I would like to talk to you about Balzac. Of course, the timing coincides with the release in our theaters of‘Lost illusions by Xavier Giannoli, freely adapted from a famous novel by the author of The human comedy. Not only is the film sumptuous, elegant, hard-hitting and defended by great performers, but it can make fans want to dive into the book at its source. Suddenly, images and words respond to each other. We say to ourselves: hey! The filmmaker emphasized this, but erased that. What an exciting back and forth!
I often have the impression that the true act of resistance consists in refusing the dictatorship of the times which hardens the spirit and invites it to all polarizations. Did the pandemic episode really condemn us to drawing our main cultural foods from TV series? It will also have given some (I am) the opportunity to re-read their classics. Thereby lost illusionsits sequel Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans and on the run, Goriot which prefigured them, found on the dormant shelves of my library, gave me hours of enchantment.
Balzac’s cynicism, copiously displayed in these three novels, offers disturbing echoes of our disenchanted modernities. Here we are drawn into Paris and the French provinces of the first half of the 19th century.and century. Make way for fascinating descriptions of streets and alleys, for psychological flights on the secret intentions of characters who make you laugh or scream. Writers possess the biases of their society and their time, but the best often manage to transcend them. The so-called giants. These giants who belong to everyone. Not just the French.
Already a great reader in my youth, I had heard an adult assure us that acquiring the subtleties of our language was not necessary for children destined to work with their hands. This presupposed a system of education at several speeds, the lowest level of which would fall automatically to the sons and daughters of workers. From the top of my 14 years, I felt that this person was wrong, without having all the arguments to attack his speech.
Lover of the language, it seemed to me that everyone should have access to the complex tools of French in order to honor it on our soil. Also to allow universal access to demanding literary works, which form the basis of humanity. Don’t these extricate us from our cocoons by exploring the vast world of yesterday mirroring today, through expressions and words sometimes fallen into disuse or never used in Quebec? The exercise makes it possible to have fun with the language, far from the pensum, in the playground. To believe that the only reading of Quebec works is enough to fill our luggage is also heresy, because real readers are omnivores by nature and curious about everything. We know our society by comparing it to others, not by simply adopting a fallback position.
The theory I heard in my childhood snowballed. What’s the point of exploring the twists and turns of French when a few hundred words allow you to be understood, in Franglais or not? we now launch everywhere, even if these theories have led us collectively straight to the wall. You don’t need to love and master your language to take your exams, get a diploma, function, work and express yourself with lots of mistakes on social media.
In Quebec, we have been persuading a whole people for decades that linguistic subtleties were only intended for the elites to unbolt and that the ordinary world did not have enough jarnigoine to find their way around. Thus do we forge a colony of functional illiterates. Yet it’s all about attitude, message, refusal to kneel before American cultural supremacy. You still have to want to believe it.
Even the French Academy ended up laying an alarming report on the multitude of English words, reinvented or not, which dot the institutional or communication sabir in France at unprecedented speed. The bewildering English-speaking autocolonialism encouraged there for ages, without even the excuse of geographical proximity or ancient conquest, is the fruit of pure snobbery and self-hatred in a society that is nevertheless so wealthy. Help !
All in all, it is obvious that many readers, in France and especially here, cannot read Balzac, Proust or Flaubert, for lack of sufficient linguistic and historical references to decode them and because great literature has no more popular in our world of screens. Also because English has already extended its empire. So we gave up de facto. And it’s a sadness to cry.