ŷ������

well. Once upon a time, not so very long ago I read La Reine Margot, coming from a background of a few years of French in school and a while on Duolingo and having reached sufficient linguistic competency that I can ask a museum attendant where the toilet is - but admittedly not really understand the answer, I found it difficult but not impossible. It was as though I was in a swimming pool, way out of my depth but floating on my back reasonably confident that eventually I would bump into the edge of the pool. So I thought I would continue in the hope of developing some competency in reading French, I picked up a couple of facile texts in simplified language and then this one, Balzac's Sarrasine in an edition for schools.

Oh goodness, this really was like being dropped into the sea and being out of my depth, waves breaking over me, salt water getting up my nose, crabs nipping my toes, and so on. It was a war of words. While Dumas gave me the impression of an easy literary style, Balzac was baroque, jittery, with dozens of cups of coffee fuelling his pen even before he was half way down the page. It was quite fascinating. It reminded me of Bruges la morte, in that if you were teaching these texts, you could set the class a task such as drawing up tables of references to gender ambiguity and then get on with building a sailing ship out of matchsticks or sewing a suit of eighteenth century style clothing.

This is a fascinating story but very tricky to discuss without spoilers - indeed the edition I read has a spoiler to illustrate the front cover.

It is a story about a Buddenbrooks style person called Sarrasine - Grandfather upwardly mobile, father consolidates wealth, Sarrasine pursues artistic endeavours. But Sarrasine I think never speaks directly to us, we either observe him as an elderly man through the narrator's eyes or hear about his Italian adventure as a young man as related to us by a young woman. This all happens a soiree rich in details firmly anchoring the event as taking place circa 1830 in Paris with the Italian adventure happening presumably at the end of the eighteenth century. So we have these sets of frames holding us back from the story in the story, but these structural elements parallel what happens in the Italian adventure when Sarrasine meets a singer and decides that they are the essence of femininity and to use them as their model (paintings, drawing and sculptures follow).

If the narrative prevents Sarrasine from speaking directly to us, this is a kind of poetic justice in that he never pays that much attention to his model, or rather his attention is superficial and involves plenty of projection and ignoring what the model is saying, and indeed what other people are telling him, because and here we reach spoiler territory (view spoiler)[ the singer is in fact a castrato, which reminded me of Angela Carter in Japan where she felt the social ideal of femininity was embodied by Kabuki performers - who are all men. I noticed that Sarrasine was described as small and delicate not generally words used to describe men, and I wondered if the basis of his attraction to the singer was their similarity, perhaps there is something of the Jungian shadow going on with each of them as a shadow version of the other. Eventually Sarrasine is disgusted by his own desire (view spoiler)[ possibly to love himself (hide spoiler)] and projects his disgust on to the singer.

It is one of those ambiguous stories; in that the author plays with a certain idea - gender ambiguity, homosexuality and while it is condemned within the text, it is also indulged. The reader might be satisfied that in the end gender norms are reimposed, but they can also be tantalised and titillated with the possibility that these are norms and not facts and can be subverted or evaded before they get there. (hide spoiler)]

But then again I do have this sense that Balzac is so conservative that he ends up being subversive. Coffee can have effect I find.