John Oliver of HBO
Thursday
In a brilliant tirade against the Paris bombers, John Oliver of HBO gave a partially literary explanation as to why France will endure. ISIS may create temporary mayhem but Sartre, Camus and Proust will last. In today’s essay I share my own personal experience with how France bestows esteem upon the poets and writers that define its national identity.
Here’s The New Yorker’s account of Oliver taking full advantage of HBO’s freedom from profanity restrictions:
“France is going to endure. And I’ll tell you why. If you are in a war of culture and life style with France, good fucking luck!” More cheering. “Go ahead, go ahead. Bring your bankrupt ideology. They’ll bring Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Piaf, fine wine, Gauloises cigarettes, Camus, Camembert, madeleines, macarons”—images of these appeared behind him as he spoke—“Marcel Proust, and the fucking croquembouche!” An image of what looked like a glazed-cream-puff Christmas tree popped up. He waved his hands and pointed at it. “Thecroquembouche! You just brought a philosophy of rigorous self-abnegation to a pastry fight, my friends. You are fucked! That is a French freedom tower!” The crowd howled with delight.
Note that Oliver adds Gauloises cigarettes and the croquenbouche to his list of French cultural achievements. Otherwise, he’d sound like a cultural snob. But there’s no doubt that France prides itself on its literature.
I grew up surrounded by French literature. My father was a French professor and a world authority on the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. French was my first language–I spent the first two years of my life in France when he was researching his dissertation—and later, when I was 13 and he was on sabbatical, I attended a French school.
In that school I most remember, and treasure, all the hours we spent with French poetry. The school day went from 9-12 and 2-5, with no class on Thursday and only morning class on Saturday. Every day, from 11:30-12 and 4:30-5, we memorized and recited poems. (And then my brothers and I walked home under the Eiffel Tower.)
To this day I can still recite lyrics by Apollinaire, Paul Verlaine, Jean de La Fontaine, Jacques Prévert, and others. I had encountered nothing comparable in my Tennessee grade school.
In college I minored in French literature and was impressed by the immense respect that the French accord their writers. Every age, it seemed, produced literary giants who weren’t afraid to go toe to toe with the powers of the age: Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire battled the 18th century monarchy, Victor Hugo belittled Napoleon III (“the small”), and Sartre clashed with Charles De Gaulle (who refused to retaliate on the grounds that “you don’t imprison Voltaire”). In other words, literature was seen as having an impact on the world.
Even when a French author satirized the French literary tradition, as Alfred Jarry did in a play we performed at Carleton (Ubu Roi), France responded by inducting him into the French Academy. To be sure, they were scandalized at first, just as they were when Victor Hugo chose not to end-stop the opening couplet in his play Hernani. In that case, riots broke out in the theater, a sign that the French take their literature very seriously. Eventually, however, the disputes are superseded by a general reverence for literature.
So when Oliver cited Sartre, Camus, and Proust among the reasons why France will endure, he was picking up on a respect for culture, art, and ideas that has been deliberately cultivated for centuries.
There’s a reward for this strong belief in the life of the mind: when one receives a blow to the body, one has something to fall back on.
Added note: I don’t like how Roger Cohen of The New York Times in his column today is beating the drums of war, but here’s an observation which dovetails with my observations on French intellectual culture:
We may not know who exactly the killers are but we know what they want to destroy. They spit at Montaigne, Voltaire and De Tocqueville. They loathe reason. They detest freedom. They cannot bear the West’s sexual mores. They would enslave the world, particularly its women, to the cruel god of their medievalist reading of Islam.