The Devil's Pleasure Garden: Rabelais

Showing posts with label Rabelais. Show all posts

Gorgeousness

In an age when beauty is out of style, the work ethic dominates the Internet and there hasn't been a painting or a poem for decades, let us reflect a little on gorgeousness.

Seven Sculptures

The word is from the French for throat, so let Nefertiti be its patroness. This likeness is from five hundred years before Homer—who says the Greeks invented sculpture? Beautiful women, fully alive, have declined to be in the same room with her, so as not to suffer comparison.

Seven Seas

Homer, Scheherazade, Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare.

Seven Films

Trouble in Paradise, To Be or Not to Be (the Lubitsch version), Ninotchka, La Dolce Vita, 8 ½, Satiricon, Party (de Oliveira's).

Seven Novels

Satyricon, Crime and Punishment, In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, The Great Gatsby ("there was something gorgeous about him"), Under the Volcano, Lolita.

Seven Beauties

Sophia; Audrey; Brigitte; Ann-Margret; Sylva; OK, Marilyn; and yes, Joan:

All of them are from the P7 sixties—the post-penicillin, pregnancy-prevention-pill, post-puberty sixties, when sex was just being invented. Polymorphous perverse sex, I mean, and these women embodied it. In The Seven Year Itch Marilyn handles a heat wave by keeping her panties in the ice box.

Then came the aphrodisiac drugs (Blake predicted "an improvement of sensual enjoyment" around that time)—and scarcely a decade later, the new diseases. Now we don't have sex any more, not with other people, especially when we're married ("If you are afraid of loneliness," said Chekhov, "do not marry"), and have taught ourselves new desires, new ambitions, rather grotesque ones in my opinion. O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there!

Seven Ungorgeous Things

Music by Shostakovich; paintings by Jackson Pollock; German food (except for bratwurst); British food (except for fish 'n' chips); prose by Stephen King, Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney (I think they're all the same guy); California wine, unless nothing else is available—unless zero is available; milk.

Seven Paintings

Catholicism and Hinduism are gorgeous. Judaism, Islam, Protestantism—well. It seems you have to be polytheistic to be gorgeous. Being Catholic is a matter of infinite complications; being Protestant, of stark simplicities. The problem the Germans (pity them!) were having with the Greeks back in the bailout days was one of infinite complications.

We've been surrounded by puritan imagery for two hundred years, Wordsworth's God brooding in solitude over the abyss. Homer's gods "dwell in bliss," and though that sterilizer Plato hates the idea, heaven may well be an orgy. Look at the company Michelangelo's God keeps:

Seven Movie Lines

"They call me Moose on accounta I'm large."—Murder, My Sweet

"Insult her. If she's a tramp, she'll get angry; if she's a lady, she'll smile."—Vivre sa vie

"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."—Camus's L’étranger, Visconti's film

"Desire is always stronger than any virtue. Satan, ora pro nobis."—The Convent

"Trying to guess her weight?"—Baby catching Bogie with a woman in his arms in To Have and Have Not

Dean: “Where’s my drink?” Frank: “In your hand.” Dean: “Is that my hand?”—some Rat Pack movie

"And waiter, do you see that moon? I want to see that moon in the champagne."—Trouble in Paradise

Seven Musicals

The Smiling Lieutenant, 42nd Street, The Merry Widow, Gold Diggers of 1935, Pal Joey, Black Orpheus, My Fair Lady. Any musical choreographed by Busby Berkeley is bound to be rich in the subtlest and the most obscene pleasures. My own sense of tragedy, such as it is, comes from his Lullaby of Broadway. Like Mozart he is proof that the refined and the vulgar hold hands.

Seven Operas
"The three finest things God ever made are Hamlet, Don Giovanni and the sea."—Gustave Flaubert

The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, The Magic Flute, La Traviata (by Cotrubas and Domingo, I beg you), Gianni Schicchi. OK, the Verdi and the Puccini suffer from post-Dickensian scmaltz. I've seen/read/heard the story of Camille so often that it seems safe; Don Giovanni is dangerous, as is Hamlet, as is the sea. Nevertheless, the music of Verdi and Puccini is undeniably gorgeous.

All thought aspires to the condition of aria. Imagine allowing your soul to sing—to sing your sins to your confessor, your worries to your psychiatrist, your passion to your lover, your despair—the greatest of human pleasures—to whoever. But no, despair is denied us; there are always other tables to bet at; the universe, as Tennessee Williams said, is a great big gambling casino.

Opera is the Catholic art, the art of confession. "Do not speak to the driver," says a sign on an Italian bus, "he has to keep his hands on the wheel." What, I have wondered elsewhere, would Protestant opera sound like? It would sound like Wagner, the end of melody, the end of pleasure.

Seven Drawings

Opera is not amoral, it is quite deliberately immoral, in the Christian sense: it is pagan. The Bonn-born Beethoven was shocked when he first heard Così fan tutte ("You can live without love, but not without lovers"), and wrote the unsingable and, for those with my pain threshold, the unhearable Fidelio.

The nordic Protestant Richard Wagner killed opera dead. Moralism, sentimantality (the two are the same: Wagner wrote Here Comes the Bride), Christianity, gnosticism, all kinds of puritanism, and to go with them, atonal music. Verdi the sentimentalist fell in love with Wagner the moralist, and that finished it. Check Philip Glass for the current state of the art. In The President's Palm Reader a hostess asks Word what he thinks of the New Music: "It's great!" he says; "You can hum a tune while you're listening to it!"

The Magnificent Seven

Louis, Cole, Django, Stéphane, Henry, Nino, Miles. After Wagner flushed melody it was up to Louis and Cole to fish it out and get it dancing again. Louis Armstrong is gorgeousness, the gorgeousest of all musicians, a poet with three voices—his composer's voice, his unmistakable flat-out in-your-face trumpet, and his voice voice which, with Domingo's, is the best male one we have. He taught Ella; he taught Frank; he created American music. Emerson put Shakespeare down because he was a mere entertainer, but entertainment is everything.

Miles Davis, after departing the Kind of Blue mode ("I have no feel for it anymore—it's more like warmed-over turkey") was Wagner's grandchild. Bitches Brew doesn't resolve musically, so it doesn't live in your memory; you recall only a phantasmagorical present. It's the closest thing there is to illegal music. But as with Beethoven and Nabokov, I feel with Davis that I'm in the presence of a bully—and yet not with Hemingway!

Seven Westerns

I hate Westerns! Except sometimes: Stagecoach, Shane, The Professionals, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, The Outlaw Josey Wales. Ford's hypnotic framing is always wasted on the most pedestrian subjects. The Professionals is the best of them all: "You bastard!" "Yes, sir, by an accident of birth. But you, you're a self-made man."

The Wild Bunch owes it everything, but one must admire those god-men who so bestride the world. Of course I have no interest in machismo—I can barely get the plug out of the hot-water bottle—and when Peckinpah eases up on it, as in The Ballad of Cable Hogue, he makes real poetry. Eastwood I contemplated in the Lubitsch piece.

Leone is the most shamelessly intellectual of them. He must have been shocked at the popularity of that work of semiotics and film criticism, A Fistful of Dollars. It founded an entire genre. His title The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a gloss on Wittgenstein's "Ethics and aesthetics are one," but the meat is a historical analysis of the industrial revolution and the Western's time in history: the cowboy and the gunfighter thrive between the Civil War and the arrival of the steam engine, and that train is always being built in his movies. Witness the scene where Eli Wallach assembles his pistol out of interchangeable parts. Heavy stuff, and off-putting if you're not hip to his mid-century out-Godard-Godard sensibility.

Which reminds me:

Seven More Movies

Pickup on South Street, The Seven Samurai, Contempt, Death in Venice, Happy New Year, The Night Porter, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. In the sixties Lelouch's A Man and a Woman was the movie of romance; now it's embarrassing to watch. His gem is Happy New Year, a beautifully controlled romantic heist, worth it alone for the pre-Steadicam hand-held one-shot scene in which Lino Ventura, fresh out of jail, cases his mistress's place and slips out when her new boyfriend arrives.

Seven Desperadoes

"The beautiful is that which fills us with despair."—Paul Valéry

"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last."—Marcel Proust

"It’s not true that a woman can change a man. I don't want to tell another lie."—8½

"It would be better if nothing existed."—Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust

"Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows."—Leonard Cohen

We sink in the sweet quicksand of Shakespeare. Perhaps the secret of his haunting voice is the despair in it, the dying fall, the tragic joy. One must look hard to find a triumphant character in him; perhaps only Rosalind sweeps the board. (Do yourself a favor and see the Elizabeth Bergner version.) He teaches us how to be no one.

"Devotion is a kind of despair, and only in despair can we find happiness, which is why I will not deprive myself of my abandonment by the man I love."—Agustina Bessa-Luís, Party

Tragic, comic, who cares; what matters is gorgeousness. I said that there have been no poems recently, but Portuguese Agustina Bessa-Luís, who scripted the best de Oliveira's films, Party and The Convent, does the real thing. Alas, I am unable to find translations of her books and am confined to subtitles in her movies, which are of an aristocratic gorgeousness alien to what one of her characters calls "the democracies."

Which reminds me—

A Further Seven Films

The Pink Panther (the original), Charade, How to Steal a Million (such exuberance!), Some Like It Hot, Toby Dammit, La jetée, The Convent. I've seen The Convent two dozen times—but don't go in there expecting a movie movie. These people don't give a damn about what we expect. Ah, to be financed like that!

Pop Music?

No. Too gospel-derived. Repent! Atone! The day of judgment is nigh! "And one of these days, baby, and it won't be long, you gonna come back crawlin on yo knees, and you gone be sayin, I still love you! Always thinkin of you! I still love, love, love—" Get lost. It gives rise to the uneasy spectacle of Presbyterians dancing. Gorgeousness is not a judgement, it's an appetite.

Elvis, yes—no brains, but a genius, and a gorgeous one. Johnny Cash, OK, I can't say no to the lyric poet of the American South. "When I was just a baby, my mama told me, Son, Always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns. I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry." If shooting a man to watch him die doesn't do it to you, what that sight has to do with the sound of a train whistle—Pow. Wham. Gotcha.

Seven Fools

Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel, Hardy, Alberto Sordi, Lucy, Jackie Gleason. If I were listing actors Gleason would be at the top, with Mickey Rooney, James Mason—I can't think who else now. Michel Piccoli.

A fool is without dignity. A fool sees through dignity. A fool has no use for dignity, except to puncture it. Especially his own.

If you make a fool of yourself deliberately, it’s a triumph. If you make a fool of yourself and it’s not deliberate, it’s humiliating. If it’s deliberate but people think it’s not deliberate, it’s still humiliating—so important is the opinion of others—to me, anyway, but then I’m a fool. The great fools brave this double edge and go all the way into being fools. They live without approval. Not easy.

It's like being ugly. It is being ugly. At the end of City Lights the blind flower girl, her sight restored, looks up at the hero who has done this for her and sees—Charlie. Ooh, bad moment.

Do I see myself as a fool? Only of the undeliberate kind. To be a fool is a holy calling.

Seven Desserts

Crêpe Suzette, zabaglione, mousse au chocolat, strawberry cheesecake, bananas in white wine, fudge cake, Tia Maria on vanilla ice cream. Each of these is in its own way a dehumanizing experience, like good sex, and should be preceded by foie gras with Sauternes, and then lobster and champagne (champagne goes with any sea food, I find), followed by a Bûcheron chèvre with Pouilly-Fumé. Or substitute for the lobster a filet de bœuf served raw and in pieces to be grilled on your own heated iron—I love it when they give you those—with a red Bordeaux. And try to control yourself.

Toby's Seven Favorite Pleasures

My alter-ego, lazy worthless Toby Tucker, hero of my comic novels, has, for preference, these:

I lay there, nudged by the lightest possible stirrings of current, waving like seaweed. Here, I congratulated myself, I could combine two of the pleasures afforded by the mortal coil: sleep and immersion in a liquid. Ingestion, elimination, gossiping, shopping for shoes, driving around listening to The Doors and making uh-uh would, for the moment, just have to wait.

Which is eight, actually, not seven. But that's Toby.

PS: Roman Tsivkin, a man of deeper culture than my own, was gracious enough to praise this piece, even while correcting me on Shostakovich, whose work I list among things ungorgeous. ‘If anything,’ says Roman, ‘his music should have the designation "ugly beauty"’ [pretty much what I feel about the above Rouault painting of the prostitute]. He sent me to hear Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1, which has all the Russian passion you could ask for (there’s nice camera work in the film on YouTube), his 7th Symphony and his jazz waltzes. And I have learned a new pleasure, for which I’m grateful.

Pure Gorgeousness.

For Your Comments.

Lubitsch

Fellini

Hitchcock

Kubrick
de Sade
Joyce
Nabokov
Leonard

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Scanbox, and YouTube, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

“I am afraid of nothing except being bored.”―Greta Garbo

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The Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France

De Sade
Might have been perfectly glad
To have had as his hassock
Masoch.

I love France.

And I love Paris. It doesn’t matter how Disneyfied it gets; it remains the world’s capital, the measure of all cities, and not just for me. In the Middle East they call Beirut “the Paris of the Mediterranean.” They used to, anyway. In Asia Shanghai is “the Paris of the East.” In America Montreal is “the Paris of the North.” “When good Americans die,” as Oscar said, “they go to Paris.” And so do bad Irishmen: Oscar is buried there.

And I love the French. Sort of. Their style, their indolence, their cuisine…so much about them endears them to one. But they are not, it must be admitted, sweet-natured. Not warm. They are, to use their own phrase, le peuple le plus désagréable du monde, même entre eux—the snarkiest people in the world, even to each other.

How did this happen? Were they always like that? Is it, as so much is these days, genetic? (See My Racial Profile.) If not, what, or who, could be the cultural antecedent of this manner?

Is it Rabelais, father of the long lunch? “Frugality,” he said, “is for the vulgar.” My kind of guy. “It is godlike to lend, but to owe is a heroic virtue.”

When he came to die he left this will: “I have nothing; I owe much. I leave the rest to the poor.”

No, there’s too much generosity of spirit there. It can’t be him.

Is it Montaigne, whose suave self-contemplation supplanted the wisdom of the ancients? Too mild. Too tolerant. And he was so deeply inhaled by Shakespeare that we tend to think of him as an Englishman.

Molière, then? That comic genius? No no no, too free of heart. Too funny. (Note though the remark in his Dom Juan that a peasant girl is at a disadvantage compared to a Parisienne, who need only adjust her coiffure to sharpen her allure. Ah, Paris!)

Voltaire? The wit, the very soul of the Enlightenment? "The trouble with honest people is that they're cowards." Hey! Almost! But no, he's simply too polite.

It cannot have been Rousseau, who loved nature and found it morally good. De Sade quashed that: “Nature averse to crime? I tell you that nature lives and breathes by it, hungers at all her pores for bloodshed, yearns with all her heart for the furtherance of cruelty!”

So it’s not Rousseau. No, it’s the Marquis himself. With him something enters French culture that had not been there before. Suzanne in Diderot’s The Nun suffers, it’s true, including erotic molestation by the Mother Superior, but she is rescued, and never submits. And Rétif de la Bretonne (he and de Sade hated one another) gave his name to the shoe fetish, known now as retifisme.

We like these on you, girls. We love to see you helpless.

But only the Marquis gives us the whole deal: "There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable—they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience." Not a bad psychologist. Cheer up, guys.

After him we get a new cruelty in French culture. I don’t mean Balzac and his books for twelve-year-olds, his gosh-isn’t-it-great manner; or even the torture that is axiomatic in Hugo’s novels.

I don’t just mean Delacroix and his orgiastic scenes of rape and slaughter—

—or the enthusiasm for women of color shown by Baudelaire, Gauguin and Rimbaud, meant to dramatize their, how shall I say, focus, not to say their dominance.

I mean the merciless exposure to which her author subjects Emma Bovary. She, a fool, and her husband, a fool—a doctor, no less, who bungles an operation on his clubfooted patient and causes his leg to be amputated—scurry like bugs under Flaubert’s microscope, his heart as neutral as glass. As Erich Auerbach said, their “world consists of pure stupidity.” Even the title is a sarcasm, “Madame Bovary,” as if the poor girl were the lady she longs to be.

Flaubert
Shaved his short hair
And reclined in the raw:
“Madame Bovary, c’est mwaw.”

And what is there, outside of the Marquis, to match her suicide, writhing in agony for days with arsenic in her belly? Anna got it over faster by throwing herself under train wheels; what a moment that must have been. Bad women must be punished, sure, I understand that, but for Emma it’s drawn out to what can only be described as sadistic length.

Here starts an entire mode of narrative. Flaubert’s protégé de Maupassant despises his characters, jeers at them. I love Proust as much as you do, but I want to be at eye-level with Swann; of course he’s a chump, who isn’t, but I don’t want always to be scoffing at him, always to be looking down at him through the Flaubertian lens.

Zola
Has the flaw
That the earthy passages that should make me drool
Just make me want to fish my jeans out of his pool.

Emma has many heirs, like Séverine in Belle de Jour, also married to a doctor. We may consider Bunuel because he regarded Paris as the capital of Spain, even before Franco. Indeed the Marquis makes personal appearances in two of his films, and Severine gets the whipping she dreams of. But not the life.

Torture had always been used for political purposes, as we use it now. The Church used it for religious purposes, but then religion is politics (I propose this as a definition). De Sade's innovation is to have used it for sexual purposes.

He is not spooked by age; his ramrod hero the Duc de Blangis is fifty. Nor is he just a master, like Nietszche; he submits to the whip himself, and Blangis regularly has himself sodomized.

There is no superego in de Sade, no conscience, no heart to be appealed to; this is his fascination and his insolence, and makes him royally dangerous. And, yes, the heart is tricky; it believes anything.

On the other hand he identifies himself with nature, rather like Byron with the raging storm—magnificent, but faintly disappointing; why identify with anything? He supposes his sex drive to be larger than ours—how dare he! And his assumption that tenderness is cowardice doesn't fit quite comfortably, not that he cares for comfort.

But his real sin, if I may so put it, is his seriousness. Libertinage and perversion are fine old traditions, but Casanova and the Earl of Rochester laugh at themselves. You won't find many laughs in the Marquis. He is a man of commitment. And then, once the orgasm is over, we're left standing around in our leathers.

The Marquis was in many ways the pride of his species;
I just hope he flossed after gobbling those feces.

It is almost precious that he is vulnerable to jealousy: "She who, either in seeking base revenge or, what can be even more sordid, out of a gross and vulgar urge to satisfy her carnal appetites, gives herself wantonly to a footman—" But let us draw a veil over the rest of this discourse.

Quite apart from torture, he—more than Freud, before Freud—made sex the content of every gesture. Like Freud he advised resisting the superego (though he wants virtue to exist, or we'll miss the pleasure of violating it), and Miller and Lawrence regarded him as the real liberator. He sponsored the passionate commitment to the carnal that we have in Genet, Duras and Robbe-Grillet. In what other country are there erotic writers of such stature?

A journalist at a press conference accused President Mitterand of having, not only a mistress, but a daughter by her. "Et puis?" he shrugged. "So?" End of story; not even a follow-up. In America he'd have had to go on TV and say he was abused as a child, not that it would halt the impeachment.

One pictures Strauss-Kahn leaping nude from single bed to single bed and throwing himself on a serving wench. (Did he, however, force his shah into an unwelcoming oral cavity? The portcullis comes down and then where are you?) It’s all the Marquis, my darlings.

“Orgasm and sarcasm,” as Woody Allen sums up the French, and they're related: if the former is your reality, how much patience do you have with anything beyond the enticements of coiffure and couture?

The French critic Roland Barthes said that “teasing is a sadistic passion,” and this, comic writer that I am, draws me to him (de Sade, not Barthes). I’ve been thrown out of bars for teasing. Kicked out of bed. Made to stand in corners. Can’t resist.

I used to be a semiologist
But now I’m not Saussure.

It can be embarrassing for the Anglo-trained male to realize that French women, I don't hesitate to generalize, expect you to enjoy hurting them. They don't enjoy it themselves, necessarily, but they expect you to. Gosh. They really are different people, and they regard us, with some justice, as children.

The Marquis could never have been an American. Manson's efforts achieved for him only a kind of psychiatric sainthood. The psychopath is a stock American figure, at least from Ahab on, and few Hollywood movies are without one. But de Sade was in the Bastille so his family could guard its reputation, and in the Charenton asylum so the Revolution could distance itself from his writings. He wasn’t a psycho.

I often think that Shakespeare lies behind the Anglo-Saxon success, just as Homer lay behind the Graeco-Roman one. Alexander slept with the Iliad beside his bed; he wanted to be Achilles; Caesar wanted to be Alexander. [Hamlet declined to be Achilles; there are no heroes in Shakespeare unless they're more or less assholes. De Sade, be it noted, delights in violating every law of nobility he can think of.] The Church, though it governed Europe for a thousand years, thrust its rule into heretical times bolstered by Dante. France has the Marquis.

One overhears, in a Paris café (this actually happened), two waiters discussing whether an acquaintance is Cartesian or Pascallian: does he favor doubt or faith? All French, the French feel, are either one or the other, and we might rush to conclude that here are their real antecedents.

Sartre
Let an enormous fartre
And sighed, "Descartes be damned.
I stink, therefore I am."

But regard the waiter as he separates himself from his confrere to “serve” you, the subtle brusqueness with which he lets you know you are intruding on his time, the culpable helplessness with which you submit while he removes, with balletic crispness, whatever is on your table, and asks you with a “Oui, m’sieur?” what you think you might want.

Do not offer him your French to sneer at. Only raise your eyes to meet his, gleaming down at you with casual malice, and you will find yourself face to face, there can be no doubt, with the Marquis.

Some of the Marquis’s remarques

For Your Own Remarques, However Sadistic

Life's a bitch—

And then you die

—featuring scenes in Greenland, and

a Santorini

earthquake.

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His recent The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains, but an intellectual snob.