The "naissance" of dark French literature

"Mother died today.  Or, maybe yesterday, I can't be sure."  (Albert Camus, The Stranger)

This quote might strike a note of recognition from deep in the recesses of our minds - back in that one high school literature class - or was it college?  But who would write something so very dark? So bleak? So existential?  Ah yes, it must be the French.  I tried to delve back into some of these French classics while I had more time to read here, but they are equally bleak even as an adult. And often, there are enough depressing things out there - I don't need to add fuel to the fire.

Don't get me wrong, I like bleak. Some of my favorite authors: John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, and so many others - I love them because they make me weep. (Inwardly, or sometimes outwardly.) My American Lit. students often ask me: "Why do so many of our books have to be sooooo depressing?" My response is always the same: "Very little great literature is written about bunnies and puppies. Well, there is Of Mice and Men, but,...don't get your hopes up."  But even for me, Sartre, Camus, all the French existentialists, wow,..they're so very dark.  Clearly there are other European writers who can rival the French, but I asked myself: What is at the root of all the bleakness and broodiness of French literature?  We are in the land of baguettes, chocolate, fine cheeses and wine? How is it that every writer seems to be so depressed?

When I visited the library, I found the answer: it is fostered at a very young age. French children's literature is dark - very, very dark. This stuff is nightmare-inducing even for adults. You think Sartre and Camus are bleak?  That's nothing.  Check out the children's section:

One of Beatrice's first choices was Le Cri de Pingouin: 

Cute right? Every book about penguins is cute. Who could write a depressing book about these adorable, waddling, tuxedo-clad birds?  Well, apparently the French can. This beautifully-illustrated book tells the story of a penguin wandering on the frozen tundra, searching for some hope in a seemingly meaningless existence. At last, he cries out at the cruel, godless universe, claiming that if there is no one to baptize him, then there is no God in heaven, and he will become an atheist. 

 In the end, it reads: "But there was no one to sing about the heroic life of the atheist penguin.  And therefore one will never know who can tell this story of the egg on the solitary iceberg." After an awkward moment of silence, my daughter asked me: "Is this a Christian book?"  Um... nope.  Pretty sure no. Clearly, more careful screening of books in the children's section would be necessary. 

Some books proved to be fairly easy to judge from the cover. One notable choice was Predateurs, with graphic black and white illustrations, and no words - just to make sure that the French pre-readers can be equally traumatized. The story line is fairly simple. It follows the story of an owl, 

a menacing-looking cat, 

and a rat, all out prowling at night.

I suppose the author intended some notion of the weak v. strong tale, since the rat is hunted by both the owl and the cat, and runs away, terrified.

The end result is that the owl and the cat run into each other head to head. 

Hence, in this flurry of feathers, the rat escapes unscathed to his hidey-hole, kisses his wife, and undoubtedly they commence in procreation so that they can produce another rodent generation to terrify readers. 

Admittedly, I am one of the most rodent-phobic people on the face of the planet, but still - how is this considered a children's book?  And how is this a "happy ending"?  There is only one way that this book could end happily - and that is if both the owl and the cat trap the rat at the same time, and very diplomatically decide to share him by carving him up like a Thanksgiving feast.  I can picture this ending, sitting across the table from each other saying things like: "Oh no, Mr. Cat, you're too kind, but I insist you take the drumstick. I know how you love dark meat."  


Some books seem to project a political message, even at a very young age. One particularly disturbing choice was Maitre la Cisaille, or Master Shears.

In this story, the people in the village were fighting, calling each other names, and generally being nasty to one another. (This is the part of the story where I was reluctant to teach my daughter some of the French vocabulary words, often censoring them for milder alternatives like "meany-face", which adds a note of irony given the next part of the book.) 

So they invite "Master Shears" to their village, who commences to eavesdrop on their private conversations, 

and makes a long list of words that they are forbidden to say. 

In case the reader might not be certain of the menacing power of "Master Shears" as big-brother / censor / dictator (or even why he's called "Master Shears") the artist included this helpful illustration: 

                         (Yes, yes I believe this is in fact a picture of Master Shears sharpening his razor-sharp beak.) 

At last, one brave young boy speaks our against the totalitarian control of Master Shears, and tells him that he's had enough of him and his list. 

In response, Master Shears screams "SILENCE!" (Which is, in fact, the first word that my daughter learned in French school, but that probably deserves its own post.) 

And what is the reward for this brave young lad who has the courage to speak out against this horrible dictator and stands up for the virtues of individualism and free speech?  Well, this is the final illustration of the book:

"And the moral of the story is....." Seriously, what should one tell one's child?  What is the moral here?  Don't stand up for free speech - it will only get you killed? Or - don't invite a censor with a razor-sharp beak into your home to teach you to talk pretty?  I can assure you that my less-than-eloquent explanation was something along the lines of, "Wow, that is one messed-up book."


So we've seen the bleakness, the godlessness, the meaninglessness of French literature, but there remains one top pick that might give some insight into how French children grow up so well-versed in absurdism. I came across this lovely little book, Souliers Rouges, Petits Pois, Etc...

There are some red slippers (souliers rouges) which play a minor role in the book, but I was not able to find any "petits pois" (little peas) and so I think the most important part of the title is "etc."  Because there is a lot of et cetera in this little book - enough to make David Lynch's hair stand on end.

It begins with a scene in the woods between the main character, Jo-jo, and a girl simply called "Princesse." 

They are talking about the future and how they don't know what will happen next, each admitting to the other that they are afraid.

Jo-jo has to leave on an errand, but when he comes back, all he finds of his beloved Princesse is her red slipper.

Then his bizzare friendly ghost-figure comes to help him, and tells him of the cabin where she's imprisoned. Jo-jo races there, looks in the window, and finds: 

And her captor is none other than the dreaded half-man, half-trophy buck.

I truly cannot begin to summarize the weirdness of this book - it defies explanation. But I'll try.  Jo-jo at this point is delirious with grief, and searches for Princesse in the forest, and thinks he found her. 

But in fact, it is not truly Princesse...

(Again - why are there no parental advisory stickers on these things?) 

The author then offers his illustrator free license with the absurdist theme, and I imagine tells him to cram in all the possible nightmare-inducing elements he can imagine. Like bugs: 

worms, 

and worms which suck you into a black hole, engulf you in even more worms, then spit you up in a new location. 

Oh yes, and the pile of worms morphs into a creature with a skeleton-like face, named "Forest." (Because, why not?) 

At this point, Jo-jo has one last vision / hallucination of his beloved Princesse, 

before seeing her body burning on the pyre.

So if you've ever wondered: What is at the root of the bleakness of the great French absurdist writers?  What was it that made Sartre write: "L'enfer, c'est les autres"?  Look no further than the children's section in the library.  

Fans and thugs - Football fandom

One of our greatest reasons for excitement in living in
Marseille this summer is that France is hosting the Euro Cup. We knew that several of the games would even be played here in Marseille. We lived in Europe in 2006, and though the World Cup was in Germany, we saw the first-hand excitement of football fever both in the Netherlands and France. This was going to be fun.

Or so we thought. Our opinions of living in a city hosting these games changed dramatically after the Russia v. England game on Saturday the 11th. The violence was so bad that it made international news - tear gas, water cannons, riot sticks, chairs and bottles were thrown, and Russian "ultras" and drunken English fans engaged in bloody fights. One bar in the Vieux Port area was set on fire. Yes, on fire.

Photo Credit: Evening Standard
(I would have shown you the video footage of this event, but it's basically just a long string of bleeped-out expletives.) 

This was the week when my brother and sister-in-law were visiting us, and I was eager to show them the sights in Marseille, and naively, thought it would be fun to witness the "football fever."  Turns out, it was a very unfortunate weekend to visit Marseille. We spent the early part of the day in the Panier district, which was relatively quiet. Though we saw many bare-chested English fans, drinking copiously and growing pink in the sun, we didn't see any direct signs of rowdiness or violence. (We soon learned that we didn't need to hear the British speak in order to figure out their nationality . They were easily-identifiable - shirtless, beer in hand.) But when we walked back toward the Vieux Port, intending to walk up to Notre Dame de la Garde, we heard the shouting and sirens and saw the tear gas. The atmosphere changed quickly, as locals and innocent tourists tried to find away out.

Tear gas at Vieux Port - notice the flying chair and bottles through the haze. 
Photo credit: The Guardian

An injured football fan at Vieux Port - Photo credit: Eurosport

We went one direction, only to be shooed away by a frantic woman advising us to go by another route. Then we took the most circuitous route possible back to the apartment, and tried to reassess the situation from there. We were torn - I felt as though I didn't want the drunken hooligans to "win" by forcing me to stay in inside.  But even from our balcony, it looked as though there was no safe route. Honestly, despite this city's reputation for violence, this is the only time I've been truly scared to leave my apartment. 

So sadly, we stayed inside on Joe and Brooke's last night in Marseille. Even there, things were not quiet. Nearly 100 drunken English fans stood outside the bar across the street, loudly chanting while watching the earlier game. Only when they left for the stadium did things begin to calm down. Then the violence shifted to the stadium. The atmosphere of the game itself was bad enough, but even worse afterwards, when the Russians scaled the barrier to attack those on the English side.

                                                            Picture Credit: Reuters

Needless to say,  this night did not endear me to either the English or the Russians. And I'm not going to choose sides. Certainly the Russian "ultras" are no joke, and have caused countless injuries in many football matches. But all of the English press seemed to report that the British fans were innocent bystanders, who were victims of unprovoked attacks by Russian 'hooligans' and 'thugs', and sometimes targeted by the police. (One headline read: "English disease not driven by Marseille drunks, but by sober, professional hooligans."- I guess by staying sober the Russians weren't playing fair?) 

"Yeah, I know I have an open head wound, but I'm not done with my beer yet."

Picture credit: Sam Cunningham

The British news sources consistently referred to the English as "fans" while the Russians were called "thugs." They added comments about the police force, who in their view, were both incompetent and unnecessarily brutal. Eric was following twitter during the game, where he got into a little debate with some right-wing British politician, who blamed the violence in Marseille on the "thug-like" atmosphere in the city itself, and the 40% Muslim population. (Ok, he's off by about 15%, but who's counting? Certainly not him.) Sorry dude, regardless of the severity of your Islamophobia, you don't get to pin this one on the Muslims. 

But when reading some outside sources, I got a more balanced view. While the British press offhandedly mentioned that the English had a few pints, the outside press remarked that they had been "drinking heavily all day" and thus provoked the police. They were also also chanting "F*** you Europe, we're all voting out." (In regards to the upcoming EU referendum.) After some anti-Irish and anti-German songs, they also sang: "Sit down if you hate the French" and "ISIS, ISIS, where are you?" At a later game in Lille, they chided the police, chanting: "Where were you in Marseille?"  These are not innocent bystanders. 

The French have taken some wise measures to avoid future violence, and not only in Marseille. I saw this yesterday at the grocery store:

Notice anything peculiar about this sign?  Maybe not, if you haven't been living in France for the last several months. It's only in English. Nothing - and I mean nothing - is only in English here. For a country in which countless individuals are fluent in English, they seem fiercely determined not to have the French culture undermined by intrusions from the English. Clearly, this sign is targeted at a particular audience, and it isn't the French. 

This regulation was a wise choice. Whereas on Saturday we heard a steady chorus of breaking bottles intermixed with drunken shouting, we heard none of that last night when France played Albania.  And this morning, I didn't find the streets filled with broken bottles and other trash, nor the stench of urine we witnessed on Sunday morning. But I think that the reduced consumption of alcohol is only part of the explanation.  France played Albania last night, and for most of the match, it was fairly close. I thought that the number of French fans would dwarf the Albanians, but I was surprised to see so many red-shirted fans, many wearing the traditional 'queleshe'-style hat. But even more surprising was the evident spirit of good will and camaraderie between the French and the Albanians. They were watching the earlier game together at bars and cafes. They were interacting with each other, singing songs with each other, posing for pictures with each other. The difference from the atmosphere on Saturday night was shocking. 

                                                           Photo credit: The Guardian

I had to go near the stadium last night to pick up my daughter from a friend's house. Initially, I was going to try to avoid the Metro stop near the stadium in order to dodge the craziness. But it turns out the buses weren't running, so I had to take the Metro to the Prado stop, and walk from there. I admit - I was nervous about this, but now I'm so glad I got to witness it up close. At one point, I was in the middle of the subway car, with Albanian fans on one side and French fans on the other. I felt my gut clench. But to my surprise, they started singing their team chants - sometimes taking turns, sometimes singing together. Everyone was smiling, laughing, and in good spirits. At one point, a French fan with a small megaphone handed it over to an Albanian fan to take a turn. It was remarkable. 


Photo credit: Associated Press

After I picked up Beatrice, she repeatedly remarked on how fans from the two different teams were talking together, smiling together, drinking together. At one point, we saw a face-painter with a French flag on her cheek, painting a red and black eagle on the face of an Albanian fan. She was stunned.  She asked: "They're from different sides, why are they so friendly to each other?" Because this is good sportsmanship my dear, this is how it's done. 

                                                Here's an image from last Friday night of                                       
                                      Joe, Brooke and Beatrice cheering on the home team!





 

Somebody get Tintin a helmet!

Moving to a new country may radically alter everyday habits. Stores don't carry your favorite cereal. Perhaps the bread is different...and much, much better. Transportation may stretch your comfort zone. And then there is TV.

It took us a few weeks before we even dared to turn on the TV, at which point we were lost. What is this "cable" of which you speak? But we were going through a Little House phase in bedtime stories (sometimes Pa can be a real self-centered jerk!), so when we stumbled on "La Petite Maison Dans La Prairie," we were hooked. Sure, it was dubbed...and oddly predictable...but it gave all of us something familiar to latch onto while also providing a dash of culture.

For quite some time we have watched very little actual TV, though we've blitzed and binged through several series on Netflix. But that's different here, too, as the catalog varies from country to country. Scrolling through the list of kids' shows, we came across a LaGrand family classic comic in TV form: Tintin.

Tintin contains the perfect ingredients to fascinate and irritate. The young hero of ambiguous age is bold, often smart, sometimes thick, and terribly unlucky*. His friends include a dog who is loyal but sometimes displays a lack of judgment, an on the wagon/off the wagon former sea captain always itchin' for a fight, a professor too stubborn for hearing aids, and the detectives Thomson and Thompson (Dupont and Dupond in French) who are easily duped every other episode into thinking that the kind-hearted Tintin has turned to crime. At least one of us is known to shout, "How is this fooling you?!" at the screen.

(*How many other characters outside of Grey's Anatomy have you known to have survived multiple plane crashes, a last-second reprieve from a firing squad, being set afloat at sea in a sealed coffin, and being shot at in nearly every episode? And we're only in season 2.)

It didn't take us long to notice that it's a fairly violent cartoon. During the opening credits Bea and I will shout together:

"Concussion!" "Watch the suspenders!"

"Concussion!"

"Concussion!"

"Concussion!"

"Close call!"

It got to the point where we wrote down every injury from a single episode:

• an airplane crashes in the Himalayas. Are there any survivors?
• a table with coffee gets overturned, resulting in scalding hot coffee in the face
• a rushing Tintin collides with a porter in the street, and both tumble to the ground
• someone eats a dangerously hot pepper
• a tired character walks into a tree
• Snowy the dog falls off a cliff into a raging river after getting into the Captain's whiskey
• the Captain trips into a pole and sees stars (concussion!)
• the Captain gets buried in an avalanche
• Tintin falls down a crevasse for his second concussion of the episode

One episode. It's quite amazing.

It was so amazing that I considered tabulating all of Tintin's injuries for a full season, noting his blatant violations of concussion protocols. (In fact, I can't recall an episode when he didn't get a concussion.) Motivation hits me in odd ways, I admit, but it's best to not always launch a new project when the idea first occurs.

One of the biggest fears for a research scientist is getting scooped. You may have done beautiful, brilliant work, but if someone beats you to the publication, your work is in vain. You'll be lucky if you can publish it anywhere. The problem is even worse if you miss a relevant publication before you begin. More than once I've found something I wanted to do already in the literature, and those papers made my work that followed much, much stronger.

So I turned to Medline.

It turns out I am not the first or even the second person to want to document Tintin's medical history. One paper focused on Tintin's agelessness, speculating that he suffered from hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (HH) due to lack of testosterone (though his aggressiveness might belie that claim):

Gerritsen notes that one potential cause of HH in children is head trauma...the author may be on to something...

This brief comment from the editor of the American Journal of Neuroradiology carries the analysis much further:

He references the large number of concussions that Tintin suffers (as cataloged here). Furthermore, he details the alcoholism and anger management troubles of Captain Haddock and speculates that Thompson and Thomson may be suffering from a neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer's. But the real gold mine comes at the end of the article and the references, where Castillo informs us of similar articles about Asterix and Winnie the Pooh!

But two other papers deserve special mention, as they performed all of the heavy lifting of injury tabulation, saving me from doing something I might later regret:

This appears to be the article that inspires the others here

In the first article, the authors (an associate professor and his two young children) carefully tabulate every one of Tintin's concussions from the comic books and evaluate their duration (for how many panels is Tintin affected?) and severity (how many different objects float around his head?). They conclude that Tintin lost consciousness a minimum of 50 times in the books. Our chants at the start of each episode are vindicated.

Next to the others, the final article is a tour de force. Four tables lay out Tintin's health impairments (HIs) by country, extent of trauma, cause of trauma, and type of HI. The fun starts in the abstract: "We found 236 events leading to 244 HIs, 13 kidnappings, six hospitalisations and two surgical procedures. There was a median of 8 HIs/adventure (range 1-30/adventure)." Later they created their own scale (the Herge system, in honor of the author) to rate the severity of Tintin's concussions. They close with humorous thoughts on the nature of fictional characters while also encouraging Tintin and friends to display "a modicum of common sense."

Nicely done, doctors. Thank you for the amusement and for saving me from a time-consuming project. I'll leave it to the reader to determine if it was a good idea.