The Wild Ass’s Skin (Peau de chagrin)

The Wild Ass’s Skin is the weirdest novel by Balzac I’ve read to-date.  It was his second major novel in his vast Human Comedy, and it features several characters who reappear later in the series, albeit not always in a consistent manner. In it, we have Balzac’s pseudo-science, fascination with magic, some romanticism such as I’ve never read in his work, the usual thrilling and cynical dissection of social structures, and sex portrayed with an abandon and explicitness from which he usually refrains.

The premise of the plot is magical:  A down on his luck, impoverished aristocrat, Raphael Valentin, looses his last coin gambling, and resolves on suicide.  To pass the time until an opportune moment arises, he visits a vast antiques shop and meets its strange proprietor.  He is shown a strange piece of leather, an ancient scrap of an ass’s skin, embossed with eastern script.  The skin has the power to grant him his every wish, but each time it does so, it shrinks, and with it, so does the lifespan of Valentin.  Another twist on the old theme of making a deal with the Devil.

The novel also has three parts, and they don’t seem to fit together all that seamlessly.  The first part describes Raphael’s coming into possession of the magical skin and his first orgy; the second is an extended flashback describing his impoverished life while he was in love with a completely heartless and drop-dead gorgeous society woman; and the third describes his agonizing descent to his inevitable end.

At one point, Valentin enlists the help of the greatest scientists in France to see if they can stretch the skin back to its original size, after he has grown fabulously wealthy by its power, and watched horrified as it diminished in size.  The great mechanical engineer gives a discourse on Pascal, motion, and hydrostatic pressure, and then watches stupefied as the skin resists the force of his engines and causes them to explode under the strain.

“Between each point in space occupied in succession by that ball,” continued the man of science, “there is an abyss confronting human reason, an abyss into which Pascal fell.

A chemist is nonplussed, and can find nothing to make the slightest change in the skin.  At a forge, in a scene that seems a combination of and Joseph Wright and John Martin, the men try to incinerate the hide, but it emerges from the flames cool and untouched.  The scientists have a laugh – the mysteries of the universe never end!  Raphael is not amused.  He visits some doctors to see if they can determine why his life force is ebbing away, but they just argue amongst themselves.

“What is the good of science?” Raphael moaned. “Here is my recovery halting between a string of beads and a rosary of leeches, between Dupuytren’s bistoury and Prince Hohenlohe’s prayer…Shall I live? They have no idea. Planchette [the engineer] was more straightforward with me, at any rate, when he said, ‘I do not know.‘”

When Raphael first takes possession of the skin, he wishes to be at a stupendous banquet and orgy – and then he sees the skin shudder and shrink a bit.  Next thing we know, he is whisked to a phenomenal debauch by two friends he stumbles upon in the street.  The tale is one of Balzac’s philosophical studies, and it dissects the psychology and practice of excess and orgies,  depicting them with great realism and in detail.

His chandeliers had been filled with wax-lights; the rarest flowers from his conservatory were carefully arranged about the room; the table sparkled with silver, gold, crystal, and porcelain; a royal banquet was spread–the odors of the tempting dishes tickled the nervous fibres of the palate. There sat his friends; he saw them among beautiful women in full evening dress, with bare necks and shoulders, with flowers in their hair; fair women of every type, with sparkling eyes, attractively and fancifully arrayed. One had adopted an Irish jacket, which displayed the alluring outlines of her form; one wore the “basquina” of Andalusia, with its wanton grace; here was a half-clad Dian the huntress, there the costume of Mlle. de laValliere, amorous and coy; and all of them alike were given up to the intoxication of the moment.

His only salvation from an early death is to arrange his life with mechanical regularity so that he need never give rise to an utterance of “I wish that…” and so never invoke the power of the skin.  He becomes a recluse.  His faithful servant, fearful that he is wasting away, and minding the doctor’s orders to “keep him interested…” arranges a special treat for him which he at first takes for one of his opiated dreams:

As Raphael’s death-pale face showed itself in the doorway, a sudden outcry broke out, as vehement as the blaze of this improvised banquet. The voices, perfumes, and lights, the exquisite beauty of the women, produced their effect upon his senses, and awakened his desires. Delightful music, from unseen players in the next room, drowned the excited tumult in a torrent of harmony–the whole strange vision was complete.

Raphael felt a caressing pressure on is own hand, a woman’s white, youthful arms were stretched out to grasp him, and the hand was Aquilina’s. He knew now that this scene was not a fantastic illusion like the fleeting pictures of his disordered dreams; he uttered a dreadful cry, slammed the door, and dealt his heartbroken old servant a blow in the face.

Contrasted with this infernal decadence, there is the scene he encounters when he flees to the mountains, searching for a serene resting place in which to live out his days without desires:

As Raphael reached the place, the sunlight fell across it from right to left, bringing out all the colors of its plants and trees; the yellowish or gray bases of the crags, the different shades of the green leaves, the masses of flowers, pink, blue, or white, the climbing plants with their bell-like blossoms, and the shot velvet of the mosses, the purple-tinted blooms of the heather,–everything was either brought into relief or made fairer yet by the enchantment of the light or by the contrasting shadows; and this was the case most of all with the sheet of water, wherein the house, the trees, the granite peaks, and the sky were all faithfully reflected. Everything had a radiance of its own in this delightful picture, from the sparkling mica-stone to the bleached tuft of grass hidden away in the soft shadows; the spotted cow with its glossy hide, the delicate water-plants that hung down over the pool like fringes in a nook whereblue or emerald colored insects were buzzing about, the roots of trees like a sand-besprinkled shock of hair above grotesque faces in the flinty rock surface,–all these things made a harmony for the eye.

Such a romantic, pastoral scene, so unlike Balzac’s usual settings of village interiors or urban apartments.  And in the two locales, he encompasses the twin extremes of Romanticism:  the diabolic, and the idyllic.

In the end, Raphael is united with Pauline, who loved him when he was poor, and now that he is rich, has herself come into a fortune.  They live together, planning to be married, and Balzac describes their lives together as one of erotic bliss, although Raphael is doomed.  When Pauline realizes Raphael’s situation, she resolves to kill herself so that they can die together:  there is a frenzied embrace, he bites her breast violently! – is it consummated? .. and they die.

Not surprising that Balzac loved the novel Melmoth the Wanderer.

Antidote

Is this the way out of that mess of phantastic dreams I fall into so often?  I am taking a class in Ikebana, Japanese flower arranging.  The allure of its simplicity and focus on natural beauty is very powerful.  These lines from Wikipedia sum it up well:

More than simply putting flowers in a container, ikebana is a disciplined art form in which nature and humanity are brought together. Contrary to the idea of floral arrangement as a collection of particolored or multicolored arrangement of blooms, ikebana often emphasizes other areas of the plant, such as its stems and leaves, and draws emphasis towards shape, line, and form.

The artist’s intention behind each arrangement is shown through a piece’s color combinations, natural shapes, graceful lines, and the usually implied meaning of the arrangement.

Another aspect present in ikebana is its employment of minimalism. That is, an arrangement may consist of only a minimal number of blooms interspersed among stalks and leaves.

In the realm of myth…

…we are everywhere at home.

Still riffing…

… on the sphinx…

Obama electric!

I had one of my occasional dips into the democratic political process today – I attended a rally in Newark, NJ for the reelection of Jon Corzine as governor of New Jersey, with Loretta Weingberg, from my town, as Lieutenant Governor.  The wait outside was tedious, but we got to the head of the line with three lovely young ladies we happened to meet, all of them dressed to the nines, and with VIP tickets.

Eventually, we got in, and we watched the entertainment while we waited.  We ended up sitting next to the girls, all of whom are from Kenya it turns out.  Loretta, Cory, and Jon gave their stump speeches, and then the main attraction was on -  Barak Obama.  The crowd went crazy – it was electric!  I had to laugh when he walked out – amazing to see him in the flesh rather than as a flickering image of a political celebrity.  We were only 150 feet away at the most.

He gave a good speech – a mixture of popular politics with some wit and humor.  He manages to weave in important ideas in a way that makes them seem popular, not something for only an elite.  He commented on how Corzine (and he) are mopping up a mess left by the previous administration, and that they don’t really mind doing that, except why do they (the Republicans) have to stand around and say things like:

“Uh, can you mop faster?  You’re not holding that mop right.  Why do you have to use a socialist mop?”  I thought that last bit was a good dig at the GOP, quite witty for an American political speech.

Dressed to the nines!

How much longer?

Working the crowd

Still waiting.

Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark

Entertainment

The Media watch

Jon Corzine, Gov. NJ

Obama

Making a point.

Vote for Jon!

Gov, Lt. Gov, Prez

As Obama was led out, people formed a crush to shake his hand or just touch him.  One big fellow was walking towards us, his hand held out – “I shook his hand, I shook the brother’s hand!  Amazing!” – probably never so excited since Christmas morning as a little boy.  My wife shook his hand, the hand that shook the hand …

Fiasco II – The horror, the horror…

I finished Zola’s novel The Debacle, and I feel as if I barely survived.  The book is absolutely harrowing in its depiction of the horror, gore, and sheer terror of war.  The graphic detail – heads blown off, entrails flying, hideous and ghoulish atrocities – are the sort of thing we expect in movies and books about war today, but in the 1890s?  I wonder if this marked a first.

Zola, of course, was known for doing his research, and he visited locations, interviewed scores of participants, and reviewed the literature.  In many ways, the book reads as an historical chronicle as much as a novel.  But it soars, or descends, into great, infernal poetry in scenes such as the days immediately after the disastrous defeats, when Jean and Maurice, solid peasant and educated bourgeois, fight for life in the great charnel house and prison that the countryside has become inside the Prussian encriclement.  The apocalypse seems to have arrived – corpses exploding and stinking, the river choked with dead men and animals, and wild herds of lost and starving cavalry horses charging madly about, destroying everything in their path in a frenzy of hunger and madness.

The deadly bitterness of occupation and civil strife are depicted as well. The murderous fury of the French against the collaborators recalls scenes I dimly remember from Marcel Ophul’s film, The Sorrow and the Pity.  (I went to see that with my parents as a kid – hardly understood any of it – but boy, did it make an impression!)  The bloodlust rises to epic stature as one woman conspires to murder the father of her child, watching as the guerillas truss him up, slit his throat, and bleed him dead like a great pig.

At the end, Maurice, now a crazed and fanatical communard, and Jean, fighting with the forces of reaction, simply because he wants everything to be gotten back in order so he can return to the land, meet again in a Paris that is recapitulating the Fall of Babylon.  An orgy of destruction, madness, and atrocious murderous rage is burning itself out.  Zola was a liberal who detested left-wing revolutionaries.  He tries to fathom in Maurice how an educated man could throw his lot in with such people as a result of the deep humiliation of the war, the frantic desire to destroy everything in the hope that something better will replace it, and the end-game of months of war, besiegement, hunger, and isolation:

Just previous to the 31st of October Maurice was more than usually a victim to this malady of distrust and barren speculation. He listened now approvingly to crude fancies that would formerly have brought a smile of contempt to his lips. Why should he not? Were not imbecility and crime abroad in the land? Was it unreasonable to look for the miraculous when his world was falling in ruins about him?

…

And so Maurice went on leading an idle, vagabondish sort of life, in a state of constant feverish agitation. He had ceased to be tormented by hunger; he devoured the first white bread he got with infinite gusto; but the city was a prison still: German guards were posted at the gates, and no one was allowed to pass them until he had been made to give an account of himself. There had been no resumption of social life as yet; industry and trade were at a standstill; the people lived from day to day, watching to see what would happen next, doing nothing, simply vegetating in the bright sunshine of the spring that was now coming on apace. During the siege there had been the military service to occupy men’s minds and tire their limbs, while now the entire population, isolated from all the world, had suddenly been reduced to a state of utter stagnation, mental as well as physical. He did as others did, loitering his time away from morning till night, living in an atmosphere that for months had been vitiated by the germs arising from the half-crazed mob. He read the newspapers and was an assiduous frequenter of public meetings, where he would often smile and shrug his shoulders at the rant and fustian of the speakers, but nevertheless would go away with the most ultra notions teeming in his brain, ready to engage in any desperate undertaking in the defense of what he considered truth and justice. And sitting by the window in his little bedroom, and looking out over the city, he would still beguile himself with dreams of victory; would tell himself that France and the Republic might yet be saved, so long as the treaty of peace remained unsigned.

from the Project Gutenberg text:  The Downfall

Karl Marx, and revolutionaries everywhere, revered the Commune, but the picture that Zola paints of it is of a disorganized, opportunistic, delusional, and fanatical group of die-hards who reduced the city of Paris to ashes.  Not that he thinks well of the forces of reaction either.  Ultimately, they serve the masters who brought on the entire debacle, by starting the war with Prussia.

In the end, France will have to be rebuilt, born anew, as in his great novel Germinal, through the simple and unstoppable drive to live and flourish in peace that Jean, the simple peasant, represents.

Everywhere at home??

One of these days, I’m going to visit the strange Park of the Monsters at Bomarzo, Italy. If I go, will I be greeted and led to the Hell’s Mouth by a sultry nymph with delightful long legs like this one?  Will my wife, and all my family obligations and history melt away, my middle age fly off to leave me youthful and desirable, my heightened emotions and vigor to be quenched in a unique, bizarre, erotic embrace within some weird grotto?

Not likely…This renaissance (Mannerist) oddity is nicely photographed and discussed in this fine book which I own.  I’ve known about the park for a very long time, but it seems that it was forgotten by Europe for centuries, until being rediscovered and somewhat restored by the efforts of Salvidor Dali and Mario Praz.  Popularity followed, and now it’s a “family destination” for tourists.

The image is from a catalog for Schneider’s of Austria, a clothing manufacturer, that was all shot in the garden.  What is going on here?  Their slogan is “Everywhere at home.”  This reminds me of the classic formulations of kitsch consciousness, i.e., that everywhere kitsch-man goes, everywhere he looks, he seems himself.  Thus, he is never open to new, genuine, experience.  Do I believe this?  Ich bin ein kitschmensch!

Fashion advertisement, and in this case, a pretty high-end, classy example of it, trades on all sorts of moods, half-understood cultural allusions, snobbisms, innovations, cultural quotes, etc. to endow the product, the look, with a feeling, a cachet.  Moody, hip, sophisticated, mannered, mysterious, cultured, refined and esoteric, sooo European…These are a few of the things this catalog has to say about Schneider’s clothes.  And you know what?  I buy it, all of it!  I want that raincoat I saw in Century 21!!  I’m a pretty unremarkable dresser, and I don’t think my appearance turns any heads, but I look at other people’s looks a lot.  Sometimes I become fixated on a woman’s coat, a man’s shoes, a purse, a pair of glasses…okay, it’s probably 80/20 when it comes to the time I spend on women/men – it’s not just fashion that catches my eye.

I’ve never been able to figure out or come to terms with exactly what is going on here.  It feels dreadfully superficial, even childish or stupid in a way.  On the other hand, it feels totally human and natural.  Does there have to be a moral evaluation involved?

I told my wife once about an incident when I was twenty years old, and I saw a Panama hat in a window of a shop in Europe during my summer travels there.  The “vision” of that hat stayed with me for days.  On the long train ride, I imagined myself wearing it in all sorts of situations – how it would make me feel all sorts of ways just by being on my head.  (Hats – the mediator of the man-sky interface.) She rolled her eyes.  That’s one reason I married her.  She keeps me somewhat tethered to reality.

Bring on La Maniera. Hail to La dolce vita!

Uh oh!!

Did we just have a really close call with an asteroid?  It wouldn’t be the first time.  Anthony Watts says in his post that the space rock was not being tracked by any Earthlings.  That’s not a happy thought!

Let’s be passionate

I hear a lot about passion these days.  People ask one another, what’s his/her passion?  People want to be passionate about their work.  What if you are only “passionate” about screwing off?  I have a lingering suspicion that all this stuff about “finding your passion” is yet another attempt by the IWM (International Work Machine) to coopt our energies into meetings its needs.  Work, work work …it’s what you LOVE!

FIASCO!!

File this under incompetent leaders of great states, right next to George W. Bush: 

The Paris of today that everyone dreams about was given to us in the 1860s and 70s by this man, Napoleon III, and his civil servant, Baron Haussmann.  His reign began in liberal democratic enthusiasm, progressed to despotism by way of coup d’état, and ended in dismal, utter, spectacular, and mind bogglingly stupid failure. 

He was manipulated into provoking a war with Prussia, convinced he would win in a walkover.  Bismarck, Prussia’s leader, couldn’t have asked for a more pliable victim.  The military catastrophe is chronicled in the first part of Zola’s book, The Debacle.  thousands of desparately hungry, exhausted soldiers marching to and fro over the French landscape, despondent and demoralized as they realize that they are being led by a gang of complete idiots. 

Think of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 without the wild hilarity, and you’ll have a notion of what I’m reading now.  In the film, The Life of Émile Zola, there is a scene early on in which the general staff is incensed at Zola about this book – they are out to get him. 

After the disaster came the Paris Commune, with its murder, insurrection, and brutal suppression.  Then, as time heals all wounds, socialist, communist, and liberal came together across their political differences to slake their thirst for revenge (la revanche!)  against Germany.  Much to the consternation of some leftists, dreaming of international solidarity, the worker’s parties supported France’s lunge into WWI – the time to regain lost territory had come at last.  More lambs to the slaughter.

Sex in a tree…

…how can that be?

My apologies to Dr. Seuss, but surely he wouldn’t have objected to being confused with Geoffrey Chaucer.   I’m thinking of  Hop on Pop’s line, “three fish in a tree?”  The Merchant’s Tale involves exactly that, in a tree. Sex, that is.

I haven’t read Chaucer since college, but I picked up a copy of The Canterbury Tales in a bookstore, and was enthralled.  The Middle English takes a while to get used to, you can’t get every word, and I don’t know how to pronounce it, but the rhythm of it carries you along nevertheless.  The edition I bought has the most obscure words glossed in the margin, and the hardest phrases explained at the page’s foot so you don’t have to be flipping to a glossary in the back all the time.  The link above is to an interlinear translation, but I find that annoying to read.

Oh yeah, back to the sex, er…the story.  The pilgrims tell stories to pass the time on the way to Canterbury.  The merchant tells one about a rich old man, January, who finally decides to get married.  Of course, he is set on marrying a young and pretty woman, and he takes the time to find just the right one, named May.  She consents – that’s the way things worked in those days.  It’s not all that clear just how well the old guy performs in bed with his well formed young wife.

Things being what they were, and are, she and a young man in the household develop some feeling for one another.  The old man goes blind, but he keeps up his favorite custom of making love to his wife al fresco in his walled garden with a gate.  Nobody there but the two of them,

And May his wyf, and no wight but they two;
And thynges whiche that were nat doon abedde,
He in the gardyn parfourned hem and spedde.

and they did things there that they didn’t do in bed.

The girl and her lover get a copy of the key to the garden, and the next time she goes there with the old man, the young one is waiting in the tree’s branches.  The tree is a fruit tree, a pear tree.  January, May.  A walled garden with a fruit tree, Eden and the apple (or was it a pear) tree?  A blind man, without knowledge of his wife’s adultery.  But they will eat of the tree.

The girl says she absolutely must have some pears, and the old man curses the absence of his servants to fetch her some.  She has an idea – he bends down and she steps on his back and climbs up into the branches to get the fruit.  Yes, she gets the fruit all right.  Up in the tree, her love is waiting, and he

Gan pullen up the smok, and in he throng.

In case you missed it, throng is the past participle of thrust. Once again, the tree of knowledge has brought its bitter fruit to bear on man.  I wonder also if this is an allusion to a famous passage in Augustine’s Confessions in which he recounts his youthful sin of stealing pears from a neighbors orchard.  And the image of a woman stepping on an old man’s back calls to mind another medieval image of man humiliated by woman.

Meanwhile, Pluto and Prosperine are observing the entire business from a corner of the garden.  Pluto vows that if May cheats on January, he will give the old man his sight back.  He wants men to be able to see the evil things woman do to them.  Prosperine, his wife, scoffs at his male chauvinist drivel, and sticks up for women.  If Pluto gives him his sight back, she will make sure that May can talk her way out the impasse.

January gets his sight – the scales drop from his eyes? – and he is infuriated.  May is ready with an answer.  You didn’t see what you think you saw.  After being blind for so long, it takes a while to get used to sight again.  You’re confused.  Really, you should thank me for being up here wrestling with this man – that’s what cured you!  I was told that is the way to restore your sight!

Nothing doing, cries January!

He swyved thee; I saugh it with myne yen,
And elles be I hanged by the hals!”
[He screwed thee; I saw it with my eyes
And else may I be hanged by the neck!]

May is a quick-witted girl.  She replies that if this is what he saw, then her cure wasn’t as good as she had thought.  Obviously, he still has vision problems.

So there we have it.  A little sex farce set in a modern (for then) Eden.  Woman tempts man again, the tree of kowledge brings sight, but having knowledge isn’t such a great thing all the time. Or do we really have the knowledge we think we do?

Krug’s feet of clay…

More on the theme of Paul Krugman going off the deep end after serving the country so well.  In a recent blog post of his, he weighs in on the lastest kerfluffle about climate change.  The guys who wrote the best-seller, Freakonomics, have a new book out with a chapter that is somewhat critical of the so-called consenus on human civilization causing the planet to get warmer.  He delivers himself of this ghastly howler, emphasis mine:

…not only that they didn’t check out the global cooling stuff, the stuff about solar panels, and all the other errors people have been pointing out, but that they didn’t even look into the debate sufficiently to realize what company they were placing themselves in.

No, it’s not his placing of the preposition at the end of the sentence that has my blood boiling.  It’s the idea that the way science should be done is by checking out whose on what side of the controversy, and then joining the right team.  That’s politics, and people who can’t tell the difference shouldn’t be writing about this issue.

And by the way, I am trying to still admire Krug a little, but it’s getting hard.

“Feet of Clay,” by the way, comes from the Old Testament (Dan.2:31-32).

Does it get better than this?

Who better than MAD to satirize the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction, aka MAD?

Thanks so much to Doug and Scott of The Mad Cover site and The MAD Store for digging up this old favorite of mine!