I liked Marcel Pagnol because my mother liked him. When films by the Provençal writer and filmmaker were shown on TV, my mother would record them on VHS tapes so she could listen to them over and over again. She became a young girl again, full of emotion and enthusiasm in front of these works that were both sparkling and profound.
Today, when my mother is no more, I cherish all the more the work that moved her. When I watch a film or reread a book by Pagnol, who died 50 years ago this year, I hear my mother laugh and cry, and it does me good.
Great works, it is sometimes said, are those that upset us, shake us. That is true, but they are also those that make us love life more and better. “I love Marcel Pagnol passionately,” my colleague Normand Baillargeon once wrote, probably for this last reason. Me too.
Pagnol’s work is not always recognized at its true value. It has achieved enormous popular success, which continues, but learned commentators are somewhat dismissive of it. In preparation for this column, I consulted the few literary reference works that I use the most. Pagnol is often absent from them.
In Theatre in the 20th centurye century (Folio, 1986), the French drama critic Paul-Louis Mignon devotes four short paragraphs to him to emphasize, essentially, the familiar and picturesque character of his heroes. Popular dictionaries go in the same direction. THE Little Larousse says that his works “tenderly evoke his native Provence.” THE Little Robert speaks of its “colorful evocation […] of Marseille folklore.” Pagnol, however, is more than that.
“In the enterprise of the discovery of man,” said his contemporary Jean Renoir (1894-1979), “Pagnol is king. Everything he tells us on stage or in a film helps to reveal the essence of beings.” The filmmakers Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, great figures of the New Wave, considered him a master of the 7e art. For Renoir, Pagnol was the father of French neorealism.
I learn this by reading Marcel Pagnol, another look (Litos, 2024, 384 pages), the beautiful essay, first published in 2014, that the French writer Karin Hann devotes to this work that she adores and which was the subject of her doctorate in literature at the Sorbonne.
Pagnol, she writes, “is undoubtedly the one of our great writers most acclaimed by the public and the least studied in our universities.” This essay, substantial but accessible, goes some way to correcting this negligence.
Pagnol, Hann notes, does not fit into any literary movement of his time. “He is neither surrealist nor absurd, and even less turned towards the nouveau roman,” she writes. “For him, writing is not a militant act. He does not wish to illustrate the disarray of the world and its emptiness nor to denounce the romantic illusion.” He does not want to illustrate ideas, but to explore the human condition through universal themes such as love, friendship, jealousy, envy, betrayal, remorse and nostalgia.
The strength of his work lies in the fact that it is never abstract. Pagnol “paints the everyday, but by sublimating it,” writes Hann, just as he speaks to the hearts of everyone, to that of my Quebec mother, for example, by never leaving his Provençal microcosm. “The more local it is, the more general it is,” he said, specifying that “the universal is reached by staying at home,” a lesson that so-called citizens of the world should meditate on more often.
Like my mother, I am unable to read Pagnol’s works without crying and laughing. The writer, notes Hann, “displays a perpetual optimism,” which is embodied in the eloquence of the characters, but the latter is accompanied by a painful lucidity. “Such is the life of men,” he writes at the end of the My mother’s castle (1957). A few joys, quickly erased by unforgettable sorrows. There is no need to tell children this.
Pagnol’s heroes – César, Marius, Fanny, Manon, the well-digger and his daughter – are not Moliere-esque types; each of them is complex, multiple, “is life in its entirety”, hence the author’s choice, explains Hann, not for comedy or tragedy, but for dramatic comedy in the strong sense of the term since “his vision of the world is not Manichean” and exposes the weaknesses of each with a look full of indulgence.
Pagnol, writes Karin Hann, tells us, with rhythm, simplicity and clarity, that humans wander, but can correct themselves and aspire to happiness, that “life is a story that ends badly”, but “that it also contains unfathomable riches that we must know how to enjoy with delight”.
My mother, thanks to him and Maupassant, knew that. It was her castle and it became mine.