A serious production of Thaïs - readers uninterested in opera can skim right past this one - readers interested in opera, apply your best judgment

The entry on Thaïs, the 1894 Jules Massenet opera, in The New Grove Book of Operas (2000), ends with this:

The human truths contained in Thaïs have yet to be revealed either on stage or indeed on record; it is, in many ways, an opera still awaiting its first serious production.

I presume the entry has been revised since then.  I have seen a serious production of Thaïs, and am listening to it now.  Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson recorded the opera in 2000 with a regional French orchestra.  I saw the production in Chicago in 2002 or 2003.  Hampson I saw several times in Chicago, but I believe this was the only time I have heard Fleming perform.

I would not want to put too much pressure on my memory of any opera I have seen, particularly one I had never heard.  I asked ma femme what she remembered, and she immediately said “the set” - a bright version of the Alexandria and the Egyptian desert, yellow, white, and blue (about two-thirds down, there it is) – “and not much else.”

How do I know it was a serious performance, then?  Back to the New Grove.  In the 1894 premiere, the star "'accidentally' exposed her breasts," and a 1973 performance featured "the first full-frontally nude opera singer."  Fleming remained clothed for her entire appearance.  If anything, the production was too static, except that the attention was then firmly on the interpretation of the music.  Really, I know the performers understand what they are singing, are “serious,” because I can hear what they’re doing on the recording.

I wrote and have abandoned a little exploration of the musical themes of the opera.  The only point worth keeping is that Massenet is clearly composing in a Wagnerian world.  Motifs run through the entire piece, performing the same thematic functions of a repeated color or phrase in a novel, except I can hum the motifs.  I am not a particularly sophisticated listener – after multiple plays of the recording, I have been able to pick out five themes.  I doubt that’s all of them.  The one the brass section plays at the beginning of the monk’s “Voilà donc la terrible cité” aria is blatantly ripped off of Tannhäuser (1845).  I think it’s Tannhäuser.

All of the motifs are blended together in the “Méditation religieuse,” a six-minute instrumental section in the exact center of the opera.  Thaïs has just been “converted” by the monk, has just decided to abandon her earthly life and return to the Christian church.  In France’s novel, this is a moment of catastrophic “victory” for the monk.  Massenet abandons the monk, and gives his attention to Thaïs, to her psychological state, which is quiet but ecstatic, and entirely wordless, aside from some off-stage humming.  France’s anti-clerical satire is entirely abandoned by Massenet.  In some sense, this eviscerates the novel.  All for the best.

I understand that the “Méditation religieuse” is popular at weddings.  It’s the moment when a courtesan resolves to become a nun, and a monk begins a life of erotic torment.  Ha ha ha!  But no one at the wedding will know that.

The Fleming and Hampson recording is highly recommended, although I wish there were a CD of highlights.

Her tone was ironical. Riquet did not understand irony - an Anatole France masterpiece

It finally occurred to me to hop over to Amazon.fr and do my basic French writer status check – what do Anatole France’s Pléiade editions look like?  The Pléiade volumes are standardized texts, with masses of annotations and who knows what else.  France has a three volume Pléiade, compiling a dozen novels and amounting to 4,200 pages.  Status: not so shabby.  I once calculate that Balzac fills about 18,000 Pléiade pages.

The fact that only a few France books have had much presence in English is not necessarily the fault of the poor author.  Reading France, it was easy enough to see how sections – sometimes long sections – of Penguin Island and Thaïs have lost their savor, but also easy to find passages of high interest.  Overall, though, I can hardly make an emphatically positive recommendation.  If what I have mentioned sounds good, it is; if it sounds painful, it is.

If you are, for some reason, planning to “read the Nobels,” I urge you to rethink that entire project, but until then, what should you do with Anatole France?  Obooki, commenting back here, had the solution.  Wend your way to Google Books, download the PDF of Crainquebille, Putois, Riquet, and other profitable tales, jump to page 79, and read the eight little pages of the edifying saga of Riquet.

Riquet is a dog; the story is told from his perspective.  It is a terrible day in his life – moving day.  Strangers invade the house, order is destroyed, the “domestic gods” (“arm-chairs, carpets, cushions”) vanish.

He could not believe that so great a disaster would ever be repaired.  And sorrow filled his heart to overflowing.  Fortunately, Riquet’s heart resembled human hearts in being easily distracted and quick to forget its misfortunes. (81)

There’s a passage a few pages later, describing the furniture on the sidewalk, awaiting the mover’s cart, that is in itself a little masterpiece.

“Riquet” is not actually a short story, it seems, but Chapter II of a novel, Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901), which is now most tempting.  The chapter is printed separately in this collection as the necessary introduction to the ridiculous and sublime “Meditations of Riquet,” twenty of the dog’s aphorisms.  Riquet is, it seems, a philosopher, a profound thinker about the most difficult problems of existence:

I am in the centre of all things; men, beasts and things, friendly and adverse, are ranged about me.

Although, as I think about it, Riquet cannot be right, because I am at the center of all things.  A paradox.

Riquet is a keen observer of the world, but also adept at generalizations:

Men possess the divine power of opening all doors.  I by myself am only able to open a few.  Doors are great fetishes which do not readily obey dogs.

I will leave the rest of his wisdom, including his prayer and other religious ideas, to the interested reader, of whom there are, I assume, many.  That was certainly not my assumption about Thaïs and Penguin Island!

That artifice did not seem ingenious to me - Anatole France's Penguin Island

Anatole France’s Penguin Island is a satirical history of France, a highbrow counterpart to Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America or – what’s an English parallel?  1066 and All That?  The novel has, more or less, no characters and no plot, and spends a good part of its time satirizing long-forgotten political issues – it’s very much a statement of French anti-clericalism, for example.  It should be a deadly bore, and, occasionally, is.

France’s silliness works in his favor, though.  He does not stay in any one period too long, and is not afraid of a joke.  How funny any particular reader finds the jokes, I will not presume to predict.  The medieval “Marbodius” chapter is a parody of Dante, in which Virgil loudly and angrily denies that he was ever a Christian, or predicted the arrival of Christ in the fourth Eclogue, or ever led that rude and ignorant Etruscan through Hell, a place he, Virgil, had never visited and in which he did not believe.  He had met Dante, though, and was appalled by his rudeness, ignorance, vulgar dialect, and primitive versification:

My ears were more surprised than charmed as I heard him repeat the same sound three or four times at regular intervals in his efforts to mark the rhythm.  That artifice did not seem ingenious to me; but it is not for the dead to judge of novelties.  (III.6)

I’m just saying that I found a lot of it funny enough.

The origin myth of Penguin Island is on the cover of that Modern Library edition.  A wandering saint, nearly deaf, nearly blind, baptizes a colony of penguins.  Heaven forms an advisory committee.  St. Augustine argues that the penguins must be transformed into humans.  One is given the impression that Augustine always wins these theological arguments.  Regardless, the penguins become people, and join the ebb and flow of human history, much to their joy and sorrow.  That the episode occurs in the Arctic, and that it is thus clear that the ancestral penguins were, in fact, puffins, is merely an irony of history.

A long section near the end is a parodic recounting of the Dreyfus Affair.  France was a Dreyfusard himself, and Dreyfus had only been reinstated in his Army rank two years earlier, so this is in part a long, laughing gloat.  Perhaps one would be better off, reading Penguin Island, not even knowing about Dreyfus, and not wasting time looking for pointless correspondences – ooh, is that Zola?  Who cares.  The central situation – a man is falsely accused, and his case becomes political fodder for all sorts of other interests – is universal enough.

My single favorite paragraph in Penguin Island is from this section.  The government, having convicted “Pyrot” with no evidence at all, decides it must shore up its case retroactively by accumulating “proofs” of his guilt.  They overdo it a bit:

Six months later the proofs against Pyrot filled two storeys of the Ministry of War.  The ceiling fell in beneath the weight of the bundles, and the avalanche of falling documents crushed two head clerks, fourteen second clerks, and sixty copying clerks, who were at work upon the ground floor arranging a change in fashion of the cavalry gaiters.  The walls of the huge edifice had to be propped.  Passers-by saw with amazement enormous beams and monstrous stanchions which reared themselves obliquely against the noble front of the building, now tottering and disjointed, and blocked up the streets, stopped the carriages, and presented to the motor-omnibuses an obstacle against which they dashed with their loads of passengers. (VI.10)

France is not so far, here, from Evelyn Waugh or Bohumil Hrabal, or dare I say it, Schulz and Kafka.  The corruption and idiocy of the government is embodied in a single action, a single image.

Such are the pleasures of Penguin Island.  If only they were more abundant.

That woodcut cover can be found at this Modern Library book collecting site.  I read a 1933 ML edition.  No mention of a translator.

The flesh of Thaïs sparkling in the light of the waters

An Egyptian hermit becomes obsessed with an Alexandrian courtesan, Thaïs, who he remembers from his youth, and becomes convinced that he has been chosen to convert her to Christianity.  He travels to Alexandria, where he succeeds in his mission.  Thaïs renounces the world and enters a convent; the monk, however, has developed an unquenchable passion for Thaïs that destroys him.  This is one way to describe Anatole France’s Thaïs (1890), and it also applies to the Jules Massenet opera, first performed four years later.

This summary omits everything, absolutely everything, that makes France’s short novel interesting, exasperating, ridiculous, profound, bad, and great.  Dead center in the novel is a parody of Plato’s Symposium, which brushes against the Judas heresy before concluding that the secret savior of mankind is a continually reincarnated Helen of Troy.  The courtesan Thaïs is an early Christian incarnation of the Helen-spirit, apparently.  I would apply all of the words in the above list, except “great,” to this one episode, which has nothing to do with anything resembling a story.

The monk Paphnutius - Massenet’s librettist found the name insufficiently euphonious and switched to Athanaël - encounters a series of figures who represent alternative, non-Christian philosophies, Skeptics and Stoics and Epicureans.  I began to fear that the entire book would be a series of such monologues or debates, and that Thaïs herself was simply one more point-of-view.

The monk’s obvious sexual repression was a complicating factor, though.  After the conversion of Thaïs, which, in an irony discarded by the opera, has almost nothing to do with any action of the monk, his condition, his spiritual and physical anguish, grows even worse.  Here’s where I began to use the word “great,” for the torments of Paphnutius, a twenty page series of increasingly bizarre visions and agonies, of which Massenet contains barely a hint.

In the center of the episode, the saint becomes a stylite.  In the sort of irony France would employ repeatedly in Penguin Island (1908), the saint draws pilgrims; the pilgrims draw commerce; commerce creates a prosperous city; a prosperous city is full of vice:

In the inns, the drinkers, reclining upon divans, called for beer or wine.  Dancers, with painted eyes and naked breasts, performed before them religious and lascivious scenes.  Young men played dice apart, an old men pursued courtesans.  Above these moving forms the motionless column stood alone; the horned head looked into the shadow, and above it Paphnutius watched between heaven and earth.  Suddenly the moon arose above the Nile, like the naked shoulder of a goddess.  The hills streamed with light and azure, and Paphnutius thought he saw the flesh of Thaïs sparkling in the light of the waters among the sapphires of the night.

The episode culminates with the monk’s renunciation of his sainthood when he calls for the assistance of the human Christ.  The human Christ is, of course, long dead.  The human saint is on his own.

The quotation is on p. 111 of a 1932 edition, published by Walter J. Black, translated by who knows who.  It’s different than, but similar to, Gutenberg’s version.

A hodgepodge of factual matter and unsupported opinion about Anatole France

For some reason, I want to spend a good part of the week on a couple of novels by Anatole France, Thaïs (1890) and Penguin Island (1908).  These were once famous books; France was once a famous writer – he won the Nobel Prize in 1921, at the age of 78, and his reputation has been in decline ever since.  His banquet speech is worth a glance.  The first sentence is hilarious.

In some sense, I mean his reputation in English, but I am not convinced that his status in French is much higher.  I paged through a couple of recent histories of French literature (e.g., A Short History of French Literature, Sarah Kay, 2003, Oxford UP) and France was always mentioned, but not for any of his books.  He has been reduced to a pro-Dreyfusard and a friend of Zola.

Penguin Island actually has a long episode that is a satirical revision of the Dreyfus Affair.  It’s poor stuff compared to the sophisticated use of the episode in Proust’s work, but France’s writing has an entirely different tone and purpose, and contains one brilliant bit I want to write about later.  I wonder if Proust has come to fill the literary niche France once occupied.

I invoked the dread word – satire.  No doubt France, in his dozens of books, had more than one mode, but in both of the novels I read he could not be clearer about his pedigree.  In tone, style, ideology, he is a disciple of Voltaire and other eighteenth century rationalists.  Thaïs evokes Zadig (1747); Penguin Island covers all of French history, and thus moves through time rather than space, but has a kinship with Candide (1759), and even ends with the cultivation of a garden, sort of – more of a meadow, really.

The garden is atop the ruins of Paris, disguised “Penguin” Paris, which has been dynamited by anarchists.  Yes, another demolished city!  I didn’t know it was there, honest.  The novel actually ends with another city built over the garden built on the old city.  You can retreat from the world and cultivate your garden, but only up to a point.

Thaïs is the basis of the third most performed Jules Massenet opera.  The librettist of course eviscerates his source, but the opera is nevertheless excellent, at least when performed, as I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, by Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson – but when is that not true?

Penguin Classics has a single France novel in print, The Gods Will Have Blood, a historical novel of the French Revolution.  The French title is better - Les Dieux ont soif, The Gods Have Thirst – someone, please fix my French – because of the sinister ambiguity.  Thirst for what?  Oh no, for blood!  Anyone read it?

obooki read a couple of early France novellas last year (down near the bottom).  He gave Jocasta a 3 (of 10) and The Famished Cat a 4, which on his scale, where almost every book ever published is a zero, is pretty good.

Such a hodgepodge.  What have I learned?  Voltaire, in decline, Massenet, Dreyfus Affair, thirsty gods.  I might return to Massenet, but otherwise, the rest of the week, I’ll ignore all of this, and just write about the Anatole France I actually read.  Attention, focused; throat, cleared.