Mythologies, Page 7

  All this would be commonplace if we were dealing with the traditional hero, whose whole value was to fly without forgoing his humanity (like Saint-Exupéry who was a writer, or Lindbergh who flew in a lounge-suit). But the mythological peculiarity of the jet-man is that he keeps none of the romantic and individualistic elements of the sacred role, without nevertheless forsaking the role itself. Assimilated by his name to pure passivity (what is more inert and more dispossessed than an object expelled in jet form?), he reintegrates the ritual nevertheless, thanks to the myth of a fictitious, celestial race, which is said to derive its peculiarities from its ascetic life, and which effects a kind of anthropological compromise between humans and Martians. The jet-man is a reified hero, as if even today men could conceive the heavens only as populated with semi-objects.

  The Blue Guide

  The Blue Guide[*] hardly knows the existence of scenery except under the guise of the picturesque. The picturesque is found any time the ground is uneven. We find again here this bourgeois promoting of the mountains, this old Alpine myth (since it dates back to the nineteenth century) which Gide rightly associated with Helvetico-Protestant morality and which has always functioned as a hybrid compound of the cult of nature and of puritanism (regeneration through clean air, moral ideas at the sight of mountain-tops, summit-climbing as civic virtue, etc.). Among the views elevated by the Blue Guide to aesthetic existence, we rarely find plains (redeemed only when they can be described as fertile), never plateaux. Only mountains, gorges, defiles and torrents can have access to the pantheon of travel, inasmuch, probably, as they seem to encourage a morality of effort and solitude. Travel according to the Blue Guide is thus revealed as a labour-saving adjustment, the easy substitute for the morally uplifting walk. This in itself means that the mythology of the Blue Guide dates back to the last century, to that phase in history when the bourgeoisie was enjoying a kind of new-born euphoria in buying effort, in keeping its image and essence without feeling any of its ill-effects. It is therefore in the last analysis, quite logically and quite stupidly, the gracelessness of a landscape, its lack of spaciousness or human appeal, its verticality, so contrary to the bliss of travel, which account for its interest. Ultimately, the Guide will coolly write: 'The road becomes very picturesque (tunnels)': it matters little that one no longer sees anything, since the tunnel here has become the sufficient sign of the mountain; it is a financial security stable enough for one to have no further worry about its value over the counter.

  Just as hilliness is overstressed to such an extent as to eliminate all other types of scenery, the human life of a country disappears to the exclusive benefit of its monuments. For the Blue Guide, men exist only as 'types'. In Spain, for instance, the Basque is an adventurous sailor, the Levantine a light-hearted gardener, the Catalan a clever tradesman and the Cantabrian a sentimental highlander. We find again here this disease of thinking in essences, which is at the bottom of every bourgeois mythology of man (which is why we come across it so often). The ethnic reality of Spain is thus reduced to a vast classical ballet, a nice neat commedia dell'arte, whose improbable typology serves to mask the real spectacle of conditions, classes and professions. For the Blue Guide, men exist as social entities only in trains, where they fill a 'very mixed' Third Class. Apart from that, they are a mere introduction, they constitute a charming and fanciful decor, meant to surround the essential part of the country: its collection of monuments.

  If one excepts its wild defiles, fit for moral ejaculations, Spain according to the Blue Guide knows only one type of space, that which weaves, across a few nondescript lacunae, a close web of churches, vestries, reredoses, crosses, altar-curtains, spires (always octagonal), sculpted groups (Family and Labour), Romanesque porches, naves and life-size crucifixes. It can be seen that all these monuments are religious, for from a bourgeois point of view it is almost impossible to conceive a History of Art which is not Christian and Roman Catholic. Christianity is the chief purveyor of tourism, and one travels only to visit churches. In the case of Spain, this imperialism is ludicrous, for Catholicism often appears there as a barbaric force which has stupidly defaced the earlier achievements of Muslim civilization: the mosque at Cordoba, whose wonderful forest of columns is at every turn obstructed by massive blocks of altars, or a colossal Virgin (set up by Franco) denaturing the site which it aggressively dominatesall this should help the French bourgeois to glimpse at least once in his life that historically there is also a reverse side to Christianity.

  Generally speaking; the Blue Guide testifies to the futility of all analytical descriptions, those which reject both explanations and phenomenology: it answers in fact none of the questions which a modern traveller can ask himself while crossing a countryside which is real and which exists in time. To select only monuments suppresses at one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the present, that is, nothing historical, and as a consequence, the monuments themselves become undecipherable, therefore senseless. What is to be seen is thus constantly in the process of vanishing, and the Guide becomes, through an operation common to all mystifications, the very opposite of what it advertises, an agent of blindness. By reducing geography to the description of an uninhabited world of monuments, the Blue Guide expresses a mythology which is obsolete for a part of the bourgeoisie itself. It is unquestionable that travel has become (or become again) a method of approach based on human realities rather than 'culture': once again (as in the eighteenth century, perhaps) it is everyday life which is the main object of travel, and it is social geography, town-planning, sociology, economics which outline the framework of the actual questions asked today even by the merest layman. But as for the Blue Guide, it still abides by a partly superseded bourgeois mythology, that which postulated (religious) Art as the fundamental value of culture, but saw its 'riches' and 'treasures' only as a reassuring accumulation of goods (cf. the creation of museums). This behaviour expressed a double urge: to have at one's disposal a cultural alibi as ethereal as possible, and to maintain this alibi in the toils of a computable and acquisitive system, so that one could at any moment do the accounts of the ineffable. It goes without saying that this myth of travel is becoming quite anachronistic, even among the bourgeoisie, and I suppose that if one entrusted the preparation of a new guide-book to, say, the lady-editors at L'Express or the editors of Match, we would see appearing, questionable as they would still probably be, quite different countries: after the Spain of Anquetil or Larousse, would follow the Spain of Siegfried, then that of Fourastié. Notice how already, in the Michelin Guide, the number of bathrooms and forks indicating good restaurants is vying with that of 'artistic curiosities': even bourgeois myths have their differential geology.

  It is true that in the case of Spain, the blinkered and old-fashioned character of the description is what is best suited to the latent support given by the Guide to Franco. Beside the historical accounts proper (which are rare and meagre, incidentally, for it is well known that History is not a good bourgeois), those accounts in which the Republicans are always 'extremists' looting churches—but nothing on Guernica—while the good 'Nationalists', on the contrary, spend their time 'liberating', solely by 'skilful strategic manoeuvres' and 'heroic feats of resistance', let me mention the flowering of a splendid myth-alibi: that of the prosperity of the country. Needless to say, this prosperity is 'statistical' and 'global', or to be more accurate: 'commercial'. The Guide does not tell us, of course, how this fine prosperity is shared out: hierarchically, probably, since they think it fit to tell us that 'the serious and patient effort of this people has also included the reform of its political system, in order to achieve regeneration through the loyal application of sound principles of order and hierarchy.'

  Ornamental Cookery

  The weekly Elle (a real mythological treasure) gives us almost every week a fine colour photograph of a prepared dish: golden partridges studded with cherries, a faintly pink chicken chaud-froid, a mould of crayfish s
urrounded by their red shells, a frothy charlotte prettified with glacé fruit designs, multicoloured trifle, etc.

  The 'substantial' category which prevails in this type of cooking is that of the smooth coating: there is an obvious endeavour to glaze surfaces, to round them off, to bury the food under the even sediment of sauces, creams, icing and jellies. This of course comes from the very finality of the coating, which belongs to a visual category, and cooking according to Elle is meant for the eye alone, since sight is a genteel sense. For there is, in this persistence of glazing, a need for gentility. Elle is a highly valuable journal, from the point of view of legend at least, since its role is to present to its vast public which (market-research tells us) is working-class, the very dream of smartness. Hence a cookery which is based on coatings and alibis, and is for ever trying to extenuate and even to disguise the primary nature of foodstuffs, the brutality of meat or the abruptness of sea-food. A country dish is admitted only as an exception (the good family boiled beef), as the rustic whim of jaded city-dwellers.

  But above all, coatings prepare and support one of the major developments of genteel cookery: ornamentation. Glazing, in Elle, serves as background for unbridled beautification: chiselled mushrooms, punctuation of cherries, motifs of carved lemon, shavings of truffle, silver pastilles, arabesques of glacé fruit: the underlying coat (and this is why I called it a sediment, since the food itself becomes no more than an indeterminate bed-rock) is intended to be the page on which can be read a whole rococo cookery (there is a partiality for a pinkish colour).

  Ornamentation proceeds in two contradictory ways, which we shall in a moment see dialectically reconciled: on the one hand, fleeing from nature thanks to a kind of frenzied baroque (sticking shrimps in a lemon, making a chicken look pink, serving grapefruit hot), and on the other, trying to reconstitute it through an incongruous artifice (strewing meringue mushrooms and holly leaves on a traditional log-shaped Christmas cake, replacing the heads of crayfish around the sophisticated bechamel which hides their bodies). It is in fact the same pattern which one finds in the elaboration of petit-bourgeois trinkets (ashtrays in the shape of a saddle, lighters in the shape of a cigarette, terrines in the shape of a hare).

  This is because here, as in all petit-bourgeois art, the irrepressible tendency towards extreme realism is countered—or balanced—by one of the eternal imperatives of journalism for women's magazines: what is pompously called, at L'Express, having ideas. Cookery in Elle is, in the same way, an 'idea'—cookery. But here inventiveness, confined to a fairy-land reality, must be applied only to garnishings, for the genteel tendency of the magazine precludes it from touching on the real problems concerning food (the real problem is not to have the idea of sticking cherries into a partridge, it is to have the partridge, that is to say, to pay for it).

  This ornamental cookery is indeed supported by wholly mythical economics. This is an openly dream-like cookery, as proved in fact by the photographs in Elle, which never show the dishes except from a high angle, as objects at once near and inaccessible, whose consumption can perfectly well be accomplished simply by looking. It is, in the fullest meaning of the word, a cuisine of advertisement, totally magical, especially when one remembers that this magazine is widely read in small-income groups. The latter, in fact, explains the former: it is because Elle is addressed to a genuinely working-class public that it is very careful not to take for granted that cooking must be economical. Compare with L'Express, whose exclusively middle-class public enjoys a comfortable purchasing power: its cookery is real, not magical. Elle gives the recipe of fancy partridges, L'Express gives that of salade niçoise. The readers of Elle are entitled only to fiction; one can suggest real dishes to those of L'Express, in the certainty that they will be able to prepare them.

  Neither-Nor Criticism

  We were able to read in one of the first numbers of L'Express (the daily) the (anonymous) profession of faith of a critic, which was a superb piece of balanced rhetoric. Its idea was that criticism must be 'neither a parlour game, nor a municipal service' which means that it must be neither reactionary nor communist, neither gratuitous nor political.

  We are dealing here with a mechanism based on a double exclusion largely pertaining to this enumerative mania which we have already come across several times, and which I thought I could broadly define as a petit-bourgeois trait. One reckons all the methods with scales, one piles them up on each side as one thinks best, so as to appear oneself as an imponderable arbiter endowed with a spirituality which is ideal and thereby just, like the beam which is the judge in the weighing.

  The faults indispensable to this operation of accountancy consist in the morality of the terms used. According to an old terrorist device (one cannot escape terrorism at will), one judges at the same time as one names, and the word, ballasted by a prior culpability, quite naturally comes to weigh down one of the scales. For instance, culture will be opposed to ideologies. Culture is a noble, universal thing, placed outside social choices: culture has no weight. Ideologies, on the other hand, are partisan inventions: so, onto the scales, and out with them! Both sides are dismissed under the stern gaze of culture (without realizing that culture itself is, in the last analysis, an ideology). Everything happens as if there were on one side heavy, defective words (ideology, catechism, militant), meant to serve for the ignominious game of the scales; and on the other, light, pure, immaterial words, noble by divine right, sublime to the point of evading the sordid law of numbers (adventure, passion, grandeur, virtue, honour), words placed above the sorry computation of lies. The latter group has the function of admonishing the former: there are words which are criminal and there are others which judge them. Needless to say, this fine morality of the Third Party unavoidably leads to new dichotomy, quite as simplistic as that which one wanted to expose in the very name of complexity. True, our world may well be subjected to a law of alternations; but you can be sure that it is a schism without Tribunal; no salvation for the judges: they also are well and truly committed.

  Besides, it is enough to see which other myths emerge in this Neither-Nor criticism, to understand on which side it is situated. Without speaking further on the myth of timelessness which is at the core of any appeal to an eternal 'culture' ('an art for all time'), I also find, in our Neither-Nor doctrine, two common expedients of bourgeois mythology. The first consists in a certain idea of freedom, conceived as 'the refusal of a priori judgments'. Now a literary judgment is always determined by the whole of which it is a part, and the very absence of a system—especially when it becomes a profession of faith—stems from a very definite system, which in this case is a very common variety of bourgeois ideology (or of culture, as our anonymous writer would say). It can even be said it is when man proclaims his primal liberty that his subordination is least disputable. One can without fear defy anyone ever to practise an innocent criticism, free from any systematic determination: the Neither-Nor brigade themselves are committed to a system, which is not necessarily the one to which they proclaim their allegiance. One cannot judge Literature without some previous idea of Man and History, of Good, Evil, Society, etc.: even in the simple word adventure, which is used with such alacrity by our Neither-Nor critics in order to moralize against those nasty systems which 'don't cause any surprise', what heredity, what fatality, what routine! Any kind of freedom always in the end re-integrates a known type of coherence, which is nothing but a given a priori. So that freedom, for the critic, is not to refuse the wager (impossible!), it is to make his own wager obvious or not.[*]

  The second bourgeois symptom in our text is the euphoric reference to the 'style' of the writer as to an eternal value of Literature. And yet, nothing can escape being put into question by History; not even good writing. Style is quite precisely dated as a critical value, and to make claims in the name of 'style' at the very time when some important writers have attacked this last stronghold in the mythology of classicism, is to show thereby a certain archaism: no, to come back once mo
re to 'style' is not adventure! Better advised in a subsequent number, L'Express published a pertinent protest by A. Robbe-Grillet against the magical appeal to Stendhal ('it reads just like Stendhal'). A certain union of style and humanity (as in Anatole France, for instance) is perhaps no longer sufficient as a basis for 'Literature'. It is even to be feared that 'style', compromised by so many falsely human works, has finally become something suspect a priori: it is, at any rate, a value which should only be put to the credit of the writer awaiting a proper appraisal. This does not mean, naturally, that Literature can exist without some formal artifice. But, with due respect to our Neither-Nor critics, who are invariably the adepts of a bi-partite universe where they would represent divine transcendence, the opposite of good writing is not necessarily bad writing: today it is perhaps just writing. Literature has entered a situation which is difficult, restricted, mortal. It is no longer its ornaments that it is defending, but its skin: I rather fear that the new Neither-Nor criticism is one season behind.

  Striptease

  Striptease—at least Parisian striptease—is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked. We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.

  It is only the time taken in shedding clothes which makes voyeurs of the public; but here, as in any mystifying spectacle, the decor, the props and the stereotypes intervene to contradict the initially provocative intention and eventually bury it in insignificance: evil is advertised the better to impede and exorcize it. French striptease seems to stem from what I have earlier called 'Operation Margarine', a mystifying device which consists in inoculating the public with a touch of evil, the better to plunge it afterwards into a permanently immune Moral Good: a few particles of eroticism, highlighted by the very situation on which the show is based, are in fact absorbed in a reassuring ritual which negates the flesh as surely as the vaccine or the taboo circumscribe and control the illness or the crime.