmann 169). In Pierrot le fou (1965), the film that directly inspired Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, voice-over narrators constantly remind us that the proceedings are "comme dans un roman de...William Faulkner ou...Raymond Chandler." In his book on the director, Richard Roud reminds us that "Hardly any of his characters seem to have families" (Roud 20). What's more, if Godard's protagonists are enfants de Marx et Coca Cola", his women seem to be "more "les the daughters of Coca-Cola than of Marx"—a view which partially explains the filmmaker's abiding misogyny. Claude Chabrol, the third wheel in the Nouvelle Truffaut-Godard-Chabrol Vague troika, soon became a specialist in policiers. Three .of 180 his murder mysteries would make Positif's polar "Top 40", while Godard and Truffaut could lay claim to only one film apiece. Chabrol is one of the masters of the psychological French crime story, as embodied by Georges Simenon's romans durs, such as Le Chat, a novel— made into film in 1971 by Pierre Granier-Deferre—into which the only "crime" is the murder of her husband's pet by an aggrieved, aging housewife. An expert on the provincial bourgeoisie, Chabrol's oeuvre owes little to any American influence except for one: Alfred Hitchcock. 1 Whether re-making Fritz Lang's M in late '80s Berlin, or adapting Ruth Rendell (La Ceremonie) or Georges Simenon (L'Enter), Chabrol approaches the material with the shrewd eye of a smalltown apothecary who lets down his guard only in the presence of such simple, peasant pleasures as good food and good wine. Italian cinema, meanwhile, has yet to transform the policier into an indigenous Italian style. A film industry that is famously rich in genres—the peplum; the sex comedy; the "spaghetti western"; the fake documentary; the slasher movie—"Hollywood on the Tiber" has seldom managed to abstract onscreen criminal activities to the point where they constitute a distinct sub-category in the entertainment industry. Readers of this chapter will doubtless be surprised to discover that I was able to progress so far without once mentioning the English-born "Master of Suspense", the generic giant whose greatness is now acknowledged on both sides of the Atlantic. I have refrained from reflecting on his overwhelming influence on the Franco/American crime film for two reasons. In the first place, as Michel Ciment pointed out in Le crime a I'ecran, Hitchcock's "oeuvre s'etait constitute a part, marquee d'un sceau si personnel qu'elle s'integre difficilement a un genre." (Le crime a I'ecran 94) In keeping with this proud islation, the lessons of Hitchcock were not only studied in the articles and then incorporated into the films of the critic/cineastes of Cahiers du cinema, but were subsequently applied in a wide variety of ways-some of which had nothing to do with the dynamics of the thriller. The seemingly po/arphobic Eric Rohmer was as infatuated by Hitchcock as were the po/a/philic Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. T o describe this class of Hollywood-friendly auteurist critic, Cahiers founder Andre Bazin went so far as to coin the word "HawksoHitchcockian." "Alfred the Great" will therefore be considered in this dissertation's final chapter, "Luc Moullet; or, The Last of the Hawkso-Hitchcockians." 1 181 If the gialli have to struggle for respect in the world of Italian publishing, they can barely cast a shadow at Cinecitta.2 Nevertheless, construct to despite determine the its absence norms, of Italian a distinct cinema was narrative able incorporate criminal motifs in new and intriguing ways throughout to the 1950s, '60s, and, '70s. In 1958, for instance, Mario Monicelli used noirish parody to great comedic effect: "The super-efficient jewel thieves of Jules Dasin's Rififi become the hopelessly incompetent gang in Monicelli's / ignoti soliti..." (Italian Films IX). In addition to its mockery of a "serious" Franco/American model, / soliti ignoti w a s simultaneously poking precocious fun at the virtuous victims of classic Neorealism, the deprived individuals whose desperate poverty rendered even the concept of crime more-or-less irrelevant to the cruelty of their circumstances. As Peter Bondanella describes it, this "hilarious parody of the typical American gangster film...concludes not with the traditional gun battle...but with a bittersweet conversation among the would-be robbers over plates of pasta and beans" (Italian Cinema 145). If the film was refreshingly anti-sanctimonious, in the context of 1950s-vintage Italian Marxism, it could also be perceived—and thus condemned—as "objectively reactionary." Ettore Scola's eponymous // Commissario Pepe (1969), one of the very few Italian features to employ a police detective as its hero, enjoys a pedigree that makes even Commissario Ambrosio, an amateur Obviously, this claim can only be justified if one thinks of Dario Argento-style "murder mysteries" as horror movies rather than policiers. Since the whole point of this rather disgusting sub-genre seems to revolve around the "aesthetic" depiction of the gory murders of young women, and since the "whodunnit" elements of such works are minor to nonexistent, I feel no compunctions about doing so. In terms of Hollywood, Argento and his disciples have more to do with Friday the 13th than they do with Silence of the Lambs. 2 182 of modernist German literature, sound a little crude. This anomaly was not wasted on critic Lino Micciche: "Al Commissario Pepe—un uomo buono e gentile, umanistiche (una non privo di cultura e anzi frequenti eccezione in somma rispetto aperture alia imagine non precisamente umanistica del polizotto italiano)...." (Micciche 41). More typically, Marco Bellochio's / pugni in Tasca (1965) integrated murder so deeply within the Oedipal subtext of the story, that the film played more like Greek tragedy than giallo. All of which is not surprising, considering Italy's unique political circumstances. If the economy continued to improve as the twentieth century progressed, the legitimacy and solidity of the state remained very much in doubt. Christian Democratic hegemony, everybody knew, rested on the twin pillars of Mafia and CIA/U.S. State support. Department It is difficult to feel guilty about smuggling cigarettes when the biggest contrabbandiere of them all are the Prime Minister and his confederates. Progressive and centrist Italians also had to contend with the shadowy forces of Operation Gladio, the secret anti- communist army whose "members were armed and paid by the USA" to "continue internal resistance" within the occupation, if such a situation country arose." (Hobsbawn "after a Soviet 165) This unit "originally consisted of last-ditch fascists...who subsequently acquired a new value as fanatical anti-communists" (Hobsbawm 165). In such conditions the concept of crime as social deviance cannot possibly make headway against the shared idea that crime means business as usual. Of this daunting edifice of corruption from which Italians are currently struggling to free themselves, the Sicilian Mafia was 183 unquestionably its most famous and invasive arm. Movies about this lethal organization, and the need for its suppression, became more frequent as the 1960s wore on. One of the earliest was Un uomo da bruciare (1962), a film made the same year as Alberto Lattuada's Mafioso, a drama co-directed by the Taviani brothers and Valentino Orsini about 'Tassassinat du Sicilien Savatore Camevale par le mafia en 1955...." (Leprohon 202). This would establish the custom of having heroic judges and prosecutors doing the work in Italian antiMafia movies that French and American filmmakers would usually assign to "maverick" detectives. Even before the Sicilian underworld took to eliminating troublesome authority figures in large numbers— between 1979 and 1992, they assassinated three judges, four police commissioners and three high-ranking politicians, as well as ancillary wives and bodyguards—they were depicted as being quite capable of doing so. No one explored this idea more thoroughly than Francesco Rosi, the Neapolitan filmmaker whose entire career was devoted to detecting and superstructure. dissecting the fatal flaws in his homeland's France's Andre Cayette and Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka attempted similar assessments of their own societies, but— despite the nobility of their intentions—their analyses were nowhere near as sharp as Rosi's. A keen observer and sharp dialectician, even Rosi's guesses were "lucky". Collectively, Rosi's films touch on virtually every aspect of Southern Italy's social dysfunction. La sfida, his debut feature, dealt with the rise and fall of an ambitious Neapolitan black marketeer in the employ of the Camorra. / magliori (1959) and Le momento (1964) focussed on the specifically Mediterranean della verita mechanics of 184 employment-driven emigration. Salvatore Giuliano (1961)—the breakthrough "investigative" feature that would profoundly influence the "Gillo Pontecorvo di La battaglia di Algeri (1966), al miglior CostaGavras, e...di altro...."—was an attempt to demystify the specifically Sicilian circumstances which gave rise to the island's legendary separatist bandit (Francesco Rosi 108). Le mani sulla citta (1963) was a portrait of a corrupt developer/politician in Naples, a courtroom drama in which the realms of commerce, control and crime are closely related. // caso Mattei (1972) is, as Pauline Kael pointed out, a sort of super-Citizen Kane in which the postwar giant of Italy's natural gas industry finds his body, as well as his life, in pieces at the film's beginning, a circumstance which prompts a formal investigation of the magnate's past. In 1973, Rosi made a typicially non-linear "biopic" about the most powerful of all Italian-American mobsters. "Pourquoi Lucky Luciano?" he pondered rhetorically. "Parce que je pense que c'est une bonne cle pour comprendre les rapports entre le pouvoir legal et le pouvoir illegal, interdependance" et plus encore que leurs (Dossier Rosi 140). Cadaveri rapports, eccellenti leurs (1976), the first Rosi feature to be based on a novel—and a French one at that— follows in the melancholy footsteps of Inspector Rogas (Lino Venturi), "un policier qui doit retrouver I'assassin d'un certain nombre de juges...." after unknown assassins start taking aim at an unnamed—but obviously Italian—judicial system (Dossier Rosi 173). Terrorism would be on the agenda in Tre fratelle (1981), and the subject of ItaloAmerican criminal collusion would be returned to more realistically in Dimenticare Palermo (1990), a work that was co-written by American 185 novelist Gore Vidal. Drug trafficking in his native Naples would be the principal motif in the director's 1991 documentary, Diario Michel features can politique critic Ciment be has rightly perceived observed that as "I'histoire locates the Neapolitan director's Rosi's sociale, de Tltalie sous la Republique" (Dossier napoletano. interlocking economique Rosi 162). et The French neorealist heritage in "[son] desir de rompre avec le cinema mensonger du fascisme, de combattre des cliches et les mythes, appartient sa demarche a celle de Rossellini et de De Sica et Zavattini" (Dossier Rosi 30). Unlike more traditional Neorealists, however, Rosi is fascinated by the past, finding in its Byzantine miasmas the roots of his country's contemporary troubles. Starting with Salvatore Giuliano—the Sicilian "Robin Hood" who waged a Jesse James-like guerilla war against the authorities for seven years, championing a politically separate Sicily and entering island folklore as a hero until his reputation was permanently tarnished by the massacre of a group of Communist Party supporters in 1947—Rosi would structure his films like open-ended inquests. Francis Ford Coppola was impressed by the fact that "you hardly ever see Giuliano!" in this film about his life. (Cowie 222) In 1987 Michael Cimino would direct a more traditional Giuliano screen biography—one which does exploit the outlaw's "cowboy" elements—but The Sicilian was neither a critical nor a commercial success. In Rosi's portrait, on the other hand, "I'urgenza dell' interrogativo precede. ..I'inf uzione narrativa" (Francesco Rosi 14). What's more, "Nei film di Rosi, al contrario delle tipiche storie poliziesche hollywoodiane, manca proposto...." (Francesco Rosi 20). intanto la soluzione del caso 186 As we have already seen, Salvatore Giuliano's narrative innovations had a profound effect on filmmakers—not least upon Francis Ford Coppola, the Italo-American director of The Godfather trilogy. Nevertheless, when it came time to make Lucky Luciano, the influence— as Rosi himself freely conceded—was not all one-way: "Quant a mon rapport avec les films de gangsters americains, j'en ai tellement vu, surtout dans ma jeunesse, qu'il m'en reste surement quelque chose dans ma fagon de regarder" (Dossier Rosi 145). Even when being influenced, however, Rosi's cinematic vision is rigorously self-aware. At the core of Lucky Luciano, for instance, "La polemica di Rosi e rivolta indirettamente contro alcuni esempi contemporanei di film sulla mafia: sicuramente // padrino di Francis Ford Coppola, con il suo messaggio superoministico e il fascino escercitato dalle anche il piu commerciale Joe Valachi menti - I segreti criminali, ma di Cosa Nostra di Terence Young, provvisto di un ritualita morbosamente dettagliata nella messa in scena del codice d'onore mafioso" (Francesco Rosi 137 - 139). Gaetana Marrone believes that this critical distance is not always recognized by Rosi's American supporters, an outside clique that collectively tends to exaggerate "la componente eroica, essenziale alia mitologia del genre gangster Hollywoodiano" (Francesco Rosi 79). In the early 1970s, this was a particularly easy mistake to make. Thanks to the explosion of specifically Italo-American during the early years of that decade, the film talent similarities between Hollywood crime films and their Cinecitta equivalents appeared to be particularly marked. The paranoid universe imagined by Francis Ford Coppola in The Conversation (1974) seemed contiguous to the Kafkaesque corruption of Elio Petri's Indagine su un cittadino al di 187 sopra di ogni sospetto (1970). Coppola's lonely, sax-blowing wire- tapper would have fit right into the world of Petri's murderously kinky "capo della 'squadri omicidi'...." (Micciche 55). If Cadaveri eccellenti "[ha visto] la Sicilia in chiave metaforica," Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) attempted to deal with the analogous American problem of "irrational" violence in a somewhat similar fashion (Francesco Rosi 104). The most commonly bracketed Italian/American cinematic "complements", though, were Coppola's The Godfather and Rosi's LuckyLuciano, movies released within a year of each other. Although Peter Cowie thought that "The Godfather gives a romantic picture of gangster life" (Cowie 74), Pauline Kael took a contrary position, insisting that the film provided "A wide, startlingly vivid view of a Mafia dynasty, in which organized crime becomes an obscene nightmare image of American free enterprise" (5001 Nights at the Movies 220). Far from simply going over the same well-trodden ground with less verve and originality, The Godfather, Part Two (1974) covers a much broader canvas, both chronologically and thematically, than did its predecessor. Its distanced, quasi-Marxist perspective seems to spring from same source that prompted Rosi to make Lucky Luciano. the The Italian social critic explained his interest in the deported Sicilian mobster in the following terms: "II a liquide la vieille conception de la Mafia et a commence a chercher les alliances avec les Juifs et les Irlandais, deux groupes criminels importants dans l'Amerique de cette epoque, alors qu'auparavant le probleme de ces alliances n'avait meme pas ete pose. II avait meme convaincu les differents groupes mafiosi italiani de s'allier au lieu de ce faire concurrente, comme c'etait le cas dans la 188 lutte ouverte qui opposait Napolitains et Siciliens" (Dossier Rosi 140 141). Jewish mobsters, American politicians and Cuban officials would play prominent roles in the second half of The Godfather, Part Two. Ten years later, Sergio Leone would pivot Once Upon a Time in America (1984), his only gangster movie, on the life-long friendship/enmity of two Jewish mobsters. Ethnicity and crime would become a major theme of American crime movies in the 1980s and '90s, with Chinese Triads, Japanese Yakuza, the Jamaican Posse, Colombian drug lords, the RussoGeorgian "mafia" and other groups all vying for attention. Long-gone were the days when Italo-American pressure groups—some of which were Mafia controlled—forced The Untouchables, a popular 1950s' TV show set in the Prohibition-era Chicago of Al Capone, into premature retirement on account of the "harmful" anti-Italian stereotypes it presented on a weekly basis. With the exception of Year of the Dragon, Michael Cimino's 1985 potboiler about a tough white policeman at war with the Triads in New York, few of these neo-gangster movies have aroused the ire of the groups concerned. Indeed, many second and thirdgeneration Americans—now safely ensconced within the matrix of middle class respectability—seem to revel in them. The reasons for this are various, but most are in some way involved with America's semiparanoid obsession with crime and race. Black music, sports heroes and fashion sense are all highly prized by white American teenagers, even as their parents flee to the suburbs, elect candidates sworn to reduce social programs, complain bitterly about the "inequities" of affirmative action, and sign petitions in favour of capital punishment, more prisons and longer terms of incarceration. To imagine a criminal past is to reduce guilt over black/white inequities. We were poor and 189 criminal once, this questionable logic runs, but somehow managed to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. What's the matter with them? The underlying logic of a Rosi film, in other words, is light years removed from contemporary American views of crime and punishment. What looked like a joining in 1974 is now exposed as what it always was: an Atlantic-sized rift. If ethnic crime has been a factor in French polars since before the release of Pepe le Moko—with reservations, of course since Jean Gabin's displaced Parisian gangster marooned in Morocco was made to seem at least as "all French" as Jimmy Cagney's whitebread mobster was made appear "all-American" in William Wellman's Public recently become an almost indispensable additive Enemy—it to the standard generic formula. The Algerian underworld of Bob Swaim's La (1981)—like has Balance Jules Dassin's Riffifi, a policier with an American at its helm—has now become as fixed in French popular culture as Mafia myths are in America. In flic movies such as Bertrand Blier's (1985), Claire Tavernier's Denis's J'ai pas sommeil L. 627 (1994), the (1993), onscreen and proceedings Police Bertrand would be unthinkable without the presence of "minority" pressures. The current crop of so-called banlieue pictures, such as Mathieu Kassowitz's La haine (1995), are also indebted to this trend—even if they do tend to take the decidedly Italian approach of siding with the underdog. Of course, in France the polar remains multi-faceted. It still includes heist films, gangster movies, poetic realism, films noirs, neonoirs, psychological studies, chamber mysteries, police detective stories, street exposes, nostalgic turns down fin-de-siecle apache alleys, black comedies, road dramas, Montmartre's movies, erotic 190 thrillers and what North Americans would probably define as horror. Gilles Deleuze once promised to compose a new form of philosophical discourse which would be situated "entre le roman policier et la science-fiction" (Narboni 23).3 Aided in this instance by language itself—before they were recast in the hardboiled mold, the words "roman noir" originally referred to the Gothic romances of the early 19th century—the polar has managed to insert itself in that precise, theoretical situation. The inheritor of all that has preceded it—including Hollywood's enormously rich generic dowry—like DNA, it continues to mutate in new recombinant ways, employing "foreign" means for local ends. In the mid-1990s, Hollywood re-made La femme Nikita and Les Diaboliques, attempting to refresh an "exhausted" genre with fresh, exogamous blood (it began doing the same with French screen farces in the late 1970s). The binational release of Luc Besson's latest feature (known in France as Leon, and in the U.S. as The Professional) probably represents some sort of breakthrough in multinational filmmaking. That the French crime movie can maintain its own identity in this trans-Atlantic style is a testament to its generic resilience. It would seem that Deleuze's prediction has been confirmed more completely than he could possibly have imagined. Since the late 1970s, futuristic thrillers, such as Bladerunner, routinely plunder the film noir canon when searching for visual ideas, while an even greater number of faux-space operas thematically strip-mine the Hollywood western. In Star Wars, for instance, Luke Skywalker's family is massacred in a manner virtually identical to the one employed against Ethan Edwards' relatives in John Ford's 1956 masterpiece, The Searchers. Four years later, in 1981, Peter Hyams would enter Hollywood history thanks to his famously brief pitch for Outland. "It's High Noon in outer space," the director explained. This terse summation—reputedly then the shortest ever made—was enough to get the project greenlighted. 3 1 91 Troublingly, serial murder sagas seem to have struck a particularly resilient chord with the global public. As Camille Nevers accurately pointed out, Les Gilles de Rais, les Lacenaire, Landru, Jack I'Eventreur, Dr. Petiot ou Dr. Holmes, et autre Vampire du Diisseldorf, tout ont alimente via la tradition orale populaire, une litterature des contes, de roman noir, roman policier, roman de gare, romanfeuilleton, et des feuilles de chou (type Detective). Tous firent I'objet de transpositions au cinema avec un bonheur inegal selon qu'elle etaient issues d'un Marcel Came ou d'un Fritz Lang, d'un Robert Hossein ou d'un Edgar G. Ulmer, d'un Christian de Chalonge ou d'un Claude Chabrol, d'un Francis Girod ou d'un Charlie Chaplin. Nevers could easily have added "d'un Aki Kaurismaki ou d'un Denys Arcand, d'un Shohei Immamura ou d'un Kathryn Bigelow, d'un Dario Argento ou d'un Ulli Lommel." The serial killer/slasher movie is now an almost universal style. Even more popular and widely-dispersed is the neo-gangster movie. Beat Takeshi and other young Japanese directors of "NeoYakuza" sagas have, in the last five or six years, broadened the vocabulary and widened the popularity of a genre that was once little more than a modern dress variation of the more violent sort of geki [costume film]. jidai- Contemporaneous with this upgrading were Hong Kong director John Woo's affectionately nostalgic, latently homosexual, blatantly cinephilic, joyously violent re-mixings of traditional and American formulae. In Hardboiled other dazzlingly Melville" created well-crafted a style thrillers, that was French (1991), The Killer (1989), and the man "qui so competitively doit tout a compelling, 1 92 Hollywood felt constrained to remove him from Hong Kong and set him to work making American movies. By the last decade of the 20th century, directing policiers was anything but an all-white profession. Generic influences could now travel as freely across the Pacific as they could across the Atlantic. Pierre Leprohon's adage that "Chaque pays ecrit I'histoire a sa maniere" was now as much a practical reality as it was a theoretical construct. In America, meanwhile, the home of the detective story, the genre is continuing to evolve. While policiers might not be as consciously critical or socially engaged as they were in the 1970s, neos-noirs— once again, the French coined the defining term first—continue to tap aspects of the national psyche that regular watchers of LAPD and other pro-police "reality" shows would prefer to forget. Contemporary crime novelists such as Barry Gifford and James Ellroy describe anti-heroes whose cynical amorality might give pause to Mike Hammer at his most ornery. On the screen, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, with its Id-level take on the fictitious small town America of Ronald Reagan's propagandafuelled dreams, is perhaps the most accurate Rorschach blot portrait we have of the psychological underpinnings of the so-called "Greed decade". More recently, fear of AIDS and other (hetero)sexually transmitted diseases has resulted in a slew of erotic thrillers in which the femme fatale of thel890s/1940s returns with a vengeance to an imaginative universe that was only briefly freed from its perennial dread of the "great pox". No doubt because of their very different attitudes towards the nature of society, the police, the state, the judiciary and the causes, 193 meaning and consequences of crime, French, American and Italian policiers have managed to maintain distinct national identities despite the post-GATT escalation of mid-Atlantic levelling and normalization. In general, this process has benefitted only the culture industry of the United States, but polars have somehow managed to survive under the shadow of Hollywood hegemony. It is interesting to note that the French crime film has followed an opposite policy to that of the French language. Where the Academie Francaise ceaselessly sought to keep the contaminating influence of "franglais" out of Racine's pure tongue, polar directors have tried to discover new ways to work them in. Far from being subservient, this policy is actually "imperialist" in the way that Deleuze described the English language. By being open to outside influences, the polar and policier they manage to re-charge their batteries constantly; by absorbing, escape being absorbed. American influence is therefore everywhere present within their generic structures, but this influence is nowhere dominant. What's more, such input is filtered through a selective—if policiers not exactly distorting—mirror. In other words, les et les polars are only as American as they want to be. Unquestionably, this is the single greatest secret of their longevity. Italian crime films, meanwhile, despite all that has happened during the last forty years of social upheaval, remain inseparably tied to Neorealism's apron strings. Organized crime and government are probably close allies in most countries, but only in Italy is the average citizen so painfully aware of this collusion. The state as idealized whole or secular God substitute is an idea that simply 194 CHAPTER THREE: THE RUINS OF ROME A s w e s a w in the l a s t t w o c h a p t e r s , A m e r i c a has long c o n s t i t u t e d b o t h a c h a l l e n g e and a t h r e a t , an a f f r o n t and a s e d u c t i o n , to F r e n c h i n t e l l e c t u a l s of a l l p o l i t i c a l p e r s u a s i o n s . It w a s s e e n as a d o u b l e - e d g e d s w o r d w i t h a d a n g e r o u s t e n d e n c y to " c u t " even t h o s e who a d m i r e d for its strength and b e a u t y . W i t h the p o s s i b l e e x c e p t i o n s of it Great B r i t a i n and G e r m a n y , i t w a s p r o b a b l y the c o u n t r y t h a t the F r e n c h c o u l d l e a s t a f f o r d to i g n o r e . In I t a l y , t h i n g s w e r e v e r y d i f f e r e n t . Even w h e n the U n i t e d S t a t e s w a s the f a v o u r e d l a n d of e m i g r a t i o n , i t a l w a y s s e e m e d to be a v e r y d i s t a n t Utopia, a paradise on the f a r side of the horizon. On s o m e l e v e l , I t a l i a n s m i g h t d e r i v e a c e r t a i n m u t e d s a t i s f a c t i o n f r o m the k n o w l e d g e that they d i s c o v e r e d A m e r i c a , but this emotion has never been p a r t i c u l a r l y m e a n i n g f u l or p r o f o u n d . The q u a s i - i n d i f f e r e n c e of w h i c h I speak o w e s n o t h i n g to the c u r r e n t l y p o p u l a r b e l i e f t h a t the New W o r l d c o u l d not, in f a c t , have been " f o u n d " s i n c e i t w a s n e v e r l o s t in the f i r s t p l a c e , h a v i n g l o n g been s e t t l e d by the o r i g i n a l A s i a n p i o n e e r s w h o , in the v e r y d i s t a n t p a s t , poured o v e r the l e g e n d a r y l a n d b r i d g e t h a t once linked Alaska discovery that to Siberia; still l e s s does it V i k i n g s and B a s q u e s had s e t relate silent to the foot belated on North A m e r i c a n s o i l hundreds of y e a r s b e f o r e C h r i s t o p h e r C o l u m b u s of Genoa r e c e i v e d h i s c h a r t e r of e x p l o r a t i o n f r o m Queen I s a b e l l a of S p a i n . What i t does r e f e r t o , r a t h e r , i s the i n e s c a p a b l e f a c t t h a t I t a l y n e v e r d e r i v e d much b e n e f i t f r o m C r i s t o f o r o C o l o m b o ' s e x e r t i o n s . T y p i c a l l y , in his p r i s o n d i a r i e s , A n t o n i o G r a m s c i l a m e n t s the f a c t t h a t m o s t of his 195 c o u n t r y m e n c a n n o t a p p r e c i a t e the l a r g e r c o n s e q u e n c e s of the G e n o e s e m a r i n e r ' s e n d e a v o r : " C h e C r i s t o f o r o C o l o m b o s i p r o p o n e s s e di a n d a r e ' a l a b u c a l del Gran K h a n / non s m i n u i s c e i l v a l o r e del suo v i a g g i o r e a l e e d e l l e sue r e a l i s c o p e r t e per la ci vi 1 i t a e u r o p e a " ( G r a m s c i 2 1 9 2 ) . D u r i n g the age of e x p l o r a t i o n and c o n q u e s t , I t a l y w a s , f o r m o s t p a r t , c o n q u e r e d and c o l o n i z e d i t s e l f . The m a r i t i m e the republics of V e n i c e and Genoa m i g h t have h e l d a M e d i t e r r a n e a n i s l a n d o r t w o in f o r t r e s s f i e f , but t h e i r e m p i r e s w e r e a l w a y s e s s e n t i a l l y mercantile. M a r c o P o l o , the m o s t f a m o u s I t a l i a n t r a i l b l a z e r p r i o r to C o l u m b u s , w a s l e s s the e m i s s a r y of the G r e a t Khan of C h i n a than he w a s a city-to-city t r a v e l l i n g s a l e s m a n . A d d i n g i n s u l t to i n j u r y , h i s A s i a n m e m o i r s written not in I t a l i a n but i n F r e n c h , the language h o m e l a n d ' s p r i n c i p a l o c c u p i e r s . A s an I m p e r i a l i s t get s t a r t e d u n t i l w e l l a f t e r the l a t e worse, its one of empire consisted primarily reputation as a m a j o r e v e r to be s u f f e r e d by an i m p e r i a l i s t the of European c o l o n i a l p l a y e r w a s d a r k e n e d by the " d i s a s t e r " at A d o w a , the m i l i t a r y defeat his power, Italy didn't 19th c e n t u r y c o m p l e t i o n of R i s o r g i m e n t o . Even t h e n , t h i s l a t t e r d a y E r i t r e a and L i b y a . S t i l l of were worst p o w e r at the hands of a n o n - E u r o p e a n people d u r i n g the 19th c e n t u r y . Colombus, therefore, was something like Guglielmo Marconi, a m a g n i f i c e n t i n n o v a t o r w h o s e d i s c o v e r i e s w o u l d u l t i m a t e l y be e x p l o i t e d by non-Italians. One senses the marginality of Cristoforo's a c c o m p l i s h m e n t s in the I t a l i a n p e r i o d by a q u i c k s c a n of the e p i c p o e t s of the 16th and 17th c e n t u r y . The I t a l i a n genre m a s t e r s Ludovico A r i o s t o and T o r q u a t o T a s s o sang of the a n c i e n t C a r o l i n g i a n hero R o l a n d and of the " l i b e r a t i o n " of J e r u s a l e m . P o r t u g a l ' s L u i s de C a m o e n s , on the o t h e r hand, c o m p o s e d The Lusiads, his heroic g l o r i f i c a t i o n of h i s s e a - 196 f a r i n g c o u n t r y m e n and the v a s t o v e r s e a s e m p i r e t h e i r c o u r a g e and s k i l l were bringing into being. 1 It s h o u l d c o m e as no s u r p r i s e , t h e r e f o r e , to d i s c o v e r t h a t n e i t h e r J o h n G l e n ' s Christopher Columbus: nor R i d l e y S c o t t ' s The Conquest of Paradise-th& The Discovery two mega-movies w i t h w h i c h the w o r l d f i l m m a k i n g c o m m u n i t y c e l e b r a t e d the quinticentennial of even the great Genoan's nautical achievement-was partially f i n a n c e d by I t a l i a n s o u r c e s . T h e r e w e r e as many f r a n c s and p e s o s as d o l l a r s i n t h e s e c o - p r o d u c t i o n s , but a b s o l u t e l y no l i r e . Italy's rather reserved reaction to the n a t i o n ' s most famous e x p l o r e r i s p e r h a p s b e s t e x p r e s s e d by C e s a r e P a s c a r e l l a ' s La Scoperta de ^America. century, W r i t t e n in Roman d i a l e c t in the l a t e n i n e t e e n t h t h i s m o c k - e p i c poem s e l d o m r i s e s above the l e v e l of d o g g e r e l . Its tone i s t h o r o u g h l y a n t i - h e r o i c , s h o t through w i t h c r i t i c i s m s of the C a t h o l i c Church, and strongly sympathetic to the New World's original i n h a b i t a n t s . Even s o , the a u t h o r i s a n y t h i n g but i n d i f f e r e n t to h i s h e r o ' s heritage: " E h , la s t o r i a , percristo, e sempre s t o r i a / C r i s t o f o r o Colombo era i t a l i a n o " a l w a y s envied ( P a s c a r e l l a 9 4 ) . F o r e i g n e r s , the a u t h o r b e l i e v e s , have Italians b e c a u s e of their innate genius: "L'italiano t ' i n v e n t a e r l e t t r i c i s m o " ( P a s c a r e l l a 98). In m o s t c o u n t r i e s , s u c h a s s u m p t i o n s about the n a t i o n a l spirit w o u l d l e a d d i r e c t l y to p u g n a c i o u s a r r o g a n c e , but not i n I t a l y . In Italians, The L u i g i B a r z i n i argued t h a t h i s c o u n t r y m e n are i n f u s e d w i t h a seemingly ineradicable self-contempt historically derived from the Being a man of his time, Camoens naturally said nothing about the underhanded p o l i t i c s , military brutality and psychological intimidation that were then seen as equally essential to the s u c c e s s f u l establishment of overseas dominions. This almost universal code of silence was particularly pronounced in Portugal, a seafaring power which soon found that rule by terror could compensate in large part for a small nation's limited manpower. 1 197 p e n i n s u l a ' s r e p e a t e d " f a i l u r e s to f u s e i n t o a u n i f i e d n a t i o n s t a t e d u r i n g the e a r l y R e n a i s s a n c e and l a t e M i d d l e A g e s . T h a t t h i s f a i l u r e of will o c c u r r e d in a l a n d f i l l e d w i t h g r e a t m i n d s and s t u d d e d w i t h the r i c h e s t and m o s t c u l t u r a l l y p r i v i l e g e d c i t i e s in Europe only made t h i n g s w o r s e . In I t a l y , t h e r e s e e m s to be an a l m o s t u n i v e r s a l d e s i r e to s n a t c h f a i l u r e f r o m the j a w s of s u c c e s s . B a r z i n i p a r t i c u l a r l y mother's d e s i r e to d e v o u r h e r o w n c u b s : "It regretted this is true that in wolfother c o u n t r i e s g r e a t men have a l s o o c c a s i o n a l l y been p e r s e c u t e d and put to death. Nowhere else, however, has it happened with the same d i s c r i m i n a t i o n , r e g u l a r i t y , and d e t e r m i n a t i o n " ( B a r z i n i x i i ) . I t a l y ' s a l m o s t u n i v e r s a l p o p u l a r i t y w i t h o u t s i d e r s d o e s n o t h i n g to d i s p e l l t h i s a i r of a l m o s t c o s m i c g l o o m . Q u i t e the c o n t r a r y : " T h e I t a l y o f . . . f o r e i g n e r s , both r i c h and poor, i s m a i n l y an i m a g i n a r y c o u n t r y , not entirely c o r r e s p o n d i n g to the I t a l y of the I t a l i a n s . T h e expatriates o f t e n do not r e a l l y pay a t t e n t i o n t o , see c l e a r l y , or l i k e the I t a l y of the I t a l i a n s " ( B a r z i n i 1 1). T h i s l a n d - p e r h a p s one s h o u l d s a y Jands-has irresistible attraction a l w a y s e x e r c i s e d an to w r i t e r s . S h a k e s p e a r e s i t u a t e d m o s t of h i s c o m e d i e s in I t a l i a n t o w n s , though the B a r d of A v o n a l m o s t certainly never set foot in Verona. Italianate verse f o r m s s t r u c t u r e d C h a u c e r ' s c a n t o s , w h i l e S p e n s e r and M i l t o n , though p a t r i o t i c a l l y opposed to t h e s e continental conventions, were always mindful of t h e m . G o e t h e r e - d i s c o v e r e d c l a s s i c i s m i n R o m e , w h i l e B y r o n , K e a t s , S h e l l e y , and the o t h e r E n g l i s h R o m a n t i c p o e t s s a i l e d to I t a l y to e i t h e r l i v e o r d i e , as the p r e - C h r i s t i a n gods w i l l e d . A l f r e d de M u s s e t w r o t e Lorenzaccio, his g r e a t e s t p l a y , as the r e s u l t of an unhappy r e s e a r c h t r i p to F l o r e n c e i n the c o m p a n y of h i s u n f a i t h f u l m i s t r e s s , George Sand. F o r m o r e than a 198 century, w r i t e r s Forster, Ezra l i k e Henry J a m e s , E d i t h W h a r t o n , T h o m a s Mann, E. M. Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Richard A l d i n g t o n , D.H. L a w r e n c e , K a t h e r i n e M a n s f i e l d , F r a n k O ' C o n n o r , J u l i a O ' F a o l a i n , and c o u n t l e s s o t h e r w r i t e r s , both g r e a t and s m a l l , f l o c k e d to the c o u n t r y i n s e a r c h of an a m b i e n c e t h a t w a s t o t a l l y i n k e e p i n g w i t h t h e a r t i s t i c t e m p e r a m e n t . T h e m a r b l e s and c i t i e s of I t a l y w e r e m o r e p e r f e c t than a n y w h e r e e l s e ; the r u i n s of Rome w e r e c r o w n e d w i t h the g l o r i e s of the Renaissance. This extraordinary n o s t a l g i a i n e v i t a b l y exacerbated the g u l f b e t w e e n r e a l i t y and d r e a m . In B a r z i n i ' s w o r d s , " T h e e i g h t e e n t h c e n t u r y I t a l y of f o r e i g n e r s ' d e s i r e s , the c o u n t r y of dead l a n g u a g e s , dead I t a l i a n s , and m u t e s t o n e s , w a s n e v e r so d i s s i m i l a r f r o m t h e I t a l i a n s ' Italy" (Barzini 30). Ironically, there i s one o u t s i d e observer whom virtually all I t a l i a n i n t e l l e c t u a l s have long a c k n o w l e d g e d as the u l t i m a t e a u t h o r i t y on t h e n a t i o n a l character. L i k e A l e x i s de T o c q u e v i l l e , t h e o f f i c i a l f o r e i g n e x p e r t on e a r l y A m e r i c a n m o r e s , M a r i e Henri B e y l e ( S t e n d h a l ' s real name) was a Frenchman travelling abroad. Indeed, in many r e s p e c t s , S t e n d h a l ' s p r o n o u n c e m e n t s upon the M i l a n e s e , N e a p o l i t a n s and R o m a n s a r e n o w r e g a r d e d as even more a c u t e and p r o p h e t i c than de Tocqueville's period reflections on N e w E n g l a n d e r s , S o u t h e r n e r s , Indians and A f r i c a n s l a v e s . T h i s N a p o l e o n i c o f f i c i a l w a s t h a t r a r e s t of c u l t u r a l p h e n o m e n a , the f o r e i g n - b o r n t r a v e l w r i t e r w h o s e e s t h e l o c a l s m o r e c l e a r l y than the l o c a l s s e e t h e m s e l v e s . S t e n d h a l ' s p r e c o c i o u s p e r s p e c t i v e s c o n t i n u e to f a s c i n a t e . A s an o f f i c e r i n N a p o l e o n ' s a r m y , and a l o n g - t i m e r e s i d e n t of I t a l y , he c a n be s e e n as a c i t i z e n of t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s of Europe 150 y e a r s avant lettre. la H i s s e n s e of F r e n c h n a t i o n a l i s m w a s c o u n t e r b a l a n c e d by an 199 e q u a l l y s t r o n g s e n s e of European i n t e r n a t i o n a l i s m . T h i s double v i s i o n endows his travel w r i t i n g w i t h enduring value. C u r i o u s l y enough, many of S t e n d h a l ' s c o m m e n t s sound l i k e e e r i e p r e m o n i t i o n s of G r a m s c i ' s p r i s o n p r o g n o s t i c a t i o n s . In Rome, Naples, Florence et en 1317, f o r i n s t a n c e , the F r e n c h o b s e r v e r w r o t e , " L a m u s i q u e est le seul art qui v i v e e n c o r e en I t a l i e " ( S t e n d h a l 3). J u s t o v e r a century later, Gramsci would complain, " L a letteratura 'nazionale' cosi d e t t a ' a r t i s t i c a ' non e p o p o l a r e in I t a l i a . Di chi l a c o l p a ? Del p u b b l i c o che non l e g g e ? D e l l a c r i t i c a che non s a p r e s e n t a r e ed e s a l t a r e al p u b b l i c o i ' v a l o r i ' l e t t e r a r i ? Dei g i o r n a l i che i n v e c e di p u b b l i c a r e in a p p e n d i c e ' i l r o m a n z o moderno i t a l i a n o ' p u b b l i c a n o i l v e c c h i o Conte di Montecristo" ( G r a m s c i 2 1 1 5 - 2 1 1 6 ) . To r e t u r n to S t e n d h a l in this r a t h e r o n e - s i d e d game of l i t e r a r y p i n g - p o n g , " E n A n g l e t e r r e , un d e r n i s o t f a i t s o u v e n t un bon l i v r e . I c i , un homme de g e n i e c o m m e F o s c o l o s ' a m u s e a f a i r e un p a m p h l e t l a t i n c o n t r e s e s e n n e m i s " ( S t e n d h a l 2 0 ) . A s u s u a l , S t e n d h a l thought he knew the r e a s o n f o r t h i s c u r i o u s s t a t e of affairs i n the l a n d of D a n t e , P e t r a r c h and V i r g i l : " . . . [ l ' l t a l i e n ] essentiellernent obscure, d'abord parce que depuis trois p e r s o n n e n'a d ' i n t e r e t a e c r i r e s u r des s u j e t s d i f f i c i l e s . . . . " 72). This unfortunately structure writing, siecles (Stendhal r e s u l t e d i n the i n d i r e c t , s e r p e n t i n e t h a t c o n t i n u e s to be the bane of so m u c h f o r m a l a shortcoming est sentence Italian w h i c h s e e m to be t o t a l l y at odds w i t h the p e o p l e b e h i n d the pens: " O n v o i t pourquoi l a f r o i d e u r a c a d e m i q u e g l a c e l e s l i v r e s du peuple le p l u s p a s s i o n e de l ' u n i v e r s " ( S t e n d h a l 7 2 ) . In the F r e n c h m a n ' s day, T u s c a n w a s f a r f r o m being e s t a b l i s h e d as the n a t i o n a l t o n g u e , and t h i s r e s u l t e d in a l o c a l i z e d babel w h i c h , to a c e r t a i n admittedly m u c h r e d u c e d - d e g r e e , p e r s i s t s to the p r e s e n t day: " E n 200 croyant p a r l e r i t a l i e n , l e s gens des p r o v i n c e s p a r l e n t encore leur d i a l e c t e " (Stendhal 72). As a privileged tolerant of Italian foreigner, foibles Stendhal could afford than, to s a y , an i m p r i s o n e d be more Communist i n t e l l e c t u a l s c r i b b l i n g a w a y in s e c r e t i n the o b s c u r i t y of M u s s o l i n i ' s p e n a l s y s t e m . T y p i c a l l y , he m i x e d r i g o u r and f o n d n e s s i n the same p h r a s e . T h u s , " R o s s i n i e c r i t un opera c o m m e une l e t t r e . Quel g e n i e s ' i l se f u t donne l a peine d ' a p p r e n d r e s a l a n g u e " ( S t e n d h a l 16). Even I t a l y ' s m o r e n o t o r i o u s c r u e l t i e s S t e n d h a l o b s e r v e d w i t h an u n j a u n d i c e d e y e : "Je s o r s de l a f a m e u s e c h a p e l l e S i x t i n e . . . j ' a i entendu ces fameux c a s t r a t s de l a S i x t i n e " ( S t e n d h a l 18). S h o r t l y a f t e r W a t e r l o o , t h i s e x N a p o l e o n i c o f f i c e r o b s e r v e d t h a t I t a l y w a s a l r e a d y in the p r o c e s s of b e i n g o c c u p i e d by i t s m o s t t e n a c i o u s t o u r i s t / i n v a d e r s : " J e f a i s , en I t a l i e , un voyage en A n g l e t e r r e " ( S t e n d h a l 2 0 ) . H a r d h e a d e d F r e n c h m a n t h a t he w a s , S t e n d h a l n o n e t h e l e s s f r e e l y c o n c e d e d t h a t h i s c o u n t r y m e n w e r e no m a t c h f o r the I t a l i a n s w h e n i t c a m e to c y n i c i s m : " L a n a i v e t e est une c h o s e i n c o n n u e en I t a l i e , et s o u f f r i r La Nouvelle i s the author's Helo'ise" ( S t e n d h a l 54.) I m p l i c i t in t h i s unspoken belief delusion might well c e p e n d a n t p e r s o n n e n'y constitute that a complete an i m p e d i m e n t peut statement a b s e n c e of self- to g r e a t n e s s . B e y l e a t t r i b u t e d m o s t of the f a u l t s of I t a l y to the s t r e n g t h of the c h u r c h and the w e a k n e s s of the p r e s s . In the f i r s t i n s t a n c e , " A R o m e et a N a p l e s , l a s e u l e l o i en v i g u e u r c ' e s t l a r e l i g i o n " ( S t e n d h a l 6 2 ) . A s f o r latter, "Le dix-neuf the v i n g t i e m e s de l a c i v i l i s a t i o n de l a F r a n c e , de T A n g l e t e r r e et de l a P r u s s e , s o n t dus a l a l i b e r t e de l a p r e s s e , et i c i e l l e ne d i t que des m e n s o n g e s " ( S t e n d h a l 6 2 ) . 201 In d i s c u s s i n g I t a l i a n c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s , o n l y r a r e l y d i d S t e n d h a l s t o o p to s e n t i m e n t a l p l a t i t u d e s . The f o l l o w i n g i s one of the more e g r e g i o u s e x a m p l e s of t h e s e e x t r e m e l y a t y p i c a l l a p s e s : " L a c a r a c t e r e i t a l i e n , c o m m e l e s f e u x d'un v o l c a n , n'a pu se f a i r e j o u r que p a r l a m u s i q u e et l a v o l u p t e " ( S t e n d h a l 140). Even a c l e a r - e y e d materialist, i t s e e m s , can o c c a s i o n a l l y get c a r r i e d a w a y . A s a l r e a d y m e n t i o n e d in C h a p t e r One, S t e n d h a l w a s one of the v e r y f i r s t F r e n c h i n t e l l e c t u a l s to w o r r y about the f u t u r e p o w e r and coming greatness mollified by the of the young United S t a t e s . He w a s republic's not in well-established the least democratic i n s t i t u t i o n s . N e w Vork and P h i l a d e l p h i a , f o r i n s t a n c e , are d e s c r i b e d a s " p a y s r e b e l l e s aux a r t s " ( S t e n d h a l 5 7 ) . E l s e w h e r e he c o m p l a i n s t h a t the U n i t e d S t a t e s " n e p r o d u i s e n t que des d o l l a r s " ( S t e n d h a l 145). A s w e s a w i n the p r e v i o u s c h a p t e r , a n t i - A m e r i c a n w e r e n e v e r as s t r o n g i n I t a l y as t h e y sentiments w e r e in F r a n c e , d e s p i t e the p r e s e n c e of much g r e a t e r o b j e c t i v e c a u s e . A m e r i c a n p o l i c e m e n p u r s u e d the M a f i a on the I t a l i a n m a i n l a n d w i t h a p e r s i s t e n c e t h a t w a s n e v e r to be a p p l i e d to F r a n c e ' s U n i o n C o r s e . D u r i n g the l a s t t h r e e y e a r s of the S e c o n d W o r l d W a r , i t w a s the U n i t e d S t a t e s A r m y A i r F o r c e t h a t c a u s e d the m o s t damage to I t a l i a n c i t i e s and t o w n s , both b e f o r e and a f t e r the e s t a b l i s h m e n t of the S a l o R e p u b l i c . In the l a t e 1 9 4 0 s , i n t e r n a l Italian p o l i t i c s w e r e i n t e r f e r e d w i t h by the U.S. S t a t e D e p a r t m e n t on a l e v e l that had previously been r e s e r v e d almost exclusively for those u n f o r t u n a t e L a t i n A m e r i c a n and C a r i b b e a n c o u n t r i e s w h o s e d e s t i n i e s w e r e c o m p r o m i s e d by W a s h i n g t o n ' s s e l f - s e r v i n g i m p o s i t i o n of Monroe D o c t r i n e . To a l l i n t e n t s and p u r p o s e s , W a s h i n g t o n t r e a t e d the Italy 202 l i k e an o v e r g r o w n " b a n a n a r e p u b l i c " . L o g i c a l l y s p e a k i n g , I t a l i a n s s h o u l d not have l i k e d A m e r i c a n s . N e v e r t h e l e s s , they did. One of the p r i n c i p a l r e a s o n s f o r t h i s a t t i t u d e w a s e m i g r a t i o n . Letters from an American In Farmer, J . H e c t o r S t . J o h n de C r e v e c o u r t ' s g e n e r a l l y sunny a c c o u n t of the l a t e 18th c e n t u r y y e a r s he s p e n t i n the New W o r l d , the author o b s e r v e d t h a t the American people "are a m i x t u r e of E n g l i s h , S c o t c h , I r i s h , F r e n c h , D u t c h , G e r m a n s and S w e d e s . From this p r o m i s c u o u s b r e e d t h a t r a c e now c a l l e d A m e r i c a n s have a r i s e n " (Crevecourt 37). Crevecourt h i m s e l f , however, a f t e r composing h i s p o p u l a r paean to the new r e p u b l i c in a b o r r o w e d E n g l i s h i d i o m , and d e s p i t e h i s o f t - p r o f e s s e d a d m i r a t i o n f o r h i s s e c o n d h o m e l a n d and the e m o t i o n a l e n t a n g l e m e n t s of an A m e r i c a n - b o r n f a m i l y , d e c i d e d to spend h i s d e c l i n i n g y e a r s in h i s n a t i v e F r a n c e . T h i s r e t r e a t w a s t y p i c a l . In one w a y o r a n o t h e r , the F r e n c h p i l l a r h o l d i n g up A m e r i c a w a s d e s t i n e d to r o t a w a y . L i k e t h e i r D u t c h , S c o t t i s h , S c o t c h - I r i s h , and G e r m a n p e e r s , the w e l l - b o r n F r e n c h m e n who r e m a i n e d in A m e r i c a tended to d i s a p p e a r willingly i n t o t h e i r host c o u n t r y ' s e m e r g i n g r u l i n g c l a s s . By the e a r l y 2 0 t h c e n t u r y , the R o o s e v e l t s and the Du F o n t s , the C a r n e g i e s and the M o r g a n s , the R o c k e f e l l e r s and the G e t t y s , a l l b e l o n g e d to the seamless upper-class milieu commonly-if not always same accurately- d e s c r i b e d as W A S P . In t h i s c o n t e x t , F r e n c h names w e r e as o f t e n Norman as G a l l i c , w h i l e the F r e n c h language and Roman C a t h o l i c r e l i g i o n a b s t r a c t p r o p e r t i e s of l i t t l e i m p o r t a n c e and l e s s e m o t i o n a l to p e o p l e w h o d i d n ' t even see t h e m s e l v e s were resonance as H u g u e n o t s . T h e self- i d e n t i f i e d F r e n c h of A m e r i c a w e r e a l m o s t e x c l u s i v e l y New F r e n c h : the e x p e l l e d A c a d i a n s who created Creole culture in New O r l e a n s ; the d i s p o s s e s s e d Q u e b e c o i s p e a s a n t s who f l o c k e d to the m i l l t o w n s of New 203 E n g l a n d i n the l a t e 1 9 t h c e n t u r y in s e a r c h of w o r k . W h i l e t h e i r a b s o r p t i o n w a s n o w h e r e n e a r as c o m p l e t e as the one t h a t their upper c l a s s brethren, inter-marriage with ethnic overtook I r i s h , P o l i s h , and I t a l i a n C a t h o l i c s e r o d e d " C a n u c k " n u m b e r s to a s i g n i f i c a n t degree. A s w e s a w i n C h a p t e r One, 2 0 t h c e n t u r y French t r a v e l l e r s to t h e N e w W o r l d s a w very f e w A m e r i c a n s as " F r e n c h " . In t h e i r t r a v e l d i a r i e s , the Quebecois usually appear offstage like some modestly i n t e r e s t i n g t r i b e of I n d i a n s w h o m t h e y n e v e r q u i t e found t h e t i m e to v i s i t . Whatever n o s t a l g i a t h e s e modern Europeans m i g h t have f e l t f o r the brave J e s u i t s and i n t e n d a n t s w h o d i s c o v e r e d so much of N o r t h A m e r i c a , and w h a t e v e r f e e l i n g s of p r i d e m i g h t have s u f f u s e d t h e i r b r e a s t s when t h i n k i n g about F r a n c e ' s i n v a l u a b l e c o n t r i b u t i o n to A m e r i c a n v i c t o r y d u r i n g i t s h a r d f o u g h t W a r of Independence, t h e s e e m o t i o n s s e l d o m s p i l l e d o v e r i n t o f a s c i n a t i o n w i t h the tidbitonts' descendants. For P a r i s i a n i n t e l l e c t u a l s w r i t i n g b e f o r e the 1 9 6 0 s , the Q u e b e c o i s m a s s e s w e r e not j u s t c o u n t r y c o u s i n s , but c o u s i n s t o o many t i m e s r e m o v e d to be w o r t h t h e m o s t h a l f - h e a r t e d s u c c o u r . Indeed, A m e r i c a c o u l d h a r d l y have appeared to be so f a s c i n a t i n g i f i t had not a l s o s e e m e d so c o m p l e t e l y u n - F r e n c h . With Italians, things were very d i f f e r e n t . Between 1 4 9 2 and 1 8 9 2 , the c i t i z e n s of I t a l y ' s d i s p a r a t e r e g i m e s had p r e c i o u s l i t t l e to do with the land that Columbus discovered. As occupation o c c u p a t i o n , and even t h e once f i e r c e l y under foreign domination, Italians followed independent c i t y s t a t e s became preoccupied w i t h fell their i n c o h e s i v e u n i q u e n e s s . Even a f t e r the R i s o r g i m e n t o w a s c o m p l e t e , I t a l y still d i d not f e e l l i k e a " n o r m a l " c o u n t r y , l i k e F r a n c e o r the U n i t e d States. A b o v e a l l , t h e r e w a s the p r o b l e m of the S o u t h , S i c i l y , an i s l a n d t h a t s e e m e d to have n o t h i n g particularly in common w i t h the 204 northern and c e n t r a l " p a r t s of the p e n i n s u l a , an u t t e r l y a l i e n within-a-state influence. o v e r w h i c h Rome c o u l d e x e r c i s e an state- all-too-limited 2 P o v e r t y , I t a l y ' s o t h e r m a j o r p r o b l e m , w a s i n d i s s o l u b l y l i n k e d to the i n t r a c t a b l e Italy heel of the n a t i o n ' s boot. What made the c r e a t i o n impossible was the Giuseppe Calzerato wrote America! America!, e doloroso that in h i s i n t r o d u c t i o n made it essential. As to A n t o n i o Margariti's " P e r quanto p a r a d o s s a l e p o t r a a p p a r i r e , i l t r i s t e fenomeno nell'unificazione same thing of dell' emigrato Italia" ha una del 1 e sue c a u s e (Margariti 8). Italy's principali outpouring of p a u p e r s w a s n o t h i n g s h o r t of p h e n o m e n a l : " D a l 1 8 7 6 al 1901 i n t u t t o i l ' r e g i o ' ci furono 5.792.546 e m i g r a t i , e nella sola C a l a b r i a 310.363...." (Margariti 1 1). T h e l a n d to w h i c h they w e n t w a s not the p l a c e w h i c h g l a d d e n e d de T o c q u e v i l l e ' s h e a r t : " [ . ' A m e r i c a non e l ' e l d o r a d o f e l i c e e incantato ma una n a z i o n e v q r a c e che i n g h i o t t e l a v o r o ed u o m i n i c a m b i o di un i n s i g n i f i c a n t e pugno di d o l l a r i " ( M a r g a r i t i In the p a r t i c u l a r always elude him: "A f a b b r i c a . . . . " ( M a r g a r i t i 76). factory, 10). c a s e of A n t o n i o M a r g a r i t i , p r o s p e r i t y Philadelphia ho lavorato in quasi would sempre in A s in C e l i n e ' s n i g h t m a r e v i s i o n of the F o r d English was seldom spoken. Unlike Bardamu, however, the F r e n c h d o c t o r ' s a l t e r ego, M a r g a r i t i k n e w he had no a l t e r n a t e f u t u r e as a s u r g e o n o r a w r i t e r . C o n s e q u e n t l y , he p o u r e d a g r e a t d e a l of his S i c i l i a n p a r a l l e l s a r e , of c o u r s e , not e n t i r e l y u n k n o w n in o t h e r c o u n t r i e s - i n c l u d i n g F r a n c e and the U n i t e d S t a t e s . C o r s i c a n s , f o r i n s t a n c e , are even more a l i e n a t e d f r o m P a r i s than S i c i l i a n s are f r o m Rome; they a l s o play a c o m m a n d i n g r o l e in the F r e n c h u n d e r w o r l d , even i f they are n o w h e r e n e a r as v i o l e n t as t h e i r p e e r s in the M a f i a and C a m o r r a . In The Nine Nations of North America, J o e l G a r r e a u s u g g e s t e d t h a t the s t a t e of F l o r i d a - t h a n k s l a r g e l y t o the r e g i o n ' s u b i q u i t o u s L a t i n A m e r i c a n d r u g d e a l e r s - m i g h t be s i m i l a r l y d i s a f f e c t e d f r o m the U S A , a l t h o u g h h i s c l a i m s i n t h i s r e g a r d are too c o m p l i c a t e d to e x p l o r e in any depth here. 2 205 l i m i t e d l e i s u r e i n t o the s t r u g g l e f o r w o r k e r s ' r i g h t s : " P r e s i anche p a r t e attiva alle lotte miglioramento per il progresso sociale, dei l a v o r a t o r i " ( M a r g a r i t i t r i p b a c k to the o l d c o u n t r y to v i s i t per il 76). A m e r i c a mi americano...." chiamo his dying mother, italiano, e per qui i n this still- in e a s i l y in either I t a l i a mi chiamano (Margariti 82). J u s t as m e m o r i e s of the p o t a t o f a m i n e c o n t i n u e to haunt a u t h o r s a c e n t u r y and a h a l f a f t e r the e v e n t , the s p e c t r e of c o n t i n u e s to be a f a c t o r in I t a l y ' s a r t i s t i c Blasetti, il D u r i n g the c o u r s e of a m i l i t a n t w o r k e r d i s c o v e r e d t h a t he no l o n g e r f i t p l a c e : "In lavoro an important film critic of Irish emigration imagination. Alessandro the 1930s and the one " e s t a b l i s h e d " d i r e c t o r f r o m the f a s c i s t p e r i o d w h o s e r e p u t a t i o n did not s u f f e r i n the l i g h t of p o s t w a r r e a s s e s s m e n t , made a d o c u m e n t a r y 1972 entitled Storie dell' emigrazione. When a s k e d w h y he in felt c o m p e l l e d to t u r n h i s hand to t h i s t o p i c , the f i l m m a k e r r e p l i e d t h a t he w a n t e d to u n d e r s t a n d del f e n o m e n o e m i g r a z i o n e , partendo da una a n a l i s i del 1 e c o n d i z i o n i s o c i a l i e p o l i t i c h e al m o m e n t o d e l l ' u n i t a d ' l t a l i a , quando c i o e , da una p r i m a e m i g r a z i o n e i n t e r n a , s i passo alle m a s s i c c e e m i g r a z i o n i v e r s o l ' A m e r i c a di cui hanno f a t t o le s p e s e s o p r a t u t t o le p o p o l a z i o n i m e r i d o n a l i , a l l e t t a t e con a r g o m e n t a z i o n i s p e s s o m e n z o g n e r e o f r a u d o l e n t i e che erano d e s t i n a t e a prendere i l p o s t o d e g l i s c h i a v i neri che l a p o l i t i c a a b o l i z i o n i s t a aveva t o l t o dal m e r c a t o , di q u e g l i s t e s s i s c h i a v i che in una p r i m a f a s e s i era p e n s a t o di s o s t i t u i r e con g l i i r l a n d e s i i q u a l i erano poi p a s s a t i a c o m p i t i meno i n g r a t i (Blasetti 370). T h i s r a t h e r s h o c k i n g and u n f a m i l i a r e x p l a n a t i o n c e r t a i n l y goes a long way towards explaining why Italian/Black and Irish/Black 206 r e l a t i o n s have been "and c o n t i n u e to be so p o o r in the U n i t e d S t a t e s , seemingly racisme in w h i t e s u b - s t a n d a r d e v e n by the ordinaire. grim statistical averages of H a v i n g been c o n s i d e r e d no b e t t e r than b l a c k s l a v e s s k i n by A m e r i c a ' s P r o t e s t a n t r u l i n g c l a s s , R o m a n C a t h o l i c I r i s h and I t a l i a n i m m i g r a n t s f e l t c o m p e l l e d to t r u m p e t t h e i r E u r o p e a n c r e d e n t i a l s at a l l t i m e s and in a l l p l a c e s , r e j e c t i n g identification every form of w i t h the f o r m e r s l a v e s w i t h w h o m t h e y had m o r e in c o m m o n than they c a r e d to a d m i t . The v e r y w e a k n e s s of t h e i r c l a i m s to b e i n g c o n s i d e r e d p a r t of the A m e r i c a n m a i n s t r e a m a g g r a v a t e d their h o s t i l i t y t o w a r d s the only people i n the m e l t i n g - p o t w h o s e a m b i t i o n s i n t h i s r e g a r d w e r e r e g a r d e d , by m e m b e r s of the P r o t e s t a n t c l a s s , to be even m o r e r i d i c u l o u s than t h e i r s . In t h i s c a s e , ruling familiarity bred h o r r i f i e d , even v i o l e n t c o n t e m p t . A m e r i c a , h o w e v e r , does not e n t i r e l y d o m i n a t e I t a l i a n e m i g r a t i o n l i t e r a t u r e . A r g e n t i n a , a f t e r a l l , and not the U.S.A., i s the s e c o n d m o s t I t a l i a n n a t i o n on e a r t h . A l a r g e p e r c e n t a g e of I t a l i a n e m i g r a t i o n i n t e r - E u r o p e a n , and the l a r g e s t s h i f t s Italian. Pane e ciocolata (1973), of a l l c o n t i n u e to be arguably inter- Franco B r u s a t i ' s m e m o r a b l e f i l m , d e a l t w i t h the p l i g h t of a S o u t h e r n I t a l i a n was most immigrant t r y i n g to get h i s f i n a n c e s t o g e t h e r i n d i s d a i n f u l , G e r m a n - s p e a k i n g S w i t z e r l a n d , a r i c h c o u n t r y w h e r e the s o - c a l l e d g u e s t w o r k e r s do a l l the m e n i a l t a s k s . C l o s e r to h o m e , the move f r o m P a l e r m o to M i l a n o r e m a i n s one of the w e l l s p r i n g s of I t a l i a n n a r r a t i v e a r t . O u t s i d e of the country's s m a l l , s h o r t - l i v e d empire (Ethiopia; Eritrea; Libya; Albania), Italian rags-to-riches stories were in exceedingly short supply. U n s u r p r i s i n g l y under the c i r c u m s t a n c e s , H o r a t i o A l g e r w a s not one of 207 the A m e r i c a n a u t h o r s c u l t i v a t e d by I t a l i a n i n t e l l e c t u a l s i n s e a r c h of s o c i a l and c u l t u r a l r e n e w a l . F o r v a r i o u s r e a s o n s , the e m i g r a t i o n p h e n o m e n o n p r o v i d e d m u c h m o r e f o d d e r to I t a l i a n c i n e m a than i t did to I t a l i a n l i t e r a t u r e . M e m o i r s s u c h as America! America! AJtre memorie del popolo were usually w r i t t e n by u n e d u c a t e d w o r k e r s , o f t e n w i t h o u t s i d e e d i t o r i a l a s s i s t a n c e and, as a c o n s e q u e n c e , they r e s e m b l e the c u r r e n t l y f a s h i o n a b l e genre of t a p e r e c o r d e d and t r a n s c r i b e d o r a l h i s t o r y m o r e than they do l i t e r a t u r e per se. T h o s e f e w literary works devoted to the Italo-American e x p e r i e n c e w h i c h do not f o c u s on u n d e r w o r l d r i t u a l s and i n i t i a t i o n s , t e n d to be c a s t i n the f o r m of f a m i l y s a g a s about c l a n s of c o n s t r u c t i o n w o r k e r s . Even h e r e , h o w e v e r , the p e d i g r e e i s a n y t h i n g but J e w i s h - A m e r i c a n n o v e l i s t / s c r e e n w r i t e r Richard Price's c o v e r s much the s a m e ground as I t a l o - A m e r i c a n D o n a t o ' s Christ in Concrete, pristine. Bloodbrothers a u t h o r P i e t r o Di and i s at l e a s t as w e l l k n o w n . One l o o k s i n v a i n f o r a s c h o o l of I t a l o - A m e r i c a n w r i t i n g t h a t c o u l d p r o f i t a b l y be c o m p a r e d to t h e i r A f r i c a n - A m e r i c a n , I r i s h - A m e r i c a n , and J e w i s h A m e r i c a n c o u n t e r p a r t s . Even c r i m e n o v e l i s t S a l v a t o r e L a m b i n o h i d e s b e h i n d the d i s i n g e n u o u s l y " W A S P " p s e u d o n y m s " E v a n H u n t e r " and " E d McBain". T h i s s h o u l d not be t a k e n to mean t h a t the I t a l i a n p r e s e n c e w a s entirely invisible in America in non-criminal format. Popular e n t e r t a i n e r s s u c h as Frank S i n a t r a and J i m m y D u r a n t e , s p o r t s h e r o e s s u c h as R o c k y M a r c i a n o and J o e D i M a g g i o , w e r e very m u c h in the p u b l i c eye. T w o of the m o s t h i g h l y - e s t e e m e d A m e r i c a n f i l m d i r e c t o r s of the 1 9 3 0 s , ' 4 0 s , and ' 5 0 s w e r e Frank C a p r a and V i n c e n t e M i n n e l l i , but the I t a l o - A m e r i c a n s o c i a l experience was never central to t h e i r work. 208 Onscreen, recognizable Italian types were scarcely l e s s stereotyped than B l a c k m a i d s and b u t l e r s , w h i l e t h e i r p r e s e n c e w a s a l m o s t a l w a y s tangential to the p l o t . In H a y s Code H o l l y w o o d , a p l a c e w h e r e the p r e s u m e d p r e j u d i c e s of s m a l l - t o w n P r o t e s t a n t A m e r i c a n s w e r e n e v e r u n d e r e s t i m a t e d , I r i s h C a t h o l i c i s m w a s about as much " e t h n i c i t y " as an A - l i s t m o v i e hero c o u l d s t a n d . To a c e r t a i n e x t e n t , t h i s s i t u a t i o n changed r a d i c a l l y i n the 1 9 7 0 s . D u r i n g t h a t d e c a d e , m o s t of the " h o t " new A m e r i c a n d i r e c t o r s w e r e of I t a l i a n d e s c e n t . M a r t i n S c o r s e s e , F r a n c i s Ford C o p p o l a , B r i a n de P a l m a , and M i c h a e l C i m i n o brought a new c o n s c i o u s n e s s to A m e r i c a n c i n e m a that was often between their d e s c r i b e d as " o p e r a t i c " . C r i t i c s f o u n d work and the more baroque p r o d u c t i o n s connections of Luchino V i s c o n t i , Michelangelo A n t o n i o n i , Bernardo B e r t o l u c c i , Francesco R o s i , and S e r g i o Leone. Even h e r e , h o w e v e r , the change w a s m o r e a p p a r e n t than r e a l . N e i t h e r C i m i n o nor De P a l m a poured much a r t i s t i c energy i n t o I t a l i a n s u b j e c t s , and w h e n they did i t e m e r g e d in the hoary old f o r m of Mafia melodrama. While Godfather the first two of F r a n c i s Ford Coppola's f i l m s are a l m o s t u n i v e r s a l l y r e c o g n i z e d as m a s t e r p i e c e s , t h e y , t o o , are M a f i a e p i c s , even i f they do d i s p l a y an u n p r e c e d e n t e d u n d e r s t a n d i n g of u n d e r w o r l d s o c i o l o g y . 3 T h e mob l i k e w i s e c a s t s a s h a d o w o v e r S c o r s e s e ' s w o r k , but at l e a s t here w e are g i v e n a chance to see the l a r g e r s o c i e t y t h a t p r o d u c e d t h i s c r i m i n a l phenomenon. In Mean Streets, the d i r e c t o r ' s breakthrough A s P a u l i n e K a e l and o t h e r A m e r i c a n c r i t i c s c o r r e c t l y p o i n t e d out at the t i m e . The Godfather m o v i e s w e r e the f i r s t H o l l y w o o d f e a t u r e s to suggest that the l i n e b e t w e e n b i g t i m e c r i m e and b i g b u s i n e s s w a s o f t e n t h i n to the p o i n t of n o n - e x i s t e n t . In one of h e r r e v i e w s , K a e l d e s c r i b e d the i n t e r l o c k i n g e p i c s as " A w i d e , s t a r t l i n g l y v i v i d v i e w of a M a f i a d y n a s t y , i n w h i c h o r g a n i z e d c r i m e b e c o m e s an o b s c e n e n i g h t m a r e i m a g e of A m e r i c a n f r e e e n t e r p r i s e " (5001 N i g h t s at the M o v i e s 2 2 0 ) . 3 209 1 9 7 3 f e a t u r e ; the M a f i a i t s e l f i s broken down i n t o b i g - s h o t s and s m a l l operators in a l i t t l e Hollywood movies, I t a l y f u l l of p r i e s t s , m a c h i s m o , s e x u a l instinctual patriotism, guilt, neighbourhood bars, c o f f e e h o u s e s , r e s t a u r a n t s and a p a r t m e n t b u i l d i n g s w h e r e f a m i l i e s s t a y t o g e t h e r u n t i l m a r r i a g e doth t h e m p a r t . T h i s i s e s s e n t i a l l y the s a m e m i l i e u t h a t S c o r s e s e w o u l d r e p r o d u c e s e v e n y e a r s l a t e r in Raging his acclaimed "biopic" of Italian-American Bull, b o x e r J a k e La M o t t a . S c o r s e s e ' s M a f i a i s both a p r e s e n c e and a t e m p t a t i o n ; i t f u n c t i o n s on the s a m e l e v e l as e n t e r i n g the p r i e s t h o o d , s l e e p i n g w i t h non-Italian g i r l s — t h e f e m a l e p e r s p e c t i v e is seldom c o n s i d e r e d in these m o v i e s and l e a v i n g the n e i g h b o u r h o o d "melting pot" emotional f o r the f r i g h t e n i n g , o u t s i d e . More o f t e n emigres who half-understood than not, S c o r s e s e ' s heroes nonetheless think of themselves as are all- American. The e m i g r e e x p e r i e n c e i s p a r t i c u l a r l y g e r m a n e to I t a l i a n c i n e m a proper. The aesthetic remembered, was ancestor of Toni, J e a n R e n o i r ' s neorealismo, 1934 study it of should be multi-lingual M e d i t e r r a n e a n e m i g r a n t s t r y i n g to s u r v i v e in the bidonvilles around M a r s e i l l e s . Even in f i l m s s i t u a t e d in v i l l a g e s and t o w n s w h e r e the l o c a l f a m i l i e s have l i v e d f o r c o u n t l e s s g e n e r a t i o n s , t h e r e i s the f e e l i n g i n N e o r e a l i s t c i n e m a t h a t p o v e r t y can at any m o m e n t s e n d t h e s e p e o p l e w a n d e r i n g f r o m p l a c e to p l a c e . T h i s i s as t r u e of the impoverished f i s h e r m e n in V i s c o n t i ' s La Terra trema ( 1 9 4 7 ) as i t i s of the R o m a n s u b - p r o l e t a r i a t d e p i c t e d in De S i c a ' s Ladri di biciclette and His Brothers ( 1 9 6 0 ) , V i s c o n t i ' s l a s t b l a c k and w h i t e d e a l t w i t h an i m p o v e r i s h e d S o u t h e r n f a m i l y (1948). Rocco masterpiece, that sought s e c u r i t y in i n d u s t r i a l i z e d M i l a n ; w i t h the e x c e p t i o n of the t r a g i c f a m i l y d y n a m i c s , 210 L i n a W e r t m u l l e r ' s Mftfii metallurgico ferito nell'onore ( 1 9 7 2 ) and Tutto a posto e niente in ordine ( 1 9 7 4 ) c o v e r much the s a m e ground. In many ways, Franco Brusati's already mentioned Pane e ciocolata is s t r u c t u r e d l i k e a l i g h t e r , c o o l e r v e r s i o n of Toni. One of the m o r e i n t e r e s t i n g ongoing Lamehca. problem of emigration is Gianni Amelio's 1994 feature T h i s t i m e the s t o r y i s not about p o o r I t a l i a n s t r y i n g to m a k e good in s o m e m o r e f o r t u n a t e about I t a l i a n c i n e m a t i c a p p r o a c h e s to the q u a r t e r of the i n d u s t r i a l i z e d w o r l d , but I t a l i a n c o n m e n t r y i n g to e x p l o i t the s t a r v i n g i n h a b i t a n t s c o u n t r y w h i c h I t a l y i t s e l f has h e l p e d to i m p o v e r i s h . Lamehca of a begins w i t h documentary footage describing M u s s o l i n i ' s i n v a s i o n / o c c u p a t i o n of A l b a n i a in 1 9 3 9 . The s c e n e then s h i f t s to the A l b a n i a of the 1 9 9 0 s , a c o u n t r y only r e c e n t l y e m e r g e d f r o m the n i g h t m a r e y e a r s of the E n v e r Hoxha r e g i m e and c u r r e n t l y c r i p p l e d by an e c o n o m i c s t a g n a t i o n g r e a t e r than t h a t of I t a l y in 1 9 4 5 . Gino ( E n r i c o Lo V e r s o ) , one of two even the I t a l i a n c o n f i d e n c e men i n t e n t on b i l k i n g t h e s e p o o r p e o p l e out of t h e i r l i m i t e d f u n d s and even more l i m i t e d s u p p l i e s of hope, g e t s d r a w n i n t o the v o r t e x of A l b a n i a n m i s e r y , and e v e n t u a l l y f i n d s h i m s e l f a b o a r d a r e f u g e e - c r o w d e d s h i p t h a t p l a n s to beach i t s e l f on I t a l i a n s a n d s , to seek refuge in a country that unceremoniously sends most illegal e m i g r a n t s home. F o r G i n o ' s v i c t i m s , I t a l y i t s e l f l o o k s l i k e A m e r i c a . In a m o v i n g i n t e r v i e w he gave to Positif m a g a z i n e , the director e x p l a i n e d h i s m o t i v a t i o n s : " J ' a p p a r t i e n s a une f a m i l i e d ' e m i g r a n t s : mon g r a n d - p e r e a e m i g r e et n ' e s t j a m a i s r e v e n u , i l a l a i s s e ma g r a n d - m e r e e n c e i n t e ( e l l e a v a i t t r o i s e n f a n t s et e t a i t e n c e i n t e du q u a t r i e m e ) , i l a d i s p a r u en A m e r i q u e du Sud. Mon p e r e - j ' a v a i s un an et demi et l u i d i x h u i t - e s t p a r t i a l a r e c h e r c h e de son p e r e , i l T a r e t r o u v e et a d i s p a r u l u i 2 1 1 a u s s i " ( V i v i a n i 2 5 ) . By m a k i n g Larnerica, the d i r e c t o r c o n t i n u e d , " J e voulais cette faire un f i l m sur l'ltalie, vue fois d'une distance g e o g r a p h i q u e a s s e z p a r t i c u l i e r e " ( V i v i a n i 25). This ubiquitous need to s o l v e Italy's multitudinous problems s h o u l d , h o w e v e r , not be t a k e n as a s i g n of s e l f - c o n t e m p t . Even the i l l educated Antonio Margariti, certainly no f r i e n d of the status quo, d e s c r i b e d h i s h o m e l a n d as " N e l l a ' t e r r a i t a l i c a , madre d e l l a c i v i 1 i t a del mondo'...." (Margariti 19). B e h i n d the d i s o r d e r of p r e - and p o s t - R i s o r g i m e n t o massive chaos and chronic I t a l y l a y the m e m o r y of R o m e , the w o r l d ' s f i r s t c e n t r a l i z e d m e g a - s t a t e , b r u t a l p e r h a p s , but s t i l l most e f f i c i e n t l y run e m p i r e the w o r l d had e v e r k n o w n . 4 the If, on the one hand, I t a l y ' s p r o b l e m s s e e m e d i n c u r a b l e , on the o t h e r they s e e m e d to be of a c y c l i c a l , t r a n s i t o r y n a t u r e . The p r o b l e m w a s : how to s o l v e t h e m ? B e n i t o M u s s o l i n i had one a n s w e r ; A n t o n i o G r a m s c i had Mussolini northwards looked backwards to Imperial In sedimentazioni A m e r i c a , , he wrote, vischiosamente passate, ha permesso and other Marxist principles, preferred look to the U n i t e d S t a t e s f o r p a r t i c u l a r storiche inspiration, f o r m i l i t a r y s u p p o r t f r o m G e r m a n y . G r a m s c i , on the hand, d e s p i t e his d y e d - i n - t h e - w o o l problems. Rome f o r another. a n s w e r s to s p e c i f i c "La non parassitarie una s p e c i a l m e n t e al c o m m e r c i o e p e r m e t t e base esistenza lasciate sana di to Italian queste dalle fasi all'industria sempre piu la riduzione e della f u n z i o n e e c o n o m i c a r a p p r e s e n t a t a dai t r a n s p o r t i e dal c o m m e r c i o a una r e a l e a t t i vi t a s u b a l t e r n a d e l l a p r o d u z i o n e , a n z i i l t e n t a t i v o di a s s o r b i r e q u e s t a a t t i vi t a n e l l ' a t t i v i t a p r o d u t t i v a s t e s s a . . . . " (Quaderni dal c a r c e r e 2 1 4 5 ) . G r a m s c i ' s p r o - A m e r i c a n e n t h u s i a s m s w e r e a l l p r e d i c a t e d on the 4 With the possible exception of the B r i t i s h , of course. 212 v e r y M a r x i s t need to advance Italy to the l e v e l of i n d u s t r i a l / d e m o c r a t i c p e r f e c t i o n then b e l i e v e d n e c e s s a r y f o r the s u c c e s s f u l t r a n s l a t i o n i n t o a t r u l y s o c i a l i s t s t a t e . Anything that advanced t h i s cause w a s promoted by G r a m s c i ; a n y t h i n g t h a t h i n d e r e d i t , he o p p o s e d . T h u s , w e r e a d the following s a d l y d i s a p p r o v i n g c o m p a r i s o n : L / A m e r i c a ha i l R o t a r y e TV.M.C.A., T E u r o p a ha l a M a s s o n e r i a e i G e s u i t i " (Quaderni dal c a r c e r e 246.) T o w a r d s t h i s e n d , the p r i s o n p h i l o s o p h e r s p e c u l a t e d t h a t a g e n e r o u s dose of s e x u a l p u r i t a n i s m and P r o t e s t a n t C h r i s t i a n i t y well be b e n e f i c i a l to Italy, although might he o b v i o u s l y w o u l d not have d e f e n d e d t h e s e p r i n c i p l e s as i n d e p e n d e n t v i r t u e s i n t h e m s e l v e s . The t r i c k w a s to get I t a l y i n d u s t r i a l i z e d , and a n y t h i n g t h a t f u r t h e r e d that p u r p o s e w a s w o r t h p u r s u i n g . T h u s , he w r o t e , " L ' a n t i a m e r i c a n i s m o e c o m i c o p r i m a a n c o r a di e s s e r e s t u p i d o " (Quaderni dal c a r c e r e 6 3 5 ) . G r a m s c i w a s as p r a g m a t i c here as he w a s e v e r y w h e r e e l s e . P e r h a p s , t o o , he w a s haunted by a n o t h e r one of S t e n d h a l ' s d i s t u r b i n g I t a l i a n o b s e r v a t i o n s , and sought some w a y to c i r c u m v e n t i t s s t u b b o r n t r u t h . In Promenades dans Rome, the g r e a t F r e n c h l i t e r a r y j o u r n a l i s t contended t h a t " L e m a t e r i a l i s m e d e p l a i t aux I t a l i e n s . L ' a b s t r a c t i o n e s t p e n i b l e p o u r l e u r e s p r i t . II l e u r f a u t une p h i l o s o p h i e t o u t e r e m p l i e de t e r r e u r et d ' a m o u r , c ' e s t - a - d i r e un Dieu pour p r e m i e r m o t e u r " ( S t e n d h a l 6 4 5 ) . T h e F u t u r i s t s , c u r i o u s l y e n o u g h , had v e r y l i t t l e to s a y America. While Filippo-Tommaso Marinetti modern Europe that " L ' i d e a di patria about w a s q u i t e happy to a n n u l l a T i d e a di tell famiglia" ( M a r i n e t t i 3 8 9 ) , and to e x t o l l the m a g n i f i c e n t l y n o n - h u m a n g l o r i e s of a i r p l a n e s , m o v i e s , m a c h i n e g u n s and e v e r y o t h e r p r o d u c t of modern i n d u s t r y , he s e e m e d c o m p l e t e l y i n d i f f e r e n t to the v e r y f o u n t a i n h e a d of the m a c h i n e w o r l d he e x t o l l e d , the U n i t e d S t a t e s of A m e r i c a . One w o u l d 213 have e x p e c t e d a c o n d e m n a t i o n of A m e r i c a n d e m o c r a c y , p e r h a p s , but w h a t about i t s f a c t o r y s y s t e m ? P e r h a p s in the f i r s t t w o d e c a d e s of the 2 0 t h c e n t u r y i t w a s s t i l l p o s s i b l e f o r an a e s t h e t i c and p o l i t i c a l r a d i c a l to be c o m p l e t e l y E u r o c e n t r i c . By the e a r l y 1 9 3 0 s , h o w e v e r , t h a t o p t i o n had begun to e r o d e - a s m u c h by c h o i c e as n e c e s s i t y . A s Italo C a l v i n o p o i n t e d out in h i s i n t r o d u c t i o n to C e s a r e P a v e s e ' s s e m i n a l s t u d y , Letteratura there was more intellectual than simple enthusiasm for Americana, U.S. w r i t i n g behind I t a l y ' s m i d - 1 9 3 0 s p a s s i o n f o r New W o r l d a u t h o r s . F o r w r i t e r s on the l e f t , s u c h as P a v e s e and E l i o V i t t o r i n i , A m e r i c a n p o e t r y and f i c t i o n c o u l d be w i e l d e d , "...come politica letteraria-italiana." e American sentiments went uno strumento (Letteratura a g a i n s t the o f f i c i a l di poJemica A m e r i c a n a xv). P r o fascist line which d e c r e e d t h a t the U n i t e d S t a t e s s h o u l d be p r e s e n t e d as " u n a s o c i e t a in c u i l ' a l f a e l ' o m e g a d e l l a v i t a e r a i l denaro e p r o t a g o n i s t a autentico d e l l a v i t a s o c i a l e era d i v e n u t a l a m a c c h i n a . . . . " (Zunino 3 2 9 ) . U.S. l i t e r a r y c r i t i c i s m c r e a t e d a s u r p r i s i n g l y f e r t i l e avenue f o r d i s g u i s e d c r i t i c i s m of the s t a t e . A c c o r d i n g to L i n o P e r t i l e , " A m e r i c a n literature p r o v i d e d young I t a l i a n i n t e l l e c t u a l s w i t h a l l t h a t s e e m e d to be m i s s i n g f r o m I t a l i a n l e t t e r s and l i f e " (Fourgues 181). L e t us c o n s i d e r V i t t o r i n i ' s author of Moby Dick, for c a s e f i r s t . When c o m m e n t i n g on the instance, the editor/translator wrote, " M e l v i l l e non s a c r e d e r e in una c o n q u i s t a t o t a l e d e l l a p u r e z z a . M e l v i l l e d i f f i d a . Crede t u t t a v i a n e l l a l o t t a " (Diario in oubblico 1 16). J u s t as M i k h a i l B a k h t i n i m p l i c i t l y c r i t i c i z e d S t a l i n , w i t h h i s c o n d e m n a t i o n of fifth century Athenian aristocrats who preferred Oriental-style a u t o c r a c y to Greek d e m o c r a t i c i n s t i t u t i o n s , so did V i t t o r i n i challenge 214 M u s s o l i n i ' s d e l u s i o n s of I t a l i a n p o l i t i c a l s o l i d a r i t y . In t h i s context, even s o m e of h i s m o r e l i g h t h e a r t e d c o m m e n t s can be r e a d as s l i g h t l y m i s c h i e v o u s p r o p a g a n d a . In W i l l i a m S a r o y a n ' s f i c t i o n a l u n i v e r s e , f o r e x a m p l e , " L ' A m e n c a appare come una r e i n c a r n a z i o n e m o d e r n a d e l l ' A s i a di H a r u n - a l - R a s c i d , San F r a n c i s c o s u o n a c o m e B a g d a d . . . . " ( D i a r i o in p u b b l i c o 9 0 ) . It goes w i t h o u t s a y i n g t h a t no f a s c i s t I t a l i a n c i t y of t h i s p e r i o d i n s p i r e d the a u t h o r w i t h s u c h p l e a s i n g , w h i m s i c a l c o m p a r i s o n s . • ne can a l s o s e e how p r a i s i n g a n o v e l i n w h i c h a l l the e v e n t s are e x t e r n a l c o u l d s e e m s l i g h t l y s u b v e r s i v e w i t h i n the c o n f i n e s of a p o l i c e s t a t e w h e r e p r i v a t e o p i n i o n s w e r e not above the l a w : " C a i n non da che f a c c e e f a t t i da v e d e r e , e non p e r m e t t e di v e d e r e o i n t r a v e d e r e a l t r o . I fatti interiori da i m p l i c i t i negli e s t e r i o r i . . . . " (Diario in pubblico 93). N a z i r e a d e r s of V i t t o r i n i ' s a n t h o l o g i e s and t r a n s l a t i o n s m u s t have been put off by positively the Italian's suggestions that "Negro" spirituals i n f l u e n c e d the w o r k s of G e r t r u d e S t e i n and E z r a had Pound. V i t t o r i n i ' s m o s t u n f o r g i v a b l e p o l i t i c a l s i n , though, w a s u n q u e s t i o n a b l y h i s c h a m p i o n s h i p of J o h n S t e i n b e c k , J a c k L o n d o n , and E r s k i n e C a l d w e l l , the A m e r i c a n w r i t e r s an w h o s e s o c i a l c r i t i q u e s c o u l d m o s t e a s i l y be translated to Italian context. T h u s , the author's anthology Americana w a s banned "...not on a c c o u n t of the A m e r i c a n t e x t , but b e c a u s e of V i t t o r i n i ' s I t a l i a n c o m m e n t a r y " (Fourgues 182). In the e a r l y days of t h e i r p r o f e s s i o n a l a s s o c i a t i o n , C e s a r e P a v e s e w a s , i f a n y t h i n g , an even s t a u n c h e r d e f e n d e r of A m e r i c a n literature than his p r i n c i p a l c o m r a d e - i n - a r t s , Elio V i t t o r i n i . Pavese w r o t e his doctoral and dissertation on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, t r a n s l a t e d Moby Dick at the t e n d e r age of 2 6 . In a l e t t e r w r i t t e n to h i s American friend A n t o n i o C h i u m i n a t t o , Pavese gushed, "You are the 215 p e a c h of the w o r l d ! Not only in w e a l t h and m a t e r i a l l i f e but r e a l l y in l i v e l i n e s s and s t r e n g t h of a r t w h i c h m e a n s t h o u g h t and p o l i t i c s and r e l i g i o n and e v e r y t h i n g . You've got to p r e d o m i n a t e in t h i s c e n t u r y a l l o v e r the c i v i l i z e d w o r l d as b e f o r e did G r e e c e , and I t a l y , and F r a n c e " (Lettere 1 926 - 1 9 5 0 1 17). 5 S a d l y , P a v e s e w a s q u i c k to r e m i n d h i s A m e r i c a n c o r r e s p o n d e n t t h a t he had n o t h i n g in c o m m o n w i t h C h i c a g o ' s m o s t f a m o u s p e r i o d c i t i z e n , A l Capone: "...you m u s t not f o r g e t t h a t w e I t a l i a n s are t w o d i s t i n c t n a t i o n s , the N o r t h and the S o u t h , and t h a t w e are the N o r t h e r n and t h a t the C h i c a g o gunmen are the S o u t h e r n and t h e r e i s a d e e p e r d i f f e r e n c e of r a c e and h i s t o r y b e t w e e n us and t h e m t h a t n o t h i n g c o u l d r e p a i r " ( L e t t e r e 1926 - 1 9 5 0 152). In p r a c t i c e , P a v e s e w a s as e n t h u s i a s t i c about A m e r i c a n m o v i e s as he w a s about A m e r i c a n b o o k s . In h i s o w n s l i g h t l y ungrammatical E n g l i s h w o r d s , " W h a t in t h e i r l i t t l e sphere have A m e r i c a n m o v i e s done in o l d E u r o p e - a n d I've a l w a y s abused t h o s e who m a i n t a i n e d i t w a s t h e i r f i n a n c i a l o r g a n i z a t i o n and a d v e r t i s e m e n t s w h i c h brought t h e m up: I say i t i s not even t h e i r a r t i s t i c v a l u e , but t h e i r s u r p a s s i n g s t r e n g t h of v i t a l e n e r g y don't m i n d w h e t h e r p e s s i m i s t i c or j o y f u l - w h a t I say have done m o v i e s w i l l do f o r the w h o l e of y o u r a r t and t h o u g h t " ( L e t t e r e 1926 - 1 9 5 0 1 17). What P a v e s e p a r t i c u l a r l y w a n t e d to do w a s v i s i t A m e r i c a - b u t the c i r c u m s t a n c e s w e r e n e v e r p r o p i t i o u s . He s i g h e d , "I d r e a m , hope, l o n g , die a f t e r A m e r i c a . I m u s t c o m e " ( L e t t e r e 1 9 2 6 - 1 9 5 0 2 0 8 ) . T h e young P a v e s e used h i s l e t t e r s to t h i s i n c r e a s i n g l y d i s t a n t a c q u a i n t a n c e as a p r i m a r y means of p e r f e c t i n g h i s E n g l i s h . He w a s p a r t i c u l a r l y i n t e r e s t e d i n w a d i n g h i s w a y t h r o u g h U.S. a r g o t : " [ A m e r i c a n b o o k s l are f u l l of s l a n g , i d i o m s , I don't k n o w w h a t , and so f o r an h a l f i n c o m p r e h e n s i b l e . I w a n t [a book on m o d e r n s l a n g usage] as the a i r I am b r e a t h i n g " ( L e t t e r e 1926 - 1950 90). 5 216 P a v e s e s e e m e d to b e l i e v e t h a t the New W o r l d w a s s u p e r i o r i n a l m o s t e v e r y w a y to the Old: " S u r e l y A m e r i c a n s are k i n d e r t h a n w e " 1926 this (Lettere 1 9 5 0 2 0 5 ) . T h u s , the m o r e " A m e r i c a n " a book w a s , the Italian reader was likely to endorse it. One of his more earliest e n t h u s i a s m s w a s E d g a r Lee M a s t e r s ' The Spoon River Anthology, b e l l i s s i m o l i b r o che non e poi di liriche, ma di personaggi,; "...un un l i b r o c h e , a detta degli Americani s t e s s i , contiene tutta l ' A m e r i c a attuale...." (Lettere 1926 - 1950 220). A s e a r l y as 1 9 3 2 , P a v e s e ' s e a r l y p a s s i o n f o r A m e r i c a w a s a l r e a d y w e a r i n g the s t i g m a t a of s e c o n d t h o u g h t s . The a u t h o r ' s f i n a l published l e t t e r s to A n t o n i o C h i u m i n a t t o a r e c r i t i c a l - i n d e e d b a r b e d - i n the w a y t h a t the e a r l y s c r e e d s w e r e not. In one e p i s t l e , P a v e s e argued v i s - a - v i s the Old W o r l d ' s unpaid m u n i t i o n s b i l l s , "I m u s t say t h a t I don't t h i n k Europe w i l l pay: a f t e r a l l Europe a l r e a d y paid in the W o r l d W a r w i t h a l l i t s d e a d , w o u n d e d , and m a i m ' d [sic], and i t ' s only r i g h t you a l s o pay with money" (Lettere 1926 - 1950 221). Things went from bad to w o r s e : " A s f o r p o l i t i c s : h e r e ' s to y o u , hoping to e n c o u n t e r you at my m a c h i n e - g u n ' s end and have you c r y mercy... P e r h a p s o n l y in the next W o r l d - w a r , w e ' l l f i n d out our t r u e c a l l i n g " ( L e t t e r e 1926 - 1 9 5 0 2 2 3 ) . In P a v e s e ' s d i a r i e s , the S t e n d h a l del n o s t r o t e m p o " American culture, author wrote that "Hemingway e lo (11 m e s t i e r e di v i v e r e 3 3 4 ) . C o m m e n t s on had, h o w e v e r , c e a s e d to exercise his artistic c o n s c i e n c e . I n s t e a d , he w a s p r e o c c u p i e d w i t h the p r o b l e m s of r e a l i s m , " w o m e n " , and s u i c i d e . A s h i s f a i t h in the r e s t o r a t i v e p o w e r s of l o v e declined, Pavese grew increasingly m i s o g y n i s t i c : " S o n o un popolo n e m i c o , le donne come i l popolo t e d e s c o " (11 m e s t i e r e di v i v e r e 3 2 7 ) . 217 T h e a u t h o r ' s A m e r i c a n o p h i l i a peaked when he w a s s t i l l i n h i s 2 0 s . E v e r y t h i n g about the U.S. s e e m e d to f a s c i n a t e h i m : "11 N o r d a m e r i c a e s e m p r e s t a t o un paese di b e v i t o r i e c c e z i o n a l i " ( L e t t e r a t u r a Americana 5). P a v e s e b e l i e v e d t h a t l i t e r a r y A m e r i c a n s l a n g c o n s t i t u t e d " . . . l a v e r a creazione di un l i n g u a g g i o - i l volgare americano...." Americana 2 8 ) . He b e l i e v e d t h a t U.S. a u t h o r s indigenous tradition, (Letteratura even if "Un greco A m e r i c a n a 79.) Moby Dick, had b u i l t t h e i r veramente Pavese most wanted his e own Melville" he f e l t , made ( o b v i o u s l y m a l e ) r e a d e r s f e e l " p i u v i v o e piu u o m o " ( L e t t e r a t u r a What (Letteratura countrymen to all A m e r i c a n a 79.) absorb from these o v e r s e a s a u t h o r s w a s a p o p u l a r language of t h e i r o w n v e r s a t i l e enough to e x p r e s s the t o t a l r e a l i t y of p o s t - R i s o g i m e n t o I t a l y , " u n l i n g u a g g i o r i c c o di t u t t o i l sangue d e l l a p r o v i n c i a e di t u t t a l a d i g n i t a di un v i t a rinnovata." (Letteratura A m e r i c a n a 34.) P a v e s e b e l i e v e d t h a t writers l i k e 0. H e n r y , in T h e o d o r e R o o s e v e l t ' s t i m e , had helped to make A m e r i c a one n a t i o n from Atlantic to P a c i f i c , an a l c h e m i c a l process that s u p p l i e d the c o l l a t e r a l b e n e f i t of d e - p u r i t a n i z i n g the c o u n t r y . E v e n t u a l l y , P a v e s e w o u l d c o n c e n t r a t e on h i s o w n l i t e r a r y works, r a t h e r than t h o s e w r i t t e n by f o r e i g n e r s ; in p l a c e of f o r e i g n m o d e l s , h i s a e s t h e t i c g r e w i n c r e a s i n g l y w e d d e d to the h o m e - g r o w n c o n s t r u c t s of n e o r e a l i s m and r e g i o n a l a u t h e n t i c i t y . Even s o , in a r a d i o broadcast d e l i v e r e d s h o r t l y b e f o r e h i s s u i c i d e in 1 9 5 0 , P a v e s e i n d i c a t e d t h a t t h i s r u p t u r e w a s not as c o m p l e t e as s o m e c r i t i c s b e l i e v e d : "...quando m i s i descrive come uno che sarebbe passato n e o r e a l i s m o p o l e m i c o e poi a d d i r i t u r a dall'americanismo al r e g i o n a l i s m o n o s t r a n o c o n f e s s o di non c a p i r e " ( L e t t e r a t u r a A m e r i c a n a 2 9 2 ) . al io 218 Although emigrants Southern Italians made up the vast majority to A m e r i c a , m o s t of the m a j o r S i c i l i a n w r i t e r s of seemed c o m p l e t e l y u n i n t e r e s t e d in New W o r l d l i t e r a t u r e . L u i g i P i r a n d e l l o , f o r instance, was almost completely regionalist. Thirty years later, G i u s e p p e T o m a s o di L a m p e d u s a ' s m a s t e r p i e c e // Battopardo, r e f e r e n c e to the U n i t e d S t a t e s i s a w i s t f u l in the only a s i d e r e l a t e d to a 1 9 4 3 bomb f a t e d to d e s t r o y a once b e a u t i f u l palazzo. This indifference, it s h o u l d be e m p h a s i z e d , w a s not e x c l u s i v e l y l i m i t e d to N a p l e s , C a l a b r i a and S i c i l y . I t a l o S v e v o , Ignazio S i l o n e , and E l s a M o r a n t e , to mention j u s t t h r e e s t e l l a r t a l e n t s , a d d r e s s e d t h e m s e l v e s f i r s t l y to t h e i r f e l l o w c o u n t r y m e n , s e c o n d l y to E u r o p e a n s , and t h i r d l y i f at a l l to r e a d e r s i n the New and Neo-colonial Worlds. In some cases, Communist s y m p a t h i e s l e d to a d e l i b e r a t e c o l d - s h o u l d e r i n g of l i t e r a t u r e f r o m the f o u n t a i n h e a d of c a p i t a l i s m . O b v i o u s l y , t h i s t e n d e n c y w o u l d g r o w once the New Deal McCarthyism. era was replaced by the Cold War regime of 6 Even s o , t h r o u g h o u t the 1930s, most w r i t e r s in N o r t h e r n and C e n t r a l I t a l y s h a r e d , to a g r e a t e r or l e s s e r d e g r e e , the p r o - A m e r i c a n l i t e r a r y t a s t e s of V i t t o r i n i and P a v e s e . N e v e r t h e l e s s , A l b e r t o M o r a v i a w a s one of the f e w who a c t u a l l y s p e n t s o m e t i m e i n the U.S.: " N e T 1 9 3 5 sono a n d a t o a New Vork, o s p i t e su i n v i t o di G i u s e p p e P r e z z o l i n i d e l l a C a s a i t a l i a n a d e l l a C o l u m b i a U n i v e r s i t y " ( D i a r i o Eurooeo 138). M o r a v i a w a s m o r e c l e a r - e y e d about the p r o m i s e d l a n d t h a n w e r e m o s t of h i s T h i s t e n d e n c y s e e m s p a r t i c u l a r l y p r o n o u n c e d in r e g a r d to M o r a n t e ' s g r e a t 1 9 6 4 n o v e l , HistoriQ. A l t h o u g h the b o o k ' s s t r u c t u r e o w e s a g r e a t d e a l to J o h n Dos P a s s o s ' s 49th Parallel, r e f e r e n c e s to A m e r i c a are e x t r e m e l y s p a r s e . A t y p i c a l e x c e p t i o n r e a d s a s f o l l o w s : " S u l f r o n t e di C o r e a , i n c u r s i o n e U S A a P y o n g Vang con l a m o r t e di s e i m i l a c i v i l i " (Morante 1026). 6 219 c o n t e m p o r a r i e s , a l t h o u g h he did not s e e m to be p a r t i c u l a r l y a w a r e of it: "Agli occhi di un tecnologicamente arretrato, europeo, e piu l'America avanzato e un paese dell'Europa, schizof renico: politicamente piu nel s e n s o che non ha p a r t i t i di s i n i s t r a che c o n t e s t i n o la s t r u t t u r a . E un po' c o m e , d i c i a m o , l a F r a n c i a p r i m a del 1 8 4 8 . Dal punto di v i s t a t e c n o l o g i c o e piu v e c c h i o di n o i , da q u e l l e s o c i o l o g i c o e p i u g i o v a n e . Un p a s t i c c i o " ( I n t e r v i s t a s u l l o s c r i t t o r e s c o m o d o 9 5 ) . Even s o , he b e l i e v e d t h a t "11 n e o r e a l i s m o n a s c e in I t a l i a da un l i b r o s o l o , e p e r g i u n t a non di un i t a l i a n o . Addio alle armi sullo s c r i t t o r e scomodo di H e m i n g w a y " (Intervista 22)7 Even a poet as o t h e r w o r l d l y Hemingway's as Eugenio M o n t a l e w a s c a p a b l e of responding to Hemingway non d e l u d e v a , c o n f e r m a v a a n z i quel s e n s o di s c h i e t t a , quasi i n f a n t i l e - m a tough-guy charms: "Tuttavia respinta furiosamente l'uomo un'umanita e c o m p r e s s a nel fondo d e l l a c o s c i e n z a come indegna d'un uomo ' d e l n o s t r o t e m p o ' - c h e i suoi l i b r i m i g l i o r i l a s c i a v a n o i n d o v i n a r e " (Montale 236). Under fascism, fondness for American culture sometimes a s s u m e d s e m i - c o m i c f o r m s . T h u s , one of the young F e d e r i c o F e l l i n i ' s first creative banned t a s k s w a s to w r i t e an a l t e r n a t i v e American Federico science fiction F e l l i n i , alors jeune d e s s i n e e , se s u b s t i t u a n t , comic strip: journalists, s u r la demande Italian text for a "Le futur devint auteur cineaste de de l ' e d i t e u r , a un bande Alex R a y m o n d m i s a l ' i n d e x p a r l e f a s c i s m e en I t a l i e , a f i n de t e r m i n e r un h i s t o i r e de Flash Gordon" (Le Monde D i p l o m a t i q u e . Dec. 1 9 9 6 2 9 ) . T h i s s o m e w h a t s u r p r i s i n g c l a i m s e e m s more c o m p r e h e n s i b l e a f t e r r e a d i n g M o r a v i a ' s p e r s o n a l d e f i n i t i o n of the movement: "11 n e o r e a l i s m e a u t o b i o g r a f i s m o e d o c u m e n t a r i s r n o a 1 i v e i l o l i r i c o " ( I n t e r v i s t a s u l l o s c r i t t o r e scomodo 23). 7 220 One of Italy's few prominent literary intellectuals to be a s s o c i a t e d w i t h the a n t i - A m e r i c a n c a m p i n 1 9 3 0 s I t a l y w a s E m i l i o C e c c h i . W i t h the a i d of Messico, America amara, and Messico rivisiata, t h r e e t r a v e l books f i r s t p u b l i s h e d in the 1 9 3 0 s and l a t e r f u s e d i n t o the o m n i b u s v o l u m e Nuovo continente, t h i s l i t e r a r y a e s t h e t e , v i r t u a l l y by d e f a u l t , a s s u m e d the p o s i t i o n of i d e o l o g i c a l opponent to P a v e s e and V i t t o r i n i . America amara, in p a r t i c u l a r , e n s c o n c e d h i m in t h i s r o l e , a l t h o u g h he s u b s e q u e n t l y took c o n s i d e r a b l e p a i n s to deny i t . S in h i s i n t r o d u c t i o n to the p o s t - w a r t r i l o g y ' s r e - p u b l i c a t i o n , C e c c h i e x p l a i n e d , "Apparsa infatti comunisti, per decisamente durante la seconda guerra mondiale, a f a s c i s t i e opposte ragioni America antiamericano, mentre amara sembro cercava soltanto la un libro verita...." (Nuovo c o n t i n e n t e v i i ) . In r e t r o s p e c t , C e c c h i ' s w r i t i n g s on A m e r i c a r e a d l e s s l i k e p r o f a s c i s t p o l e m i c s than the s o r t of t r a c t s w e have c o m e to e x p e c t f r o m the t r a v e l j o u r n a l s of F r e n c h i n t e l l e c t u a l s v i s i t i n g A m e r i c a i n y e a r s i m m e d i a t e l y p r e c e d i n g and i m m e d i a t e l y f o l l o w i n g the W o r l d W a r . In p a r t i c u l a r , the a u t h o r r e s e m b l e s a s o r t of the Second Italianate G e o r g e s D u h a m e l . A s Di B i a s e w o u l d have i t , " S i veda i l p r o b l e m a d e l razzismo, q u e l 1 o dei n e g r i , dei lavoratori legati alle catene di T h e v e r y t i t l e of the m i d d l e v o l u m e in t h i s t r i l o g y plagued i t s a u t h o r u n m e r c i f u l l y . A s C a r m i n e Di B i a s e noted in h i s book l e n g t h s t u d y of C e c c h i , the a c c u s e d i n s i s t e d t h a t he w a s p r i m a r i l y a t t r a c t e d by t h e a l l i t e r a t i v e m a g i c of t h e l e t t e r " a " : " P e r i l t i t o l o America amara ( 1 9 3 0 - 1 9 4 3 ) C e c c h i s t e s s o d i c h i a r a , n e l l ' Avertimento al l i b r o , di e s s e r e a t t r a t t o da u n ' a l l i t t e r a z i o n e c o m e Arnica America di J . G i r a u d o u x , Amusante America di A . de M e e u s , America primo amore di Ii. S o l d a t i e con n e l l ' o r e c c h i o ' m a r e m m a a m a r a ' d'una v e c c h i a c a n z o n e t o s c a n a " (Di B i a s e 8 9 ) . T h a t h i s a l l i t e r a t i v e t i t l e w a s the only n e g a t i v e one of the f o u r he c i t e d w a s a d e t a i l w h i c h C e c c h i c h o s e not to d w e l l on u n d u l y . T h e f a c t t h a t Harlem, a Second World War vintage a n t i - A m e r i c a n p r o p a g a n d a f e a t u r e c o m m i s s i o n e d by the f a s c i s t s w a s l a r g e l y d e r i v e d f r o m C e c c h i ' s t r a v e l w r i t i n g , w a s l i k e w i s e s o m e t h i n g he p r e f e r r e d to d o w n p l a y . 8 221 m o n t a g g i o , del c i n e m a , d e l l a d e l i n q u e n z a m i n o r i l e , dei gangsters, scuola, della religione, della d o n n a " (Di Biase 89). della Long-legged A m e r i c a n w o m e n ; s k y s c r a p e r s ; m o v i e h o u s e s ; Henry F o r d ' s f a c t o r i e s : f o r r e a d e r s of C h a p t e r One, C e c c h i ' s i t i n e r a r y w i l l s e e m v e r y familiar. F a r f r o m b e i n g r a c i s t , C e c c h i w a s as fond of " N e g r o s p i r i t u a l s " as any writer on the u g l i n e s s , it antifascist usually left. What's w a s ugly: " V i more, sono l u o g h i when he described che l ' i n d i g e n z a , la v e r g o g n a , l ' i n f a m i a hanno t a l m e n t e i m p r e g n a t i e s a t u r a t i , da r e n d e r l i , a cosi dire, eloquenti Sinistre c o m e una s t o r i a t r a s f u s a s i i n s o s t a n z a v i s i v a . epopee m u m m i f i c a t e . Vie e piazze devastate e deserte; l u g u b r a m e n t e s o l e n n i come c i m e t e r i . La B o w e r y , a Nuova Y o r k , e uno di • u e s t i l u o g h i " ( A m e r i c a amara 519). He w a s , of c o u r s e , not immune to the feelings of cultural s u p e r i o r i t y t h a t p e r m e a t e d so many F r e n c h and G e r m a n i n t e l l e c t u a l s of his time. At the M u s e u m of N a t u r a l History, for i n s t a n c e , he was p r o m p t e d to m a k e the f o l l o w i n g o b s e r v a t i o n , " E c c o A m e r i c a . . . g r a c e e p u e r i l e ; s e m p r e con q u e g l i o c c h i a l i da nonna e con q u e l l ' i n c a r n a t o di l a t t e e r o s e ; c r e d u l a , eppoi pedante f i n o a l l ' i n v e r o s i m i l e " (America a m a r a 2 0 ) . U.S. m u s e u m s s e e m to have o f t e n d r i v e n t h i s s e a s o n e d a r t l o v e r to c u l t i v a t e d d e s p a i r : " E d i f f i c i l e c r e d e r e che m u s e o ' d i m o r a d e l l e M u s e , ' s i g i u d i c a da una q u a n t i t a di m u s e i significhi americani" ( M e s s i c o 4 8 ) . L i k e Duhamel and h i s F r e n c h c o m p a t r i o t s , C e c c h i t h o u g h t of America as a strange mixture sexlessness, a circumstance separazione dei sessi; p u r i t a n e s i m o . . . . " (Jodi 3 0 4 ) . of matriarchy occasioned effetto dei by "il preguidizi and enforced fenomeno instillati della dal 222 C e c c h i d i d , h o w e v e r , d i f f e r f r o m Duhamel in h i s a t t i t u d e t o w a r d s m o v i e s . W i t h g r e a t p l e a s u r e , he d e s c r i b e s h i s m e e t i n g s w i t h A d o l p h e M e n j o u , G l o r i a S w a n s o n , and George A r l i s s . S i n c e h i s f i r s t v i s i t to A m e r i c a c a m e in the f o r m of a v i s i t i n g p r o f e s s o r s h i p at the U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a at B e r k e l e y in the e a r l y 1 9 3 0 s , the a u t h o r c o u l d o b s e r v e the d e a t h of the s i l e n t m o v i e and the b i r t h of i t s t a l k i n g s u c c e s s o r at f i r s t hand. S o m e w h a t s u r p r i s i n g l y f o r a c o n s e r v a t i v e I t a l i a n c i n e p h i l e , he p r e f e r r e d B u s t e r K e a t o n ' s m a t e r i a l i s t c o m e d i e s to the m o r e e t h e r e a l m o v i e s of " t h e l i t t l e t r a m p " , l a u d i n g the s t o n e f a c e d s i l e n t " S e n z a le s e n t i m e n t a l i master f i n e z z e e le t r a s c e n d e n t i i r o n i e di C h a p l i n . . . . " (Messico 29). I t a l i a n f i l m t h e o r i s t s , c o n v e r s e l y , g e n e r a l l y p r e f e r r e d C h a p l i n to Keaton. From 9 an millionaire-kicking cultural antifascist point "little tramp" of view, the cop-hating, o b v i o u s l y made a m o r e effective w e a p o n than did K e a t o n ' s s t o n e - f a c e d l o n e r . F o r the critics who w r o t e f o r Bianco e Nero and the o t h e r s e r i o u s I t a l i a n f i l m j o u r n a l s of the 1 9 3 0 s and ' 4 0 s , A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e selectively American than novels it was were in the useful, literary more magazines. "Hardboiled" because t r a n s l a t e d i n t o I t a l i a n t e r m s of r e f e r e n c e . was appropriated they could so easily be 1 0 H o l l y w o o d , on the o t h e r hand, w a s r e g a r d e d w i t h m o r e s u s p i c i o n than l o v e . C h a p l i n a s i d e , i t w a s g e n e r a l l y s e e n as the b a s t i o n of the In the 1 9 6 0 s , P i e r P a o l o P a s o l i n i w e n t so f a r as to argue t h a t the r e l e a s e of C h a p l i n ' s Modern Times c o n s t i t u t e d an i m p o r t a n t t u r n i n g point in human h i s t o r y . 9 A t h e o r y w h i c h L u c h i n o V i s c o n t i proved c o n c l u s i v e l y w h e n he t u r n e d J a m e s l i . C a i n ' s D e p r e s s i o n E r a pulp novel The Postman Always Rings Twice i n t o the f i r s t g r e a t I t a l i a n n e o r e a l i s t f i l m in 1 9 4 1 . A t f i r s t banned by the a u t h o r i t i e s , i t w a s l a t e r r e l e a s e d at 11 Duce's request in 1942 despite a decidedly u n p a t r i o t i c subtext that c e l e b r a t e d bohemian h o m o s e x u a l i t y o v e r both b o u r g e o i s m a r r i a g e and h e t e r o s e x u a l a d u l t e r y . 1 0 223 w o r l d ' s most c o m m e r c i a l l y s u c c e s s f u l " w h i t e telephone m o v i e s . " 1 1 J e a n R e n o i r ' s Toni w a s t h e i r model of c i n e m a t i c e x c e l l e n c e , not V i c t o r F l e m i n g ' s Gone with the Wind. A n d , so f a r as l i t e r a r y sources were c o n c e r n e d , the f a t h e r s of n e o r e a l i s m did not look to E r n e s t H e m i n g w a y for i n s p i r a t i o n , as A l b e r t o Giovanni c l a i m e d , but to V e r g a . F o r t h e m , V e r g a ' s s t a n d a r d of " v e r i s m o " narrative norm. As Moravia contentiously 1 2 Cal 1 i s t o neorealismo, s e t the Cosulich wrote in his i n t r o d u c t i o n a c o l l e c t i o n of the hugely i n f l u e n t i a l to Verso il e a r l y w r i t i n g s of G i u s e p p e De S a n t i s , " l ' e p i s o d i o s a l i e n t e r e s t a n o i due a r t i c o l i c h e De S a n t i s s c r i s s e in c o l l a b o r a z i o n e con Mario A l i c a t a p e r r i c h i a m a r e l'attenzione del cinema italiano s u l l ' o p e r a di V e r g a , l o scrittore s i c i l i a n o c i o e i n q u e g l i anni e r a d i v e n t a t o i l punto di r i f e r i m e n t o tutti i focolai di d i s s i d e n z a c u l t u r a l e . . . . " (De S a n t i s di 18). F u t u r e c i n e a s t e s w e r e a d v i s e d t h a t , " G i o v a n n i V e r g a non ha s o l a m e n t e c r e a t o una g r a n d e o p e r a di p o e s i a , m a ha c r e a t o un p a e s e , un t e m p o , una s o c i e t a . . . . " (De S a n t i s 4 9 ) . 1 3 W h i l e De S a n t i s a d m i r e d many t h i n g s about A m e r i c a n r e a l i s m , the p r i n c i p a l c r i t i c of the j o u r n a l Cinema believed that European culture w a s e s s e n t i a l l y c l a s s i c a l , w h i l e i t s A m e r i c a n counterpart, lacking sufficient historical reference points, " e s i s t e e continue a esistere mediante schemi e convenzioni instabilmente ' r o m a n t i c i ' " (De S a n t i s 6 0 ) . R o m a n t i c i s m , De S a n t i s p r i m l y n o t e d , had T h e c o n t e m p t u o u s t e r m by w h i c h the l i g h t , f l u f f y , r o m a n t i c c o m e d i e s m a s s p r o d u c e d by M u s s o l i n i ' s f i l m s t u d i o s w e r e g e n e r a l l y known. 1 1 V i s c o n t i w o u l d take t h i s a d v i c e to heart in the i m m e d i a t e p o s t - w a r period when he shot La Terra trema, a f i l m based on a V e r g a t e x t , i n S i c i l i a n d i a l e c t w i t h S i c i l i a n n o n - a c t o r s in an a u t h e t i c S i c i l i a n f i s h i n g v i l l a g e . On the m a i n l a n d , t h i s p i c t u r e w a s s h o w n w i t h T u s c a n subtitles. 1 2 224 e x e r c i s e d l i t t l e i n f l u e n c e on I t a l y . C o n s e q u e n t l y , " L ' A m e r i c a , i n v e c e , e r a p r e o c c u p a t a s o l t a n t o di c r e a r e una nuova f o r m u l a d e s t i n a t a i n s i e m e a l i a a l t r a che p o r t a v a a l i a r i b a l t a l a v i t a dei g a n g s t e r s , a s o s t i t u i r e con s u c c e s s o i l g l o r i o s o ' w e s t e r n ' . . . . " (De S a n t i s 60). In m a t t e r s of r e a l i s m , De S a n t i s b e l i e v e d t h a t A m e r i c a n c i n e m a f o l l o w e d r a t h e r t h a n l e d : " F u il cinema americano a continuare la esperienza r e a l i s t i c a del c i n e m a e u r o p e o . . . . " (De S a n t i s 4 7 ) . W h i l e he a d m i r e d K i n g V i d o r , J o h n F o r d , Frank C a p r a , and s e v e r a l o t h e r A m e r i c a n d i r e c t o r s , De S a n t i s c l a i m e d t h a t " i l m i o ' c r e d o ' p a r t i v a d a l l ' e s e m p i o del c i n e m a f r a n c e s e di q u e g l i anni s c a t u r i t o dal c l i m a del F r o n t e P o p o l a r e , e che a v e v a in J e a n R e n o i r i l suo piu a t t e n t o e profondo poeta c i n e m a t o g r a f i c o . . . . " (De S a n t i s 3 8 ) . French c r i t i c s w e r e among the f i r s t i n t e r n a t i o n a l viewers to r e c o g n i z e the unique g e n i u s of t h i s n e w f i l m s t y l e , but they d i d not f e e l i n c l i n e d to bask in the r e f l e c t e d g l o r y of t h e i r a l l e g e d t u t e l a g e . A n d r e Bazin and h i s Rossellini more disciples might have o r l e s s e q u a l l y , but admired R e n o i r and Roberto to they entirely them separate geniuses, discrete national p e r s o n a e . 1 3 were R o s s e l l i n i , of c o u r s e , w a s the d i r e c t o r w h o made a v i r t u e out of p o v e r t y of m e a n s , w h o s h o t i n the s t r e e t under v a r i a b l e l i g h t i n g c o n d i t i o n s b e c a u s e the r o o f C i n e c i t t a and R o m e ' s o t h e r s t u d i o s had a l l been b l o w n o f f of by A l l i e d b o m b e r s , who w o r k e d w i t h a m a t e u r a c t o r s b e c a u s e he c o u l d n ' t a f f o r d a f u l l y p r o f e s s i o n a l c a s t , w h o - d u r i n g the s h o o t i n g of Open City-mixed N e v e r t h e l e s s , the F r a n c o - I t a l i a n c u l t u r a l exchange w a s so e x t e n s i v e on the c i n e m a t i c p l a n e t h r o u g h o u t the 1 9 3 0 s and e a r l y ' 4 0 s , the p h e n o m e n o n d e s e r v e s s o m e c o m m e n t . Luchino V i s c o n t i w o r k e d as a d e s i g n e r and a s s i s t a n t d i r e c t o r f o r J e a n R e n o i r during those y e a r s , w h i l e M i c h e l a n g e l o A n t o n i o n i a p p r e n t i c e d w i t h M a r c e l C a r n e . In P i e r r e L e p r o h o n ' s w o r d s , " L ' a x e R o m e - B e r l i n f a c i l i t a i t l e s e c h a n g e s a v e c l ' A U e m a g n e , m a i s de P a r i s egalement, p l u s i e u r s r e a l i s a t e u r s vinrent t r a v a i l l e r avec les equipes i t a l i e n n e s . A p r e s Max O p h u l s , J e a n de L i m e u r , J e f f M u s s o et P i e r r e C h e n a l , M a c e l l ' H e r b i e r . . . e t J e a n R e n o i r (La Tosca) s'y t r o u v a i e n t en 1 9 4 0 " (Leprohon 80). 1 3 225 and m a t c h e d b o o t l e g f i l m s t r i p s he bought on the b l a c k m a r k e t , pour faute de mieux, a f t e r a l l the u s u a l o u t l e t s had shut d o w n . R o u g h , e d g y , verging on d o c u m e n t a r y : n e o r e a l i s m s e e m e d to be j u s t p o s t w a r w o r l d needed. W h i l e f i l m s s u c h as Roma citta and Ladri di biciclette what aperta the (1945) a l l f o c u s s e d on e x t r e m e l y l o c a l s o c i a l p r o b l e m s , the i n t e r n a t i o n a l p o s s i b i l i t i e s of the f o r m b e c a m e a l m o s t i m m e d i a t e l y apparent. As neorealism's foremost ideologue and exponent, s c r e e n w r i t e r Cesare Zavattini wrote in his autobiography: "Ogni cinema che m i r a a un r a p p o r t o s t r e t t o con i g r a v i p r o b l e m i d e l l ' uomo m o d e r n o , fa del n e o r e a l i s m o , p a r t e c i p a a questo movimento che e o r m a i la c o s c i e n z a del c i n e m a " ( Z a v a t t i n i 4 7 4 ) . Perhaps the f i r s t neorealist film to d e a l w i t h the wartime r e l a t i o n s h i p s of A m e r i c a n s and I t a l i a n s w a s R o b e r t o R o s s e l l i n i ' s 1 9 4 6 o m n i b u s f i l m , Paisa. B e g i n n i n g w i t h t h e A l l i e d l a n d i n g s i n S i c i l y and 1 9 4 3 , and c o n c l u d i n g w i t h j o i n t Wehrmacht in northern evolves from mutual U.S./partisan actions against the I t a l y t w o y e a r s l a t e r , t h e mood of t h e f i l m hostility and s u s p i c i o n to t o t a l t r u s t and understanding, between these l i n g u i s t i c a l l y separated protagonists, as t i m e p a s s e s and the t r o o p s m a r c h n o r t h . Not a l l of t h e s e e a r l y t a k e s on U.S./Italian Lattuada's relations Senza were pieta, quite so upbeat, however. f o r e x a m p l e , deals w i t h a doomed romance b e t w e e n a b l a c k A m e r i c a n m i l i t a r y p o l i c e m a n and an I t a l i a n A s i n La putain Alberto respectueuese, m o s t of the b l a m e f o r t h i s s t a t e of a f f a i r s i s d i r e c t l y a t t r i b u t e d prostitute. unfortunate to i n g r a i n e d , i n s t i t u t i o n a l i z e d American racism. Ironically, quite a f e w neorealist f i l m s escapist attributes of the A m e r i c a n a s s u m e d s o m e of t h e cinema whose norms they 226 o s t e n s i b l y s o u g h t to e s c a p e . A s Roy A r m e s w r o t e of // Cammino speranza, della " T h e g u n f i g h t at the r a i l w a y s t a t i o n in Rome i s c o n s t r u c t e d in t r u e g a n g s t e r f i l m f a s h i o n , w h i l e the r i t u a l i s t i c e l e m e n t i s s t r e s s e d i n the k n i f e f i g h t to the d e a t h t h a t t a k e s p l a c e in the s h o w b e t w e e n S a r o and V a n n i f o r the p o s s e s s i o n of B a r b a r a " ( P a t t e r n s of R e a l i s m 140). In the s a m e v o l u m e , A r m e s a d d e d , "In many w a y s [the] S i c i l i a n films of G e r m i are b e s t r e g a r d e d not as w o r k s i n a pure realistic t r a d i t i o n but as s t y l i s e d I t a l i a n e q u i v a l e n t s to the A m e r i c a n w e s t e r n " ( A r m e s 140). B e t w e e n the l a t e 1 9 4 0 s and l a t e 1 9 5 0 s , I t a l i a n c i n e m a e v o l v e d in a n u m b e r of s i g n i f i c a n t w a y s . N e o r e a l i s m p r o p e r soon d e g e n e r a t e d i n t o the c o r r u p t s u b - g e n r e k n o w n as neorealismo rosa, a f o r m a t in w h i c h the t r a g e d y of I t a l i a n p o v e r t y w a s l a r g e l y s u p p l a n t e d by l o w c o m e d y and l o c a l c o l o u r . 1 4 So f a r as the m a s s a u d i e n c e w a s c o n c e r n e d , b r o a d f a r c e w a s the p r e f e r r e d b i l l of f a r e , though f e w of t h e s e c o m e d i e s were ever exported outside Italy's b o r d e r s . f o r m u l a e i n c l u d e d the "peplum" 1 5 Other viable c o m m e r c i a l (or n e o - m y t h o l o g i c a l f i l m , m u s c l e m a n h i s t o r i c a l e p i c s w h o s e r o o t s r e a c h e d back to M a c i s t e , the hero of Cabiria), strongman the I t a l i a n s o c i a l c o m e d y (in w h i c h S i c i l i a n s e t t i n g s w e r e u b i q u i t o u s ) , o m i n i b u s m o v i e s ( c o l l e c t i o n s of s h o r t f i l m s , often t h e m a t i c a l l y l i n k e d by a u t h o r or human f o i b l e ) , the o p e r a t i c f i l m ( o f t e n of v e r y high q u a l i t y ) , and the m u s i c a l ( u s u a l l y w r e t c h e d ) . In the 1 9 6 0 s Even i n t h e i r h e y d a y , i t s h o u l d be n o t e d , n e o r e a l i s t p r o d u c t i o n s n e v e r a m o u n t e d to m o r e t h a n a m o d e s t p e r c e n t a g e of o v e r a l l I t a l i a n f i l m o u t p u t . A c c o r d i n g to P e t e r B o n d a n e l l a , of the 8 2 2 I t a l i a n f e a t u r e f i l m s p r o d u c e d b e t w e e n 1 9 4 5 and 1 9 5 4 , " o n l y about 9 0 ( o r s l i g h t l y o v e r \0%) c o u l d e v e r be c a l l e d n e o r e a l i s t f i l m s . . . . " ( B o n d a n e l l a 3 5 ) . A n u m b e r of t h e s e f i l m s n o n e t h e l e s s c o n c e r n e d t h e m s e l v e s w i t h I t a l o - A m e r i c a n s u b j e c t m a t t e r . R a f f a e l l o f l a t a r r a z z o ' s Come scopersi VAmerica ( 1 9 4 9 ) i s a c a s e i n point. 1 4 1 5 227 and ' 7 0 s , t h e s e s t a p l e s w o u l d be a u g m e n t e d by Mondo cane-style documentaries sensational (questionably non-fictional records of e v e n t s f r o m around the w o r l d ) , the " s p a g h e t t i w e s t e r n " ( m o r e t h i s l a t e r ) , the e r o t i c h o r r o r m o v i e , and "la luce rossa" about (pornography, both h a r d - a n d s o f t - c o r e ) . Hollywood studios, meanwhile, often availed themselves of C i n e c i t t a ' s s e r v i c e s , w h e n they w a n t e d to m a k e e p i c s on the cheap. A m e r i c a n a c t o r s f r e q u e n t l y s t a r r e d in I t a l i a n m o v i e s of both the f i r s t and s e c o n d r a n k . 1 6 F o r many y e a r s , Rome w a s a f f e c t i o n a t e l y k n o w n as " H o l l y w o o d on the T i b e r . " S u r p r i s i n g l y , t h i s U.S. i n v a s i o n did not have an i n i m i c a l e f f e c t on l o c a l p r o d u c t i o n . A s P e t e r B o n d a n e l l a p o i n t e d out in Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, in 1972 " I t a l i a n p r o d u c t s g a i n e d 62.5% of the b o x - o f f i c e r e c e i p t s as c o m p a r e d to a m e r e 15.1% earned by H o l l y w o o d f i l m s " ( I t a l i a n C i n e m a 145). A r t i s t i c c h a n g e s ran p a r a l l e l to t h e s e e c o n o m i c g a i n s . M o s t of the m a s t e r s of n e o r e a l i s m g r a d u a l l y d r i f t e d a w a y f r o m the o r t h o d o x path. F o r V i s c o n t i , t h i s " h e r e s y " took the f o r m of p e r i o d f i l m s s u f f u s e d w i t h elegant n o s t a l g i a f o r the M a r x i s t d i r e c t o r ' s own a r i s t o c r a t i c past. A n t o n i o n i , on the o t h e r hand, abandoned p r o l e t a r i a n and p e t i t - b o u r g e o i s concerns almost entirely in favour of his intimate, exhaustive e x p l o r a t i o n s of upper c l a s s a n o m i e . F i n d i n g i t i n c r e a s i n g l y d i f f i c u l t to f i n d b a c k e r s f o r the n e o r e a l i s t p r o j e c t s he s t i l l w a n t e d to c o m p l e t e , Rossellini gradually switched media, specializing in unadorned t e l e f i l m s about f a m o u s people w h i c h w e r e made in F r a n c e as w e l l as I t a l y . De S i c a f l o u n d e r e d 1 6 for many y e a r s , u n t i l the world and A t a c t i c made much e a s i e r by the a l m o s t u n i v e r s a l I t a l i a n p r a c t i c e of p o s t - d u b b i n g . the 228 H o l l y w o o d A c a d e m y e m b r a c e d // Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, his 1972 e l e g y to I t a l i a n J e w s k i l l e d in the H o l o c a u s t . With his highly personal iconography, s u r r e a l i s t i c childlike innocence, playful a n t i - c l e r i c a l i s m , pre-pubertal and c i r c u s a e s t h e t i c s , of a l l the m a j o r imagery, sensuality Italian directors, Federico F e l l i n i w o u l d a p p e a r to have t r a v e l l e d the f u r t h e s t f r o m the n e o r e a l i s t point of origin. He m i g h t a l s o s e e m the furthest removed from A m e r i c a n c u l t u r a l i n f l u e n c e . And y e t , as I s h a l l s h o r t l y a r g u e , t h i s i s f a r f r o m b e i n g the c a s e . A s a l r e a d y m e n t i o n e d , one of F e l l i n i ' s e a r l i e s t j o b s w a s w r i t i n g the I t a l i a n t e x t f o r the A m e r i c a n s c i e n c e f i c t i o n c o m i c s t r i p , Flash Gordon. most He w a s a l s o one of the c o - w r i t e r s of Paisa, still the r i g o r o u s s t u d y of U . S . / I t a l i a n s o c i a l r e l a t i o n s , a f a c t w h i c h s u g g e s t s he w a s then as c o m f o r t a b l e w i t h n a t u r a l i s t i c c o v e n t i o n s as he w a s w i t h c o m e d i c and f a n t a s t i c f o r m u l a e . In Testaments trahis, we learn that " D e p u i s l o n g t e m p s i l [ F e l l i n i ] r e v e de f a i r e de L'Amerique K a f k a ] un f i l m , et dans Intervista [the n o v e l by i l nous a f a i t v o i r l a s c e n e du c a s t i n g pour ce f i l m reve...." (Kundera 61) A l l t h i s i s f a i r l y w e l l - k n o w n . What I a m a b o u t to s u g g e s t n o w , h o w e v e r , i s m u c h m o r e u n o r t h o d o x . After h a v i n g r e a d C u r z i o M a l a p a r t e ' s a u t o b i o g r a p h i c a l n o v e l La Pelle, I can only c o n c l u d e t h a t the n o v e l i s t ' s s t y g i a n i m a g i n a t i o n exercised a p o w e r f u l i n f l u e n c e o v e r the younger f i l m m a k e r ' s e l y s i a n p s y c h e . If t h i s c o n n e c t i o n has not been made e a r l i e r , I s u s p e c t i t i s p r i m a r i l y b e c a u s e radical d i f f e r e n c e s in e m o t i o n a l tone have o b s c u r e d the i m a g i s t i c s i m i l a r i t i e s . M a l a p a r t e d e d i c a t e d h i s g r e a t e s t book as f o l l o w s : " A l l ' memoria del Colonnello Henry H. Cummings, dell' Universita affetuosa di Virginia, 229 e di tutti i bravi, i buoni, gli onesti soldati americani, d'arme dal 1943 al 1945, morti inutilmente miei per la liberta compagni dell' Europa" ( M a l a p a r t e 4). A g a i n and a g a i n , the a u t h o r i d e n t i f i e s h i m s e l f w i t h the spirit of the Old Europe w h i c h the w a r has d e s t r o y e d . D e s p i t e h i s sympathy for the A m e r i c a n s o l d i e r s w h o f o u g h t " b o o t " , h i s book s h a r e s none of the o p t i m i s m of the f i l m Paisa. their way up the similarly-themed H a v i n g been both a f a s c i s t and an a n t i f a s c i s t , M a l a p a r t e w a s s e e m i n g l y t r u s t e d by f e w of h i s f e l l o w I t a l i a n s , and he r e t u r n e d t h i s f a v o u r w i t h ( l i t e r a r y ) i n t e r e s t . He both b l a m e s h i s h o m e l a n d f o r W o r l d W a r T w o and e x t r a c t s a l m o s t m a s o c h i s t i c s a t i s f a c t i o n f r o m the b i t t e r n e s s of d e f e a t : " E c e r t o a s s a i piu d i f f i c i l e p e r d e r e una g u e r r a che v i n c e r l a " ( M a l a p a r t e 12). He and the o t h e r I t a l i a n s o l d i e r s now e n l i s t e d in the Allied uniforms cause wear the haunting stigmata of bloodstained w h i c h were taken from "ai soldati britannici c a d u t i a El A l a m e i n e a T o b r u k " ( M a l a p a r t e 12). The l a t e s t o c c u p i e r s of N a p l e s are s i m u l t a n e o u s l y c o n t e m p t u o u s and f r i e n d l y . A n A m e r i c a n o f f i c e r s a y s , "'I l i k e i t a l i a n (sic) people. I l i k e t h i s b a s t a r d , d i r t y , w o n d e r f u l p e o p l e ' " ( M a l a p a r t e 17). On a c c o u n t of the g r e a t s u f f e r i n g s of the N e a p o l i t a n s , " C r i s t o e r a n a p o l e t a n o " ( M a l a p a r t e 17). M a l a p a r t e ' s l i k i n g f o r A m e r i c a n s i s the e x a c t o p p o s i t e of t h a t of h i s U.S. s u p e r i o r s : '"I c l e a n , the w o n d e r f u l a m e r i c a n (sic) l i k e A m e r i c a n s . I l i k e the p u r e , the p e o p l e ' " ( M a l a p a r t e 17). In a s c e n e t h a t c o u l d not help but s t i r the i m a g i n a t i o n of a F e l l i n i , w e are t o l d t h a t N e a p o l i t a n w h o r e s f a v o u r not only blonde w i g s but a l s o blonde m e r k i n s , b e c a u s e f o r b l a c k A m e r i c a n s G.l.s, t h e i r p r e f e r r e d p r e y , " n o n p i a c c i o n o l e donne b i a n c h e t r o p p o nere" (Malaparte 21). Like C e l i n e , M a l a p a r t e w a s an a n t i - r a t i o n a l i s t : " ' P e r capire l'Europa...la 230 r a g i o n e c a r t e s i a n a non s e r v e a n u l l a . L ' E u r o p a e un p a e s e m i s t e r i o s o pieno di segreti inviolabili'" (Malaparte 2 7 ) . A m o n g the indigent f a m i l i e s of N a p l e s , b l a c k s o l d i e r s are t r a d e d l i k e s l a v e s by l o c a l s t r e e t a r a b s j they are not p e r c e i v e d as f i e l d h a n d s , h o w e v e r , but as h u s b a n d s . Even m o r e i m p o r t a n t than h i s c o l o u r , t h o u g h , i n the c o n t e x t of this s t a r v i n g c i t y , i s a G.l.'s a c c e s s to A l l i e d s u p p l i e s : "...un b i a n c o del P X c o s t a quanto un driver di c o l o r e " ( M a l a p a r t e 3 4 ) . 1 7 On a p a r t i c u l a r l y bizarre Neapolitan s t a i r c a s e , Malaparte described a vision that could not h e l p but i n f l a m e the young F e l l i n i ' s i m a g i n a t i o n , an u r b a n hell i n h a b i t e d s o l e l y by g r o t e s q u e f e m a l e d w a r v e s : " S o n o c o s i p i c c o l e , che giungono a s t e n t o al g i n o c c h i o di un uomo di m e d i a s t a t u r a " ( M a l a p a r t e 37). While American soldiers will sometimes cohabit with these c r e a t u r e s as p r o s t i t u t e s , even the m o s t hardened I t a l i a n w h o r e - m o n g e r w i l l have n o t h i n g to do w i t h t h e m . 1 8 Of N a p l e s ' r e c e n t s t r u g g l e to f r e e i t s e l f f r o m N a z i o c c u p a t i o n , the a u t h o r i s e q u a l l y proud and h o r r i f i e d : "I r a g a z z i e le donne furono i piu t e r r i b i l i , in q u e l l e q u a t t r o g i o r n a t e di l o t t a s e n z a q u a r t i e r e " ( M a l a p a r t e 6 3 ) . A v i s i t to the " V i r g i n of N a p l e s " ( a l l e g e d l y , the o n l y g i r l of the c i t y to have not t h u s f a r herself, although she m a k e s h e r l i v i n g exclusively prostituted from publicly p r o v i n g t h a t she i s s t i l l " v i r g o i n t a c t a " ) f i l l s M a l a p a r t e w i t h the m o s t S u c h e x p l o i t e d b l a c k c h a r a c t e r s w e r e a l s o f e a t u r e d i n Paisa, Senza pieta, ande v e n t u a l l y — L i l i a n a C a v a n i ' s 1981 s c r e e n v e r s i o n of La Pelle. A r e l a t e d f i g u r e can a l s o be found in F e d e r i c o F e l l i n i ' s 1957 m a s t e r p i e c e , I Hotte di Cabiria. 1 7 Images of d i s t o r t e d f e m a l e s e x u a l i t y are one of the abiding c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s of F e l l i n i ' s c i n e m a . One i s r e m i n d e d of the p i l l b o x o g r e s s f r o m Otto e demi, the g i a n t e s s a t t e n d e d by t w o p e r i w i g g e d d w a r v e s in Fellini Casanova, the h e r m a p h r o d i t e / " f r e a k s h o w " a t t r a c t i o n f r o m Fellini Satyricon, and d o z e n s of o t h e r s of s t r i k i n g e x a m p l e s t h a t m i g h t , u n d e r s l i g h t l y d i f f e r e n t c i r c u m s t a n c e s , have been e t c h e d by M a l a p a r t e ' s pen. One m i g h t a l s o p o i n t out t h a t , a c c o r d i n g t o M i l a n K u n d e r a , w h a t m o s t a t t r a c t e d F e l l i n i t o K a f k a ' s America w a s the f i g u r e of B r u n e l d a , a g i a n t - s i z e d d i v a - t u r n e d - p r o s t i t u t e w h o m the C z e c h n o v e l i s t d e s c r i b e s as " u n m o n s t r e de s e x u a l i t e a l a f r o n t i e r e du r e p u g n a n t et de l'excitant...." (Kundera 62). , 8 231 profound shame; it makes him feel conquered f o r e i g n e r s who are no l o n g e r f r i e n d s but v i c t o r s . i s l e s s than p l e a s e d by the t r a n s f o r m a t i o n what he describes as the 1 9 in the presence In the s a m e v e i n , he of I t a l y ' s l a r g e s t c i t y homosexual of capital of the into world: " L i n t e r n a z i o n a l e degli i n v e r t i t i , tragicamente s p e z z a t a della guerra, si r i c o m p o n e v a in quel p r i m o l i m b o d ' E u r o p a l i b e r a t a da s o l d a t i (Malaparte 123). M a l a p a r t e a s s o c i a t e s these C o m m u n i s m , the new g e n e r a t i o n of w r i t e r s , alleati" gay i m m i g r a n t s and the a r t i s t i c with avant- g a r d e ; he s e t s t h e m up i n o p p o s i t i o n to b o t h h i m s e l f and I t a l y ' s t a i n t e d but s t i l l glorious p a s t . 2 0 A t one p o i n t , the a u t h o r goes so f a r as to s u g g e s t t h a t G e n e r a l Donovan a c t i v e l y r e c r u i t e d h o m o s e x u a l s f o r the OSS as a m e a n s of s p r e a d i n g s u b v e r s i o n and bad m o r a l e behind G e r m a n lines. 2 1 On a v e r y f e w o c c a s i o n s , M a l a p a r t e ' s l i t e r a r y v o i c e a s s u m e s the s u p e r c i l i o u s t o n e s of a s u p e r i o r F r e n c h v i s i t o r to the New W o r l d : " C o m e t u t t i i G e n e r a l i d e l l ' U.S. A r m y , i l G e n e r a l e Cork [ C l a r k ? ] a v e v a un s a c r o t e r r o r e dei S e n a t o r i e dei C l u b s f e i m m i n i l i d ' A m e r i c a " ( M a l a p a r t e 2 7 9 ) . Once o r t w i c e , he even s a t i r i z e s F r e n c h a t t i t u d e s towards Italy. A f r i e n d in the F r e n c h A r m y , f o r i n s t a n c e , i s not e n t i r e l y s a t i s f i e d w i t h Stendhal's 19th-century r e p o r t a g e f r o m the C i t y of the C a e s a r s : " ' S i j ' a i un r e p r o c h e a l u i f a i r e - d i s s e P i e r r e L y a u t e y - c ' e s t d ' a i m e r R o m e que P a r i s " ( M a l a p a r t e 3 9 0 ) . 1 9 Need one add t h a t b i z a r r e b r o t h e l mieux Malaparte's p e s s i m i s t i c view of s c e n e s are y e t a n o t h e r f i x t u r e of F e l l i n e s q u e cinema? W h i l e the F e l l i n i w h o shot Satyricon w a s c l e a r l y q u i t e s y m p a t h e t i c to the n o t i o n of s e x u a l a m b i g u i t y , the d i r e c t o r w h o made La Dolce vita a d e c a d e e a r l i e r u s e d gay c h a r a c t e r s as a m e a n s of u n d e r l y i n g c o n t e m p o r a r y d e c a d e n c e in a m a n n e r not u n l i k e Malaparte's. 2 0 I n t e r e s t i n g l y enough, Donovan's name w a s purged f r o m the e a r l i e s t A m e r i c a n t r a n s l a t i o n of La Pelle, as w e r e many of the book's more g r a p h i c s e x u a l d e s c r i p t i o n s . 2 1 232 E u r o p e ' s i m m i n e n t d o o m - a n d A m e r i c a ' s n a i v e a t t e m p t to p r e v e n t perhaps best impotently epitomized when a volcano erupts and U.S. it-is fighters pour m a c h i n e g u n b u l l e t s i n t o the l a v a in a v a i n a t t e m p t to s t o p i t . Once a c i v i l i z a t i o n had been r e d u c e d to a p r i m i t i v e survival l e v e l , M a l a p a r t e a p p a r e n t l y b e l i e v e d , t h e r e w a s n o t h i n g anyone c o u l d do to r e s t o r e i t to i t s f o r m e r s t a t e . 2 2 A l t h o u g h N e o r e a l i s m w a s abandoned by v i r t u a l l y i t s pure f o r m , i t s m o r a l a u t h o r i t y everyone in 2 3 c o n t i n u e d to h o l d s w a y o v e r the c o n s c i e n c e s of m o s t s e r i o u s I t a l i a n d i r e c t o r s . G u i d o A r i s t a r c o , the s e l f - a p p o i n t e d g u a r d i a n of M a r x i s t p u r i t y in I t a l i a n f i l m c r i t i c i s m , had f a m o u s l y t h u n d e r e d , "I s o l i o p p o s i t o r i del n e o r e a l i s m o f u r o n o dunque i f a s c i s t i , i r e a z i o n a r i di q u a l s i a s i s p e c i e " ( A r i s t a r c o 2 8 ) . S i n c e A m e r i c a m e d d l e d i n s o many o t h e r a s p e c t s of I t a l i a n life d u r i n g the e a r l y y e a r s of p o s t w a r p o l i t i c a l and e c o n o m i c r e c o v e r y , i t s h o u l d c o m e as no s u r p r i s e to d i s c o v e r t h a t H o l l y w o o d r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s w e r e s i m u l t a n e o u s l y doing e v e r y t h i n g in t h e i r p o w e r to u n d e r m i n e the c o m m e r c i a l h e a l t h of n e o r e a l i s m . A s A r i s t a r c o a s t u t e l y w a r n e d : "'11 M a n i f e s t o del C i r c o l o romano del c i n e m a d i c e anche d e l l a c o n c o r r e n z a a m e r i c a n , ' " s o t t o l i n e a nel 1 9 5 5 ' C i n e m a N u o v a ' che c o s i c o m m e n t a : 'Quando, tempo f a , venne in I t a l i a Mr. J o h n s o n p e r c o n t o d e l l a M P A A e c i i n v i t o c h i a r a m e n t e ad abbandonare l a s t r a d a del n e o r e a l i s m o con l a p r o m e s s a di a p r i c i , in c a m b i o , i grandi c i r c u i t i a m e r i c a n i , non fu d i f f i c i l e s c o r g e r e i l f i n e d e l l a m a n o v r a , l a quale t e n d e v a a e l i m i n a r e un ipo di c o n c o r r e n z a p e r i c o l o s a perche c o s t i t u i v a un genere b a s a t o su b a s s i c o s t i , per i n v i t a r e i n o s t r i i n d u s t r i a l i a s c e n d e r e in c a m p o s u l t e r r e n o d e g l i a m e r i c a n i , dove a l i a f i n e s a r e m m o s t a t i f a c i l m e n t e b a t t u t i (come g i a a c c a d d e 2 2 2 3 T h i s m e s s a g e , h a p p i l y , w a s not absorbed by I t a l y ' s g r e a t e s t l i f e - a f f i r m i n g director. Accatone, P i e r P a o l o P a s o l i n i ' s 1961 d i r e c t o r i a l debut, w a s r a t h e r p e r v e r s e l y s h o t i n a pure n e o r e a l i s t s t y l e . 233 t r e n t ' anni f a ; come e a c c a d u t o di r e c e n t e ad A r t h u r R a n k ) " ' ( N e o r e a l i s m o e nouva c r i t i c a 140). As things turned out, many Italian movies of less than A u g u s t i n i a n m o r a l r i g o u r did indeed p e n e t r a t e the A m e r i c a n m a r k e t in the e a r l y 1 9 6 0 s , d e s p i t e A r i s t a r c o ' s deep r e s e r v a t i o n s . Many of t h e s e f e a t u r e s w e r e s e r i o u s w o r k s w i t h a s e x u a l c o n t e n t t h a t U.S. c e n s o r s w e r e p r e p a r e d to t o l e r a t e in o v e r s e a s i m p o r t s , but not in motion picture productions. homegrown A decade l a t e r , when H o l l y w o o d f u n c t i o n e d u n d e r f e w e r " b l u e n o s e " c o n s t r a i n t s , the s e r i o u s d r a m a s of F e l l i n i , V i s c o n t i and A n t o n i o n i had been l a r g e l y r e p l a c e d by l i g h t s e x f a r c e s , many s t a r r i n g L a u r a A n t o n e l l i . By and l a r g e , t h e s e l a t e r w o r k s were i n f e r i o r not only to I t a l i a n c i n e m a ' s m a j o r p o s t w a r m a s t e r p i e c e s but a l s o to s u c h s k i l l f u l l y made s a t i r i c a l f a r c e s as V i t t o r i o de S i c a ' s oggi domani ( 1 9 6 3 ) and P i e t r o G e r m i ' s Divorzio all' Italiana (1961). F r a n c e s c o R o s i and the T a v i a n i b r o t h e r s w e r e p r o b a b l y the l a s t I t a l i a n c i n e a s t e s to be m o r e or l e s s guaranteed U.S. leri major distribution. B e r n a r d o B e r t u l u c c i s t i l l i s , p r i m a r i l y on a c c o u n t of the f a c t t h a t , f o r the l a s t f i f t e e n y e a r s , m o s t of h i s m o v i e s have been made w i t h A n g l o A m e r i c a n money and s h o t in E n g l i s h . 2 4 In r e t r o s p e c t , i t now s e e m s c l e a r t h a t I t a l i a n c i n e m a n e v e r a c h i e v e d m o r e than a succes d'estime among A m e r i c a n a u d i e n c e s , even d u r i n g i t s " a r t h o u s e " heyday. N a t i v e i n s u l a r i t y and s t u d i o m a n i p u l a t i o n of a d v e r t i s i n g , t h e a t r e c h a i n s , and p o p u l a r t a s t e - M P A A s p o k e m a n J a c k V a l e n t i has been t e l l i n g the world A c c o r d i n g to f i l m h i s t o r i a n P e t e r B o n d a n e l l a , even Last Tango in Paris ( 1 9 7 2 ) , the d i r e c t o r ' s f a m o u s s t u d y of a g r i e f - s t r i c k e n m i d d l e a g e d A m e r i c a n e x p a t r i a t e s e e k i n g s e x u a l s o l a c e i n the C i t y of L i g h t , w a s o r i g i n a l l y c o n c e i v e d , at l e a s t i n p a r t , as an i n v e r t e d , e n t i r e l y n e g a t i v e i m a g e of V i n c e n t e M i n n e l l i ' s i r r e p r e s s i b l y c h e e r f u l An American in Paris ( 1 9 5 1 ) 2 4 234 t h a t " A m e r i c a n s don't l i k e m o v i e s w i t h s u b t i t l e s ' " f o r the p a s t t h i r t y y e a r s - H o l l y w o o d on the T i b e r n e v e r s t o o d m u c h c h a n c e of t u r n i n g i n t o a New W o r l d succes de scandale. N e v e r t h e l e s s , in s p i t e of e v e r y t h i n g , the s p i r i t c o n t i n u e d to l i v e on. S o m e t i m e s i t of neorealism c r o p p e d up i n the m o s t unlikely p l a c e s . Who, f o r i n s t a n c e , w o u l d have e x p e c t e d to f i n d i t in w h a t later b e c a m e d e r i s i v e l y k n o w n as the " s p a g h e t t i w e s t e r n , " the i m m e n s e l y p o p u l a r I t a l o - A m e r i c a n s u b - g e n r e w h i c h d i r e c t o r S e r g i o Leone f i r s t c r o s s - b r e d in 1 9 6 4 ? In Per un pugno di dollari dollaro ( 1 9 6 4 ) and Per qualche in piu ( 1 9 6 5 ) , Leone e s t a b l i s h e d many of the c o n v e n t i o n s w h i c h h u n d r e d s of i m i t a t o r s w o u l d soon f o l l o w . U s u a l l y f r o n t e d by A m e r i c a n s t a r s ( m o s t f a m o u s l y C l i n t E a s t w o o d ) , f i l m e d in the p l a i n s of A n d a l u s i a ( E u r o p e ' s c l o s e s t e q u i v a l e n t to A m e r i c a ' s Old W e s t ) , and h e l m e d by Italian directors who sometimes affected Anglo-Saxon names, s p a g h e t t i w e s t e r n s w e r e both more c y n i c a l and b l o o d i e r than t h e i r U.S. c o u n t e r p a r t s . O c c a s i o n a l l y , they w e r e a l s o m o r e p o i n t e d l y A c c o r d i n g to U.S. c r i t i c Danny P e a r y , Per qualche dollaro political. in piu c o n t a i n s " t h e k e y p o l i t i c a l s c e n e i n a l l of L e o n e ' s w o r k : at the end E a s t w o o d p i l e s up the dead b o d i e s of V o l o n t e ' s gang, c o u n t i n g t h e m not by n u m b e r but by the b o u n t i e s each c o r p s e w i l l earn h i m . S o c i a l i s t L e o n e ' s p o i n t i s c l e a r : in c a p i t a l i s t A m e r i c a , dead men equate w i t h m o n e y " ( P e a r y 156). It might a l s o be n o t e d t h a t , in h i s h e r o i c l o n e r r o l e s w i t h L e o n e , E a s t w o o d ' s n a m e l e s s h e r o e s w e r e i n v a r i a b l y t r e a t e d to s a v a g e b e a t i n g s w h o s e i c o n o g r a p h y c o u l d e a s i l y be c o m p a r e d to t h a t of the C r u c i f i x i o n . Once a g a i n w e are r e m i n d e d of the d e e p l y b u r i e d , a l m o s t I t a l i a n c o n f l a t i o n of the briganti the Old W e s t . subliminal of m o d e r n S i c i l y w i t h the o u t l a w s of 235 M a r x i s m and C h r i s t i a n h u m a n i s m a s i d e , h o w e v e r , the n e o r e a l i s t element in spaghetti westerns was extremely slight. Super-heroes gunned d o w n a r m i e s of v i l l a i n s w i t h l i t t l e r e g a r d f o r the l a w s of e i t h e r p r o b a b i l i t y o r b a l l i s t i c s . In L e o n e ' s f i l m s in p a r t i c u l a r , w o m e n w e r e even s c a r c e r than they w e r e in the r e a l Old W e s t , w h i l e h i s c o l d - e y e d s u p e r - h e r o e s poured m o s t of t h e i r e r o t i c energy i n t o h i g h l y r i t u a l i z e d , c i r c u l a r d u e l s t h a t e m p h a s i z e d f l i n t y - e y e d c l o s e - u p s . In a w o r d , t h e y w e r e s t r a n g e . Of // Buono il brutto the Man W i t h No Name t r i p t y c h , il cattivo ( 1 9 6 6 ) , the l a s t panel i n P a u l i n e Kael wrote, "This Italian W e s t e r n s e t in our C i v i l W a r p e r i o d , l o o k s m o r e f o r e i g n to us than an ordinary Italian f i l m - w h i c h g i v e s r i s e to s p e c u l a t i o n about how we a l t e r the s c a l e , and hence the m e a n i n g , in our m o v i e v e r s i o n s of f o r e i g n s t o r i e s " (Going S t e a d y 53). Or, as A m e r i c a n c r i t i c B i l l Krohn put i t in a F r e n c h f i l m j o u r n a l , " L e o n e n ' e t a i t pas a m e r i c a i n , et l e c i n e m a dont i l t i r e son i n s p i r a t i o n l e p l u s p r o f o n d e n ' e t a i t l e n o t r e . II commence c o m m e a s s i s t a n t de V i t t o r i o de S i c a , et son p r e m i e r w e s t e r n f u t ' r e m a k e ' p r e s q u e s c e n e a s c e n e , de Yojimbo, p l a n e t e L e o n e " 12). un le f i l m de K u r o s a w a " ( " L a A s the I t a l i a n ' s f i l m s g r e w m o r e a m b i t i o u s , C l i n t E a s t w o o d began to f e e l as i f t h i s I t a l i a n a u t e u r w e r e " t r y i n g to be m o r e D a v i d L e a n t h a n S e r g i o L e o n e " ( S c h i c k e l 169). E v e n the filmmaker's g e n e r a l l y s y m p a t h e t i c f e l l o w c o u n t r y m a n L i n o M i c c h i c h e f e l t t h a t the d i r e c t o r w a s m o r e on P l a n e t a S e r g i o t h a n in the Old W e s t : ' " L e o n e a t t e s t a con grande e v i d e n z a al c a r a t t e r e f o n d a m e n t a l m e n t e asttrato del p r o p r i o c i n e m a : i l suo r e f e r e n t e e s c l u s i v o , i n f a t t i , r i s u l t a e s s e r e non g i a l a s t o r i a del W e s t , s i a pure f i l t r a t a a t t r a v e r s o l ' e p o p e a che ne ha f a t t o i l c i n e m a a m e r i c a n o , ma l ' e p o p e a c i n e m a t o g r a f i c a s t e s s a ; non 236 la s t o r i a , c i o e , e neppure il mito, ma l a s t o r i a del c i n e m a e la rapprentazione del mito.../" ( S t o r i a e f i l m 64). Leone h i m s e l f , h o w e v e r , w a s s t r o n g l y i n s i s t e n t on t h e . a b s o l u t e i m p o r t a n c e of H o l l y w o o d c i n e m a to h i s l i f e and w o r k . In a t r i b u t e to J o h n F o r d , he w r o t e , " J e n ' a u r a i s j a m a i s pu tourne // etait un fois dans 1'ouest, et m e m e Le Bon, la brute et le truand, s i l ' e n f a n t que j ' e t a i s n ' a v a i t vu l e s d e s e r t s de T A r i z o n a , l e s v i l l e s de b o i s en f e u que J o h n F o r d m o n t a i t dans une l u m i e r e pure et e t o n n a n t e " ( L e o n e 1 5 ) . F o r L e o n e , F o r d w a s a n y t h i n g but a r e a l i s t : " L a v e r i t a b l e f o r c e de s e s f i l m s on l a trouve dans la puissante irremediablement nostalgie p e r d u e s et s u r t o u t d'un monde aux frontieres dans s o n i d e e v i s i o n n a i r e de l ' A m e r i q u e qui t r a n s p i r a i t de chaque p h o t o g r a m m e " (Leone 15). It s h o u l d , p e r h a p s , be e m p h a s i z e d here t h a t t h e l a t e nineteenth c e n t u r y - t h e h i s t o r i c a l p e r i o d in w h i c h m o s t s p a g h e t t i w e s t e r n s w e r e s e t - w a s a t i m e when Italian i n t e l l e c t u a l i n t e r e s t in the New World was negligible to n o n - e x i s t e n t . T h e l i t e r a r y t r e a s u r e s of H e r m a n M e l v i l l e and Mark T w a i n w e r e not to be o f f i c i a l l y acknowledged for a n o t h e r h a l f c e n t u r y . L i t e r a r y P a r i s i a n s m i g h t have k e p t one u n q u i e t eye p e r m a n e n t l y f a s t e n e d on t h e b r a s h p o l i t i c a l and e c o n o m i c g i a n t g r o w i n g by l e a p s and bounds on t h e o t h e r s i d e of t h e A t l a n t i c f o r t w o c e n t u r i e s o r m o r e , but I t a l y ' s s e l f - i n v o l v e m e n t w i t h i t s o w n s e e m i n g l y i n s u p e r a b l e p r o b l e m s d i d not a l l o w N e a p o l i t a n w r i t e r s and F l o r e n t i n e p h i l o s o p h e r s the s a m e l e i s u r e . T h i s e a r l y i n d i f f e r e n c e has o f t e n had t h e u n i n t e n t i o n a l but u n a v o i d a b l e e f f e c t of m a k i n g I t a l i a n p o r t r a i t s of t h e A m e r i c a n p a s t s e e m even more f a b u l o u s (i.e. Zabriskie Point) than t h o s e of t h e F r e n c h . A m e r i c a n e c o n o m i c a t t i t u d e s , p o l i t i c a l a m b i t i o n s , and 237 ethnic hierarchies were already fully formed by t h e t i m e outside I t a l i a n o b s e r v e r s f i n a l l y took a b e l a t e d - i f g e n e r a l l y a d m i r i n g - l o o k . Even s o , i t would be w r o n g to s u g g e s t that distant Italian o b s e r v e r s w e r e e n t i r e l y b l i n d to U.S. f a u l t s . Even S e r g i o L e o n e , d e s p i t e h i s s e l f - e v i d e n t l o v e f o r a l l t h i n g s A m e r i c a n , w a s q u i t e c a p a b l e of implicitly criticizing anti-Italian s t e r o e t y p e s w i t h i n the iconography of H o l l y w o o d c i n e m a . It i s f o r t h i s r e a s o n , I a s s u m e , t h a t he made t h e underworld protagonists of Once Upon a Time in America, g a n g s t e r f i l m , J e w i s h r a t h e r than S i c i l i a n . h i s only 2 5 A s i d e f r o m L e o n e ' s p o p u l a r r i f f s on A m e r i c a n g e n r e s , f e w I t a l i a n productions motifs. of t h e 1 9 6 0 s and ' 7 0 s f e a t u r e d Marco Ferreri's Dilinger e morto significant (1969), for r e s t r i c t e d i t s e x p l i c i t U.S. c o n t e n t to a s i n g l e Chicago American instance, Sun-Times h e a d l i n e . S i n c e w e have a l r e a d y d i s c u s s e d t h e A m e r i c a n c o n n e c t i o n running through Francesco R o s i ' s c r i m i n a l autopsies in Chapter T w o , t h e r e i s no need to r e - c o n s i d e r t h e m here beyond t h e b a s i c a c t of r e m e m b r a n c e . T h e m a j o r e x c e p t i o n one s h o u l d make to t h i s r u l e w o u l d be t h e s i n g l e f l a s h b a c k s e q u e n c e i n Tre fratelli (1981) wherein Second W o r l d W a r e r a I t a l i a n s make j o y f u l c o n t a c t w i t h I t a l o - A m e r i c a n G.l.s. T h i s f i l m e d m e m o r y i s c l e a r l y a n o s t a l g i c homage to R o s s e l l i n i ' s Paisa. In t h e " A g e of Marx and Coca C o l a " , V i t t o r i o de S i c a made s e v e r a l features with partial e f f o r t s {After U.S. f i n a n c i n g , but none of t h e s e throw-away the Fox; Woman Times Seven) c a n be c o u n t e d among h i s H i s t o r i c a l l y s p e a k i n g , of c o u r s e , he w a s q u i t e w i t h i n h i s r i g h t s to do s o . U n t i l t h e y e m e r g e d t r i u m p h a n t f r o m the i n t e r - e t h n i c P r o h i b i t i o n gang w a r s of t h e l a t e 1 9 2 0 s and e a r l y 1 9 3 0 s , L a C o s a N o s t r a had to s h a r e urban p o w e r w i t h a l a r g e n u m b e r of I r i s h and J e w i s h A m e r i c a n gangs. If they had not, p o p u l a r s t e r e o t y p i n g i n the U.S. w o u l d d o u b t l e s s have f o l l o w e d a s o m e w h a t d i f f e r e n t course. 2 5 238 major works. "Toby D a m m i t / ' Federico F e l l i n i ' s short contribution the 1 9 6 8 h o r r o r - t h e m e d o m n i b u s f i l m Spirits to of the Dead, d e a l t w i t h a s e l f - l o a t h i n g A m e r i c a n a c t o r in R o m e , and the e p o n y m o u s a n t i - h e r o of Casanova ( 1 9 7 6 ) w a s p l a y e d by Donald S u t h e r l a n d . 2 6 Aside from these r e l a t i v e l y m i n o r d e t a i l s and one s i n g u l a r l y e v o c a t i v e f i l m t i t l e e Fred), the d i r e c t o r ' s post \9b0-oeuvre (Ginger w a s m o r e I t a l i a n and l e s s A m e r i c a n than w e r e h i s m o r e n a t u r a l i s t i c w o r k s of the 1 9 5 0 s ( w h i c h w e r e o f t e n f r o n t e d by s u c h m i n o r H o l l y w o o d s t a r s as R i c h a r d B a s e h a r t and B r o d e r i c k C r a w f o r d ) . A s has a l r e a d y been m e n t i o n e d , d u r i n g the l a s t d e c a d e of h i s l i f e ( 1 9 6 6 - 1 9 7 7 ) , R o b e r t o R o s s e l l i n i ' s c r e a t i v e e n e r g i e s w e r e a l m o s t e n t i r e l y c o n s u m e d by the p r o d u c t i o n of s e m i - d o c u m e n t a r y t e l e f i l m s about the l i v e s of c u l t u r a l l y s i g n i f i c a n t E u r o p e a n s . In s i m i l a r f a s h i o n , the l a v i s h h i s t o r i c a l d r a m a s w h i c h c h a r a c t e r i z e d the latter t h i r d of L u c h i n o V i s c o n t i ' s d i r e c t o r i a l c a r e e r m o r e or l e s s l i m i t e d U.S. influence to occasional casting choices. American enthusiasms, meanwhile, were director/poet's oft-stated 2 7 Pier Paolo P a s o l i n i ' s seemingly limited to the l i k i n g f o r the f i l m s and p e r s o n a of C h a r l i e C h a p l i n . T h a n k s to h e r m a s s c i r c u l a t i o n f a n s in New V o r k ' s j o u r n a l i s t i c c o m m u n i t y , L i n a W e r t m u l l e r w a s i n v i t e d to make a s i n g l e U.S. f e a t u r e (The End of the World in Our Usual Beds on a Night Full of Rain) in 1 9 7 6 , an entirely unsatisfactory venture which not only damaged the d i r e c t o r ' s r e p u t a t i o n , but w h i c h a l s o drove h e r back to the b u r l e s q u e 2 6 A l t h o u g h t e c h n i c a l l y a C a n a d i a n , S u t h e r l a n d i s s t i l l thought of as A m e r i c a n by m o s t Europeans. B u r t L a n c a s t e r ' s s t a r r i n g r o l e in // Gattopardo (1962) being by f a r the m o s t n o t a b l e . R e c o g n i z i n g t h i s f a c t , B e r n a r d o B e r t o l u c c i , u n q u e s t i o n a b l y the m o s t A m e r i c a n i z e d of the m a j o r I t a l i a n d i r e c t o r s , w o u l d s u b s e q u e n t l y use the a g i n g H o l l y w o o d a c t o r i n a l m o s t i d e n t i c a l i c o n o g r a p h i c f a s h i o n i n Novecento ( 1 9 7 6 ) . P e r h a p s not so c o i n c i d e n t a l l y , B e r t o l u c c i l i k e w i s e c h o s e D o n a l d S u t h e r l a n d , t h e d i s a g r e e a b l e l e c h e r of F e l l i n i ' s Casanova, f o r the part of A t t i l a , the c o n t r o v e r s i a l e p i c ' s f a s c i s t v i l l a i n . 2 7 239 portraits of I t a l i a n c u l t u r e w h i c h had made h e r f a m o u s in the first place. Ermanno O l m i ' s oeuvre w a s i n t e n s e l y n a t i o n a l , as w a s P i e t r o G e r m i ' s (even if Italian he did c a s t D u s t i n H o f f m a n i n h i s s e x u a l m o r e s , Alfredo Bertolucci's Last existentially tormented Alfredo). Tango in Pahs w i t h the (brilliantly last d a y s of p l a y e d by an Marlon B r a n d o ) , w h i l e La Luna ( 1 9 7 9 ) d e a l t w i t h the i n c e s t u o u s t r a v a i l s A m e r i c a n s in I t a l y . Indeed, aside of On the o t h e r h a n d , B e r n a r d o dealt U.S. e m i g r e 1973 s a t i r e of 2 8 from Bertolucci and Francesco Rosi, only M i c h e l a n g e l o A n t o n i o n i e v i n c e d s t r o n g U.S. i n t e r e s t s in the 1 9 6 0 s and ' 7 0 s . Professione: Reporter (1 9 7 5 ) d e a l t w i t h the Odyssey of a doomed overseas correspondent ( p l a y e d by t h a t q u i n t e s s e n t i a l l y actor, who Jack Nicholson) fatally a s s u m e s the American identity of an international arms dealer. While this feature was favourably received by m o s t A m e r i c a n c r i t i c s , A n t o n i o n i ' s e a r l i e r e f f o r t , Zabhskie Point ( 1 9 7 0 ) , m o s t d e f i n i t e l y w a s not. P r i m a r i l y c o n c e r n e d w i t h the r a d i c a l s t u d e n t m o v e m e n t in C a l i f o r n i a , c i r c a 1 9 6 9 , the f i l m w a s denounced by m o s t A m e r i c a n c r i t i c s as the m o s t v i c i o u s p i e c e of anti-American p r o p a g a n d a e v e r to be u n l e a s h e d by a n o n - E a s t e r n B l o c f i l m m a k e r . 2 9 The p a s s a g e of a l m o s t t h i r t y y e a r s h a s , a l a s , done v e r y l i t t l e to change I r o n i c a l l y , v i r t u a l l y a l l of the m o v i e s w h i c h B e r t o l u c c i a c t u a l l y made in the U n i t e d S t a t e s w e r e c o n c e r n e d w i t h m a t t e r s N e a r and F a r E a s t e r n . T h i s i s t r u e of The Last Emperor ( 1 9 8 7 ) , The Sheltering Sky ( 1 9 9 0 ) , and Little Buddha ( 1 9 9 4 ) . On the o t h e r hand, Stealing Beauty ( 1 9 9 6 ) , the d i r e c t o r ' s f i r s t I t a l i a n f e a t u r e s i n c e La Tragedia di un uomo hdiculo ( 1 9 8 1 ) , r e t u r n e d to h i s f a v o u r i t e t h e m e of A m e r i c a n s a b r o a d . W h a t ' s m o r e , i t w a s s i m u l t a n e o u s l y r e l e a s e d i n m a i n l y E n g l i s h and m a i n l y I t a l i a n language v e r s i o n s . T h u s , d e s p i t e a c e r t a i n t h e m a t i c r e p e t i t i o u s n e s s , Bernardo B e r t o l u c c i 2 8 r e m a i n s the m o s t e t h n i c a l l y u n c l a s s i f i a b l e of a l l m a j o r I t a l i a n f i l m m a k e r s . P e r h a p s b e c a u s e he w a s then l a r g e l y u n k n o w n to a l l but c o n n o i s s e u r s of a l t e r n a t i v e t h e a t r e , U.S. p l a y w r i g h t S a m S h e p a r d ' s c o n t r i b u t i o n to A n t o n i o n i ' s s h o o t i n g s c r i p t d i d n o t h i n g to a s s u a g e the c r i t i c s ' xenophobic fury. 2 9 240 this national c o n s e n s u s . P e r i o d I t a l i a n c r i t i c s , on the t e n d e d to see the f i l m v e r y d i f f e r e n t l y . "Alia maggior parte other hand, In the w o r d s of one of t h e m , dei r e c e n s o r i s t a t u n i t e n s i di Zabriskie Point s e m b r a , i n f a t t i , t o t a l m e n t e s f u g g i t o che l ' u l t i m o f i l m di M i c h e l a n g e l o A n t o n i o n i non e un ' p a m p h l e t ' contro I ' A m e r i c a , ma un p o e m a sull' A m e r i c a " ( M i c c i c h e 65). This difference of opinion reminds us o n c e a g a i n of L e p r o h o n ' s i n f i n i t e l y w i s e a x i o m f r o m Le Cinema italien: Pierre "Chaque pays e c r i t l ' h i s t o i r e a s a m a n i e r e " (Leprohon 3 2 ) . F o r I t a l y , t h i s m e a n t t h a t the long, p e r i o d i c a l l y p r o s p e r o u s , p o l i t i c a l chaos that f o l l o w e d the c o l l a p s e of the Roman E m p i r e - a s i t u a t i o n w h i c h did not e n t i r e l y change w i t h the t h e o r e t i c a l c o m p l e t i o n of the R i s o r g i m e n t o p r o c e s s - c a s t a l o n g s h a d o w o v e r t h a t c o u n t r y ' s i n h e r i t o r s , j u s t as A m e r i c a n s w e r e i n d e l i b y m a r k e d by the r e v o l u t i o n a r y e v e n t s of 1 7 7 6 , and F r e n c h m e n w e r e p e r m a n e n t l y changed by 1 7 8 9 , the y e a r w h e n B o u r b o n a b s o l u t i s m was dealt its death blow. These radically different political i n h e r i t a n c e s in l a r g e p a r t e x p l a i n the d i v e r g e n c e of F r e n c h and I t a l i a n a t t i t u d e s t o w a r d s the U n i t e d S t a t e s as c u l t u r a l s y m b o l and p o l i t i c a l entity. If F r a n c e has c a u s e to s e e the U n i t e d S t a t e s as a g l o b a l c o m p e t i t o r w h i c h t h r e a t e n s i t s o w n c l a i m s to b e i n g c o n s i d e r e d the u n i v e r s a l r e p u b l i c , one w o u l d e x p e c t I t a l i a n s to e x p e r i e n c e a c e r t a i n d e g r e e of envy i n r e g a r d to a n a t i o n w h o s e u n i t y can be r e a d as an i m p l i c i t r e p r o a c h to t h e i r t r a d i t i o n a l f r a c t i o u s n e s s . Even s o , i t m u s t be a d m i t t e d t h a t A m e r i c a n o p h o b i a has t h u s f a r n e v e r r e a c h e d the s a m e l e v e l s among I t a l i a n l e f t i s t s t h a t i t did among t h e i r F r e n c h - s p e a k i n g c o u n t e r p a r t s , d e s p i t e the f o r m e r g r o u p ' s g r e a t e r o b j e c t i v e g r i e v a n c e s . In p o l i t i c a l l y m i l i t a n t Roman c i r c l e s , s y m p a t h y f o r T h i r d W o r l d c a u s e s 241 and s u s p i c i o n of m a s s c u l t u r e 3 0 d i d not a u t o m a t i c a l l y t r a n s l a t e into e x p l i c i t c o n d e m n a t i o n of U.S. f o r e i g n p o l i c y i n S o u t h e a s t A s i a the w a y t h a t i t d i d a m o n g r a d i c a l P a r i s i a n s and B e r l i n e r s . G r a m s c i after a l l , had a r g u e d t h a t the ideology himself, of a n t i - A m e r i c a n i s m w a s i n h e r e n t l y s t u p i d . U n t i l the n a t i o n had s o l v e d i t s m o s t p r e s s i n g p r o b l e m of i n c o m p l e t e n a t i o n a l c o h e s i o n , I t a l i a n i n t e l l e c t u a l s w e r e not about to pre-emptively s l a m any s o c i o e c o n o m i c d o o r s t h a t m i g h t be m a d e t o s w i n g i n a p r o g r e s s i v e f a s h i o n w i t h i n the c o n t e x t of I t a l i a n c u l t u r e and social conditioning. thinkers have 3 1 P e r h a p s f o r r e l a t e d r e a s o n s , I t a l i a n w r i t e r s and generally been r e m a r k a b l y tolerant of foreigners' m i s c o n c e p t i o n s of t h e i r h o m e l a n d . U n l i k e t h e i r F r e n c h p e e r s , t h e y a l m o s t n e v e r w a x p a r a n o i d , w h i l e t h e i r o u t b u r s t s of t e s t i n e s s a r e f e w and f a r b e t w e e n . 3 2 D u r i n g the p a s t q u a r t e r c e n t u r y , I t a l i a n i n t e r e s t i n A m e r i c a n l i f e has not so m u c h w a n e d as b e c o m e m o r e p e r i p h e r a l to n a t i o n a l self- i n t e r e s t . C o n t e m p o r a r y and n e a r - c o n t e m p o r a r y w r i t e r s s u c h as U m b e r t o Eco and I t a l o C a l v i n o have w r i t t e n f r e q u e n t l y on A m e r i c a n t h e m e s and s u b j e c t s , but g e n e r a l l y i n a tone of c o o l d e t a c h m e n t t h a t s t a n d s i n T h e o d o r W. A d o r n o ' s i n f l u e n c e w a s at i t s peak d u r i n g the 1 9 6 0 s , t h e s a m e d e c a d e i n which Antonio G r a m s c i ' s prison diaries were f i n a l l y published in t h e i r entirety. 3 0 S i n c e both n a t i o n s a t t a i n e d u n i t a r y s t a t e h o o d more o r l e s s c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s l y d u r i n g the 1 8 7 0 s , a f t e r h a v i n g e x i s t e d f o r many c e n t u r i e s as g e o g r a p h i c a l a b s t r a c t s of r e l a t e d r e p u b l i c s and p r i n c i p a l i t i e s , i t w o u l d m a k e f o r an i n t e r e s t i n g s t u d y t o c o m p a r e and c o n t r a s t the v e r y d i f f e r e n t a t t i t u d e s t o w a r d s n a t i o n a l i d e n t i t y w h i c h have been h e l d by the c i t i z e n s of Italy and Germany. Such s p e c u l a t i o n i s , of c o u r s e , o u t s i d e the p a r a m e t e r s of the p r e s e n t d i s c u s s i o n . 3 1 S t e f a n o M o n t e f i o r e p r o v i d e d us w i t h one of t h e s e r a r e e x a m p l e s of i l l - h u m o u r i n the N o v e m b e r 14, 1 9 9 6 e d i t i o n of Corriere della Sera: " E m a f i a l a p a r o l a i t a l i a n a p i u c i t a t a nel l a s t a m p a s t r a n i e r a , " ( M o n t e f i o r e 14) t h i s l i n g u i s t i c p a t r i o t c o m p l a i n s . T h e w o r l d p r e s s , i t s e e m s , w i l l go to any l e n g t h s to add i n s u l t to i n j u r y : " U n r e g o l a m e n t e di c o n t i a T o k i o ? E s t a t a l a Japanese mafia. Non l a yakuza" ( M o n t e f i o r e 14.) S u c h d i s e n c h a n t m e n t w i t h m a i n l y A n g l o - S a x o n m e d i a i s , of c o u r s e , p r e t t y m i l d s t u f f w h e n c o m p a r e d t o t h e a n g r i e r j e r e m i a d s of Georges Duhamel and L o u i s - F e r d i n a n d C e l i n e . 3 2 242 s t a r k c o n t r a s t to the h o t - b l o o d e d , a l m o s t d e s p e r a t e e n t h u s i a s m s of C e s a r e P a v e s e and E l i o V i t t o r i n i . W h i l e i t i s s t i l l a l a n d of m a r v e l s , f o r these later authors potential it has l o n g s i n c e c e a s e d to be a H o l y L a n d of Italian salvation. Commissario Ambrosio might walk through the s t r e e t s of M i l a n t h i n k i n g about the l a t e s t Woody A l l e n m o v i e , and the t e r r o r i s t - h a u n t e d f a m i l y of G i a n n i A m e l i o ' s Colpire al cuore w a t c h dubbed e p i s o d e s of Kojak on T V , but t h e s e c u l t u r a l might comestibles a r e o n l y i m p o r t e d l u x u r i e s , not the s t a p l e s of t h e i r l i v e s . If I t a l y h a s b e c o m e s o m e w h a t m a r g i n a l i z e d in r e l a t i o n to the m o d e r n w o r l d , so has A m e r i c a in r e l a t i o n to Italy. S i n c e t h i s s i t u a t i o n i s i n many w a y s i n s e p a r a b l e f r o m p o s t m o d e r n e x i s t e n c e as a w h o l e , w e w i l l not e l a b o r a t e on i t h e r e . I n s t e a d , w e s h a l l c o n t i n u e the a r g u m e n t at the a p p r o p r i a t e p l a c e in C h a p t e r F o u r , o u r s t u d y of the d i s s o l u t i o n of n a t i o n a l i d e n t i t y w i t h i n the a c i d b a t h of a multinational world. 243 CHAPTER As FOUR: SLOUCHING TOWARDS the intellectuals twentieth tend to century view the fades United THE MILLENNIUM into the 21st, States from two French radically d i f f e r e n t , m u t u a l l y i n c o m p a t i b l e p e r s p e c t i v e s . On the one hand, t h e r e i s a c a l m a c c e p t a n c e of the c e n t r a l i t y o t h e r , t h e r e i s the h o r r i f i e d most extreme of U.S c u l t u r a l h e g e m o n y ; on the r e a l i z a t i o n t h a t the w o r s t f e a r s of anti-American Jeremiahs of the past have the been confirmed with interest. As Jack Ralite Diplomatique, wrote in a recent edition of Le Monde "Les enterprises geantes-Time Warner-Turner, Disney- A B C , W e s t i n g h o u s e - C B S - s o n t , de p l u s en p l u s p r e s e n t e s en E u r o p e , ou elles achetent interviennent des s t u d i o s , c o n s t r u i s e n t des s a l l e s multiplexes, dans l e s r e s e a u x c a b l e s , p a s s e n t des a c c o r d s a v e c l e s e n t e r p r i s e s l o c a l e s " ( R a l i t e 32). T h i s c e n t r a l i z a t i o n of c u l t u r a l has resulted in a situation where "Aux quelque 140 capital monopoles n a t i o n a u x de T a u d i o v i s u e l s ' e s t s u b s t i t u e un o l i g o p o l e m o n d i a l c o m p o s e de 5 ou 6 g r o u p e s avec un chef de f i l e a m e r i c a i n " 1 (Ralite 32). A g a i n s t C a n a d i a n r e a d e r s , s t e e p e d i n t h e i r o w n s u b j e c t i o n to the a l l - d e v o u r i n g U.S. m e d i a m a c h i n e , w i l l undoubtedly w a r m to the l e g i t i m a c y of R a l i t e ' s c l a i m s when they peruse the f o l l o w i n g p a s s a g e : " L e g o u v e r n e m e n t f r a n c a i s , r e p r e s e n t s p a r l e m i n i s t e r e des f i n a n c e s et s o u m i s a l a v i g i l a n c e des m i l i e u x de l a c r e a t i o n , s ' e f f o r c e d ' o b t e n i r une c l a u s e d ' e x c e p t i o n c u l t u r e l l e ' dans le AMI, s e m b l a b l e a c e l l e q u i , a l a demande du C a n a d a , f i g u r e d a n s l ' A c c o r d de l i b r e - e c h a n g e n o r d - a m e r i c a i n . . . . " ( R a l i t e 3 2 ) C a n a d i a n c u l t u r a l n a t i o n a l i s m has long been f u e l l e d by the notion that the nation north of the 4 9 t h P a r a l l e l i s the one m o s t in t h r a l l to U.S. e n t e r t a i n m e n t c o n g l o m e r a t e s . To d i s c o v e r t h a t the C a n a d i a n p r e d i c a m e n t s e e m s e n v i a b l e to a r e p r e s e n t i v e of F r a n c e , the m o s t c u l t u r a l l y independent of W e s t e r n E u r o p e a n s t a t e s , i s to r e a l i z e j u s t how c o m p l e t e A m e r i c a n c o n t r o l of the p r e s s and the a i r w a v e s has become. 1 244 t h i s u n r i v a l l e d c o l o s s u s , t h e r e i s no l o n g e r a C o m m u n i s t " O t h e r " to keep i t in c h e c k ; y i n g no l o n g e r k n o w s y a n g , n o r a n i m a a n i m u s . Indeed, in even the m o s t " p o s i t i v e " F r e n c h a c c o u n t s of A m e r i c a n t r i u m p h a l i s m , one can hear a c e r t a i n note of m e l a n c h o l y , the fatalistic sigh unwanted of defeated realists who know they must n e c e s s i t y . T h i s i s t r u e not only of Realpolitik-minded bow to Atlanticists of the R a y m o n d A r o n s c h o o l , but of l e f t i s t " h e r e t i c s " as w e l l . It a p p l i e s w i t h p a r t i c u l a r f o r c e to the m o s t i n f l u e n t i a l m e m b e r of t h i s s e c o n d group, J e a n B a u d r i l l a r d . W h i l e , as we s h a l l soon s e e , many F r e n c h w r i t e r s and f i l m m a k e r s s e t the s t a g e f o r B a u d r i l l a r d ' s p o s t - E u r o p e a n p e r s p e c t i v e , t h i s weary i c o n o c l a s t r e m a i n s the m o s t classical Gallic intellectual. In striking e x a m p l e of 1 9 8 5 , he w r o t e , world- the anti- "L'Amerique est p u i s s a n t e et o r i g i n a l e , l ' A m e r i q u e e s t v i o l e n t e et a b o m i n a b l e - i l ne f a u t chercher ni a effacer Tun ou l ' a u t r e , ni a reconcilier les deux" ( A m e r i q u e 87.) In l o v e w i t h A m e r i c a n f r e e w a y s and d e s e r t s , B a u d r i l l a r d r e v e l s i n the m i n d l e s s s p e e d of New W o r l d l i f e : " L a V i t e s s e e s t le t r i o m p h e de l ' e f f e t s u r l a c a u s e , l a t r i o m p h e de T i n s t a n t e s u r le t e m p s c o m m e p r o f o n d e u r , le t r i o m p h e de l a s u r f a c e et de l ' o b j e c t a l i t e pure s u r l a p r o f o n d e u r du d e s i r " ( A m e r i q u e 12). A t one p o i n t , he even f l i r t s w i t h the u n t h i n k a b l e by s u g g e s t i n g t h a t the h o m e l a n d of l y n c h i n g i s , i n practical t e r m s , l e s s r a c i s t t h a n the n a t i o n t h a t gave the huddled m a s s e s liberte, F r a n c e , on a s u r t o u t egalite, fraternite: l'impression world's "...quand on r e v i e n t v i s q u e u s e de p e t i t en r a c i s m e , de s i t u a t i o n f a u s s e et h o n t e u s e pour t o u t le monde. A l o r s qu'en A m e r i q u e , chaque ethnie, chaque race developpe une langue, une culture 245 c o m p e t i t i v e , p a r f o i s s u p e r i e u r e a c e l l e des ' a u t o c h t o n e s ' . . . " ( A m e r i q u e 82). To be s u r e , s o m e of the a u t h o r ' s c o m m e n t s do a p p e a r to be f a i r l y t r a d i t i o n a l . When he w r i t e s , f o r i n s t a n c e , t h a t " L e s A m e r i c a i n s c r o i e n t aux f a i t s , m a i s pas a l a f a c t i c i t e " imagine almost identical (Amerique words flowing 8 4 ) , one c o u l d e a s i l y f r o m the pen of A l e x i s de T o c q u e v i l l e . In s i m i l a r f a s h i o n , h i s c l a i m t h a t " . . . l ' A m e r i q u e e n t i e r e e s t pour nous un d e s e r t . La c u l t u r e e s t s a u v a g e : e l l e y f a i t le s a c r i f i c e de l ' i n t e l l e c t et de t o u t e e s t h e t i q u e , p a r t r a n s c r i p t i o n reel" (Amerique 97) inevitably r a i s e s the G e o r g e s D u h a m e l . In a p a r t i c u l a r l y imagine l i t t e r a l e dans le Eurocentric spectre e n t h u s i a s t i c m o m e n t , one S i m o n e de B e a u v o i r t r i g g e r i n g the following of could explosion of e c s t a t i c g u s h : " B e a u t e des N o i r e s , des P o r t o r i c a i n e s a New York. En d e h o r s de l ' e x c i t a t i o n s e x u e l l e que donne l a p r o m i s c u i t e r a c i a l e , i l f a u t d i r e que l e n o i r , le p i g m e n t des r a c e s s o m b r e s , e s t c o m m e un n a t u r e l qui s ' e x a l t e du f a r d a r t i f i c i e l fard pour c o m p o s e r une b e a u t e - n o n s e x u e l l e : a n i m a l e et s u b l i m e - q u i manque d e s e s p e r e m e n t aux v i s a g e s b l e r n e s " ( A m e r i o u e 2 1). Still, if Baudrillard s e e s A m e r i c a as a s u c c e s s f u l U t o p i a , a p a r a d i s e r e g a i n e d , the e n s u i n g g a r d e n of d e l i g h t s i s m o r e w o r m than apple. " L e p a r a d i s , " he w r i t e s , " e s t ce q u ' i l e s t , e v e n t u e l l e m e n t funebre, monotone et superficiel" (Amerique 96). Under Ronald's R e a g a n ' s h a p p y - f a c e d r e g i m e , he a r g u e s , the U n i t e d S t a t e s b e c a m e a g i a n t C a l i f o r n i a s a n d b o x , and, d e s p i t e i t s o f t - d e m o n s t r a t e d potency, a " m e n o p a u s a l " c u l t u r e . Under R e p u b l i c a n r u l e , w a r i t s e l f has b e c o m e a s o r t of a u d i o v i s u a l game. The i n v a s i o n of G r e n a d a , f o r e x a m p l e , e n j o y e d 246 the l u x u u r y of "[Un] S c e n a r i o s a n s r i s q u e , m i s e en s c e n e c a l c u l e e , e v e n e m e n t a r t i f i c i e l , s u c c e s a s s u r e " ( A m e r i q u e 107). N e e d l e s s to s a y , the p r e v i o u s c o n s t r u c t w a s b r o u g h t to the peak of p e r f e c t i o n by George Bush d u r i n g the G u l f War. A s B a u d r i l l a r d w o u l d have i t , " A p r e s l a guerre chaude (la v i o l e n c e du c o n f l i t ) , a p r e s l a g u e r r e froide morte-decongelation de l a g u e r r e f r o i d e - q u i nous l a i s s e aux p r i s e s a v e c le c a d a v r e de l a g u e r r e , et l a n e c e s s i t e de gener ce c a d a v r e en d e c o m p o s i t i o n , que p e r s o n n e aux c o n f i n s du G o l f e ne p a r v i e n t a r e s s u c i t e r . Ce que l ' A m e r i q u e , S a d d a m H u s s e i n et l e s p u i s s a n c e s du G o l f e se d i s p u t e n t l a - b a s , c ' e s t le c a d a v r e de l a g u e r r e " (La G u e r r e du G o l f e n'u a oas eu l i e u 9). In 1 9 9 1 , A m e r i c a ' s " v i r t u a l " energy w o u n d up s e r v i n g the i n t e r e s t s of the W h i t e H o u s e , the W e s t , I s r a e l and the A r a b m a s s e s : " T o u t se p a s s e c o m m e s ' i l a v a i t un agent de l a CIA d e g u i s e en Saladin" (La Guerre du Golfe n'u a pas eu lieu 71). General S c h w a r t z k o p f ' s p r e d i c t i o n of a c o s t l y c a m p a i g n ended in v i c t o r y tinged w i t h f a r c e : " P a r f o i s un t r a i t d ' h u m o u r n o i r : l e s douze m i l l e c e r c u e i l s a c h e m i n e s en meme t e m p s que l e s m u n i t i o n s et l e s a r m e s . La a u s s i , l e s A m e r i c a i n s avons f a i t preuve de p r e s o m p t i o n : l e u r s p e r t e s s o n t s a n s c o m m u n e m e s u r e avec l e u r s p r e v i s i o n s " (La Guerre du G o l f e n'u a pas eu 1 i e u 5 3 ) . Indeed, " U n s i m p l e c a l c u l f a i t a p p a r a i t r e que s u r 5 0 0 000 s o l d a t s i m p l i q u e s dans l e s o p e r a t i o n s du G o l f e , i l en s e r a i t m o r t t r o i s f o i s p l u s s i on l e s a v a i t l a i s s e s dans l a v i e c i v i l e , u n i q u e m e n t en a c c i d e n t s de l a r o u t e " (La Guerre du G o l f e n'u a pas eu l i e u 7 4 ) . When c o m p a r i n g Europe to A m e r i c a , B a u d r i l l a r d d o e s so i n a m a n n e r t h a t d e v a s t a t i n g l y d e f l a t e s the p r e t e n t i o n s of b o t h : " Q u a n d j e v o i s des A m e r i c a i n s , s u r t o u t i n t e l l e c t u a l s , l o u c h e r avec n o s t a l g i e s u r l ' E u r o p e son h i s t o i r e , s a m e t a p h y s i q u e , s a c u i s i n e , son p a s s e , j e me d i s 247 q u ' i l s ' a g i t l a d'un t r a n s f e r ! rnalheureux. L ' h i s t o i r e et le r n a r x i s m e s o n t c o m m e l e s v i n s f i n s et l a c u i s i n e ; i l s ne f r a n c h i s s e n t pas v r a i m e n t l ' o c e a n , m a l g r e l e s t e n t a t i v e s e m o u v a n t e s pour l e s a c c l i m a t e r . C ' e s t l a revanche j u s t i f i e e du f a i t que n o u s , E u r o p e e n s , n ' a v o n s j a m a i s apprivoiser vraiment l a m o d e r n i t e , qui se r e f u s e a u s s i a pu franchir l ' o c e a n , m a i s dans l ' a u t r e s e n s " ( A m e r i q u e 7 9 ) . F o r a l l h i s m o d e r n i t y , on t h i s l e v e l at l e a s t , B a u d r i l l a r d a p p r o a c h e s the U n i t e d S t a t e s in a manner indistinguishable f r o m t h a t of his i l l u s t r i o u s nineteenth- c e n t u r y f o r e b e a r , A l e x i s de T o c q u e v i l l e . Once a g a i n , Old W o r l d s are o l d , and New W o r l d s are n e w , and n e v e r the t w a i n s h a l l m e e t . In any e v e n t , n e i t h e r Europe nor A m e r i c a have any r e a l hope of triumphing quotidian over the realities: other "Mais in que the les effectless US ne void soient of postmodern plus le centre m o n o p o l i s t i q u e de l a p u i s s a n c e m o n d i a l e , ce n ' e s t pas q u ' i l s Taient p e r d u e , c ' e s t t o u t s i m p l e m e n t que le c e n t r e n ' e x i s t e p l u s " ( A m e r i o u e 105). T h i s p r o b l e m i s i n t i m a t e l y r e l a t e d to the 2 0 t h c e n t u r y c o m m o d i t y w h i c h i s in s h o r t e s t s u p p l y : " A u j o u r d ' h u i , t o u t e s t l i b e r e , l e s j e u x s o n t faits, et nous nous r e t r o u v o n s collectivement devant la question c r u c i a l e : QUE FAIRE A P R E S L ' O R G I E ? " (La T r a n s p a r e n c e du m a l 1 1). In the l a t e 2 0 t h c e n t u r y , A m e r i c a n i n f l u e n c e i s by no m e a n s the o n l y t h r e a t to F r e n c h amour-propre: "Les cultures fortes (Mexique, J a p o n , I s l a m ) nous r e n v o i e n t le m i r o i r de n o t r e c u l t u r e d e g r a d e e , et l ' i m a g e de n o t r e c u l p a b i l i t e p r o f o n d e " ( A m e r i o u e 121). If we jump f o r w a r d a decade in t i m e , we w i l l discover that B a u d r i l l a r d ' s once unusual p e r s p e c t i v e s have b e c o m e c o i n of the r e a l m in c o n t e m p o r a r y F r e n c h d i s c o u r s e . If t h i s i s not a l w a y s immediately a p p a r e n t , i t i s p r o b a b l y b e c a u s e not e v e r y o n e a c c e p t s the n e w world 248 order with the same sanguine, shoulder-shrugging r e p e a t e d l y d e m o n s t r a t e d by the a u t h o r of Amerique. indifference W h i l e hope f o r F r a n c e ' s f u t u r e i s now e x c e e d i n g l y r a r e , the w i l l to r e s i s t i s f a r f r o m dead. Le Monde Diplomatique, f o r i n s t a n c e , c o n t i n u e s to r a i l a g a i n s t the d y i n g of the (European) l i g h t in f r o n t page a r t i c l e / e d i t o r i a l s . In one s u c h t h i n k p i e c e , Ignacio R a m o n e t c o m p l a i n e d t h a t " l ' e m p i r e a r n e r i c a i n est l e s e u l au m o n d e , c ' e s t une h e g e m o n i e e x c l u s i v e , et c'est la p r e m i e r e f o i s que ce phenomene e t r a n g e s u r v i e n t dans 1 ' h i s t o i r e de l ' h u m a n i t e " (Ramonet 10). Ramonet s e e m s p a r t i c u l a r l y d i s t u r b e d by U.S. d o m i n a n c e of E u r o p e a n m e d i a : " . . . s u r l e s 5 0 c h a i n e s e u r o p e e n e s de t e l e v i s i o n a d i f f u s i o n n a t i o n a l . . . l e s f i l m s a m e r i c a i n s r e p r e s e n t a i e n t , en 1 9 9 3 , 55% de l a p r o g r a m m a t i o n " (Ramonet 1). In all s u c h a r t i c l e s , the editorialists typically focus on a c u l t u r a l l y t h r e a t e n e d Europe r a t h e r than a c u l t u r a l l y t h r e a t e n e d F r a n c e . In the l a t e 1 9 9 0 s , only a u n i t e d Europe s e e m s s t r o n g enough to r e s i s t extra-continental s o c i o - e c o n o m i c i n c u r s i o n s , a changed s t a t e of a f f a i r s f r o m the C o l d W a r days w h e n European e n t r e p r e n e u r s d e f e n d e d virtually any A m e r i c a n c o n n e c t i o n on the g r o u n d s t h a t i t c o u l d o n l y s t r e n g t h e n the Old W o r l d ' s f i r s t l i n e of d e f e n c e a g a i n s t C o m m u n i s m , b o t h f o r e i g n and d o m e s t i c . W i t h the c o l l a p s e of the S o v i e t U n i o n , h o w e v e r , the old p l a y i n g f i e l d w a s changed beyond r e c o g n i t i o n . Interestingly e n o u g h , i n Le Monde's pan-European polemics, A m e r i c a i s no l o n g e r p r e s e n t e d as the only c a p i t a l i s t b a r b a r i a n at the g a t e s . I n c r e a s i n g l y , J a p a n e s e e c o n o m i c s u c c e s s e s are r i n g i n g alarm b e l l s as w e l l . In h i s r e c e n t s t u d y of the g r o w i n g p o w e r of the w o r l d ' s l a r g e s t m u l t i n a t i o n a l s , F r e d e r i c F. C l a i r m o n t p o i n t e d out t h a t , at the 249 p r e s e n t t i m e , J a p a n c o n t r o l s 6 2 of t h e s e e c o n o m i c j u g g e r n a u t s while A m e r i c a i s in c h a r g e of only 5 3 . The Land of the R i s i n g S u n , the a u t h o r c o n t e n d s , i s even m o r e of a c h a l l e n g e r than t h e s e f i g u r e s s u g g e s t . He w r i t e s , "11 e x i s t e c i n q e n t e r p r i s e s M i t s u b i s h i p a r m i l e s ' d e u x c e n t s p r e m i e r e s ' , dont le c h i f f r e d ' a f f a i r e s agrege d e p a s s e l e s 3 2 0 m i l l i a r d s de d o l l a r s " ( C l a i r m o n t 16). In o t h e r w o r d s , M i t s u b i s h i by i t s e l f is e c o n o m i c a l l y m o r e p o w e r f u l than the 1 1 m u l t i n a t i o n a l s c o n t r o l l e d by H o l l a n d , V e n e z u e l a , S w e d e n , B e l g i u m , M e x i c o , C h i n a , B r a z i l and C a n a d a . Under the c i r c u m s t a n c e s , the need f o r an e c o n o m i c a l l y u n i t e d E u r o p e an a r e a w h i c h , a f t e r all, still c o n t r o l s 37% of the top 2 0 0 global c o r p o r a t i o n s - s e e m s more urgent than ever. Le Monde, i n t r i g u i n g l y cultural e n o u g h , s e e m s as p e t r i f i e d of J a p a n e s e i n f l u e n c e as i t i s of the i s l a n d n a t i o n ' s e c o n o m i c s t r e n g t h . P e r h a p s b e c a u s e they have a p p a r e n t l y s e i z e d a " f r i g h t e n i n g " 50% of the French bandes dessinees market-by expanding it, it should be e m p h a s i z e d , not by d e c i m a t i n g i t - P a s c a l L a r d e l l i e r ' s r a t h e r p a r a n o i d a r t i c l e on the J a p a n e s e manga e m p h a s i z e d the a l l e g e d c r u d i t y , c r u e l t y , and i n h u m a n i t y of t h i s i m m e n s e l y p o p u l a r c o m i c book f o r m , while s a y i n g v e r y l i t t l e about i t s c r o w d - p l e a s i n g v i s u a l s t y l e ( L a r d e l l i e r 2 9 ) . N o w a d a y s , i t w o u l d s e e m , the b a r b a r i a n s a t t a c k f r o m b o t h e a s t and w e s t . F o r t h o s e who a s s o c i a t e F r e n c h c u l t u r e w i t h the e a r l y e s p o u s a l of B l a c k j a z z , nigritude, B e n i n s c u l p t u r e , japonaiserie, Mesoamerican m y s t i c i s m , and a h o s t of o t h e r n o n - w h i t e or n o n - W e s t e r n i n f l u e n c e s , the t h i n l y - v e i l e d x e n o p h o b i a of s u c h a r t i c l e s m u s t c o m e as s o m e t h i n g of a s u r p r i s e . C o u l d R e g i s D e b r a y , C h e ' s c a m p a i g n c o m p a n i o n in B o l i v i a and the m o s t a d m i r e d i n t e l l e c t u a l m a n - o f - a c t i o n s i n c e A n d r e M a l r a u x , 250 r e a l l y f e a r t h a t F r a n c e i s b e c o m i n g "un pays sans Jules, sans Ernest, un plein pays de Boris et d'Ursula, Milan et Julio..." resurgence of (Debray 186). French l e f t - w i n g Indeed, activism sans de Djamila prior to a propos Hippolyte, et de Rachel, the refreshing the country's r e a c t i o n a r y new a n t i - i m m i g r a t i o n l a w s , i t s e e m e d f o r a t i m e t h a t m o s t of the n a t i o n ' s l e a d i n g i n t e l l e c t u a l s a c c e p t e d at l e a s t s o m e of the p l a n k s of J e a n - M a r i e Le P e n ' s n e o - f a s c i s t p r o g r a m . In r e a l i t y , of c o u r s e , m o d e r n F r a n c e f a l l s s o m e w h e r e in b e t w e e n the e x t r e m e s of a c t i v i s m and r e a c t i o n . Much P a r i s i a n intellectual d i s c o n t e n t i s not so much a r e j e c t i o n of the o u t s i d e w o r l d as i t i s a d e s p e r a t e , a l m o s t e c o l o g i c a l , a t t e m p t to p r e v e n t the d e s t r u c t i o n of the e n v i r o n m e n t they know b e s t . It a l s o c o n s t i t u t e s a r e a r - g u a r d a t t e m p t to p r e s e r v e F r a n c e ' s r o l e as the " A t h e n s " of the m o d e r n w o r l d long a f t e r i t s t o p p e d a t t e m p t i n g to be i t s " R o m e " . S i n c e the a u t h o r i t y for t h i s r o l e r e s t s s o l e l y w i t h the F r e n c h R e v o l u t i o n and the s o c i o p o l i t i c a l E n l i g h t e n m e n t w h i c h i t s p a w n e d , any c h a l l e n g e to t h i s increasingly f r a g i l e l e g i t i m a c y i s d e e p l y r e s e n t e d . One f i n d s t h i s a t t i t u d e c r o p p i n g up in a d i z z y i n g v a r i e t y of f o r m s . Even Liberation's recent "Livres Tokyo 1 9 9 7 " supplement seemed f a r more preoccupied w i t h F r a n c e ' s d e c l i n i n g i n f l u e n c e on J a p a n e s e thought than i t w a s w i t h the r e a l i t y of J a p a n e s e l i t e r a t u r e t o d a y . "[Meme] s i l e s n o m s de D e l o n et de B a r d o t d i s e n t e n c o r e v a g u e m e n t quelque c h o s e , l ' l t a l i e s e m b l e a v o i r r e m p l a c e e l a F r a n c e dans l a p e t i t e p l a c e que l e s J a p o n a i s l a i s s e n t aux m o d e s o c c i d e n t a l e s , " one c r i t i c complains (Haraig K i l l ) , w h i l e another is o b v i o u s l y d e l i g h t e d w h e n a J a p a n e s e a u t h o r a s s e r t s t h a t the h i g h e s t p r a i s e one can p r o f f e r a book i s to l i k e n i t to J e a n G e n e t ' s Journal voleur (Ludon 111). In t h i s c o n t e x t , i t w o u l d s e e m , the U n i t e d S t a t e s du 251 does not t r u l y count as the " W e s t " . F o r H a r a i g and h i s a s s o c i a t e s , the w o r d occidentale o b v i o u s l y r e f e r s to E u r o p e , and not the N e w W o r l d , w h i c h i s a l m o s t as d o m i n a n t in J a p a n as i t i s e v e r y w h e r e e l s e . T h i s u n d e r s t a t e d but v e r y c o m m o n a t t i t u d e p u t s the s t i n g i n t o A l a i n F i n k i e l k r a u t ' s La Defaite de la pensee, the n e w philosopher's a n g u i s h e d a c c o u n t of the d e f e a t of F r e n c h - c e n t r e d " u n i v e r s a l " v a l u e s at the hands of a v a s t n u m b e r of m u l t i - c u l t u r a l v i l l a i n s who justify their adaptations of reversion to barbarism with cynical the p a r t i c u l a r i s t i d e a s of J o h a n n G o t t f r i e d von H e r d e r and A i m e C e s a i r e . " D i e u e s t m o r t , " the a u t h o r s n e e r s , " m a i s l e Volksgeist (Finkielkraut est fort" 143.) A g a i n s t the c l a i m s of the T h i r d W o r l d n a t i o n a l i s t s , m i n d l e s s young p e o p l e , and pop c u l t u r a l P h i l i s t i n e s who have s e e m i n g l y i n h e r i t e d the e a r t h , the p h i l o s o p h e r a d v a n c e s the w a r n i n g t h a t , " L a liberte est impossible a l'ignorant" (Finkielkraut 168) Most e x a s p e r a t i n g of a l l , " L e s i n t e l l e c t u e l s ne se s e n t e n t p l u s c o n c e r n e s p a r l a s u r v i e de l a c u l t u r e " ( F i n k i e l k r a u t 163). What i s p e r h a p s m o s t f a s c i n a t i n g f o r n o n - F r e n c h r e a d e r s of t h i s book i s the i n e s c a p a b l e f a c t t h a t i t s a u t h o r , a " u n i v e r s a l " c h a m p i o n who a t t a c k s p e t t y n a t i o n a l i s m s on e v e r y f r o n t , i s s e e m i n g l y o b l i v i o u s to the o b v i o u s o b j e c t i o n t h a t w h a t h e ' s r e a l l y d o i n g i s d e f e n d i n g one f o r m of r e g i o n a l i s m - t h a t of h i s h o m e l a n d , F r a n c e , the c r a d l e of the F r e n c h R e v o l u t i o n and i t s a v a t a r N a p o l e o n - a g a i n s t a l l the o t h e r s . He t h i n k s l i k e a s e c o n d c e n t u r y B.C. A t h e n i a n c o w e d by the competing s h a d o w s of R o m e , S p a r t a , and Macedon. He l i t e r a l l y c a n ' t s e e t h a t the " t r e e " he d e f e n d s i s j u s t a n o t h e r p a r t of the " f o r e s t " he c o n d e m n s . If t h i s s e e m s s e l f - e v i d e n t to A n g l o - C a n a d i a n - A m e r i c a n r e a d e r s , w e s h o u l d p e r h a p s b e a r in m i n d t h a t , as a group, w e are e q u a l l y prone to 252 making universalis!: claims of equivalent self-centeredness. For m o n o l i n g u a l a n g l o p h o n e s , the w o r l d s p e a k s E n g l i s h and E n g l i s h o n l y . To be m u l t i l i n g u a l , i n s u c h c i r c l e s , i s to s t a n d o u t , to be e l i i t i s t , to deny the u n i f y i n g p r i m a c y of the w o r l d ' s l a t e s t l i n g u a f r a n c a - i n e f f e c t , s p e a k one of the s o c i a l l y d i v i s i v e t o n g u e s d e v i s e d by S a t a n a f t e r fall of the proponent powerful Tower of Babel. Although it is currently the the loudest of E u r o p e a n u n i t y , of the Old W o r l d ' s need f o r a n e w and polyglot s t a t e , F r a n c e in many w a y s m i r r o r s these A n g l o - A m e r i c a n s e n t i m e n t s . T h e m e m o r y of F r e n c h as the e d u c a t e d lingua franca is s t i l l national to tongue's very much a l i v i n g memory subsequent replacement world's i n P a r i s , and the by J o h n n y - C o m e - L a t e l y E n g l i s h i s both r e m e m b e r e d and r e s e n t e d . Indeed, i f F r a n c e , E n g l a n d , and the U n i t e d S t a t e s did not c o n t a i n s u c h t e t c h y , e a s i l y - b r u i s e d e g o s , the age-old dance of Anglo/French and Franco-American love/hate r e a c t i o n s c o u l d n e v e r have t a k e n p l a c e . A s La R o c h e f o u c a u l d so a p t l y put i t , " N o s e n n e m i s a p p r o c h e n t p l u s de l a v e r i t e dans l e s jugements q u ' i l s f o n t que nous n'en a p p r o c h o n s n o u s - m e m e s " (La R o c h e f o u c a u l d 18). B e f o r e t r a v e l l i n g any f u r t h e r in t h i s d i r e c t i o n , i t w o u l d p r o b a b l y be b e s t to r e t u r n to the p r e c i s e p o i n t w h e r e w e d e c a m p e d at the end of C h a p t e r One. A s the r e a d e r may r e c a l l , we ended t h a t s e g m e n t w i t h a b r i e f c o n s i d e r a t i o n of Mobile and 6 810 OOO litres d'eau par t w o of M i c h e l B u t o r ' s e a r l i e r etudes stereophoniques, to a day i n the l i f e of e a c h of A m e r i c a ' s c o n s t i t u e n t seconde, the f i r s t d e v o t e d s t a t e s , and the s e c o n d to a y e a r i n the l i f e of N i a g a r a F a l l s . D e s p i t e t h e i r e x p e r i m e n t a l literary inherited f o r m a t , many of the i d e a s c o n t a i n e d i n t h o s e t e x t s from previous generations of French literary were travellers 253 exploring the mysteries of the New W o r l d . The g h o s t l y voices of m a r t y r e d , m y s t i c a l Indians and o p p r e s s e d , m a r g i n a l l y - e m p l o y e d B l a c k s o w e d as m u c h to a g e - o l d P a r i s i a n p r e s u p p o s i t i o n s about A m e r i c a as t h e y d i d to the New W o r l d ' s i n d i s p u t a b l y ugly r a c i a l h i s t o r y . c e l e b r a t i o n of A m e r i c a n o p u l e n c e and v a r i e t y , of a m a t e r i a l Butor's plenitude t h a t w a s as d e p r e s s i n g l y r e p e t i t i o u s as i t w a s s e n s u a l l y e x h i l a r a t i n g , was chronologically f a r more s p e c i f i c , harking back to the French t r a v e l l e r s of the l a t e 1 9 4 0 s , the s t a r v e d p i l g r i m s who f l e d d e f e a t e d , r a t i o n - r i d d e n F r a n c e to f e e d off the f l e s h p o t s of New Vork. D e s p i t e h i s c o n n e c t i o n to the nouveaux romanciers, B u t o r ' s books f i t p e r f e c t l y into the t i m e - h o n o u r e d c h a i n of F r a n c o - A m e r i c a n t r a v e l j o u r n a l s . La Brume a Santa Barbara w a s s o m e w h a t d i f f e r e n t . F o r one t h i n g , the a u t h o r a p p e a r s not as an e n l i g h t e n e d v i s i t o r but as a g u e s t w o r k e r . F o r a n o t h e r , the s t o r y u n f o l d s e n t i r e l y in S o u t h e r n C a l i f o r n i a , f a r f r o m the t r a d i t i o n a l author t o u r i s t c e n t r e s of C h i c a g o and N e w Vork. W h i l e i s t e a c h i n g at the U n i v e r s i t y c a m p u s , a bomb goes o f f , m o r t a l l y the of C a l i f o r n i a ' s S a n t a B a r b a r a wounding a night w a t c h m a n : " L e g a r d i e n e s t m o r t deux j o u r s p l u s t a r d s a n s a v o i r r e p r i s c o n n a i s s a n c e . . . L ' a f f a i r e devenant m e u r t r e , le FBI v i n t e n q u e t e r " (Ou: La genie du l i e u 2 95.) N e e d l e s s to s a y , J . E d g a r H o o v e r ' s a g e n t s " f i t p e s e r des s o u p c o n s s u r l e s o r g a n i s a t i o n s de gauche, c e l l e s des N o i r s en p a r t i c u l i e r " (Ou: La g e n i e du l i e u 2 9 5 ) . T h u s , the s n a k e s l i t h e r e d i n t o p a r a d i s e , " e t comprenions qu'on eut pu nommer Pacifique cet Ocean nous fameux a u j o u r d ' h u i p a r l e s f u r e u r s . L e s v a g u e s , l e s o i s e a u x , l e s b r a n c h e s " (Ou: La genie du l i e u 2 9 9 ) . T h i s b r i e f w o r k i s e s s e n t i a l f o r a n u m b e r of h i s t o r i c a l r e a s o n s . F o r one t h i n g , i t i s among the v e r y f i r s t F r e n c h t e x t s to be s e t in 254 S o u t h e r n C a l i f o r n i a , to use the " f l a k y " s t a t e as a p a r a d i g m f o r A m e r i c a tout court. F o r a n o t h e r i t s e p a r a t e s i t s e l f f r o m the s l i g h t l y patronizing a t t i t u d e t o w a r d s A m e r i c a n B l a c k people t h a t even J e a n - P a u l S a r t r e f e l l p r e y to in La Putain respectueuse. Although they cannot " p a s s " for w h i t e l i k e the v i n d i c t i v e m u l a t t o hero of B o r i s V i a n ' s J'irai cracher sur vos against the tombes, dark-skinned rebels s t i l l s y s t e m , using their off-centre manage to r e v o l t stage obscurity as a d e a d l y weapon i n s t e a d of a s e n t i m e n t a l p l a y f o r f o r e i g n e r s ' p i t y . La Brume a Barbara l a p s a g a i n s t none of the t r a d i t i o n a l Chateaubriand l a n d s c a p e s c h e r i s h e d by and de T o c q u e v i l l e . B u t o r ' s Americans are i m m a n e n t , e x i s t i n g in a rapidly changing present, c o m p l e t e l y from Europeans and yet still somehow Santa caught up in totally different the same c o n v u l s i o n s t h a t g r i p p e d F r a n c e , I t a l y , and G e r m a n y i n May of 1968. A f t e r B u t o r , the U n i t e d S t a t e s w i l l n e v e r be s e e n t h r o u g h F r e n c h e y e s in q u i t e the s a m e w a y a g a i n . J e a n F r a n c o i s L y o t a r d ' s Le Mur du Pacifique, the s a m e t i m e as La Brume a Santa Barbara, a p p e a r e d at r o u g h l y and w e n t o v e r m u c h the s a m e ground. T h i s t e x t i s a l l e g e d l y w r i t t e n by e i t h e r M e r l i n V a c l e z o r M i c h e l V a c l a y , a w o u l d - b e i n s t r u c t o r at yet a n o t h e r of the U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a ' s ubiquitous campuses: " L e s V i s i t i n g P r o f e s s e u r s europeens s u r l e s c a m p u s s o n t l e s p r e c e p t e u r s g r e c s . . . . " (Le Mur du P a c i f i o u e 2 0 ) . F o r h i m , the F r a n c o - A m e r i c a n p a r a l l e l s b e t w e e n Rome and G r e e c e are now complete: "Les presidents americains sont des empereurs, Washington est Rome, les E t a t s - U n i s d'Amerique sont l ' l t a l i e , 1'Europe est is leur Grece" (Le Mur du Pacifioue 19). If California now e m b l e m a t i c of the e n t i r e U.S.A., t h i s i s b e c a u s e t h a t f o r m e r l y S p a n i s h speaking region is-Hawaii being summarily excluded from 255 c o n s i d e r a t i o n on the grounds t h a t the h i s t o r y of t h i s f o r m e r P o l y n e s i a n k i n g d o m c a n be b e t t e r u n d e r s t o o d w i t h i n a N o r t h / S o u t h most westerly U.S. s t a t e : " C ' e t a i t context-the TOuest absolu: Les moyens du c a p i t a l i s m e a m e r i c a i n , c ' e s t - a - d i r e le p o u v o i r r o m a i n ; l a b e a u t e des c o r p s c o u r a n t s u r l e s plages.... (Le Mur du P a c i f i o u e 41.) L y o t a r d ' s v i s i o n of A m e r i c a n i m p e r i a l s p l e n d o u r r e a d s l i k e a c r o s s b e t w e e n a D a v i d Hockney p a i n t i n g and an e p i s o d e of Baywatch: " L ' O u e s t a b s o l u n ' e s t que v i l l e s , j a r d i n s i r r i g u e s , p l a g e s et d e s e r t s , en c e l a t o u t c o n f o r m e au P r o c h e - O r i e n t " (Le N u r du P a c i f i a u e 18). T h i s n o t i o n of C a l i f o r n i a as the new s e a t of the P a x A m e r i c a n a w o u l d be e c h o e d , in d i v e r s e w a y s , by I t a l i a n as w e l l as F r e n c h w r i t e r s , f o r the r e s t of the 2 0 t h c e n t u r y . F o r , d e s p i t e t h e i r i n c r e a s e d i n t e r e s t i n the q u o t i d i a n r e a l i t i e s of the U.S.A., B u t o r and L y o t a r d w e r e ultimately m o r e i n t e r e s t e d in r e - r o u t i n g the Myth of A m e r i c a than in d e s t r o y i n g . i t a l t o g e t h e r . T h i s w a s in p a r t a r e f l e c t i o n of r e a l i t y . S i n c e the early 1 9 6 0 s , A m e r i c a n w e a l t h and i n d u s t r y have t r a v e l l e d in a S o u t h w e s t e r l y d i r e c t i o n , l e a v i n g the N o r t h e r n i n d u s t r i a l s t a t e s s o m e w h a t b e r e f t . Even New Y o r k , s t i l l u n c h a l l e n g e d as the hub and a x i s of A m e r i c a n high a r t , had been r e n d e r e d an e c o n o m i c b a s k e t c a s e by radical shifts in e c o n o m i c s as w e l l as d e m o g r a p h i c s . If W a s h i n g t o n w a s R o m e , then L o s A n g e l e s w a s C o n s t a n t i n o p l e , the c a p i t a l of a s e c o n d Roman E m p i r e t h a t w o u l d l o n g o u t l i v e the f i r s t . Much of Le Mur du Pacifique w a s t a k e n up w i t h m e d i t a t i o n s on the n a t u r e of the B l a c k m a l e p s y c h e , the angry l i b i d o t h a t i n c e s s a n t l y s u f f e r e d in the s o c i o - p s y c h o l o g i c a l m a z e of W h i t e c a p i t a l i s m . A g r e a t many of t h e s e p r o n o u n c e m e n t s s e e m to have been i n s p i r e d by p r i m a r i l y Black literary s o u r c e s , in p a r t i c u l a r Richard Wright's Black Boy, 256 E l d r i d g e C l e a v e r ' s Soul on Ice, and R a l p h E l l i s o n ' s Invisible Man. If " V o t r e v e r g e e s t n o i r e , done vous n ' e x i s t e z p a s , le b l a n c s e u l e x i s t e " (Le Mur du P a c i f i o u e 3 2 ) . In t h i s s i t u a t i o n , " L a peau b l a n c h e s o u l e v e le d e s i r meteque comme l ' i n t e r i e u r appelle l'exterieur...." (Le M u r du P a c i f i o u e 19). The n a t u r e of t h i s hunger i s u n a v o i d a b l y ugly: " C o m m e n t s i t u o n s - n o u s le d e s i r de v i o l e r qui naTt dans l a verge m e t e q u e ? " (Le Mur du P a c i f i o u e 3 4 ) . F r o m A f r i c a n - A m e r i c a n a n g s t , i t ' s a s h o r t j o u r n e y to F r a n t z F a n o n ' s m o d e l of the c o l o n i z e d m i n d : " C ' e s t Rome qui le rend a i n s i : La C e s a r e b l a n c h e s u s c i t e l e s m a s q u e s a s a p e r i p h e r i e , e l l e f a i t l e v e r des e p a i s s e u r s , e l l e s ' e n t o u r e de s i g n e s , de s i n g e s , de f o u s , de n e g r e s , de g r e c s , de j u i f s , d ' a r a b e s , de c h i n o i s , de r i t a l s , t o u t b a s a n e s " (Le Mur du P a c i f i o u e 3 5 ) . S i n c e the n a r r a t o r has a l r e a d y l i n k e d visiting E u r o p e a n p r o f e s s o r s to the c o n c e p t of Greek t u t o r s under Roman r u l e , L y o t a r d has e s s e n t i a l l y p l a c e d F r e n c h m e n on the s a m e l e v e l as B l a c k s in the A m e r i c a n s c h e m e of t h i n g s . T h i s r e s u l t s in an i d e n t i c a l i r e : " L e m e t e q u e e s t c r i t i q u e e v i d e m m e n t p a r c o n s t i t u t i o n , p u i s q u ' i l n ' e s t pas c i t o y e n a m e r i c a i n - r o m a i n " (Le Mur du P a c i f i o u e 3 9 ) . W h i l e J e a n Genet did not c o n c e r n h i m s e l f unduly w i t h the reality of " R o m a n " A m e r i c a - t h a t i d e a w o u l d not become une idee fixe u n t i l the 1980s-he was very much attracted to the popular image of the A m e r i c a n B l a c k as s o c i o s e x u a l o u t s i d e r . I n i t i a l l y h i s i n t e r e s t in ( m a l e ) Africans was twigged c o n v i c t s , an e r o t i c by h i s e a r l y fascination with dark-skinned obsession which acquired a political w h e n p l a c e d i n the c o n t e x t dimension of E u r o p e a n c o l o n i a l i s m . T h i s w a s the i m p e t u s behind Les Negres, one of h i s g r e a t e s t p l a y s . T h i s e x p e r i m e n t a l d r a m a d e a l t w i t h "[!_'] A f r i q u e aux m i l l i o n s d ' e s c l a v e s r o y a u x , A f r i q u e deportee, continent a la derive...." (Oeuvres c o m p l e t e s 125). In o t h e r 257 w o r d s , A m e r i c a ' s h i s t o r i c a l c o n t r i b u t i o n to the h i s t o r y of s l a v e r y w a s i m p l i e d r a t h e r than e x p l i c i t , an unnamed c h o r a l p a r t f o r a c h o i r of p a l e skinned exploiters. It w a s only a f t e r the a u t h o r d e v e l o p e d an a c t i v e i n t e r e s t in the B l a c k P a n t h e r m o v e m e n t d u r i n g the l a t e emphasis started to s h i f t . 1 9 6 0 s , t h a t the continental He began to b r e a k b r e a d w i t h African- A m e r i c a n m i l i t a n t s , j u s t as he w o u l d l a t e r e s t a b l i s h s o c i a l c o n t a c t s w i t h a r m e d m e m b e r s of the P L O . In b o t h i n s t a n c e s , he w a s a s k e d to p a r t i c i p a t e : " J ' a i ete i n v i t e par deux m o u v e m e n t s r e v o l u t i o n n a i r e s , p a r le m o u v e m e n t des B l a c k s P a n t h e r s , des P a n t h e r e s N o i r e s , et des P a l e s t i n i e n s " ( D i a l o g u e s 2 5 ) . When a s k e d i f he f e l t at home w i t h the first of these two "Immediatement...pendant groups, the author responded, deux m o i s j ' e t a i s tous s e u l au m i l i e u d ' e u x " ( D i a l o g u e s 17). L i k e the P L O , the P a n t h e r s h e l d f o r Genet " u n e c h a r g e e r o t i q u e t r e s f o r t e " ( D i a l o g u e s 2 6 ) . The h o m o s e x u a l i t y t h a t s e p a r a t e d h i m f r o m t h e s e m a i n l y h e t e r o s e x u a l r a d i c a l s c l e a r l y only i n c r e a s e d h i s d e s i r e . He d e l i g h t e d i n the f a c t t h a t h i s r e p u t a t i o n c o u l d daunt e v e n a r m e d r e v o l u t i o n a r i e s b r a n d i s h i n g guns: " J ' a i r e v u A n g e l a D a v i s , e l l e me dit: ' M a i s , nous a u s s i , on a peur de v o u s ' " ( D i a l o g u e s 17). M i c h e l F o u c a u l t ' s i n t e r e s t i n the U n i t e d S t a t e s w a s m o r e a c t i v e l y gay t h e n G e n e t ' s . Many of h i s n o t i o n s of f r e e d o m w e r e r e v i s e d by h i s e x p e r i e n c e of San F r a n c i s c o b a t h h o u s e s and s a d o m a s o c h i s t i c b a r s : " J e crois qu'il est politiquement important que la sexualite puisse f o n c t i o n n e r c o m m e e l l e f o n c t i o n n e dans l e s s a u n a s , ou, s a n s que T o n s o i t e m p r i s o n n e dans s a p r o p r e i d e n t i t e , T o n r e n c o n t r e des gens qui s o n t pour vous c o m m e on e s t pour eux: r i e n d ' a u t r e que des c o r p s a v e c lesquels d e s c o m b i n a i s o n s , des f a b r i c a t i o n s de p l a i s i r vont etre 258 p o s s i b l e " (La V o l o n t e de s a v o i r 9 4 ) . S t i l l , d e l i g h t e d though he w a s by the s e x u a l e x p e r i e n c e of A m e r i c a - e v e n though i t w a s t h r o u g h these anonymous which eventually pleasures that he contracted k i l l e d h i m - F o u c a u l t ' s specific the AIDS virus r e f e r e n c e s to A m e r i c a and A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e are as r a r e in h i s books as they are in t h o s e of h i s contemporaries R o l a n d B a r t h e s , J a c q u e s L a c a n , L o u i s A l t h u s s e r , and J a c q u e s D e r r i d a . If h i s l i b i d o c e a s e l e s s l y s o u g h t to e s c a p e f r o m s o c i a l and s e x u a l r e s t r a i n t s i d e a s w i t h an a l m o s t of Old E u r o p a , h i s s u p e r - e g o the constructed e x c l u s i v e l y E u r o p e a n a u d i e n c e in m i n d . U n l i k e G e n e t , he c o u l d n e v e r s a y , " L a p o l i t i q u e f r a n c a i s e , j e m'en f o u s , c a ne m ' i n t e r e s s e p a s " ( D i a l o g u e s 56). Of c o u r s e , f o r some F r e n c h w r i t e r s and i n t e l l e c t u a l s , of the U.S. d i d n ' t scathing change much jeremiad-"Derisoire premedi tee/Tout est faux doute/Simplement la lumiere o v e r the erreur dans ce perceptions years. Jacques Prevert's j udi c i ai r e / O f f i c i el 1 e m e n t proces/Pas Tombre de T i n n o c e n c e . . . " ( O e u v r e s d'un completes. T o m e 11 8 1 2 ) — l i n e s w r i t t e n in the e a r l y 1 9 5 0 s on b e h a l f of the a c c u s e d A m e r i c a n s p i e s J u l i u s and E t h e l R o s e n b e r g , do not d i f f e r g r e a t l y from " S a t e t e , s a j o l i e t e t e e t a i t m i s e a p r i s aux e n c h e r e s du m a l h e u r , du grand malheur d e o - l e g a l , dei dollar, haineux, raciste...." (Oeuvres c o m p l e t e s . T o m e 11 3 4 8 ) , w o r d s c o m p o s e d a l m o s t t w e n t y y e a r s l a t e r in support of another American political prisoner, the Black Marxist c o l l e g e i n s t r u c t o r and c o m r a d e - i n - a r m s of Bobby S e a l e and J e a n G e n e t , A n g e l a D a v i s . J e a n C a u , m e a n w h i l e , s e e m e d d e t e r m i n e d to put a 1 9 7 0 s s t y l e s l a n t on the d i s d a i n f u l o b s e r v a t i o n s of the a r c h - A m e r i c a n o p h o b e , G e o r g e s D u h a m e l : " L e s USA...ont l e u r s e u i l de d e c a d e n c e : l e s a r s e n a u x a t o m i q u e s a v e c l e s q u e l s , j ' e n j u r e , on ne c o n s t r u i r a pas des s a l l e s de 259 c o n c e r t s " (Cau 5 1 ) . W i t h O l y m p i a n a p l o m b , he s n e e r s at teenagers, B l a c k s , and e v e r y o n e e l s e w i t h o u t a v e s t e d i n t e r e s t i n the Old Europe w h i c h no l o n g e r e x i s t s . L i k e h i s 1 9 3 0 s p r e d e c e s s o r , Cau i s a d e p t at beating of the left conservative with the traditionalists. arms of the left for the benefit Thus, we hear that A m e r i c a n student a c t i v i s t s are c o w a r d l y as w e l l s t u p i d and p r i m i t i v e : " N o u v e a u b a r b a r e s , des j e u n e s p e u v e n t s a c c a g e r des b a n c s et des p u p i t r e s d'uni v e r s i t e s , mais i l s n'approcheront pas des s i l o s de f u s e e s , et l e s a r i s t o c r a t e s de l a t e r r e u r ne l a i s s e r o n t pas l e s b a b b a r e s de l a c o n t r e - c u l t u r e casser l e s o r d i n a t e u r s " (Cau 51 - 5 2 ) . A t t e m p t i n g to f e l l t w o i d e o l o g i c a l f o e s w i t h a s i n g l e b l o w , Cau c o n t e n d s t h a t the Red b o u r g e o i s i e resembles "la acultures, bourgeoisie reprochent noire americaine dont l e s f i l s , aux p e r e s l e u r t r a h i s o n et v e u l e n t un j o u r revenir n o i r e s d'une ame c o m m u n e et d'un d e s t i n c o l l e c t i f " particularly aux sources (Cau 163). In a n a s t y b i t of w o u l d - b e r e - v a l o r i z a t i o n , the a u t h o r argues t h a t the s t r u g g l e b e t w e e n A m e r i c a n s l a v e s and A m e r i c a n s l a v e o w n e r s a p p r e c i a b l y w o r s e n e d on the day w h e n " l e B l a n c e s t devenu hontueux. A l o r s , en un p r e m i e r t e m p s , l e s N o i r s ont r e c l a m e l ' e g a l i t e , m a i s au f u r et a mesure naturellement-le que celle-ci leur etait p r o c e s s u s e s t toujours c e u x qui l e u r o u v r a i e n t accordee, totalement ils ont tout le m e m e - m e p r i s e l e s p o r t e s de l e u r monde et en un d e u x i e m e t e m p s , i l s ne v e u l e n t pas e t r e l e s egaux de ceux a l ' e g a r d d e s q u e l s i l s n ' e p r o u v e n t que m e p r i s . . . . " (Cau 133). In C a u ' s n e o - f e u d a l u n i v e r s e , " U n e s o c i e t e s a n s e s p e r a n c e et s a n s f o i d e v i e n t f a t a l e m e n t une s o c i e t e de t o l e r a n c e " (Cau 7 3 ) . U n s u r p r i s i n g l y , the only " R o m a n " c o m p a r i s o n the a u t h o r m a k e s in c o n n e c t i o n w i t h the U n i t e d S t a t e s c o n c e r n s the new 260 e m p i r e ' s i n e v i t a b l e f a l l ; about i t s heyday and r i s e he has v e r y l i t t l e to say. As mentioned in Chapter One, m o s t of the pro-American p r o p a g a n d a to f l o w f r o m F r e n c h pens d u r i n g the 1 9 7 0 s w a s d i p p e d i n the Atlanticist i n k w e l l . R a y m o n d A r o n and o t h e r "objective" pro- G a u l l i s t i n t e l l e c t u a l s defended the U n i t e d S t a t e s on the grounds t h a t i t w a s the one d e p e n d a b l e b a s t i o n a g a i n s t t o t a l i t a r i a n i n c u r s i o n s from the S o v i e t U n i o n . To o u t s i d e r s , s u c h v o i c e s s e e m e d to be f e w and f a r b e t w e e n , s h o u t e d d o w n and d r o w n e d out by the much l o u d e r r h e t o r i c of the l e f t . Of c o u r s e , to o u t s i d e e y e s , t h i n g s l o o k e d q u i t e s i m i l a r in the 1 9 2 0 s . To a New Vork a c a d e m i c s c r i b b l i n g in h i s C a m b r i d g e s t u d y , P a r i s was the home anarchists, of of Surrealists hard drinkers, and drug D a d a i s t s , of addicts, and Communists sex fiends. o v e r w e e n i n g C a t h o l i c i n f l u e n c e on i n t e r - w a r F r e n c h i n t e l l e c t u a l and The life, of w h i c h A n d r e Gide c o m p l a i n e d so o f t e n in h i s j o u r n a l s , w a s l a r g e l y l o s t on the o v e r s e a s o b s e r v e r . O u t s i d e r s m i g h t be a w a r e of the works of G e o r g e s B e r n a n o s , F r a n c o i s M a u r i a c , and S i m o n e W e i l , but the v a s t g a l a x y of m i n o r p o e t s , n o v e l i s t s , and j o u r n a l i s t s w h o s u p p o r t e d t h e s e s t a r s of the F r e n c h C a t h o l i c i n t e l l i g e n t s i a w e n t l a r g e l y u n n o t i c e d . The overall effect w a s not d i s s i m i l a r to j u d g i n g an o c e a n s o l e l y on the b a s i s of i t s w h a l e s and s h a r k s . W h i l e i t i s by no m e a n s c e r t a i n t h a t the A t l a n t i c i s t s of the e a r l y 1 9 7 0 s d o m i n a t e d t h e i r M a o - i n s p i r e d l e f t - w i n g p e e r s i n the s a m e w a y t h a t C h a r l e s M a u r r a s ' s d i s c i p l e s o v e r w h e l m e d the B o l s h e v i k o p p o s i t i o n f o r t y y e a r s e a r l i e r , they w e r e u n q u e s t i o n a b l y s t r o n g e r than m o s t s o c i a l h i s t o r i e s s u g g e s t . N e v e r t h e l e s s , s i n c e t h i s i n t e l l e c t u a l d i s p u t e w a s m o r e of an i n t e r n a l c u l t u r a l s t r u g g l e than it 261 was a reflection of c o n c r e t e F r a n c o - A m e r i c a n r e l a t i o n s , i t s further c o n s i d e r a t i o n c l e a r l y f a l l s o u t s i d e the p a r a m e t e r s of t h i s s t u d y . France's late ' 6 0 s , early '70s flirtation with Maoism ended a l m o s t as s u d d e n l y as i t began. The r e s u l t of the s a m e h i s t o r i c a l f o r c e s which gave b i r t h to Situationism a d e c a d e e a r l i e r , the movement r e f l e c t e d i n t e l l e c t u a l d i s e n c h a n t m e n t w i t h the e s t a b l i s h e d C o m m u n i s t p a r t i e s of the S o v i e t v a r i e t y . The h e r o e s of the O c t o b e r R e v o l u t i o n , G a l l i c t h i n k e r s b e l i e v e d , had d e g e n e r a t e d i n t o m e r e s o c i a l i m p e r i a l i s t s . C h i n e s e s o c i a l i s m w a s s e e n as the m o r e a u t h e n t i c p a t h to f o l l o w , one that had not been c o - o p t e d by too many y e a r s of self-interested f i n a g l i n g and bad f a i t h . Even s o , the S o v i e t Union n e v e r a c h i e v e d the E v i l E m p i r e s t a t u s in F r a n c e w h i c h i t e n j o y e d in the U n i t e d States a l m o s t f r o m the day w h e n the R o m a n o v s w e r e s e c r e t l y s h o t and b u r i e d in a b a s e m e n t ( t h i s s t i g m a only r e a l l y l i f t e d in the y e a r s 1 9 4 2 - 1 9 4 5 , w h e n M o s c o w w a s W a s h i n g t o n ' s i n d i s p e n s a b l e a l l y in the w a r a g a i n s t the T h i r d R e i c h ) . A s F r e d e r i c J a m e s o n put i t in h i s r e v i e w of the h i s t o r y c u t t i n g edge F r e n c h j o u r n a l special i s s u e on t h e Tel United Quel, " . . . t h e r e the c a m e an e n t h u s i a s t i c S t a t e s ; an a p p a r e n t l y e x p e r i e n c e of S o l z e n i t s y n ' s Gulag Archipelago of mind-blowing ( p u b l i s h e d in F r e n c h in 1 9 7 4 ) , l e a d i n g to the d i s c o v e r y of ' t o t a l i t a r i a n i s m ' and the of the d i s s i d e n t . . . . " ( J a m e s o n 6). F r o m t h i s r a d i c a l s h i f t i n revelation political e m p h a s i s s p r a n g the c l a s s of d i s a f f e c t e d f o r m e r M a o i s t s s o o n dubbed les nouvelles philosophes. T h e i r best known text, Bernard-Henri Levy's La Barbarie a visage humaine, w a s a s y s t e m a t i c r e p u d i a t i o n of F r a n c e ' s long-term r o m a n c e w i t h M a r x i s t - L e n i n i s m . Levy r e j e c t e d B o l s h e v i s m w i t h a d i s m i s s i v e c o m p l e t e n e s s t h a t w a s f a r m o r e d o g m a t i c than the 262 m o r e m o d e s t s e p a r a t i o n w h i c h A l b e r t C a m u s had a d v o c a t e d a q u a r t e r c e n t u r y e a r l i e r i n L'Homme revolte. Unlike Camus, however, Levy w a s not r e v i l e d f o r h i s " d e f e c t i o n " b e c a u s e the mood of F r e n c h t h i n k e r s w a s then m o v i n g in an i n c r e a s i n g l y p r o - A m e r i c a n d i r e c t i o n . S t a t e m e n t s t h a t w o u l d once have been condemned as r e a c t i o n a r y now r e c e i v e d a i l but unanimous nods e x p r e s s i n g the Zeitgeist of approval. Tzvetan Todorov was merely when he w r o t e , " C a r l a d i g n i t e e s t t o u j o u r s s e u l e m e n t c e l l e d'un i n d i v i d u , non c e l l e d'un groupe ou d'une et nation" (Face a l ' e x t r e m e 3 5 ) . P l e n t i f u l e v i d e n c e of t h i s a l t e r e d p e r s p e c t i v e may be f o u n d P h i l i p p e S o l l e r s ' s Femmes and J u l i a K r i s t e v a ' s Les Sarnourais, romans a clefs in two by the m a r r i e d " s u c c e s s o r s " to J e a n - P a u l S a r t r e and S i m o n e de B e a u v o i r . Of t h e s e t w o w o r k s , K r i s t e v a ' s n o v e l , w i t h its metaphorical association with a proverbial Asian elite, was obviously the m o s t b e h o l d e n to Les Mandarins, de B e a u v o i r ' s P r i x Goncourt- w i n n i n g , s e m i - a u t o b i o g r a p h i c a l p r e s e n t a t i o n of the l o r d s and l a d i e s of S t . G e r m a i n - d e s - p r e s ' s p o s t w a r E n l i g h t e n m e n t . In K r i s t e v a ' s fictional u n i v e r s e , the l e a d i n g l i g h t s of p o s t - s t r u c t u r a l i s m have s u p p l a n t e d the s t a r s of e x i s t e n t i a l i s m . W h i l e S o l l e r s ' s book c o v e r e d m u c h the s a m e t e r r i t o r y , i t s s t y l i s t i c i n d e b t e d n e s s to C e l i n e , as w e l l as i t s s e x u a l b r a v a d o and t e a s i n g corrida with feminist orthodoxy, turned Femmes i n t o a s o m e w h a t o b l i q u e homage to de B e a u v o i r ' s book. A t one p o i n t d u r i n g the n o v e l , J e r r y S a l t z m a n , an A m e r i c a n f r i e n d of Herve S i n t e u i l and Olga M o r e n a , the n e w l y - c r o w n e d k i n g and queen of intellectual Paris, r h e t o r i c a l l y a s k s , " Q a v i e n t d'Anne D u b r e u i l ? " ( L e s S a r n o u r a i s 3 5 4 ) . S i n c e Anne D u b r e u i l , g i v e o r t a k e a l e t t e r (h, to be p r e c i s e ) , i s the name of de B e a u v o i r ' s a l t e r ego in Les Mandarins, this 263 b i t of l i t e r a r y l a r c e n y l e a v e s the r e a d e r i n no doubt as to the a u t h o r ' s real intentions. fictional Kristeva is insinuating her rival/predecessor's p e r s o n a i n t o the t e x t . T h i s j e s t i s r e n d e r e d even r i c h e r , even m o r e c o m p l e x by S a l t z m a n ' s next s e n t e n c e : " D e l ' A c a d e m i e f r a n c a i s e ? " (Les S a m o u r a i s 3 5 4 ) . In the 1 9 8 0 s , the f i r s t and only w o m a n to have been e l e c t e d t o t h e F r e n c h A c a d e m y w a s , of c o u r s e , not S i m o n e de B e a u v o i r , but M a r g u e r i t e Samourais, Yourcenar, the " h e r m i t " of M a i n e . In Les one w i l l d i s c o v e r t h i n l y v e i l e d pen p o r t r a i t s of C l a u d e L e v i - S t r a u s s , R o l a n d B a r t h e s , J a c q u e s L a c a n , M i c h e l F o u c a u l t , and the r e s t of the Tel Quel crew, j u s t a s one f i n d s , i n de B e a u v o i r ' s s o u r c e text, f i c t i o n a l r i f f s on A l b e r t C a m u s , A r t h u r K o e s t l e r , and the o t h e r literary satellites and de who once orbited Les Temps tiodernes, Sartre B e a u v o i r ' s i n f l u e n t i a l m o n t h l y m a g a z i n e , during the l a t e 1 9 4 0 s . Like intellectual Anne Dubreuihl, Olga Morena acquires an American l o v e r w h i l e in the U n i t e d S t a t e s . T h i s i n d i v i d u a l , l i k e so many of the c h a r a c t e r s i n t h i s m o c k - r o m a n a c l e f , b e a r s a name h e a v i l y f r e i g h t e d w i t h m o d e r n i s t r e s o n a n c e . J u s t as O l g a ' s husband c a r r i e s the Proustian moniker Herve S i n t e u i l , her l o v e r is saddled with the W o o l f i a n f a m i l y name, Dalloway. Olga's a f f a i r w i t h Edward i s c l e a r l y meant to p a r a l l e l Anne D u b r e u i h l ' s trans-Atlantic dalliance with " L e w i s B r o g a n , " de B e a u v o i r ' s f i c t i o n a l i z e d p o r t r a i t of N e l s o n A l g r e n (at t h i s p o i n t i n t i m e , I w o u l d not c a r e to h a z a r d a g u e s s a s t o w h e t h e r Edward Dalloway historical century, w a s , in f a c t , m o d e l l e d a f t e r an e q u a l l y concrete p e r s o n a g e ) . A d d i n g r e f e r e n c e to r e f e r e n c e , and c e n t u r y to O l g a / J u l i a o c c a s i o n a l l y r e f e r s to h e r a m o r o u s A m e r i c a n as " l e p a s t e u r B o v a r y , " a f a c t w h i c h p e r h a p s e x p l a i n s w h y E d w a r d - y o k e d to the m e m o r y of n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y literature's most famous c u c k o l d - i s 264 less central storyline to the p l o t of Les coincidental d'histoires that of Les Mandarins the novel Samourais (Les than L e w i s w a s to S a m o u r a i s 306). b e g i n s w i t h the It the is hardly w o r d s , " / / n'y a plus d'amour" (Les S a m o u r a i s 9). K r i s t e v a ' s t o n e i s c o o l e r t h a n de B e a u v o i r ' s : l e s s p a s s i o n a t e ; more elegant. Her B u l g a r i a n c o n n e c t i o n s more or l e s s guarantee she w i l l have d i f f i c u l t y f u n c t i o n i n g as a l e f t i s t m i l i t a n t , even at the b e s t of t i m e s : " ' C ' e s t l a l u t t e f i n a l e , ' entonne O l g a , c a r e l l e tous l e s c o u p l e t s de ce c h a n t depuis l'age de s i x that connait a n s , quand les d o m i n i c a i n e s f r a n c a i s e s qui d i r i g a i e n t l a m a t e r n e l l e f u r e n t e x p u l s e e s et que des m a t t r e s s e s nomine par le gouvernment r e m p l a c e r e n t ' M i n u i t , Chretiens, c'est l'heure s o l e n n e l l e . . . ' par ' D e b o u t l e s d a m n e s de l a t e r r e . . . . " ( L e s S a m o u r a i s 1 18). W h i l e she i s as s o l i c i t o u s of S o l l e r s ' s reputation a s de B e a u v o i r w a s of S a r t r e ' s , s h e c e l e b r a t e s i t in a p a r t i c u l a r l y S o l l e r s i a n w a y , p u t t i n g w o r d s of a l m o s t M e p h i s t o p h e l e a n iconoclasm into Herve's France's intellectual sarcastic mouth. Indeed, when mocking s t a r s of the 1 9 8 0 s , H e r v e / P h i l i p p e s o u n d s m o r e than a l i t t l e l i k e C a m i l l e P a g l i a : " - D e s i m p o s t e u r s ! P r o d u i t s bons p o u r l ' e x p o r t a t i o n ! Japon, en Afrique, frelates On l e s v e n d , et t r e s c h e r , en A m e r i q u e , au bientot en Russie" (Kristeva 352). In this d e s a t u r a t e d , e f f e c t l e s s t i m e p e r i o d , c u l t u r a l m o n u m e n t s are as r a r e as l o v e s t o r i e s . Olga t r a v e l s to A m e r i c a and C h i n a , j u s t as s h e o r i g i n a l l y journeyed to France. Epiphanic s u r p r i s e s , it s e e m s , c a n be found n o w h e r e : " A l ' h o t e l A l g o n q u i n d e s c e n d a i e n t des F r a n g a i s p r e t e n t i e u x a l a r e c h e r c h e des I n d i e n s d ' o r i g i n e , ou s i m p l e m e n t New-Yorkais spirituels des annees vingt. Ronde...n'avaient s u r v e c u " (Les S a m o u r a i s 5 0 0 ) . n o s t a l g i q u e s des Helas! La Table 265 Life i s not only elsewhere in t h i s narrative; it is literally nowhere. In Femmes, m o s t of the n a r r a t o r ' s j o u r n e y s are m o t i v a t e d by h i s p e r i p a t e t i c phallus. His g i r l f r i e n d s include Chinese, A m e r i c a n , Spanish, and I t a l i a n w o m e n , and t h i s g i v e s h i m a m p l e o p p o r t u n i t y to t r a v e l to t h e i r r e s p e c t i v e h o m e l a n d s on q u e s t s t h a t are as m u c h e r o t i c as t h e y a r e c u l t u r a l . T o muddy the waters, Philippe Sollers i n s c r i b e s himself into two separate literary journalist symbolically p e r s o n a e : the A m e r i c a n around w h o m the a c t i o n r e v o l v e s , and S , the F r e n c h w r i t e r w i t h w h o m he c o l l a b o r a t e s . A b o v e a l l t h e r e are w o m e n : s e d u c t i v e , b e a u t i f u l , o m n i p r e s e n t , but a l w a y s a pain. If the a u t h o r i s a m i s o g y n i s t , h i s h a t r e d of w o m e n i s a l t e r n a t e l y p a s s i v e and m a n i p u l a t i v e , the best of bad s i t u a t i o n s while cynically bowing to n e c e s s i t y . T h e f o l l o w i n g p a s s a g e i s p r o t o t y p i c a l : " L e monde making historical appartient aux f e m m e s . C ' e s t - a - d i r e a l a m o r t " ( S o l l e r s 12). W r i t t e n i n a p s e u d o C e l i n e a n s t y l e , t o p - h e a v y w i t h e l l i p s e s , the n a r r a t o r does e v e r y t h i n g in his power to draw t e c h n i q u e s : " L e mot the reader's 'roman' est attention to his meta-fictional m a g i q u e . Et un r o m a n A m e r i c a i n ? F i t z g e r a l d ? B e l l o w ? R o t h ? M a i l e r ? Ou p l o t o t policiere, relating mafia, drogue, d o l l a r s ? " ( S o l l e r s his s t o r i e s through comment? atmosphere 78). His reasons the m e d i u m of an e x p e r i m e n t a l for Gallic a u t h o r are e q u a l l y a r t i f i c i a l : " J ' a i demande s i m p l e m e n t a l ' e c r i v a i n qui s i g n e r a ce l i v r e , de d i s c u t e r avec moi c e r t a i n s points... P o u r q u i j e l'ai c h o i s i , l u i ? P a r c e q u ' i l e t a i t h a l " ( S o l l e r 12). The s a m e a p p l i e s to h i s c h o i c e of the F r e n c h l a n g u a g e : " P o u r q u o i en f r a n c a i s ? Q u e s t i o n de tradition... Les F r a n c a i s , c e r t a i n s F r a n c a i s , en s a v e n t davantage, 266 f i n a l e m e n t , s u r l e t h e a t r e que j ' a i i n t e n t i o n de d e c r i r e . . . " ( S o l l e r s 12 13). The n a r r a t o r , and i d e o l o g i c a l agent like S o l l e r s h i m s e l f , changes p o l i t i c a l , affiliations provocateur, religious the w a y m o s t p e o p l e c h a n g e s h i r t s . he o u t d o e s even H e n r i Sinteuil in An intellectual i n s o l e n c e . S ( f o r s e x e , p e r h a p s , or s o p h i s t e , as w e l l as S o l l e r s ? ) s t a n d s in perpetual awe of novelty and c h a n g e . T h u s , c e l e b r a t e s i s the New York t h a t a r o s e after literary pilgrimage: postgothique, computer "La nuit de New the New York the g r e a t age of F r e n c h York, verticale, empilee, p e r p a n t e , c u b i q u e . . . Le W o r l d T r a d e C e n t e r c o m m e lumineux, a v e c s e s deux tours he comme de l o n g s v i s u e l s . . . E t , au bout de l a rue ou j ' h a b i t e , le m o u v e m e n t e n t r e p o t s , l e s c a m i o n s . . . Le m a g a s i n de Delikatessen un micros du p o r t . . . l e s ouvert jusqu'a deux h e u r e s l e s m a t i n s . . . Le b a r des P o r t o r i c a i n s . . . N e w York e s t a u s s i une ville espagnol..." (Sollers 161). The narrator's American e n t h u s i a s m s - w h i c h range f r o m M e l v i l l e ' s Moby Dick to the p a i n t i n g s of " B i l l " de K o o n i n g , f r o m W i l l i a m S t y r o n ' s b e s t s e l l e r s to J o h n M c E n r o e ' s b a c k h a n d - a r e s e l d o m r e c i p r o c a t e d by the many w o m e n i n h i s l i f e , m o s t of w h o m he s l y l y m o c k s as u n w i t t i n g P h i l i s t i n e s and p a r l o r r a d i c a l s . Of one m i s t r e s s , he c o m p l a i n s : " E l l e n ' a i m e pas l ' A m e r i q u e . . . E l l e trouve que New York e s t une v i l l e n e o g o t h i q u e s a n s i n t e r e t . . . E l l e s c o m m e l e s p r o g r e s s i s t e s du monde e n t i e r ; c o m m e tous ceux qui sont v i s c e r a l e m e n t et p r o v i n c i a l e m e n t a t t a c h e s aux g r a n d e s i d e e s s i m p l e s du XIXe s i e c l e , i n c a p a b l e s d ' a p p r e c i e r l a n o u v e l l e beaute de l a - b a s . . . s a s o u p l e s s e , s o n e n e r g i e . . . . " ( S o l l e r s 199 - 2 0 0 ) . The n a r r a t o r ' s sudden i n t e r e s t i n the B i b l e , I s r a e l , and r e l i g i o u s c o n v e r s i o n s i t s no m o r e c o m f o r t a b l y his former peers than do his views on women, America, with and 267 h o m o s e x u a l s . P e r h a p s t h i s i s why he f e e l s the need to d i v i d e the g u i l t , i n v e n t i n g an A m e r i c a n s e l f f o r the s u p e r f i c i a l l y s e l f - e f f a c i n g S: - J e ne s u i s pas r e e l l e m e n t e c r i v a i n , d i s - j e , C ' e s t vous qui e t e s mon double au pays des d o u b l e s ! - J e me demande qui e s t l ' e c r i v a i n de n o u s , d i t - i l , s o n g e u r (Sollers 659). Of c o u r s e , d e s p i t e the n a r r a t o r ' s e l a b o r a t e l i t e r a r y d i s g u i s e , he i s still s u r r o u n d e d by v e i l e d p o r t r a i t s of Tel Quel's intellectual B e i n g m a l e , h o w e v e r , and m u c h m o r e p r o m i s c u o u s stars. than e i t h e r Olga M o r e n a o r A n n e D u b r e u i h l , he d e v i s e s a m o r e p i c a r e s q u e c a r e e r for h i m s e l f , a r a n d i e r j o u r n e y . D e s p i t e i t s C e l i n e a n s t y l e , Femmes can even be r e a d as Les Mandarins updated not by S i m o n e de B e a u v o i r ' s spiritual h e i r , but by J e a n - P a u l S a r t r e ' s - o r i s i t N e l s o n A l g r e n ' s ? The a b s u r d hubris of this a p p r o a c h adds c o n s i d e r a b l y to the novel's sardonic, m e a n - s p i r i t e d c h a r m . A t t i m e s i t ' s d i f f i c u l t to t e l l w h e r e the p r e e n i n g self-flagellation s t o p s and the s e l f - i n c r i m i n a t i n g any c a s e , i t i s not the s o r t of s t r a t e g y American b o a s t i n g b e g i n s . In one i s a c c u s t o m e d to f i n d i n novels. Being the beneficiaries of relatively cheap jet K r i s t e v a and S o l l e r s take A m e r i c a n l i f e much more travel, both matter-of-factly than did t h e i r p r e d e c e s s o r s . V o y a g i n g to A m e r i c a does not m a k e t h e m f e e l l i k e C h r i s t o p h e r C o l u m b u s o r V a s c o da Gama. T h e y are treading well-charted younger t u r f and t h e y k n o w i t . S o m e of t h e i r s l i g h t l y c o n t e m p o r a r i e s k n o w i t even b e t t e r . Indeed, t h e i r r e l a t i o n s h i p to t h a t of the New W o r l d , being more closely approximates complete and l o n g e r - l a s t i n g , more the p e r s p e c t i v e of a J o h n C r e v e c o u r t t h a n an 268 A l e x i s de T o c q u e v i l l e . F o r t h e m , A m e r i c a i s m o r e t h a n j u s t a h a l f t h r e a t e n i n g , h a l f - s e d u c t i v e , f a n t a s t i c a l l y r i c h , q u a s i - b a r b a r i c p l a c e to v i s i t . It i s , r a t h e r , the l o c u s of a l l m o d e r n l i v i n g , a m i n d s c a p e t h a t young E u r o p e a n s c o u l d n ' t e s c a p e even i f they w a n t e d to. This changed reality is m e m o i r i s t i c n o v e l , L'Occupation at the core americaine. of Pascal Quignard's I n i t i a l l y the n a r r a t o r i s q u i t e s a n g u i n e about t h i s t u r n of e v e n t s : " L ' O r l e a n a i s f u t o c c u p e p a r l e s C e l t e s , p a r l e s G e r m a i n s , p a r l e s R o m a i n s et l e u r douze d i e u x durant c i n q s i e c l e s , p a r l e s F r a n c s , par l e s N o r m a n d s , p a r l e s A n g l a i s , p a r l e s A l l e m a n d s , p a r l e s A m e r i c a i n s " (Quignard 9). A l t h o u g h the l a s t of t h e s e o c c u p a t i o n s i s the m o s t p l e a s a n t , i t i s a l s o the m o s t i n s i d i o u s . P a t r i c k C a r r i o n and h i s f r i e n d s are f a s c i n a t e d by t h e s e f o r e i g n e r s i n midst, high-living GIs i n 1950s France, all blithely their unaware that G e n e r a l C h a r l e s de G a u l l e w o u l d s h o r t l y r e - i n t e r p r e t the n a t i o n ' s NATO c o m m i t m e n t s to the p o i n t w h e r e the Yanks and t h e i r t a n k s w o u l d be o b l i g e d to w i t h d r a w . Even the young C o m m u n i s t s in O r l e a n s , d i s d a i n f u l though they are of A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e in g e n e r a l , are f r a n k l y e n a m o u r e d of the s e p i a - t o n e d u n d e r b e l l y of the i m p e r i a l i s t b e a s t . T V , t h e y can r e s i s t , but j a z z , r o c k ' n ' r o l l , and r h y t h m and b l u e s l e a v e s t h e m totally d e f e n c e l e s s . F r a n c o i s - M a r i e R i d e l s k y , the m o s t m i l i t a n t of the l o c a l B o l s h e v i k s , i s r e - b o r n as " R y d e l l . " A l t h o u g h h i s a n t i - A m e r i c a n r a n t s are both p a s s i o n a t e and p r o l o n g e d — ' " J e c h i e s u r l a c o n q u e t e de l ' O u e s t . . . s u r l a bombe L i t t l e B o y , s u r l e s F o r d s et l e s C h e v r o l e t s , s u r l e r a c i s m e , s u r le W a l l S t r e e t , s u r l e s b u i l d i n g s " (Quignard 108)--nothing can change the f a c t t h a t " S o n dieu e t a i t Monk. S e s a p o t r e s a v a i e n t nom C h a r l i e P a r k e r et M i l e s D a v i s " (Quignard 6 2 ) . The U.S. o c c u p a t i o n c a s t s a s h a d o w on e v e r y t h i n g , i n c l u d i n g l o v e , the p r e v i o u s r o m a n c e b e t w e e n 269 the n a r r a t o r and M a r i e - J o s e being s e r i o u s l y d i s r u p t e d by t h e a r r i v a l of o v e r s e a s o b j e c t s of d e s i r e . Of a l l the l i n e s i n Q u i g n a r d ' s t e x t , t h e f o l l o w i n g i s the m o s t i r o n i c a l l y untrue: " L e 2 7 a v r i l 1 9 6 7 , l e t e r r i t o i r e f u t e n t i e r e m e n t l i b e r e " (Quignard 2 0 9 ) . T h e A m e r i c a n s m i g h t be gone, but they a r e c e r t a i n l y not f o r g o t t e n . Many of Q u i g n a r d ' s t h e m e s w o u l d be i n c o r p o r a t e d in C l a i r e D e n i s ' s 1 9 9 4 f e a t u r e , U.S. Go Home. C o - s c r i p t e d by Anne W i a z e m s k y , J e a n - L u c G o d a r d ' s s e c o n d w i f e and one of the l e g e n d a r y d i v a s of m o r e t h a n one E u r o p e a n N e w Wave m o v e m e n t , t h i s s h a r p l y o b s e r v e d , c h r o n o l o g i c a l l y s e n s i t i v e , and s u r p r i s i n g l y g e n t l e c o m i n g - o f - a g e c o m e d y c e n t r e s on a 1965 vintage party after w h i c h teenaged Martine ( A l i c e Houri), her p o p u l a r f r i e n d M a r l e n e ( J e s s i c a T h a r a u d ) , and M a r t i n e t s o l d e r brother A l a i n ( G r e g o i r e C o l i n ) f i r s t dance to A m e r i c a n m u s i c , then get p i c k e d up by an A m e r i c a n A r m y o f f i c e r ( V i n c e n t G a l l o ) in a j e e p . A s i d e o l o g y b a t t l e s d e s i r e , and c o n s u m e r i s m s u c c e s s f u l l y c o - o p t s i d e o l o g y , t h e "battle honours" ultimately go to the A m e r i c a n , w h o i s as w i l l i n g l y k i n d as he i s a t t r a c t i v e l y n a i v e . P h i l i p p e L a b r o ' s L'Etudiant etranger i s even m o r e definitively c a s t i n the C r e v e c o u r t i a n m o l d of a u t o b i o g r a p h i c a l o b s e r v a t i o n . U n l i k e P a s c a l Q u i g n a r d , Labro a c t u a l l y l i v e d in the U n i t e d S t a t e s f o r a n u m b e r of y e a r s , s t u d y i n g at a c o n s e r v a t i v e S o u t h e r n u n i v e r s i t y during the McCarthyite among h i s 1950s. The author describes a conformism f e l l o w c l a s s m a t e s t h a t one o r d i n a r i l y a s s o c i a t e s only w i t h Red G u a r d s d u r i n g C h i n a ' s C u l t u r a l R e v o l u t i o n : " D e t o u t e l a r a n g e e , Buck e s t l e s e u l a n ' a v o i r p a s l e s c h e v e u x en b r o s s e , l a crewcut...." (Labro 18). T h e i r g a r m e n t s a r e as u n i n d i v i d u a t e d as t h e i r h a i r : " I l s s o n t t o u t h a b i l l e s de l a m e m e f a c o n , on c r o i r a i t p r e s q u e en u n i f o r m e : c o l de c h e m i s e a 270 p o i n t e s b o u t o n e e s , c r a v a t e s a r a y u n e s , tweed jackets b l a z e r s o m b r e " (Labro 18). A l l t h i s p r o v i n c i a l b r o w n - n o s i n g f a i l s s o l i c i t the s o p h i s t i c a t e d s n e e r of c o n t e m p t from a Jean-Paul a c h e v r o n s ou Sartre or w h i c h one w o u l d to expect a S i m o n e de B e a u v o i r : " J e v e u x me c o n f o r m e r . J e veux e t r e a m e r i c a i n c o m m e eux...." (Labro 2 7 ) . T h e young Labro i s l e s s i n t r i g u e d by the i n h a b i t a n t s of F a u l k n e r ' s V o k n a p a t a w p h a C o u n t y t h a n he i s by the c h a r a c t e r s i n C h a r l e s S c h u l t z ' s c o m i c s t r i p , Peanuts. then-new W i t h l i t t l e c o m p l a i n t , he a c c e p t s the puritan r e s t r a i n t s of Deep S o u t h d a t i n g r i t u a l s : "...il n'y a pas de p u t a i n dans l a v a l l e e de V i r g i n i e " (Labro 3 4 ) . F o r a w h i l e , the c a l l o w n a r r a t o r d a t e s a black school teacher, until " B i g J i m M c L a i n " - a Southern sheriff whose name q u i t e f i t t i n g l y , i s i d e n t i c a l to t h a t of an e p o n y m o u s J o h n Wayne r o l e in a p e r i o d a n t i - C o m m u n i s t C o l d W a r a g i t p r o p d r a m a - w a r n s him off. A f t e r t h i s t h i n l y v e i l e d t h r e a t , our n o m i n a l hero p u r s u e s a S o u t h e r n b e l l e i n a m o r e c o n v e n t i o n a l m a n n e r . H e ' s a t t r a c t e d to B l a c k c u l t u r e , f e r r e t i n g out R & B r e c o r d s on the f o r b i d d e n " d a r k s i d e " of t o w n , but he i s s t i l l a s t r a n g e r , and not a p a r t i c u l a r l y c o u r a g e o u s one at t h a t . A s he h i m s e l f a d m i t s , " J e ne s a i s r i e n des N o i r s . A c e t t e epoque, l a V i r g i n i e t e l l e que j e l ' a i d e c o u v e r t e , e s t t o t a l e m e n t s e g r e g a t i o n i s t e . . . I c i , c ' e s t le s u d " (Labro 8 6 ) . T h e c o n t e m p o r a r y F r e n c h w r i t e r who i s m o s t s t r o n g l y a s s o c i a t e d w i t h p r o - A m e r i c a n p o s i t i o n s , though, is unquestionably P h i l i p p e Djian. Aside from Louis-Ferdinand Celine, virtually a l l of D j i a n ' s cultural i n f l u e n c e s are U.S. in o r i g i n . A s one of h i s b i o g r a p h e r s w r o t e , " A v i n g t ans...a c e t t e epoque...il h a i t l a c u l t u r e . . . D y l a n et Cohen s o n t l e s d i e u x 271 vivants" (Boudjedra 8 - 9). 2 Djian worked for six months at the R o c k e f e l l e r C e n t r e in 1 9 6 8 , t r a v e l l e d throughout L a t i n A m e r i c a w i t h an a v a n t - g a r d e t h e a t r e troupe s h o r t l y t h e r e a f t e r , and s e t t l e d h i s f a m i l y i n M a r t h a ' s V i n e y a r d a f t e r t u r n i n g 4 0 . W h i l e the a u t h o r does not f o r g e t to pay t h e o b l i g a t o r y G a l l i c homage to E r n e s t H e m i n g w a y and W i l l i a m F a u l k n e r , he h a s been f a r m o r e marginal writings profoundly affected by t h e more of Henry M i l l e r and R i c h a r d B r a u t i g a n . " H e n r i , " a s Mohamed B o u d j e d r a p o i n t s o u t , i s the m o s t r e c u r r e n t g i v e n name among D j i a n ' s f i c t i o n a l p r o t a g o n i s t s . Above a l l , though, t h e r e i s B r a u t i g a n , the U.S. h i p p i e m o v e m e n t ' s c l o s e s t e q u i v a l e n t to a l i t e r a r y f i g u r e of m a j o r "beat" status: "Brautigan, l'instinctif, l'ambivalent Richard Brautigan est la premiere figure, figure recurrente puisqu'il revient dans p l u s i e u r s r o m a n s , q u ' i l e s t a l u i s e u l l e s u j e t de l a n o u v e l l e Une raison d'aimer la vie..." ( B o u d j e d r a 8 9 ) . In Maudit manege, the n a r a t o r / a l t e r ego r e c o r d s t h a t " C ' e s t l e j o u r ou j ' a i tape l a d e r n i e r e page qu'on a a p p r i s l a m o r t de R i c h a r d B r a u t i g a n , et le s o i r j e me s u i s s a o u l e c o m m e j e l ' a v a i s e n c o r e j a m a i s f a i t de ma v i e et j e s u i s r e s t e un l o n g m o m e n t c o u c h e en t r a v e r s du t a p i s a e c o u t e r l e s gens c h i a l e r dans l a r u e " ( M a u d i t m a n e g e 5 1 ) . W i t h i n the p a r a m e t e r s of the a u t h o r ' s hip u n i v e r s e , t h i s k i n d of m o u r n i n g i s as h e a r t - f e l t tragically and p r o f o u n d as a f u l l - s c a l e V i k i n g funeral. Djian i s equally taken w i t h A n g l o - A m e r i c a n n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y a u t h o r s and l a t e t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y rock ' n ' r o l l e r s : " A p r e m i e r e v u e , une c o n s t a t a t i o n s ' i m p o s e : peu d ' e c r i v a i n s f r a n c a i s dans c e t t e e c u r i e " ( B o u d j e d r a 8 8 ) . Only i n one r e s p e c t i s he t r u l y t r a d i t i o n a l : "11 y a c h e z c e t a u t e u r un r a p p o r t s i n g u l i e r au t e r r i t o i r e , L e o n a r d C o h e n , t h e m o s t c r i t i c a l l y r e v e r e d of a l l C a n a d i a n t r o u b a d o r s , i s d e s c r i b e d as " A m e r i c a n " i n F r e n c h p e r i o d i c a l s . 2 often 272 une c o n n i v e n c e s e c r e t e , p o u r le r o m a n t i c i s m e f a c o n C h a t e a u b r i a n d , epoque Natchez..." (Boudjedra 91). A m e r i c a n i n f l u e n c e on the a u t h o r can be f e l t even in t h o s e n o v e l s and t a l e s w h e r e New W o r l d geography i s n o t a b l y a b s e n t . In h i s r e v i e w of J e a n - J a c q u e s B e i n e i x ' s s c r e e n v e r s i o n of J 7 o 2 le matin, a French f i l m c r i t i c c o m p l a i n e d t h a t " P h i l i p p e D j i a n , [le c o m p e r e du r e a l i s a t e u r ] , qui a e c r i t le l i v r e , e s t t r o p envoute p a r l ' A m e r i q u e pour e t r e s i n c e r e , et c o n f o n d a v e c une c e r t a i n e d e l e c t a t i o n de s o l i t u d e et e g o t i s i n e " ( " L e s o r i p e a u x du l o o k " 79). If P a r i s i a n c r i t i c s have l o n g r a i l e d a g a i n s t the r e l a t i v e l y mild " l i b e r t i e s " w h i c h D j i a n t a k e s w i t h the F r e n c h l a n g u a g e , i t i s a l m o s t c e r t a i n l y b e c a u s e they s u s p e c t t h i s f r e e d o m s t e m s f r o m Nexus, and not Voyage au bout de la nuit. T h i s d e f e n s i v e h o s t i l i t y i s at l e a s t partly m o t i v a t e d by the u n c e r t a i n t y g e n e r a t e d by F r a n c e ' s d e c l i n i n g c u l t u r a l r o l e on the g l o b a l s c a l e . A s D j i a n h i m s e l f w o u l d have i t , " ' A P a r i s , on croit que l a l i t t e r a t u r e f r a n c a i s e e s t e n c o r e en t r a i n d ' i l l u m i n e r m o n d e , en f a i t l e s gens r i g o l e n t . L e s e d i t e u r s a m e r i c a i n s le n'achetent j a m a i s un r o m a n f r a n c a i s , l e s E s p a g n o l s et l e s I t a l i e n s un p a r - c i p a r la...." ( R o b i t a i l l e 2 0 2 ) . Even s o , D j i a n i s not as s e a m l e s s l y w e l d e d to the American m a i n f r a m e as h i s d e t r a c t o r s c o n t e n d . A s he h i m s e l f a d m i t s , " ' B r e f , j e p a r l e l ' a n g l a i s . . . c o m m e un F r a n c a i s . . . . " ( R o b i t a i l l e 2 0 4 ) . He h a s , s e e m s , no i n t e r e s t it i n h o b n o b b i n g w i t h h i s A m e r i c a n p e e r s : "11 y ' a q u e l q u e s a n n e e s quand i l habitait Cape C o d , W i l l i a m Styron, qu'il l ' a d m i r e , n ' h a b i t a i t pas t r e s l o i n : ' J ' e t a i s c o n t e n t q u ' i l s o i t l a , m a i s j e ne l u i ai j a m a i s p a r l e . En l i s a n t s e s o e u v r e s , j ' a v a i s eu le m e i l l e u r de lui m e m e ' " (Robitaille 201). 273 Henri-John narrator/hero (again that Milleresque given name!), the of Lent dehors, i s a F r e n c h p r o f e s s o r w h o m o p e s around Cape Cod a f t e r h i s w r i t e r w i f e l e a v e s h i m . New England i s l e s s a p l a c e f o r h i m to l i v e than i t i s the i d e a l l o c a t i o n to b r o o d i n g l y r e f l e c t on h i s (Gallic) past. Not for this melancholic the solace of political e n g a g e m e n t : " J e p e n s a i s que l e s R u s s e s et l e s A m e r i c a i n s m e t t r a i e n t b i e n t o t un p o i n t f i n a l e a nos p r o b l e m e s , a u s s i ne v o y a i s - j e pas d ' u t i l i t e a me m e l e r de s e s c h o s e s " ( D j i a n 382). S i g n i f i c a n t l y , Henri-John's A m e r i c a n o p h i l i a p r e - d a t e s h i s h a n d s - o n A m e r i c a n e x p e r i e n c e . In the m i d - 1 9 6 0 s , his friend Meryl looked a f t e r his overseas education: " E l l e me f i t d e c o u v r i r - c e r t a i n s paquets a r r i v a i e n t e x p r e s pour moi des U S A q u e l q u e s j e u n e s a u t e u r s c o m m e C a r v e r ou H a r r i s o n a l o r s que j ' e n e t a i s e n c o r e a K e r o u a c ou S a r o y a n , et j e f u m a i s des W i n s t o n s d'importation, j ' e n r e c e v a i s d e s c a r t o u c h e s e n t i e r e s " ( D j i a n 4 1 8 ) . When r e a d i n g the p r e v i o u s p a s s a g e , one s h o u l d b e a r in m i n d t h a t blond t o b a c c o w a s once as hard a s e l l in F r a n c e as w e r e w h i s k y and b o u r b o n ; the e c o n o m i c s u c c e s s of t h e s e s t i m u l a n t s r e c o g n i z e d as c i r c u m s t a n t i a l subsequent in F r a n c e s h o u l d t h e r e f o r e e v i d e n c e of a f u n d a m e n t a l be change in D j i a n has begun to n a t i o n a l t a s t e s , not as a m e r e e x p a n s i o n . Starting w i t h his 1994 novel Assassins, e x p l o r e an A m e r i c a t h a t i s even m o r e a m o r p h o u s t h a n i t w a s One assumes before. t h a t the a c t i o n s d e s c r i b e d t a k e p l a c e in the New W o r l d , but one can n e v e r be e n t i r e l y s u r e . A t t i m e s , i t s e e m s as i f the a u t h o r ' s v i s i o n of H e n o c h v i l l e - a name w h i c h in and of i t s e l f s u g g e s t s s o m e s o r t of u n i o n b e t w e e n New England and Old F r a n c e - o c c u p i e s an half-world where imaginary F r e n c h and A m e r i c a n l a n d s c a p e s and m o r e s have b e c o m e h o p e l e s s l y i n t e r t w i n e d . To quote one o u t s i d e o b s e r v e r , t h i s New 274 World belongs to imaginaire...cree an "Amerique de t o u t e s jamais i d e n t i f iee...un pieces" (Robitaille). territoire T h e end r e s u l t is u n p r e c e d e n t e d : as s h a r p l y o b s e r v e d as de T o c q u e v i l l e ' s A m e r i c a , as r o m a t i c i z e d as de B e a u v o i r ' s , and as d e r a c i n a t e d as K a f k a ' s . In F r a n c e , as in the r e s t of E u r o p e , the w i d e s p r e a d a d a p t a t i o n American technology and practices has led to a de of facto A m e r i c a n i z a t i o n of the p o p u l a c e . C r o w d s f l o c k to M c D o n a l d ' s i n P a r i s , the c i t y of haute c u i s i n e . The m o d e r n i z a t i o n of the C i t y of L i g h t i n s p i r e d J e a n - L u c G o d a r d ' s AlphavilJe provincial cities. 3 Without can now be f o u n d in that remote i r o n y , the P a r i s - b a s e d J u l i o C o r t a z a r , a l e f t - w i n g m a g i c r e a l i s t , can e n t h u s e , " P o u r n o u s , P a r k i n g l a n d e s t une terme de l i b e r t e " ( C o r t a z a r and Dunlop 9 6 ) . In 1 9 9 7 , a Situationist c o n d u c t i n g a derive through even the o l d e s t , m o s t i n d i g e n o u s s t r e e t s of the French capital would find no q u a r t e r untouched by changing p s y c h o g e o g r a p h y ; the o l e a g i n o u s s t r a i n s of M i c h a e l J a c k s o n b o o m b o x i n g f r o m a Sony W a l k m a n i s now more than enough to s c a t t e r the s h a d e s of V o l t a i r e , V e r l a i n e , and V i l l o n . C l a u d e M i l l e r ' s cringing expressed d e s i r e to c o n s t r u c t "un u n i v e r s qui r e n v o i e a m e s r e v e s de c i n e m a , des s o u v e n i r s m a g n i f i e s de f i l m s a m e r i c a i n s vus l e s s a m e d i s s o i r s dans mon e n f a n c e " ( C u r c o l 107) now s e e m s q u a i n t l y a n a c h r o n i s t i c . More than 7 0 y e a r s ago, D.H. L a w r e n c e w r o t e t h a t " a l l t h a t i s v i s i b l e to the naked European e y e , in A m e r i c a , i s a s o r t of r e c r e a n t E u r o p e a n " ( L a w r e n c e 3). Nowadays one contemporary could say the E u r o p e a n s . What same thing today once s e e m e d m o s t in reverse about eccentric about Although, of course, the most famous Russian Communist paper, and the leading French conservative paper, have not yet fused into Figaro-Pravda, as Godard predicted. S t i l l , when you consider the other media mergers that have taken place, one can hardly accuse the Franco-Swiss filmmaker of shoddy prescience. 3 275 Lawrence's literary study prescient: "The furthest reached the p i t c h of of t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s n o w a p p e a r s most f r e n z i e s of F r e n c h m o d e r n i s m . . . h a v e not y e t extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, H a w t h o r n e , W h i t m a n r e a c h e d . T h e European m o d e r n s are a l l trying to be extreme. The great A m e r i c a n s I mention j u s t were i t " (Lawrence 4). The p r e v i o u s s t a t e m e n t r i n g s even t r u e r when you p l a c e the w o r d " p o s t " b e f o r e the w o r d " m o d e r n " . S t i l l , i f t h e F r e n c h o f t e n s e e m angry a t , and unhappy w i t h , U.S. cultural i n v a s i o n s of t h e u n c o n t r o l l e d variety, they still derive a m e a s u r e of p r i d e f r o m t h e i r c h a m p i o n s h i p of u n d e r v a l u e d A m e r i c a n a r t i s t i c a s s e t s , a p r i d e t h a t i s s u r e l y not u n c o n n e c t e d to t h e i r unvanquished belief in superior G a l l i c s e n s i b i l i t y . in A m e r i c a n h a r d b o i l e d n o v e l s c o n t i n u e d disparate filmmakers the a l t e r e d national Francois Truffaut que je and A l a i n C o r n e a u (Serie c i r c u m s t a n c e s of t h e s e a d a p t a t i o n s , they w e r e s c r i p t e d in a s p i r i t interest unabated, inspiring a s C l a u d e M i l l e r (Dites-lui B e r t r a n d T a v e r n i e r (Coup du torchon), Despite Cinematic still such 1'airne), noire). wide-screen very c l o s e to r e v e r e n c e . w a s f a i r l y t y p i c a l w h e n he e x p l a i n e d t h a t , a p r o p o s the w o r k s of W i l l i a m I r i s h , " q u a n d j e d e v a i s a f f r o n t e r un ' p r o b l e m e I r i s h ' , j ' a v a i s des c h a n c e s de t r o u v e r l a ' s o l u t i o n I r i s h ' " ( G i l l a i n 2 4 4 ) . In 1 9 9 6 , C l a u d e M e s p l e d e and J e a n - J a c q u e s S c h l e r e t published a m a s s i v e b i o g r a p h i c a l d i c t i o n a r y / b i b l i o g r a p h y / b i o g r a p h y of t h e m a i n l y A m e r i c a n a u t h o r s w h o s u p p l y the r a w m a t e r i a l f o r La S e r i e n o i r e . T o d a t e , no p u b l i s h e r i n A m e r i c a has seen f i t to t r e a t n a t i v e c r i m e w r i t e r s w i t h the s a m e s c r u p u l o u s r e s p e c t . In t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s , by f a r t h e m o s t contentious Franco- A m e r i c a n e n t h u s i a s m i s t h e one c o n n e c t e d to J e r r y L e w i s . In h e r 276 February 1 9 8 9 " l e t t r e de N e w Y o r k / ' B e r e n i c e R e y n a u d p u b l i s h e d an extremely f u n n y and p r e s c i e n t a r t i c l e e n t i t l e d " Q u i a P e u r de J e r r y L e w i s ? P a s N o u s , pas n o u s . " To the h a c k n e y e d q u e s t i o n " W h y do t h e F r e n c h l o v e J e r r y L e w i s / ' Reynaud posed a c o u n t e r - q u e s t i o n ' " P o u r q u o i l e s A m e r i c a i n s p e n s e n t - i l s que l e s F r a n c a i s a i m e n t J e r r y Lewis?'" ( R e y n a u d V l l l ) . T h e e n s u i n g a n s w e r s to the l a s t q u e s t i o n p r o d u c e d a sort of Rorschach blot contemptuous attitudes two nations enemies. portrait of t h e a l t e r n a t e l y underlying cultural who are s i m u l t a n e o u s l y admiring relations between wary friends and and these friendly 4 L i t m u s t e s t p s y c h o l o g y a s i d e , h o w e v e r , J e r r y L e w i s does have h i s c r i t i c a l c h a m p i o n s in F r a n c e , f i l m . t h e o r i s t s w h o w o u l d s e r i o u s l y c l a i m that their i d o l i s as w o r t h y underappreciated Alfred of s e r i o u s r e s p e c t as w e r e t h e o n c e - Hitchcock and H o w a r d H a w k s . Of these d e f e n d e r s , by f a r the m o s t e f f u s i v e w a s the r e c e n t l y d e c e a s e d R o b e r t Benayoun. A fluent translator of anglophone, Edward magazine revelled last generation Lear's limericks, in " c e 'tour d'esprit' F r a n c a i s ont t o u j o u r s t a n t de d i f f i c u l t y this tres Surrealist, stalwart of and Positif a n g l o - s a x o n que l e s a s a i s i r " ( J o u b e r t 6 6 ) . In the w o r d s of l o n g - t i m e c o l l e a g u e M i c h e l C i m e n t , " i l etait...un s o r c i e r c a r , non c o n t e n t de nous t r a n s p o r t e r d'une r i v e a l ' a u t r e , il fut le plus s o u v e n t en a m a n t du f l e u v e , d e c o u v r i r a u s s i b i e n l e C i n e m a Novo e t G l a u b e r R o c h a , l e s i n d e p e n d e n t s n e w - y o r k a i s , l e s c o u r t s m e t r a g e s de R e s n a i s , J e r r y L e w i s ou l e s c o m i q u e s j u i f s du Borscht B r o o k s a Woody A l l e n " ( B e n a y o u n l e dandy l i t t e r a i r e though 4 not as high profile on t h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l F o r a c o m p l e t e t r a n s c r i p t of t h i s a r t i c l e , p l e a s e see Appendix 3. Belt, de Mel 63). Benayoun, circuit as the 277 c i n e a s t e / c r i t i c s of Cahiers they for re-setting du cinema, the p a r a m e t e r s w a s at l e a s t as r e s p o n s i b l e as of F r e n c h t a s t e . H i s e a r l y and e x t r a v a g a n t e n t h u s i a s m f o r Night of the Hunter, C h a r l e s L a u g h t o n ' s only m o t i o n p i c t u r e in the c a p a c i t y of d i r e c t o r , u n q u e s t i o n a b l y to the f a c t t h a t Studio premiere magazine awarded that p l a c e de c l a s s e m e n t " in i t s contributed 1955 production r a n k i n g of " l e s 5 0 "la meilleurs f i l m s - c u l t e s " ( 7 7 ) . B e n a y o u n ' s m a g a z i n e w r i t i n g o w e d l i t t l e to the i d e o l o g i c a l l y - d r i v e n c r i t i c i s m of the 1 9 7 0 s and ' 8 0 s . A s he h i m s e l f put i t , " J ' a i t o u j o u r s pense que la critique devait etre poetique, meme si e l l e s ' a p p l i q u e a un f i l m i m p a r f a i t , ce a T i n v e r s e de c e r t a i n s de m e s a m i s qui c r o y a i e n t a l a p o s s i b i l i t y d'une p o e t i q u e d e l i b e r e e on ne d e c i d e p a s , p a r e x e m p l e , qu'on f e r a un f i l m s u r r e a l i s t e , on e s t s u r r e a l i s t e ou on ne T e s t p a s " ("Le c i n e m a et n o u s " 4 8 ) . B e n a y o u n ' s d e d i c a t i o n to Bonjour, Mr. Lewis, the a u t h o r ' s best k n o w n - s o m e w o u l d say h i s m o s t n o t o r i o u s b o o k - b e g i n s w i t h a c u r i o u s dedication: "A ANDREW SARRIS, le Spiro Agnew de la critique a m e r i c a i n e . " ( B o n j o u r . Mr. L e w i s 6) S a r r i s , i t s h o u l d be r e c a l l e d , w a s the A m e r i c a n r e v i e w e r who f i r s t i n t r o d u c e d F r e n c h - s t y l e criticism Cahiers i n t o the U n i t e d S t a t e s , a d a p t i n g i t du Cinema's downplaying the in a w a y t h a t pro-Hollywood enthusiasms while magazine's equally n e o r e a l i s m and F r e n c h realisme p o i n t e d o u t , w a s at c r i t i c a l strong poetique. auteurist simultaneously advocacy Positif, exalted of Italian i t s h o u l d a l s o be and i d e o l o g i c a l odds w i t h t h e Cahiers c r o w d , so A n d r e w S a r r i s ' a p p r o a c h c o u l d not help but be s c r u t i n i z e d w i t h double s u s p i c i o n . T h i s p a r t i a l l y e x p l a i n s the c r i t i c s insulting bracketing w i t h Richard Nixon's disgraced, philistine Vice President, but not e n t i r e l y . Benayoun was a S u r r e a l i s t p o e t , a f t e r a l l ; c o n c e i v a b l y , 278 h i s Bonjour d e d i c a t i o n c o u l d , i f one i n s i s t s , be r e a d as an e x t r e m e l y obscure compliment. O r i g i n a l l y , Benayoun w a n t e d to w r i t e a book c a l l e d Les Jokers, a w o r k t h a t w o u l d have e n c o m p a s s e d the c a r e e r s of W.C. F i e l d s , B u s t e r K e a t o n , Groucho M a r x , T o t o , A l b e r t o S o r d i , and The B e a t l e s , as w e l l as Jerry L e w i s . F o r the author, these a r t i s t s "etaient a la f o i s les b o u f f o n s , l e s d a n d y s , l e s e x c e n t r i q u e s de l e u r t e m p s ' " ( B o n j o u r . Mr. L e w i s 1 1). If B e n a y o u n ' s book can be read as a p a n e g y r i c o r h a g i o g r a p h y , i t i s at t i m e s c u r i o u s l y u n f l a t t e r i n g to i t s s u b j e c t . When c o n s i d e r i n g the n a t u r e of L e w i s ' s p a r t n e r s h i p w i t h the h a n d s o m e Dean M a r t i n , f o r i n s t a n c e , the a u t h o r w r i t e s , " D ' a u t r e p a r t se p r e s e n t J e r r y L e w i s , un a v o r t o n s i m i e s q u e et j u v e n i l e , c o i f f e c o m m e s a b r o s s e a d e n t s , qui ne s a i t ni c h a n t e r ni d a n s e r m a i s s ' o b s t i s e a le f a i r e , et q u i , r e f u s a n t t o u t p u b e r t e , se l a i s s e c a l i n e r par des dames o p u l e n t e s au s e i n p l e i n de l a i t , ou p r e f e r a b l e m e n t par son i d o l e m a s c u l i n e , Dean M a r t i n " ( B o n j o u r . MrLewis 21). Benayoun d e s c r i b e s J e r r y as b o t h " l ' a n t i - J a m e s Dean" ( B o n j o u r . Mr. L e w i s 19) and as an a d u l t who a d o r e s a l l c h i l d r e n b e c a u s e " [ i l s ont] de son a g e " ( B o n j o u r . Mr. L e w i s 41). A g a i n and a g a i n , B e n a y o u n r e f e r s to h i s s u b j e c t ' s o n s c r e e n w e a k n e s s , e f f e m i n a c y , immaturity, i n e p t i t u d e w i t h w o m e n . F o r the a u t h o r , L e w i s ' s w i l l i n g n e s s to e x p l o r e e m o t i o n s and m o d e s of being w h i c h m o s t p e o p l e w o u l d be a s h a m e d to a d m i t i s w h a t m a k e s h i m a g r e a t a r t i s t . It i s on the s t r e n g t h of volition that he m a k e s h i g h - f l o w n claims s u c h as t h e this following: " C o m m e c e l l e de B u n u e l (et l a r a s s e m b l a n c e a r r e t e l a ) , l ' o e u v r e de J e r r y L e w i s e s t basee s u r des s o u v e n i r s d ' e n f a n c e " ( B o n j o u r . Mr. L e w i s 3 3 9 ) . T h i s , in B e n a y o u n ' s e y e s , m a k e s h i s s u b j e c t a c u l t u r a l incendiary: " P o u r t a n t i l r e s t e un p e r s o n n a g e s u b v e r s i f . II e s t le s a t i r i s t e l e p l u s 279 f e r o c e , le plus disent des r e g i m e s johnsoniens et n i x o n i e n s . Son p a c i f i s m e e s t m i l i t a n t . II ne c r a i n t pas d ' a t t a q u e r l a guerre du V i e t n a m , de donner l e p a r t b e l l e aux n o i r s " ( B o n j o u r . Mr. L e w i s 147). Pacifist; pro-Black; anti-establishment: these three c o u l d not help but e n d e a r t h e m s e l v e s to l e f t - w i n g qualities European c r i t i c s . In E u r o p e , the c o m m e r c i a l or c r i t i c a l f a i l u r e of m a j o r A m e r i c a n m o v i e s i s o f t e n a t t r i b u t e d to p o l i t i c a l f a c t o r s . By i m p l i c a t i o n , Heaven's Gate d i e d at the b o x - o f f i c e not b e c a u s e i t w a s a s t r u c t u r a l m e s s but b e c a u s e i t s u n d e r l y i n g m e s s a g e about the c l o s i n g of the W e s t w a s u n c o n g e n i a l to M i d d l e A m e r i c a n v i e w e r s . T h e r e i s m o r e than a l i t t l e t r u t h to t h e s e charges. Much of Bonjour, fir. feelings of gratitude Lewis for his i s t a k e n up w i t h the continental actor/director's acceptance. At a press c o n f e r e n c e , he s a y s , " - E n F r a n c e , on r e c o i s l e s f i l m s d i f f e r e m m e n t , meme en Italie, en A n g l e t e r r e , en A l l e m a g n e de ou en E s p a g n e . Le c i n e p h i l i e europeen e x a m i n e l e s f i l m s , et se p r e o c c u p e m o i n s de T a n g l e c o m i q u e que de s a m o t i v a t i o n . II se s o u c i e de l ' e c r i t u r e , du m o n t a g e , de l a p h o t o , de l a m i s e en s c e n e , et i l e s t i n t r i g u e p a r I'homme... Aux U.S.A. l e s i n t e l l e c t u e l s n'ont pas l e t e m p s pour c e s c h o s e s - l a , i l s s o n t t r o p o c c u p e s a q u i t t e r l a s a l 1 e avant meme de s ' a s s e o i r " ( B o n j o u r . Mr. L e w i s 161). Most gratifying of a l l , "Nous avons la-bas une categorie d ' i n d i v i d u s que nous a p p e l o n s (par d e r i s i o n ) c r i t i q u e s . En F r a n c e vous a v e z des a n a l y s t e s " ( B o n j o u r . Mr. L e w i s 161). More r e c e n t l y , Woody A l l e n has been g e t t i n g treatment in F r a n c e . A s the a c t o r / d i r e c t o r the J e r r y t o l d Cahiers du Lewis Cinema, " C ' e s t une h i s t o i r e qui a c o m m e n c e avec Edgar P o e , p u i s a c o n t i n u e a v e c F a u l k n e r et t a n t d ' a u t r e s . T o u t l e monde s a i t aux E t a t s - U n i s que l a 280 France a la reputation de d e c o u v r i r et de c e l e b r e r les artistes a m e r i c a i n s qui s o n t i g n o r e s dans l e u r p a y s . II y a q u e l q u e s a n n e e s , l e New Yorker a p u b l i e un d e s s i n ou T o n v o y a i t un r o i s u r s o n t r o n e qui d i s a i t du b o u f f o n a s s i s a s e s p i e d s : 'lei, France on considere il n'est pas etre drole, mais en que c est un genie!' C ' e s t un a t t i t u d e J typiquement a m e r i c a i n " ( C i m e n t and T o b i n 14). J u s t a s , s o m e m i g h t add, r o l l i n g out the r e d c a r p e t to o s t e n t a t i o u s l y honour neglected A m e r i c a n a r t i s t s i s t y p i c a l l y F r e n c h . A s Mia F a r r o w p o i n t e d out in h e r m e m o i r s , " P a r i s i a n s are a l o t n i c e r i f y o u ' r e w i t h Woody A l l e n " (Farrow 242). The l i s t of s i m i l a r l y p r i v i l e g e d A m e r i c a n c u l t u r a l c e l e b r i t i e s i s very long indeed. C u r r e n t l y , they include Clint Eastwood, Michael C i m i n o , S a m F u l l e r , T i m B u r t o n , J o h n C a r p e n t e r , and Monte H e l l m a n . T h e s e N e w W o r l d h e r o e s are m o r e o r l e s s e v e n l y d i v i d e d t a l e n t e d m o n e y - m a k e r s qui sont meprises par between leurs concitoyens, and m a r g i n a l f i g u r e s w h o s e c a r e e r s have been d r o w n e d i n the H o l l y w o o d f a c t o r y s y s t e m . A t p r e s e n t , m o s t U.S. l i o n s in F r a n c e are c o n n e c t e d i n some way with the cinema; forty years a g o , the majority were a f f i l i a t e d w i t h j a z z . W i t h the n o t a b l e e x c e p t i o n s of E d g a r A l l a n Poe (a w r i t e r who i s o f t e n p e r c e i v e d as more F r e n c h than A m e r i c a n , a n y w a y ) , H e r m a n M e l v i l l e ( F r e n c h c r i t i c s adore h i m a l m o s t as much as do t h e i r Italian counterparts), cultural William F a u l k n e r (now c o m m o d i t y ) , Ernest Hemingway (highly an a l m o s t universal prized for his lean, s p a r e s t y l e ) , and v i r t u a l l y a l l U.S. m a s t e r s , m a j o r or m i n o r , of le roman noir, a u t h o r s are s e l d o m so p r i v i l e g e d . The s h o r t r o s t e r above w a s r e c e n t l y expanded to i n c l u d e a n o t h e r l i t e r a r y c e l e b r i t y : W i l l i a m S t y r o n . P h i l i p p e D j i a n , as w e have a l r e a d y 281 s e e n , r e g a r d s t h i s man as an i d o l ( a l b e i t one he'd p r e f e r not to w o r s h i p in the f l e s h ) . M i c h e l B u t o r , a n o t h e r G a l l i c a d m i r e r , w r o t e the p r e f a c e to the F r e n c h l a n g u a g e e d i t i o n of Set This House on Fire. In M e l v i n J . F r i e d m a n ' s o p i n i o n , t h i s phenomenon can be e x p l a i n e d p r i m a r i l y as an e x t e n s i o n of the l o n g - e s t a b l i s h e d F r e n c h l o v e of W i l l i a m F a u l k n e r : " H e w a s t a k e n up v i g o r o u s l y and c r e a t i v e l y by the F r e n c h - e v e n b e f o r e he w a s p r o p e r l y a p p r e c i a t e d in h i s n a t i v e c o u n t r y - a n d , on o c c a s i o n , w a s d e e m e d to be the i n h e r i t o r of the F r e n c h s y m b o l i s t s " (Kolb and N o a k e s 123) . F r i e d m a n r e m i n d s us t h a t " A l m o s t t w o d e c a d e s ago the S o r b o n n e p r o f e s s o r R o g e r A s s e l i n e a u e d i t e d an i n f l u e n t i a l March by speaking of its author as 'un e s s a y on The ecrivain plus Long francais q u ' a m e r i c a i n ' " ( K o l b and N o a k e s 123). In the s a m e v e i n , he p r o p o s e s t h a t " S t y r o n s e e m s to be f o l l o w i n g in a l i n e of m e m o i r i s t s of d e c i d e d l y French temperament w h i c h began w i t h M o n t a i g n e and c a r r i e d S a i n t - S i m o n and R o u s s e a u d o w n to S a r t r e Noakes through and M a l r a u x " ( K o l b and 1 2 3 ) . In the p r o c e s s , " S t y r o n s e e m s to have j o i n e d P o e and F a u l k n e r in the e n v i a b l e p r o c e s s of being G a l l i c i z e d " (Kolb and N o a k e s 124) . One a s p e c t of t h i s phenomenon w h i c h F r i e d m a n does not deal w i t h at s u f f i c i e n t l e n g t h i s the g r a c e f u l e a s e w i t h w h i c h S t y r o n ' s p r o s e t a k e s to F r e n c h t r a n s l a t i o n . To c i t e language r e n d e r i n g of Sophie's just one e x a m p l e , the French Choice e n d o w s t h a t t e x t w i t h an e l e g a i c m e l a n c h o l y t h a t i s in s o m e w a y s r i c h e r and m o r e r e s o n a n t t h a n the s a d n e s s to be f o u n d in the E n g l i s h o r i g i n a l . L i k e P o e , F a u l k n e r , J i m Thompson, William I r i s h , and P a t r i c i a H i g h s m i t h , S t y r o n w h e n p l a n t e d in F r e n c h s o i l . T h e s a m e c a n n o t be s a i d f o r flourishes Gertrude S t e i n , E z r a P o u n d , e.e. c u m m i n g s , or a hundred o t h e r w r i t e r s of g r e a t e r 282 or equal w o r t h . F o r an A m e r i c a n " g r a f t " to t a k e , in o t h e r w o r d s , i t m u s t be j o i n e d to a p l a n t of s i m i l a r s p e c i e s t h a t has long been i n d i g e n o u s to F r e n c h s o i l . W h i l e t h e r e are o b v i o u s l y s o m e m a j o r e x c e p t i o n s to rule (rock V r o l l i s p r o b a b l y the m o s t e g r e g i o u s e x a m p l e ) , i n i n s t a n c e s it h o l d s t r u e . W h a t ' s m o r e , as one a s c e n d s f r o m this most popular c u l t u r e to high a r t (pace, d e c o n s t r u c t i o n i s t s ) , t h i s t h e o r y b e c o m e s v e r y c l o s e to a l a w . A s the o l d c h e s t n u t w o u l d have i t , h o w e v e r , i m i t a t i o n i s s t i l l the s i n c e r e s t f o r m of f l a t t e r y . J a c q u e s Demy t r i e d to b u i l d an e n t i r e c a r e e r on the b a s i s of h i s l o v e f o r 1 9 5 0 s ' - v i n t a g e H o l l y w o o d m u s i c a l s , o n l y o c c a s i o n a l l y r e f e r r i n g to the s t y l i s t i c s of Rene C l a i r ' s e a r l y m u s i c a l c o m e d i e s and the much o l d e r n a t i v e t r a d i t i o n of l i g h t - h e a r t e d Interestingly, operetta. e n o u g h , The Model Shop, the one f i l m he made i n the p r o m i s e d l a n d of S o u t h e r n C a l i f o r n i a , w a s not o n l y n o n - m u s i c a l but d e c i d e d l y d o w n b e a t . By g e t t i n g too c l o s e to the t i m e l e s s f a n t a s y , he s u c c e e d e d only in t u r n i n g i t i n t o h a r s h q u o t i d i a n r e a l i t y . M u l t i p l e d i s i l l u s i o n m e n t s are a l s o at the r o o t of A l a i n R e s n a i s ' s little-seen 1989 feature, playwright/cartoonist / Want to Go Home. S c r i p t e d i n E n g l i s h by Jules Feiffer (although most francophone a u d i e n c e s s a w i t in a v e r s i o n w h i c h , w i t h the e x c e p t i o n of one key and rather p e r p l e x i n g s e q u e n c e , had been dubbed i n t o F r e n c h ) , the film d e s c r i b e d the r e t u r n of one p a r t i c u l a r A m e r i c a n to P a r i s . J o e y W e l l m a n ( A d o l p h G r e e n , the c o - a u t h o r in r e a l l i f e of a dozen MGM m u s i c a l s ) i s a f o r m e r G l - t u r n e d - s u c c e s s f u l - c a r t o o n i s t who f l i e s to F r a n c e to r e c e i v e a p r i z e f o r h i s w o r k and p a t c h up h i s r e l a t i o n s h i p w i t h h i s expatriate d a u g h t e r . W e l l m a n ' s c o m i c s t r i p " H e p C a t " i s a l l the rage i n bandes dessinees by h i s c i r c l e s , and the a r t i s t / a u t h o r is initially gratified 283 r e c e p t i o n in a c o u n t r y w h i c h he f i r s t s a w through the s i g h t s of h i s M-1 c a r b i n e . M o s t of the A m e r i c a n s he m e e t s are e x t r a o r d i n a r i l y boorish and a n n o y i n g . One l u n k - h e a d e d d i r e c t o r g r u n t s , " L ' A m e r i q u e e s t fait p o u r l e v i o l , p e u t - e t r e , m a i s pas pour l ' a m o u r " - a s e n t i m e n t one c o u l d m o r e e a s i l y i m a g i n e a F r e n c h m a n e x p r e s s i n g than an A m e r i c a n . D u r i n g the movie, Wellman/Green finds himself caught in the p r e d i c a m e n t t h a t one w o u l d e x p e c t to b e f a l l Gene K e l l y in An in Paris. More s p e c i f i c a l l y , he s t u m b l e s sort of American into a French bistro and m y s t e r i o u s l y l o s e s h i s a b i l i t y to speak the l o c a l language (the p e c u l i a r l i n g u i s t i c a l l u s i o n I r e f e r r e d to e a r l i e r v i s - a - v i s the dubbed v e r s i o n ) , and m u s t use pad and p e n c i l to make h i m s e l f u n d e r s t o o d - l i k e good c a r t o o n i s t , one m i g h t add. In h e r r e v i e w of t h i s f i l m , every Colette M a z a b r a r d w r o t e , " L ' A m e r i c a i n , c a r i c a t u r a l , r e p r e s e n t e un f a n t a s m e de l ' A m e r i q u e on n'ose p l u s en f a i r e . T o u t c o m m e l e s l i e u x de F r a n c e s o n t l a c a r i c a t u r e des f a n t a s m e s a m e r i c a i n s . La F r a n c e e s t r e d u i t e a P a r i s (et P a r i s a l a S o r b o n n e , un h o t e l , une g a l e r i e d ' a r t , un b u r e a u de l a S o r b o n n e ) , et l a N o r m a n d i e ( d e b a r q u e m e n t oblige)" (Mazabrard 54). R e f e r r i n g to the f i l m ' s o r i g i n a l r e l e a s e p r i n t , she a d d s , " C e t t e F r a n c e p o u r nous d e v i e n t t e r r e e t r a n g e r e ( t o u t le f i l m e s t en a n g l a i s , s o u s t i t r e en f r a n c a i s ) " ( M a z a b r a r d 55). / Want to Go Home l e a v e s us hanging " E n t r e deux p a y s , e g a r e , e n t r e deux e p o q u e s , a v e c s a t r i s t e f i g u r e , il i n c a r n e l ' e r r a n c e du h e r o s de l a m o d e r n i t e , un peu m o r t - v i v a n t , un peu relique...et ' s i t r i s t e , s i t r i s t e ' " ( M a z a b r a r d 5 6 ) . F o r our p u r p o s e s , " L a m o d e r n i t e d ' e t r e v i e i l l o t " c r o s s - r e f e r e n c e s a n u m b e r of i n t e r e s t i n g c h a r a c t e r s and m o t i f s . D i r e c t e d by an a g i n g member of la Nouvelle Vague ( s o m e critics might dispute this d e s i g n a t i o n , but to me i t s e e m s s o u n d ) , and s t a r r i n g one of the grand 284 o l d men of the H o l l y w o o d m u s i c a l , / Want to Go Home d e s c r i b e s a cultural conflict t h a t a p p e a r s p r e p a r e d to m u t a t e if not, s p e a k i n g , to die out. R e s n a i s , F e i f f e r and G r e e n , though s t i l l strictly creatively p r o d u c t i v e , knew a l l too w e l l t h a t they w e r e in f a c t r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s of a cultural cultural ancien regime t h a t w a s f a t e d to die w i t h t h e m . F o r the c o n s u m e r s of the 2 1st C e n t u r y , the G r e a t W a r , the R o a r i n g Twenties, the L i b e r a t i o n , the Postwar Existential B o o m , and the R a d i c a l S i x t i e s w i l l j u s t be p h r a s e s as i n n o c e n t of e m o t i o n a l r e s o n a n c e as the t r e a t y of N a n t e s or the R i s e of the J a n s e n i s t s . If the o l d w a r were to go on at a l l , it will inevitably be f o u g h t with different w e a p o n s , and f o r d i f f e r e n t ends. To a l a r g e d e g r e e , one a l r e a d y s e e s t h i s h a p p e n i n g in the F r e n c h movie industry. For several years now, governmental funding agencies have made a p o i n t of d i s t i n g u i s h i n g b e t w e e n F r e n c h p r o d u c t i o n s t h a t are s h o t i n t h e i r n a t i v e tongue and t h o s e t h a t are s h o t i n E n g l i s h , r e w a r d i n g the f o r m e r e c o n o m i c a l l y , and p u n i s h i n g the l a t t e r . m o s t G a l l i c f e a t u r e s are s t i l l s h o t in F r e n c h , the n a t i o n ' s t i n y While handful of " m e g a - p r o d u c t i o n s " a r e , w i t h i n c r e a s i n g r e g u l a r i t y , w r i t t e n and r e l e a s e d in E n g l i s h . To d a t e , Luc B e s s o n ' s The Fifth Element ( 1 9 9 7 ) , i s the m o s t e g r e g i o u s e x a m p l e of t h i s t r e n d . The m o s t e x p e n s i v e m o v i e e v e r to be made o u t s i d e the s t a t e - s u b s i d i z e d S o v i e t o r c o r p o r a t e l y c o n t r o l l e d A m e r i c a n s t u d i o s y s t e m s , Le Cinqieme element t i t l e ! ) f o l l o w s hard on the h e e l s of The Professional/Leon bleu/The (its dubbed and Le Grand Big Blue, t w o of the d i r e c t o r ' s e a r l i e r f e a t u r e s , the f i r s t of w h i c h w a s s h o t in New Vork w i t h m a i n l y A n g l o - A m e r i c a n a c t o r s , w h i l e the s e c o n d w a s l e n s e d i n E n g l i s h w i t h a U.S. f e m a l e l e a d . E v e n Femme Nikita, La the one F r e n c h l a n g u a g e , F r e n c h - t h e m e d L u c B e s s o n 285 p i c t u r e of the p a s t d e c a d e — s t y l i s t i c a l l y i t o w e d m o r e to J e a n - P i e r r e M e l v i l l e than to any H o l l y w o o d f i l m m a k e r - w a s l a t e r r e - m a d e f i r s t as an A m e r i c a n f e a t u r e , then as an A m e r i c a n T V s e r i e s . If B e s s o n ' s i s s t i l l a s o m e w h a t e x t r e m e c a s e , i t i s n o n e t h e l e s s t r u e t h a t H o l l y w o o d i n c r e a s i n g l y l o o k s at the F r e n c h f i l m i n d u s t r y as a s o u r c e of r a w c u l t u r a l DNA. Ignoring a l l but a f e w of the h u n d r e d s of a d m i r a b l e F r e n c h d r a m a s t h a t have been made o v e r the y e a r s , the U.S. m o t i o n p i c t u r e i n d u s t r y g e n e r a l l y p r e f e r s to z e r o in on the French comedies, awkwardly Things critics r e - d r a p i n g them in Anglo Saxon " d r a g " . have p r o g r e s s e d so f a r commercially-minded-some now actually light-weight down this might s e e m to say welcome sad road that the more culturally-colonized-film this state of affairs. For i n s t a n c e , i n a r e c e n t a r t i c l e , Studio c r i t i c A l a i n K r u g e r w a s d e l i g h t e d by the f a c t t h a t t w o F r e n c h p r o d u c e r s w o u l d have a hand in the r e - m a k e of the G a l l i c f a r c e , Un indien dans la ville, enthusiastically declaring, "11 f a u t e s p e r e r que l e s t a l e n t s et T e n e r g i e des p r o d u c t e u r s Lhermitte et L o u i s B e c k e r s u f f i r o n t Thierry a c o n v a i n c r e D i s n e y de s o r t i r f i l m a v e c l e s v r a i s m o y e n s " ( K r u g e r 1 1). P e r h a p s the m o s t le frightening e l e m e n t i n t h i s e q u a t i o n i s the i m p l i c i t b e l i e f t h a t budget i s the o n l y thing that makes commercial movies different, not national t e m p e r a m e n t . Once upon a t i m e , s u c h an a t t i t u d e w o u l d have p r o m p t e d d e m o n s t r a t o r s to m a r c h through the s t r e e t s . It w o u l d be r e a s s u r i n g to t h i n k t h a t t h i s a t t i t u d e is only h e l d by the m a s s m a r k e t F r e n c h f i l m c r i t i c s and d i r e c t o r s , but s u c h i s not the c a s e . Even B a r b e t S c h r o e d e r , one of the unsung " s a i n t s " of i n d e p e n d e n t French f i l m production, is anything but deaf to the s i r e n s o n g S o u t h e r n C a l i f o r n i a . A s w e read in a 1991 e d i t i o n of Cahiers du of cinema, 286 " D i r i g e a n t la son t r o i s i e m e f i l m a m e r i c a i n , Barbet Schroeder est ravi du t r a v a i l d e s a c t e u r s a m e r i c a i n s - ' / 7 s se donnent vraiment a fond'-et des l u x u e u s e s c o n d i t i o n s de p r o d u c t i o n a H o l l y w o o d , qui l u i ont p e r m i s d ' a u d i t i o n e r 'cinquante Posit/T-backed acteurs pour chaque role du film.'" (Krohn 7). w r i t e r s and c r i t i c s a r e no m o r e i m m u n e to t h i s t e m p t a t i o n than are t h e i r Cahiers-bQsed a s s e s s m e n t of Atlantic r i v a l s . C o n s i d e r the f o l l o w i n g City. " L ' u n des m e i l l e u r s f i l m s e t r a n g e r s de l a r e n t r e e t o u c h e de p r e s le c i n e m a f r a n c a i s , i l e s t de L o u i s M a l l e . T o u r n e en a n g l a i s aux U S A et a M o n t r e a l a v e c de l ' a r g e n t canadien (il r e p r e s e n t e m e m e l e Canada au F e s t i v a l de V e n i s e ) pendant l e boom d e s t a x - s h e l t e r s , q u ' i l a su c o n t o u r n e r avec m a e s t r i a , Atlantic City e s t en f a i t un t h r i l l e r A m e r i c a i n digne de l a grande epoque, aux a b o r d s de W.R. B u r n e t t et de N e l s o n A l g r e n , m a i s vu d'un o e i l u n a n i m i s t e , p a r m o m e n t a l t m a n i e n " ("Atlantic C i t y " 69). For late t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y F r e n c h i n t e l l e c t u a l s , t h i s d i l u t i o n of F r e n c h c i n e m a w i t h A m e r i c a n t h e m e s , m o d e l s , and p r o d u c t i o n methods i s p e r c e i v e d as p a r t of a l a r g e r p r o b l e m . A s w e s a w i n the Le Monde articles c i t e d e a r l i e r , European unity i s being urged as a p o s i t i v e antidote to economic and c u l t u r a l submission to U . S . / J a p a n e s e hegemony. Even the t i t l e s of s o m e of t h e s e t h i n k p i e c e s a r e r e f l e c t i v e of o l d G a l l i c t h i n k i n g being poured i n t o n e w u n i o n i s t m o l d s . C o n s i d e r the following controlent h e a d l i n e f o r i n s t a n c e : " L e s deux c e n t s s o c i e t e s qui le monde" (16). C l e a r l y , in this context societes" (multinational " l e s deux c o r p o r a t i o n s ) have e f f e c t i v e l y cents replaced " l e s deux c e n t s f a m i l l e s " - t h e w e a l t h y a r i s t o c r a t i c and haut bourgeois c l a n s w h o w e r e once s a i d to c o n t r o l the 200 families supplanted 1 9 t h c e n t u r y F r a n c e - a s e f f e c t i v e l y as the shadowy union of F r e e m a s o n s , 287 P r o t e s t a n t s , and J e w s who c o m p r i s e d the " u n h o l y " c o n t r o l l i n g trinity m o s t d r e a d e d by c o n s e r v a t i v e F r e n c h C a t h o l i c s f r o m the r i s e of M a r t i n L u t h e r to the f a l l of M a r s h a l P h i l i p p e P e t a i n . F r o m the a c c o m p a n y i n g charts we learn that 62 of these globe-spanning companies c o n t r o l l e d by the J a p a n e s e and 5 5 by the A m e r i c a n s . If w e look closely, however, we discover that 6 5 of the world's are more wealthiest c o r p o r a t i o n s are o w n e d and o p e r a t e d by EEC m e m b e r s , w h i l e another nine are o w n e d by n o n - a l i g n e d W e s t e r n E u r o p e a n s . In o t h e r w o r d s , a unified Europe w o u l d r e p r e s e n t a more potent economic f o r c e than e i t h e r the U n i t e d S t a t e s or the Land of the R i s i n g Sun. If Europe i s e v e r to r e g a i n i t s ( d o m i n a n t ) p l a c e in w o r l d a f f a i r s , the n e w Atlanticists b e l i e v e , i t can only be as a c o n t i n e n t , not as an a s s e m b l a g e of m i d d l e ranking powers. France, therefore, g r e a t n e s s o n l y as an i n t e g r a l hopes to play the most can r e a s o n a b l y e x p e c t to attain p a r t of a l a r g e r c o l l e c t i v e in w h i c h important cultural and the second i m p o r t a n t e c o n o m i c r o l e . T o w a r d s t h i s e n d , c e r t a i n s i g n s of it most national d i s t i n c t n e s s (the f r a n c ; a g r i c u l t u r a l p o l i c i e s ) m u s t be m o d i f i e d o r done away w i t h altogether. French thinkers are p a i n f u l l y aware of the damage done to European c u l t u r e as a r e s u l t of the l a c k of g o v e r n m e n t a l protection accorded i t s constituent parts. As J e a n - P a u l Bourget w r o t e in a s p e c i a l i s s u e of Cahiers de Cinema d e v o t e d to European c i n e m a , " A quelques nuances pres, il y a r a c c o r d s u r le c o n s t a t : H o l l y w o o d a t o u j o u r s su ' c a n n a b a l i s e r ' non s e u l e m e n t l e s t a l e n t s , m a i s a u s s i l e s s innovations europeen" (Bourget 81). What Bourget says A m e r i c a n s i s p r e c i s e l y w h a t the A m e r i c a n s s a y of t h e although the latter charge is made with far less of the Japanese- justice. Such hardheaded t h i n k i n g w o u l d do c r e d i t to a M e t t e r n i c h or a T a l l e y r a n d . 288 A s w e have s e e n f r o m our e a r l i e r r e a d i n g s of B a u d r i l l a r d and B u t o r , h o w e v e r , t h i s Realpolitik French writers, r e s p o n s e i s a n y t h i n g but u n i v e r s a l . intellectuals, A m e r i c a n i z a t i o n of the w o r l d and filmmakers with everything from approach the a c c e p t a n c e to h a t r e d , f r o m e x c i t e m e n t to f e a r . Of c o u r s e , w i t h the p o s t - w a r r i s e of A s i a n e c o n o m i c g i a n t s , i t c o u l d f a i r l y be s a i d t h a t g l o b a l i z a t i o n and Americanization have c e a s e d to be r e a s o n a b l y s p e c i f i c s y n o n y m s . J a p a n , a f t e r a l l , b o a s t s s e v e n m o r e Top 2 0 0 m u l t i n a t i o n a l s t h a n d o e s the U n i t e d S t a t e s , c o r p o r a t i o n s t h a t are even m o r e t i g h t l y controlled than t h e i r A m e r i c a n c o u n t e r p a r t s , a s w e p r e v i o u s l y s a w in F r e d e r i c C l a i r m o n t ' s Old T e s t a m e n t w a r n i n g of the g r o w i n g p o w e r of t h a t f i v e fingered corporate giant, Mitsubishi. In l i t e r a t u r e , t h i s b l u r r i n g of n a t i o n a l d i s t i n c t i o n s can s o m e t i m e s c r e a t e s o m e odd e f f e c t s . When r e a d i n g Le Vieil homme et le loup, f o r e x a m p l e , J u l i a K r i s t e v a ' s s e c o n d n o v e l , the r e a d e r i s apt to a s s u m e at first t h a t the fictitious r e p u b l i c in an a l t e r n a t e nation of Santa Barbara is a Californian u n i v e r s e w h e r e the R o m a n E m p i r e ' s p o w e r s t r e t c h e d to the New W o r l d ; a l i t t l e l a t e r on, he o r she i s l i k e l y to g u e s s t h a t the a c t i o n i s s e t in s o m e i m a g i n a r y " b a n a n a r e p u b l i c " i n C e n t r a l A m e r i c a . In f a c t , one has to plunge q u i t e d e e p l y i n t o the book before d i s c o v e r i n g that Santa Barbara's real l i f e model is B u l g a r i a , the p e o p l e ' s r e p u b l i c f r o m w h i c h the a u t h o r actually permanently e m i g r a t e d in the m i d - 1 9 6 0 s . A s the n a r r a t o r v e r y p r o p e r l y c o m p l a i n s , " S a n t a B a r b a r a ne m'a pas l i v r e s e s s e c r e t s " (Le V i e l homme et le IOUD 2 6 8 ) . A n d , even more a p t l y , " S a n t a B a r b a r a e s t p a r t o u t " homme et l e loup 2 6 8 ) . (Le Vieil 289 I r o n i c a l l y , i t i s in the f i e l d of c u l t u r a l c r i t i c i s m and p h i l o s o p h y , one of the f e w a r e a s of modern l i f e in w h i c h the F r e n c h s t i l l h o l d the u p p e r h a n d , t h a t the G a l l i c r e s p o n s e i s m o r e e m o t i o n a l t h a n l o g i c a l , more paranoid than p r a c t i c a l . For North A m e r i c a n s , these o f t e n make f o r c o m i c a l reading. A case in point i s the disputes epistolary d i s p u t e t h a t broke out b e t w e e n " D e r r i d i a n s " and " a n t i - D e r r i d i a n s " the p a g e s of The New York Review of Books several years in ago. D e c o n s t r u c t i o n i s t s defended t h e i r b e l i e f s w i t h a p r o t e c t i v e f e r v o r t h a t s u g g e s t e d dogma r a t h e r than i d e o l o g y ; t h e i r opponents (if s u c h they can be p r o p e r l y called) responded w i t h a sort Despite its double-sided secular nature, strongly r e s e m b l e d an a r g u m e n t of a m a z e d this bemusement. intellectual dispute b e t w e e n a c o l y t e s and freethinkers, b e t w e e n b e l i e v e r s in the t r u t h and c o n f u s e d f o l l o w e r s of B a a l . T h e unintentional c o m e d y of the situation stemmed directly from the p a r t i c i p a n t s ' i n a b i l i t y to r e c o g n i z e a t e m p e s t in a t e a c u p w h i l e s a i l i n g t h r o u g h one. D i d i e r E r i b o n ' s d e f e n s e of M i c h e l F o u c a u l t f r o m h i s A n g l o - S a x o n critics w a s , if a n y t h i n g , even more passionate. Eribon, Foucault's F r e n c h b i o g r a p h e r , c o m p l a i n e d e q u a l l y of the s a l a c i o u s a t t e m p t s of J a m e s M i l l e r , F o u c a u l t ' s A m e r i c a n b i o g r a p h e r , to drum up i n t e r e s t in his book by d r a w i n g undue attention to s e x u a l i t y , and of h i s s u b s e q u e n t f a i l u r e his subject's "perverse" to d e l i v e r on t h i s p r o m i s e b e c a u s e not enough h a r d i n f o r m a t i o n tawdry w a s a v a i l a b l e . F o r the F r e n c h s c h o l a r , h i s A m e r i c a n c o u n t e r p a r t w a s n o t h i n g but a s h a m e f u l r e d u c t i o n i s t , a l a z y , sex-maddened puritan who, through ignorance or n e g l e c t , f a i l e d to e x p l o r e the m o r e r e l e v a n t s o u r c e s of Foucault's p h i l o s o p h i c a l i n s p i r a t i o n . To E r i b o n , M i l l e r i s a c o m r a d e - i n - a r m s of 290 b o t h C a m i l l e P a g l i a and T o n y J u d t , the a u t h o r of the f i e r c e l y anti- C o m m u n i s t p o l e m i c , Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1956. He writes: rnouvement "D'autres phenomenes de r e a c t i o n attestent anti-francaise. la 1944 - profondeur On p o u v a i t voir de dans ce les l i b r a i r i e s , i l n'y a pas s i l o n g t e m p s , des p i l e s du l i v r e s de C a m i l l e P a g l i a , qui s ' e n p r e n d a v e c une v i o l e n c e inoui'e a F o u c a u l t , D e r r i d a , L a c a n , e t c " ( E r i b o n 70). F o r h i m , the " a t t a c k s " a g a i n s t J a c q u e s D e r r i d a in the pages of The New York Review of Books are no j o k e , s i n c e t h e y were includes launched by a cabal which c o n s e r v a t e u r s et de l a d r o i t e "a la fois des neo- r e a g a n i e n n e , m a i s a u s s i de l a g a u c h e t r a d i t i o n e l l e " ( E r i b o n 71 - 7 2 ) . T h i s New W o r l d h o s t i l i t y , i t s e e m s , i s not u n m i x e d w i t h c o n t e m p t : " M e m e s i e l l e n ' e s t pas t o u j o u r s formulee en t e r m e s a u s s i e x t r e m i s t e s que ceux de C a m i l l e P a g l i a ou de J a m e s M i l l e r , on r e n c o n t r e f r e q u e m m e n t l ' i d e e qu'au fond l e s F r a n c a i s s o n t des gens un peu b i z a r r e " (Eribon 72). To be s u r e t h e r e i s much a n t i - F r e n c h s e n t i m e n t in c o n t e m p o r a r y A m e r i c a n l i f e , but it i s the l a c k of c o n t e x t which makes Eribon's c o m p l a i n t s sound s o m e w h a t s i l l y and even f a n t a s t i c . F r a n c e ' s s t u b b o r n refusal to submit completely to American tastes in the m a t t e r s of p o p u l a r m u s i c and m o v i e s - a b o u t a t h i r d of t h o s e cultural markets are s t i l l " h o m e - g r o w n " - h a s a r o u s e d the i r e of W a s h i n g t o n , H o l l y w o o d , and W a l l S t r e e t ; i t r e m a i n s a p e r e n n i a l bone of c o n t e n t i o n in a l l G A T T t a l k s . T h e r e i s a l s o , on a l e s s e l e v a t e d l e v e l , a k n o w - n o t h i n g , knee-jerk r e s p o n s e a g a i n s t a n a t i o n t h a t i s s e e n as p o m p o u s , o v e r - i n t e l l e c t u a l , and m i l i t a r i l y ineffective. Queenan's The Unkindest The " b o t t o m line" film Cut: How a Hatchet flan Critic $7,000 Movie and Put it All t e a c h e r in J o e Made His Own on His Credit Card i s f a i r l y t y p i c a l w h e n he 291 r e a s s u r e s a E u r o c e n t r i c s t u d e n t w i t h the w o r d s , " R i g h t n o w , e v e r y o n e in this room is better than 80 percent of f i l m m a k e r s . . . O w r c r a p i s t w e n t y t i m e s betterthtm those French t h e i r c r a p " (Queenan 4 5 ) . What i s " t y p i c a l " about t h i s c h a u v i n i s t r e p l y i s i t s assumptions: "Of course, we're better. froggy Who needs self-evident proof? Or c o m p a r a t i v e d a t a ? Don't b o t h e r me w i t h the f a c t s ; my m i n d ' s made up." It i s p r e c i s e l y t h i s s o r t of u n c r i t i c a l c o m p l a c e n c y t h a t has a l l o w e d A m e r i c a n s o c i a l s e r v i c e s to s i n k u n i m p e d e d to the b o t t o m r u n g s of the a d v a n c e d d e m o c r a c i e s ; the u n w i l l i n g n e s s to c o m p a r e , the c e r t a i n t y of p e r f e c t i o n , a c t s d e c i s i v e l y a g a i n s t the p o s s i b i l i t y of c r o s s - r e f e r e n t i a l i m p r o v e m e n t . What E r i b o n s e e m i n g l y f a i l s to u n d e r s t a n d i s t h a t this a t t i t u d e e n c o m p a s s e s not j u s t F r a n c o - A m e r i c a n c u l t u r a l r e l a t i o n s , but e v e r y a s p e c t of m a t e r i a l l i f e ; i t i s not an e x c e p t i o n or a b e r r a t i o n , but a universal American g i v e n - l i k e gravity. One s h o u l d a l s o b e a r in m i n d t h a t A m e r i c a n s , l i k e E n g l i s h m e n and C a n a d i a n s , are s t i l l v a g u e l y i r k e d by the f a c t t h a t F r e n c h c i t i z e n s s e e m to f e e l no g r a t i t u d e f o r t h e i r l i b e r a t i o n f r o m G e r m a n o c c u p a t i o n d u r i n g the S e c o n d W o r l d War. Even a w r i t e r as E u r o p e a n i z e d as Gore V i d a l i s c a p a b l e of w r i t i n g in h i s m e m o i r s " w e h a d - a l l of u s - w o n the great i m p e r i a l w a r , and t h a n k s to u s , the w h o l e w o r l d w a s b r i e f l y A m e r i c a n " ( V i d a l 101). H y p o c r i s y i s a v i c e o f t e n a t t r i b u t e d by A m e r i c a n s to the F r e n c h . Their ability to r a i l a g a i n s t the " m o t e " of A m e r i c a n r a c i s m while r e m a i n i n g s m u g l y b l i n d to the " b e a m " in t h e i r o w n s o c i a l a t t i t u d e s often is r e m a r k e d upon by s c h o l a r s and t r a v e l l e r s : " T h e F r e n c h a r e e n t i r e l y f r a n k in e x p r e s s i n g t h e i r r a c i s m . I w o n d e r e d w h e t h e r t h i s l a c k of d e l i c a c y , i n d e e d s t u p i d i t y , w a s an a b s e n c e or i n h i b i t i o n o r s i m p l y 292 arrogance. Their public offensiveness ranged from smoking in r e s t a u r a n t s to t e s t i n g n u c l e a r b o m b s i n t h e P a c i f i c . P e r h a p s t h e y d i d not k n o w t h a t the w o r l d had moved o n , o r p e r h a p s they d i d not c a r e ; o r , m o r e l i k e l y , they d e l i g h t e d i n being o b n o x i o u s " (Theroux 9 1 ) . It w a s not P a u l T h e r o u x w h o w a s t h e p r i n c i p a l o b j e c t of D i d i e r E r i b o n ' s w r a t h , h o w e v e r , but C a m i l l e P a g l i a . " F r e n c h t h e o r y " h a s been d e s c r i b e d by t h a t w o u l d - b e i c o n o c l a s t as an " e p i d e m i c " ( P a g l i a 1 0 1 ) , while J a c q u e s L a c a n h a s been w r i t t e n off as " b o r i n g , pompous, i m p r e c i s e , and a h i s t o r i c a l " ( P a g l i a 2 3 2 ) . Of a l l p e r f i d i o u s t h i n k e r s , t h o u g h , h e r bete noire French is unquestionably "Foucault, a glib g a m e - p l a y e r w h o took v e r y l i t t l e r e s e a r c h a v e r y l o n g w a y , [and] w a s e s p e c i a l l y a t t r a c t i v e to l i t e r a r y a c a d e m i c s in s e a r c h of a s h o r t c u t to understanding world history, anthropology and p o l i t i c a l economy" ( P a g l i a 9 9 ) . I n s t e a d of f o l l o w i n g t h e s e f a l s e f o r e i g n s a g e s , " O u r g u i d e s h o u l d be n o t t h e f r i g i d , head-tripping n e r d M i c h e l F o u c a u l t , but p r o p h e t i c A l l e n G i n s b e r g , w h o f u s e d H i n d u i s m w i t h W a l t W h i t m a n to give us a r a d i c a l vision of energy, passion and s e n s u a l i t y - o f h o m o s e x u a l i t y grounded i n the a m o r a l r h y t h m s of n a t u r e " ( P a g l i a 1 0 5 ) . In A m e r i c a n t e r m s , t h e r e f o r e , C a m i l l e P a g l i a c a n be s e e n as s o m e o n e w h o w a n t s to r e t u r n to the f o r e s t , s o m e o n e w h o w a n t s to e s c a p e f r o m the ( e x c e s s i v e l y E u r o p e a n i z e d ) p r o b l e m s of the c i t y . She i s a n a t i v i s t i n e a r l y 1 9 t h c e n t u r y t e r m s , not a c u l t u r a l of t h e J a c k V a l e n t i v a r i e t y . S h e , t o o , i s a f f l i c t e d imperialist with perceptual p r o b l e m s of s c a l e , f a i l i n g to s e e h o w l i t t l e i m p a c t the F r e n c h a c o l y t e s she d e t e s t s have had on any p a r t of h e r c o u n t r y outside This difficulty h a s been e x a c e r b a t e d both the academy. by t h e g e n e r a l l a c k of s u c c e s s and r e c o g n i t i o n w h i c h the a u t h o r has been a c c o r d e d w i t h i n t h e 293 c o n f i n e s of the u n i v e r s i t y , and by the o p e n - a r m e d e m b r a c e she has r e c e i v e d f r o m the m a s s m e d i a w h i c h , f o r a t i m e , c o u l d not get enough of h e r b y t e - s i z e d p r o n o u n c e m e n t s i m p o t e n c e of the i n t e l l e c t u a l on the f r i v o l i t y , m e n d a c i t y , and world. A l t h o u g h i t l a c k e d the e r u d i t i o n of E r i b o n ' s j e r e m i a d , the open l e t t e r s e n t by the d e s c e n d a n t s of V i c t o r Hugo to the P a r i s i a n d a i l y Liberation d e a l t w i t h a f a r m o r e s e r i o u s c u l t u r a l p r o b l e m . W r i t t e n in r e s p o n s e to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the a n i m a t e d t r a v e s t y of t h e i r a n c e s t o r ' s novel w h i c h D i s n e y S t u d i o s had c u l l e d f r o m Notre Dame de Paris, t h e s e l a t t e r day Hugos p r o t e s t e d a g a i n s t the e x p r o p r i a t i o n of a r t by m a s s m e d i a and a d v e r t i s i n g , m a k i n g a c a s e f o r R a v e l ' s Bolero and V e r m e e r ' s La Laitiere as w e l l as the Saga of Q u a s i m o d o , C l a u d e F r o l l o , P i e r r e G r i n g o i r e , and E s m e r a l d a . R h e t o r i c a l l y they a s k e d , " L e s a u t o r i t e s culturelles de n o t r e p a y s ne d e v r a i e n t - e l l e s pas r e a g i r devant p i l l a g e c o m m e r c i a l de p a t r i m o i n e et r a p p e l e r que l ' u n i v e r s a l i t e ce d'une g e n i e e s t d'une a u t r e n a t u r e que c e t t e ' m o n d i a l i s a t i o n ' v u l g a i r e des m a r c h a n d s s a n s s c r u p l e s ? " ( " H a l t du p i l l a g e D i s n e y " 8). The f a c t that the preceding editorial's headline included an a n g l i c i s m ( " H a l t " ) adds to the poignancy of the s i t u a t i o n . A s w e have a l r e a d y s e e n , H o l l y w o o d has s t r i p m i n e d F r e n c h c i n e m a in s e a r c h of ( r e m a k e ) i n s p i r a t i o n , e v e n as i t systematically shut out the original p r o d u c t f r o m i t s home s h o r e s . T h e H u g o s ' " u n i v e r s a l i s m " i s f a r l e s s c h a u v i n i s t i c a l l y F r e n c h than i s A l a i n F i n k i e l k r a u t ' s appropriation of the t e r m . It i s a ch 1789-dependent de coeur w h i c h enjoys equal r e s o n a n c e in a l l but a f e w c u l t u r a l l y p r i v i l e g e d e n c l a v e s in A s i a ( C h i n a ; I n d i a ; Hong Kong) w h e r e the m a s s m e d i a has not y e t infected by A m e r i c a n c u l t u r a l b i a s e s nor d o m i n a t e d been by fatally American 294 e c o n o m i c i n t e r e s t s . If not f o r the a s - y e t u n d e t e r m i n e d f i n a l i m p a c t of Japan's massive contribution word to the p r o c e s s , the n e o - l i b e r a l " g l o b a l i z a t i o n " w o u l d be a v i r t u a l catch- s y n o n y m f o r the f a r more ominous " A m e r i c a n i z a t i o n " . I t a l y , n e e d l e s s to s a y , i s not among the happy g l o b a l e x c e p t i o n s to cultural domination c i t e d a b o v e . A s w e s a w in C h a p t e r T h r e e , the n a t i o n ' s unique c o n t r i b u t i o n s to the h i s t o r y of a r t - n o o t h e r c o u n t r y has contributed so m u c h f o r so l o n g i n so many different p a r a d o x i c a l l y not r e s u l t e d in a s e l f - s u f f i c i e n t ways-have popular c u l t u r e . The i n h e r i t o r s of Rome and the R e n a i s s a n c e c o n t i n u e to be net i m p o r t e r s of Top 4 0 m u s i c , m u r d e r m y s t e r i e s , T V s e r i a l s , and m o t i o n p i c t u r e s . Even the " d a m a g e c o n t r o l " t h a t r e h a b i l i t a t e d the c o m m e r c i a l f i l m i n the industry 1 9 5 0 s , ' 6 0 s , and e a r l y ' 7 0 s has been l a r g e l y undone by m a r k e t and o t h e r f o r c e s . C u l t u r a l l y s p e a k i n g , I t a l y h a s , i n many w a y s , r e v e r t e d to the ground z e r o w a s t e l a n d of w h i c h G r a m s c i so b i t t e r l y c o m p l a i n e d . Once a g a i n , I t a l i a n c o h e s i o n has s e e m i n g l y been r e d u c e d to the unique n a t u r e of i t s i n s o l u b l e p r o b l e m s . S t i l l , d e s p i t e t h i s r e t u r n to w h a t w o u l d s e e m to be a p a r t i c u l a r l y d e p r e s s i n g f o r m of " n o r m a l i t y " , Italian attitudes t o w a r d s the U n i t e d S t a t e s have not r e g a i n e d t h e i r f a s c i s t - e r a r o s y g l o w . W h i l e one still does not e n c o u n t e r the u n i f i e d , w e l l - r e a s o n e d r e s e n t m e n t of the F r e n c h i n t e l l i g e n t s i a , c r i t i c i s m s of the U n i t e d S t a t e s are f r e q u e n t , e v e n i f they l a c k i d e o l o g i c a l f e r v o r . E v e r s i n c e M i c h e l a n g e l o s e t the tone 2 7 years ago w i t h Point, I t a l i a n movies made i n the Zabriskie United S t a t e s are anything but a d m i r i n g portraits of (Henry) F o r d i a n Utopias. F o r one t h i n g , most of them deal w i t h c r i m e - n o t a l l of i t of the I t a l o - A m e r i c a n variety (a 295 c r i t i c i s m o f t e n l e v e l l e d a g a i n s t Once Upon a Time in America, L e o n e ' s e p i c s t u d y of Jewish m o b s t e r s d u r i n g the P r o h i b i t i o n e r a ) . In a d d i t i o n to F r a n c e s c o R o s i ' s A proposito Palermo w a s shot from Lucky Luciano and To Forget an E n g l i s h l a n g u a g e s c r i p t by G o r e V i d a l ) , t h i s u n f l a t t e r i n g l i s t i n c l u d e s M a r c o F e r r e r i ' s Tales of Ordinary Madness (which Sergio and Ciao Monkey, as w e l l as G i u l i a n o M o n t a l d o ' s Sacco e Vanzetti. The s o c i a l c r i t i c i s m i m p l i c i t in P a o l o and V i t t o r i o T a v i a n i ' s Good Morning, follows Babylonia i s more s u b t l e than most. T h i s the a d v e n t u r e s of t w o Southern California from their 1987 mock epic stonemason brothers native who t r a v e l to I t a l y i n s e a r c h of f a m e and f o r t u n e i m m e d i a t e l y b e f o r e the outbreak of W o r l d W a r One. S c i o n s of a very t r a d i t i o n a l family-their a n c e s t o r s e a r n e d t h e i r d a i l y b r e a d by b u i l d i n g and r e s t o r i n g c h u r c h e s f o r as long as anyone c o u l d r e r n e m b e r t h e s e Old W o r l d i m m i g r a n t s find t h e i r new " m a e s t r o " - t h e i r former m a s t e r h a v i n g been an e x c e p t i o n a l l y d o m i n e e r i n g f a t h e r - i n the f o r m of D.W. G r i f f i t h , the singlehandedly commercial immensely invented motion or talented revised American most of the p i c t u r e . A t the t i m e , G r i f f i t h h i m s e l f by m a k i n g Intolerance filmmaker "laws" was who of the bankrupting ( 1 9 1 6 ) , h i s m o s t g r a n d i o s e p r o j e c t , and h i s n e w I t a l i a n c o l l a b o r a t o r s are c o n s e q u e n t l y a s k e d to c o n t r i b u t e t h i s a r t i s t i c e x c e s s / e c o n o m i c f o l l y by s c u l p t i n g a b r a c e of to dancing e l e p h a n t s w h i c h w i l l be used to d e c o r a t e B e l s h a z a a r ' s p a l a c e d u r i n g the film's ruinously exact Fall of Babylon sequence. Eventually, they s u c c e e d , i n the p r o c e s s a d d i n g to the g r a n d e u r not o n l y of the d o o m e d B a b y l o n i a n e m p e r o r , but to h i s e q u a l l y v u l n e r a b l e r e - a n i m a t o r as w e l l . 296 E a r l y on i n t h e f i l m , w e c a t c h G r i f f i t h s c o p i n g e x c e r p t s f r o m t h e e a r l y I t a l i a n e p i c s Quo Vadis and Cabiria, d e r i v i n g i n s p i r a t i o n f r o m the w o r l d ' s f i r s t f e a t u r e f i l m s . His d i s c o v e r y , i n o t h e r w o r d s , i s r e a l l y an Italian d i s c o v e r y , j u s t as the h u s h e d , s h a r e d s e n s e of a w e p r o d u c e d by the m o t i o n - p i c t u r e v i e w i n g e x p e r i e n c e i s a d i r e c t echo of s i l e n t p r a y e r in v a s t c o n t i n e n t a l c a t h e d r a l s . When s p e a k i n g to t h e I t a l i a n boys' s u s p i c i o u s p a t r i a r c h , G r i f f i t h c o m e s p e r i l o u s l y c l o s e to s a y i n g so i n a s many w o r d s . Movies are a m u t a t i o n of R o m a n C a t h o l i c i s m , j u s t a s A m e r i c a n popular culture i s built w i t h E u r o p e a n - o r perhaps we should say Italian-bricks. F e d e r i c o F e l l i n i a t t e m p t e d an even m o r e o b l i q u e c r i t i q u e of t h e U.S. i n Intervista (1989). favourite filmmaker, foreign In h i s p e n u l t i m a t e feature, the European d i r e c t o r Hollywood's who won more O s c a r s than any o t h e r , r e s o r t e d to a t r i c k he f i r s t t r i e d in 8 / / 2 ( 1 9 6 3 ) . In t h i s , h i s s e c o n d a t t e m p t at m a k i n g a f e a t u r e on t h e s u b j e c t of h i s c h r o n i c i n a b i l i t y to b r i n g s u c h a p r o j e c t to c o m p l e t i o n , t h e a m b i e n c e of the n e v e r to be s t a r t e d f i l m - w i t h - a - f i l m i s not s c i e n c e f i c t i o n a l but K a f k a e s q u e . A s F r a n k B u r k e put i t i n Fellini's I ntervi the sta's citation of Amerika, Films, "Through postmodern/postcolonial p e r m u t a t i o n s b e c o m e e l a b o r a t e and q u i t e c o m i c a l : a C z e c h J e w w r i t e s about A m e r i c a i n G e r m a n and has h i s w o r k a d a p t e d by an I t a l i a n w h o s t a g e s i t as p a r t of an i n t e r v i e w f o r the J a p a n e s e " (Burke 2 8 1 ) . P e r h a p s b e c a u s e he w a s t r e a t e d so w e l l i n A m e r i c a - h i s films s o m e t i m e s a c c o m p l i s h e d t h e r a r e m i r a c l e of m a k i n g money i n t h e N e w W o r l d , even a s they g a r n e r e d the u s u a l c r i t i c a l h o n o u r s - F e l l i n i ' s s a t i r e w a s m o r e t h a n a l i t t l e s h o r t on f e r o c i t y . M a r c o F e r r e r i , a f i r s t rate I t a l i a n f i l m m a k e r w h o w a s not so f e t e d , d i d not s u f f e r f r o m t h e s a m e 297 r e s t r a i n t s . W h i l e h i s m o v i e s tend not to deal w i t h A m e r i c a they are ever w a t c h f u l of the a l l - b u t - i n v i s i b l e social directly, subversions u s h e r e d in by the ongoing p r o c e s s of g l o b a l i z a t i o n . In i n t e r v i e w s , he i s f a r m o r e e x p l i c i t than he i s o n s c r e e n , c o m p l a i n i n g t h a t " E n I t a l i e , l e s intellectuels l'Amerique" sont presque ("Entretien intellectuels tous lies a une avec Marco F e r r e r i " europeens n'aiment pas le vision fascinee de 3 5 ) . Even w o r s e , " L e s cinema europeen, il ne c o n s i d e r a i t pas l e u r c i n e m a . Ils s o n t v o i r l e s f i l m s a m e r i c a i n s p a r c e que c'est l'Amerique, l'idee du v o y a g e . . . . " ( " E n t r e t i e n avec Marco F e r r e r i " 3 5 ) . H o l l y w o o d ' s " n o - b r a i n e r " p o l i c i e s have r e s u l t e d i n f i s c a l s u c c e s s a l l o v e r the globe: " A p a r t le c i n e m a a m e r i c a i n , t o u s l e s a u t r e s c i n e m a s sont e l i t a i r e s , comme l ' e t a i t le t h e a t r e " ("Entretien avec M a r c o F e r r e r i " 3 5 ) . The tone of c i n e m a t i c d e b a t e , he c o n t i n u e s , has been r e l e n t l e s s l y debased by m a n a g e r i a l p r e s s u r e : " C ' e s t ce que j e d i s a c e r t a i n s c r i t i q u e s i t a l i e n s : vous p a r l e z de nos f i l m s , m a i s v o s p a t r o n s , l e s d i r e c t e u r s des j o u r n a u x , vous i m p o s e n t d ' e c r i r e s u r S h a r o n S t o n e " ("Entretien a v e c M a r c o F e r r e r i " 3 6 ) . S a d d e s t of a l l , "11 f a u t d i r e a u s s i que l e p u b l i c qui va v o i r l e s f i l m s americains deteste le cinema" ( " E n t r e t i e n avec Marco F e r r e r i " 3 6 ) . F r o m the l a t e 1 9 7 0 s o n w a r d s , the I t a l i a n f i l m i n d u s t r y has c o m e to o c c u p y an i n c r e a s i n g l y m a r g i n a l i z e d p o s i t i o n i n the c i n e m a t i c food c h a i n . The d e a t h of a g e n e r a t i o n of g e n i u s ( R o b e r t o R o s s e l l i n i ; L u c h i n o V i s c o n t i ; P i e r P a o l o P a s o l i n i ; V i t t o r i o de S i c a ; F e d e r i c o F e l l i n i ) has not been e a s i l y r e p l a c e d , d e s p i t e the b e s t e f f o r t s of Nanni M o r e t t i and Gianni the Amelio. Similarly, international popularity the only recent actor to rival of S o p h i a L o r e n , M a r c e l l o M a s t r o i a n n i , G i n a L o l l o b r i g i d a , and A n n a Magnani i s the m a d c a p c o m i c R o b e r t o B e n i g n i . 298 W h a t ' s m o r e , the c o l o n i z a t i o n of I t a l y by c a b l e T V had a d e l e t e r i o u s e f f e c t on the q u a l i t y of the n a t i o n a l f i l m i n d u s t r y . Even m o r e t h a n i n m o s t p a r t s of the w o r l d , i t tended to dumb t h i n g s d o w n . Even s o , i n c r e a s i n g l y t h e r e are s i g n s t h a t I t a l i a n s w i l l no l o n g e r s u f f e r t h e s e i n d i g n i t i e s in s i l e n c e . A r e c e n t a r t i c l e i n Corriere della Sera, f o r e x a m p l e , f u l m i n a t e d a g a i n s t A m e r i c a n c r i t i c R i c h a r d C o r l i s s ' s c o n c l u s i o n t h a t a m e a n i n g f u l I t a l i a n c i n e m a no l o n g e r e x i s t e d : "11 f a t t o e che da un po' di t e m p o c i r c o l a a l i v e l l o i n t e r n a z i o n a l e , s o s t e n u t a da una q u i n t a c o l o n n a di a u t o l e s i o n i s t i n o s t r a m i , un i n s i s t e n t e c a m p a g n a denigratoria contro il cinema italiano, accusato d'esser caduto grande a l t e z z e a grado z e r o . T a l e v a l u t a z i o n e non ha f o n d a m e n t o r e a l i t a . S a p p i a m o bene che in t u t t i i c a m p i d e l l a c r e a t i v i t a da nella (cinema, l e t t e r a t u r a , p i t t u r a e m u s i c a ) non s t i a m o v i v e n d o un m o m e n t o m a g i c o c o m e i l v e n t e n n i o s e g u i t o a l i a f i n e d e l l a g u e r r a , ma c o s e buone ed o t t i m e c o n t i n u a n o ad e s s e r c i ed anche a r t i s t i veteran! o giovani di t u t t o r i s p e t t o . Chi a f f e r m a i l c o n t r a r i o e s c i o c c a m e n t e p r e v e n u t o , o c o m e i l c r i t i c o di Time, poco i n f o r m a t o " ( K e z i c h 2 0 ) . One f i n d s s i m i l a r disenchantment p u b l i s h e d in in a February La Repubblica. 12, 1997 article which was first In t h i s c a s e , the v i l l a i n of the p i e c e i s not k n o w - n o t h i n g A m e r i c a n c r i t i c s at C a n n e s , but k n o w - n o t h i n g American v o t e r s c h a r g e d w i t h the r e s p o n s i b i l i t y of c h o o s i n g 1 9 9 7 ' s A c a d e m y A w a r d s . S i l v i a B i z i o s e e m s to t a k e it as a p e r s o n a l M a d o n n a , of s e l f - c o n s c i o u s l y I t a l o - A m e r i c a n affront that d e s c e n t , w a s not even n o m i n a t e d i n the B e s t A c t r e s s c a t e g o r y . In s i m i l a r v e i n , she attributes M i n a S o r v i n o ' s n o m i n a t i o n as B e s t S u p p o r t i n g A c t r e s s to the f a c t t h a t the p e r f o r m e r w a s then engaged to A c a d e m y p r e s i d e n t , A r t h u r Most galling of a l l , " I n f i n e , una s o l a p r e s e n z a i t a l i a n a , i l Hiller. corto 299 m e t r a g g i o Senza Parole di A n t o n e l l a de L e o , p r o d o t t o d e l l a F i l m T r u s t I t a l i a e g i a u s c i t o s u g l i s c h e r m i i t a l i a n i ; del r e s t o , e r a p a r s o c h i a r o a t u t t i che l a s c e l t a i t a l i a n a d e l l a Mia Generazione come m i g l i o r film s t r a n i e r o e r a f a l 1 i t a in p a r t e n z a " ( " L ' O s c a r v e r s o L o n d r a " 3 9 ) . R e m a r k a b l y , d e s p i t e i t s s e e m i n g l y e n d l e s s s e r i e s of s e t b a c k s , no major I t a l i a n d i r e c t o r has y e t s e t up p e r m a n e n t shop i n t h e United S t a t e s of A m e r i c a . To be s u r e , B e r n a r d o B e r t o l u c c i w o r k e d almost e x c l u s i v e l y f o r New W o r l d c o m p a n i e s b e t w e e n 1981 and 1 9 9 5 , but even he has m o v e d back to I t a l y . W h a t ' s m o r e , the m o v i e s t h a t he d i d m a k e i n E n g l i s h f o r A n g l o - A m e r i c a n s t u d i o s (The Last Emperor, The Sky; Little Sheltering Buddha) w e r e r e s p e c t i v e l y s e t in C h i n a , N o r t h A f r i c a , and ( a n c i e n t and m o d e r n ) India. T h e one A m e r i c a n p r o j e c t he had r e a l l y s e t h i s h e a r t on (a s c r e e n v e r s i o n of Red Harvest, the m o s t e x p l i c i t l y capitalist of Dashiell Hammett's hardboiled novels) was g r e e n l i g h t e d by any H o l l y w o o d s t u d i o . B e r t o l u c c i m i g h t have antinever "flirted" w i t h A m e r i c a , but a r t i s t i c n u p t i a l s w e r e n e v e r f i n a l i z e d . I n t e r e s t i n g l y e n o u g h , the H o l l y w o o d incursion which Italians s e e m to r e s e n t the least i s the m a d e - i n - U S A M a f i a m o v i e . A s w e r e a d i n The Godfather Legacy, the o f f i c i a l production diary which was p u b l i s h e d to c e l e b r a t e the 2 5 t h a n n i v e r s a r y of the r e l e a s e of the f i r s t part of F r a n c i s Ford Coppola's Cosa Nostra t r i l o g y , " W h i l e Americans Godfather, recipient of I t a l i a n d e s c e n t may have h e l d g r u d g e s some against The I t a l i a n s in I t a l y did not. In J u l y 1 9 7 3 , A l Ruddy w a s n a m e d of the 1973 David Donatello award as the best foreign p r o d u c e r of the year... P a c i n o a l s o w o n the D o n a t e l l o a w a r d f o r p e r f o r m a n c e " (Lebo 29). his 300 In I t a l i a n n e w s p a p e r s , much of the c o m m e n t a r y on the d o i n g s of A m e r i c a n s - m o r e s p e c i f i c a l l y , on the doings of A m e r i c a n n e i t h e r s y c o p h a n t i c nor m a l i c i o u s , but p l a y f u l l y celebrities-is lubricious. Corriere della Sera w a s c h e e r f u l l y c h a r t i n g the c o u r s e of Mia F a r r o w ' s a l l e g e d a f f a i r w i t h V a c l a v Havel at a t i m e w h e n m o s t A m e r i c a n g o s s i p s h e e t s w e r e u n a w a r e t h a t the a c t r e s s had g o t t e n i n v o l v e d w i t h , n e v e r separated from, journalistically Philip Roth. P e r c e i v e d American mind puritanism is pursued w i t h s p e c i a l enthusiasm. Thus, A l e s s a n d r a Farkas solemnly informs h e r r e a d e r s t h a t U.S. porno u s e r s on the I n t e r n e t m i g h t soon be in f o r a rude c o m e - u p p a n c e : " C o n l a nuova l e g g e , i n v e c e , chiunque t r a f f i c h i v i a I n t e r n e t con i m m a g i n i o p a r o l e ' i n d e c e n t i ' r i s c h i a 2 anni di p r i g i o n e e 2 5 0 m i l a d o l l a r i I n t e r n e t , U s a in g u e r r a " identical tone of problems of the l a t e s t di m u l t a " ( " C e n s u r a su 10). S c a r c e l y a m o n t h e a r l i e r , in an a l m o s t v o i c e , S i l v i a B i z i o had e x p l a i n e d s c r e e n v e r s i o n of Lolita, the censorship pointing out that " M o l t o probabilmente saranno gli europei, e forse proprio gli i t a l i a n i , i p r i m i a v e d e r e i l c o n t r o v e r s o quanto a t t e s o f i l m di A d r i a n L y n e , (Bizio 39). department, book/film Not to be outdone in the Lolita" America-the-straitlaced Ennio C a r e t t e , i n h i s c o v e r a g e of R o b e r t H u g h e s ' s s e r i e s on the evolution of American art, new p l a y e d up its " b l u e n o s e d " a s p e c t s to the h i l t : " L a t e s i e p r o v o c a n t e : p e r c o l p a d e l l e sue p r o f o n d e r a d i c i p u r i t a n e , l ' A m e r i c a non ha m a i e s p r e s s o un grande p i t t o r e del n u d o " ( C a r e t t e 20). T h i s i s b e c a u s e s e x u a l r e p r e s s i o n i s at the h e a r t of A m e r i c a n e v i l : " Q u e s t a s a r e b b e anche l a m a t r i c e della v i o l e n z a nel 1 a s o c i e t a U S A " ( C a r e t e 20). More r a r e l y , I t a l i a n j o u r n a l i s t s poke fun at A m e r i c a n p o l i t i c s and p o l i t i c i a n s . T h i s tendency i s p a r t i c u l a r l y pronounced in a r t i c l e s s u c h as 301 ' " V o g l i a m o J o h n Wayne p r e s i d e n t e ' " , a Corriere think-pieces that first a p p e a r e d on A u g u s t della 21, Sera s u i t e of 1996. A l e s s a n d r a F a r k a s ' s a p p r o a c h w a s the m o s t t o n g u e - i n - c h e e k , d e s c r i b i n g the " D u k e " as the " m u s a di R i c h a r d N i x o n , eroe di R o n a l d Reagan e i n s p i r a t o r e di N e w t G i n g r i c h e Bob D o l e " ( " ' V o g l i a m o J o h n Wayne p r e s i d e n t e ' " 9). F o r M a r c e l l o V e n e z i a n o , on the o t h e r hand, the r u g g e d - l o o k i n g c o w b o y a c t o r is a more almost s e r i o u s phenomenon, radiating strength and r e a c t i o n in e q u a l m e a s u r e : "'11 m i t o di J o h n W a y n e ? ' L a d e s t r a U s a lo alimenta perche e il coagulo di tutte le culture conservatrici a m e r i c a n e . S i c o n t r a p p o n e al m i t o p r o g r e s s i s t a d e l l ' e m a n c i p a z i o n e rappresentato da Martin Luther King'" ("Intervista a Marcello V e n e z i a n i " 9). On the o t h e r hand, r e a c t i o n a r y though i t i s , t h i s right- w i n g m y t h m i g h t a c t u a l l y be of s o m e use to I t a l y : ' " N o n a b b i a m o n u l l a del genere. La morte della patria, prima di diventare materia di d i b a t t i t o c u l t u r a l e e p o l i t i c o , era g i a n e l l ' i m m a g i n a r i o c o l l e t i v o . Non a c a s o i l n o s t r o c i n e m a non ha p r o d o t t o grandi eroi p o s i t i v i alia John W a y n e ' " ( " I n t e r v i s t a a M a r c e l l o V e n e z i a n i " 9). In p l a c e of the multi- f a c e t e d A m e r i c a n m y t h of the opening of the f r o n t i e r , of the t a m i n g of the W e s t , I t a l i a n r e a d e r s and v i e w e r s m u s t c o n t e n t t h e m s e l v e s w i t h the l e s s c o n c l u s i v e , more d i v i s i v e m y t h of the R i s o r g i m e n t o : ' " L a n o s t r a f o n d a z i o n e ha a v u t o una s o l a grande r a p p r e n t a z i o n e l e t t e r a r i a e cinematografica, // Gattopardo, che pero e l ' e s a t t o contrario e p i c a , p e r c h e e l ' e s a l t a z i o n e del d i s i n c a n t o nei c o n f r o n t i di u n ' del n e o n a t o s t a t o u n i t a r i o ' " ( " I n t e r v i s t a a M a r c e l l o V e n e z i a n i " 9). W h a t the p r e v i o u s q u o t a t i o n s s u g g e s t i s a v e r y s l i g h t s h i f t in e m p h a s i s . W h i l e I t a l y s t i l l f e e l s in s o m e w a y s i n f e r i o r to the U n i t e d S t a t e s in i t s c a p a c i t y as an i n t e g r a l n a t i o n - s t a t e , i t s s o c i o l o g y in s o m e 302 w a y s n o w a p p e a r s s u p e r i o r . To t a k e j u s t one e x a m p l e , r e s p e c t culture i s c l e a r l y g r e a t e r in M i l a n t h a n i t i s i n C h i c a g o . In for racial m a t t e r s , I t a l i a n s l i k e w i s e s e e t h e m s e l v e s as m o r e t o l e r a n t t h a n t h e i r U.S. c o u n t e r p a r t s . W h i l e the p r e v i o u s s t a t e m e n t i s only p a r t i a l l y t r u e , i t i s , in any event, far cultural truer t h a n the nearly identical c l a i m s m a d e by F r e n c h c o m m e n t a t o r s . D e s p i t e the a r t i s t i c a l l y negritude, liberating spirit of and d e s p i t e the p r o m i n e n t p o s i t i o n s of p o w e r a t t a i n e d by a t i n y h a n d f u l of n o n - w h i t e f r a n c o p h o n e c o l o n i a l s , the s i t u a t i o n of the a v e r a g e d a r k - s k i n n e d F r e n c h c i t i z e n i s now p r o b a b l y w o r s e than t h a t of the a v e r a g e A f r i c a n - A m e r i c a n . A s w e s a w in C h a p t e r T h r e e , even m o s t fascist I t a l i a n s d i d e v e r y t h i n g i n t h e i r p o w e r to s a v e t h e i r J e w i s h f e l l o w c i t i z e n s f r o m the d e a t h - c a m p s of the N a z i s ; w e a l s o s a w how the p e o p l e v o t e d e n t h u s i a s t i c a l l y f o r " M i s s N e r a , " the D o m i n i c a n - b o r n M i s s I t a l y , even i f a n u m b e r of p r o m i n e n t j o u r n a l i s t s w e r e d i s p l e a s e d by the fact that a non-Tuscan, non-Sicilian, was symbolically r e p r e s e n t i n g the c o u n t r y in i n t e r n a t i o n a l beauty p a g e a n t s . J o u r n a l i s t i c a m e n d s , h a p p i l y , w e r e s o o n made: "11 c o n c e t t o che i c i t t a d i n i di uno s t a t o debbano e s s e r e n e c e s s a r i a m e n t e m e m b r i di uno s t a t o s t i r p e , di un e t n i a , non e a p p l i c a b i l e ad uno s t a t o m o d e r n o . " ( " L a m i s s di c o l o r e " 12). N e v e r t h e l e s s , d e s p i t e the " h a p p y e n d i n g " to the Denny M e n d e z s t o r y , o f f i c i a l I t a l y ' s i n i t i a l r e a c t i o n to her beauty queen c l e a r l y l e f t a s c a r i n the n a t i o n a l c o n s c i o u s n e s s . It i s a v i r t u a l a r t i c l e of f a i t h i n I t a l y t h a t i n d i g e n o u s h a t r e d s are r e g i o n a l , not i n t e r n a t i o n a l (hence the d e s i r e of La Lega del Nord to r e p l a c e T u s c a n I t a l i a n w i t h a b e w i l d e r i n g v a r i e t y of l o c a l d i a l e c t s - i n c l u d i n g b r e s c i a n o , u d i n e s e , e t c . - e m p l o y i n g 303 f o r e i g n t o n g u e s s u c h as E n g l i s h f o r i n t e r n a l c o m m u n i c a t i o n s between p r o v i n c e s and c i t i e s ) . A t t e m p t s to s a l v e the p o p u l a r c o n s c i e n c e have c o m e in a n u m b e r of w a y s , m o s t c o m m o n l y in the p h r a s i n g of interview q u e s t i o n s . If not f o r the " M i s s N e r a " i n c i d e n t , f o r e x a m p l e , i t s e e m s m o s t u n l i k e l y t h a t the A f r i c a n s u p e r m o d e l Iman w o u l d have been c o a x e d to p r o v i d e the f o l l o w i n g a n s w e r s . When A l e s s a n d r a F a r k a s a s k e d the world-famous mannequin S t a t e s , she p r o m p t l y if she e x p e r i e n c e d r a c i s m in the United r e p l i e d " Q u o t i d i a n a m e n t e , " p r i o r to p r o v i d i n g a l o n g l i s t of e v e r y d a y e x a m p l e s ( " I m a n : 'Io e B o w i e p r o n t i a c a m b i a r e v i t a p e r un f i g l i o ' " 2 2 ) . When, h o w e v e r , she w a s a s k e d about m o d e l l i n g o p p o r t u n i t i e s f o r n o n - w h i t e s in I t a l y , Iman e n t h u s e d : ' " G l i i t a l i a n i sono s e m p r e s t a t i a l l ' a v a n g u a r d i a n e l l ' a p p r e z z a r e le donne n e r e . In n e s s u n a l t r o P a e s e o c c i d e n t a l e c o s i t a n t e m o d e l l e di c o l o r e f i n i s c o n o s u l l a c o p e r t i n a del 1 e r i v i s t e . P e r i v o s t r i u o m i n i l a b e l l e z z a non ha c o l o r e ' " ( " I m a n : 'Io e B o w i e p r o n t i a c a m b i a r e v i t a p e r un f i g l i o ' " 2 2 ) . A l l t h i s s h o u l d not, of c o u r s e , delude the r e a d e r i n t o t h i n k i n g t h a t I t a l y i s an e n t i r e l y classless, colour-blind society. As we saw in C h a p t e r T h r e e , the s o c i a l s t r i c t u r e s k e e p i n g p e o p l e i n t h e i r p l a c e are firmly f i x e d , even if the same s t r i c t u r e s are r a r e l y imposed on f o r e i g n e r s . T h e i r f r e e d o m f r o m the p r e s s u r e to c o n f o r m , h o w e v e r , i s a c c o m p a n i e d by an u n a v o i d a b l e s o c i a l p r i c e t a g . P a u l T h e r o u x made t h i s d i s c o v e r y i n I t a l y , h i s f a v o u r i t e c o u n t r y in E u r o p e , a f t e r v i s i t i n g the v i l l a g e w h e r e C a r l o L e v i had been i m p r i s o n e d under M u s s o l i n i . T h e r o u x w a s s h o c k e d to d i s c o v e r t h a t many v i l l a g e r s did not c o n s i d e r the a u t h o r of Cristo si e fermato a Eboli to be I t a l i a n : " T h e man who had s u f f e r e d e x i l e and made A l i a n o f a m o u s in t h i s w o n d e r f u l book w a s not an I t a l i a n , a f t e r a l l , but j u s t a J e w . . . T h e s e t w o men w e r e not a n t i - s e m i t e s . T h e y 304 w e r e v i l l a g e r s . E v e r y o n e who v i s i t e d w a s m e a s u r e d by the s t a n d a r d s of the v i l l a g e , and w h e n i t c a m e to n a t i o n a l i t y the s t a n d a r d s had s t r i c t l i m i t s " ( T h e r o u x 199). M i s s N e r a m i g h t be M i s s I t a l y , i n o t h e r w o r d s , but at s o m e l e v e l she i s s t i l l M i s s Nera. In f i l m and j o u r n a l i s m , t h e r e f o r e , w e can c l e a r l y s e e n e w Italian t r e n d s d e v e l o p i n g in r e g a r d to A m e r i c a , t r e n d s t h a t are much c l o s e r to contemporary French parabolas than were their p r e d e c e s s o r s . In l i t e r a t u r e , h o w e v e r , the p e r s p e c t i v e i s q u i t e d i f f e r e n t . In the books and e s s a y s of U m b e r t o Eco and I t a l o C a l v i n o one no l o n g e r e n c o u n t e r s , i n s y m b o l i c f o r m , r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s of a c h a o t i c y o u n g e r r e p u b l i c p a y i n g tribute to a larger, more s u c c e s s f u l d e m o c r a c y , in the hopes of d i s c o v e r i n g s o m e t h i n g l o c a l l y u s e f u l , but, r a t h e r , a s c h o o l of w i s e and w o r l d l y " G r e e k s " a t t e m p t i n g to e x p l a i n the w o r l d to a r i s i n g r a c e of young " R o m a n s " w h o s e s u r f e i t of b r a w n i s m a t c h e d o n l y by t h e i r l a c k of tact and sophistication. If this description sounds a tad c o n d e s c e n d i n g , the r e a d e r s h o u l d b e a r in m i n d t h a t , 2 , 0 0 0 y e a r s a g o , I t a l y w a s i t s e l f the rude s u p e r p o w e r i n need of i n s t r u c t i o n f r o m a m o r e cultivated but l e s s p o t e n t civilization. Thus, contemporary i n t e l l e c t u a l s are p a r t i c u l a r l y s e n s i t i v e to the n u a n c e s of p o w e r , w a y s in w h i c h a c o u n t r y can s h i f t f r o m one r o l e to these latterday inevitably "Greeks" are w r i t i n g at the end of Italian to the the o t h e r . T h a t a millennium adds e x t r a f u e l to t h e i r p r o g n o s t i c a t i o n s . T h e c o u r s e of W e s t e r n h i s t o r y (the r i s e and f a l l of G r e e c e and R o m e ; the a s c e n s i o n of C h r i s t i a n i t y ) endows their texts w i t h a certain authority t h a t i s as m u c h c i r c u m s t a n t i a l as i t i s d i e g e t i c . U m b e r t o E c o ' s Dalla perifera delllmpero these rather mournful, w o r l d - w e a r y w a s one of the f i r s t of m e d i t a t i o n s . T h i s mock Roman 305 " h i s t o r y " i n c l u d e s the L a t i n d e d i c a t i o n , " A d G e r a l d u m F o r d u m B a l b u l u m F o e d e r a t e r u m I n d i a g r u m ad O c c a s u m V e r g e n t i u m C i v i t a t e m P r i n c i p e m " ( D a l l a o e r i f e r a d e l l ' I m o e r o 107). T h e e m p i r e the a u t h o r s u r v e y s i s a l r e a d y i n a s e v e r e s t a t e of d e c l i n e , s l i d i n g f r o m i m p e r i a l g r a n d e u r to m e d i e v a l decay: " D ' a l t r a p a r t e l a grande c i t t a , che oggi non e i n v a s a da b a r b a r i b e l l i g e r a n t i e d e v a s t a t a da i n c e n d i , s o f f r e di s c a r s i t a di a c q u a , c r i s i d e l T e n e r g i a e l e t t r i c a d i s p o n i b i l e , p a r a l i s i del t r a f f i c o " (Dalla o e r i f e r a d e l l ' Imoero 199). F o r E c o , A m e r i c a i s no l o n g e r the n u t s and b o l t s , n o - n o n s e n s e l a n d of Henry F o r d , but a r a t h e r e f f e t e r e f u g e langorous fantasy: " G l i europei colti e gli americani p e n s a n o a g l i S t a t i U n i t i c o m e a l i a p a t r i a dei g r a t t a c i e l i of europeizzati di v e s t r i e a c c l a i o , e d e l l ' e s p r e s s i o n i s m o a s t r a t t o . Ma g l i S t a t i U n i t i sono anche l a p a t r i a di S u p e r m a n . . . . " ( D a l l a o e r i f e r a d e l l ' l m p e r o America primarily as a land of m u s e u m s , of 14). Eco t h i n k s which of Superman's i m a g i n a r y F o r t r e s s of S o l i t u d e - w h i c h i n c l u d e s , a m o n g o t h e r things, r e l i c s and m o d e l s of h i s l o s t home w o r l d , K r y p t o n - a s the m o s t perfect e x a m p l e of t h i s phenomenon. E c o ' s tone i s l i g h t , f u n n y , t h o u g h t f u l , and d e t a c h e d t h r o u g h o u t . He i s a c o m p l e t e s t r a n g e r to the s e l f - c o n s c i o u s b r i l l i a n c e and c o m p l a c e n t d e s p a i r of, s a y , J e a n B a u d r i l l a r d . He s p e a k s w i t h the v o i c e of a p e o p l e t h a t l o s t c o n t r o l of the r u d d e r of the so l o n g a g o , i t now e x i s t s s o l e l y as a v a g u e , v e s t i g i a l world m e m o r y . He t h i n k s l i k e a T h i r d - C e n t u r y A t h e n i a n in the Rome of C o n s t a n t i n e . When w r i t i n g about A m e r i c a , E c o , good p o s t m o d e r n i s t t h a t he i s , m a k e s a p o i n t of t r e a t i n g e v e r y t h i n g w i t h the s a m e d e g r e e of m i r t h and s e r i o u s n e s s . T h u s , the e m o t i o n a l Peanuts interdynamics of the c o m i c a r e t r e a t e d w i t h the s a m e c l e a r - e y e d s o b r i e t y w i t h international strip which p o l i t i c s are d i s s e c t e d : " L a t r a g e d i a e che C h a r l i e B r o w n 306 non e i n f e r i o r e . Peggio: e assolutamente normale. E come tutti" ( A p o c a l i t t i c i e integrati 269). L i k e E c o , h i s n e a r - c o n t e m p o r a r y , I t a l o C a l v i n o t e n d e d to l o o k at the U n i t e d S t a t e s not so m u c h as a n e w , but as a p r e m a t u r e l y aged, w o r l d . In the p u b l i s h e d t e x t of the s i x N o r t o n l e c t u r e s he d e l i v e r e d i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s , one f i n d s p r e c i o u s f e w writers and l i t e r a t u r e . Although r e f e r e n c e s to he w a s t e c h n i c a l l y American born i n Cuba, C a l v i n o ' s e d u c a t i o n and thought p r o c e s s e s w e r e i n t e n s e l y E u r o c e n t r i c . W h a t he l i k e s m o s t thoroughgoing in A n g l o - S a x o n w r i t i n g i s w h a t r e m i n d s avant-guardist that he i s - m o s t of his him- continent's c l a s s i c a l p a s t : " C o m ' e p r o v a t o p r o p r i o dai due g r a n d i a u t o r i del n o s t r o s e c o l o che p i u s i r i c h i a m a n o al M e d i o e v o , T . S . E l i o t e J a m e s J o y c e , e n t r a m b i con una f o r t e c o n s a p e v o l e z z a t e o l o g i c a ( s i a pur con d i v e r s e i n t e n z i o n i ) " ( L e z i o n e A m e r i c a n e 1 13). Unlike Cesare Pavese and A n t o n i o Gramsci, Eco and Calvino a c t u a l l y got to v i s i t the U n i t e d S t a t e s . T h e i r d e s i r e and need to do s o , h o w e v e r , w e r e n o w h e r e n e a r as g r e a t . T h e i r a t t i t u d e s t o w a r d s the New W o r l d w e r e i n s p i r e d not by hopes and d r e a m s , but by d i r e c t o b s e r v a t i o n . Even s o , the v a n i s h e d A m e r i c a of P a v e s e , C e c c h i , and V i t t o r i n i i s s t i l l s o m e t i m e s invoked for ironic effect. For example, this c h e e k n o s t a l g i a i s the n a r r a t i v e engine p r o p e l l i n g tongue-in- "Henry Ford," a f i c t i t i o u s i n t e r v i e w w i t h the g r e a t A m e r i c a n a u t o m o b i l e manufacturer, w h i c h a p p e a r e d in a p o s t h u m o u s l y - p u b l i s h e d c o l l e c t i o n of C a l v i n o ' s short s t o r i e s and n o v e l l a s . When the Y a n k e e p r a g m a t i s t ' s unnamed i n t e r l o c u t o r a s k s , " C h i piu di Henry F o r d ha dato f o r m a al n o s t r o modo di v i v e r e ? " ( R o m a n z i e r a c c o n t i 1 9 8 ) , F o r d r u d e l y a n n o u n c e s t h a t he w o u l d p r e f e r to speak about n o t h i n g but b i r d s . Even a f t e r the inventor 307 f i n a l l y g e t s the b e t t e r of h i s o w n p e r v e r s i t y , he c o n t i n u e s to s p e a k to h i s I t a l i a n v i s i t o r as i f the g u l f b e t w e e n Old W o r l d and New w e r e of inter-planetary d i m e n s i o n s - w h i c h , i n a s e n s e , t h e y a r e . One c o u l d h a r d l y i m a g i n e an I t a l i a n f r a m i n g the f o l l o w i n g s e n t e n c e : " L a m o d a e una del 1 e f o r m e di s p r e c o che io d e t e s t o " ( R o m a n z i e r a c c o n t i E l s e w h e r e , Ford trumpets the dated cliches which 201). once s t r u c k a r e s p o n s i v e c o r d in T u s c a n s and S i c i l i a n s of a l l p o l i t i c a l p e r s u a s i o n s : " L a gente che f a c e v a l a coda al n o s t r o u f f i c i o d e l l e a s s u n z i o n i e r a una f o l i a di i t a l i a n i , di g r e c i , di p o l a c c h i , di u c r a i n i , e m i g r a n t i da t u t t e l e province dell' impero russo e dell' impero austro-ungarico, che parlavano lingue e d i a l e t t i i n c o m p r e n s i b i l i " (Romanzi e racconti 203). T o each of t h e s e w r e t c h e d and h o m e l e s s w a n d e r e r s , a s l i c e of " A m e r i c a p i e " w a s served: "Ho f a t t o i m p a r a r e loro l ' i n g l e s e e i v a l o r i nostra morale... f amiglie...." Sono d i v e n t a t i (Romanzi e racconti cittadini americani, 2 0 3 ) . S o m e of the loro della e loro "crackerbarrel p h i l o s o p h e r ' s " h o m e s p u n h o m i l i e s are t r a n s l a t e d l i t e r a l l y for comic e f f e c t : "11 t e m p o e d e n a r o " ( R o m a n z i e r a c c o n t i 2 0 7 ) . Indeed, m a k e s t h i s s a t i r i c a l p i e c e so w i c k e d l y funny i s i t s b r i l l i a n t what conflation of F o r d ' s s e l f - e v a l u a t i o n w i t h the e n v i o u s I t a l i a n a p p r a i s a l s of the 1930s. Calvino's imaginary six transcript wittily s p a n s at least d e c a d e s of m u t a t i n g i d e a s . Younger I t a l i a n w r i t e r s , c o n v e r s e l y , tend to t r e a t A m e r i c a m o r e m a t t e r - o f - f a c t l y . The n a r r a t o r of Treno di panna, f o r i n s t a n c e , does not f l y to A m e r i c a to pay homage at the g r a v e s i d e s of E d g a r A l l a n P o e , H e r m a n M e l v i l l e , and W i l l i a m F a u l k n e r . L i k e young p e o p l e on b o t h s i d e s of the A t l a n t i c n o w a d a y s , he i s s o m e w h a t d e r a c i n a t e d , a b i t of a d r i f t e r . He o b s e r v e s the q u o t i d i a n m i n u t i a e of C a l i f o r n i a n l i f e w i t h the 308 a f f e c t l e s s c a l m of a s u r v e i l l a n c e c a m e r a : Guardavo T r a c y n e l l a l u c e di neon: l a s u a f a c c i a m a r c a t a di r a g a z z a c a l i f o r n i a n a , i tratti cosi e s p l i c i t i del 1 e s o p r a c c i g l i a e del n a s o ; g l i o c c h i r a p i d i " (De C a r l o 5). Initially, his friends are m a i n l y Italian, and t h e n t h e y a r e not. T h e n a r r a t o r s e e m i n g l y has v e r y l i t t l e t o l e r a n c e f o r e m i g r e E u r o p e a n s w h o fail to a d a p t to c h a n g e d s u r r o u n d i n g s : " P a r l a v a i n g l e s e m o l t o s e n z a r i u s c i r e ad a r t i c o l a r e i s u o n i g i u s t i " male, (De C a r l o 4 7 ) . So f a r as c u l t u r e i s c o n c e r n e d , he i s as blank as the m o s t b l i s s e d - o u t s u r f e r boy: " U n m i n u t o dopo m i ha c h i e s t o ' C o m e m a i s e i venuto a L o s A n g e l e s ? ' Non s a p e v o c o s a r i s p o n d e r e ; ero i m b a r r a z a t o e s t a n c e Ho d e t t o ' P e r i l s u c c e s s o ' . L e i mi guardava di l a t a , con a r i a p e r p l e s s a . Mi ha c h i e s t o " M a s u c c e s s o in c o s a ? ' S e m b r a v o in q u a l c h e modo a n s i o s a . Ho d e t t o 'Non lo s o ' " (De C a r l o 7 2 ) . Up u n t i l n o w , w e have m a i n l y c o n s i d e r e d the c r i t i c a l r e a c t i o n s of F r e n c h and I t a l i a n i n t e l l e c t u a l s to le defi americain. A s the r e a d e r has been f o r e w a r n e d s e v e r a l t i m e s a l r e a d y t h r o u g h o u t the c o u r s e of this d e b a t e , w e have r e a c h e d the p o i n t i n o u r d i s c o u r s e w h e n a f o u r t h c u l t u r a l a c t o r m u s t be p e r m i t t e d to a s c e n d the t h e o r e t i c a l stage. For r e a s o n s of b a l a n c e and p e r s p e c t i v e , we m u s t now s h i f t our a t t e n t i o n to a g e o g r a p h i c a l " b r i d g e " w h i c h w a s once p a r t of the F r e n c h E m p i r e and which is currently one of "Uncle Sam's" closest geographical n e i g h b o u r s . I am r e f e r r i n g , of c o u r s e , to the p r o v i n c e of Q u e b e c , the f o r m e r F r e n c h c o l o n y w h i c h w a s a n n e x e d by the B r i t i s h i n t e r m s of l a t e t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y region tends common to to r e f l e c t the struggle most for 1 7 6 1 . In globalization, Canada's most of the s t r e s s e s and s t r a i n s cultural identity at the distinct that end of are the m i l l e n n i u m . W h i l e , as w e have s e e n , a n a t i o n s u c h as I t a l y m i g h t no 309 l o n g e r be a g l o b a l p l a y e r w h e n i t c o m e s to s h a p i n g u n i v e r s a l attitudes and t h o u g h t s , in many w a y s i t r e m a i n s s t r o n g enough to p r o t e c t i t s o w n i n t e g r a l b o r d e r s . So much cannot be s a i d f o r m o s t s m a l l e r n a t i o n s and e t h n i c e n c l a v e s . A l l too o f t e n , they f i n d t h e m s e l v e s b l o w n to and f r o by cultural winds over which they exercise little c o n t r o l . Even more g a l l i n g to t h o s e i n v o l v e d , they are f r e q u e n t l y not even n o t i c e d by the larger political entities which see l i t t l e besides their principal o p p o n e n t s i n the s t r u g g l e f o r g l o b a l p o w e r . To c a l c u l a t e the m o r e ranging i m p l i c a t i o n s intellectuals for of the l o n g - t e r m cultural struggle h e g e m o n y , the far- of F r a n c o - A m e r i c a n history of the Quebecois p r o v i d e s an a l m o s t p e r f e c t p a r a d i g m . ( W h a t ' s m o r e , s i n c e Q u e b e c o i s c o m m e n t a t o r s on F r a n c o - A m e r i c a n r e l a t i o n s have been m a k i n g c a m e o a p p e a r a n c e s s i n c e the Barbarians," this early shift p a g e s of in " A m o n g the emphasis should not (More Avanced) prove unduly disorienting). A s w e s a w i n C h a p t e r One, the B o u r b o n m o n a r c h y a c c e p t e d the l o s s of m o s t of New F r a n c e as a m i n o r s e t b a c k o c c u r r i n g w i t h i n the g l o b a l c o n t e x t of the Seven Y e a r s ' War. P e r h a p s i n f l u e n c e d by V o l t a i r e ' s f a m o u s d i s m i s s a l of h i s n a t i o n ' s n o r t h e r n m o s t d i d v e r y l i t t l e to p r o t e c t i t s arpents possession, Versailles de neiges. W h i l e Quebec w a s m i l i t a r i l y c o n q u e r e d by the a r m i e s of the B r i t i s h E m p i r e , y e a r s of F r e n c h n e g l e c t w e r e p r i m a r i l y r e s p o n s i b l e f o r the c o l o n y ' s d e f e a t . New F r a n c e had e f f e c t i v e l y been abandoned by one European s u p e r - p o w e r a c e n t u r y b e f o r e i t w a s a b s o r b e d by another. F o r our p u r p o s e s , t h i s has r e s u l t e d in a v e r y i n t e r e s t i n g As we saw experienced earlier, strong French pangs of readers of nostalgia the when early situation. 19th reading century about the 310 territories they had so r e c e n t l y Chateaubriand's popularity lost. It w a s no c o i n c i d e n c e that p e a k e d a r o u n d the t i m e of the L o u i s i a n a P u r c h a s e , the r e a l e s t a t e deal t h a t p e r m a n e n t l y cut the u m b i l i c a l c o r d b e t w e e n F r a n c e and the New W o r l d . W i t h the r i s e of the U n i t e d S t a t e s as a major e c o n o m i c p l a y e r and p o t e n t i a l military giant, Gallic a t t i t u d e s changed once a g a i n . By r e v o l t i n g a g a i n s t the B r i t i s h C r o w n , the n e w n a t i o n of A m e r i c a had b e c o m e s o m e t h i n g n e w and u n s e t t l i n g , an e n t i t y made up e q u a l l y of hope f o r the f u t u r e and i m p l i c i t t h r e a t to E u r o p e a n h e g e m o n y ; at one and the s a m e t i m e , i t was a welcoming enemy and a d i s q u i e t i n g f r i e n d . B e c a u s e the v e r y e x i s t e n c e of the young r e p u b l i c t h r e a t e n e d u n d e r m i n e the f o u n d a t i o n s of F r e n c h amour propre, it to understandably d r e w the l i o n ' s s h a r e of c r i t i c a l a t t e n t i o n . F r o m A l e x i s de T o c q u e v i l l e to S i m o n e de B e a u v o i r , the p r o v i n c e of Quebec f i g u r e d m a i n l y as a s a d footnote to the g r a n d e u r of France's imperial p a s t , as a d o o m e d a n o m a l y w i t h i n the anglophone v a s t n e s s of the U.S. I m p e r i u m . In many c a s e s , i t f u n c t i o n e d p r i m a r i l y as a g i a n t B e r l i t z s c h o o l , a p l a c e f o r f r a n c o p h o n e w r i t e r s to p e r f e c t t h e i r E n g l i s h w h i l e c o n t i n u i n g to o r d e r t a x i r i d e s and d i n n e r s en francais. G e o r g e s S i m e n o n began h i s t e n - y e a r s o j o u r n in N o r t h A m e r i c a in p r e c i s e l y t h i s f a s h i o n , p r e p a r i n g f o r h i s j o u r n e y s o u t h i n f r a n c o p h o n e M o n t r e a l . O r i g i n a l l y , he had m e r e l y been a s k e d to e s t a b l i s h c o n t a c t s w i t h Q u e b e c o i s p u b l i s h e r s : " ' Q u e diriez-vous d'une mission aupres des editeurs anglo-saxons et c a n a d i e n s ? . . . L e s C a n a d i e n s s o n t i m p o r t a n t s , c a r on p a r l e f r a n g a i s au Quebec'" (Memoires intimes 125). A f t e r a f e w m o n t h s i n la belle province, the B e l g i a n c r i m e n o v e l i s t s e t up s t a k e s i n t h e A m e r i c a n h e a r t l a n d f o r a s o l i d d e c a d e . D e s p i t e the e a s e of c o m m u n i c a t i o n , it 31 1 w o u l d s e e m t h a t Quebec did not r e a l l y speak to the w e l l s p r i n g s of h i s creative imagination. • n e r e a s o n f o r t h i s w a s , p e r h a p s , h i s i n a b i l i t y to s e e beyond the d i s t o r t i n g m i r r o r of Maria Chapdelaine. by French globe-trotter Louis That early 20th century novel, Hemon, had created Quebecois s t e r e o t y p e s as c l o y i n g l y i n d e l i b l e as H a r r i e t B e e c h e r S t o w e ' s A f r i c a n A m e r i c a n s l a v e s . W h i l e to s o m e e x t e n t H e m o n ' s n a r r a t i v e p e r i o d f a c t - s o , f o r t h a t m a t t e r , d i d Uncle unfortunate effect of t u r n i n g shifting Tom's reflected Cabin\-it social mores into had the permanent a r c h e t y p e s . In H e m o n ' s u n i v e r s e , F r e n c h C a n a d i a n s w e r e s o n s of the s o i l the w a y t h a t r o b i n s w e r e b i r d s of the t r e e s ; they w e r e r u r a l p a t r i a r c h s who took o r d e r s f r o m t h e i r w i v e s in p r i v a t e , and l i v e d in t e r r o r of the p a r i s h p r i e s t . A b o v e a l l , they w e r e k e e p e r s of the flame, traditional p e o p l e w h o w o u l d i g n o r e the English-dominated c i t i e s and p r o t e c t t h e i r f a r m s . A t one p o i n t in Maria Chapdelaine, the e p o n y m o u s h e r o i n e is t e m p t e d to move s o u t h . W h i l e l i s t e n i n g to a s w e e t - t a l k i n g U . S . - b a s e d suitor, Maria's mind wanders, "en songeant aux grandes cites a m e r i c a i n e s " (Hemon 191). T h e n she h e a r s a n o t h e r i n n e r v o i c e " [ q u i ] s ' e l e v a c o m m e un r e p o n s e . L a - b a s s ' e t a i t autre race parlant d'autre T e t r a n g e r : des gens d'une c h o s e dans une a u t r e langue, chantant d ' a u t r e s c h a n s o n s . . . . " (Hemon 191). T h i s s i r e n song c a r r i e s g r e a t w e i g h t w i t h M a r i a C h a p d e l a i n e : " [ e l l e ] s o r t i t de son r e v e et s o n g e a : ' A l o r s j e v a i s r e s t e r i c i ...de m e m e " (Hemon 195). F o r a l l t h e i r r u s t i c charm, H e m o n ' s paisans are t h o r o u g h - g o i n g xenophobes: " L o r s q u e l e s C a n a d i e n s f r a n c a i s parlent d'eux-memes, i l s disent toujours Canadien, sans plus; et a t o u t e s l e s a u t r e s r a c e s qui ont d e r r i e r e eux peuple l e p a y s j u s q u ' a u 312 P a c i f i q u e , i l s ont garde pour p a r l e r d ' e l l e s l e u r s a p p e l l a t i o n s d ' o r i g i n e : A n g l a i s , I r l a n d a i s , P o l o n a i s , ou R u s s e , s a n s a d m e t t r e un s e u l instant que l e u r s f i l s , m e m e nes dans l e p a y s , p u i s s e n t p r e t e n d r e a u s s i au nom de C a n a d i e n s " (Hemon 71 - 7 2 ) . S t i l l , even i f L o u i s H e m o n ' s o u t s i d e o b s e r v a t i o n s did e v e n t u a l l y o s s i f y i n t o a c o l l e c t i o n of c l i c h e s , at l e a s t he t o o k t h e t r o u b l e to i n t e r e s t h i m s e l f in the l i v e s of the Q u e b e c o i s . T h i s i s s o m e t h i n g t h a t F r e n c h i n t e l l e c t u a l s have t r a d i t i o n a l l y f a i l e d to do. On the o t h e r h a n d , the m y t h of M a r i a C h a p d e l a i n e u n q u e s t i o n a b l y had a p a r a l y z i n g e f f e c t on Q u e b e c o i s c u l t u r e u n t i l w e l l i n t o the 1 9 5 0 s . T h e r u r a l v a l u e s of the nineteenth-century c o n t i n u e d to be p i o u s l y p r e a c h e d l o n g a f t e r the m a j o r i t y of F r e n c h C a n a d i a n s had b e c o m e urban d w e l l e r s . T h i s f o r m u l a a l l o w e d f o r l i t t l e beyond h e r o i c b a t t l e s b e t w e e n the e a r l y s e t t l e r s and les affreux sauvages and s t o i c t a l e s of s i m p l e f a r m e r s who r e m a i n e d r o o t e d to the s o i l and t h e i r old w a y s no m a t t e r w h a t . M o s t of the e a r l y Quebecois motion p i c t u r e s - t h a n k s to o b d u r a t e o p p o s i t i o n f r o m Roman C a t h o l i c C h u r c h , Quebec's f i r s t true f i c t i o n released until feature was the not 1 9 4 3 - a n d r a d i o r o m a n s w e r e f i r m l y r o o t e d in t h i s e t h o s . W h i l e a n u m b e r of p o e t s , s u c h as the h a l f - I r i s h E m i l e N e l l i g a n , did manage to e s c a p e f r o m t h i s s t u l t i f y i n g r e l i g i o - c u l t u r a l e m b r a c e , m o s t narrative fiction was inertly i m m u r e d i n i t . Up u n t i l 1960, c h a n g e d m o r e s l o w l y i n Quebec t h a n t h e y d i d i n t h e r e s t of things North A m e r i c a . A f t e r t h a t d a t e , they changed w i t h s u c h b l i n d i n g s p e e d t h a t i n t e r e s t e d p a r t i e s are s t i l l s t r u g g l i n g to c a t c h up. The Q u i e t and t h e n the Not So Q u i e t R e v o l u t i o n s e a r n e d b i g d i v i d e n d s i n t e r m s of n o v e l s , m o v i e s , and p l a y s t h a t l o o k e d at l o c a l l i f e i n n e w and ways. U n s u r p r i s i n g l y , many of these works were invigorating concerned with 313 s i t u a t i n g t h e Q u e b e c o i s i n a l a r g e r w o r l d w h e r e they d i d n o t , a s a r u l e , f e e l at home. T h e f i r s t and m o s t b a s i c c u l t u r a l change c a m e w i t h t h e d e c i s i o n to w o r k i n joual. B e g i n n i n g w i t h M i c h e l T r e m b l a y ' s e a r l y p l a y s , s u c h a s Les Belles soeurs, and t h e u n s c r i p t e d NFB F r e n c h u n i t d o c u m e n t a r i e s s h o t i n the e a r l y ' 6 0 s s t y l e k n o w n a s cinema direct, t h e language of t h e p e o p l e began to r e p l a c e f o r m a l P a r i s i a n F r e n c h i n a r t i s t i c d i s c o u r s e . Un joualanais, sa joualanie, an e a r l y M a r i e - C l a i r e B l a i s n o v e l , d e a l t w i t h t w i n s o l i t u d e s o t h e r than t h e i n f a m o u s ones b e t w e e n E n g l i s h - and F r e n c h - s p e a k i n g Q u e b e c e r s . I n s t e a d , s h e c h o s e to f o c u s on t h e r i f t b e t w e e n s p e a k e r s of " e d u c a t e d " and " u n e d u c a t e d " F r e n c h . A s w e s a w in C h a p t e r One, t h i s c o n f l i c t i s m o r e c o m p l i c a t e d than at f i r s t i t m i g h t a p p e a r . Q u e b e c e r s v i s i b l y p r e e n w h e n e v e r P a r i s i a n s c o m p l i m e n t t h e m on t h e i r s p o k e n F r e n c h , nodding t h e i r heads e a g e r l y w h e n t h e i r d i s t a n t European r e l a t i o n s n o s t a l g i c a l l y s i g h t h a t here at l e a s t , a p u r e , p r e - R e v o l u t i o n a r y F r e n c h c o n t i n u e s to be e m p l o y e d l o n g a f t e r i t h a s d i e d out on t h e m a i n l a n d . On t h e o t h e r h a n d , i t i s by no means c e r t a i n that the d i a l e c t spoken i n , s a y , a G i l l e s C a r l e or Andre F o r c i e r m o v i e i s i d e n t i c a l to t h e F r e n c h t h a t w a s s p o k e n on t h e P l a i n s of A b r a h a m i n 1 7 5 9 ; n e i t h e r i s i t c e r t a i n t h a t i t i s t h e s a m e t o n g u e t h a t m o v e d A l e x i s de T o c q u e v i l l e to e p i s t o l a r y a d m i r a t i o n 7 0 y e a r s l a t e r . Indeed, i t w o u l d p r o b a b l y be f a i r to s a y t h a t the o r d i n a r y F r a n c o Quebecois l i n g u i s t i c admiration society e x c h a n g e i s t h e e x a c t o p p o s i t e of t h e m u t u a l which the printed record s u g g e s t s . A s Edmond W i l s o n put i t , " T h e French Canadians...have s o m e t h i n g against F r a n c e ; a n d , on t h e i r snobbish in matters s i d e , the French are of l a n g u a g e of a g r u d g e imperturbably and s p e e c h . E v e n t h e s c r i p t s of 314 Canadian documentary films have s o m e t i m e s been put i n t o P a r i s i a n F r e n c h b e f o r e they c a n be s h o w n i n F r a n c e , and a young C a n a d i a n t o l d me t h a t on one o c c a s i o n - t h o u g h he w a s w o r k i n g on t h e E n c y c l o p e d i e L a r o u s s e - a F r e n c h m a n he had m e t i n P a r i s s u g g e s t e d t h a t t h e y might b e t t e r speak i n E n g l i s h , s i n c e the P a r i s i a n w o u l d no doubt not be able to u n d e r s t a n d t h e C a n a d i a n ' s F r e n c h " ( W i l s o n 172 - 1 7 3 ) . C o m p l a i n t s of t h i s v a r i e t y are v e r y c o m m o n . Due to i t s c l o s e p r o x i m i t y to both E n g l i s h Canada and t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s , joual i n e v i t a b l y i n c l u d e s a l a r g e r n u m b e r of a n g l i c i s m s than does francais in v i r t u a l isolation from actuel. W h a t ' s m o r e , joual developed mainland French f o r several c e n t u r i e s , a c i r c u m s t a n c e r e s u l t i n g i n a l a r g e n u m b e r of l o c a l " p e c u l i a r i t i e s " . T o complicate things still f u r t h e r , joual itself i s not a homogeneous tongue. W h i l e s o m e f o r m s of u n d e r - p r i v i l e g e d w o r k i n g - c l a s s s p e e c h c a n b e s t be d e s c r i b e d a s patois, in la Gaspesie many p e o p l e s t i l l s p e a k a F r e n c h pure and a n t i q u e enough to a w e even the m o s t d e m a n d i n g G a l l i c intellectual. Politically, scarcely relations less contentious between these l i n g u i s t i c than are t h e i r linguistic r e l a t i v e s are differences. If m o d e r n - d a y s e p a r a t i s t s , p o s t - C h a r l e s de G a u l l e , r e l y on t h e F r e n c h nation to supply the putative nation of Quebec w i t h international l e g i t i m a c y , t h e i r p a r e n t s w e r e e d u c a t e d by t e a c h e r s w h o s a w P a r i s a s B a b y l o n and F r a n c e a s t h e f o n t of a l l e v i l . U n t o u c h e d by t h e s o c i a l l i b e r a l i z a t i o n and i n t e r n a t i o n a l i s m of t h e F r e n c h R e v o l u t i o n , i n w a r d l o o k i n g Quebec m a i n t a i n e d the p i o u s t r a d i t i o n s of s e v e n t e e n t h p e a s a n t s . N e w F r a n c e ' s r u l i n g c l a s s had t r a d i t i o n a l l y mainland, returning home after their tour century come f r o m the was through-a major d i f f e r e n c e b e t w e e n i t and the T h i r t e e n C o l o n i e s w h i c h w o u l d l a t e r f o r m 315 the U n i t e d S t a t e s - s o Quebec w a s l e f t v i r t u a l l y leaderless following t h e i r p e r m a n e n t d e p a r t u r e i n the 1 7 6 0 s . Indigenous p o l i t i c a l such as it was, resided primarily in the p r i e s t h o o d , power, in the f e w s u r v i v i n g s e i g n e u r i a l f a m i l i e s , and in the s m a l l urban c l a s s of c o l l e g e educated p r o f e s s i o n a l s . Economic l i f e w a s l e f t almost e x c l u s i v e l y in a n g l o p h o n e hands. I n e v i t a b l y , affairs the c u l t u r e e n s u i n g f r o m t h i s s t a t e of w a s r e v a n c h i s t , b a c k w a r d - l o o k i n g , p r i e s t - r i d d e n , and a n t i - m o d e r n i n tone and i n t e n t . If, on the p l u s s i d e , t h e s e a t t i t u d e s French culture guaranteed allowed to s u r v i v e i n N o r t h A m e r i c a , on t h e d o w n s i d e , t h e y the i m p o v e r i s h m e n t and p o w e r l e s s n e s s of m o s t of its m e m b e r s . D e s p i t e t h e r a d i c a l c h a n g e s w h i c h have o v e r t a k e n Quebec d u r i n g t h e p a s t t h i r t y - f i v e y e a r s , t h e s e p r o b l e m s a r e by no m e a n s resolved. One of t h e f i r s t t h i n g s t h a t s t r i k e s o u t s i d e r e a d e r s of Q u e b e c o i s f i c t i o n and v i e w e r s of Q u e b e c o i s f i l m s i s the a l m o s t t o t a l a b s e n c e of non-pure laine c h a r a c t e r s . S t i l l , if the " o t h e r " is often physically a b s e n t f r o m t h e s e w o r k s , h i s o f f - s t a g e p r e s e n c e m o s t d e f i n i t e l y i s not. Margaret Atwood's contention that Canadian l i t e r a t u r e is primarily about s u r v i v a l a p p l i e s w i t h d o u b l e , i f not t r i p l e , f o r c e i n t h e c a s e of Quebec. In the Q u e b e c o i s i m a g i n a t i o n , the " R e s t of C a n a d a " i s s e e m i n g l y an O n t a r i o t h a t n e v e r ends. One s e e s t h i s i n p o p u l a r c o m e d i e s s u c h as D e n i s H e r o u x ' s J'ai mon voyage ( 1 9 7 4 ) , a f a r c e " q u i r a c o n t e T o d y s e e d un couple...et s e s e n f a n t s , de M o n t r e a l a V a n c o u v e r , ou i l s s o n t de p u r s J etrangers" ( C o l o m b e and J e a n 4 7 7 ) . T h e huge s i g h of r e l i e f these t r a v e l l e r s c o l l e c t i v e l y heave upon r e t u r n i n g to la belle province after t h e i r p r o l o n g e d s o j o u r n among l e s tetes carries w a s o f t e n e c h o e d by 316 the a u d i e n c e . A l l the q u i r k s and e c c e n t r i c i t i e s t h a t d i f f e r e n t i a t e Cape Bretoners from from Albertans, British Columbian naturopaths S a s k a t c h e w a n w h e a t f a r m e r s , w e r e n o t a b l y l a c k i n g i n t h i s f i l m . What w e s a w in e s s e n c e w a s Upper Canada w r i t l a r g e , an Orange O n t a r i o t h a t occupied every contemporary square inch of land where French Canadian thought, at Quebec least in was the not. In camp of c o n v i n c e d n a t i o n a l i s t s , Canada i s s t i l l a n a t i o n of t w o , not f o u r and c e r t a i n l y not t e n n a t i o n s ; the d e m o g r a p h i c c h a n g e s of the p a s t 150 y e a r s are e i t h e r i g n o r e d or e x p l a i n e d a w a y as i r r e l e v a n t . If to o u t s i d e r s t h i s looks l i k e w i l l f u l b l i n d n e s s - t h e l e s s tolerant might say m a d n e s s to p a t r i o t i c i n s i d e r s i t l o o k s l i k e an i n d i s p e n s a b l e s u r v i v a l t o o l . In Q u e b e c o i s f i c t i o n , A m e r i c a i s a l s o a f a i r l y h o m o g e n e o u s p l a c e . M o n t r e a l - b a s e d i n t e l l e c t u a l s do not s h a r e t h e i r P a r i s i a n c o u n t e r p a r t s ' m a n i a f o r s e e i n g as much of the U n i t e d S t a t e s as h u m a n l y p o s s i b l e . I n s t e a d , t h e y t e n d to f o c u s on the p l a c e s w h e r e the Q u e b e c o i s have traditionally gone i n s e a r c h of w o r k - s o m e t i m e s voluntarily, more o f t e n i n v o l u n t a r i l y - s u c h as New H a m p s h i r e and L o u i s i a n a , o r the p l a c e s w h e r e t h e y have m o r e r e c e n t l y gone to p l a y , s u c h as M i a m i B e a c h or C a l i f o r n i a . S o m e w h a t s u r p r i s i n g l y , the U n i t e d S t a t e s i s s e l d o m t r e a t e d l i k e the G r e a t S a t a n . A n d r e F o r c i e r ' s i m m e n s e l y p o p u l a r T V m i n i - s e r i e s Les Tisserands between century du pouvoir Quebecois mill might workers N e w E n g l a n d , but i t have d e a l t with and Y a n k e e m i l l class struggles owners w a s e x c e p t i o n a l in t h i s in 19th r e s p e c t . More c o m m o n l y , A m e r i c a n s are d e p i c t e d as f a i r l y b e n i g n and r e m a r k a b l y s p a r s e i n a l a n d t h a t s e e m s to c o n s i s t of l i t t l e b e s i d e s Q u e b e c o i s t o u r i s t s and e m i g r e s . A n g l o p h o n e Q u e b e c e r s a r e , i f a n y t h i n g , even m o r e r a r e , but t h e y are n o w h e r e n e a r as o b l i g i n g . A b j e c t v i l l a i n y is the 317 attribute most commonly demonstrated during their brief cameo appearances. A l l of t h e s e p r e s u p p o s i t i o n s are p r e s e n t in V i c t o r L e v y - B e a u l i e u ' s p o s t m o d e r n i s t n o v e l , Oh Miami Miami Miami ( 1 9 7 3 ) - w i t h one e x c e p t i o n . B e a u l i e u ' s A m e r i c a n s are a t a d n a s t i e r t h a n u s u a l . He deliberately e x o t i c i z e s F l o r i d a , m a k i n g i t s e e m l i k e some f r i g h t e n i n g o u t c r o p p i n g of Hollywood jungle, Canadian dramatis even as he deromanticizes his mainly French p e r s o n a e . T h u s , " M i a m i e s t une a c c o u t u m a n c e , un f a b u l e u x voyage dont on ne r e v i e n n e n t j a m a i s " (Oh M i a m i M i a m i M i a m i 173). In t h i s favourite Quebecois t o u r i s t ' s port-of-call, "Tous le t e r r i t o i r e de l a F l o r i d e g r o u i l l e de c r o c o d i l e s aux d e n t s l u i s a n t e s , de s e r p e n t s a s o n n e t t e s dont l e s f i n e s l a n g u e s e m p o i s o n e e s s o n t c o m m e le deroulement de p e t i t s t a p i s r o u g e s . . . . " (Qh M i a m i M i a m i M i a m i 132). A l t h o u g h they don't a c t u a l l y meet many A m e r i c a n s , p r e f e r r i n g to spend most of t h e i r t i m e i n bed w i t h e a c h o t h e r o r e l s e g u z z l i n g b e e r i n F l o r i d a b a r s , B e a u l i e u ' s c h a r a c t e r s d o n ' t have much good to s a y about t h e i r h o s t s . The p o l i c e in p a r t i c u l a r c o m e in f o r a s e v e r e s h e l l a c k i n g : " ' D a n s c ' t e p a y s , s i tu f a i s pas a t t e n t i o n a t e s a f f a i r e s , t ' e s un h o m m e m o r t . La p o l i c e , s o i s - t u c o m m e n t e l l e e s t a M i a m i ? E l l e te t r o u v e dans une r u e l l e a v e c un p o i g n a r d dans le dos et e l l e t ' a c c u s e de p o r t d ' a r m e i l l e g a l ' " (Qh M i a m i M i a m i M i a m i 2 2 4 ) . A n g l o s w i t h the name " P h i l " are particularly a b h o r r e n t . " L e v i e u x P h i l F l a n a g a n de S h a w i n i g a n " (who c o u l d , i t m u s t be a d m i t t e d , be f r a n c o p h o n e , d e s p i t e h i s n a m e , a l t h o u g h o b v i o u s l y not pure laine) t a k e s s e x u a l a d v a n t a g e of a d r u n k e n male e m p l o y e e d u r i n g the b o o k ' s f i r s t f i f t y p a g e s , w h i l e " l e v i e u x P h i l de C h i c a g o " made a not e n t i r e l y h o n o u r a b l e f o r t u n e out of an " I n v e n t i o n dument p a t e n t e e s u r l a p e n i c i l l i n e " (Qh M i a m i M i a m i M i a m i 180). 318 On the p l u s s i d e / F l o r i d a did s e r v e as the l a s t r e f u g e f o r the m o s t c e l e b r a t e d of a l l Q u e b e c o i s w r i t e r s - i n - e x i l e : " E s t - c e que tu ne r e n d s pas c o m p t e que j a m a i s j e ne s e r a i s venu i c i s i j e n ' a v a i s pas Tidiote i d e e d ' e c r i r e ce l i v r e s u r J a c k K e r o u a c . . . " (Oh M i a m i M i a m i M i a m i 2 8 5 ) . T h e , in t h i s i n s t a n c e at l e a s t , i m p l i c i t l y autobiographical narrator ( B e a u l i e u d i d i n d e e d p u b l i s h a book about h i s a d m i r a t i o n f o r the man who w r o t e On the Road), goes to v i s i t " l e j o l i b u n g a l o w des K e r o u a c ou rn'attendaient M e m e r e , et N i n , et S t e l l a , et l e s s c r a p b o o k s p l e i n e des p h o t o s j a u n i e s , de s o u v e n i r s et de m a u v a i s e s n o u v e l l e s " (Oh Miami Miami 286). Beaulieu eventually c o m e s to s e e the e n t i r e W o r l d as a m a g i c a l Q u e b e c o i s / N a t i v e A m e r i c a n c o n s t r u c t : n'etait qu'une vaste toile Miami d'araignee... Indien sans New "L'Amerique doute, Indien s u r e m e n t , m a i s s i peu Q u e b e c o i s a l o r s q u ' i l s a u r a i e n t du e t r e l e s deux en m e m e t e m p s e t , l ' e t a n t , beaucoup p l u s que S a u v a g e et Q u e b e c o i s " (Oh M i a m i M i a m i M i a m i 323.) T h i s v i s i o n l e a d s to the f o l l o w i n g c o n c l u s i o n : "Quel grand reve que c e l u i de c e t t e A m e r i q u e f r a n c a i s e ! De cette A m e r i q u e m e t i s s e l . . . Momo, M i a m i ce n ' e s t qu'une b a n l i e u e de M o n t r e a l " (Oh M i a m i M i a m i M i a m i 3 2 5 ) . 5 A l t h o u g h l e s s a r t i s t i c a l l y a m b i t i o u s than B e a u l i e u ' s s t y l i s t i c a l l y c o m p l e x n o v e l , the S o u t h e r n U.S. s t a t e of G e o r g e M i h a l k a ' s Quebecois America. c o m e d y , La Florida Inspired "snowbirds"- by s l u r s (1993) i n the Canadian t o u r i s t s populist i s no l e s s a d r e a m of local p r e s s about who p o l l u t e d the French so-called Florida beaches with T h i s d e s c r i p t i o n i s l e s s pi xi 11 a t e d than i t a p p e a r s . A s J o e l G a r r e a u p o i n t e d out in The Nine Nations of North America, an i n n o v a t i v e look at New W o r l d r e g i o n a l i s m , " A t i t s h e i g h t . . . t h e F r e n c h E m p i r e in ' A m e r i q u e ' c o v e r e d a l m o s t a l l the c o n t i n e n t w i t h the e x c e p t i o n of F l o r i d a and M e x i c o , w h i c h w e r e o c c u p i e d by the S p a n i s h . A s f o r the E n g l i s h , they hugged only the A t l a n t i c c o a s t south of the Gaspe P e n i n s u l a . " (Garreau 3 6 7 - 3 6 8 ) 5 319 their incomprehensible language, obscene s w i m s u i t s d i s p l a y e d p o t b e l l i e s - L a Florida and brazenly d e s c r i b e s the a d v e n t u r e s of a f a m i l y of w o r k i n g c l a s s Q u e b e c o i s who abandon the s n o w s of M o n t r e a l in f a v o u r of the s a n d s of the C a r i b b e a n . To pay f o r t h e i r e n d l e s s h o l i d a y , open a r e s o r t h o t e l t h a t c a t e r s a l m o s t e x c l u s i v e l y to f e l l o w they French C a n a d i a n s . Even the t w o A m e r i c a n c i t i z e n s who t r y to c a u s e t r o u b l e these ex-Montrealers t u r n out to have Q u e b e c o i s r o o t s . In for Suzette C o u t u r e and P i e r r e S a r r a z i n ' s s c r i p t , t h e r e are even f e w e r a n g l o p h o n e s than in Oh Miami Miami. T h i n g s are m u c h the s a m e in Vves B e a u c h e m i n ' s b e s t s e l l i n g n o v e l , Le Matou ( 1 9 8 3 ) . A t one p o i n t d u r i n g the n o v e l , F l o r e n t B o i s s o n n e a u l t , the b o o k ' s H o r a t i o A l g e r - l i k e h e r o , v a c a t i o n s in F l o r i d a to e s c a p e f r o m p e r s e c u t i o n at the hands of the m y s t e r i o u s - a n d i n e f f a b l y foreign-Egon R a t a b l a v a s k y . A s u s u a l the Q u e b e c o i s v i s i t o r s t e n d to hang out with l o n g - e s t a b l i s h e d " s n o w b i r d s " ; F l o r e n t c o n s i d e r s s t a y i n g t h e r e as w e l l . In t h i s t e x t , A m e r i c a n s e x i s t p r i m a r i l y as f r i e n d l y background noise. T h e y are f o r e v e r s a y i n g c h e e r y t h i n g s s u c h a s , "Good evening, Looking for something?" folks? ( B e a u c h e m i n 2 6 2 ) . I n e v i t a b l y , of c o u r s e , one f i n d s a d a r k e r s i d e to t h i s g e n i a l i t y . A t one p o i n t , a B l a c k Floridian announces " / keep away from smart guys like hell and always deal with French Canadians... They're sweet like corn syrup..." (Beauchemin 2 7 4 - 2 7 5 ) . When F l o r e n t r e s p o n d s to t h i s a d m i s s i o n w i t h a g l a c i a l g l a r e , h i s American acquaintance immediately tries don't le get angry for that, protesta to m a k e a m e n d s : Noir, / was only "--Now kidding" ( B e a u c h e m i n 2 7 5 ) . The p r o b l e m i s he w a s n ' t , and e v e r y b o d y k n o w s it. The idea that a l l anglophones regard a l l French C a n a d i a n s as inferior i n s o m e w a y i s a n o t i o n t h a t runs r i g h t t h r o u g h Le Matou. 320 P o p u l i s t to the c o r e , the novel w o r k s on the a s s u m p t i o n t h a t les et les etrangers enjoy unspecified historical autres advantages over the Quebecois hero, Florent Boissonneault. This perception occasionally erupts into outright b i g o t r y - e s p e c i a l l y against the J e w s . A t t i m e s , it even manages to conflate its prejudices, as i t does when the p r e s u m a b l y J e w i s h anglophone v i l l a i n L e o n a r d S l i p s k i n m a r r i e s an attractive church. Such a l i g n m e n t s are Quebecoise in a P r o t e s t a n t s u s p i c i o u s l y s i m i l a r to the J e w i s h / P r o t e s t a n t / F r e e m a s o n t r i n i t y of e v i l that has a n i m a t e d u l t r a m o n t a n e French C a t h o l i c i s m f o r the past 2 0 0 y e a r s . It i s a l s o a c u r i o u s l y a n t i q u e f o r m of r a c i s m t h a t p r e - d a t e s the m o d e r n w o r l d . L i k e so many of the deep s t r u c t u r e s of Q u e b e c o i s society, both good and b a d , t o outsiders it seems curiously a n a c h r o n i s t i c . It i s a l s o r e m i n i s c e n t of the a t t i t u d e s d e s c r i b e d by L o u i s Hemon. A s o m e w h a t d i f f e r e n t m e l a n g e of p a s t and p r e s e n t a t t i t u d e s may be found i n Pelagie-la-Charette. The w i n n e r of the 1 9 7 9 P r i x G o n c o u r t , A n t o n i n e riai 1 l e t ' s novel i s n o t a b l e f o r a n u m b e r of r e a s o n s . F o r one thing, s t r i c t l y descendant s p e a k i n g M a i l l e t i s not a Q u e b e c o i s e but an A c a d i a n , a of t h e Nova S c o t i a and N e w B r u n s w i c k - b a s e d French c o m m u n i t y w h i c h w a s f o r c i b l y t r a n s p o r t e d to the A m e r i c a n S o u t h i n the m i d d l e of the 1 8 t h c e n t u r y . T o d a y , t h a t c o m m u n i t y i s d i v i d e d m o r e or-less equally between 1'Acadie in the M a r i t i m e s and t h e C a j u n c o m m u n i t i e s of L o u i s i a n a . W h i l e l i p s e r v i c e i s s o m e t i m e s p a i d t o t h e i r misfortunes by Q u e b e c o i s i n t e l l e c t u a l s , Q u e b e c o i s p o l i t i c i a n s have done, and c o n t i n u e to do, v e r y l i t t l e on t h e i r b e h a l f . A c a d i a ' s s u r v i v a l , t h e r e f o r e , i s f a r more m i r a c u l o u s than Q u e b e c ' s . 321 P e r h a p s f o r t h i s r e a s o n , Pelagie-la-Charette wonder tale. The book's eponymous heroine often reads like a i s an A c a d i a n Harriet T u b m a n w h o l e a d s h e r p e o p l e on a t e n - y e a r t r e k a c r o s s t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s back to t h e i r a n c e s t r a l h o m e s i n A t l a n t i c C a n a d a . P r o g r e s s i s s l o w and o f t e n b i t t e r , but t h e c a r a v a n n e v e r f u l l y s t o p s : " L ' A c a d i e a v a n c a i t au pas des b o e u f s " (Mai 11 et 2 0 1 ) . When t h e y ' r e n o t i c e d at a l l , the b i r t h pangs of the United distorting S t a t e s are seen through a distant m i r r o r : " D e p l u s , i l f a l l a i t c o m p t e r a v e c l a g u e r r e qui en e t a i t a s o n p l u s f o r t en c e t t e f i n 1 7 7 5 " (Mai 11 et 2 0 4 ) . No m a t t e r what happens, a t t e n t i o n i s a l w a y s i n w a r d l y f o c u s s e d . The others a r e , w e l l , other. "...Des E s p a g n o l s , des P o r t u g a i s , des C a t a l a n s . . . B a l t i m o r e e t a i t l e c a r r e f o u r du m o n d e " (Mai 11 et 168). M o r a l e i s m a i n t a i n e d w i t h a s e r i e s of s e l f - r e - a f f i r m i n g , enemy-mocking toasts: "'Pelagie-la-Charrette v i v r a t o u j o u r s . Et m e r d e au r o i d ' A n g l e t e r r e ! ' " ( M a i n e t 149) Wherever p o s s i b l e , a n a l o g i e s a r e made b e t w e e n B l a c k s l a v e s and A c a d i a n e x i l e s . T h u s , P e l a g i e ' s c o m p a n i o n s " [ s o n t ] d e p o r t e s s u r l e Black Face" (Mai 11 et 4 5 ) , a s h i p w h o s e name b e t r a y s i t s u s u a l p u r p o s e . Upon completing t h e i r j o u r n e y h o m e w a r d s , the n e w " I s r a e l i t e s " d i s c o v e r t h a t e v e r y t h i n g has been r e - n a m e d : " S u r l e s r i v e s de l a b a i e F r a n p a i s e , d i t e s Fundy...." (Maillet 320). 6 A s i d e f r o m i t s i n t r i n s i c v a l u e as f i r s t - r a t e h i s t o r i c a l Mail l e t ' s w r i t i n g i s of i n t e r e s t literature, f o r w h a t i t h a s to s a y a b o u t North A m e r i c a ' s other F r e n c h f a c t . B e c a u s e of t h e i r r e v e r e n c e f o r t h e p a s t , Acadians would s e e m to have an e v e n s t r o n g e r p r o v i n c i a l m o t t o , "je me souviens," claim than do the Q u e b e c o i s t h e m s e l v e s . IHere M a i l l e t ' s n o v e l i s r e m i n i s c e n t of B r i a n F r i e T s Translations, a n g l i c i z a t i o n of G a e l i c place names in 19th century Ireland. 6 to Q u e b e c ' s a p l a y about t h e 322 As chanteuse collection of Edith Butler mainly wrote traditional in L'Acadie sans frontieres, songs, "J'appartiens a Tancienne A c a d i e et a T A c a d i e moderne. J e veux v i v r e l e s deux a l a f o i s . " 15) Many of the chansons a i n c l u d e d in t h i s a n t h o l o g y r e f l e c t (Butler the s a m e e v e n t s t h a t i n s p i r e d A n t o n i n e M a i l l e t : " C o n d a m n e s a v i v r e , / C o m m e des juifs errants/lls revenir,/Dans ont marches longtemps,/Qu'ils ( B u t l e r 7 6 ) . Les ont fini par Anglais, in s o m e of t h e s e l y r i c s , are even m o r e f a c e l e s s than t h e y w e r e i n Pelagie-la- Charette: le p a y s d ' a v a n t " si " R e v e i l l e r e v e i l l e c ' e s t l e s g o d d a m s qui v i e n n e n t , / B r u 1 e r recolte/Reveille reveille hommes a c a d i e n s / P o u r s a u v e r le la village" ( B u t l e r 78). Ironically, d e s p i t e the f a c t t h a t the A c a d i a n s w e r e t r e a t e d far m o r e b r u t a l l y by the B r i t i s h E m p i r e than w e r e t h e i r Q u e b e c o i s c o u s i n s , the d e s c e n d a n t s of t h e s e o p p r e s s e d e x i l e s are f a r m o r e c o m m i t t e d to the is idea of a unified Canada. Even more surprisingly, there c o n s i d e r a b l e e n m i t y b e t w e e n t h e s e t w o m a j o r b r a n c h e s of F r e n c h N o r t h A m e r i c a . In 1 9 6 3 , Edmund W i l s o n w r o t e , " A n A c a d i a n , I w a s t o l d , w o u l d not w o r k f o r a Q u e b e c o i s F r e n c h f a m i l y " ( W i l s o n 4 3 ) . Even i f one t a k e s t h a t c l a i m w i t h a g r a i n of s a l t , i n g r a i n e d h o s t i l i t i e s b e t w e e n t h e s e t w o francophone communities unquestionably exist. W h i l e many of Edmond W i l s o n ' s p r o n o u n c e m e n t s y e a r s ago are s t i l l of thirty-four v e r y c u r r e n t , one at l e a s t has been s u p e r s e d e d . 7 In 0 Canada! An American's Notes on Canadian Culture ( 1 9 6 3 ) , many of the a u t h o r ' s o b s e r v a t i o n s are a l m o s t f r i g h t e n i n g l y u p - t o - d a t e . One r e a d s , f o r i n s t a n c e , t h a t " C a n a d i a n p u b l i s h e r s have the s e r i o u s g r i e v a n c e t h a t by b r i n g i n g out s p e c i a l Canadian e d i t i o n s , s u c h p e r i o d i c a l s a s Time and The Reader's Digest d i v e r t f r o m the C a n a d i a n m a g a z i n e s a good p a r t of the n a t i o n a l a d v e r t i s i n g , w i t h o u t w h i c h i t i s i m p o s s i b l e f o r t h e m to get along...." ( W i l s o n 6 2 ) E l s e w h e r e , the A m e r i c a n c r i t i c r e f l e c t s , " o n e even f i n d s F r a n c o p h i l e E n g l i s h C a n a d i a n s who adore the French of F r a n c e - - p a i n t i n g , l i t e r a t u r e , c h a t e a u x , c u i s i n e and a l l 7 323 T h i s d a t e d c l a i m r e a d s as f o l l o w s : " F r e n c h C a n a d i a n s have not yet been a b l e to i m p o s e on a w i d e r a u d i e n c e - a s the A m e r i c a n s have to s o m e extent d o n e - a literary Scots-flavoured language of t h e i r o w n . " ( W i l s o n 173) Now t h a t translations of M i c h e l T r e m b l a y ' s ;'owa/-drenched d r a m a s p l a y r e g u l a r l y to c a p a c i t y h o u s e s in G l a s g o w and E d i n b u r g h , i t is probably s a f e to s a y t h a t Quebec has c r e a t e d a l i t e r a r y w h i c h , under o p t i m u m c o n d i t i o n s , can p r o f i t a b l y language be a d a p t e d to p o l i t i c a l s i t u a t i o n s and a r g o t - h e a v y m o t h e r t o n g u e s . other 8 In C a n a d i a n w r i t e r s , h o w e v e r , i t s e e m s t h a t w h a t Edmund W i l s o n sought was not so m u c h c o n n e c t i o n to the d o m i n a n t a new language as i t was an idiomatic s t y l e of the 2 0 t h c e n t u r y . T h u s , the authors he s i n g l e d out f o r s p e c i a l p r a i s e w e r e Toronto native whose stripped-down Morley two Callaghan-a s t y l e had d e v e l o p e d alongside t h o s e of F. S c o t t F i t z g e r a l d and E r n e s t H e m i n g w a y in e m i g r e P a r i s - a n d M a r i e - C l a i r e B l a i s , a r g u a b l y the l e a s t p r o v i n c i a l w r i t e r this country has e v e r p r o d u c e d . C o n s i d e r i n g the c r i t i c ' s d e e p , p e r s o n a l t i e s to so many of the f o u n d e r s of l i t e r a r y surprise modernism, this predilection nobody. Even s o , W i l s o n s h o w e d r e m a r k a b l e should prescience in r e c o g n i z i n g B l a i s ' s t a l e n t so e a r l y in h e r c a r e e r . When the n o v e l i s t w a s barely i n t o h e r 2 0 s , the doyen of A m e r i c a n c r i t i c s , w h o w a s then the r e s t - - b u t are c o n t e m p t u o u s of the F r e n c h of F r e n c h C a n a d a , a c o u n t r y t h e y s e e m h a r d l y to have v i s i t e d " ( W i l s o n 2 0 8 ) . F o r a l l h i s s y m p a t h y f o r and u n d e r s t a n d i n g of C a n a d i a n c u l t u r e , i t s e e m s m o s t u n l i k e l y t h a t the great A m e r i c a n c r i t i c w o u l d have been i m p r e s s e d by the once v i b r a n t , now f a d i n g joual r e v o l u t i o n . H i s s y m p a t h y f o r Q u e b e c o i s l i t e r a t u r e w a s i n s e p a r a b l e f r o m h i s f r a n c o p h i l i a , a union w h i c h h i s s u m m a t i o n of the a r t i s t i c value of E m i l e N e l l i g a n tends to u n d e r s c o r e : " T h i s poet i s at once the R i m b a u d and the G e r a r d de N e r v a l of F r e n c h C a n a d a , and he s e e m s to me to be the only r e a l l y f i r s t - r a t e Canadian poet, F r e n c h or E n g l i s h , t h a t I have y e t r e a d . " ( W i l s o n 9 7 ) 8 324 n o t o r i o u s f o r h i s d i s l i k e of new t a l e n t , e n t h u s e d , " M i l e . B l a i s i s a t r u e p h e n o m e n o n ; she may p o s s i b l y be a g e n i u s " ( W i l s o n 148). Phenomenal M a r i e - C l a i r e B l a i s certainly most recent novel and the w i n n e r of the w a s - a n d i s . Soifs, 1995 her Governor-General's A w a r d f o r F r e n c h - l a n g u a g e f i c t i o n , i s u n a s h a m e d l y m o d e r n i s t in s t y l e , f i l l e d w i t h s e n t e n c e s t h a t run on f o r t w e l v e pages or m o r e , c h a n g i n g narrators w i t h o u t w a r n i n g in a s t r e a m - o f - c o n s c i o u s n e s s c a t a r a c t imagined sensibilities. B e c a u s e she has l i v e d so m u c h of h e r abroad, B l a i s is a consummate literary Soifs, of life c o s m o p o l i t a n . The s e t t i n g of f o r e x a m p l e , i s a C a r i b b e a n i s l a n d w h e r e people f r o m a l l o v e r the world try and fail to shut the modern world-with its Bosnian m a s s a c r e s and s e x u a l e p i d e m i c s - o u t of s i g h t and out of m i n d . C e r t a i n motifs keep r e c u r r i n g . The f o l l o w i n g i s p r o b a b l y the m o s t o b s e s s i v e . W h i l e s o a k i n g up the s u n , a p r i v i l e g e d m i d d l e - c l a s s w o m a n c a n ' t herself from thinking about " l ' e x e c u t i o n stop d'un n o i r i n c o n n u dans une p r i s o n du T e x a s , l a m o r t p a r i n j e c t i o n l e t a l e , une m o r t v i o l e e , d i s c r e t e c a r e l l e ne f a i s a i t aucun b r u i t , une m o r t l i q u i d e i n t r a v e i n e u s e , d'une e f f i c a c i t e e x e m p l a i r e p u i s q u e le condamne p o u v a i t se l ' i n f l i g e r a l u i m e m e dans l e s p r e m i e r s r a y o n s de l'aube...." ( S o i f s 13 - 14). H i s t o r i c a l v i c t i m s of r a c i a l o p p r e s s i o n are c i t e d w i t h the s a m e c a d e n c e d f l a t n e s s with which Michel Butor introduced m e s s i a h s in Mobile: a s u c c e s s i o n of d o o m e d Indian " N i n a Mae M c K i n n e y , p r e m i e r e a c t r i c e n o i r e dans l e s t h e a t r e s du New Vork, d ' l d a G r a y , p r e m i e r e f e m m e c h i r u g i e n d e n t a l e noire a Cincinnati...." ( S o i f s l'abolition 1 5 0 ) ; " M a r y M c l e o d B e t h u n e , nee a p r e s de l ' e s c l a v a g e . . . f o n d a i t l a p r e m i e r e n o i r e en F l o r i d e . . . . " ( S o i f s 2 4 8 ) . ecole pour l e s filles 325 In h e r m e m o i r Parcours n o v e l Un liaison literary parisienne, d'un ecrivain: Notes americaines and h e r B l a i s p r o v e s to be e q u a l l y at home in the m i l i e u s of New England and F r a n c e . In the f i r s t of t h e s e b o o k s ( w h i c h w a s not p u b l i s h e d u n t i l 1 9 9 3 , a l t h o u g h the f i r s t entry is dated thirty years earlier), the author two journal describes her a p p r e n t i c e s h i p y e a r s as an a u t h o r in A m e r i c a . Edmund W i l s o n h i m s e l f a p p e a r s i n t h i s t e x t , s i t t i n g on a park b e n c h , s p e a k i n g " a v e c T e t e n d u e de s a v a s t e c u l t u r e , i l me t r a c e un p o r t r a i t d e t a i l l e de V i r g i n i a W o o l f , de s a v i e , de son o e u v r e " ( N o t e s americaines 18). W i l s o n , i t a p p e a r , w a s u n c o m m o n l y s y m p a t h e t i c to w o m e n w r i t e r s would f o r a man of h i s g e n e r a t i o n , but even so M a r i e - C l a i r e B l a i s w a s c l e a r l y not content to s i t at h i s f e e t in the c a p a c i t y of b l i s s f u l a c o l y t e : " E t d e v a n t t a n t d ' e r u d i t i o n , moi qui ne s u i s pas un e s p r i t c u l t i v e , dans l a v i e l i t t e r a i r e n'en qu'a s e s d e b u t s , j e d o i s me t a i r e . M a i s j ' a i d e j a e p r o u v e l a m e m e i r r i t a t i o n ou l a m e m e gene en l i s a n t des b i o g r a p h e s de S i m o n e W e i l e c r i t e p a r des h o m m e s , j e n'ai j a m a i s a i m e ce ton de p r o p r i e t e r i g i d e et c o n f i n e qui e s t le t o n , dans l e s annees s o i x a n t e , des c r i t i q u e ou des b i o g r a p h i e s l o r s q u ' i l p r e s e n t e n t ou e t u d i e n t l e s o e u v r e s e c r i t e s p a r des f e m m e s " ( N o t e s a m e r i c a i n e s 19). A s i d e f r o m W i l s o n , B l a i s made the a c q u a i n t a n c e of R o b e r t L o w e l l , Mary M c C a r t h y , E l i z a b e t h Hardwick, J o h n H e r s e y , M a r g u e r i t e Y o u r c e n a r , and V l a d i m i r Nabokov d u r i n g course of h e r N e w E n g l a n d s o j o u r n . She w a s , h o w e v e r , the primarily i n f l u e n c e d by the m o d e r n i s m e m b o d i e d in the n o v e l s of V i r g i n i a W o o l f and the p o e m s of E l i z a b e t h B i s h o p and M a r i a n n e M o o r e , as w e l l as the A f r i c a n - A m e r i c a n w r i t e r s who w e r e b e g i n n i n g to c o m e i n t o t h e i r o w n : "Pendant cet ete-la...je lis James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph 326 E l l i s o n , et j e p r e n d s c o n s c i e n c e de l a p l u s h o n t e u s e r e p r e s s i o n de T h i s t o i r e " (Notes a m e r i c a i n e s 1 4 - 1 5 ) . This identification already been w i t h the A m e r i c a n s of the n o n - w h i t e s commented on in connection with French has literary t r a v e l l e r s . F o r a v a r i e t y of r e a s o n s , t h e i r Q u e b e c o i s c o m p a t r i o t s push t h i s l i n e of thought s t i l l f u r t h e r . F o r t h e m , A m e r i c a n r a c i s m i s not j u s t a convenient c u d g e l w i t h w h i c h to b l u d g e o n the the h e a d s of their b o o r i s h h o s t s ; i t i s , r a t h e r , e m b l e m a t i c of t h e i r o w n s o c i a l w o u n d s . In t h e i r s t r u g g l e s w i t h w h a t are s o m e t i m e s s e e n as o m n i p o t e n t Quebecois a r t i s t s identify strongly anglos, w i t h the w r e t c h e d of the earth: w i t h B l a c k s , N a t i v e A m e r i c a n s - s o m e t i m e s even P a l e s t i n i a n s . It i s not coincidental Negres blancs t h a t the b e s t k n o w n s e p a r a t i s t de l'Amerique. text was entitled Les In the s a m e v e i n , the m o s t h a t e d A n g l o taunt w a s a l w a y s "Speak White!" N e e d l e s s to s a y , B l a i s i s too s o p h i s t i c a t e d and w o r l d l y an a r t i s t to f a l l i n t o one of t h e s e m o n o c h r o m a t i c p o l i t i c a l p o s i t i o n s . A l s o , h e r e x p e r i e n c e of the U n i t e d S t a t e s i n c l u d e s as many p l e a s a n t personal m e m o r i e s as i t does i d e o l o g i c a l r e s e r v a t i o n s . N e i t h e r a h a g i o g r a p h e r nor a d e m o n o l o g i s t , h e r v i s i o n i s a l w a y s a d m i r a b l y b i n o c u l a r . A l t h o u g h i t ' s w i t t i e r , d r i e r , and m o r e p l a y f u l , B l a i s ' s s k e w e r i n g of French literary pretensions is actually more d e f l a t i o n of A m e r i c a n c u l t u r a l b a l l o o n s . Une liaison deadly parisienne than her (1975) d e s c r i b e s the a d v e n t u r e s of a Q u e b e c o i s w h o t r a v e l s to F r a n c e on a Canada C o u n c i l g r a n t , hoping to make a name f o r h i m s e l f in the C i t y of L i g h t . Once t h e r e , he d i s c o v e r s t h a t the l i t e r a r y s a l o n s and j o u r n a l i s t i c p o l i t i c s w h i c h B a l z a c s a t i r i z e d so p i t i l e s s l y in Illusions perdus still delights very much in f o r c e . The haughty Madame A r g e n t i are in 327 p u t t i n g M a t h i e u L e l i e v r e in h i s p r o v i n c i a l p l a c e : " ' Q u i e t e s - v o u s , dans nos L e t t r e s F r a n c a i s e s ? Un s i m p l e e t r a n g e r , un a d o l e s c e n t . . . . " (Une liaison parisienne 135). Parisian critics prove to be equally c o n d e s c e n d i n g : ' " Q u i e s t ce f a u x C a n d i d e , c e t t e ame p r o u s t i e n n e en v i s i t e a P a r i s . . . . " (Une l i a i s o n p a r i s i e n n e 143). The L u c i e n de R u b e m p r e s of the t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y , i t w o u l d s e e m , no l o n g e r c o m e j u s t f r o m the French provinces. The hero of J e a n - P i e r r e L e f e b v r e ' s 1 9 7 7 f e a t u r e , Le Vieux pays ou Rimbaud "Abel est mort, had a s o m e w h a t d i f f e r e n t e x p e r i e n c e : In t h i s ( w h o had e a r l i e r w i s t f u l l y film w i s h e d ' t o be a b l e to c h a n g e the c o u r s e of e v e n t s ' ) r e t u r n s to the land of h i s a n c e s t o r s only to d i s c o v e r t h a t the F r a n c e in w h i c h he had been taught to b e l i e v e no l o n g e r e x i s t s that it e x i s t s (as J a n D a w s o n w r o t e ) ' o n l y in m u s e u m s and i n his i m a g i n a t i o n ' . . . . " ( M o r r i s 31 1). O t h e r f i l m m a k e r s a p p r o a c h e d the s e m i l e g e n d a r y e n c l a v e of t h e i r f o n d e s t hopes and the home of t h e i r loved betrayers documentarist with almost Richard Lavoie, for ethnographic best- objectivity. example, went to B r i t t a n y , NFB the F r e n c h p r o v i n c e f r o m w h i c h m o s t p r o t o - Q u e b e c o i s e m i g r a t e d , to s h o o t Voyage en Bretagne interieure ( 1 9 7 8 ) , " o u i l s ' i n t e r e s s e aux m o e u r s et c o u t u m e s de c e t t e r e g i o n " ( C o l o m b e and J e a n 3 2 2 ) . One of the more i n t r i g u i n g r e c e n t f i l m s on the s u b j e c t of Q u e b e c ' s relationship to documentary, writer/director f e a t u r e Alias the Le Sort outside de world l'Amerique. is Jacques This is material which 1996 the has m i n e d many t i m e s b e f o r e . In h i s 1 9 8 9 n o n - f i c t i o n Will James, Godbout c h r o n i c l e d the c a r e e r of the d e r a c i n a t e d Q u e b e c o i s c e l e b r i t y of them a l l , a habitant himself Godbout's most who r e - i n v e n t e d as a n a t i v e - b o r n T e x a s r a n c h hand p r i o r to c a r v i n g out a 328 successful histoire career for americaine, himself as a c o w b o y writer/artist. a novel p u b l i s h e d in 1 9 8 5 , the a u t h o r In Une recounted the a d v e n t u r e s of a m i d d l e - a g e d Q u e b e c o i s p r o f e s s o r who s p e n d s a y e a r in Southern California, encountering many of the same cultural b o o n d o g g l e s d e s c r i b e d by M i c h e l B u t o r , A n d r e a De C a r l o , and writers from Europe's " l a t i n quarter". meditation straight on n a t i o n a l to l'Amerique the heart identity, of In h i s m o s t r e c e n t however, Quebec's Godbout ongoing other cinematic decided dilemma. Le to go Sort de a p p r o a c h e s the t r a u m a of 1 7 5 9 f r o m a v e r t i g i n o u s variety of a n g l e s . A l t h o u g h , s t r i c t l y s p e a k i n g , the f i l m m u s t be c l a s s i f i e d as a documentary, objective it i s not w i t h o u t i t s reporter fictional e l e m e n t s . Godbout shares screen time w i t h playwright the Rene-Daniel D u b o i s , a Q u e b e c o i s p l a y w r i g h t who has been c o m m i s s i o n e d to w r i t e an i m a g i n a t i v e s c e n a r i o on the e v e n t s t h a t l e d up to the c l i m a c t i c on battle the P l a i n s of A b r a h a m . He has been a s k e d to do so by a H o l l y w o o d s t u d i o : " J ' e c r i s un f i l m pour l e s A m e r i c a i n s s u r ce que s i g n i f i e pour nous l a j o u r n e e l a p l u s i m p o r t a n t e de l ' h i s t o i r e a nous...." A s he t a l k s to Godbout, his friend and de f a c t o collaborator, Dubois a s s u m e s the p e r i o d d r e s s of the h i s t o r i c a l c h a r a c t e r s he i m p e r s o n a t e s , at one p o i n t conducting a lively conversation w i t h himself in the d o u b l e g u i s e of V o l t a i r e and L o u i s X V - a p e r f e c t m e t a p h o r f o r the s c h i z o p h r e n i c n a t u r e of t h i s d e b a t e . E l s e w h e r e , the f i l m m a k e r s visit the d e s c e n d a n t s of G e n e r a l s W o l f e and M o n t c a l m , the s l a i n m i l i t a r y l e a d e r s w h o s e a r m i e s d e c i d e d the f a t e of filmmakers track French North down bilingual, left-leaning spare time. In the General A m e r i c a in Wolfe's BBC j o u r n a l i s t 1 7 5 9 . In L o n d o n , descendant, a the fluently w h o f r o n t s a b l u e s band i n h i s French countryside, meanwhile, the Baron de 329 M o n t c a l m t u r n s out to be an u n r e c o n s t r u c t e d l e g i t i m i s t w h o s e s o l e goal in l i f e i s to c o m p l e t e l y rebuild the r u i n e d f a m i l y a p o l o g y , he e x p l a i n s , " M o n f a m i l i e a toujours castle. Without servis les Bourbons." R e t u r n i n g to Quebec to p u r s u e t h e i r r e s e a r c h e s , Godbout and D u b o i s d i s c o v e r m o r e t h r e a d s t h a t l e a d n o w h e r e . F i n d i n g the p r o p e r r e c o r d s p r o v e s to be a K a f k a e s q u e n i g h t m a r e as the men w a n d e r fruitlessly f r o m a r c h i v e to a r c h i v e . Even w o r s e , the h i s t o r i c a l r e c o r d i s c o n s t a n t l y b e i n g o v e r s h a d o w e d by f o l k m e m o r y . T h e d i r e c t o r r e c a l l s h i s father s a y i n g , " N ' o u b l i e p a s , J a c q u e s , que l e s A n g l a i s ont b r u l e s nos m a i s o n s . " E l s e w h e r e , p o l i t i c a l pundit L a u r i e r L a p i e r r e o p i n e s , " N o u s a v o n s deux e n n e m i s aux P l a i n e s d ' A b r a h a m . Ils s o n t l e s A n g l a i s et l e s F r a n c a i s . " It i s a l s o s u g g e s t e d t h a t the u l t i m a t e b e n e f i c i a r i e s of t h i s b a t t l e the A m e r i c a n s , the m a s t e r s of the world who have were commissioned Dubois to r e c o n s t r u c t h i s t r a u m a f o r t h e i r c o m m e r c i a l p l e a s u r e . In both h i s l i t e r a r y and h i s f i l m w o r k , J a c q u e s Godbout m a n a g e s to e n c o m p a s s t w o d i c h o t o m o u s t r e n d s in Q u e b e c ' s c u l t u r a l make-up, two centrifugal f o r c e s t h a t c e a s e l e s s l y t h r e a t e n to u p s e t i t s equilibrium. Philippe finalement In Gajan's words, "L'art fragile de G o d b o u t , de r e p o s e r l e s q u e s t i o n s t o u t en e v a c u a n t l e s f a u x c'est pistes (Qui e s t l e t r a i t r e ? ) et l e s f a u s s e s c e r t i t u d e s (Qui e s t l e v a i n q u e u r de l a b a t a i l l e ? p a r e x e m p l e " ( G a j a n 8 4 ) . On the one hand, the p r o v i n c e i s p o s s i b l y the m o s t c o s m o p o l i t a n p l a c e on the c o n t i n e n t , e v i n c i n g t a s t e s t h a t d i f f e r m a r k e d l y f r o m the N o r t h A m e r i c a n n o r m . On the o t h e r hand, i t i s one of the m o s t i n s u l a r , n o u r i s h i n g an a l m o s t p a r a n o i d f e a r of n a t i o n a l i m m o l a t i o n in the s u r g i n g s e a of a n g l o p h o n e s t h a t s u r r o u n d it. To a c e r t a i n e x t e n t this reflects the d i f f e r e n c e between town and 330 c o u n t r y . If M o n t r e a l i s N o r t h A m e r i c a ' s P a r i s , then r u r a l Quebec i s i t s Gal w a y . T h i s t e n s i o n r e s u l t s in an a m b i v a l e n t a t t i t u d e t o w a r d s Q u e b e c o i s w h o have made good a b r o a d . W h i l e o v e r s e a s r e c o g n i t i o n i s seen as g e n e r a l l y good, i t i s also fraught w i t h p e r i l . M a r i e - C l a i r e B l a i s , f o r example, obviously f e l t some e l u s i v e , i l l - d e f i n e d uneasiness when she m e t a f e m a l e p r o f e s s o r of F r e n c h l i t e r a t u r e w h o e n t h u s e d , " a H a r v a r d , nous c o n n a i s s o n s A n n e H e b e r t , A n t o n i n e Mail let, Michel Tremblay, R e j e a n Ducharme...que de t e m p s , nous a i m e r o n s de p l u s en p l u s de v o s a u t e u r s i c i . . . . " ( N o t e s a m e r i c a i n e s 2 4 ) . It s h o u l d be e m p h a s i z e d here t h a t t h e u n c e r t a i n t y i n q u e s t i o n w a s f e l t by the m o s t c o s m o p o l i t a n of Quebecois writers, a peripatetic literary pilgrim. F o r the Vves B e a u c h e m i n s of Q u e b e c , t h e s i t u a t i o n s e e m s m o r e s i n i s t e r s t i l l . F o r t h e m , anyone w h o m o v e s a w a y t h r e a t e n s to b e c o m e a W i l l J a m e s . • ne of t h e v e r y f e w e x c e p t i o n s to t h i s rule i s Jack Kerouac. A l t h o u g h he w a s born i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s and s p e n t p r e c i o u s t i m e i n la belle province, little s i n c e the e a r l y 1 9 7 0 s t h e B e a t n o v e l i s t h a s been a Q u e b e c o i s i c o n , h i s p o s i t i o n c a n o n i z e d by n o v e l i s t / s c r e e n w r i t e r V i c t o r - L e v y Beaulieu who c e a s e l e s s l y r e i t e r a t e d " c e t t e passion f o l l e pour K e r o u a c . " 9 In 1 9 8 9 , R e g i n a l d M a r t e l and Yves B o i s v e r t p u b l i s h e d a s l i m v o l u m e c a l l e d Quebec Kerouac Blues, a c e l e b r a t i o n i n p r o s e and v e r s e of t h e m a n f r o m " L o w e l l ! V i l l e de m e s a n c e t r e s ! C a n a d i e n f r a n c a i s ! " ( M a r t e l and B o i s v e r t 2 1 ) . It i s i n t e r e s t i n g to note that B e a u l i e u , l i k e so many French and I t a l i a n w r i t e r s , both past and p r e s e n t , i s a l s o a g r e a t a d m i r e r of H e r m a n M e l v i l l e . He w r o t e , " c e que M e l v i l l e a e t e , c ' e s t c e que j e v o u d r a i s e t r e . " ( M o n s i e u r M e l v i l l e 1 2 3 ) F o r h i m , t h e A m e r i c a n n o v e l i s t i s one of V i c t o r Hugo's s p i r i t u a l b r o t h e r s : " L ' u n a v a i t e c r i t Moby Dick e t T a u t r e Les Travailleurs de la mer, l e s deux grands l i v r e s du XIXe s i e c l e s u r l e o c e a n ! " ( M o n s i e u r Melville 1 30) 9 331 Of c o u r s e , J a c k K e r o u a c c o n t r i b u t e d to t h i s t r i b u t e by h i s r e f u s a l to d i s p a r a g e h i s Q u e b e c o i s r o o t s . P a u l T h e r o u x ' s f a t h e r , f o r i n s t a n c e , w a s of F r a n c o - A m e r i c a n s t o c k , b u t , a s w e have a l r e a d y novelist/travel ancestors writer's are almost indifference comments universally to t h e u n i q u e l y on t h e n a t u r e hostile. Thanks seen, the of h i s distant to h i s s i n g u l a r " C a n u c k " a s p e c t s of h i s N e w E n g l a n d c h i l d h o o d - a s i n of o m i s s i o n w h i c h m u s t be added to t h e i d e o l o g i c a l b o n f i r e of h i s o u t s p o k e n f r a n c o p h o b i a - t h e odds of P a u l T h e r o u x e v e r b e i n g a d o p t e d by M o n t r e a l ' s l i t e r a r y j o u r n a l i s t s a s a long l o s t fils pays are v i r t u a l l y n i l . In Satori in Paris, du conversely, Jack/Jacques audibly r e j o i c e d in h i s c u l t u r a l heritage. F a r from being d e f e n s i v e in F r a n c e , he p r a c t i c e d a f o r m of a g g r e s s i v e f r a n c o p h i l i s m , a t a c t i c w h i c h e m p h a s i z e d the i m m e m o r i a l F r e n c h n e s s of le peuple Quebecois: "A m a r v e l l o u s m a n , and J e w i s h , and w e have o u r c o n v e r s a t i o n i n F r e n c h , and I even t e l l h i m t h a t I r o l l my ' r ' s ' on my tongue and not i n my t h r o a t b e c a u s e I c o m e f r o m M e d i e v a l F r e n c h Q u e b e c - v i a - B r i t t a n y s t o c k , and he agrees, admitting t h a t m o d e r n P a r i s i a n F r e n c h , tho dandy, has r e a l l y been c h a n g e d by t h e i n f l u x of G e r m a n s , J e w s and A r a b s f o r a l l t h e s e t w o c e n t u r i e s and not to m e n t i o n the i n f l u e n c e of the f o p s i n t h e c o u r t of L o u i s the F o u r t e e n t h w h i c h r e a l l y s t a r t e d i t , and I a l s o r e m i n d e d h i m t h a t F r a n c o i s V i l l o n ' s r e a l name w a s p r o n o u n c e d ' V i l l e O n ' and n o t ' V i y o n ' ( w h i c h i s a c o r r u p t i o n ) and t h a t in t h o s e days you s a i d not ' t o i ' o r ' m o i ' but l i k e ' t o u e ' o r ' m o u e ' (as w e s t i l l do i n Quebec and i n t w o days I heard i t i n B r i t t a n y ) . . . . " ( K e r o u a c 4 5 - 4 6 ) . It i s i n s t r u c t i v e to n o t e , in the p r e c e d i n g p a r a g r a p h , h o w many of the articles of the Quebecois catechism survived Kerouac's M a s s a c h u s s e t t s u p b r i n g i n g . One f i n d s both the i n s i s t e n c e t h a t joual i s 332 the true French, conversationalist the authentic who accepts French, this view. and the One a l s o French finds coclear d i s t i n c t i o n s b e t w e e n " u s " and " t h e m " , the " r e a l " F r e n c h m e n and the J e w i s h , G e r m a n , and A r a b i m m i g r a n t s who have so s a d l y c o r r u p t e d the tongue of R a b e l a i s and V i l l o n . F a r f r o m b e i n g a s s i m i l a t e d by A m e r i c a n D r e a m , i n the K e r o u a c - o r p e r h a p s I s h o u l d s a y h o u s e h o l d , the Q u e b e c o i s Zeitgeist survived virtually the Kerouac- intact. A f t e r the " Q u i e t R e v o l u t i o n " of the 1 9 6 0 s and e a r l y 1 9 7 0 s , the s o c i a l m o v e m e n t t h a t d i d so m u c h to d i s p e l the s t r i c t u r e s of Q u e b e c ' s p a r o c h i a l p u r i t a n i s m , F r e n c h c h a r a c t e r s w e r e o c c a s i o n a l l y s h o w n in a better l i g h t . No l o n g e r w e r e inheritors of 1 7 8 9 o r the they simply obliging the tourists sinful who and atheistic p r a i s e d joual as e f f u s i v e l y i n f i c t i o n as they d i s p a r a g e d i t in r e a l l i f e . Now they c o u l d sometimes function as a c o u n t e r w e i g h t to A n g l o - A m e r i c a n cultural d o m i n a t i o n , as a m o r e c o n g e n i a l s o u r c e of m o d e r n i s m and savoir T h u s , the G a l l i c cook i n Le flatou novelist Vves B e a u c h e m i n than i s treated f a r more favourably any of the quasi-Satanic " a n g l o s " . L i k e w i s e , i n P i e r r e G a n g ' s f i r s t f e a t u r e Sous-sol sexual coming-of-age story faire. set mainly in the l a t e by Montreal (1996), a 1 9 6 0 s , a young F r e n c h t o u r i s t i s p r e s e n t e d as a l i b e r a t i n g w i n d w h i c h h e l p s to blow a w a y the l i n g e r i n g c l o u d s of C h u r c h - g e n e r a t e d s e x u a l r e p r e s s i o n . A n o t h e r change u s h e r e d in by the 1990s w a s a new cinematic a w a r e n e s s of M o n t r e a l ' s s o - c a l l e d " a l l o p h o n e " c o m m u n i t i e s . Latin A m e r i c a n p o l i t i c a l r e f u g e e s began to f i g u r e p r o m i n e n t l y in f i l m s s u c h as M i c h e l B r a u l t ' s Les Noces de papier ( 1 9 8 9 ) . A r o u n d the s a m e t i m e , f r o m w i t h i n the h e a r t of M o n t r e a l ' s I t a l i a n c o m m u n i t y , a l o c a l boy began to e s t a b l i s h h i s r e p u t a t i o n as one of the p r o v i n c e ' s foremost 333 filmmakers. Paul Tana's medium-length 1 0 "[raconta] l'itineraire Caffe Italia Montreal de t r o i s g e n e r a t i o n s peu h a b i t u e e au p h e n o m e n e de T i m m i g r a t i o n en m a s s e " ( C o l o m b e and J e a n 5 0 8 - 5 0 9 ) He f o l l o w e d t h i s up w i t h La Sarrasine ( 1 9 9 1 ) , a s t u d y of e t h n i c c o n f l i c t between I t a l i a n i m m i g r a n t s and Q u e b e c o i s urban d w e l l e r s at the t u r n of this c e n t u r y . I n t r i g u i n g l y , the f i l m ' s e p o n y m o u s S a r a c e n r e f e r s to a s t r i n g borne f i g u r e in an I t a l i a n m a r i o n e t t e s h o w . T h i s d a r k - s k i n n e d puppet s e r v e s the s a m e n a r r a t i v e R o s s e l l i n i ' s Paisa, subject to f u n c t i o n as the w o o d e n M o o r i n R o b e r t o a d e t a i l w h i c h s u g g e s t s t h a t I t a l o - Q u e b e c e r s are as motherland influence as are their French-speaking neighbours. In the i n t e r e s t s of f a i r n e s s , i t s h o u l d p r o b a b l y be p o i n t e d out t h a t French i n t e l l e c t u a l s backwater. no l o n g e r l o o k at Quebec p u r e l y as a B o t h F e l i x L e c l e r c and R o b e r t Charlebois cultural rejuvenated p o p u l a r F r e n c h m u s i c in the 1 9 6 0 s , and P a r i s i a n c r i t i c s w e r e p r o p e r l y appreciative. truly 1 1 A t t i m e s , i t c o u l d f a i r l y be s a i d , they w e r e more than appreciative-on conciliatory-attempting behalf of their to be m o r e fellow countrymen, almost Q u e b e c o i s t h a n the Q u e b e c o i s themselves. M o n t r e a l e r s of I t a l i a n d e s c e n t are a l m o s t c e r t a i n l y the a l l o p h o n e c o m m u n i t y w h i c h i s m o s t a s s i d u o u s l y c o u r t e d by Q u e b e c ' s f e d e r a l i s t and n a t i o n a l i s t c a m p s . A s n o n - n a t i v e E n g l i s h s p e a k e r s t h e y w e r e , p r i o r to the p a r t i Q u e b e c o i s ' s f i r s t e l e c t o r a l v i c t o r y i n 1 9 7 6 , l a r g e l y a s s i m i l a t e d i n t o M o n t r e a l ' s anglophone c o m m u n i t y , d e s p i t e t h e i r C a t h o l i c f a i t h . F o l l o w i n g changes to the p r o v i n c e ' s e d u c a t i o n a l l a w s , m o s t of t h e i r c h i l d r e n w e r e s u b s e q u e n t l y c h a n n e l l e d i n t o M o n t r e a l ' s F r e n c h l a n g u a g e s c h o o l s y s t e m , but t h i s s e e m i n g l y had l i t t l e e f f e c t on t h e i r p o l i t i c a l l o y a l t i e s . G e n e r a l l y popular in both l i n g u i s t i c c a m p s , they tend to s l i d e b e t w e e n M o n t r e a l ' s e t h n i c c o m m u n i t i e s w i t h g r e a t e r ease than m o s t . T h e c u l t u r a l u n i q u e n e s s w h i c h has a l w a y s p r e v e n t e d m u c h - c o n q u e r e d I t a l y f r o m b e i n g r e - m a d e i n a n o t h e r c o u n t r y ' s i m a g e s e e m s to h o l d t r u e i n Q u e b e c ' s I t a l i a n neighbourhoods as w e l l . 1 0 1 1 One of L e c l e r c ' s s o n g s p l a y s a p i v o t a l r o l e in F r a n c o i s T r u f f a u t ' s Tirez sur le pianists. 1960 m a s t e r p i e c e , 334 J a c q u e s B e r t i n ' s Felix Leclerc: To underscore his subject's Le Roi heureux i s a c a s e i n p o i n t . importance, this rather sycophantic b i o g r a p h e r w r i t e r s , "11 e s t le s e u l C a n a d i e n - o u i , le s e u l - d o n t le nom s o i t connu p a r t o u s - t o u s - l e s F r a n c a i s " ( B e r t i n 7). C o n t i n u i n g on in the same francocentric Canada. Du vieux v e i n , B e r t i n m a r v e l s t h a t "11 v i e n t Canada francais: pas de de l o i n : du litterature, pas d ' i n t e l l i g e n t z i a , pas de t r a d i t i o n s c u l t u r e l l e s , pas de C a f e de F l o r e , p a s de M o n t p a r n a s s e . . . p a s de r e v u e s , pas de t h e a t r e , pas d ' e r u d i t i o n , pas des s p e c t a t e u r s e c l a i r e s " ( B e r t i n 8 - 9). B e h i n d t h i s d e p r i v e d lumberjack w o r l d , of c o u r s e , o u t s i d e f o r c e s l u r k e d - a l l of t h e m s p e a k i n g E n g l i s h : " ' A u x a n g l a i s l ' a r g e n t , l e s a f f a i r e s . A n o u s , l e s a m e s . Et l a m i s e r e ' " ( B e r t i n 2 9 ) . T h e n , t o o , t h e r e w a s the C h u r c h . A c c o r d i n g to B e r t i n , in 1 8 9 9 , Q u e b e c ' s 2 0 0 c i v i l s e r v a n t s had to engage in unequal c o m b a t w i t h no f e w e r than 1 0 , 0 0 0 p a r i s h p r i e s t s . W h a t ' s m o r e , the layman/priest r a t i o of 5 7 6 - 1 w a s the m o s t V a t i c a n - f r i e n d l y in the w o r l d : " P o u r un p r e t r e , l e Quebec de 1 9 0 0 p e u t , en e f f e t , r e s s e m b l e r a un p a r a d i s t e r r e s t r e : t o u t y e s t dans l a m a i n de l ' e g l i s e " ( B e r t i n 4 9 ) . A s L e c l e r c himself r e c a l l e d , ' " C ' e s t g r a c e aux p r e t r e s que nous p a r l o n s francais. Mais helas! il faut bien dire encore t o u t e l a v e r i t e . Le c l e r g e a c o n t r i b u e a nous m a i n t e n i r dans une c e r t a i n e n u i t de l ' e s p r i t ' " (Bertin 5 3 ) . When he t a l k s about the r o l e of a n g l o p h o n e s i n Q u e b e c , the a u t h o r assumes the xenophobic tones of L o u i s H e m o n ' s habitants. When c o n s i d e r i n g p o p u l a t i o n s h i f t s in Quebec C i t y , f o r i n s t a n c e , he w r i t e s , " E n 1 8 6 1 , i l y ' a a v a i t q u a r a n t e pour c e n t d ' a n g l o p h o n e s dans l a v i l l e . Et pas t o u s des r i c h e s . Des I r l a n d a i s , c a t h o l i q u e s c o m m e l e s c a n a d i e n s f r a n c a i s m a i s . . . a n g l o p h o n e s avant t o u t " ( B e r t i n 7 0 ) . When s p e a k i n g of Quebec's somewhat ambivalent relationship to F r a n c e , c o n v e r s e l y , 335 B e r t i n ' s e m p h a s i s s h i f t s e v e r so s l i g h t l y f r o m P e q u i s t e o r t h o d o x y P a r i s i a n snobbery: to " P a r l e r f r a n p a i s - e t un f r a n c a i s ' a n c i e n ' , p r e s q u e d e n a t u r e - p a f a i t h a b i t a n t . II y ' a d'un c o t e l a F r a n c e , t e r r e des a r t s , des a r m e s et des l o i s qui f a s c i n e et qui f a i t peur, le pays de l a c u l t u r e et du p e c h e . E t , de l ' a u t r e , les Anglais, les patrons, m e i l l e u r s " (Bertin 8 8 ) . 1 2 les gagneurs, les A c c o r d i n g to B e r t i n , F e l i x L e c l e r c s u f f e r e d a b o m i n a b l y w h e n he m o v e d f r o m Quebec C i t y to M o n t r e a l : " L e c e n t r e v i l l e de Quebec e s t europeen... M o n t r e a l e s t une c i t e a m e r i c a i n e (Bertin 111). 1 5 Modifying his i n i t i a l somewhat contradictorily, " sneer somewhat, Bertin a d d s - one m i g h t s a y , under the c i r c u m s t a n c e s - t h a t "11 n'y a que dans le c e n t r e , v e r s l a p l a c e d ' a r m e s et 1 ' H o t e l de V i l l e que s u b s i s t e n t q u e l q u e s v e s t i g e s du r e g i m e f r a n p a i s , m i l e s aux c o n s t r u c t i o n s v a n i t e u s e s du c a p i t a l i s m e a n g l o - a m e r i c a i n , p o i n t toutes l a i d e s d ' a i l l e u r s " ( B e r t i n 1 12). U s i n g M o n t r e a l and E n g l i s h Canada as a p r e t e x t , J a c q u e s B e r t i n f i n d s the p e r f e c t o p p o r t u n i t y sixty-year-old to r e p r i s e s l u r s of G e o r g e s D u h a m e l i n a n e w c o n t e x t ; i n the this r e s p e c t , at l e a s t , one c o u l d say t h a t n o t h i n g at a l l had c h a n g e d i n the French l i t e r a r y t r a v e l l e r ' s psyche. What i s d i f f e r e n t i s the d e t e r m i n a t i o n Quebec i n an e q u a l l y good l i g h t . T h i s s l i g h t to c a s t both F r a n c e and change in journalistic a t t i t u d e i s p r o b a b l y not u n c o n n e c t e d to s h i f t s in F r e n c h f o r e i g n p o l i c y since the end of the Second World War. W i t h its defeat in 1940 T h e n o n - Q u e b e c o i s w o r d in t h i s G a l l i c s u m m a t i o n of Q u e b e c ' s t a k e on F r a n c e and the A n g l o S a x o n w o r l d i s of c o u r s e " a r m e s " . In the s c o r e s of Q u e b e c o i s f i l m s w h i c h I have s e e n , and the h u n d r e d s of Q u e b e c o i s b o o k s and m a g a z i n e s w h i c h I have r e a d , I c a n n o t r e c a l l a s i n g l e o c c a s i o n in w h i c h a Quebecois poet, n o v e l i s t , j o u r n a l i s t , or f i l m m a k e r e x p r e s s e d the s l i g h t e s t a w e o r a d m i r a t i o n f o r F r e n c h m i l i t a r y p r o w e s s . T h i s i s one d i r e c t i o n , i t w o u l d s e e m , in w h i c h ethnic s e l f - i d e n t i f i c a t i o n cannot be pushed. 1 2 I w o n d e r how many o t h e r A m e r i c a n c i t i e s can b o a s t of so m u c h a u t h e n t i c l a t e c e n t u r y and e a r l y 18th c e n t u r y F r e n c h a r c h i t e c t u r e ? 1 3 17th 336 c o m p o u n d e d by the l o s s of i t s A f r i c a n and A s i a n c o l o n i e s , F r a n c e ' s c l a i m to b e i n g c o n s i d e r e d a g r e a t m i l i t a r y and p o l i t i c a l p o w e r s e e m e d less credible all prestige, efforts the t i m e . To c o m p e n s a t e f o r this lack of global w e r e made in the E l y s e e P a l a c e to e s t a b l i s h the n a t i o n as the c e n t r e of a w o r l d w i d e f r a n c o p h o n e c o m m u n i t y w h i c h w a s f i v e o r s i x t i m e s as l a r g e as F r a n c e i t s e l f . P a r a l l e l to t h i s p o l i c y ran the g o v e r n m e n t ' s a l r e a d y d i s c u s s e d a t t e m p t s to a s s u m e one of the key roles in a United Europe s t r o n g enough to c o m p e t e w i t h both the A m e r i c a n s and the J a p a n e s e on t h e i r o w n t e r m s . S t e e p e d as a l w a y s in the t e n e t s of Realpolitik, gloire F r e n c h p o l i t i c i a n s s a w q u i t e c l e a r l y t h a t i f Ja w a s e v e r to r e t u r n to the banks of the S e i n e i t w o u l d c o m e in the f o r m of a c o n f e d e r a t e d , not a n a t i o n a l , package. In t e r m s of w a l k i n g t h i s n e w double l i n e , J a c q u e s B e r t i n i s a c o n s u m m a t e m a s t e r . When he w r i t e s , for instance, "Parlons Joual! V o i l a l a r e p o n s e au f a m e u x ' s p e a k w h i t e ! ' " ( B e r t i n 2 5 9 ) he m a k e s a c a s e f o r the l o c a l d i a l e c t w i t h o u t i n any w a y i m p u g n i n g the p u r i t y of Parisian i d e a l . Joual exists exclusively thanks E n g l i s h . T h u s , the F r a n c o - Q u e b e c o i s l i n g u i s t i c to the the oppressive confrontation is left e n t i r e l y out of the loop. L e o n a r d C o h e n , on the o t h e r hand, M o n t r e a l ' s best-known anglophone p o e t / s o n g w r i t e r - a n d p o p u l a r i n P a r i s , by the w a y - i s not l e t off one w h o i s extremely so e a s i l y : "11 p a r l e en f r a n c a i s . B o n , i l a un a c c e n t qui le t r a h i r a i t s ' i l l u i f a i s a i t c o n f i a n c e et parlait l e dos t o u r n e . M a i s i l p a r l e l e n t e m e n t , L'accent ajoute mollification of au charme" that final (Bertin 289). sentence, the sans elever la Despite French of the voix. partial Montreal's anglophone c o m m u n i t y i s c l e a r l y not g r a n t e d the s a m e i m m u n i t y which B e r t i n a c c o r d s to h i s pure laine f r i e n d s . It i s no e x a g g e r a t i o n to s t a t e 337 t h a t at t i m e s the b i o g r a p h e r ' s w i l l i n g n e s s to c u r r y Q u e b e c o i s f a v o u r f r e q u e n t l y b o r d e r s on the r i d i c u l o u s . C o n s i d e r the f o l l o w i n g summary of the f i r s t FLQ m a n i f e s t o : " L e t e x t e p r e s e n t e un m e r i t e p l u t o t r a r e . II s e m b l e a v o i r ete e c r i t p a r un v r a i l i t t e r a t e u r . II o b t i e n d r a un v r a i s u c c e s p o p u l a i r e " ( B e r t i n 2 6 0 ) . Only once does the a u t h o r a d m i t what h e ' s r e a l l y up to: " J " e c r i r a i une s o r t e de r o m a n h i s t o r i q u e s u r l a n a t i o n quebecoise" (Bertin 313). That what B e r t i n has w r i t t e n i s r a t h e r than h i s t o r y i s a f a i r l y generous i n t e r p r e t a t i o n fiction of t h i s book; t h o s e l e s s w e l l - d i s p o s e d t o w a r d s the a u t h o r m i g h t argue i n s t e a d t h a t w h a t he has w h i p p e d up i s l i t t l e b e t t e r than s e c o n d - h a n d n a t i o n a l i s t p r o p a g a n d a , a b o r r o w e d p o l i c y p o s i t i o n w h i c h l a c k s the emotional v a l i d a t i o n of p e r s o n a l g r i e v a n c e . Happily, afflicted not all French t r a v e l l e r s w i t h nostalgie des colonies in Quebec are as fatally as i s F e l i x L e c l e r c ' s F r e n c h b i o g r a p h e r . W h i l e f i l m m a k e r M i c h e l M o r e a u , in h i s autobiographical documentary the Le Pays reve (1996), does make occasional B e r t i n e s q u e a s i d e - " M o n t r e a l a t t r a p e le v i r u s des E t a t s - U n i s " b e i n g p e r h a p s the m o s t a s t r i n g e n t - i n g e n e r a l h i s c o m m e n t s are f a r m o r e l o w key. D e s p i t e h i s f o n d n e s s f o r C h a r l e s T r e n e t s o n g s and the w r i t i n g s of C o l e t t e , w h o w a s b o r n , he a n n o u n c e s p r o u d l y " 3 0 k i l o m e t r e s de c h e z n o u s , " he w o u l d w i n d up in 7a belle province in 1 9 6 0 at l e a s t partially as a r e s u l t of h i s d i s g u s t o v e r the c o l o n i a l w a r w h i c h F r a n c e w a s then w a g i n g in A l g e r i a . Many of the e i g h t y n o n - f i c t i o n f i l m s he s u b s e q u e n t l y made d e a l t with the problems of immigrants adjusting e n v i r o n m e n t . A b o u t Quebec i t s e l f he s a y s r e l a t i v e l y to a new little/expressing g r a t i t u d e f o r the good t h i n g s w h i c h F r e n c h N o r t h A m e r i c a b r o u g h t to 338 h i s l i f e , but w i t h o u t e v e r r e s o r t i n g to a r r o g a n t o v e r - s i m p l i f i c a t i o n s of the J a c q u e s B e r t i n v a r i e t y . Somewhat surprisingly, at least one American has j o u r n a l i s t i c a l l y bashed the U S A f r o m a p u t a t i v e Q u e b e c o i s p e r s p e c t i v e . A V i e t n a m War vintage draft-dodger, Robert Dole a c q u i r e d foreign l a n g u a g e s in Europe p r i o r to a s s u m i n g a c a d e m i c r e s p o n s i b i l i t i e s at the U n i v e r s i t e du Quebec a T r o i s R i v i e r e s . Le Cauchemar pamphletaire actuelle sur les vestiges du puhtanisme americain: dans la Essai mentalite i s the a u t h o r ' s r e s p o n s e to a n a t i o n a l h e r i t a g e w h i c h c a u s e s h i m c o n s i d e r a b l e u n e a s e . The book i s d e d i c a t e d to Mark F r e c h e t t e , an A m e r i c a n a c t o r of Q u e b e c o i s d e s c e n t who s t a r r e d in Zabriskie Point, M i c h e l a n g e l o A n t o n i o n i ' s l a t e ' 6 0 s ode to r a d i c a l A m e r i c a , p r i o r becoming a revolutionary to in h i s o w n r i g h t , and d y i n g i n p r i s o n u n d e r m y s t e r i o u s c i r c u m s t a n c e s . Dole w r i t e s , " V o i c i mon h y p o t h e s e : A T i n s u des A m e r i c a i n s , il existe un c a r a c t e r e a m e r i c a i n e , un c o m p o r t e m e n t a m e r i c a i n , une a m e r i c a i n qui s o n t propre mentalite au p e u p l e a m e r i c a i n et qui le d i s t i n g u e n t d ' a u t r e s n a t i o n a l i t e s " (Dole 12). L i k e Le Monde's f r o n t - p a g e e d i t o r i a l i s t s , he b e l i e v e s t h a t " D e p u i s l a c h u t e du s o c i a l i s m e en Europe et a i l l e u r s , p l u s r i e n n'empeche l'americanisation de l a p l a n e t e " (Dole 13). S e e k i n g to e x p l a i n h i s m o t i v a t i o n s m o r e fully, the a u t h o r c o n f e s s e s , " L a t r i p l e p e r s p e c t i v e a m e r i c a i n e - e u r o p e e n e q u e b e c o i s e va donner a mes r e f l e x i o n s des t o u r n u r e s o r i g i n a l e s , p a r f o i s peut-etre Corriere e x c e n t r i q u e s " (Dole 16). L i k e the c u l t u r a l of della Sera, Dole a t t r i b u t e s the i l l s of A m e r i c a n - s t y l e p o l i t i c a l c o r r e c t n e s s to the l i n g e r i n g century page w r i t e r s effects puritanism: " S i l'individu deprivation dans sa vie of d e t e r m i n i s t i c faisait personnelle, seventeenth- p r e u v e de f a i b l e s s e ou de ses voisins sauraient qu'il 339 n'appartenait pas au groupe des e l u s " (Dole 2 4 ) . A s r e a d e r s of C h a p t e r T h r e e w i l l r e m e m b e r , t h i s i s p r e c i s e l y the s o r t of New W o r l d m i n d s e t w h i c h A n t o n i o G r a m s c i w i s h e d on h i s f e l l o w I t a l i a n s as an i n t e r i m p r e s o c i a l i s t m e a s u r e . C l a i m s are made in Le Cauchemar one c a n o n l y americain hope a r e e x a g g e r a t e d : " L e s A m e r i c a i n s which construisent a c t u e l l e m e n t p l u s de p r i s o n s que d ' e c o l e s " (Dole 4 2 ) . The Land of the ( U n ) f r e e , a l a s , i s s e e m i n g l y not c o n t e n t w i t h t u r n i n g i t s o w n terrain into a m a s s i v e prison yard: " C ' e s t precisement la c o n v i c t i o n q u ' i l s sont le peuple e l u de Dieu qui p r o c u r e aux A m e r i c a i n s le s e n t i m e n t de d e v o i r j o u e r le r o l e de gendarme r n o n d i a l e " (Dole 47). S i m i l a r l y - a l t h o u g h , Dole would contend, with feministe americaine greater justice a introduit on i t s encore une side-"Le autre mouvement vision de la p r e d e s t i n a t i o n : e l u e s s o n t l e s f e m m e s et l e s n o n - e l u s , l e s h o m m e s " (Dole 5 5 ) . L i k e D.H. L a w r e n c e , R o b e r t Dole s e e s c r u e l t y as an i n t e g r a l p a r t of the A m e r i c a n c h a r a c t e r : " L e l i e u t e n a n t G a l l e y d e v i n t un h e r o s a m e r i c a i n " (Dole 6 8 ) . L i k e S i m o n e de B e a u v o i r , the a u t h o r b e l i e v e s t h a t B l a c k s have a much g r e a t e r u n d e r s t a n d i n g of W h i t e s than W h i t e s do of t h e m s e l v e s : " S e l o n B a l d w i n , l a s o u r c e du p o u v o i r des N o i r s d o i t etre l e u r c o n n a i s s a n c e des B l a n c s , qui e s t s u p e r i e u r e a c e t t e que l e s B l a n c s ont d'eux memes" (Dole 111). Being i n c o r r i g i b l y A m e r i c a n p e o p l e are i n c a p a b l e of r e s o r t i n g capitalist, the to the one s y s t e m that m i g h t s a v e t h e m : s o c i a l i s m . In D o l e ' s w o r d s , " L e peuple a m e r i c a i n e s t v r a i m e n t m a l h e u r e u x , m a i s 1 ' i d e e de b l a m e le s y s t e m e s o c i o e c o n o m i q u e du p a y s p o u r ce m a l h e u r e s t i n c o n c e v a b l e " (Dole 101). More b l u n t l y , he w r i t e s " L ' e x p e r i e n c e a m e r i c a i n e s t un e c h e c " (Dole 128). C o n s e q u e n t l y , the author's "participation a l a l u t t e p o u r un Q u e b e c independent c o n s t i t u e un r e a c t i o n a l a m e n a c e d ' h o m o g e n e i s a t i o n a l ' a m e r i c a i n e de 340 n o t r e p e t i t e p l a n e t e " (Dole 120). Of l i t e r a r y c r i t i c s of A m e r i c a , Dole s o m e w h a t too s i m p l i s t i c a l l y c l a i m s t h a t " L e s a u t e u r s qui a n a l y s e l a mentalite a m e r i c a i n e se d i v i s e n t f a c i l e m e n t en deux g r o u p e s : c e u x d ' a v a n t l e XXe s i e c l e et ceux de XXe s i e c l e . Chez ceux du p r e m i e r g r o u p e , Toptimisme et Tadmiration a l'endroit du p e u p l e a m e r i c a i n sont p r e s q u e u n a n i m e s . Ceux du d e u x i e m e groupe, p a r c o n t r e , e x p r i m e n t a peu p r e s un c e r t a i n d e s e n c h a n t e m e n t (Dole 1 2 0 ) . " A b o v e a l l e l s e , Le Cauchemar americain 1 4 i s an i n t e r e s t i n g e x a m p l e of c o n s t r u c t e d i d e n t i t y . D e s p i t e the a u t h o r ' s a i l - A m e r i c a n o r i g i n s - a t the v e r y end of t h i s ch is one of passionately those de coeur, Dole r u e f u l l y a d m i t s t h a t he h i m s e l f fierce, warning his inward-looking readers puritans against-his he social has been situation- e m b a t t l e d s o c i a l i s t ; Q u e b e c o i s n a t i o n a l i s t ; f r a n c o p h o n e a u t h o r ; enemy of p o l i t i c a l c o r r e c t n e s s ; d i s b e l i e v e r in P e n t a g o n / W a l l S t r e e t myths- m a k e s h i m r a t h e r m o r e than j u s t a c o m r a d e - i n - a r m s of Le Monde's g l o b a l e c o n o m i s t s , Corhere della Sera's p o p u l a r c u l t u r e p u n d i t s , and Jacques B e r t i n - s t y l e Quebecois wanna-bes. Because his v i e w s coincide so e x a c t l y w i t h t h o s e of h i s n a t u r a l a l l i e s , h i s b r o a d s i d e s are of m o r e v a l u e t h a n t h o s e of Quebecois i n t e l l e c t u a l s cultural a mere insider. For French, a f r a i d of d r o w n i n g influence, Dole's testimony Italian, far and i n a v u l g a r s e a of U.S. i s as i d e o l o g i c a l l y v a l u a b l e as a n t i - Z i o n i s t p r o n o u n c e m e n t s f r o m Orthodox r a b b i s w o u l d be i n r a d i c a l A s w e s a w i n C h a p t e r T h r e e , the I t a l i a n c u l t u r a l a n a l y s t s of the 1 9 3 0 s w e r e f a r m o r e s y m p a t h e t i c t o w a r d s the United S t a t e s of A m e r i c a than w e r e A l e x i s de T o c q u e v i l l e and J . H e c t o r S t . J o h n de C r e v e c o u r t , the t w o b e s t - i n t e n t i o n e d F r e n c h l i t e r a r y t r a v e l l e r s of the 19th c e n t u r y . D o l e ' s g e n e r a l i z a t i o n i s f u r t h e r h u r t by i t s f a i l u r e to e x p l a i n the e x i s t e n c e of p o s t w a r F r e n c h A t l a n t i c i s t s , and by i t s de f a c t o e l i m i n a t i o n of E n g l i s h t r a v e l w r i t e r s , m o t h e r l a n d s c r i b e s w h o w e r e g e n e r a l l y k i n d e r to the r e v o l t e d " 1 3 c o l o n i e s " i n t h i s c e n t u r y than they w e r e in the l a s t . 1 4 341 P a l e s t i n i a n c i r c l e s . In both c a s e s , u n i v e r s a l l e g i t i m a c y i s b r o u g h t to r e g i o n a l c o n c e r n s v i a the t e s t i m o n y of h i g h - p r o f i l e " a p o s t a t e s " . Of c o u r s e , in the f i n a l d e c a d e s of the 2 0 t h c e n t u r y , an i n c r e a s i n g n u m b e r of E u r o p e a n i n t e l l e c t u a l s are t a k i n g U.S. h e g e m o n y more-or- l e s s f o r g r a n t e d . We have a l r e a d y s e e n how U m b e r t o Eco w r i t e s from the America's p e r s p e c t i v e of rise both Rome but the conquest from and t h a t of not Athens, seeing transmission of the in old " H e l l e n i s m " w h i c h he r e p r e s e n t s . I r o n i c a l l y , one of the m o s t b r i l l i a n t style i s not Arcand's an Old W o r l d m a s t e r but 1986 feature Roman f r o n t i e r Le Declin i n h e r i t o r s of t h i s a s s u m e d a New W o r l d u p s t a r t . de 1'Empire americain Denys i s s e t on a t h a t i n c l u d e s M o n t r e a l and G e o r g e v i l l e , Q u e b e c . Its d r a m a t i s p e r s o n a e c o n s i s t a l m o s t e x c l u s i v e l y of l i b i d i n a l l y - o b s e s s e d history p r o f e s s o r s w h o d e c i d e to s p e n d a w e e k e n d t o g e t h e r in the c o u n t r y . W h i l e m o s t of t h e i r c o n v e r s a t i o n i s d e v o t e d to g a s t r o n o m y and s e x , w h e n e v e r they do t u r n t h e i r t h o u g h t s t o w a r d s t h e i r m e t i e r , speak w i t h a b i t t e r s w e e t they r e s i g n a t i o n t h a t w o u l d not have s e e m e d out of p l a c e i n the age of J u l i a n the A p o s t a t e . Remy, for instance, believes that history is really a question n u m b e r s : " Q a , pa v e u t d i r e p a r e x e m p l e que l e s N o i r s finiront certainement americains n'arriveront of, sud-africains un j o u r p a r g a g n e r , a l o r s que l e s N o i r s n o r d j a m a i s a s ' e n s o r t i r . Ca v e u t d i r e a u s s i que l ' h i s t o i r e n ' e s t pas une s c i e n c e m o r a l e . Le bon d r o i t , l a c o m p a s s i o n , l a j u s t i c e s o n t des n o t i o n s e t r a n g e r e s a l ' h i s t o i r e " ( A r c a n d 1 1). A l t h o u g h h e r p r i o r i t i e s are s l i g h t l y d i f f e r e n t , Diane i s v e r y m u c h in a c c o r d w i t h R e m y : " V o y e z - v o u s on p o s s e d e p l u s de d o c u m e n t s s u r l e s E g y p t i e n s que s u r l e s N u b i e n s , beaucoup p l u s de d o c u m e n t s s u r l e s E s p a g n o l s que s u r 342 l e s M a y a s , et b i e n s u r beaucoup p l u s de d o c u m e n t s s u r l e s h o m m e s que sur les f e m m e s . Et d'ailleurs c'est une limite tres certaine de l ' h i s t o i r e . M a i s i l y a p e u t - e t r e un e l e m e n t p s y c h o l o g i q u e : c ' e s t qu'au f o n d on a i m e beaucoup m i e u x e n t e n d r e p a r l e r des v a i n q u e u r s que des v a i n c u s " ( A r c a n d 1 1 1). F o r D a n i e l l e , m e a n w h i l e , E u r o p e ' s c o l o n i z a t i o n of North America-a colonization from which she has directly b e n e f i t e d - " C ' e s t l a d e u x i e m e p l u s g r a n d e c a t a s t r o p h e de l ' h i s t o i r e d'humanite, vingtieme apres la peste siecle, c'est noire au m o y e n - a g e . C o m p a r e a c a , l e du b o n b o n ! " ( A r c a n d 138). P i e r r e agrees: " L ' h i s t o i r e de l ' h u m a n i t e , c ' e s t une h i s t o i r e d ' h o r r e u r " ( A r c a n d 139). F o r D o m i n i q u e , the s t i g m a t a of d e c l i n e are e v e r y w h e r e and u n a v o i d a b l e : "Les s i g n e s du d e c l i n de l ' e m p i r e sont p a r t o u t . La p o p u l a t i o n qui m e p r i s e s e s p r o p r e s i n s t i t u t i o n s . La b a i s s e du taux de n a t a l i t e . Le r e f u s des hommes de s e r v i r dans l'armee. incontrolable... Avec l'ecroulement La d e t t e nationale devenue du r e v e m a r x i s t e - l e n i n i s t e , on ne peut p l u s c i t e r aucune m o d e l e de s o c i e t e dont on p o u r r a i t dire: voila c o m m e n t nous a i m e r o n s v i v r e " ( A r c a n d 143). S t i l l , t h e r e are certain a d v a n t a g e s to b e i n g a l i v e i n s u c h an age: " L e d e c l i n d'une c i v i l i s a t i o n e s t a u s s i i n e v i t a b l e que le v i e i l l i s s e m e n t des i n d i v i d u s . A u m i e u x , on peut e s p e r e r r e t a r d e r un peu le p r o c e s s u s . . . R e m a r q u o n s que n o u s , i c i , nous a v o n s l a c h a n c e de v i v r e en b o r d u r e de l ' e m p i r e . L e s c h o c s s o n t beaucoup m o i n s v i o l e n t s . II f a u t d i r e que l a p e r i o d e a c t u e l l e peut etre t r e s a g r e a b l e a v i v r e p a r c e r t a i n s c o t e s " ( A r c a n d 173). D e c l i n e i s not the s a m e t h i n g as d e m i s e , h o w e v e r . T h u s , w h e n P i e r r e o p i n e s " M o i , j ' a i l ' i m p r e s s i o n qu'on s a u r a j a m a i s v r a i m e n t le fond de l ' h i s t o i r e " (Arcand 173), o p t i m i s m s t r u g g l e s w i t h f a t a l i s m . Under ordinary c i r c u m s t a n c e s , t h i n g s w o u l d be changed d r a m a t i c a l l y by the b a r b a r i a n s at the g a t e , by 343 the rude b r o o m f r o m the s t e p p e s t h a t s w e e p s the c u l t i v a t e d but effete dead w o o d of e s t a b l i s h e d c u l t u r e s i n t o the d u s t b i n of h i s t o r y . T h i s t i m e a r o u n d , h o w e v e r , the traditional outriders t a s k . T h e end r e s u l t a r e too weak to is a strange accomplish sort of their stasis, the s e e m i n g l y e n d l e s s p r o l o n g a t i o n of a fin d'epoch w a i t i n g p e r i o d w h i c h i n the p a s t w o u l d have l o n g s i n c e been t e r m i n a t e d by e n t r o p i c social f o r c e s . By a l l the l a w s of H e g e l , M a r x , S p e n g l e r , and T o y n b e e , the c i v i l i z a t i o n w e l i v e in s h o u l d have ended y e a r s ago, and yet i t has not. I n s t e a d of c h a n g i n g , i t m u t a t e s . What the f u t u r e h o l d s f o r t h i s o l d / n e w hybrid culture, this p o s t h i s t o r i c a l / a h i s t o r i c a l corporate c i v i l i z a t i o n , w i l l p r o b a b l y not be k n o w n u n t i l the next " m u t a t i o n " o c c u r s , s o m e t i m e d u r i n g the c o m i n g m i l l e n n i u m . 344 CONCLUSION The r e f r a i n f r o m one of G i l l e s V i g n e a u l t ' s m o s t p o p u l a r s o n g s r e a d s as f o l l o w s : " M o n p a y s ce n ' e s t pas un p a y s c ' e s t l'hiver/Mon j a r d i n ce n ' e s t pas un j a r d i n c ' e s t l a p l a i n e / M o n c h e m i n ce n ' e s t pas un chemin c'est (Vigneault l a n e i g e / M o n p a y s ce n ' e s t pas un p a y s c ' e s t 159). Although to outsiders these lines Thiver" might sound p l e a s a n t l y p a s t o r a l , to Quebec n a t i o n a l i s t s they are a r a l l y i n g c r y and the u n o f f i c i a l a n t h e m of the P a r t i Q u e b e c o i s . The g a r d e n s , winters, p l a i n s , and s n o w r e f e r r e d to r e s i d e e x c l u s i v e l y w i t h i n the f r o n t i e r s la belle province; they have n o t h i n g at a l l to do w i t h the v e r y of similar phenomena found in R u s s i a , S c a n d i n a v i a , the n o r t h e r n h a l f of the U n i t e d S t a t e s , or even E n g l i s h - s p e a k i n g Canada. T h o s e in the k n o w w i l l get the p o i n t ; as f o r t h o s e o u t s i d e the l o o p , t h e i r l a c k of u n d e r s t a n d i n g is w e l c o m e d , not r e s e n t e d . In o t h e r w o r d s , " M o n P a y s " i s the e x c l u s i v e p r o p e r t y of le quebecois in the s a m e w a y t h a t T h o m a s M o o r e ' s Irish Melodies of E r i n ' s n a t i o n a l p a t r i m o n y . surface effects peuple are p a r t In both c a s e s , o u t s i d e r s m i g h t e n j o y the of t h e s e p o e m s , but t h e y w i l l n e v e r f u l l y g r a s p the s e l f - a b s o r b e d s u b t e x t s w h i c h speak to one a u d i e n c e and one a u d i e n c e only. T h i s i s n a t i o n a l l i t e r a t u r e t h a t s t a y s n a t i o n a l l i t e r a t u r e ; i t does not r e a l l y have an i n t e r n a t i o n a l context. If s u c h w o r k s are in s o m e w a y s at l e a s t i m p l i c i t l y xenophobic, t h e y do at l e a s t o f f e r a l a s t l i n e of d e f e n s e i n the c u r r e n t struggle a g a i n s t c u l t u r a l g l o b a l i z a t i o n . Though M i c k e y Mouse and Rambo speak 345 to e v e r y T o m , D i c k , and s u c k e r , l e s P l o u f f e and F i n n M c C o o l do not. 1 T h e r e w i l l a l w a y s be some l o c a l t a s t e s w h i c h even the m o s t a s t u t e and merciless multinational w i l l be unable to s a t i s f y . U n f o r t u n a t e l y for p l u r a l i s m , however, these highly s p e c i a l i z e d hungers seem fated to o c c u p y an e v e r s m a l l e r p r o p o r t i o n of the c u l t u r a l pie. F r a n c e , I t a l y , and Quebec have r e s p o n d e d to t h i s challenge-a c h a l l e n g e w h i c h , f o r a l l p r a c t i c a l p u r p o s e s , m i g h t as w e l l be c a l l e d le defi to americain-in a variety s u m m a r i z e them of different w a y s . It S t a t e s at a pivotal the point in i t s history. potential In the t i m e w h e n the t h i n l y p o p u l a t e d of early century, during Nouvelle France w e r e f i r s t e s t a b l i s h e d , G a l l i c i n t e r e s t i n the latitudes time briefly. F r a n c e f i r s t b e c a m e a w a r e of the t r e m e n d o u s United i s now the 16th c o l o n i e s of of the New W o r l d w a s m i n i m a l . A s i d e f r o m i t s p r o v i d e the m a i n l a n d w i t h f u r s , the e c o n o m i c p o t e n t i a l la northern ability to of New F r a n c e w a s s e r i o u s l y u n d e r v a l u e d . What V e r s a i l l e s r e a l l y w a n t e d w a s a c c e s s to Indian and C a r i b b e a n s t o r e s of g o l d and s p i c e s , not b e a v e r p e l t s . Quebec w a s u l t i m a t e l y imperialist frost-bitten l o s t to E n g l a n d i n w h a t w a s , to E u r o p e a n s , l i t t l e m o r e than a m i n o r t h e a t r e of the S e v e n Y e a r s ' War. It w a s only a f t e r the l o s s of Quebec t h a t F r e n c h w r i t e r s r e a d e r s began to i n t e r e s t and themselves in t h e i r l o n g - d e s p i s e d arpents de neiges. J o u r n a l i s t i c h i s t o r i e s , s u c h as The Jesuit Relations b e c a m e p o p u l a r , as d i d , a l i t t l e l a t e r o n , t h o s e L e s P l o u f f e w e r e a p o p u l a r Q u e b e c o i s T V f a m i l y of the 1 9 5 0 s , a m e t a m o r p h o s i s t h a t f o l l o w e d t h e i r f i r s t a p p e a r a n c e in a novel by R o g e r L e m e l i n . G i l l e s C a r l e gave t h e m the w i d e s c r e e n t r e a t m e n t in 1 9 8 1 . A s f o r Finn M c C o o l , he i s the m o s t p a r o c h i a l of e p i c I r i s h h e r o e s , an u n g l a m o r o u s giant t o t a l l y l a c k i n g in the p r i m i t i v e a l l u r e of C u c h u l a i n n , Mdbh, and Conchobar. 1 346 C a t h o l i c - f l a v o u r e d f o r e s t f a n t a s i e s of Rene de C h a t e a u b r i a n d . By the early 19th century, when French a t t i t u d e s t o w a r d s the r e s t of the w o r l d w e r e s t a r t i n g to change and the n a t i o n s of the N e a r and F a r E a s t which until that i n a c c u r a t e but time morally had often been employed admirable political as historically models w i t h c h a s t i z e the s o c i a l and i n t e l l e c t u a l s h o r t c o m i n g s of Vancien which to regime- were r e - i n v e n t e d as a s o r t of O r i e n t a l i s t t h e m e p a r k , a p p r e c i a t i o n of the U n i t e d S t a t e s began in e a r n e s t . W h i l e n o s t a l g i a f o r the l o s t f o r e s t s of the New World w a s r e l a t i v e l y benign, interest i n the Thirteen C o l o n i e s w a s v e r y g r e a t . The U n i t e d S t a t e s of A m e r i c a , a f t e r a l l , m i g h t n e v e r have c o m e i n t o e x i s t e n c e i n i t s p r e s e n t f o r m i f F r e n c h n a v a l a s s i s t a n c e had not t u r n e d the m i l i t a r y t i d e in f a v o u r of the c o l o n i a l i n s u r r e c t i o n a r i e s . A f t e r 1 7 8 9 , A m e r i c a w a s s e e n as a f e l l o w r e p u b l i c , still a relative r a r i t y i n an age of a b s o l u t e m o n a r c h y . A l t h o u g h it p r e c e d e d t h e i r s , F r e n c h d e m o c r a t s g e n e r a l l y took p r i d e i n the s u c c e s s of the A m e r i c a n R e v o l u t i o n . In 1 8 3 2 , the young V i c t o r Hugo w r o t e in h i s d i a r y , a p r o p o s of the l e g i s l a t o r s of h i s day, " M e s s i e u r s , p a r l o n s un peu m o i n s de R o b e s p i e r r e et un peu p l u s de W a s h i n g t o n " ( C h o s e s vues T o m e 1 1 2 0 ) . In t h a t s a m e d e c a d e , A l e x i s de T o c q u e v i l l e p u b l i s h e d De Ja democratie en Amerique, a v o l u m e w h i c h i s s t i l l r e g a r d e d , e v e n by A m e r i c a n s , as the m o s t i n s i g h t f u l e v a l u a t i o n of the A m e r i c a n c h a r a c t e r e v e r c o m p i l e d . T h e c o n s t r u c t i o n of a s p e c i f i c a l l y F r e n c h " f a n t a s y " A m e r i c a w a s already w e l l advanced. N i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y G a l l i c v i e w s of the U n i t e d S t a t e s w e r e not a l l so c h a r i t a b l e , h o w e v e r . S h o r t l y a f t e r the b a t t l e of W a t e r l o o , S t e n d h a l worried that American economic power might soon dominate the d i s u n i t e d n a t i o n s of Europe. P r o t e c t e d by i t s u n i v e r s a l m i l i t i a s y s t e m - 347 a f o r m of s e l f - d e f e n c e w h i c h m o r e than made up f o r A m e r i c a ' s t h e n negligible intents army-and its and p u r p o s e s internal affairs. v a s t s p a c e s , the U n i t e d S t a t e s w a s to impervious Yankee w h a l e r s to European i n t e r v e n t i o n and c l i p p e r ships made in all its British a d m i r a l s f e a r f o r t h e i r c o n t i n u e d c o n t r o l of the s e v e n s e a s . A m e r i c a n i n d u s t r y , though s t i l l p r i m i t i v e , a l r e a d y s h o w e d s i g n s of s u r p a s s i n g the factories of Hamburg and Liverpool. Everything about America s u g g e s t e d the w a x i n g of p o w e r , j u s t as e v e r y t h i n g about Europe i m p l i e d i t s wane. There w a s a l s o , of course, a wide-spread fear of American v u l g a r i t y . Even A l e x i s de T o c q u e v i l l e , a p h i l o - A m e r i c a n i f e v e r t h e r e w a s one, had a l o t to say on t h i s s c o r e . A m e r i c a n l i t e r a t u r e and a r t of the early 19th counterparts. century Even were more decidedly worryingly, inferior the to engine their of European democratic g o v e r n m e n t p a r a d o x i c a l l y s e e m e d to l e a d to a c o n s e n s u a l t h i n k i n g t h a t ultimately unknown resulted in a c o n f o r m i t y in a b s o l u t i s t of opinion E u r o p e . In m a t t e r s of the that was entirely mind, it seemed, d e m o c r a c y l e d to s l a v e r y , not f r e e d o m . T h i s paradox c a u s e d d i s c o m f o r t all a c r o s s the political spectrum, affecting left- and right-wing w r i t e r s w i t h equal f o r c e . If A m e r i c a had s o m e t h i n g to t e a c h Europe i n t e r m s of e c o n o m i c s and p r a c t i c a l g o v e r n m e n t , the Old W o r l d had b e s t be c a r e f u l that it d i d not b e c o m e i n f e c t e d with American artistic m e d i o c r i t y and u n i f o r m i t y of o p i n i o n . F o r F r e n c h i n t e l l e c t u a l s , A m e r i c a w a s not only a m o v e a b l e f e a s t , but a m o v e a b l e f a m i n e as w e l l . F o r t h e s e r e a s o n s , the d i s t i n c t i o n b e t w e e n 19th and 2 0 t h c e n t u r y French l i t e r a r y travellers in A m e r i c a i s n o w h e r e n e a r as s h a r p as R o b e r t Dole w o u l d have us b e l i e v e . P r o and con f o r c e s s t r a d d l e d not 348 only c e n t u r i e s , but Twentieth-century individual writers as w e l l . G e o r g e s D u h a m e T s complaints, for example, were predicated almost e x c l u s i v e l y on n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y c u l t u r a l s t a n d a r d s . A l t h o u g h - d e s p i t e h e r l e f t - w i n g l e a n i n g s - s h e s h a r e d s o m e of D u h a m e T s v i e w s , S i m o n e de Beauvoir's material liking for the United S t a t e s owed a great d e a l to the w a n t and s o c i a l p a r a l y s i s she had r e c e n t l y e x p e r i e n c e d i n P a r i s a f t e r l i v i n g through f o u r y e a r s of Nazi o c c u p a t i o n . R a y m o n d A r o n , m e a n w h i l e , p r a i s e d the U n i t e d S t a t e s p r i m a r i l y because it w a s an i r r e p l a c e a b l e b u l w a r k a g a i n s t B o l s h e v i s m in the p o s t - 1 9 4 5 w o r l d . In m o r e r e c e n t d e c a d e s , one m i g h t also take into account both F r e n c h w o r l d - w e a r i n e s s - t h e b e l i e f t h a t the Old W o r l d i s e x p e r i e n c i n g at l e a s t a H e g e l i a n , i f not a S p e n g l e r i a n , end of t i m e - a n d F r e n c h c o r p o r a t i s m , the d e s i r e to a m a l g a m a t e the n a t i o n i n t o a u n i f i e d Europe w h i c h w o u l d once a g a i n be able to p l a y a m a j o r r o l e on the w o r l d s t a g e . T e m p o r a r y n e e d s ; 2 situational h o p e s and f e a r s ; t i m e l e s s v a l u e s : a l l t h e s e t h i n g s played a part in d e t e r m i n i n g French attitudes towards the have United States. In t h i s s t u d y , w e have c o n s i d e r e d t h e s e s h i f t s in e m p h a s i s f r o m a v e r y l i m i t e d n u m b e r of p e r s p e c t i v e s , the m o s t i m p o r t a n t of w h i c h w e r e F r e n c h t r a v e l w r i t i n g f r o m the l a t e 18th c e n t u r y to the p r e s e n t d a y , and the e v o l u t i o n of F r e n c h c r i m e f i c t i o n d u r i n g m o r e - o r - l e s s the s a m e F r e n c h i n t e r e s t i n the doomed c i v i l i z a t i o n s of M e s o a m e r i c a has been a c o n s t a n t in t h i s c e n t u r y , f r o m A n t o n i n A r t a u d on. A t t i m e s , i t s e e m s as i f the M a y a s , I n c a s , and A z t e c s f u n c t i o n as a s o r t of phoenix i m a g e f o r G a l l i c t h i n k e r s , a p r o m i s e of r e s u r r e c t i o n as w e l l as d e a t h , a r e m i n d e r t h a t u p s t a r t A m e r i c a i s b u i l t on v e r y o l d bones. T h i s s e n t i m e n t i s p a r t i c u l a r l y s t r o n g i n J.M.G. Le C l e z i o ' s i n t e r e s t i n g book, Le reve Mexicain (1988). The a u t h o r w r i t e s , " L ' u n i v e r s e s t f a i t de m o r t " (Le C l e z i o 9 2 ) , and " T o r i g i n e de l a c i v i l i s a t i o n e s t dans l a b a r b a r i e " (Le C l e z i o 112). S u c h s e n t i m e n t s are f a r m o r e r e l e v a n t to the age of J e a n B a u d r i l l a r d than they are to the b e t w e e n - w a r heyday of A n d r e Gide. 2 349 p e r i o d . T h i s l a t t e r c a t e g o r y w a s meant to s h o w the i n t e r r e l a t e d n e s s of F r a n c o - A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e , the w a y s in w h i c h the t w o s o c i e t i e s have s e q u e n t i a l l y played off, irritated, and i m i t a t e d each other. It also p r o v i d e d o p p o r t u n i t i e s to b r a n c h off i n t o s u c h r e l a t e d f i e l d s as l i t e r a r y a t t i t u d e s and the t r a n s - c u l t u r a l nature of f i l m p r o d u c t i o n . W h i l e o c c a s i o n a l r e f e r e n c e s w e r e made to the e v o l u t i o n of comic strip and the popular song, all such commentary the h a s been d e l i b e r a t e l y r e l e g a t e d to the s t a t u s of i l l u s t r a t i v e a s i d e s . If one w e r e to e x a m i n e all the c o n n e c t i o n s b e t w e e n F r e n c h and A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e , a l l the w a y s in w h i c h F r e n c h i n t e l l e c t u a l s have r e c o n s t r u c t e d a fantasy A m e r i c a f o r t h e i r own s p e c i f i c purposes, t h i s book w o u l d , of n e c e s s i t y , be s e v e r a l t i m e s l o n g e r than i t i s . Though t h o r o u g h n e s s i s a p r i m e a c a d e m i c v i r t u e , so i s b r e v i t y . In o t h e r w o r d s , I have t r i e d to c o n t a i n my a r g u m e n t s w i t h i n m a n a g e a b l e l i m i t s . Unlike their French contemporaries, Italians of the l a t e 18th c e n t u r y w e r e not p r e d i s p o s e d to t a k e a n o s t a l g i c v i e w of the U n i t e d States because, s t r i c t l y s p e a k i n g , I t a l y did not t h e n e x i s t . L i k e the G e r m a n y of t h o s e y e a r s , I t a l i a w a s not a n a t i o n but a g e o g r a p h i c a l expression. Cobbled together from a c o l l e c t i o n of p e t t y kingdoms, f o r e i g n p r o t e c t o r a t e s , papal f i e f d o m s , and f a d e d c i t y s t a t e s , the n e w c o u n t r y w a s not f u l l y u n i f i e d u n t i l w e l l i n t o the n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y . In 1 8 4 8 , G i u s e p p e M a z z i n i c o m p l a i n e d : ' " L ' l t a l i a del N o r d , l e t r e I t a l i e , le c i n q u e I t a l i e sono b e s t e m m i e di s o f i s t i ' " ( B e l a r d e l l i 2 4 ) . Even a f t e r the R i s o r g i m e n t o w a s r e a l i z e d , r e g i o n a l d i f f e r e n c e s w e r e so e x t r e m e they a s s u m e d a l m o s t i n t e r n a t i o n a l d i m e n s i o n s . L o m b a r d y d i f f e r e d Sicily about as m u c h as S w i t z e r l a n d d i f f e r e d from from Crete. Tuscan I t a l i a n , a l t h o u g h the m o s t l i t e r a r y of the n a t i o n ' s many d i a l e c t s , w a s 350 s p o k e n by only a m i n o r i t y of the p o p u l a t i o n . N o r t h / S o u t h d i s c r e p a n c i e s in w e a l t h w e r e e n o r m o u s . In I t a l y , t h e r e w a s no J u n k e r - s t y l e ruling c l a s s w i t h the i r o n d i s c i p l i n e needed to i m p o s e i t s w i l l on r e c a l c i t r a n t p r o v i n c e s . T u s c a n y t r i e d , but i t s s u c c e s s w a s a l w a y s i n c o m p l e t e . E a r l y a t t e m p t s at s o c i a l e n g i n e e r i n g " a l m o d e l l o i n g l e s e del self-government" were replaced, after (Bellardelli 1 8 6 0 , w i t h an at t i m e s t y r a n n i c a l state. S i c i l y was always turbulent, while today 24) centralized La L e g a del Nord t h r e a t e n s to s e c e d e f r o m the I t a l i a n u n i o n , a f a c t w h i c h , s o m e w h a t s u r p r i s i n g l y , has not r e s u l t e d in "un contrario" ( R u s s o 2 4 ) in the S o u t h , b u t , r a t h e r , "con responsibility persino separatismo di e di dignita razzismo" blasphemies," alia campagna (Russo regional 24). differences Far in incivile from Italy [un] uguale e senso di denigrazione being are as di e "sophistical empirically d e m o n s t r a b l e as the l a w s of t h e r m o d y n a m i c s . T h e y are as m u c h f a c t s of l i f e as i l l n e s s o r death. For Italians, therefore, awareness of America was always i n t i m a t e l y c o n n e c t e d to the n a t i o n ' s e n d l e s s s e a r c h f o r s o l u t i o n s to i t s s e e m i n g l y i n s o l u b l e p r o b l e m s . I n t e r e s t in C h r i s t o p h e r C o l u m b u s , f o r e x a m p l e , b e c a m e pronounced only a f t e r I t a l i a n s had begun to m i g r a t e to the U n i t e d S t a t e s in l a r g e n u m b e r s . F o r new i m m i g r a n t s u n s u r e of t h e i r E n g l i s h and t h e i r new s o c i a l s t a t u s , the k n o w l e d g e t h a t one of their c o u n t r y m e n had " d i s c o v e r e d " the New W o r l d w a s i m m e n s e l y r e a s s u r i n g . Queen I s a b e l l a ' s f a v o u r i t e p i l o t s e r v e d as an i d e a l c o u n t e r w e i g h t to the Black Hand m o b s t e r s with whom Italo-Americans were so often i d e n t i f i e d . He a l s o r e p r e s e n t e d the a m o r p h o u s I t a l i a n g e n i u s - e m b o d i e d i n D a n t e , G u g l i e l m o M a r c o n i , G a l i l e o , the m a s t e r s of the R e n a i s s a n c e , 351 e t c . - w h i c h had c o n t r i b u t e d so m u c h to w o r l d c u l t u r e w i t h o u t i n any w a y s t r e n g t h e n i n g t h e i r h o m e l a n d ' s s e n s e of n a t i o n a l i d e n t i t y . T h u s , f o r many I t a l i a n s , t h e i r n a t i o n a l l e g a c y w a s not so much a found t r e a s u r e as i t w a s an i n h e r i t e d curse. In the e a r l y d e c a d e s of the t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y , the s e a r c h f o r A m e r i c a n - s t y l e a n s w e r s g r e w s t r o n g e r . If, as the v e n e r a b l e d i p l o m a t M. de N o r p o i s c o n t e n d e d i n A la Recherche du temps perdu, the m o t t o the 19th c e n t u r y I t a l i a n n a t i o n a l i s t s had been '"L'ltalia fara da se'" of (Le C o t e de G u e r m a n t e s 6 9 0 ) , t h i s m i l i t a n t s e l f - r e l i a n c e w a s not s h a r e d by their descendants. Thus, e c o n o m i s t s sought to s o l v e the nation's e n d e m i c p o v e r t y by i m p o s i n g Henry F o r d ' s f a c t o r y s y s t e m on Italy's w o r k i n g and m a n a g e r i a l c l a s s e s . L e f t - w i n g i n t e l l e c t u a l s , m e a n w h i l e , opposed the b r a s h energy of the n e w A m e r i c a n l i t e r a t u r e to the s t u d i e d d e a d n e s s of n e o c l a s s i c a l and f r a n k l y f a s c i s t texts. Because Italy's u n i q u e n e s s w a s m o r e - o r - l e s s g u a r a n t e e d by the u n i q u e n e s s of problems-the nation had, a f t e r a l l , already survived its countless c e n t u r i e s of f o r e i g n o c c u p a t i o n - t h e r e w a s n e v e r any r e a l f e a r that Italy might become hopelessly A m e r i c a n i z e d . A l l that Antonio G r a m s c i and o t h e r p r o g r e s s i v e t h i n k e r s r e a l l y w a n t e d w a s f o r I t a l y to b e c o m e a l i t t l e more organized, a l i t t l e l e s s h e d o n i s t i c , a l i t t l e more modern, p u r i t a n , and P r o t e s t a n t . A f t e r t h a t i t w o u l d f i n a l l y be f r e e to f o l l o w its own guiding star. B e c a u s e of i t s unique s o c i a l d y s f u n c t i o n s , I t a l i a n c r i m e fiction, as w e s a w in C h a p t e r T w o , d i f f e r s m a r k e d l y f r o m both F r e n c h and A m e r i c a n d e t e c t i v e s t o r i e s . D e s p i t e t h e i r a p p r o a c h e s to the a r c h e t y p a l f i g u r e s of l a w m a n somewhat polars different 352 and o u t l a w , A m e r i c a and F r a n c e are both s t r o n g , c e n t r a l i z e d s t a t e s i n w h i c h the f e d e r a l g o v e r n m e n t , even w h e n d e t e s t e d , i s a f u n d a m e n t a l , inescapable fact of life. In I t a l y , on t h e other hand, t h i s oddly c o m f o r t i n g i l l u s i o n has n e v e r r e a l l y t a k e n r o o t . B e h i n d the p a r l i a m e n t t h a t s i t s in Rome are the c a b a l s t h a t r e a l l y run informal things, a l l i a n c e s made up of h i g h - r a n k i n g M a f i o s i , c l e r i c s , p o l i c e i n s p e c t o r s , a r m y g e n e r a l s , c a p i t a l i s t s , m e d i a m a g n a t e s , CIA a g e n t s , j u d g e s , and p o l i t i c i a n s f r o m a l l p o l i t i c a l p a r t i e s w i t h the p o s s i b l e e x c e p t i o n of the C o m m u n i s t . I t a l y has been c o n q u e r e d so many t i m e s t h a t even d e m o c r a t i c a l l y e l e c t e d p a r l i a m e n t s are w i d e l y p e r c e i v e d as j u s t the l a t e s t o c c u p y i n g p o w e r . It has been c a l c u l a t e d t h a t i f every I t a l i a n p a i d ]QO% of h i s o r h e r t a x e s , the s u m s u r r e n d e r e d w o u l d e x c e e d the n a t i o n ' s g r o s s n a t i o n a l p r o d u c t . What t h i s m e a n s in p r a c t i c e i s t h a t e v e r y I t a l i a n , in o r d e r to s u r v i v e , m u s t to a g r e a t e r o r l e s s e r d e g r e e , b r e a k the l a w . T h i s has r e s u l t e d in a s o c i e t y w h e r e the religious p o l a r i t i e s of good and e v i l , at l e a s t i n s o f a r as t h e y a p p e r t a i n to the a c q u i s i t i o n of p r o p e r t y , on the d e e p e s t e m o t i o n a l l e v e l do not really a p p l y . In I t a l i a n c r i m e f i c t i o n , the l a w i s g e n e r a l l y so n e b u l o u s it t h r e a t e n s to d i s a p p e a r a l t o g e t h e r , w h i l e the o u t l a w i s a l m o s t a l w a y s s y m p a t h e t i c , the v i c t i m of f o r c e s o u t s i d e h i s or her c o n t r o l . No w o n d e r A m e r i c a n - s t y l e p u r i t a n i s m has n e v e r made i n r o a d s in I t a l y . 3 L i k e t h e i r F r e n c h c o e v a l s , young I t a l i a n s c u r r e n t l y t a k e A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e m u c h more m a t t e r - o f - f a c t l y than t h e i r f a t h e r s and It c o u l d be argued t h a t p u r i t a n i s m has n e v e r t a k e n r o o t i n F r a n c e e i t h e r , but c i r c u m s t a n c e s are s l i g h t l y d i f f e r e n t . T h e l i n g e r i n g a f t e r e f f e c t s of J a n s e n i s t c o u p l e d t o t h e m o d e l of J e s u i t p r a c t i c a l i t y , h a s r e s u l t e d i n a s o r t of " P r o t e s t a n t i s m , " a m e r c a n t i l e m i n d s e t w h e r e m o s t C a t h o l i c s think and a c t l i k e Huguenots. 3 t h e r e the theology, de f a c t o veritable 353 grandfathers militantly ever did. While p o s t w a r Italy never manifested a n t i - A m e r i c a n sentiments that were common intellectual c o i n i n s o m e q u a r t e r s of p o s t w a r F r a n c e - a c u r i o u s s t a t e of r e a l l y , s i n c e the Italians had f a r m o r e r e a s o n to t a k e the affairs, umbrages- A m e r i c a c e a s e d to be the o v e r r i d i n g o b s e s s i o n i t had once been. In the 1 9 4 0 s , ' 5 0 s , and ' 6 0 s , the I t a l i a n c i n e m a w a s e c o n o m i c a l l y h e a l t h y and f a r m o r e c r e a t i v e than i t s H o l l y w o o d c o u n t e r p a r t . W h a t ' s m o r e , n e w m e a n s of industrial production began to s p r e a d w e a l t h among the p e o p l e , p a r t i c u l a r l y in the n o r t h e r n and c e n t r a l r e g i o n s . I t a l i a n c l o t h e s , cars, planes, films-even typewriters-set new standards of i n t e r n a t i o n a l s t y l e . C l e a r l y , the n a t i o n w a s no l o n g e r the s o c i o c u l t u r a l b a c k w a t e r i t had once been. On the o t h e r hand, t h i s p r o g r e s s had been a c h i e v e d w i t h o u t , m a d d e n i n g l y , a m e l i o r a t i n g any of the p r o b l e m s w h i c h had p l a g u e d the p e n i n s u l a f o r c e n t u r i e s . R e g i o n a l d i s h a r m o n y e c h o e d f r o m M i l a n to P a l e r m o ; p a r t i a l p r o s p e r i t y did n o t h i n g to s h r i n k the s i z e of the n a t i o n ' s b l a c k m a r k e t , a c l a n d e s t i n e e c o n o m y w h i c h m i g h t well be l a r g e r than i t s o f f i c i a l c o u n t e r p a r t . I t a l y , in o t h e r w o r d s , w a s s t i l l Italy. F o r c o n t e m p o r a r y I t a l i a n s , the A m e r i c a n e n t e r t a i n m e n t industry w o u l d s e e m to be the one a r e a of New W o r l d e n t e r p r i s e w h i c h i s s t i l l f o l l o w e d w i t h o b s e s s i v e i n t e r e s t . The a d v e n t u r e s and p e c c a d i l l o e s of Madonna and Woody A l l e n , of J u l i a R o b e r t s and R o b e r t De N i r o , are s e e m i n g l y i r r e s i s t i b l e to e v e r y o n e f r o m c u l t u r a l A s w e s a w i n C h a p t e r T h r e e , the U.S. S t a t e D e p a r t m e n t and the C I A i n t e r f e r e d m o r e v i g o r o u s l y i n I t a l i a n p o l i t i c s than they did in the i n t e r n a l a f f a i r s of any o t h e r W e s t e r n nation. 4 354 journalists to Commissario Ambrosio, from cafe idlers to Nanni M o r e t t i . F r e q u e n t l y , i n q u i r i e s i n t o the l i v e s of t h e s e U.S. c e l e b r i t i e s are p u r s u e d w i t h a l a c k of d e c o r u m w h i c h w o u l d not be t o l e r a t e d in N o r t h A m e r i c a n n e w s p a p e r s . In the s a m e v e i n , Roman and M i l a n e s e n e w s p a p e r regularly s p e c u l a t e about the m o t i v e s b e h i n d A m e r i c a ' s b i - c o a s t a l "rapper war" Anything w i t h a candour that is utterly touching on A m e r i c a n h y p o c r i s y u n k n o w n i n the U . S . or s e x u a l r e p r e s s i o n 5 is d i s c u s s e d w i t h p a r t i c u l a r r e l i s h . D e s p i t e G r a m s c i ' s a r g u m e n t s to the c o n t r a r y , in t o d a y ' s I t a l y the p o s i t i v e u s e s of p u r i t a n i s m are b e l i e v e d to be f e w and f a r b e t w e e n . A s we s a w in C h a p t e r Four, Italian intellectual leaders a s s u m e an a l m o s t A t h e n i a n p e r s o n a w h e n g e n t l y a d m o n i s h i n g now their s t r o n g e r , m o r e v i t a l , but l e s s c u l t i v a t e d A m e r i c a n " c h i l d r e n " . T h i s m a n t l e i s w o r n l i g h t l y , w i t h o u t a r r o g a n c e , as b e f i t s a c u l t u r e t h a t w a s once c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s w i t h t h a t of the E t r u s c a n s . A n a t t r a c t i v e note of s e l f - m o c k e r y u n d e r s c o r e s m o s t of t h e s e e s s a y s - p a r t i c u l a r l y the ones w r i t t e n by U m b e r t o Eco. O c c a s i o n a l l y , of c o u r s e , I t a l i a n a r t i s t s s t i l l do s e e k i n s p i r a t i o n f r o m t h e i r w o r k in A m e r i c a n f i l m s . When F r a n c e s c o R o s i w a s a d a p t i n g one of P r i m o L e v i ' s H o l o c a u s t m e m o i r s f o r the s c r e e n , f o r i n s t a n c e , he t h o u g h t '"Chariot soldato i n c e s s e n t l y of C h a r l e y C h a p l i n ' s s i l e n t classic n e l l a g u e r r a ' 1 5 - 18, in cui c ' e r a l a d r a m m a t i c i t a di t u t t i i f i l m di g u e r r a , ma l a l e v i t a , l a l e g g e r e z z a , l ' i r o n i a , i l g r o t t e s c o di C h a p l i n f i n i v a p e r e s s e r e una c r i t i c a p r e z i o s a e c o s t a n t e a q u a n t o accadevo interno a l u i ' " (Fusco 41). For Italians, therefore, A m e r i c a i s s t i l l a s o u r c e of i n s p i r a t i o n , but f o r now i t i s j u s t one of many. 5 A b o u t t h e i r o w n " s c a n d a l s " , h o w e v e r , they are c o n s i d e r a b l y m o r e coy. 355 Q u e b e c o i s m e d i t a t i o n s on the n a t u r e of l a t e 2 0 t h c e n t u r y e m p i r e are, conversely, generally fraught w i t h s l i g h t l y dated f i n - d e - s i e c l e a n g s t . N a t i o n a l i s t - m i n d e d M o n t r e a l - b a s e d i n t e l l e c t u a l s have m o r e i n c o m m o n w i t h Giuseppe M a z z i n i than they do w i t h sleight-of-hand p o s t m o d e r n i s t s of the I t a l o C a l v i n o v a r i e t y . T h a n k s no doubt to the t e m p o r a l p a r a l y s i s t h a t t y p i c a l l y a c c o m p a n i e s the f o r c i b l e i n c l u s i o n of a conquered polity into a m u l t i - n a t i o n a l e m p i r e , la belle province's p o l i t i c a l m i n d s e t o w e s more to 1 7 6 3 and 1 8 3 7 than i t does to 1997. 6 Its a p p r e h e n s i o n of N o r t h A m e r i c a e n c o m p a s s e s L o w e r C a n a d a , U p p e r C a n a d a , and the U n i t e d S t a t e s . So f a r as the c o n t i n e n t ' s n o r t h e r n h a l f i s concerned, it i s more or l e s s evenly divided b e t w e e n t w o founding "nations": Catholic, French-speaking Quebec and P r o t e s t a n t , anglophone O n t a r i o . S u c h l a t e r d e v e l o p m e n t s as C a n a d a ' s W e s t e r n and A t l a n t i c p r o v i n c e s are e i t h e r c o n f l a t e d w i t h the p r o v i n c e ' s i n c r e a s i n g l y m e g a l i t h i c p e r c e p t i o n of O n t a r i o or e l s e i g n o r e d a l t o g e t h e r . When s p e a k i n g of les Anglais et les autres, Quebec n a t i o n a l i s t s are r e f e r r i n g to e i t h e r A n g l o Q u e b e c e r s , E n g l i s h C a n a d i a n s , o r c i t i z e n s of the U n i t e d S t a t e s . discourse, these words f u l f i l l Anglo-Saxons a function 7 In c o n t e m p o r a r y Q u e b e c o i s a n a l o g o u s to t h a t of les in 2 0 t h c e n t u r y F r e n c h c o m m e n t a r y . T h e y are l a c e d w i t h From Rwanda to Russia, from Bosnia to Afghanistan, from India to Belgium, this is a process w h i c h is c u r r e n t l y being repeated a l l over the w o r l d . At a t i m e when international c o n f l i c t s number n i l , internecine feuds are counted by the dozen. Every single separated member of the former Soviet bloc, for instance, seems to be resuming independent political l i f e from the exact point where it left off decades or centuries ago. If the lessons of the late 20th century have taught us anything, it is surely that empires act primarily as freezing agents, entombing their constituent parts like insects in amber until such time as a political thaw permits them to resume their interrupted journey. Of n e c e s s i t y , in years past, these w i d e - r a n g i n g terms also embraced the United Kingdom, although, in the wake of the B r i t i s h Empire's effective dissolution, the spectre of rule by a foreign crown has long since receded from the forefront of n a t i o n a l i s t discontents. 6 7 356 the b i t t e r n e s s t h a t i n e v i t a b l y f o l l o w s i n the w a k e of nine c e n t u r i e s ' w o r t h of o v e r t and c o v e r t language groups. Sadly, it warfare between two mutually seems most unlikely that they jealous will be " d e f a n g e d " i n the i m m e d i a t e f u t u r e . A s w e s a w i n C h a p t e r F o u r , the s o - c a l l e d R e s t of Canada p l a y s a very minor role in the Quebecois f i c t i o n a l u n i v e r s e . On t h e rare o c c a s i o n s w h e n they do a p p e a r , the p r i n c i p a l d r a m a t u r g i c a l f u n c t i o n of the country's a n g l o p h o n e p r o v i n c e s i s to r e m i n d French Canadian v i e w e r s / r e a d e r s of the l o s s of a u t h e n t i c i t y t h a t a u t o m a t i c a l l y e n s u e s w h e n one i s c u t o f f f r o m o n e ' s s o c i a l and e t h n i c r o o t s . T h e o v e r a l l e f f e c t i s a k i n to t h a t of e x a m i n g a s e v e n t e e n t h - c e n t u r y s u r v e y map of of c e n t r a l A f r i c a . In both c a s e s , m o s t of the t e r r a i n w o u l d have to be marked " T e r r a Incognita". America, on t h e o t h e r hand, i s s l i g h t l y more present and variegated. F l o r i d a , being a f a v o u r i t e Quebecois v a c a t i o n spot, appears f a i r l y o f t e n , even i f n a t i v e F l o r i d i a n s do not. F r e n c h C a n a d i a n w r i t e r s and f i l m m a k e r s a r e a l s o s t a r t i n g to e v i n c e t h e s a m e half-horrified, h a l f - e c s t a t i c f a s c i n a t i o n w i t h S o u t h e r n C a l i f o r n i a t h a t F r e n c h and I t a l i a n i n t e l l e c t u a l s have been r e f l e c t i n g f o r the p a s t - q u a r t e r c e n t u r y . New E n g l a n d , on the o t h e r h a n d , i s the l o c a t i o n of t h e d a r k , S a t a n i c mills which claimed so many unemployed habitants in the late n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y ; i t i s a l s o the a n c e s t r a l home of one of la province's belle very f e w U.S.-born l o c a l h e r o e s , J a c k K e r o u a c . F o r o b v i o u s r e a s o n s , F r a n c e i s s o m e w h a t m o r e of a c o n c r e t e p r e s e n c e in the Quebecois i m a g i n a t i o n t h a n i s any m e m b e r of t h e A n g l o - S a x o n " c o n f e d e r a t i o n . " D e s p i t e t h e f e e l i n g s of b e t r a y a l and a b a n d o n m e n t w h i c h the B o u r b o n w i t h d r a w a l of t h e 1 7 6 0 s inevitably 357 e n g e n d e r e d , on a deep e m o t i o n a l l e v e l Quebec s t i l l clearly wants m a k e a f a v o u r a b l e i m p r e s s i o n on i t s d e l i n q u e n t " p a r e n t " . to Obviously, t h i s i s w h a t l i e s behind so much of the n e v e r - e n d i n g d e b a t e o v e r w h i c h country s p e a k s the true, the original F r e n c h . By the same token, o v e r s e a s s u c c e s s in F r a n c e i s r e g a r d e d w i t h a s o m e w h a t w a r y eye. W h i l e n a t i o n a l p r i d e i s v i s i b l y t a k e n in the a c c l a i m w h i c h F e l i x L e c l e r c and R o b e r t C h a r l e b o i s r e c e i v e d in le vieux pays ou Rimabaud est mort (to quote the t i t l e of J e a n - P i e r r e L e f e b v r e ' s m e m o r a b l e m o v i e about a habitant on p i l g r i m a g e in the land of h i s a n c e s t o r s ) the dubbing of ; ' o w s / - l a c e d f i l m s i n t o " s t a n d a r d " F r e n c h s t i l l raises nationalist hackles. On the o t h e r hand, when t a l k i n g about F r a n c e and the F r e n c h , s o m e Q u e b e c o i s c o m m e n t a t o r s , d e s p i t e t h e i r unhappy h i s t o r i c a l h e r i t a g e , are u n c o m m o n l y a b l e , u n b i a s e d and a s t u t e . P a r i s - b a s e d La Presse c o r r e s p o n d e n t L o u i s - B e r t r a n d R o b i t a i l l e i s a p r i m e e x a m p l e of t h i s c o s m o p o l i t a n type. In Et Dieu crea les Francais, a c o l l e c t i o n of h i s a r t i c l e s p u b l i s h e d in 1 9 9 5 , the a u t h o r pronounced f a i r l y and k n o w i n g l y on e v e r y t h i n g f r o m E u r o - D i s n e y to P h i l i p p e D j i a n ' s a w k w a r d p o s i t i o n i n the s o m e t i m e s s t u f f y world of P a r i s i a n l e t t e r s . On the s u b j e c t of A n g l o - F r e n c h r e l a t i o n s , he s h r e w d l y w r o t e , "11 n ' e s t pas i m p o s s i b l e que l e s F r a n g a i s et l e s A n g l a i s - e t e r n e l l e m e n t et p a r f o i s mechamment r i v a u x - a i e n t en c o m m u n ce qu'on p o u r r a i t a p p e l e r b a n a l e m e n t un g r o s c o m p l e x e de s u p e r i o r i t e , qui se r e v e l e de m o i n s en m o i n s f o n d e a m e s u r e que s ' e l o i g n e n t l e s s o u v e n i r s g l o r i e u x du G r a n d S i e c l e ou de l'Empire" (Robitaille). One can see how Robitaille's Quebecois background, w i t h i t s _/owa//anglais r i v a l r i e s - a p e r f e c t w o r k i n g model of the " 9 0 0 Y e a r s W a r " w r i t s m a l l - i d e a l l y f i t t e d h i m to make s u c h an 358 o b s e r v a t i o n . The a u t h o r s e e m s to a p p r o a c h h i s a n c e s t r a l h o m e l a n d w i t h n e i t h e r f e a r nor f a v o u r : " L e f a i t d ' e t r e Q u e b e c o i s n ' e s t p l u s ni un a t o u t ni un o b s t a c l e . . . e t l e s Q u e b e c o i s qui debarquent aujourd'hui sont s i m p l e m e n t c o n f r o n t e s , c o m m e t o u s l e s a u t r e s , venus de p r o v i n c e ou de S u i s s e , a un s y s t e m e c o m m e r c i a l qui a e t e n d u son e m p i r e s u r l a t o t a l i t e des v a r i e t e s . . . . " ( R o b i t a i l l e 2 7 9 - 2 8 0 ) . Fond as he i s of h i s n e w l o c a l e , the a u t h o r in no w a y t h i n k s of i t as " h o m e " : " . . . l a F r a n c e n ' e s t pas s e u l e m e n t d i f f e r e n t e du Quebec ou de l ' A m e r i q u e du N o r d - c ' e s t une a u t r e p l a n e t e . Q u i , dans l e s d o m a i n e s l e s p l u s i m p o r t a n t s de la vie quotidienne...fonctionne sur les c r i t e r e s completement etrange. N o t e z que s o u v e n t l e s F r a n c a i s pensent que c ' e s t l ' A m e r i q u e qui n ' e s t pas n o r m a l e " ( R o b i t a i l l e 6 0 - 6 1 ) . W h i l e he m i g h t not w r i t e as e l e g a n t l y about f o r e i g n l a n d s as do h i s n e a r - c o n t e m p o r a r i e s U m b e r t o Eco and J e a n B a u d r i l l a r d , L o u i s - B e r t r a n d R o b i t a i l l e i s at l e a s t as c l e a r eyed as t h e y . O f f h a n d , i t i s hard to t h i n k of a l i t e r a r y traveller who s e e s t h i n g s l e s s " f a n t a s t i c a l l y " than he. N e v e r t h e l e s s , d e s p i t e R o b i t a i l l e ' s s p l e n d i d e x a m p l e , i t m u s t be admitted that filmmaking the is s t i l l overwhelming bulk of Quebecois f i c t i o n intensely introspective, its creators intent and on e x p l o r i n g l o c a l t h e m e s in l o c a l w a y s . F a r m o r e than the 19th c e n t u r y I t a l i a n n a t i o n a l i s t s who f i r s t f r a m e d the i d e a , they are t r u l y i n t e n t on doing t h i n g s t h e m s e l v e s . In many w a y s , " f a n t a s y A m e r i c a " i s b e c o m i n g a t h i n g of the p a s t . A s the w o r l d g r o w s e v e r m o r e c o l o n i z e d by H o l l y w o o d , T i n P a n A l l e y , and W a l l S t r e e t , the d i f f e r e n c e b e t w e e n S e l f and " O t h e r " b e c o m e s i n c r e a s i n g l y tenuous. Marlon Brando h i g h l i g h t e d t h i s f a c t in a r e c e n t i n t e r v i e w he gave to Studio m a g a z i n e : " J ' a d o r e l a F r a n c e p a r c e que pour 359 m o i c ' e t a i t un b a s t i o n de l i b e r t e a p r e s l a g u e r r e - T o u t c e l a a change m a i n t e n a n t . C ' e s t a m u s a n t p a r c e que l e s F r a n c a i s ont l o n g t e m p s t a q u i n e l e s A m e r i c a i n s en d i s a n t que nous v i v i o n s d a n s une s o c i e t e de t r u e s e t de g a d g e t s . A u j o u r d ' h u i , c e s o n t l e s F r a n c a i s qui v i v e n t de t r u e s et de gadgets...." ( D ' Y v o i r e 104). How t r u e . Of w h a t use i s the p a r a d i g m of a " f a n t a s y A m e r i c a " i n a Europe w h e r e antique the t a l l e s t architecture s k y s c r a p e r in France emerges f r o m the of M o n t p a r n a s s e , w h e r e young p e o p l e prefer M i c h a e l J a c k s o n to E d i t h P i a f , w h e r e h o u s i n g e s t a t e s s u r r o u n d e v e r y m a j o r c i t y , w h e r e A m e r i c a n T V d o m i n a t e s e v e r y European n e t w o r k and H o l l y w o o d m e g a - p r o d u c t i o n s have f i r s t d i b s on e v e r y European s c r e e n , where Asia's rising economic giants are i n c r e a s i n g l y s e e n to be r e p l a c i n g the U.S. c o n g l o m e r a t e s of y o r e , w h e r e even the s i z e of c a r s no l o n g e r s e r v e s to m e a n i n g f u l l y d i f f e r e n t i a t e Old? the New World f r o m the It i s a d e r a c i n a t e d , c o s m o p o l i t a n w o r l d w h e r e i n an E n g l i s h - language P o l i s h w r i t e r l i k e J e r z y K o s i n s k i can p l a y a p r a c t i c a l j o k e (in the f o r m of a naughty c a m e o - a - c l e f i n Blind Date) on a f r a n c o p h o n e poet s u c h a s " P r e s i d e n t L e o p o l d S e d a r [Senghor] of S e n e g a l , w h o a l s o h a p p e n e d t o be K o s i n s k i ' s t r a n s l a t o r in that c o u n t r y " (Sloan 177). T h a n k s to s u p e r s o n i c j e t t r a v e l , t h e f a x m a c h i n e , and t h e I n t e r n e t , l i t e r a r y t r a v e l l e r s c a n move a b r o a d a l m o s t i n s t a n t l y . Of w h a t u s e a r e s u c h o l d - f a s h i o n e d c o m m o d i t i e s as n a t i o n a l i d e n t i t y i n an a h i s t o r i c a l , t r a n s - n a t i o n a l u n i v e r s e ? Why not g i v e up t h e f i g h t i m m e d i a t e l y and a c c e p t the f a c t t h a t no c o u n t r y can r e a l i s t i c a l l y e x p e c t to be m o r e than a wholly o w n e d s u b s i d i a r y of D i s n e y / T i m e / W a r n e r / M i t s u b i s h i ? A n d how can a p l a c e o r r e g i o n 360 be c o n s i d e r e d r e a l o r f a n t a s t i c a l w h e n 99% of the t h i n g s a r e v i r t u a l r a t h e r than a c t u a l ? T h e r e are no e a s y a n s w e r s to t h e s e q u e s t i o n s . A s E r i c H o b s b a w n w r o t e i n the l a s t p a r a g r a p h of h i s h i s t o r y of the " s h o r t ' " twentieth- c e n t u r y , " W e do not k n o w w h e r e w e are g o i n g " ( H o b s b a w m 5 8 5 ) . The C o l d W a r i s o v e r , l e a v i n g only one m i l i t a r y s u p e r - p o w e r on the f i e l d , but a host of economic competitors. Politically, the world is f r a c t u r i n g , even as h u m a n i t y ' s t r u e c e n t r e s of p o w e r d e v o l v e f r o m n a t i o n s t a t e s to m u l t i n a t i o n a l corporations. A r m e d c o n f l i c t i s now w a g e d a l m o s t e x c l u s i v e l y b e t w e e n r i v a l c i t i e s , t r i b e s and p r o v i n c e s , p r i m a r i l y b e c a u s e the very c o n c e p t of c o u n t r y has begun to seem irrelevant on a p l a n e t where clan loyalties are burgeoning everywhere. N e v e r t h e l e s s , as w e s a w e a r l i e r , c e r t a i n f o r m s of s e n t i m e n t and h u m o u r r e m a i n i n d e s t r u c t i b l y n a t i o n a l , so they w o u l d a p p e a r to p r o v i d e m o s t of the b e d r o c k f o r de f a c t o l o c a l r e s i s t a n c e to the interlinked trends " m a r r i a g e " , it of must globalization be a d m i t t e d , and xenophobia s i n c e the curiously (a combination bizarre strongly i m p l i e s an unholy union b e t w e e n H e r d e r ' s c o n c e p t of a n c e s t r a l c u l t u r e and Finkielkraut's belief in universal Enlightenment truths; the c o n t r a d i c t i o n s of the m o d e r n w o r l d have r e s u l t e d in s o m e v e r y s t r a n g e b e d f e l l o w s ) . T h e r e a r e , h o w e v e r , m o r e s u b t l e s i g n s of international n o n - c o m p l i a n c e . In a 1997 a r t i c l e e n t i t l e d " D i x ans en c h i f f r e s " , Studio m a g a z i n e u n d e r l i n e d s o m e of t h e s e d i f f e r e n c e s : " C i n q c o n t r e c i n q l e b o x - o f f i c e d e p u i s 1 9 8 7 , r e n v o i e dos a dos f i l m s f r a n c a i s et a m e r i c a i n s . M a i s , a y r e g a r d e r de p l u s p r e s , l e s g o u t s s ' a c c o r d e n t pas v r a i m e n t du p u b l i c francais ne 361 a v e c ceux du p u b l i c a m e r i c a i n . Dans ce Top 10 F r a n c e , on ne que deux films presents dans l e T o p retrouve 10 E t a t s - U n i s s u r l a meme periode...." ( 1 1 9 ) . In o t h e r w o r d s , even A m e r i c a n i z e d F r e n c h v i e w e r s prefer to c o n s t r u c t an i m a g i n a r y A m e r i c a t h a t i s r a d i c a l l y d i f f e r e n t f r o m the one a c c e p t e d by t h e i r U.S. c o n t e m p o r a r i e s . What's more, it is entirely p o s s i b l e t h a t U.S. c u l t u r a l i n f l u e n c e has a l r e a d y p e a k e d , and w i l l soon be c h a l l e n g e d on an i n c r e a s i n g n u m b e r of f r o n t s f o r c u l t u r a l When a l l t h e s e f a c t o r s are borne i n m i n d , i t seems supremacy. overwhelmingly l i k e l y t h a t the A m e r i c a b e l i e v e d in by the a v e r a g e F r e n c h m a n , Italian, and Q u e b e c o i s w i l l r e m a i n " f a n t a s t i c a l " , no m a t t e r how much a c c u r a t e d a t a i s o b t a i n e d , and no m a t t e r how m u c h the t r a d i t i o n a l paradigms m i g h t change. It i s , a f t e r a l l , h i g h l y l i k e l y t h a t m o s t A m e r i c a n s l i v e i n a F a n t a s y A m e r i c a , j u s t as m o s t F r e n c h m e n o c c u p y a F a n t a s y F r a n c e , m o s t I t a l i a n s a F a n t a s y I t a l y , and m o s t Q u e b e c o i s a F a n t a s y France. 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Reynaud T r a n s l a t e d bu Mark Harris B a c k e d by the A m e r i c a n Museum of the Moving Image (AMMI), New Vork f i l m p r o f e s s o r S c o t t B u k a t m a n f i n a l l y found the c o u r a g e to m o u n t a Jerry Lewis retrospective included not only the (November 1 1 - December 9, 1988) films about b r o a d c a s t s , u n s e e n and u n s e e a b l e s e e m e d the perfect troubling cultural opportunity to and by J e r r y , s i n c e the attempt but 1940s to also which his and ' 5 0 s . resolve TV This one of the e n i g m a s of our t i m e s . E v e r s i n c e I m o v e d to the U n i t e d S t a t e s , t h e r e ' s a l w a y s been someone to ask s m i r k i n g l y , " W h y do the F r e n c h l o v e J e r r y L e w i s ? " I t h e r e f o r e i n v e r t e d asked a c r o s s - s e c t i o n of viewers the q u e s t i o n , and and n o n - v i e w e r s , "What makes A m e r i c a n s t h i n k t h a t the F r e n c h do l o v e J e r r y L e w i s ? " The a n s w e r s ran f r o m gags to p a r a n o i a , w i t h n e r v o u s a l l u s i o n s p a i d to the "shameful s e c r e t s " of the A m e r i c a n p s y c h e . " T h e F r e n c h m u s t l o v e i m p o t e n t men. Or e l s e t h e y ' r e a t t r a c t e d by h i s s e n s e of r h y t h m , h i s p h y s i c a l i t y . " (Filmmaker, "The French are crazy about Jerry female) Lewis because B a r d o t ' s c a t w a t c h e s h i s f i l m s at b r e a k f a s t . " (Conceptual " B e c a u s e they l o v e Nana M o u s k o u r i . " (Archivist, artist, male) Brigitte male) 385 " O n t e l e v i s i o n one n i g h t , t h e r e was this comic who did Jerry L e w i s i m i t a t i o n s , s a y i n g 'In F r a n c e , I am a god.' T h a t ' s the f i r s t t i m e I e v e r h e a r d t h a t . " (Viewer, female) " I n A m e r i c a , you g r o w up k n o w i n g L e w i s , but w h y ? It's an e n i g m a . " (Spectator, "It's that the French love male) b e c a u s e he does t h e s e c o m p l e t e l y loopy t h i n g s . T h e F r e n c h have the s a m e n u t t y s e n s e of humour." (Projectionist, "It's Jerry b e c a u s e he r e p r e s e n t s t h e l i t t l e f e l l o w female) i n a l l of u s , t h e f e l l o w w h o s t r u g g l e s to s u r v i v e . H i s f i l m s are a l l about n i c e g u y s , not b a s t a r d s . " (Aging groupie, female) " F o r m e , h e ' s a l w a y s been t h e K i n g of C o m e d y . He does these s t r a n g e t h i n g s , e v e r y o n e i s s h o c k e d , but w h e n you look more really c l o s e l y you r e a l i z e t h a t h e ' s the one w h o ' s n o r m a l . " (Museum guard, male) " N o A m e r i c a n o v e r the age of 14 c a n s t a n d a J e r r y L e w i s m o v i e . When I w a s i n P a r i s , e v e r y o n e I m e t h a t e d h i s g u t s . " (Film student, male) "I w a s r a i s e d by a f a t h e r w h o f o r b a d e us to w a t c h J e r r y L e w i s . Vears l a t e r I b r o k e up w i t h a p a l w h o w a n t e d to s p e n d L a b o u r Day w e e k e n d w a t c h i n g the J e r r y L e w i s T e l e t h o n . " (Anthropology student, female) "He's anti-culture, intellectuals, ugly he p i c k s on e a s y targets (professors, people). His comedy i s a p e r v e r s i o n of genuine s l a p s t i c k h u m o u r ( C h a p l i n , the Marx B r o t h e r s ) . Why do the F r e n c h l o v e h i m ? I t ' s one of t h o s e F r e n c h e c c e n t r i c i t i e s . " (Children's author, male) 386 "In F r a n c e , a l l J e r r y L e w i s m o v i e s are dubbed. T h e y d o n ' t r e s p o n d to the s a m e f i l m s t h a t w e see here. P e r h a p s t h e y ' r e f u n n i e r . " (Viewer, male) "I r e a d i n a m a g a z i n e t h a t F r e n c h m e n p r e f e r t h e i r a c t o r s to be f a i r l y ugly, w i t h crooked mouths (Gabin, Belmondo, Depardieu). Perhaps they l i k e J e r r y L e w i s ' s f a c i a l e l a s t i c i t y . " (Translator, "It's male) one of t h o s e t h i n g s t h a t make us q u e s t i o n the m e n t a l of E u r o p e a n s . T h e n a t i o n that invented brioche s e n s i b l e o p i n i o n of J e r r y L e w i s . " (Video artist, health should hold a more male) " A m e r i c a n s are c o n v i n c e d t h a t the F r e n c h l o v e of J e r r y L e w i s i s nothing but a m e a n s of a f f i r m i n g t h e i r cultural superiority, m o c k i n g t h a t w h i c h i s m o s t s t u p i d in A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e . " and of (Spectator, male) "It a l l o w s us not to t a k e the F r e n c h too s e r i o u s l y . T h e y have S a r t r e , e x i s t e n t i a l i s m , and a l l t h a t , BUT they a l s o l o v e J e r r y L e w i s and C l i n t E a s t w o o d . T h a t b r i n g s t h e m d o w n to e a r t h . " (Organizer retrospective, of the male) "Doubtless it has something to do with American sexual r e p r e s s i o n . We b e l i e v e the F r e n c h to be more l i b e r a t e d in t h a t a r e a , and t h i s p e r m i t s t h e m to see in J e r r y w h a t w e r e f u s e to s e e in o u r s e l v e s . But i t ' s a l s o a j o k e : 'You see w h a t dumb a s s h o l e s the F r e n c h a r e ? T h e y t h i n k t h e y ' r e so c u l t i v a t e d , and yet they l i k e J e r r y L e w i s ! ' T h i s i s m o r e of a r e f l e c t i o n of w h a t w e t h i n k about the F r e n c h than of w h a t w e t h i n k about J e r r y L e w i s . " (Publicist "American tourists for a symphony orchestra, male) are c o n v i n c e d t h a t E u r o p e a n s d e t e s t them. J e r r y L e w i s i s a k i n d of e x a g g e r a t e d v e r s i o n of the A m e r i c a n t o u r i s t , 387 he i s g e n u i n e l y p e r c e i v e d in t h i s m a n n e r by E u r o p e a n s , o r at l e a s t t h i s i s the w a y w e f e a r he i s p e r c e i v e d . " (Radio producer, female) " D u r i n g the 1 9 5 0 s , L e w i s t o y e d w i t h s o m e t h i n g t h a t A m e r i c a n s w e r e not ready to r e c o g n i z e in t h e m s e l v e s . They did not u n d e r s t a n d why the F r e n c h l o v e d J e r r y L e w i s , t h i s s y m b o l of t h e i r w e a k n e s s , of their i m m a t u r i t y . " (Film prof, male) "I Lewis. don't find it p a r t i c u l a r l y He's our onscreen alter s t r a n g e t h a t the F r e n c h l o v e J e r r y ego, and he manifests certain c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s w h i c h w e h e s i t a t e to a c k n o w l e d g e in o u r s e l v e s . " (Video artist, female) " Y e s , I f i n d i t r i d i c u l o u s t h a t the F r e n c h l o v e J e r r y L e w i s , but t h a t i s n ' t n e c e s s a r i l y a c r i t i c i s m . In an e x a g g e r a t e d f a s h i o n , he c r e a t e s p a i n f u l , e m b a r r a s s i n g s i t u a t i o n s , w h i c h he h a m m e r s i n h a r d e r and h a r d e r , to the p o i n t w h e r e a u d i e n c e s m u s t f i n a l l y i d e n t i f y w i t h t h e m . " (Bookseller, female) "In the U n i t e d S t a t e s , i t i s the c h i l d r e n , not the a d u l t s , w h o l i k e J e r r y L e w i s . In F r a n c e , he m u s t s e e m e x o t i c , and I i m a g i n e t h a t sentimentality in h i s f i l m s a p p e a r s l e s s s e l f - e v i d e n t and the mortifying t h a n i t does here. T h a n k s to t h e i r c i n e m a t i c c u l t u r e , the F r e n c h s e e L e w i s as the l e g i t i m a t e d e s c e n d a n t of K e a t o n and C h a p l i n . In the U.S., c o n v e r s e l y , T V has made L e w i s a n a c h r o n i s t i c . " (Film critic, male) " L e w i s and Frank T a s h l i n r e p r e s e n t the s u r v i v a l of s l a p s t i c k , of p h y s i c a l c o m e d y , w h i c h i s a l s o a European t r a d i t i o n . T h e r e are great s i m i l a r i t i e s b e t w e e n J e r r y and J a c q u e s T a t i . " (Film prof, male) "His programs unique manner and f i l m s bien." (Writer, male) [The of o p e n i n g up a s c e n e i n h i s Ladies' television Man] i n f l u e n c e d G o d a r d i n Tout va 388 "Lewis e m p l o y s e l e m e n t s of popular culture commercials and c a r t o o n s , w h i c h are not borrowed from r e c o g n i z e d as s u c h in A m e r i c a . If, f o r e x a m p l e , one f i n d s L e w i s gags in G o d a r d ' s m o v i e s , i t ' s because they constitute a sort of critique of c a p i t a l i s m , of the d e p a r t m e n t s t o r e . " (Film prof, female) " I n i t i a l l y you have a hard t i m e a p p r e c i a t i n g J e r r y L e w i s . A t f i r s t you m i g h t s a y h e ' s OK but s t r i c t l y f o r k i d s , l i k e P e e Wee H e r m a n . W h a t ' s m o r e , he p l a y s the l i t t l e boy h i m s e l f . It's only a f t e r w e b e c o m e f a m i l i a r w i t h his work that we s t a r t to u n d e r s t a n d h i s a r t . A s f o r m y s e l f , I l e a r n e d a l o t f r o m w a t c h i n g L e w i s i n Cinderf ella: I could u n d e r s t a n d b e t t e r w h a t w a s happening on the s c r e e n , g r a s p the L e w i s t e c h n i q u e s w h i c h had e s c a p e d me w h e n I w a s younger. He c o m e s f r o m a showbiz tradition t h a t ' s v e r y c l o s e to m u s i c . He has a v e r y m u s i c a l s e n s e of i m p r o v i s a t i o n w h i c h w i l l brook no c o n s t r a i n t s ; i f he can pump a l i t t l e m o r e m a g i c i n t o the i n s p i r a t i o n of the m o m e n t , n o t h i n g on e a r t h will s t o p h i m . I've done a f a i r a m o u n t of T V , and o f t e n w o r k e d with S a m m y D a v i s , J r . , to w h o m he w a s v e r y c l o s e . He and S a m m y w e r e i n t e r e s t e d i n e v e r y t h i n g , they w a n t e d to t r y everything. They'd hire people f o r a g i g , then t e l l t h e m w h a t to do. T h e i r i d e a s w e r e a l w a y s the b e s t . To w o r k w i t h t h e m w a s a r e a l A m e r i c a n e d u c a t i o n . We w e r e too r e a d y to do t h i n g s the u s u a l w a y , w h i c h c o s t us p l e n t y . Why do the F r e n c h l o v e J e r r y L e w i s ? Beyond the c o n v e n t i o n s , you can s e e in h i s work all these nuances w h i c h transcend language, all these w o n d e r f u l l i t t l e t h i n g s . . . " (Musician, from 1951 till 1963} male, member of Count Basie's orchestra 389 Appendix Two: P i t y f o r John Wayne By B o r i s Vian T r a n s l a t e d by Mark Harris The t i m e has come to ask o u r s e l v e s i f c e r t a i n s t a r s don't d e s e r v e s t a t u e s ; i n any e v e n t , I w o u l d l i k e to see one r a i s e d to J o h n W a y n e , the " J o a n of A r c " of H o l l y w o o d , t h a t e x p i a t o r y v i c t i m of trans-Atlantic " B i s h o p C a u c h o n s " , a b i t t e r hero p r e d e s t i n e d to i g n o m i n i o u s d e a t h by a s p h y x i a t i o n i n the h o l d s of d i s e m b o w e l l e d s h i p s s p i t t e d on p o i n t e d r o c k s at the b o t t o m of the sea... Here are t w o f i l m s : Reap the Wild Wind and The Wake of the Witch-the s e c o n d b e i n g b e t t e r t h a n the f i r s t by v i r t u e of i t s but-alas!-in black-and-white. Here a r e t w o films Red script (there must be t h o u s a n d s of o t h e r s ) w h e r e J o h n W a y n e , p a i n f u l l y s q u e e z e d f o r v a r i o u s r e a s o n s i n t o an u n s a f e d i v i n g s u i t , s u c c u m b s to r u p t u r e d a i r hoses s e v e n t y f e e t b e l o w s e a l e v e l . In The Wild Wind, i t m u s t be a d m i t t e d , h i s role is somewhat equivocal; h e ' s a n i c e guy but a b i t of a b o u n d e r , so you k n o w h e ' s going to die in a c c o r d a n c e w i t h the m o r a l i m p e r a t i v e s of T i n s e l T o w n . In The beginning to Wake, on the o t h e r hand, one r o o t s f o r h i m e n d , but he d i e s a n y w a y . It's very from suspicious. Let's investigate further. Bad t h i n g s a l w a y s happen to J o h n Wayne. F r o m the m o m e n t he a p p e a r s o n s c r e e n , w i t h t h a t t h i n - l i p p e d gob of h i s and t h o s e d o c k e r s i z e d d e l t o i d s , y o u r blood runs c o l d as you s a y , "It isn't p o s s i b l e , he's 390 not g o i n g to make i t . " One hopes a l i t t l e , a g a i n s t a l l the o d d s , but make i t he d o e s n ' t . T h i s i s r e a l l y , r e a l l y bad.... A b s o l u t e l y a n y t h i n g can happen to E r r o l F l y n n : E r r o l F l y n n always wriggle out of it. If he w e r e to play hayerling, the will suicide w o u l d be b o t c h e d s u r e as s h o o t i n g , and i f MGM a s s i g n e d h i m the p a r t of the Immortal qualified French M a i d - f o r which he's every as t h a t h o r s e of a B e r g m a n - h e w o u l d s q u a d r o n of the King's musketeers while bit as physically be s w e p t strolling to the up by a torture c h a m b e r . B u t J o h n W a y n e ? In the s a m e r o l e , J o h n W a y n e w o u l d be burned at the s t a k e at D o m r e m y in f r o n t of e v e r y b o d y , d u r i n g the f i r s t r e e l , on the charge of " b u t t e r y " . Or e l s e he w o u l d s t u m b l e i n t o the m o a t at O r l e a n s , h i s d i v i n g s u i t r i d d l e d w i t h c r o s s b o w b o l t s . He w o u l d be d e a d , s t r a n g l e d by an o c t o p u s in h i s b a t h , s c a l p e d by h i s b a r b e r , o r p o i s o n e d by h i s 1 1 m o n t h old son... One t h i n g i s c e r t a i n : J o h n Wayne i s doomed. And f r o m here on out i t s e e m s i m p o s s i b l e to i m a g i n e a s c e n a r i o from w h i c h J o h n Wayne c o u l d e v e r e m e r g e u n s c a t h e d ; " t h e y " will a l w a y s get h i m . It d o e s n ' t m a t t e r i f J o h n W a y n e ' s i n t e n t i o n s are good or bad. R e p l a c e B i n g C r o s b y w i t h J o h n Wayne in Going My Way, and y o u ' l l f i n d the f a t h e r of one of h i s f l o c k , a n o t o r i o u s c o m m u n i s t , c u t t i n g down w i t h a burst from his t y p e w r i t e r . him If J o h n Wayne p l a y e d N a p o l e o n , the b r i d g e at A r c o l e w o u l d c r u m b l e beneath h i s f e e t . T h e m o s t t e r r i b l e t h i n g of a l l i s t h a t " t h e y " don't amount to v e r y m u c h in the t r a g i c d e s t i n y of J o h n Wayne. In r e a l i t y , " t h e y " c a n ' t s a v e h i m . I'm sure that a gut-bustingly funny s c r i p t , c o n s i g n e d to J o h n W a y n e , w o u l d by m e a n s of l e p r o u s , h u m i d , and a l t o g e t h e r s u s p e c t a u t o a l t e r a t i o n , transform i t s e l f into a sad, sordid, brutal story where John 391 W a y n e - i m m a c u l a t e a p o s t l e , c h a s t e , p u r e , i n n o c e n t and s u b l i m e - w o u l d die in s p i t e of e v e r y t h i n g . Does s u c h a t h i n g as the e v i l eye e x i s t , t h e n , in c i n e m a ? J o h n Wayne has the e v i l b u l l s e y e . 392 Appendix Three: Hypocrisy American Style By Luc Moulet Translated bu Mark Harris If I l i k e E.T., i t i s b e c a u s e S t e v e n S p i e l b e r g - w h o , at f i r s t g l a n c e , a p p e a r s to be s i t u a t i n g h i m s e l f w i t h i n the t r a d i t i o n cinema-simultaneously, almost surreptitiously, of supernatural o f f e r s us a r a r e and m e t i c u l o u s g l i m p s e of o r d i n a r y A m e r i c a n l i f e w i t h the a i d of a f a m i l y t h a t s e e m s a v e r a g e in e v e r y r e s p e c t , c l o s e r to F r e d e r i c k W i s e m a n o r Raymond Depardon than to Issac Asimov or Philip K. D i c k . a n t i c i p a t e s j u d g i n g the f i l m on the b a s i s of i t s r i c h n e s s of One invention, i m a g i n a t i o n and play. And t h e n , as a bonus, w i t h o u t p a y i n g a d i m e e x t r a , one i s p r o v i d e d w i t h an i n f i n i t e l y more p r e c i o u s s l i c e of l i f e w h i c h one c a n n o t even c r i t i c i z e , s i m p l y b e c a u s e one w a s n ' t e x p e c t i n g i t . One i s caught short, d i s a r m e d ; one is left with the feeling of d i s c o v e r e d s o m e t h i n g , of b e i n g o n e s e l f the f i l m ' s a u t h o r o r and of a f i r s t c l a s s and-disinterest having inventor- n e o r e a l i s t f i l m to boot! One had e x p e c t e d one t h i n g , i n r o b o t i c s h e l p s h e r e - o n e got s o m e t h i n g t e n times b e t t e r . E.T. i s n o t h i n g but a red h e r r i n g o r c l u e . A m e r i c a n h y p o c r i s y i s marvellous. E.T. i s not n e c e s s a r i l y the i d e a l e x a m p l e : an A m e r i c a n who l i v e s this cinematic intriguing reality on a d a i l y basis might than w o u l d a Frenchman. It's well also far from Spielberg anticipated this reading from a distant observer. find it less certain that 393 A f i l m s u c h as F r i t z L a n g ' s Beyond a Reasonable r e s p e c t , much purer: we believe that w e ' r e Doubt is, in t h i s watching an argument a g a i n s t c a p i t a l p u n i s h m e n t , and t h e n , at the v e r y end, w e f i n d out t h a t i t ' s the o p p o s i t e , or, at the very l e a s t , s o m e t h i n g e l s e a g a i n . T h e A m e r i c a n s are s p e c i a l i s t s in t h i s A s e a r l y as 1 8 5 1 , Moby Dick activity. initially presented i t s e l f as a f o r b i d d i n g t e c h n i c a l a c c o u n t of the p r o f e s s i o n of f i s h i n g as p r a c t i c e d in v a r i o u s m a r i t i m e c o u n t r i e s - a l o u s y c r i t i q u e and a dead w e i g h t in t e r m s of s a l e s . B u t t h i s h y p o c r i t i c a l a n c h o r a g e in the m o s t p h y s i c a l form of o b j e c t i v i t y architecture. l a i d the f o u n d a t i o n for a refined metaphysical In s i m i l a r f a s h i o n , in C h a n d l e r ' s Lady in the Lake a n d D a s h i e l l H a m m e t t ' s tough n e i g h b o u r h o o d s , the i n v e s t i g a t i o n ' s goal i s not p r i m a r i l y broad canvas to r e v e a l the k i l l e r ' s i d e n t i t y , of America, a portrait b u t , r a t h e r , to p a i n t a composed of the various p e r s o n a l i t i e s s t a n d i n g behind the doors upon w h i c h Spade and M a r l o w e are o b l i g e d to knock. Here i t i s a q u e s t i o n of i n s i d i o u s c h a n g e s ( i n v i s i b l e for sure) a l o n g the d o m i n a n t l i n e of i n t e r e s t . More a g g r e s s i v e , e a s i e r t o o , i s the switch i n g e n r e d u r i n g the c o u r s e of the f i l m : w i t h Madam ( D e M i l l e ) , History is Made at Night ( B o r z a g e ) , and Made for Satan Each Other ( C r o m w e l l ) , w e move f r o m pure indoor c o m e d y - m a t i n e e and s o m e t i m e s vaudeville-to the resulting least (at disaster film in the first with aerial two examples) r e d o u b l i n g of i m p a c t , due in l a r g e p a r t or m a r i t i m e in an options, unexpected to the e l e m e n t of surprise. D o u b t l e s s i t ' s here t h a t we f i n d a s o m e w h a t dubious a e s t h e t i c , c r e a t e d by p r o d u c e r s who, believing the initial comedy to be t o o s h a m e l e s s l y added an e n t i r e l y new i n g r e d i e n t to the f o r m u l a . slight, 394 In H o w a r d H a w k s ' s t w i n f l i c k s , Sergeant Prefer Blondes, York and Gentlemen w e p a r t i c i p a t e i n an even m o r e p e r v e r s e d o u b l i n g up. T h e s e t w o f i l m s t r i p s h a v e , at the s a m e t i m e , an e n t i r e l y c o n v e n t i o n a l meaning, plus (a little like pentimento in painting) a critical s i g n i f i c a n c e that is totally contradictory. I recently saw Scorsese's Color of Money, featuring two s u p e r s t a r s who w e r e paid a b u n d l e , P a u l N e w m a n and T o m C r u i s e , t h e i r n a m e s o c c u p y i n g the g r e a t e r p a r t of the p o s t e r . Okay, so t h e s e s t a r s , p a r t i c u l a r l y at the b e g i n n i n g of the p i c t u r e , do not s t a n d out f r o m the r e s t of the c a s t : the e d i t i n g does not p r i v i l e g e t h e m . A t f i r s t w e s e e the s u m t o t a l of s i t u a t i o n s and a c t o r s , m o s t of w h o m are l i t t l e - k n o w n . We are l e f t w i t h the f e e l i n g t h a t w e are t a k i n g p a r t in a n e w s c a s t , w h i c h i n c r e a s e s our b e l i e f in the r e a l i t y of w h a t w e are s e e i n g . A n d the contrary fictional weight which these two sacred cows carry is s e e m i n g l y r u b b e d out by t h e i r d i s c r e e t i n t r u s i o n i n t o an a p p a r e n t l y n o n - f i c t i o n a l u n i v e r s e . T h a t ' s the s a m e t r i c k e m p l o y e d by J o h n F o r d in a n u m b e r of f i l m s (The Long Voyage Home), Raoul W a l s h (A Lion in Streets, Dark Command), the a n d , in g e n e r a l , by W a r n e r B r o t h e r s S t u d i o s d u r i n g t h e i r heyday. An a s t o n i s h i n g double p l a y : the p u b l i c goes to the f i l m s b e c a u s e of t h e i r s t a r s ; i t f i n d s t h e m , but o n l y w i t h difficulty. T h u s i t p a r t i c i p a t e s m o r e d i r e c t l y i n the f i l m . A n d the s t a r s g a i n a s u p p l e m e n t a r y a d v a n t a g e . In C i m i n o ' s Heaven's Gate, not o n l y do w e have a h a r d t i m e p i c k i n g out the s t a r s , p a r t i c u l a r l y d u r i n g the final b a t t l e , b u t - e v e n more a c u t e l y - w e don't c l e a r l y comprehend w h a t is going on o r w h a t the f i l m ' s deeper m e a n i n g m i g h t b e - a s s u m i n g t h e r e i s one. 395 One c o u l d s a y m u c h the s a m e about Two-Lane Blacktop H e l l m a n ) o r - o n c e a g a i n w e r e t u r n to H a w k s - T r / e Big (Monte Sleep, whose i n c o m p r e h e n s i b l e s t o r y l i n e w a s w r i t t e n i n p a r t by W i l l i a m F a u l k n e r . T h i s i s the s a m e F a u l k n e r w h o , d u r i n g the c o u r s e of h i s long c a r e e r as n o v e l i s t , n e v e r d e s i s t e d f r o m s e t t i n g t r a p s in h i s t e x t s so t h a t his r e a d e r s w o u l d have a hard t i m e f i g u r i n g out w h a t w a s g o i n g o n , at a time w h e n e v e r y o n e e l s e w a s d o i n g the c o n t r a r y . T h e m o s t e x a m p l e of t h i s i s the c o r n c o b rape in Sanctuary. famous To be s u r e one has u n d e r s t o o d , i t i s n e c e s s a r y to read o v e r the l i n e s in q u e s t i o n s e v e r a l t i m e s ( s o m e t h i n g w h i c h w a s not a l l o w e d in c i n e m a , at l e a s t not u n t i l the m i r a c l e of v i d e o c a s s e t t e s ) . T h i s t e c h n i q u e can p e r h a p s be e x p l a i n e d by the need to e s c a p e f r o m the c e n s o r ' s t h u n d e r b o l t s ; but one f i n d s i t a g a i n in e a r l i e r n o v e l s s u c h a s The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, w h i c h d i d not run the same risk. One can see h e r e , in a l l t h e s e h y p o c r i t i c a l t e c h n i q u e s , the m a r k of a p u r i t a n c i v i l i z a t i o n . P u r i t a n i s m c r e a t e d a s y s t e m so r i g i d sexually, aesthetically, economically: scriptural codes, Prohibition, Hollywood, etc.) that it passages, must (morally, diverse inevitably t r a n s g r e s s e d a g a i n s t , and t h i s t r a n s g r e s s i o n , of n e c e s s i t y , m u s t be be s u b t e r r a n e a n . P r o t e s t a n t s found t h i s to be the c u l t m o s t a d a p t a b l e to a r t i s t i c m a t t e r s . M o r e o v e r , m o s t s c r e e n w r i t e r s w i l l t e l l you t h a t the e s s e n t i a l t h i n g i s to c r e a t e a d i f f e r e n c e : f o r e x a m p l e , the w r i t e r k n o w s m o r e t h a n the v i e w e r who k n o w s more (or l e s s ) t h a n the protagonist. T h e i d e a l g e n r e t h u s b e c o m e s the c r i m e s t o r y , w h i c h , t h r o u g h o u t the h i s t o r y of the n o v e l , has long r e m a i n e d the p r i v a t e p r e s e r v e of p u r i t a n , Anglo-Saxon countries. 396 F a u l k n e r ' s i m p o r t a n c e i s s e l f - e x p l a n a t o r y : he w a s t h e f i r s t to f u s e the t w o profound m e a n i n g s of t h i s a e s t h e t i c of e v a s i o n - t h a t i s to s a y , i t s p u r i t a n i m p r e g n a t i o n ( w i t h the u s u a l p a n o p l y of s i n , r e m o r s e , c l a u s t r a t i o n and the tomb) and i t s e x i s t e n t i a l f r e i g h t - t h e c o m p l e x and confusing facts preventing an o u t p o u r i n g of s e n s u a l i t y . I t ' s more a n c i e n t t h a n m o d e r n . T h a t w h i c h i s hidden e m e r g e s f r o m c a l c u l a t i o n , w h i l e c a l c u l a t i o n e m e r g e s f r o m chaos. It i s t h i s e x i s t e n t i a l e l e m e n t w h i c h i s d o m i n a n t i n the f i l m s of H e l l m a n and C i m i n o , as i t i s in Mann's Man of the West, w i t h o u t e n t i r e l y e x c l u d i n g , by the w a y , t h a t w h i c h i s w i l f u l l y h i d d e n , s i n c e t h e s e f i l m s p r e t e n d to b e l o n g - q u i t e u n s u c c e s s f u l l y , as a m a t t e r of f a c t - t o a g e n r e , the w e s t e r n o r road m o v i e . The s t r e n g t h of the A m e r i c a n c i n e m a i s t h e r e f o r e l i n k e d to t h i s o m n i p r e s e n c e of t h e h i d d e n , w h i c h m a k e s t h e F r e n c h c i n e m a s e e m m i s g u i d e d . Our f i l m m a k e r s don't hide behind a s y s t e m , w h i c h d o e s n ' t e x i s t h e r e , o r behind a genre ( w i t h the e x c e p t i o n of Gance). T h e y w o r k in the v a s t m o r a s s of p s y c h o l o g i c a l d r a m a . A l m o s t a l l of t h e m e s c h e w b u r l e s q u e , s w a s h b u c k l i n g and a d v e n t u r e m o v i e s , p o r n o - e v e r y t h i n g , i n f a c t , except the c r i m e story. They c l e a r l y delineate t h e i r subject m a t t e r , and do not d i v e r g e f r o m i t d u r i n g the c o u r s e of the f i l m . F r o m the o u t s e t , they e m p h a s i z e the i m p o r t a n c e of t h e i r s t a r s . No d o u b l e play. A c i n e m a too s q u a r e , too obvious.... One does f i n d c e r t a i n b r i l l i a n t Nuit du carrefour, or the f i l m s e x c e p t i o n s , s u c h as R e n o i r ' s La of J e a n - L u c Godard ( h i m s e l f of P r o t e s t a n t o r i g i n ) , who play w i t h the p r o m i s e of t h e i r t i t l e s (Pierrot le fou, King Lear, Numero deux). T h e l a t e s t s u c h e x c e p t i o n i s c a l l e d pas sommeil. J'ai 397 T h i s f i l m r e l i e s e n t i r e l y on the hidden. C l a i r e D e n i s s a y s as l i t t l e as p o s s i b l e about the t a n g e n t of h e r i n t r i g u e , of the r e l a t i o n s b e t w e e n c a u s e and e f f e c t . Even a l i t t l e l e s s than the s t r i c t m i n i m u m : she t h r o w s h e r v i e w e r a b a i t e d hook. It's up to h i m to b i t e o r n o t , to d e c e i v e h i m s e l f e v e n t u a l l y , to w o r k in any c a s e . Out of t w e n t y e x a m p l e s , Til t a k e t h i s one: t o w a r d s the end of the f i l m , the p r o t a g o n i s t , d r i v i n g in h e r c a r , n o t i c e s a man at the s t e e r i n g w h e e l of a n o t h e r v e h i c l e . W i t h o u t a p p a r e n t r e a s o n , w h e n the l i g h t t u r n s r e d , she d e l i b e r a t e l y s l a m s i n t o him, totally wrecking the machine. The man refuses to lodge a c o m p l a i n t , p r e t e n d i n g - a g a i n s t the a d v i c e of o n l o o k e r s - t o be the one at f a u l t . Is t h i s a doubly g r a t u i t o u s a c t ? Not v e r y l i k e l y . Revenge a g a i n s t an u n k n o w n p e r s o n w h o s e p r e v i o u s m i s d e e d s w e r e c u t out d u r i n g the editing process? A g a i n not very p r o b a b l e . Or of the man, making p r o p o s i t i o n s and f o l l o w i n g h e r d o w n the s t r e e t , as one of my f e m a l e f r i e n d s s u g g e s t s ? Or, as I t h i n k w h e n r e f l e c t i n g upon the moments w h i c h f o l l o w t h i s s c e n e , of an e x - l o v e r i n t e r v i e w e d an h o u r e a r l i e r , who p r o m i s e d a job to o u r h e r o i n e t h e n f a i l e d to s h o w u p ? After i n q u e s t and r e - v i s i o n ( t h i s i s a m o s t r e w a r d i n g t a c t i c ) , my i n t u i t i o n s e e m s to have been c o n f i r m e d . Any o l d hack c o u l d have a v o i d e d u n c e r t a i n t y by d e c k i n g out the e x - l o v e r i n a s u i t or a m e m o r a b l e a c c e s s o r y , or by m a k i n g h i m speak in a h i g h l y d i s t i n c t i v e a c c e n t . B u t , he w o u l d t h e r e b y have d e s t r o y e d o u r d i s q u i e t i n g p a r t i c i p a t i o n in the r h y t h m s of a w o n d e r f u l l y r i c h f i l m .