Great Books From Different Traditions: France (II)

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

This is one in an occasional series in which Mr. Carrigan, throughout this year, will be making lists of Ten Great Books of different traditions, cultures and countries and explaining his reasoning behind his choices.

When Alain Robbe-Grillet died last week, French literature, and modern literature in general, lost one of its leading lights. It’s hard to say how many people read his novels these days, but The Voyeur and The Erasers ushered in a new fiction in the 1960s in France and heavily influenced the fiction that would come to be called “postmodern.” Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction paved the way for minimalists such as Raymond Carver as well as the apocalyptic postmodernism of writers like Ronald Sukenick and Robert Coover. In addition to the novels and his critical essay, Robbe-Grillet is perhaps best known for his screenplay of Alain Resnais masterpiece, Last Year at Marienbad, one of the most masterful French films of the twentieth century.

Robbe-Grillet’s death reminds us of the far-reaching contributions of French literature to world literature. In For a New Novel, he reminds us that “Flaubert wrote the new novel of 1860 [Flaubert’s novel was actually published in 1857, but its influence reached beyond its date of publication, ushering in a new style of fiction for the new decade and decades to follow], and Proust wrote the new novel of 1910.” Indeed, French literature has provided us with some of the most memorable, the most heart-breaking, the most complex, the most light-hearted, and the most lyrical writings in all of history. Last week, I listed five great French books that represent various stages of French life and culture. This week, two more great French books, in chronological order.

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia. This gorgeous little novel is the least well known book on this list, but it deserves to be better known and to have a broader audience. The novel explores Rousseau’s themes of the nobility of natural humanity—raised naturally, without the constraints of society, children are good, loving and beautiful creatures; it’s part of their nature—as well as the philosopher’s ideas about the positive values that a close knit family group conveys. More than that, this is a heart-breaking love story that ends tragically; its pathos tears at one’s soul even more that the final scene of Madame Bovary when little Berthe, whose mother has already committed suicide, finds her father dead in the garden. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel deeply influenced Flaubert. After she is married, for example, Emma Bovary reflects on her reading of the novel and concludes that her marriage to Charles is missing the purity and the simple beauty of the love between Paul and Virginia. In fact, Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet that “Virginia’s death is very beautiful, but so many other deaths are equally moving (because Virginia’s is exceptional!). What is admirable is the letter she writes to Paul from Paris. It always tears out my heart when I read it. There will be less weeping at the death of my old Bovary than at Virginia’s, I am sure of that in advance.” Set on the tropical island of Mauritius, this Romantic novel tells the tragic tale of two children whose doomed love moves us deeply. Much like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [published thirty years later], Paul and Virginia evokes the innocence of human nature, the yearning for love all human experience, and the devastation we feel when love is robbed from us when the outside world breaks into our earthly paradises. The children are raised in an idyllic paradise, and it is only when Virginia leaves to go to France for her education that their world falls apart. Early in the novel, the narrator describes the beauty of Paul and Virginia’s paradisiacal life:

They had no other studies but helping and pleasing each other . . . never had the teachings of a gloomy morality filled them with anxiety . . . Thus did their early years pass like a lovely dawn which gives promise of a lovelier day . . . their eyes . . . made them seem like those children of heaven, those blessed spirits whose very nature is mutual love and who need no thoughts to render their feelings nor words for their affection.

Charles was astonished at the whiteness of her nails. They were shiny and tapering, scrubbed cleaner than Dieppe ivory, and cut almond-shape. Her beauty was in her eyes—brown eyes, but made to look black by their dark lashes: eyes that came to meet yours openly, with a bold candor . . .

Her hair, so smooth that its two black braids seemed each a single piece, was parted in the middle with a fine line that dipped slightly with the curve of her head, and was swept together in a thick bun at the back, leaving the tips of her ears just visible . . . Her cheeks were like rosy apples; and she carried a pair of tortoise-shell eye-glasses attached, in masculine fashion, to two buttonholes of her bodice.

Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this time. She had that indefinable beauty that comes from joy, enthusiasm, success, and which is only the harmony of temperament with circumstances . . . Her eyelashes seemed formed expressly for long amorous gazes where the pupil sank into depths, while a deep breath opened her delicate nostrils and lifted the corners of her ripe lips, shadowed by a bit of dark down . . . Her voice now took on softer modulations, her figure as well. Something subtle that took hold of you wafted from the very folds of her dress and the curve of her foot.