Playing with fire in France - Lyon's Fête des lumières

For the last four days, for just two hours a day, a big chunk of the center of Lyon has been converted into a kind of artsy urban theme park.  The theme is light – illuminations, light sculptures, and short films projected against every convenient large flat surface.  It's the Fête des lumières!

It is something to see, a French city emptied of cars and buses, surrounded by soldiers, and packed with people – several million people – wandering around, sipping hot wine, and taking what must be some desperately bad cell phone photos of light-based art exhibits.  I know most of my photos were awful.

This one is not bad.  An example of a light sculpture, the flying fish flapping around.  Or perhaps it is a bird, since I know, in spite of the bad crowd, that there is a nest in middle of the fountain, because I saw people constructing it earlier in the week.  I know there is a fountain because etc.  This is one of the pleasures of living in Lyon, witnessing not just the festival but the preparations for the festival.  To see a bubble appear around a fountain.

The short films attract large enough – enormous – crowds that I was being literal about the theme park.  Ordinary city streets are converted into cattle chutes, or whatever they call the crowd-control corridors at Disney World.  Get in line, wait, advance, wait, and emerge in one of the big city plazas to watch the cartoon.  The highlight for me was the tribute to film (visible on Youtube) that made simultaneous use of the facades of the City Hall and the Art Museum.  Only in France would the films selected for a cute cartoon make a pretty decent syllabus for an Intro to Film course; only in Lyon would the spectacle start with a long excerpt from Workers Leaving the Factory, the first film.

Curiously, the festival has a religious purpose as well.  The first sign that the festival was upon us was the appearance of the illuminated words “MERCI MARIE” on the hill over the city.  A religious procession mounts the hill and thanks Mary for protecting the city from pestilence and revolution and so on.  I glimpsed the procession on Friday while helping build a candle-sculpture at the base of a Roman amphitheater.  You can see the shape of the head, yes?

That night, the wind and rain and sleet were so bad that there were not many candles lit when we gave up.  Saturday, the weather was good and the artist was more ambitious, so it was a solid two hours of lighting candles with a gas campfire starter.  I am not sure what the design is, exactly, because by the time we had the whole thing lit, the crowds above us were too thick to bother with.

I was supposed to help again tonight, but the weather was and is too miserable.  Still: constructing candle art that a million people will see in a Roman theater while a procession of priests pass by – when else will I have the chance to do this?

An incomparable day - the joys of Pelle the Conqueror

I do want to write a little bit about the joys of Pelle the Conqueror, not just the language but the liveliness of the book.  It has occurred to me that the movie, for all its virtues – it is superb – exaggerates the misery of the story by greatly compressing the timeframe.  Pelle is “eight or nine” (17) when the novel begins and a teen by the end, the toughest, smartest kid in town.  The film has to crowd all of horrible stuff – the infanticide, the brain damage, the, um, the castration – into a period commensurate with a lack of change in the actors, especially the boy who plays Pelle.  So in the book, these little tragedies occur over the course of years rather than months.

So how about some of the novel’s joy.

Christmas Eve came as a great disappointment.  (75)

Off to a bad start.  Pelle’s father Lasse is no longer young, so Lasse and Pelle are low ranked even among farmhands.  Farm animals do not have holidays, so someone has to stay home.

There was dried cod and rice pudding on Christmas Eve, and it tasted all right…  (76)

The normal diet is herring and porridge, so this is an improvement.  Still.

Lasse and Pelle went to bed.

“Why is there Christmas anyway?” asked Pelle.

Lasse scratched his hip reflectively.

“That’s just the way it is,” he answered hesitantly.  “Well, then it’s the time when the year turns around and goes upward, you see…  And of course it’s also the night when Baby Jesus was born!”  It took him quite a while to produce this last reason, but it also came with perfect assurance.  “One thing goes with another, you see.”  (76, ellipses in original)

One of my worries about the subsequent novels is that they presumably have much less Lasse, a loss.  Hey, look what the words did there, neato.

Let’s try another holiday.  Chapter 18, the longest in the book, covers a memorable Midsummer Eve.

There were jars of stewed gooseberries, huge piles of pancakes, one hard-boiled egg apiece, cold veal, and an endless supply of bread and butter…  In the front was placed a small cask of beer, covered with green oats to keep the sun off it; there was a whole keg of aquavit and three bottles of cold punch.  (181)

Now that’s more like it.  The farm workers visit all the local sites, like the old tower and the valley with an echo.

“What is Karl Johan’s greatest treat?”  And the echo answered right away: “Eat!”  It was extremely funny, and they all had to try it with their own names – even Pelle.  When that was exhausted, Mons made up a question that made the echo give a vulgar reply.
“You shouldn’t teach it stuff like that,” said Lasse.  “What if some fine ladies came up here, and he started calling that after them?”  They just about died laughing at the old man’s joke, and he was so delighted by the applause that he kept on repeating it to himself all the way back.  Ho, ho – he wasn’t quite ready to be thrown to the rats after all.  (189)

Yes, I will miss Lasse.

Maybe I should have just rambled in this chapter.  It is full of delights.

The music sounded so sweet in the ear  and in the mind;  memories and thoughts were purified of all that was ugly; let the day itself take its due as the holiday it was.  It had been an incomparable day for Lasse and for Pelle – making up for many years of neglect.  Too bad that it was over instead of just beginning.  (196)

I took my dingy volume by the scroop - a Wuthering Heights anniversary - Then there was a hubbub!

"I could not bear the employment. I took my dingy volume by the scroop, and hurled it into the dog kennel, vowing I hated a good book.

Heathcliff kicked his to the same place.

Then there was a hubbub!"

Ha ha! That's the stuff!* Those are, of course, the immortal words of Catherine Linton-Heathcliff-Earnshaw, ten years old** and already out of her gourd. They were also written by Emily Brontë in Chapter 3 of Wuthering Heights, an inspirational book.

The internet is full of re-readings of Wuthering Heights - see Dorothy W. a few months ago for a high-level example, or Rohan Maitzen, who gets it all into one paragraph. "Not what I remember," that's the common refrain. It's not a romantic book, it turns out. Nor a sane one.

I see here that Anna Quindlen has a novel with a scene where a therapist prescribes Wuthering Heights to a teenager for therapeutic purposes. I had not realized that Quindlen had written a thriller about a psychiatrist who gaslights her clients - I had always thought she was so nice. I myself find Wuthering Heights therapeutic, but that's because I think maniacal laughter is healthy.

I have never seen a movie of Wuthering Heights, and I did not read it while an impressionable teen, so I will have to confess that the novel was just as I remembered it: funny, horrifying, original, clumsy in places, sublime in others.

This week I'll celebrate a slightly late first anniversary of Wuthering Expectations by wallowing around in the Wuthering half. I don't have anything in particular to say about the book, but that won't stop me from enjoying a good roll in it, like the bulldog Skulker*** when he has found a particularly fragrant and enticing dead thing on the moor.

P.S. I extend a special welcome to the omniscient Brontëblog, who will somehow make their way here by means of their mysterious internet voodoo.

* More books are abused - kicked around, thrown in fires - in Wuthering Heights than in almost any book I can think of this side of Swift's The Battle of the Books.

** More or less. I didn't keep track that carefully, although Emily Brontë did.

*** Note that it's the "normal" Lintons who have a bulldog named Skulker trained to bite little girls - "and look how Skulker has bitten her -- how her foot bleeds!" This is from Edgar and Catherine's "meet cute" scene - she's bit by a dog, he stands there and points at her.

George Eliot, party girl

I have been getting stuck on the harvest party, near the end of Adam Bede. That party is actually a structural sequel to a remarkable long scene (7% of the novel) in the exact center of the book, Captain Arthur Donnithorne's 21st birthday party. Arthur is the son of the big local landowner, so the whole county is at the party, almost every character in the novel.

Eliot describes everything. The food, the toasts, the dancing. There's a fine two or three pages devoted to the disappointment in her prize of the girl who wins the sack race. There's a sack race! And a donkey race. It's a good party. Lazy movie critics would say the scene is Altmanesque.

The party is the climax of the first half of the novel. Not of the plot - up to this point there has hardly been any. Eliot spends 300 pages setting the scene. This is risky. She risks tedium. The girl and her prize is a good example. After winning an extremely undignified race, she wants something pretty, and is crushed to find that she's won a heavy winter robe and some flannel. This scene advances the crucial "young woman's vanity" theme, and ties it to a "forward motion" theme that won't be understood until later in the book.* The more I look at it, the more artful it seems. But the girl herself is a character of very little importance, and the scene does not move the plot by an inch.

It's not exactly the case that nothing happens up to this point. Adam's father dies in a drunken accident early in the novel, and the love triangle that's the center of the main story begins to develop. But all of this is still part of normal life. The birthday party - now that's an extraordinary event. "It'll serve you to talk on, Hetty, when you're an old woman - how you danced wi' th' young squire the day he come o' age." Poor Hetty.

What are the precedents for this novelistic use of a party? Balzac sets a lot of important scenes at parties and balls, but rarely spends any effort describing the party itself. The ball in Jane Austen's Emma is more what I'm thinking of.

The list of later parties is much longer. Joyce surely knew Adam Bede - "The Dead" is a descendent of Eliot's party. Lampedusa might have known it, too - he was a demonic reader of English novels, and The Leopard has a classic party, more tightly tied to the structure of the novel than Eliot's. I wonder if Proust knew Eliot? Those endless parties of his. Talk about risking tedium! Risked, and achieved.

* And she abandons her prize - she "throw[s] down the odious bundle under a tree"! If you haven't read the book, you won't know what I'm talking about. Tomorrow, maybe.