Sunday, October 31, 2010

On Friendship (with an Apology)

"But it really is time to join the others, and I've mentioned only one of the two things that I meant to ask you, the least important one. The other is more important to me, but I'm afriad you will say no. Would you mind if we were to call each other tu?"

"Mind? I'd be delighted. 'Joy! Tears of joy! Undreamed-of happiness!'"

"Oh, thank you...thank you...After you! It's such a pleasure to me that you needn't bother about Mme de Guermantes if you'd prefer--calling each other tu is enough." (from The Guermantes Way

Here, the fictional Marcel is making a formal declaration that his friendship with Robert de Saint-Loup has reached a more intimate stage. They'd been close buddies for months. Marcel (initially motivated to drop in on his friend so that he could somehow break into the honeycombed world of Saint-Loup's aunt, the Duchesse de Guermantes) has found the perfect friend. Saint-Loup caters to the sickly Marcel's every need with remarkable sincerity and understanding. Marcel, in turn, seems divided between the love he has for the Duchesse and the intense affection he has for Saint-Loup.

I sometimes wish that we had a formal mode of address in English with this little stepping stone of the informal "you." How you come about this decision to eliminate the distance between yourself and another person and how you choose to communicate this without getting the cold shoulder has something in common with a marriage proposal. It's an elaborate social ritual that puts friendship on the same level as romantic love. And why not? Why shouldn't friendships be cultivated with the same delicacy as one's love interests?

Mon dieu! I have an apology to make. I confused the Princesse de Guermantes with the Duchesse de Guermantes in my last blog entry. The description of the woman in her loge at the theater was that of the Princesse de Guermantes, not to be confused with the Duchesse who is Marcel's ideal love interest. She's the one he saw as a young boy in the cathedral at Combray. And the Duchesse is also the one who is deliciously jolie laide as you can see in the following description: 

...I caught sight of the profile, beneath a navy-blue toque, of a beaklike nose against a red cheek, barred across by a piercing eye like some Egyptian deity...Mme de Guermantes was dressed in fur to the tip of her toque...Amid this natural plumage, her tiny head curved out its beak, and the prominent eyes were piercing and blue.     

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

On French Women

Like a great goddess who presides from afar over the sport of lesser deities, the Princesse had deliberately remained somewhat to the back of her box, on a side-facing sofa, red as a coral rock...The beauty that set her far above the other mythical daughters of the semidarkness was not altogether materially and inclusively inscribed in the nape of her neck, in her shoulders, in her arms, or in her waist. But the exquisite, unfinished line of this last was the exact starting point, the inevitable origin of invisible lines into which the eye could not help extending them, marvelous lines, engendered around the woman like the specter of an ideal figure projected against the darkness. (from The Guermantes Way)  

It's no accident that Proust is often quoted for saying, "Let's leave the obviously pretty women to men with no imagination." The Princesse de Guermantes, described above, would make a good example of jolie laide ("unconventionally good-looking woman: a woman whose facial features are not pretty in conventional terms, but nevertheless have a distinctive harmony or charm.")

We first meet the mysterious Princesse de Guermantes in Combray, when the young Marcel spies her in the town's Gothic cathedral, as the light spilling through the stained glass windows illuminates "the little pimple flaring up at the corner of her nose." Courtly love is very much alive and well two volumes later in The Guermantes Way, as the protagonist, now a man in his early twenties, continues to worship her to the point of stalking her by visiting her favorite Parisian haunts every day.

I thought of the topic of French women when I saw an article in the New York Times on October 11th ("Where Having It All Doesn't Mean Having Equality"), in which the editor-in-chief of French Elle says: "We have the right to do what men do--as long as we also take care of the children, cook a delicious dinner and look immaculate. We have to be superwoman."

Debra Ollivier, author of the scholarly tome (okay, guilty pleasure) What French Women Know: About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind, adds her own interpretation when she writes, "Readers, let us bite into the Big Camembert with this: In France men and women actually like one another. A lot. There is no American-style war of the sexes going on. French men and women actually want to be together. They enjoy their mutual company. They spar. They debate. They flirt. They seek out one another's company in a multiplicity of social settings." (Unlike American women who are sex-starved and prickly, I assume.)

What is it about French women, besides their scarves and their thinness (attributed on alternate days to cigarettes, delighting in small portions of foie gras, and peer pressure), that makes them so unique?

I think Jeanne Moreau summed it up when she said, "One thing you have to give up is attaching importance to what people see in you." This is a tall order when you grow up in a "haveaniceday" culture in which it is not only important to be liked, but well liked. French women (at least in Eric Rohmer films) share a blend of self-possession, self-knowledge, and poise. These women are as intelligent and acutely emotional as they are individual. The American woman in popular culture is childlike, doughy and half-formed in comparison. Superwoman or not, the French woman shoots out at sharp angles, like the Princesse de Guermantes and her "marvelous lines."