Frankophilia
 

In recent months I've decided to affiliate with the Franks (also called "the Ferengi" or "the French"). A hybrid German-Latin / Northern-Southern people living in Old Europe, the Franks are equally despised by chauvinist Americans and by Osama's Jihadut. (When Muslims call us "Crusaders", they're calling us French). All the way back to the Chrétien de Troyes and the Song of Roland, the French have had a knack for lewdness, irony, and the freedom of women.

The proximate cause of my decision was my recent reading in the French and German literature of the last two centuries. Much as I love the intensity of Kleist, Hölderlin, Büchner, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Wittgenstein, I ended up deciding that that kind of intensity and seriousness can be dubious when it comes to philosophy (e.g. Hegel, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt), and that it will be utterly disastrous  when applied to foreign policy.

I have classified Kafka as a Czech like Hasek, so he's still cool. Nietzsche and Heine both tried to escape from the German seriousness, but Nietzsche was only half successful. One of these days I will write more about The German  Seriousness -- from which contemporary Germany seemed blessedly to have escaped. It seems traceable back to Luther and his Counter-Reformation adversaries, Kant's categorical imperative, and the martial ethic of the Prussian and Austrian military castes, with a dose of straight-edge nihilism added during the twentieth century .

The Frankish gift for irony, realism, and lewdness was evident from the beginning. After their  Revolution, the Franks became the world's most completely secular people, and with the Restoration they also had to learn to deal both with miltary defeat, and with a pious, trashy government. French authors heroically met these challenges (secularity is hard), and avoiding excessive seriousness was their most heroic move.

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My Frankish articles:

St. Augustine, Nietzsche, and Rimbaud: the Perils of Classicism

Sexual repression and hatred of the body are often alleged to be at the root of Western alienation. An examination of a number of key figures (Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and St. Augustine, with glances at Sartre, Pascal and Thoreau) shows that behind the sexual repression and ressentiment often lie years of intensive classical education forced upon these authors by ambitious parents -- often mothers, with the fathers absent or ineffectual). The supposed sexual repression is simply the result of the same social-climbing imperatives, which forbid both illicit relationships and marriages into inappropriate families.

Gautier's Hippopotamus, Baudelaire's Goony Bird, Rimbaud's Dancing Bear

Recently I happened on some photographs of Gautier, however, and his grumpy, distinctly non-effete appearance caught my eye. (The photo I've posted isn't the worst: there's another one where he looks like a street wino). It's no great discovery to point out that apolitical escapism is a reaction to political hopelessness and to the debasement of political life, but these pictures made me feel that Gautier's aestheticism was also  reactive, and that he had been engaged in a lifelong struggle against his inner oaf. A little research brought up some more evidence: Gautier's totem animal was the hippopotamus.

I stick up for Charles Bovary and several other uncool people

Every guy I knew growing up was a Charles Bovary. My dad was a Charles Bovary. I wasn't going to have to marry any of them, so I liked them all fine. I am somewhat of a Charles Bovary myself. His big country wedding sounded like an enhanced version of the kind of weddings we had where I grew up -- a lot of fun, really.

I cannot be fair to Emma

Emma is the misogynist's idea of Woman: emotional, incapable of rationality, but exciting. From a social Darwinist point of view, she was the natural prey of the seducer Rodolphe and the usurer Lheureux, and could never have been anything else -- whereas the hapless Charles (the me-figure in this story) was her own natural prey. From a Buddhist point of view, her story is a tidy little morality play about the fatally self-defeating essence of desire. Or it could be a bourgeois homily on debt, or on the virtues of chastity and faithfulness. But I don't think those are messages I was intended to get.

The Avant-garde Hollyhock

The hollyhock played a unexpectedly large role in XIX-c French avant-garde literature, appearing twice in the works of Gerard de Nerval, once each in poems by Verlaine and Rimbaud, once in a Berthe Morisot painting named for the flower, and it also fugures in the works of Jean Giono.

Erik Satie: À bas Paladilhe et Lenepveu!

Erik Satie was a truculent alcoholic who lived for decades in tiny, squalid apartments  which no one was ever allowed to enter. After his death his family and friends had to remove two loads of garbage and rubbish before they could retrieve the manuscripts and other effects which were heaped haphazardly about the room. He had only one very short serious relationship with a woman, and hid his true feelings behind a sarcastic, whimsical mask which no one was ever able to penetrate. In short, a man after my own heart.

Max Jacob

"When my pack meets you, if I am the last one and make no greeting, don’t let yourself think that it’s because of that business with the cushions. And if my pack meets your pack and smiles are exchanged, don’t let yourself think that one of them comes from me."

The only thing Aucassin ever does is pine for Nicolette. His kingdom is attacked and his aged father is unable to fight, but Aucassin only wants to continue pining. When his father finally cons him into defending his birthright with a lying promise, Aucassin goes absent-mindely into battle and is almost killed before he remembers where he is. Then he fights bravely and captures the enemy baron who has been attacking their kingdom continuously for decades. When Aucassin finally finds Nicolette after her first escape, he immediately falls absent-mindedly off his horse, throwing his shoulder out of joint, so that she has to set it for him. Then she has to explain to him that they need to flee, since his father intended to have Nicolette burned to death; otherwise he would have blissfully wandered around until she was captured .

A Pragmatist Descartes

The basic "Cartesian" philosophical principles of mind-body dualism, idealism, and the ontological proof of the existence of God are all there in the Discourse on Method, but in such a sketchy form that they don't seem like philosophy at all. The metaphysical, philosophical part is limited to the six pages of Part Four, and to me seems by far the weakest and least interesting part of the book. What's really interesting is the description of a practical analytic, atomistic scientific method -- including a job description for research assistants, an early version of peer review, and a model for scientific training that looks a lot like "progressive education".  A naive reading of Descartes' text finds a pragmatist.

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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