By Pedro Pizano
July 21, 2009

At the hearings to confirm Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme court it seems the issue is not her views on some of the most pressing issues of our times (like abortion or the capital punishment), but on her racial background.

In any case, the law (and the woman behind the bench), is supposed to have no race or skin-color. Yet, it cannot be denied that cultural diversity is useful to put a case in context rather than to create prejudice for or against it.

The arguments against Sotomayor’s confirmation that have been made by die-hard republicans and, of course, the NRA, are based on a comment, a ruling, and her 12 years as a board member of Latino Justice, (formerly known as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF)), almost as if her 17 years of experience as a federal judge didn’t count, nor her top-of-her-class honors from Princeton Law.

‘I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” Sotomayor said in a 2001 speech. A comment which have led many, as Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Al.), to say that she’s a ‘reverse racist.”

This would mean, at least for Republicans, that if Sotomayor were to be confirmed, she would use her bully pulpit to favor Hispanic and other minorities.

Sotomayor recently explained what she had meant by her “wise Latina” phrase. “I used a rhetorical figure that didn’t work. It was unfortunate because it gave the impression that I believe that personal experiences shape the outcome of a case but that is clearly not what I do as a Judge.” “The goal of that speech,” she continued, “ was to motivate students, lawyers, and Hispanics to understand how their personal experiences enrich the law… Life experience has to influence you, we are not robots that see proofs without feeling. We have to recognize our feelings and put them aside. That was what my speech [back in 2001] said.”

Sen. Sessions, who’s also the highest ranking Republican in the Senate Judiciary Committee, said those words said back in 2001 were “completely the opposite of what you are saying now.” Sen. Sessions is also afraid that her judicial “philosophy” will “blossom” in the highest seat in the nation where she will not be subject to revision from a higher court.

These arguments made against the nomination by the Republicans are futile since they themselves have recognized that they do not have enough votes to impede her confirmation by the senate. Even more, Sen. Sessions, who led the attacks against Sotomayor, has a history of ‘insensitivity” in regards to racial issues. Some reports even say that during his nomination hearings, Session said jokingly that that the Ku Klux Klan wouldn’t be as bad if some of its members didn’t smoke Marijuana.

So, in short, Republicans are using the hearings to advance their own agenda with no regard as to what the purpose of the hearings are in the first place. The purpose of their questions against Sotomayor don’t intend to prove whether she’s ready for the supreme court or not, they just want to gain points with their voters. Not that they even need it, of course. In the case of Sen. Sessions (R.-Al), he was reelected with 64% of the vote in 2008. Then again, Alabama is a state where Obama (the first African American president ever) only got 10% of the white American voters.

The problem lies in the fact that Hispanics are still perceived of being of a lower class in a country which paradoxically proclaims itself to be classless. The influx of immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America who hold what some people call “menial jobs”, has created a racial prejudice. And while prejudices serve as self-defense mechanisms in emergency situations (i.e. crossing the street when a hooded man with baggy pants approaches you in a dark alley), once in a while someone like Sotomayor comes along, someone who’s ready to prove everyone wrong and become, without doubt, the first Hispanic ever in the supreme court.

Image taken from here.

Some facts and quotations taken from Maribel Hastings’ article in Spanish. (Read it here)

“Good advertising can only make a bad product fail faster.”

By Pedro Pizano
Jul 15, 2009

In the art or science of thrusting things into people’s attention when people do not believe that they deserve to be there, (i.e. MARKETING), the “Colombia is Passion” video has made its claim to fame.

This three-minute clip has been broadcasted over the Internet and on national TV, both in English, Spanish, French and German, as part of a nation-wide campaign to change the world’s perception of Colombia.

The story is as follows. In 1996 the Colombia Government approached one of the leading authorities on country branding, Mr. David Lightle, to ask him to create a marketing campaign to improve the country’s image. Mr. Lightle went to Bogotá, looked around and said, “Don’t waste your money,” according to Matt Moffett from the Wall Street Journal.

When the new government headed by Alvaro Uribe called Mr. Lightle again in 2004, the country seemed to have become better organized (or in the very least had money to waste) and Mr. Lightle accepted the offer and designed the “Colombia is Passion” campaign of which the video is its flagship.

The video has become so popular that, on YouTube alone, many different groups have uploaded about 300 videos on the same subject. Some of the titles are as follows: “Find out the truth about Colombia,” “The Colombian army is full of Passion”, and “The risk is wanting to stay”.

The original video “Colombia is Passion”, designed by Mr. Lightle, has been watched almost one million times on YouTube. It uses a little sweet-voiced Colombian girl that speaks in English to narrate a carefully constructed discourse. For example she says, “and all of them share one thing….[a] passion for peace. Perhaps, now you will think differently about my country because what I have just showed you reflects who we truly are. Colombia is all about Colombians, that’s why Colombia is Passion!”

Apart from the obvious grammatical error, the angle from which is made seems to be quite clear. That is, the over-the-top hyperbolic reworking of Colombia’s élan vital with the objective to change the world’s perception of a country that in the 1990’s had been put on the U.S.A. black list with countries such as North Korea and Cuba.

The clip starts off with the sounds of coffee beans splashing across the screen falling at the rhythm of rapid-fire drumming, and then moves on to show the famous emeralds, a parrot to endorse the country’s biodiversity and finally in a carefully constructed transition we start hearing new-age operatic voices while we watch the beaches and mountains of Colombia as if seen from the window of a private airplane. Afterwards, we hear for the first time the voice of the little girl, while at the same time we are shown a picture of a blonde girl perched upon a tractor. In the next clip we see her cuddled by her mother. She says: “This is how my country looks from the outside. Now I want you to see it from the inside.”

And so it continues, the girl is always the narrator, and the positivist images, coupled with slide-shows, come in rapid succession as the girl describes them. “There is progress, exquisite coffee, countless beautiful women and orchids… we have art, just think of Master Fernando Botero’s art. The man who made the world fall in love with the chubby ones…”

It is very well made and carefully constructed. The girl provides emotional appeal, the images visual stimulation. The film-making leaves you breathless and at the end your perception of Colombia has been changed forever and for the better. Let’s just hope that the prophetic words of Bill Bernbach don’t hold true in this case: “Good advertising can only make a bad product fail faster.”

Picture taken from nation-branding (Good resource about this advertising phenomenon)

First sentence by Simon Anholt.

By Pedro Pizano
Jul, 15, 2009

Colombia has been nation-branded, following the latest fads in advertising, as “Colombia is Passion.” The ulterior motives for such a campaign are unclear but it is obvious that the intent is to change the world’s perception of its war ridden hostage situation.

The flagship of this campaign is a video, in English, blatantly advertising all the wonders of Colombia. It is complemented with “Colombia is Passion” merchandise and a countrywide campaign to change Colombians’ perception of themselves. This campaign has achieved spectacular results. In just two years tourism increased by 65%, and not only that, it has created what can only be called a brainwashing of its citizens. Colombians now believe they live in one of the happiest countries in the world, as related by two studies on world happiness done in 2003 by the University of Erasmus at Rotterdam, and in 2005 by the New Economic Foundation in London.

Brainwashing may be strong term but it can be argued that the campaign of Colombia is Passion is partly responsible for Colombian’s thinking so highly of themselves. In a nation-wide summon for letters, The Luis Angel Arango Public Library (the most visited public library in the world per day), received around 7,000 letters that related personal stories of dealing with violence. The subsequent exhibition was called “Letters of Persistence.” According to the curator, Maria Ospina, a Harvard PhD in comparative literature, about 500 of them (10%) echoed the words of the “Colombia is Passion” advertising. 

“People were asked to write about how they had overcome and persisted violence through their personal life stories,” Ospina said in an email, “About 500 of those letters responded with: “Colombia is beautiful, it has two oceans, many natural resources, frogs, etc. That is, they couldn’t talk about their personal life but rather fell back into what the propaganda [Colombia es Pasión] was saying.”

If Colombians have a passion for something it’s a passion for killing their brothers. A passion that has spanned a couple of centuries and has left the county ravaged by “underground” civil wars after civil wars. Yet, the country still manages to proclaim itself as the longest standing democracy in South America. It seems then, that this whole self- deception has become a habit in Colombia.  Colombians can’t handle the truth, so they prefer to hide it. Even Gabriel Garcia Marquez disguises it in his style of writing, which has been tied up in the most simplistic of terms as “magical realism”: “Magical realism is perfectly suited to a country like Colombia, where the truth is often so terrible and unspeakable that it needs to be told as if it were a fantasy,” according to New York Times contributor Silvana Paternostro.

Here’s a bit of that truth. In the 1990’s the eruption of cocaine consumption and the subsequent rise of Drug Barons such as Pablo Escobar made Colombia one of the most dangerous countries in the world. At some point it had the highest murder and kidnapping rate in the world. Put on the black list with countries such as North Korea and Cuba, tourism was at an all time low in the 1996. In 2002, Alvaro Uribe’s new government created and paid for an advertising campaign to brand Colombia as a country of passionate, good people.

There’s nothing wrong with advertising a country’s positive points but the historical situation in which this advertisement was created and the denial of where the money comes from to pay for this advertisement (The government paid for 65% of the costs) seems to tell another story. (Read a brief history of the Colombia is Passion Campaign)

How does the video make us forget all of this underlying violence?

With mesmerizing cinematography of the countries astounding biodiversity and a little girl speaking in English with a Colombian accent, the video tells the world how Colombia is composed of “ many, many, many good people… we Colombians, are ordinary people…people with problems but who are nonetheless considered among the happiest under the sun.”

Sometimes the video comes through as a catch-22: trying to hide the holocaust behind the images using all the tricks of the trade. Again, much in the same way Philip Morris was able to market filtered cigarettes as being healthy in 1932. Where does advertising stop and deceiving begin?

As Simon Jenkins says in the Guardian on Feb 8, 2007, “Passion alone won’t rescue Colombia from its narco-economy stigma.” Colombia still produces 80% of the cocaine that is consumed in the U.S. and 50% of its heroin (even after 6 billion dollars of U.S. aid to fight the drug war). Whichever way you turn the pancake, it is a country laden with Drug Money.

If you want to delve further into it, it has one of the biggest populations of displaced people in the world, second only to Sudan and there are still 700 people, or more, held hostage in the jungle by left wing narco-terrorist group the FARC.

St. Tertius, on a comment left on the guardian article mentioned above, equates the video “Colombia is Passion” to what the Catholic Church has been doing for years on end, i.e. concealing and distorting the truth. He says on Feb 9, 2007,  “I hate the “Colombia es pasión” advertisement. Its not-so-subtle religious undertones reminds many of us of the times when referring to Colombia as “el País del Sagrado Corazón” [Land of the Sacred Heart] wasn’t intended as a complement, but as an indictment for the most backward aspects of its culture.”

Nonetheless, the video is very well made, so much that Colombians themselves have begun to believe that Colombia is a perfect, happy place and that it can live up to the Lonely Planet accolade as the 9th best tourist attraction in 2006.  Aren’t there some really obvious problems that have to be dealt with, though?

Where is the fine line between fantasy and reality? It lies in the crack between the message announced by the Colombia is Passion video and the Confession of one of the para-military leaders, (private armies who vow to kill every last FARC rebel) who avowed before an U.S. court to at least 300 murders (the Colombian police holds him responsible for the deaths of more than 7,000 Colombians).

Where is the truth? It’s certainly not in this Public Service Announcement.

In a campaign similar to that of Philip Morris with the Marlboro brand, Colombia is trying to change the world’s perception of its war ridden hostage situation in much the same way as Philip Morris hid the relationship between smoking and cancer for so many years. This time it’s in the form of a video called “Colombia is Passion.”

Since the 1990’s, with the eruption of cocaine consumption and the rise of Drug Barons such as Pablo Escobar, Colombia has been perceived as one of the most dangerous countries to visit. Put on the black list with countries such as North Korea and Cuba, tourism was at an all time low in the 1990’s. In response to this “dire” situation the new government of Colombia, headed by Alvaro Uribe, (who was elected in 2002) created and paid for a 4 million-dollar advertising campaign to brand Colombia as a country of passionate, good people.

The result is a video, in English, blatantly advertising all the wonders of Colombia, coupled with merchandise, and a countrywide campaign to change Colombians’ perception of themselves. This campaign has achieved spectacular results. In just two years tourism increased by 65%, and not only that, it has created what can only be called a brainwashing of its citizens. Colombians now believe they live in one of the happiest countries in the world, as related by two studies on world happiness done in 2003 and 2005, by the University of Erasmus at Rotterdam and the New Economic Foundation in London, respectively.

There’s nothing wrong with advertising a country’s positive points but the historical situation in which this advertisement was created and the denial of where the money comes from to pay for this advertisement (The government paid for 65% of the costs) seems to tell another story.

As Simon Jenkins says in the Guardian on Feb 8, 2007, “Passion alone won’t rescue Colombia from its narco-economy stigma.” Colombia still produces 90% of the cocaine that is consumed in the U.S. and 60% of its heroin (even after 6 billion dollars of U.S. aid to fight the drug war). Whatever way you turn the pancake, it is a country laden with Drug Money.

If you want to delve further into it, it has one of the biggest populations of displaced people in the world, second only to Sudan and there are still 700 people, or more, held hostage in the jungle by the FARC.

How does the video make us forget all of this?

With mesmerizing cinematography of the countries astounding biodiversity and a little girl speaking in English with a Colombian accent, the video tells the world how Colombia is composed of “ many, many, many good people… we Colombians, are ordinary people…people with problems but who are nonetheless considered among the happiest under the sun.”

Sometimes the video feels as if it is trying to hide the holocaust behind the images using all the tricks of the trade. Again, much in the same way Philip Morris was able to market filtered cigarettes as being healthy. Where does advertising stop and deceiving begin?

St. Tertius, on a comment left on the guardian article mentioned above, equates the video “Colombia is Passion” to what the Catholic Church has been doing for years on end; he says on Feb 9, 2007,  “I hate the “Colombia es pasión” advertisement. Its not-so-subtle religious undertones reminds many of us of the times when referring to Colombia as “el País del Sagrado Corazón” [Land of the Sacred Heart] wasn’t intended as a complement, but as an indictment for the most backward aspects of its culture.”

Nonetheless, the video is very well made, so much that Colombians themselves have began to believe that Colombia is a perfect, happy place and that it can and will live up to the Lonely Planet accolade as the 9th best tourist attraction in 2006.  Aren’t there some really obvious problems that have to be dealt with, though?

If Colombians have a passion for something it’s a passion for killing their brothers. A passion that has spanned a couple of centuries and has left the county ravaged by “underground” civil wars after civil wars. Yet, the country still manages to proclaim itself as the longest standing democracy in South America. It seems then, that this whole self- deception has become a habit in Colombia.  Colombians can’t handle the truth, so they prefer to hide it. Even Gabriel Garcia Marquez disguises it in his style of writing, which has been tied up in the most simplistic of terms as “magical realism”: “Magical realism is perfectly suited to a country like Colombia, where the truth is often so terrible and unspeakable that it needs to be told as if it were a fantasy,” according to New York Times contributor Silvana Paternostro.

Where is the fine line between fantasy and reality? It lies in the crack between the message announced by the Colombia is Passion video and the Confession of one of the Paramilitary leaders, (private armies who vow to kill every last FARC rebel) who avowed before an U.S. court to at least 300 murders (the Colombian police holds him responsible for the deaths of more than 7,000 Colombians).

Where is the truth? It’s certainly not in this Public Service Announcement.

By Pedro Pizano

Paternostro, Silvana My Colombian War: a journey through the country I left behind 310pp. Holt and Company $16.00
________________________________________________________________________

When Silvana Paternostro, a Colombian-born journalist and one of 50 Latin American Leaders for the New Millennium, went home for a writing seminar with the most renowned of all Colombian novelists and a former journalist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, she realized that the “magical realism” of Colombia had become an imaginary world of horror stories. “I am here as the journalist who went to Colombia to move between the magical and the real—and sometime actually the awful…. except I like to call my stories non-fiction magical realism,” Paternostro said once in L.A.

My Colombian War is a moving and horrifying account of how Paternostro tried to recover the magical realism of her childhood by trying to be a war reporter in that forsaken land. It is written in short bursts of beautiful heart-wrenching prose that makes one (or me at least) cry at the despair and hope her words and phrases convey.

“To them [Colombians], Colombia might not be at war,” Paternostro says in the book, “But I am at war with Colombia. I am going back because there is a war, brutal war, a war full of horror. I am going to tell them that each and every one knows it, allows it, and hides it. Everyone has blood on their hands. I want everyone to plead guilty.”

The only way to fight any war is through words. As Paternostro says, “Magical realism is perfectly suited to a country like Colombia, where the truth is often so terrible and unspeakable that it needs to be told as if it were a fantasy,” and therein lies her strife.

My Colombian War tells the tale of Paternostro’s journey through her childhood on an assignment from the New York Times. Her initial intent was to write about Colombia’s war by visiting her grandfather’s farm, El Carmen. Through a personal experience and personal history she sought to recreate the country’s fight over land that has been reenacted by different groups since the birth of the modern Colombian Republic in 1820. At first it was a blood bath between Liberals and Conservatives, then it was genocide between Liberals and Conservatives, then it was a massacre between the FARC, the ELN, the Army, the Police and the AUC. And so it will go on forever if no one is willing to stop the vicious cycle of fighting for land in Colombia.

For some, the history of Colombia becomes the background in which Paternostro self-aggrandizes her emotions and they write off the book as a narcissistic but brilliant fictional narrative, for others the local becomes the universal and through her life we understand the whole; “Blending superb reportage with poignant personal stories, she offers stunning, comprehensive narrative of Colombia’s complicated past and present,” as the back cover explains.

In the end no one else could have written this book: her qualities as a reporter, her emotional grandeur and analysis could have only come from someone like Paternostro. Her story is in itself magical realism and her war with language and with life brings with it great literature in the making. I would put it next to Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Garcia Marquez: his best story and the one that has lived in my mind the longest and the most. Happy reading!

Baudelaire, Maupassant and Modernity

“For I, to fold enchantment round their hearts,
Have pools of light where beauty flames and dies,
the placid mirrors of my luminous eyes.”
From Beauty by C.B

uy de Maupassant’s stories, “A necklace”, “A million”, “A Parisian Affair”, and “Mother of Invention”, are modern, by the criteria set out by Baudelaire, in the choice of subject and in their choice of setting even if they are not comparable in feeling to what Baudelaire consider the most modern artistic current: Romanticism. Normally, Maupassant is considered a Naturalist or a high realism writer, but it can be said that he was modern for his time.

For Baudelaire, Art is Beauty: “The duality of art is the inevitable result of the duality of man. The eternal element may be considered the soul of art, if you wish, and the variable element its body” (293). Although the quote doesn’t express the relationship of art and beauty, the purpose of this discussion is precisely to establish “a rational and historical theory of beauty.” That being said, Art is beauty and the expression of the ineffable part of it through the present circumstances. These present circumstances make up the body of a work of art while the eternal element is the essence of art or the soul of it. This search is not particular to Art itself; it stems from the duality of man, as Baudelaire points out: men have a body and a soul and they strive to represent that in art.

Baudelaire has said before that this duality is precisely the duality of beauty: “Beauty is composed of an element that is eternal, invariable, and exceedingly difficult to measure, and of another element that is relative and circumstantial, such as period, fashion, morality, emotion, taken either one by one or all together.” (292-293). The former is very similar from the following:: “All forms of beauty… contain something eternal an something transitory- something absolute and something particular.”(292) The artist in trying to make a work of art that is beautiful can only be measured by how well he incorporated the eternal and the transitory in his work. The eternal part, as Baudelaire says, “is exceedingly difficult to measure,” but it must always be present.

As such we can affirm that art for Baudelaire is about the artist’s expressing this duality of beauty and of man. Even more, that that is what Art has always been, for as he says, “every painter of the past had his own modernity” (296). It follows that for Baudelaire Modernity is precisely that part of life, beauty, and man that lies in the present. It is the circumstantial, the spontaneous, the ephemeral. “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art, [that the former quotes had talked about] of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.” (296) Beauty contains two parts; one of which is the eternal and the other the transitory. The eternal part is very difficult to measure but it must be glimpsed and the transitory part is the circumstantial. That part which is transitory is the Modernity of a work of art for Baudelaire. Writers have always known that to write about universals is impossible; one can only reach that universality: that eternal part of beauty, by writing about the local and present situation. And in the describing the most local one finds the most universal.

This becomes easier to understand when one realizes that for art to be alive in the mind of the painter and of the beholder it has to have as much of the present as it can. It would be ridiculous or even profoundly satirical to sculpt for example a marble Adonis wearing an i-pod. For Baudelaire the importance of the present is that it harmonizes the work of art and it allows us to glimpse the eternal part of art which otherwise would be “indigestible, inappreciable, unadapted and unsuited to human nature.” (293).

Modernity is not then just the present, it must also make us glimpse that part of the eternal beauty, and last if not least it has to be original, and that for Baudelaire is only given by the present: “for almost all our originality comes from the stamp that time imprints upon our feelings.” (297) As I said before the most local (the transitory part) is the most universal (the eternal part) and in the most local is where one can find all the inspiration and all the originality. In that paradox is where great art lives.

Guy de Maupassant is a great artist. Not only because he was very successful during his time but because we’re still reading him 150 years later and his stories seem as alive as if they were written today. He is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and he was a protégé of that other great artist, Flaubert. Today we consider him as a classical author or to be more specific as a Naturalist or High Realism writer. Nevertheless, it’s the purpose of this article to understand if some of Maupassant’s stories can indeed fulfill Baudelaire’s criteria for Modernity, even if for us neither of them can be considered modern nor is it relevant if Baudelarie’s criteria for modernity still holds true. On this point there will be some opinions given at the end. The question right now is: do Maupassant’s stories fulfill Baudelaire’s criteria for modernity?

We will take as a reference point for the time being and for the sake of argument the artistic current called Romanticism. Whether M. is a romantic or not is a question we will address later. This will be useful when trying to determine whether M’s stories are modern or not since Baudelaire considers Romanticism “the most contemporary expression of the beautiful…To speak of Romanticism is to speak of modern art.” (40) It is in this discussion of romanticism that Baudelaire gives the most succinct points on what he considers modern and why.

Baudelaire mentions four criteria for a work of art to be modern as related to romanticism. These would be: the choice of subject, the choice of setting, the truth of art and the manner of feeling. Maupassant fulfills the first three and as such can be considered a modern artist if not a Romantic because for Baudelaire “romanticism lies neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in the manner of feeling.” For Baudelaire this manner of feeling is precisely the romantic feeling. That feeling is what gave way to the highest expression of romanticism with paradoxically enough is not a symphony, a work of art or a literary work. The highest moment of Romanticism as Bertrand Russell said, is Lord Byron’s death in Missolonghi, fighting for the liberty of Greece. By that he meant that romanticism was no mere painting current, a poetic or musical movement but a élan vital, an attitude toward the world, a way of seeing it and how we fit in it. Maupassant was not like that at all. As he said in the epitaph that he himself penned: “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.” Maupassan’t is not a Romantic but he certainly is modern according to the first three criteria given by Baudelaire: the choice of subject, the choice of setting, and the truth of art

The choice of subject can be equated to B. discussion of the heroism of modern life. For him, it is important to establish that there is indeed such a thing: “Before trying to discover the epic side of modern life and to prove through examples that our age is no less fertile in sublime themes that the past, it may be said that, just as all centuries and all peoples have had their forms of beauty, so inevitable we have ours. That is the natural order of things…” (43) Every age has a specific form of beauty and this abstract concept can be best explained by symbols. It is no coincidence that Baudelaire was the founder of symbolism and as such he has a beautiful metaphor full of the symbols of his modernity that expresses the form of beauty of his age. It is the metaphor of mourning.

Baudelaire puts it this way: “Is it not the necessary garb of our suffering age which wears the symbol of perpetual mourning even on its thin black shoulders?…an endless procession of hired mourners, political mourners, amorous mourners, bourgeois mourners. We are all of us celebrating some funeral.” Is it not true that all of the character start out mourning for something they don’t have and end up mourning because they got it and it didn’t live up to their expectations? It is important to remember that mourning here is taken metaphorically. Mourning is normally taken to mean a state of sorrow over the death or departure of a loved one. Maupassant shows that we can fall in love with many things; even things that we don’t have or that we don’t want to have.

In “A Parisian Affair” the ending paragraph says: “Returning home, the image of Paris swept inexorably clean by the cold light of day filled her exhausted mind, and as she reached her room, sobs broke from her now quite frozen heart.” She is mourning for that illusion she once had of the rich and beautiful of Paris. The illusion, the love for it has been swiped clean and there is nothing left but to mourn for the fairy tale story she had constructed in her mind. One feels she has lost a child of her imagination and that it will take her a while to replace this infatuation or love with something as appealing as the star-crossed world of fashionable Parisian stars.

In “A million” the Bonnins mourn for the promise of a million and the condition that they cannot fulfill to get it, and then, at then at end Madame Bonnin despises if not mourns for the women who commit adultery just because she did it for a higher purpose. Throughout the story she is mourning for the senility of her husband, for the child she can’t have, of what she must do to get it and all for the love of 1 million francs.

In “Mother of invention” la comtesse mourns for the children she doesn’t want to have and her husband mourns for the child who he thinks is not his. At the ends M. even gives us a glimpse of that melancholy which is so essential to Baudelaire and that let us see a little of that eternal beauty just as Baudelaire would have wanted. “He left, looking at her still and wondering that she could remain so beautiful. Stirring within him he could feel a strange emotion, perhaps more awesome, he thought, than good old-fashioned love itself.” (274)

Lastly, in “The Necklace” isn’t giving 10 years of life and beauty for a necklace that was not even worth 500 francs the most pungent of all mournings? Besides it fits in perfect with Baudelaire’s image of modernity: “Do not those puckered creases, playing like serpents around the mortified flesh, have their own mysterious grace?” (40)

For these reasons it is safe to say that these stories by Maupassant are modern according to the first criteria suggested by Baudelaire because they fulfill his symbols. Baudelaire also gives a very vivid image of what subjects a modern artist should tackle. “I notice that most artists who have dealt with modern themes have restricted themselves to public and official subjects…however, there are subjects to be found in private life that are far more heroic.” (44) It is clear that in all of Maupassant’s stories he writes about the private lives of woman.

Baudelaire, in fact, does not say that every private life is worthy of becoming a work or art. He goes on to describe with the morbidness that characterized him where one could find these private stories. “the spectacle of fashionable life and of thousands of stray souls – criminal and kept women – … all prove to us that we need only open our eyes to become aware of our heroism.” (44)

Here follow examples from the stories which prove that fashion is one of the underlying motives of the four stories. All the women are in love with fashion, they wanted and will do anything to uphold that fashion but at the same time risking all they have. Is that not a symptom that they are in love with it?

In “A Parisian Affair” the main character is precisely one who is obsessed with the fashionable life of the rich and wealthy:

“Lulled by the regular snoring of her husband sleeping next to her on his back with a scarf wrapped round his head, she conjured up the images of all the famous men who made the headlines and shone like brilliant comets in the darkness of her somber sky. She pictured the madly exciting lives they must lead, moving from one den of vice to the next, indulging in never-ending and extraordinarily voluptuous orgies…” (42)

“In “A Million,” the same hold true. “ Nevertheless she suffered all the time. She had been destined, or so she believed, for a delicate life of luxury” (296). These women are all after fashion and luxury. They believe that there they will be happy and I’m sure that that was not something Maupassant made up. There probably were millions of woman in the 19^th century who where thirsting to be fashionable. Another famous book describes exactly the same motives in woman and gives one of the most classical and most famous ways of social climbing. Even today we speak of one who will climb the social ladder by any means as a Rastignac. This book, of course is Pere Goriot by Balzac written very close to the short stories by Maupassant.

The setting is also of outmost importance to Baudelaire. “Parisian life is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. The marvelous envelops and permeates us, like the atmosphere itself but we do not see it.” (296) Fortunately, Maupassant found a way to show that to us, he was a convalescent transfixed by the newness of each day. Luckily for us every single one of the stories mentioned take place precisely in Paris. In none other than a Parisian affair M. writes: “She looked on Paris as representing the height of all magnificent luxury as well as licentiousness.” (42) We have proven that M. stories fulfill the first two criteria. The third one is the one of the truth of art.

As for what Baudelaire calls the truth of art, he is mainly referring to that of which we had spoken before: the depiction of the transient nature of the present; the dresses, costumes, streets and such manners which one could find in Paris in the 1870’s. It is obvious that these stories are set in the present. An even a character such as Jean Varin, which is mentioned by name in “A Parisian affair”, was a real sculptor. In “Mother of Invention” they make reference to real places in Paris, the Bois de Boulogne, L’Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile and the Champs Elysees.

Having fulfilled all three criteria Baudelaire proposed we can say that these fours stories are without doubt modern for Baudelaire. The choice of subject, the setting and the truth of art are present with very clear examples and symbols in all of them and they let us glimpse the eternal beauty through the transient beauty of the time and place where he wrote them. They are without doubt great works of art; it’s not for nothing that M. is considered the father of the modern short story. Are Baudelaire’s criteria still relevant today?

The criteria for modernity suggested by Baudelaire remained relevant until the 1950’s. He was without doubt the most important character and perhaps the founding father of modernity but after post-modernism and post-structuralism his criteria are just a theory of art that is outdated.Today we may find that the ugly is more beautiful or that a Campbell’s soup can repeated a thousand times can be art. We may even see an Adonis with an i-pod or a broken toilet displayed as art; a pipe that is not a pipe and some melting clocks in a surreal setting. A theory of art is overrated, even if it is more necessary than ever.

If we agree that everything can be deconstructed, that is that we can find the reference or the frame on which any theory or work of art is constructed, then there is no need for a specific theory of beauty but for many self-referential theories. Baudelaire’s can be one of them but it will not tell us if something is modern or even art. It is just another, although fascinating, way to view the world.

Add which books you took the quotes from!

picture taken from:

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1070/1323221975_c0da9e8733.jpg

Pedro Pizano

Roaring Paris

Paris, “La Ville Lumiere” has been a cultural hub since the late nineteenth century until our days. Writers, painter, and artists of all sorts have moved there and have created a rich imaginary world where Paris lives figuratively. This was especially true in the 1920’s where a series of socio-economic, political, moral, and cultural factors allowed and motivated American writers, as Hemingway and Stein, to live there.

This paper will start with a general description of the aforementioned factors to be able to understand what Post-war Paris was like and why it was so appealing. The argument will center and stem from the factors themselves and not from the point of view of the writers. Immediately after, it will flip the coin and examine why the authors themselves wanted to move there: their fundamental assumptions about an artist’s life, their views on America and their place in it, the consequences of The Great War on their psyche, and how it is or not a youth-culture movement. It will end by demonstrating the aforesaid experience of Paris by using examples from A Moveable Feast and Paris France, by Hemingway and Stein respectively. Henceforth follows the description of economic, social, technological, political, moral, and cultural factors of Paris, France in the 1920’s in that order.

The 1920’s were called the roaring 20’s primarily because for the first time the United States became an economic and military super-power in the aftermath of the Great War. The cultural and technical production that began in the US quickly spread like infectious fire through all of Europe. In France, the years from 1920 until the onset of the Great Depression were called the “années folles”(Crazy years). These economic factors made Europe very appealing for Americans.

In Paris the exchange rate for the dollar was so favorable that one could rent a comfortable apartment in La Rive Gauche for less than fifty dollars a month.[1] The economical situation was so bad in France because of two reasons, the material devastation of the Great War and the casualties the French men endured:

“It was France which paid the biggest price of the war when comparing the demographic scale. 1,325,000 people died and 280 million people were injured. … An economist, Sorby, evaluated the total material damage of France caused by the World War I as 55 billion francs. This is equivalent to 15 times the national income of France before the World War I°.”[2]

Paris, being the capital of France, suffered the most: the active population decreased by 10.5 percent and repeated bombings caused damage and casualties, especially in 1918 with the development of German long-range siege artillery. The United States, on the other hand, since it was indirectly paying for the rebuilding of all Europe with loans at elevated interests rates and it was transitioning from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy was able to become the richest nation in the world.

The other grand reason as to why Paris was so appealing were the amazing technological advances that occurred in the early years of the 20th century, to name a few: electricity, automobiles, airplanes, telephone, radio and cinema. Also, basic appliances such as washing machines, clothes dryers, exercise machines, refrigerators, freezers, electric stoves, and vacuum cleaners all became popular from the 1920s. France was a mayor player in the technological advancement. For example, the Paris Exposition of 1889 was the first electrical installation that was successful on such a big scale.[3] The cinema was also invented by Auguste and Louis Lumière in Paris and by the start of the twentieth century when the automobile industry was beginning to take off, France produced 30,204 cars in 1903, representing 48.8% of world automobile production that year.[4] France had basically a monopoly on the technological advances in the early years of the 20^th century. A monopoly that was slowly being taken away by those two countries that believe that war solves all their problems, the United States and Germany. Because of this Paris was a charming city during and after the second industrial revolution as it was called, and Berlin and NY were not.

In the United States the 1920 election of Warren G. Harding “symbolized the national mood. Inarticulate, unassuming, and inoffensive, Harding stuck many as less a visionary leader than a bumbling uncle.”[5] The national mood was one which was described by many expatriates as too business minded, too conservative and pragmatic and too rooted in its inflexible presumption of moral superiority to comprehend the disruptions brought about by cultural and technological change.[6] Harold Stearns (whom Hemingway parodied as Harvey Stone in The Sun Also Rises) criticized existing conditions in America and the Young Intellectual published in 1921: “The institutional life of America is a combination for the blackjacking of our youth into the acceptance of the status quo not of 1920, but of the late eighteenth century in government, of the early nineteenth century in morals and culture, and of the stone age in business.”[7] Add to that the Eighteenth Amendment of 1919 which made prohibition law for the next 30 years and it can be understood why Stearns ended his book with advice that became the battle cry of the expatriate artist” “Get Out!”

In the world at large, advances in philosophy, psychology, natural sciences, and physics eroded the belief humanity had in positivist progress, humility, servitude and Christian virtues. In philosophy the most representative is Nietzche (1844-1900) with his superhuman and his will to power. Darwin advances the theory of evolution and chance is thrown into human nature, Freud brings forth the deep dark unconscious and Einstein makes everything relative. These were all essential cultural factors in the 1920’s and were the precursors and some of the consequences of The Great War. As such, writers would adopt them: sometimes as a general feeling of disenchantment in the world at large, sometimes as a means to explore regions formerly unknown in their psyche, or they would use them to create new literary techniques like James Joyce and his subconscious run on sentences or Stein and her distinctive style.

Regarding the Cultural Revolution that occurred in those years, The Roaring Twenties were where jazz music blossomed, the flapper redefined modern womanhood, and Art Deco peaked. The general spirit of the era was marked by a general feeling of discontinuity associated with modernity, a break with traditions. Everything seemed to be feasible through modern technology. Formal decorative frills were shed in favor of practicality, in architecture as well as in daily life. At the same time, amusement, fun and lightness were cultivated in jazz and dancing, in defiance of the horrors of World War I, which remained present in people’s minds. The period is also often called “The Jazz Age” because it was were the American big bands found their golden era and traveled throughout the world.[8]

For these reasons Virgina Woolf could write in 1924, “On or about December 1910 human nature changed…All human relations shifted — those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.”[9]

The roaring 20’s or the Crazy years in Paris were precisely the expression of that change, and it was only natural that writers such as Stein were there to live it and Hemingway moved there to experience it.

Stein writes in her book Paris France: “So it begins to be reasonable that the twentieth century whose mechanics, whose crimes, whose standardization began in America, needed the background of Paris, the place where tradition was so firm that they could look modern without being different, and where their acceptance of reality is so great that they could let anyone have the emotion of unreality.”[10] This quote beautifully summarizes what has been said in the former paragraphs, and illustrates in a few points the whole concept of the American expatriate. She then adds one of the most lucid sentences about American writers in Paris and she does it in a peculiar American “modernist” style: “…what is it to-day a French woman said to me about an American writer, it is false without being artificial…It did not take the twentieth century to make them [the French] say that as it has taken the twentieth century to make other people say that.”[11]

For Hemingway it was “the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is.”[12] As he himself tells on in A Moveable Feast, he was free to roam the scenic avenues and rues of Paris, with a notebook and pencils in his coat, until he found a café where he would order a café au lait and perhaps some St. James Rum. The atmosphere of these small cafés, with their peculiar customers, their marbled topped tables and pretty girls, would allow him to write endlessly and tirelessly:

“The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I though. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil…then the story was finished and I was very tired. I read the last paragraph and then I looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone…”[13]

In the former quote we can see how Hemingway uses his surroundings to catapult himself into the writing. The girl becomes his inspiration to start writing: “I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere…”[14] and then as we see in the former quote, she holds his attention fixed because it is his one constant fascination until the story takes over him, his surroundings, and everything else. At that point he belongs to Paris, Paris belongs to him but all of that belongs precisely to the act of writing. The only way Hemingway could seize his surroundings was through art (and I wonder if there’s any other way of doing it) and he could only do it in Paris.

Yet, Hemingway was not writing about Paris itself or its “belles femmes”, he was writing about Michigan. Why would he go all the way to Paris to write stories based on his experiences with his father on Walloon Lake in Petoskey, Michigan? “I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood,” he tells us, “and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things.” Of course, by other growing things he refers to stories and books. But what is exactly this notion of transplanting yourself and what are the motivations behind it apart from all the socio-political, economical and cultural factors already mentioned?

Curnutt examines the reasons why expatriate modernists, such as Hemingway, Stein, and many others would move to Paris in the 1920’s. He mentions 5 main characteristics which are: displacement as a fundamental condition of life, the denunciation of America’s repressive morality, the apparent renunciation of their nationality, the consequences of World War I, and the youth-culture movement it wanted to become.

Expatriate modernists depict displacement as a fundamental condition of life in the early 20^th century because they came of age at a time of personal tragedy, and “the only thing left to believe in was art…As Fitzgerald explained in his first novel, this Side of Paradise (1920), this generation had “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”[15] As such, Curnutt explains: “Foreign travel became a pastime in the 1920’s in part because it provides a perfect metaphor for expressing this orphan-like sense of not belonging.”[16] Travel in a foreign land breeds anxiety when one confronts languages one does not understand or food one is not accustomed to, therefore travelers usually compensate by imagining their comfort upon returning home. “But expatriate modernists did not believe a homecoming was possible. Because their childhood world was now so old fashioned and irrelevant to the contemporary scene, they saw themselves cut loose from their moorings, doomed to drift from port to port in search of a stability they were not sure they would ever find.”[17] This self-imposed exile by many American writers had this essential condition as its base; one that has been as old as mankind but that was especially poignant in those first decades of the twentieth century. Many people who were already of age by the 1900, which lived through the Bolshevik revolution in Russia or saw the coming of the century in Paris, have trouble explaining what these years were. They say that you would have had to live it to understand it. The years from 1900-1920 were the end of an era of humanity, of perhaps the highest artistic current: Romanticism, of faith in progress, and of the start of the century of death. How could anyone feel they belonged anywhere when all of these miraculous and scary changes were happening in the world at large? Specifically how could someone with artistic aims stay in a land that was still in the 18^th century and was ruled by Puritan morals such as the United States was?

Expatriate modernists denounce America as a land of repressive morality where puritanical attitudes render the nation incapable of acknowledging the uncertainties of the age. Curnutt explains: “Contributing to the modernist’s sense of displacement was their belief that the vast bulk of Americans failed to appreciate the complexities of modern life.”[18] By that they meant, as explained before, that you could not live in a land that was too-businesses minded and too conservative to comprehend anything about sexual freedom or personal freedom. Artists also wanted to dwell in a land where alcohol and other mind-altering substances (which have been associated with artistic production since the beginning of time but especially in the 19^th century) were readily available.

Although expatriate modernists condemned American conservatism, they did not renounce their nationality. Rather, they regarded Paris as a foreign realm in which they could create new identities, craft new values, and explore unconventional and taboo behaviors. Curnutt argues that American expatriates did not go to Paris because they were interested in Paris itself, nor in the culture or even the language. He says “The point of living and writing abroad was no to become a citizen of another country but to free oneself from the restrictions of home.”[19] I would argue otherwise because then they could have gone anywhere but they all chose Paris. From Joyce to Picasso everyone was in Paris at that time and it was because of its cultural history and its literary tradition. Artists have and will always be respected in Paris. Even today an artist will be given a parking spot over a politician or a rich merchant. For Americans in the 1920’s you simply had to go to Paris.

Henry Miller, another expatriate, in one of the seminal books about Paris writes: “Paris of itself initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil.” [20] This quote summarizes the 3 main points mentioned by Curnutt before. It explains displacement as a fundamental condition and its consequence of extirpation from the maternal womb or homeland, and the new experience that was to be found in Paris in those times.

Regarding the questions as to why it had to be Paris, Pizer tells us “And although any act of transplanting might theoretically be beneficial, it is Paris above all, as Miller implies, that has served as the best “obstetrical instrument.”…It is itself [Paris] an image of freedom in that it harbors –in its quartiers, its residents, and its activities-a sufficient range of life to dramatize how freedom of choice, and therefore, as in transplanting, a fuller growth, lie within one’s capacity simply through an act of movement.”[21] That is to say the city itself represents displacement itself and Hemingway is well aware of that when for example in the first sketch of A Moveable Feast he runs away from the Café des Amateurs because it’s filthy, to a nice café on Saint Michel where he can write. He describes with minute detail the streets he took to get there: “I walked down the Lyceee Henri Quatre and the ancient church of St. Etienne-du-Mont and the windswept Place du Pantheon and cut in for shelter to the right and finally came out on the lee side of the Boulevard St-Michel and worked on down it past the Cluny and the Boulevard St. Germain until I came to a good café that I knew on the Place St-Michel” [22] Paris, the city itself became a metaphor because of its geography and innumerous offers of culture, café life and people of the act of displacement itself. This was all configured by the cultural and socio-political history of the 19^th century, which is beyond of the scope of this paper to describe, but which made Paris the only destination possible for American writers in the 1920’s, contrary to what Curnutt believes.

Expatriate modernists also explore the consequences of World War I depicting it as a major cause of their disillusionment and disaffection. Curnutt affirms that “perhaps the greatest casualty [of WWI] was the idea that war was a noble endeavor fought for patriotism, the honor and glory of sacrifice and the valiant defense of one’s principles and convictions..[It] resulted in unprecedented cynicism toward the motives for armed conflict.”[23] Of course the war itself was one of the major displacements in the 20^th century with millions of soldiers leaving their homeland forever, never to return. The war simply ended all possibilities for the world to be the same and “the best expatriate modernists recognized that, although the war made belief in the values their elders bequeathed them impossible, to craft new ideals that would impose order and clarity upon the confusions of modern life remained the responsibility of the younger generation”[24]

Finally, expatriate modernism is a youth-culture movement because no one wanted to come of age in a world that had made the War possible and all its horrors. It was better to remain innocent and child-like to try to forge new ideals and not become and “adult” as dictated by society. Staying in America would have necessitated this and as such everyone who wanted to be anyone had to go to Paris.

For Hemingway and Stein, as we have seen, their sejour in Paris was essential not only for the maturation of their writing styles but also for the creation of their whole personalities. It was there that they first became writers, it was there that Stein could be openly lesbian, it was there that Hemingway lost his innocence and broke the vows of marriage for the first time but it was also one of the happiest of times before that. In short, Paris in the 1920’s represented a sort of Eden and a falling out of it, A Moveable Feast may be precisely the representation of that. “The image of a lost Eden,” Pizer explains, “is one of the most evocative and permanent resources of the western imagination, with writers and artists drawing upon a host of symbolic equivalents of the journey from innocence and bliss to tragic knowledge. Fore Hemingway [and Stein], Paris served this role well.”[25] And in that discovery and loss of Eden, writers such as these have created that figurative image of Paris which we all hold dear.

__________________________________________________________________

Name of your College or University:	BOSTON UNIVERSTY
Name of the course:	WRITING 150 PARIS IN LITERATURE
Date:	MARCH 24 2009

This paper proposes to review the various incarnations of Vautrin, or Jacques Collins in the mind of critics and of Balzac himself only to add at the very end another one. This new incarnation that this paper is proposing is that of Vautrin as the hero of capitalism following Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Jacques Collin would be her John Galt.

The paper will progress through a detailed examination of the various sources we have available for discovering the most enigmatic and fascinating character that Balzac ever created. He appears as a major character in no less than 4 of the great books of “La Comedie humaine”: Le Pere Goriot, Illusions perdues, Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes, and in La dernier Incarnation de Vautrin, (and as a minor character in who knows how many others) but he also has an entire play dedicated and named after him, Vautrin.

We will start of course with an examination of what Balzac wrote about Vautrin himself and then proceed to critical interpretations of Vautrin. We will see him as Balzac’ Double (alter-ego), the portrait of a real man Vidoq, as The Fallen Angel of Victor Hugo, and finally as Capitalism’s Hero.

Because of the scope of this paper we will examine just two sources from Balzac: Le Pere Goriot and the play Vautrin. It is interesting to note that Vautrin was performed for the first time at the Porte-Saint-Martin Theatre, Paris March 14, 1840 while the publishing house of Werde published Pere Goriot as a novel in March 1835. Illusions perdues is the name of two separate novels one published in 1837 and one published in 1839. Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes was published in four parts from 1838-1847, and “La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin” was first published in 1842. As we can see, Vautrin comes after Le Pere Goriot, during the writing of Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes.

Since we now that Balzac started writing Pere Goriot in 1834, we can assume that he was obsessed or at least infatuated with Vautrin for at least 13 years, at least that is as a literary character. But since Balzac cannot be described without being a realist and as someone who took everything from real life, the antecedents of this character take us back even further, specifically to the winter of 1828. At that time a French criminal king turned chief of the police named Eugène François Vidocq published a pair of memoirs recounting his criminal exploits. Balzac met Vidocq in April 1834, and used him as a model for a character named Vautrin he was planning for an upcoming novel.[1]

We first hear of Vautrin in the opening pagers of Le Pere Goriot. Its place in the book is very logical because Balzac starts the novel off by a complete description of the place the live in and the characters that live there. He has also placed the description of Vautrin at a significant point in the order by which he presents the characters. He has paired up 4 characters in the pages before (la demoiselle Michonneau with Poiret, who are similar, and Victorine and Madame Couture who is her governess). After Vautrin, he will describe Goriot. [2]

Not only does he describe Vautrin as the best of police novels do, he also sets the stage for what will become for some readers an obsession with the enigma of Vautrin. This is tremendously important in the context of Balzac’s work, because as McCarthy lets us known in her book: “In an article entitled “Balzac et le dechiffrement des signes,” Jean Luis Bourget claimed that “Dechiffrement” (“deciphering”) is the essential theme, motif, and structure of La Comedie humaine…A character that is certainly one of the most significant metaphors of dechiffrement in Balzac’s work is Jacques Collin.” [3]

Throughout all of the books that make reference to Vautrin we have to keep “Deciphering” who is this Vautrin that is presented to us. His many names add to the beauty of the game, but even then he’s so mysterious that “names alone will not do. In Le Pere goriot, the narrator also calls him, among many other names, a “sphinx en perruque” (3:133), “le tentateur”(3:163) and “ce demon”(3:184)”[4]

Later on McCarthy explains what she means by metaphor in the first quote mentioned above. Vautrin is not only a metaphor of a literary technique (Dechiffrement) and an “essential theme, motif and structure of La Comedie humaine” but also a metaphor of how we should read La Comedie Humaine, That is to say, the challenge that such a large and cluttered work poses to us and also the challenge it was for him to write it in the first place. This is why later this paper argues that Vautrin is indeed Balzac’s alter ego. “Jacques Collin, with his constant enticement to perceive beyond, is a metaphor for the challenge that Balzac extended to us within La Comedie humaine, a challenge that he himself accepted, to grasp the essential nature of reality.”[5] In the end Vautrin is Balzac: “

It is not for nothing that the sovereign ruler of the Balzacian kingdom is Vautrin, the great rebel, all of whose qualities imitate Balzac’s and resemble Satan’s. He has a taste for souls, which is also the passion of the true novelist, but which in Vautrin, is an infernal desire. Those whose salvation he claims to achieve are led to death, and one senses that more than once, Balzac trembled before the somber power of this double of himself.[6]

In short, Balzac gives as little information as he can about Vautrin in this opening paragraph, while giving us enough to become captivated. (We will only become fascinated with him at the scene of his arrest). What is really masterful in this description is that Vautrin is a man in disguise and as such Balzac has to describe his disguise but also let us glimpse why he’s disguised. Being a realist writer, Balzac has to give us an impression of reality but he has to hide the character’s reality at the same time. We really question ourselves, (in this game of dechiffrement) of the realism of a portrait of a portrait as Elodie says: “Dans le cas de Vautrin, … il faut décrire la seule apparence et en même temps livrer des indices qui préparent le dévoilement à venir. On s’interrogera donc sur le réalisme de ce portrait de ce portrait et sur sa dimension énigmatique.”[7]

The important traits that Balzac gives us are: the character’s strength, the force of his will, his large hands (and all the locks he can pick with them) and shoulders, his audacity, his seeming omniscience, his overarching knowledge and most particularly his penetrating gaze:

À la manière dont il lançait un jet de salive, il annonçait un sang-froid imperturbable qui ne devait pas le faire reculer devant un crime pour sortir d’une position équivoque. Comme un juge sévère, son œil semblait aller au fond de toutes les questions, de toutes les consciences, de tous les sentiments.[8]

For Elodie this is of outmost importance because “Le regard est analysé comme une voie d’accès vers l’âme; on déchiffre l’homme Vautrin en lisant dans ses yeux..[9]” The eyes are the windows of the soul, they say. In the case of Vautrin we see that his soul is made in the image of his body and vice versa, even better, his body has been made to fit his soul: “Vigueur du corps, de l’esprit et du caractère vont de pair; l’âme de Vautrin est bien chez elle dans le corps de Vautrin, l’une façonnée à dessein, semble-t-il, à le mesure de l’autre.”

It is precisely because of these two facts (the game of dechiffrement and his mysterious soul) that this man captivates us. McCarthy ends her discussion of Vautrin by saying: “The game of recognition that the presentation of Collin-Vautrin-Herrera requires of us, the perspective that it permits us, and the author’s careful design and manipulation of the character’s multilayered personality make of Jacques Collin one of the most fascinating reappearing characters in La Comedie humaine.”[10]

This paper will return to Le Pere Goriot after this example from the play Vautrin which succinctly explains one of the most confusing traits of Vautrin, his homosexuality, which has been discussed too many times to have any relevance here. For the sake of this paper we will just say that Vautrin takes an interest in talented and beautiful men and that this is not necessarily sexual but may also be paternal or both as Freud would later say. In this passage we see two things that we perhaps didn’t fully realize in le Pere Goriot. The first one is that he searches obsessively for purity of heart, and the other is that he takes that as his conscience, whether he does it because he doesn’t have an ounce of either of them, is still left to see.

“You may judge my power from what I am in process of doing for Raoul. Ought he not to be preferred before all? Raoul de Frescas is a young man who has remained pure as an angel in the midst of our mire-pit; he is our conscience; moreover, he is my creation; I am at once his father, his mother, and I desire to be his guiding providence. I, who can never know happiness, still delight in making other people happy. I breath through his lips, I live in his life, his passions are my own; and it is impossible for me to know noble and pure emotions excepting in the heart of this being unsoiled by crime. You have your fancies, here I show you mine. In exchange for the blight which society has brought upon me, I give it a man of honor, and enter upon a struggle with destiny; do you wish to be of my party? Obey me.”[11]

The last part of the excerpt above goes hand in hand with what Vautrin says to Rastignac in Le Pere Goriot about how to enter society. Vautrin’s life is a war-zone, and he thinks he’s a cannonball or an epidemic:

“Savez-vous comment on fait son chemin ici ? Par l’éclat du génie ou par l’adresse de la corruption. Il faut entrer dans cette masse d’hommes comme un boulet de canon, ou s’y glisser comme une peste. L’honnêteté ne sert à rien.[12]

At last we arrive to the scene where Vautrin is arrested and this is what we see:

“Tout espoir de fuite fut donc interdit à Trompe-la-Mort, sur qui tous les regards s’arrêtèrent irrésistiblement. Le chef alla droit à lui, commença par lui donner sur la tête une tape si violemment appliquée qu’il fit sauter la perruque et rendit à la tête de Collin toute son horreur. Accompagnées de cheveux rouge brique et courts qui leur donnaient un épouvantable caractère de force mêlée de ruse, cette tête et cette face, en harmonie avec le buste, furent intelligemment illuminées comme si les feux de l’enfer les eussent éclairées. Chacun comprit tout Vautrin, son passé, son présent, son avenir, ses doctrines implacables, la religion de son bon plaisir, la royauté que lui donnaient le cynisme de ses pensées, de ses actes, et la force d’une organisation faite à tout. Le sang lui monta au visage, et ses yeux brillèrent comme ceux d’un chat sauvage. Il bondit sur lui-même par un mouvement empreint d’une si féroce énergie, il rugit si bien qu’il arracha des cris de terreur à tous les pensionnaires. A ce geste de lion, et s’appuyant de la clameur générale, les agents tirèrent leurs pistolets. Collin comprit son danger en voyant briller le chien de chaque arme, et donna tout à coup la preuve de la plus haute puissance humaine. Horrible et majestueux spectacle ! sa physionomie présenta un phénomène qui ne peut être comparé qu’à celui de la chaudière pleine de cette vapeur fumeuse qui soulèverait des montagnes, et que dissout en un clin d’oeil une goutte d’eau froide. La goutte d’eau qui froidit sa rage fut une réflexion rapide comme un éclair. Il se mit à sourire et regarda sa perruque.

“Tu n’es pas dans tes jours de politesse,” dit-il au chef de la police de sûreté. Et il tendit ses mains aux gendarmes en les appelant par un signe de tête. “Messieurs les gendarmes, mettez-moi les menottes ou les poucettes. je prends à témoin les personnes présentes que je ne résiste pas.”Un murmure admiratif, arraché par la promptitude avec laquelle la lave et le feu sortirent et rentrèrent dans ce volcan humain, retentit dans la salle.”[13]

It’s such a great scene, and so pivotal to the understanding of Vautrin, that it is necessary to put it here in its entirety. As we can see, it is in this moment that we really see Vautrin for who he is. McCarthy tells us that it is in fact the only scene in all of La Comedie humaine where we see him without any masks or disguises, the only moment where we don’t have to play “le jeu de dechiffrement”: “…it is our first and last glimpse of the actual Jacques Collin. It is a brief and impressive portrayal of the powerful criminal, and it is the only appearance of him undisguised in all of La Comedie humaine.”[14]

Maybe the most important phrase in all the passage is the following where the revelation of who he is, is brought to a climax: “Chacun comprit tout Vautrin, son passé, son présent, son avenir, ses doctrines implacables, la religion de son bon plaisir, la royauté que lui donnaient le cynisme de ses pensées, de ses actes, et la force d’une organisation faite à tout.” [15] Balzac not only means that all the characters in the book understood everything about Vautrin in a brief moment of absolute clarity; he means that we as the readers do the same and that he himself understood everything about Vautrin, only when he wrote this scene.

It is those moments of absolute clarity where someone’s personality and character become so concentrated that we can penetrate into the mysteries of the human race through the actions of a single man. Balzac knew that and that’s why he added just after this passage, this description, in which Vautrin is not a man any more, not even a representation of a certain group of people but the degenerate nation itself, which in its hearth all human sentiments are represented, except guilt. Except guilt! A very important fact to remember when we discuss Vautrin as the hero of capitalism.

…Le bagne avec ses mœurs et son langage, avec ses brusques transitions du plaisant à l’horrible, son épouvantable grandeur, sa familiarité, sa bassesse, fut tout à coup représenté dans cette interpellation et par cet homme, qui ne fut plus un homme, mais le type de toute une nation dégénérée, d’un peuple sauvage et logique, brutal et souple. En un moment Collin devint un poème infernal où se peignirent tous les sentiments humains, moins un seul, celui du repentir. Son regard était celui de l’archange déchu qui veut toujours la guerre.[16]

To top it all off, in the first passage Balzac writes: “Collin comprit son danger en voyant briller le chien de chaque arme, et donna tout à coup la preuve de la plus haute puissance humaine.”[17] He gave proof of his possession of a power of the highest order, says one translator but it’s closer to the truth if one says he gave proof of the highest human power ever seen. Vautrin is indeed the most powerful human that has ever existed in La Comedie Humaine. That is why Victor Hugo will later compare him to God and Jesus Christ. He will say he’s almost the son of god become man. Or is he the fallen archangel, Lucifer?

Nevertheless Honore de Balzac was a realist and he took this Son of God from real life, he was inspired by Eugène François Vidocq (1775-1857) a criminal who became chief of the Paris police. Vidocq became very famous in France after the publication of his memoires in the winter of 1828. We know for sure from a footnote in the 6^th edition of Le Pere Goriot by P.G Castex that Levasseur mentioned the 4 volumes of Vidocq’s Memoires in a receipt presented to Balazc on the 10^th of February of 1830, and as such we know that Balzac read them. He also met him in 1834 and had dinner with him a couple of times and surely learned a lot from his mistress Madame de Berny.[18]

Here follows some facts from Vidocq’s life. He was born in Arras in 1775 to a baker: at 13 he already flourished his sword with extraordinary ability, and those who were comrades-in-arms gave him the only education he would ever receive. He ended up stealing 2,000 francs from his parents and leaving hem forever. This is the description of his first crime where it is surprising that he almost seems honest, and can’t bear to be weak in any way; Vautrin is describes in eerily similar terms when they arrest him. Vidocq says in his own words:

“Le comptoir etait ferme; je fus presque satisfait de rencontrer cet ob-

stacle. Cette fois, je me rappelai l’amour que me portait ma mere, non

plus pour me promettre l’impunite, mais pour eprouver un commence-

ment de remords. J’allais me retirer, Poyant me retint, son eloquence

inferale me fit rougir de ce qu’il appelait ma faiblesse…” [19]

Later in his memories Vidocq describes almost exactly the situation in Le pere Goriot where Vautrin wishes Rastignac to marry Victorine Taillefer so both of them can take advantage of her money, but in this scene Vidocq plays the role of Rastignac; it reminds us of the fact that Vautrin tells Rastignac that he’s been in the same position as he is now.

“Ce quadragenaire a l’habitude des femmes, il appuie ha-

bilement le jeune charmeur, et se prepare a tirer parti de la toquade de

l’hotesse. Il croit possible de les marier. C’est alors a peu pres la scene

dans laquelle Vautrin pousse Rastignac a epouser Victorine Taillefer,

avec cette difference que Vidocq joue le role de Rastignac, et non celui

du tentateur. Vidocq avance quelques objections, dont l’une au moins

ne manque pas de force: il est deja marie, bien qu’il ait quitte sa femme

depuis longtemps.”[20]

If we had kept reading, we would find that the old man, in fact, convinces Vidocq. He marries her and takes the money from this woman just as Vautrin wants Rastignac to do. The similarities are very evident although of course Balzac has inflicted some of his genius into every character, as Baudelaire would say. If genius is indeed what Balzac has, who other, than another genius, in this case Victor Hugo, to tell us why the creation of Vautrin is the work of a Master.

Again, it’s necessary to put the whole quote here, since it’s Victor Hugo and because he says some pretty impressive things. He mention the Son of God become man again and the myth of paternalism that surrounds Vautrin.

“Vautrin est le grand desherite de l’amour, le grand maudit du devouement. Vautrin est ce qu’il y a de plus tendre, dans ce qu’il y a de plus implacable, un coeur de pere sous une casaque de galerien. Il a ete rejete par la loi, il s’en venge en remplacant la nature. Il est raye du nombre des hommes, il s’en console en ajoutant au nombre des peres. Vautrin c’est le paria fait pere; c’est presque autant que le Dieu fait homme.”

The writer goes on to say the following which will become very important in the context of seeing Vautrin not as a criminal but as a savior which is always the case when one talks about capitalism’s hero, especially in the context of Ayn Rand.

“Faut-il donc croire que la Voix venue de l’Au-dela accepte l’homo-

sexualite de Vautrin comme un “remplacement” de la nature, et qu’en

mettant la main sur Lucien de Rubempre, apres avoir manque Ras-

tignac, l’ancien forcat s’eleve au niveau de Jesus-Christ? Pensee

sacrilege pour les croyants, absurdite pour les autres. “[21]

How can it be that Vautrin becomes a savior? Reboussin expresses it so well when he says in the last quote: “Pensee sacrilege pour les croyants, absurdite pour les autres.” Nevertheless, in one branch of philosophy called Objectivism, that of Ayn Rand, his character, his passions and his morals conform to what she refers to as a man and even more as the capitalist par excellence.

She would argue that Vautrin is the only moral character in the book, and as such he’s precisely the embodiment of capitalism’s hero. His lucidity and success come not only from the understanding of the principles (whether good or bad) that society proclaims it follows and the ones it really does, but also from the understanding that to be successful in a capitalist society you have to be selfish.

His morality stems from the fact that only a code of morality, according to Rand, accepted by choice is a code of morality:

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.[22]

Vautrin not only has made the choice long ago in his life and as such he became the embodiment of that morality he’s also a very rational being. As we can remember form one of the first quotes where we first encounter Vautrin in Le Pere Goriot, Balazc describes him as that archetype of rationality, he describes him as a judge: “Comme un juge sévère, son œil semblait aller au fond de toutes les questions, de toutes les consciences, de tous les sentiments.”

WORKS CITED

BOOKS

1- McCarthy, Mary Susan. Balzac and his Reader. 1949. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1982. (115-129)

2- Kanes, Martin. Critical Essays on Honore de Balzac. 1990. Boston: G.K. Hall & CO, 1990. (Beguin 124-125) (Van Rossum-Guyon 196-197)

3- Balzac , Honore de. Vautrin: The works of Honore de Balzac The Dramas Vol. XXXIV. 1901. Philadelphia: Avil Publishing Company, 1901. Translated and edited by J.Walker McSpadden. Pages 3-154.

4- Balzac, Honore de. Old Goriot. 38. England: Penguin Books, 1951.

ARTICLES

1- “ Balzac and Dostoevskij: Ethics and Eschatology” Joel Hunt The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter, 1958), pp. 307-324 Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

2- ”Vautrin, Vidocq et Valjean” Marcel Reboussin The French Review, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Mar., 1969), pp. 524-532

3- Paper delivered by Ayn Rand at the University of Wisconsin Symposium on “Ethics in Our Time” in Madison, Wisconsin, on February 9, 1961. Taken on 3-12-09 from : http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand_the_objectivist_ethics

4- “The Criminal-King in a 19th Century Novel” Anthony Blunt Journal of the Warburg Institute, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Jan., 1938), pp. 248-249 Published by: The Warburg Institute

5- Baran James, John. “Predators and Parasites in ‘Le Pere Goriot’ Symposium 47.n.1 (Spring 1993) 3(13). Academic OneFile. Gale Boston Univ, Mugar Memorial Library, 5 mar 2009.

6- Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), Le Père Goriot (1835) Taken from http://www.etudes-litteraires.com/balzac.php on 03-23-09

7- Rastignac-Telemaque: The Epic Scale in “Le Pere Goriot” Alexander Fischler The Modern Language Review, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Oct., 1968), pp. 840-848 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association

8- Le portrait de Vautrin. Taken from http://www.bacdefrancais.net/pere_portrait.html on March 23, 2009

[24] Kanes, Martin. Critical Essays on Honore de Balzac. 1990. Boston: G.K. Hall & CO, 1990. (Beguin 124-125) (Van Rossum-Guyon 196-197)

“Completely love it. Completely fit in,” said Bernardo Vargas, 20, and SMG Rising Junior about being an international student and an immigrant for at least four years at Boston University. Still, having been born in Monterrey Mexico, he told me the following story: “When the swine flu epidemic broke out, my boss called me to ask if I was feeling well, if maybe I had a cold or was coughing.” I asked Bernardo if he thought his boss only called because he was Mexican. Vargas didn’t hesitate for a second and answered: “Yes…. that is precisely the expression of America’s long time fear of the unknown….”

whole article

FINAL DRAFT

By Pedro Pizano June 7, 2009

“Completely love it. Completely fit in,” said Bernardo Vargas, 20, and SMG Rising Junior about his time as an international student at BU. Having been born in Monterrey, he expected to experience a certain amount of prejudice. “When the swine flu epidemic broke out, my boss [at BU] called me to ask if I was feeling well, if maybe I had a cold or was coughing.” I asked Bernardo if he thought his boss only called because Bernardo was Mexican. Bernardo didn’t hesitate for a second and answered: “Yes, that is precisely the expression of America’s long time fear of the ‘unknown’.” By unknown he is referring to the prejudices Americans have about immigrants. Recently, if you’re Mexican you’re supposed to have had contact with people who have swine flu and if you’re Colombian you will always have cocaine to sell. Right?

For BU students Melody Feo, 20, and Hector Oseguera, 21, daughter and son of former illegal immigrants and now naturalized American citizens, the ‘prejudice of the unknown’ has created other difficulties. They both grew up in neighborhoods that were primarily Hispanic, and like Bernardo, they have no problem fitting in although it has troubled them in certain episodes of their life. “I have never felt any pressure from anyone or anything about being an immigrant,” said Melody. She remembers, though, that when she was 8, she realized that she couldn’t participate in any of the extra-curricular activities at her elementary school because her parents were not legal residents of Parsippany, NJ. “It felt like a cold sadness that swept through the house. I was too young to understand why I couldn’t play with the other kids.” She now knows that this sadness was caused by her parent’s melancholy for a forsaken land and their silent acceptance of the trials they were enduring.

From these student’s experiences it seems that once they arrived to BU their trials were over. Boston University has, in the end, “one of the highest numbers of international students among American colleges and universities,” according to the Mission Statement for the Global Future written by the President’s council. And as such, it is a place where prejudices are confronted, differences are resolved and respect is learned towards other’s cultures.

The incoming freshman class for 2007, for example, was 68% white, 15% Asian, 7% international students, 7% Hispanic, and 2% black. And that is only the freshman class. In 2007, including graduate students and non-degree students, 12.8 % of the university-wide student population at BU was Hispanic. That means that were about 4,000 students that declared themselves as Hispanics. And that means Hector, Melody and Hector are part of a critical mass that everyday changes everybody’s prejudices about Latin American Immigrants.

Melody, Hector and Bernardo have always declared themselves as Hispanic though they are to all eyes and ears, American. They’ve never denied their culture, speak their mother tongue with perfect fluidity and the three of them want to go back to their country when they have finished their studies. Yet, Hector knows that many Americans are still not comfortable with the idea that the U.S has no official language though English is by default the “norm”. Some Americans feel the same discomfort when they feel that a part of somebody else’s culture is becoming part of what Americans consider absolutely American. For example Hector says that when he worked in a supermarket he never understood why Americans complained about the existence of a Spanish Aisle at supermarkets. Maybe those people need to come to Boston University, or maybe the U.S needs to become more like Boston University.

I was young and unafraid then, but that didn’t make me any less nervous when I invited her on a date. Her flat-capped silver hair had enamored me and she was the prize one had to go get in our little circle of friends. Paula was her name.

“There’s this party at my school on Friday…” I asked her one sunny day when sitting on the steps of her fake marble Doric-column porch.

“… And I’m going,” she said.

I should have known she would answer like that. I mean, of course. She already knew at 14 she wanted to become a professional go-cart racer and she was well on her way to becoming one. Who would have ever thought she didn’t know what she wanted?

We finally met at the gym in my school: a building too big for a 14-year old party. Boys could still be seen discussing among themselves which girl to ask out, while the girls, presuming complete indifference, were sitting down on their chit chatty chairs. It was a complete flop

But on that night, when dust still sparked in the sky, I wanted to kiss her.

Our hands silently locked while we walked towards the swings, away from the enchanting Caribbean rhythms (floating on the warm breeze) that were caressing her bare ankles.

“Will this be my first kiss?” I thought. I was hoping she was thinking the same.

She was, as she told me years later. But we never did.