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| Sunday, 5 December 2004 |
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Funny kinds of writers! On the margins of serious literature, some major authors have gone down the path of humour. Here, from Rabelais to Daniel Pennac, are a few sparkling pieces to read. - Didier Jacob, (Journalist on the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur) Was it the father of Gargantua and Panurge who, at the end of the Middle Ages, brought Panurge's comic sheep into the fold? Champion of the 'vernacular' over the high-flown style of the classical Greek and Latin authors, Rabelais (1483-1553) made the stumbling speech of the little people ring out from his writing desk, giving a platform to the popular culture of his day and to the burlesque style of his own invention. He was not without imitators - Paul Scarron bequeathed a Roman comique (The Comic Novel) (1651-1657) packed with twists and turns. While these Renaissance troublemakers produced puns and brawls galore in every genre, the children of the Grand Siecle (the 17th century) honed their style and refined their targets. It was LaFontaine, in his satirical Fables -the "ample comedy of a hundred different acts" - who took aim and fired at the aristocratic society of his time. Boileau made fun of the clergy. Later, in the 18th century, it was Diderot and Voltaire, whose critical satire slowly insinuated itself, like a drip into a patient's vein, into the great sacred cow of monarchical society. If the age of Enlightenment was indeed the age of the free and rebellious spirit, the Romantic 19th century was less concerned with making people laugh than making them cry. From Chateaubriand to Lamartine, not forgetting Balzac, there was nothing but violins and funeral marches. Only Flaubert, the uncompromising nonconformist, concluded his work by thumbing his nose in an extraordinary way at the sentimentalism and wide-eyed scientism of the time: in his novel Bouvard et Pecucnet (Bouvard and Pecuchet), he relates the disastrous saga of two naive autodidacts who fail ineptly at everything they undertake. This sense of the ridiculous and the comic in Flaubert appears again in his Dictionnaire desidees recues (Dictionary of Accepted Ideas), in which the writer pokes fun at all the cliches and prejudices of "bourgeois foolishness", with an incisive humour, an inheritance which our contemporaries vie with one another to claim. Oddballs of the 20th century After that suffocating century, humour saw a resurgence in the early 20th century - for was this not the Belle Epoque? One of the most eccentric, Alphonse Allais, took over the editorship of Le Chat noir, a satirical paper, for which he wrote articles under the name of Francisque Sacrey, a famous critic of the day who protested in vain against this illegal assumption of his identity. Allais left us some one thousand five hundred ludicrous tales and entire volumes of humerous maxims, in which he particularly targeted priests, politicians and the military. "Laughter is to man", he wrote, "what beer is to the pump". A few cranks of the same ilk were to follow, like Alfred Jarry, who, in his famous play Ubu roi, attacked the arbitrary nature of political power with the weapons of the absurd. What about Jules Renard? His Journal (1887-1910), which is bursting with funny, tender and caustic observations, on himself as well as on the human condition, is like a bible of French humour. In the 1930s and 1940s, light or serious fantasy allowed people an escape from a sombre reality: Marcel Ayme (Le Passe-Muraille - The Walker - through - Walls), Raymond Queneau (Zaziedans le metro - Zazie in the metro), Boris Vian (L'Ecume des jours - Foam of the Daze) made their mark on the generations that came after them. Today, the effervercent Francois Cavanna (Les Russkoffs - The Russkoffs), the impertinent Philippe Meyer (Pointes seches - Dry Points) and the delightful Daniel Pennac (with The Malaussene Saga) are keeping the tradition alive. Pastiche, a user's manual In tribute to their masters, some writers have not hesitated to parody them in texts imitating their style. Arthur Rimbaud copied Francois Villon, while Flaubert plagiarised Chateaubriand. Proust left us several pieces mimicking the Goncourt brothers, well-known acerbic chroniclers of their times, Balzac and Flaubert. Co-author with Michel-Antoine Burnier, notably of Roland Barthes sans peine (Roland Barthes made easy), Patrick Rambaud, who won the Prix Goncourt for a Napoleonic novel, had Marguerite Duras lined up in his sights in his pastiche, Virginie Q, which purported to have been written by a Marguerite Duraille (1988). A caricature? A tribute? An exercise in writing or affection? Pastiche reflects a love of words as well as a desire to cut the victim down to size. This literary genre, which is inconceivable without humour, talent and erudition, is nothing new. All the great writers since Racine and La Bruyere have tried it with varying degrees of success. But rare are those who have devoted themselves exclusively to it, like Paul Reboux and Charles Muller, who from 1908 on published their famous A la maniere de...(In the manner of...), a collection made up entirely of pastiches and which produced so much laughter in intellectual circles that it was followed by an A la maniere de... 2 in 1912. Andre Maurois was also, before the war, one of the great champions of this modest literary genre - the novelist wrote an entire book mimicking Proust (Le Cote de Chelsea - The Chelsea Way, 1932). As for journalist and novelist Patrick Besson, the current star of the genre, his pastiches are less exercises in admiration than total assassinations. - D.J. Casting another winning dice Reviewed by Aditha Dissanayake Warning! If you take Kamani Jayasekera's A Gambler's Game and other stories, into your hands inside a bookshop, you might be tempted to read it from beginning to end, then and there, shifting your weight from one foot to the other, being jostled by the other customers and glared at by the owner, but ignorant to your surroundings for the forty-five minutes, that would take you to read the twelve stories. But, don't. Because the book deserves a couch, a pillow under your head and something delicious to munch. A slab of chocolate? Or perhaps, not this last, for most of the stories in themselves are delicious. Yes, if you begin at random, say with A Groom for Marie, leaving the first and the third stories for a rainy day. Through the domestic help, Marie, Kamani parodies the romanticism of the upper middle classes, who though ensconced in luxury, yet yearn for the simple life of the rustic. Though the people of the household consider jak fruit, jak seed and manioc yams a luxury, those she could do without. For they reminded her of how tasteless they could become if you had to eat them day in and day out to quench the pangs of hunger. Marie's dreams of marrying Mr. Right is revealed through gentle humour. The thought of him make her resist the advances of the Malu man and the paper boy. Who did they think she was? A young nobody who was up for touching and fondling? She was now a would be bride. She had to wait for the prospective groom. Stories like Halls of Learning and The Classic Theft are obviously episodes from real life. So, too The Gambler's Game, where the powerful prose makes the willing or unwilling reader too, share the intimacy between the narrator and her husband. "He notices my sideward glance and smiles Enjoying yourself? he asks. Yes, very much...But how frightening even beauty could be when you hear and not see it. The philosophy in Lady Luck is staggering, especially when at the end of the last paragraph you realise the identity of the narrator. Paragraphs like The rat race, the deadlines...the prominence given to wealth and glory. Even health being a competition that led to accumulate more stress. Makes one read and re-read the story to gather all the wisdom it contains. Kamani Jayasekera has done it again through her third book of short stories, as usual, leaving the reader wishing for more. Through The Gambler's Game, she has, once again, cast the dice on the right side. Website for writers WriteClique.net a website for writers, was officially launched at the British Council on November 25. This site can be considered an online book to which individual writers can submit their writing ranging from poems, short stories, prose, plays, excerpts from novels etc. Each writer will have his/her own personal page on the site, which will contain a list of their writing as well as details about the writer and contact information. The unique feature about this site is that all writing can be submitted online by logging onto www.writeclique.net. The site also features an advanced database that will let the user search for writing based on the writer's name, title, category, genre, age and keyword. Additionally, the 'rating system' in place is the core quality control mechanism of the site, which gives all the readers the ability to rate any piece of writing on the site, upto five stars - though different votes will carry different weights. i.e. - the editorial vote will be equal to 20 normal votes. However the editorial rating will be initially invisible and not show up as stars until at least one other person votes for it. But it will show up high or low in searches based on the editorial rating, thereby guiding people towards good reading material. The site will also provide a home for writers groups and publishers where they could have a page giving information about their activities, meetings and projects. WriteClique.net reserves the right not to publish any writing with offensive content. Other than that none of the work selected for this site will be edited or changed in any way. For further information about the site please contact the British
Council ARTS unit on 4521542 or e-mail us at [email protected] |
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