The Wave

As I posted earlier, I have been venturing into Japanese flower arranging.  The pull of the Japanese minimalist aesthetic is very powerful for me, and I was first introduced to it in college when I took a survey course on Japanese art.  I have thought about it a lot, and I decided to write my professor a thank-you note about it – thirty years late.  It took a bit of doing to locate her – her name has changed – and in searching, I came across a talk she gave about this famous print by Hokusai, “The Great Wave.”  [Complete talk  here:  Totebags, Teeshirts, and Tableware: The Domestication of Hokusai's Great Wave.]

In her talk, she addresses issues of the commercialization of art, mass reproduction of images and commoditization for the consumer economy, cultural appropriation of icons, and the history of japonisme in Western art.  The latter has been known for a century among art scholars as an important influence on Art Nouveau, Impressionism, and other trends, but it was brought to the fore in the public mind with one of Thomas Hoving’s first “blockbuster” exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Among the ironies Professor Guth points out is that in Japan in the 1970s, Hokusai, and the Ukiyo-e genre in which he worked, was not exactly a universally lauded high point of Japanese culture.  Indeed, he was considered a practioner of a rather disreputable art form, and not a member of the high-art pantheon, not the least  because he worked in woodblock prints, a medium intended for popular mass consumption.  Ukiyo-e, the floating world, is the culture of the pleasure district, if not the red light district, and one of his more kinky essays in that direction is shown here:

Imagine this on display in a high-profile exhibit of loan works from Japan during its heyday as the International Bogeyman of the American economy!

Guth takes a broad minded view of the inevitable mixing of art and commerce, tracing the ways in which museums aided the transformation of The Great Wave into one of the most recognizable images of Japanese art today.  She dismisses the attitude of one critic whom she quotes early on as saying that museums must hold the line between art and mass-consumption, accepting the situation of today.  After all, anytime you put a person in front of art, you never know what kind of experience they will have.  An opposing view, whether from the right or the left of the political spectrum, decries the degeneration of cultural capital in favor of profit, spectacle, kitsch…etc., sharing a remarkably similar lack of confidence in the power of ordinary people to evolve imaginative responses of their own to art works.

I became aware of the ubiquity (highlighted at this blog) of the Hokusai print myself when I noticed the logo of a clothing line with which my son was obsessed during his skateboarding phase.  I don’t think I have seen another example of the appropriation of the image through such abstraction.

In the realm of myth…

…we are everywhere at home.

Still riffing…

… on the sphinx…

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!

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?

Can’t buy me love!

Around the corner from the entrance to my office is the Century 21 Department Store, certainly one of the most popular tourist destinations in New York after the World Trade Center site -  with the slogan “Fashion worth fighting for! “  I go there regularly on my lunch hour to consume and keep myself in high-quality slacks, shoes, and haberdashery without breaking my bank.

The image of frenzied women clawing over tempting fabrics and clothes is at the center of Zola’s novel, Ladies Delight (Au Bonheur des Dames), the story of a hugely successful department store c. 1880, and an amazing novel in many ways.  It is a tale of the swaddling days of consumerism, commodity fetishism, commodification – the whole array of cultural-crit jargon.  Here it is, laid out:  advertisement, loss leaders, seductive product displays, free giveaways, ominbuses with huge posters, mega-sales, fads-fashion-and novelty; the economics of price wars, driving the small shops on “main street” under the wheels of the big malls, and on and on.  It’s so familiar, you wonder if there ever was a world without shopping centers!

Mouret is the dynamic, handsome, hedonistic, creative volcano at the center of the huge machine that is his department store, the shop, as the employees call it.  He has his pick of the sales girls – any would give themselves to him for the thrill of it and the money he’ll throw their way – and a society mistress as well.  He is a font of new ideas for selling, marketing, creating desire, creating need, creating new products, new sensations!  The daily takings climb steadily towards the landmark figure of 1,000,000 francs!

The sales workers are a frenzied competitive lot – backbiting and driven.  This job is their chance to make something for themselves, perhaps of themselves.  They are dismissed en masses at a dip in weekly sales, and many come from lives of unrelenting urban or rural poverty.  The feminine protaganist arrives this way, and the trials of her incredibly difficult life during her early days in Paris are related in detail.  Then she “goes over to the other side,” as her uncle, the doomed proprietor of an old fashioned fabric shop calls it, and she goes to work for the infernal machine.

Many women in Zola’s novels are the equal of their male counterpart, and this novel relates a long duel of hearts between Mouret and Denise.  She is proud, quiet, her personality is based on a rock-solid and austere self-respect.  She withstands poverty, the gossipy and vile sniping of her fellow sales girls, and exhaustion to rise within the sales staff hierarchy.  Gradually she wins them over, and Mouret, noticing her excellent good sense and employing her ideas, begins to fall for her.  She worships him, adores him, and everyone assumes he’s already bedded her, but she maintains her “virtue.”  She does this not out of sentimental notions of what a good girl is, but because she fears that to give herself to him would end up with her being cast off when he tires of her, leaving her emotionally ruined and desolate.  She is right.

Mouret, for his part, a man who built his life on women, on controlling with cold calculation their whims and desires, on exploiting them for their money and their erotic attributes, on taking an Olympian and disdaining view of them, that sorry herd of females who jam his shop and make him rich – Mouret feels himself suffering the revenge of Woman.  The Eternal Feminine is breaking him.  Denise will not yield, no matter how much money he offers, no matter what he offers!  In the end, he submits, he begs her to marry him.  She accepts, realizing that their duel has humanized him.  He realizes he cannot buy love, and it is love he wants.  Male and female are reconciled.

 The book is filled with detailed discussions of how the shop works, how accounts are kept, how the machine of consumption is kept on its well-oiled track.  It also has endless discussions of textiles that are utterly bewildering to me – I don’t know what most of them even look like.   In a nice twist, the final drama before Denise accepts Mouret involves a store detective catching an arrogant society lady stealing lace and gloves.  All are slaves to the machine, rich and poor. 

The shop is depicted as the personification of Woman, of Woman’s erotic allure, of superficial desire, of inhuman capitalism, of modern life.  Here are a few samples:

The silk department was like a great room dedicated to love, hung with white by the whim of a woman in love who, snowy in her nudity, wished to compete in whiteness.  All the milky pallors of an adored body were assembled there, from the velvet of the hips to the fine silk of the thighs and the shining satin of the breasts.

. . .

 In the silk department there was also a crowd, the principal crush being opposite the inside display, arranged by Hutin, and to which Mouret had given the finishing touches. It was at the further end of the hall, around one of the small wroughtiron columns which supported the glass roof, a veritable torrent of stuffs, a puffy sheet falling from above and spreading out down to the floor. At first stood out the light satins and tender silks, the satins a la Seine and Renaissance, with the pearly tones of spring water; light silks, transparent as crystals— Nile-green, Indian-azure, May-rose, and Danube-blue. Then came the stronger fabrics: marvellous satins, duchess silks, warm tints, rolling in great waves; and right at the bottom, as in a fountain-basin, reposed the heavy stuffs, the figured silks, the damasks, brocades, and lovely silvered silks in the midst of a deep bed of velvet of every sort—black, white, and coloured—skilfully disposed on silk and satin grounds, hollowing out with their medley of colours a still lake in which the reflex of the sky seemed to be dancing. The women, pale with desire, bent over as if to look at themselves. And before this falling cataract they all remained standing, with the secret fear of being carried away by the irruption of such luxury, and with the irresistible desire to jump in amidst it and be lost.

. . .

In the lace department the crush was increasing every minute. The great show of white was there triumphing in its most delicate and dearest whiteness. It was an acute temptation, a mad desire, which bewildered all the women.  The department had been turned into a white temple, tulles and Maltese lace, falling from above, formed a white sky, one of those cloudy veils which pales the morning sun. Round the columns descended flounces of Malines and Valenciennes, white dancers’ skirts, unfolding in a snowy shiver down to the ground. Then on all sides, on every counter, was a stream of white Spanish blonde as light as air, Brussels with its large flowers on a delicate mesh, hand-made point, and Venice point with heavier designs, Alen9on point, and Bruges of royal and almost religious richness. It seemed that the god of dress had there set up his white tabernacle.

I can’t hear you…

Lots of commentaries on Fellini’s 1960 film, La Dolce Vita, make much of the fact that it contains many allusions to Dante.  Is this surprising, that an Italian artist should do this?  No more than that an English speaking writer would quote Shakespeare or the King James Bible.

A long film, a rich film, a simple story.  A man searching for…a way out of the shallowness, ennui, and spiritual desolation of his life.  A beautiful woman loves him, but maybe she’s the wrong one for him.  She needs a little more sophistication to wrestle him to the ground, so he grinds her up and spits her out.  He is disgusted by his “friends,” but who else does he have?  The man he seems to admire commits a grisly suicide.  His father?  He hardly knows him, and genuine article that he is, he has a few of his own illusions to deal with.  Maybe Marcello is just too handsome for his own good.

At the end, he encounters again the beautiful young girl from a little cafe he met earlier.  A profile like an angel.  She beckons to him, but he can’t hear her across the waves.  He goes back to his degenerate orgiasts who are leaving the beach where they were gawking at an enormous “sea monster” the fishermen brought in.  Might there be a shred of hope left for him?

The most famous sequence features Anita Ekberg and the Trevi Fountain in Rome.  Another beckoning blonde, but his is no angel from an Umbrian frescoe.  It’s a Swedish-American pagan goddess offering erotic transcendence.  At least until the municipal authorities turn off the fountain’s water supply…

A really fatal woman!

The Big Heat was enjoyable for its enveloping atmosphere of corruption and the psychological tension in Bannion, the hero.  Too Late for Tears [YouTube clip]is a treat because it features the most thoroughly characterized, and completely evil femme fatale that I’ve ever seen in noir.  She is played by Lizabeth Scott, who had a string of such roles.  She looks mean, even when she’s trying to be nice, and she has a voice even more husky than Kathleen Turner’s.

This movie wastes no time – the first scene has Scott and her husband driving to a dinner party when she starts complaining that she doesn’t want to go because the hosts will look down on her, they’re so snooty.  She finally grabs the wheel in an attempt to force her husband to turn around and go home, and he skids to a stop.  A car drives by and hurls a leather satchel into their back seat.  It’s filled with cash.  There you have it – her deep-seated psychological unease about her social position, her violence and impulsivity, and a pile of money to set them ablaze. 

After evading the crook who tries to catch up with them to retrieve what was supposed to have been given to him, the couple fights about what to do with the money.  He wants to give it to the police – she wants to keep it, spend it!  They compromise, and he deposits it in a locker at the train station, hoping she’ll calm down and give in. 

Nothin’ doing!  She starts spending money on luxuries, and hiding them in the kitchen cabinets.  Minks, dresses, accessories.  When he gets a call from his banker about the state of his checking account, he confronts her.  She reveals her deeply wounded childhood:  “We were poor.  Not hungry poor.  Middle-class poor!”  (That’s worse!)  People always looking down at them because they couldn’t keep up.  It’s what drives her, but hubby is a little too simple to see what a beast he has by the tail.  Dan Duryea, the crook who finally catches up with her to demand his blackmail loot is smarter.  He gives her the nickname, Tiger,  and he finds out he has her by the tail, and only barely.  Her lust for loot is terrifying.

Finally, near the end, she makes off for Mexico with the cash.  Hubby and the crook have been dealt with.  We see her checking in at a fancy hotel, and her delight at finally reaching the sphere where she belongs is almost girlish.  She is having the time of her life.  Crime really pays!  Funny, it’s rare in films that you ever see the bad guys enjoying their ill gotten gains.  Of course, her high time doesn’t last long.

Sarrasine’s cynosure

“He entered and took a seat in the pit, crowded between two unconscionably stout abbati; but luckily he was quite near the  stage…Suddenly a  whirlwind of applause greeted the appearance of the prima donna.  She  came forward coquettishly to the footlights and curtsied to the  audience with infinite grace.  The brilliant light, the enthusiasm of a  vast multitude, the illusion of the stage, the glamor of a costume  which was most attractive for the time, all conspired in that woman’s  favor.  Sarrasine cried aloud with pleasure.  He saw before him at that  moment the ideal beauty whose perfections he had hitherto sought here  and there in nature, taking from one model, often of humble rank, the  rounded outline of a shapely leg, from another the contour of the  breast; from another her white shoulders; stealing the neck of that  young girl, the hands of this woman, and the polished knees of yonder  child, but never able to find beneath the cold skies of Paris the rich  and satisfying creations of ancient Greece.  La Zambinella displayed in  her single person, intensely alive and delicate beyond words, all  those exquisite proportions of the female form which he had so  ardently longed to behold, and of which a sculptor is the most severe  and at the same time the most passionate judge.  She had an expressive  mouth, eyes instinct with love, flesh of dazzling whiteness.  And add  to these details, which would have filled a painter’s soul with  rapture, all the marvelous charms of the Venuses worshiped and copied  by the chisel of the Greeks.  The artist did not tire of admiring the  inimitable grace with which the arms were attached to the body, the  wonderful roundness of the throat, the graceful curves described by  the eyebrows and the nose, and the perfect oval of the face, the  purity of its clean-cut lines, and the effect of the thick, drooping  lashes which bordered the large and voluptuous eyelids.  She was more  than a woman; she was a masterpiece! In that unhoped-for creation  there was love enough to enrapture all mankind, and beauties  calculated to satisfy the most exacting critic.

“Sarrasine devoured with his eyes what seemed to him Pygmalion’s  statue descended from its pedestal.  When La Zambinella sang, he was  beside himself.

Free and open elections

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin – He was the author of the great anti-utopian novel, We.  Orwell admired it, and he thought Huxley had been influenced by (copied?) it.  He died in exile, after his letter to Stalin gained him permission to emigrate rather than remain the USSR without the permission to write.  Considering the contents of his 1923 essay, On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters,  it’s a wonder he wasn’t just taken out and shot.

Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.

Where the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion, social life, art) cools, the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma- a rigid, ossified, motionless crust. Dogmatisation in science, religion, social life, or art is the entropy of thought. What has become dogma no longer burns: it only gives off warmth- it is tepid, it is cool.

The novel, We, is a memoir written by a prominent engineer in the glorious future One State in which human life is totally regulated.  Mathematics has trumped all poetry.  Individuals rejoice in their state as ciphers.  Sex is proscribed to limited “private hours” regulated by the Book of Hours, and access to sex partners is free, and regulated with a system of recorded pink chits.  The book is a little heavy with literary experimentation as it seeks to evoke the mentality of the future man who revels in his routine and lack of spontaneity, but it is prescient of so many things, in culture, in politics, and especially in the entire future of science fiction, that it amazes.  It also has a very sharp and dark humor.

They say that the Ancients conducted elections in some kind of  secrecy, hiding like thieves … Why would all this mystery be necessary?  Even today it is not understood conclusively; the likeliest explanation is that elections were connected to some sort of mystical, superstitious, maybe  even criminal rites.  For us, there is nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of:  we celebrate election day in the daytime, openly and honestly.  I see everyone vote for the Benefactor; everyone sees me vote for the Benefactor – and it couldn’t be any different, since “I” and “everyone” are the unified “WE” …And if you even suggest the impossible, that is, that there could be some dissonance in the usual homophony, then the invisible Guardians are here, among our ranks:  at any momen, they can stop ciphers who are falling into error and save them from their next false step – and save the One State from them.

Need I add that the “hero” is undone by love, by sex, by a femme fatale ?  At their trysts outside the glass wall of the city, in the museum of the Ancient House, she wears a yellow silk dress.  Her teeth are like daggers.  She scorns the One State, respects nothing.  She is irrestible to him, the engineer of the great spaceship Integral, the vessel that will bring the happiness of tyranny to other planets.  She drives him crazy…makes him…human?

Baby Doll

This film came to my attention on reading the obituary of Karl Malden – it got his career off on its very long run.  Elia Kazan directed, Carol Baker and Eli Wallach starred as well.  Tennessee Williams provided the story of corruption, repressed, seething sexuality, vengeance, race relations, and a whole lotta other stuff.

Some discuss this film as a comedy, a campy masterpiece, but I see it as much more than that.  It’s a finely wrought drama about three strong, conflicting characters in a moral quagmire.  It has humor, but it’s kind of sad.

Archie Lee is married to Baby Doll – her daddy wanted to provide for her as he was dying.  She wasn’t ready for marriage, so he extracted a promise from Archie not to touch her until her twentieth birthday.  She sleeps in the nursery, in her old crib, in a broken down plantation mansion that Archie Lee bought to convince her daddy he was coming up in the world.

Archie’s plans to expand his business and restore the house fall victim to Mr. Vacarro, a recent arrival who bought up some old farms and cottin gin mills and cornered all the local business, including Archie’s.  He’s not well liked, but he is respected for his business acumen.  During a party he throws for the community to try and smooth over hard feelings, Archie, the only local planter not attending, torches his mill.

Vacarro vows to get his own justice.  He contracts with Archie to gin his cotton, and then moves in on his “wife.”  Does he want to sexually possess her, or just get her support for a legal action against Archie?  In the end, he does both, but he doesn’t “touch” her either.  He knows she’s “just a child” and he has some decency – but there is, as he admits to Archie when insisting that he “took nothing else from her,” an attraction between them.

All the actors do a wonderful job, but Carol Baker, in her first big role, is remarkable.  Malden is great, and a figure of pathetic fun, but she and Wallach are amazing in their sexual pas de deux.  Much of the humor in their exhanges comes from her ridiculous affectations of proprietry, despite her obvious, wilting fascination with Mr. Vacarro.  When he offers her a pecan nut he cracked with his teeth, she demurs, “Oh, Mr. Vacarro.  I could never accept a nut that had been in a man’s mouth.”  He replies, “You’ve got many refinements.”

Baker’s career was rocky, and she eventually left Hollywood for Italy.  Before she left, her second husband fashioned her into blonde bombshell sex symbol, and she starred as Jean Harlow.

Some clips of my favorite scenes are linked below:

The Black Sheep (La Rabouilleuse)

One of my favorite novels, and certainly at the top of my Balzac list, is this story of a titanic battle over a family fortune in the provincial town of Issoudun.  The French title can be translated as The Fisherwoman, and that is how Flore Brazier, the character is known in town.  More precisely, la rabouilleuse means a girl who assists a fisherman by using a stick to disturb the water in a stream so that the fish flee right into the nets.  This is how the young Flore was employed by her guardian when she enters the story.

I don’t know why the book is called The Black Sheep in English.  It leaves open the question of just who is the black sheep:  Phillipe Brideau – the brutal, callous, murderous, thieving, totally dishonorable former soldier of the Imperial Guard; or his brother, Joseph Brideau – a sincere, talented, hardworking, but impoverished artist living in a crassly materialistic milieu that considers painting a career for failures, no matter how brilliant the practitioner.  Flore, on the other hand, is the point about which much of the action revolves.

A child of stunning beauty, even in the abject rags of rural poverty in which she lives, Flore is ‘rescued’ from her fate by Old Rouget who happens upon her on a ride.  His intentions in bringing her to his house are anything but honorable, but Balzac, as always, is tactful in his Olympian manner.  He sees all, but needn’t tell all.  The old man dies, and the girl, grown to a fabulously beautiful young woman proceeds to dominate his imbecile of a son.  He is totally in thrall to her sexual  power, and she sets up a comfy menage a trois by bringing Maxence, a local reprobrate of a magnitude to equal Phillipe, as her live-in lover.  Together, they scheme to get the dolt of a son to sign over his enormous fortune, accumulated by his hard nosed miser dad, to them.  Sex is the lubricant that keeps their machinations going.

Well, the field of battle is set for the confrontation between Flore-Maxence and Phillipe.  It turns out that Phillipe’s mother is the dolt’s aunt, so she has an interest in the family stash, although her brother, the dead Rouget, always claimed, without evidence, that she was illegitimate, and he didn’t speak to her for the thirty years she lived in Paris.  Money, family, sex, city vs. country…everything!

Phillipe turns hero as he comes to Issoudoun to find a way to eliminate the influence of Flore and Maxence over his rich and stupid uncle.  The town isn’t big enough for the two villainous rascals.  One will have to go, and it will have to be in a box.  And so it happens…

The suspense is great, the absolutely devilish brilliance with which Phillipe outwits and crushes the gold digger crew, and his subsequent destruction as he pursues his true corrupt nature, now with piles of cash to back him, is amazing.  The mother is without a clue, nearly to the end, believing Phillipe to be her “good” son, and Joseph to be an ineffectual, if loyal boy, even as Phillipe robs her blind.  The action  and grasping morality of the characters is breathtaking in its brutality.

La Duchesse de Langeais

From Balzac’s History of the Thirteen, we have this novel about a coquette noblewoman who goes a bit too far.  She revels in teasing men and making them think she will be theirs, only to dump them and watch them squirm.  She meets her match in the smoldering General Montriveau, an idealized self-portrait of the author.

Once the General realizes that she is only playing with him, he concocts a scheme to teach her a thing or two – he has his men, initiates to the cabal of The Thirteen, abduct her and prepare to scorch her brow with a hot brand.  Talk about scarlet letters!  There is much knotting and unbinding of wrists and ankles as she is led here and there, blindfolded, to undisclosed locations before being deposited back at her party from which she was snatched.  Her footmen are all drunk – part of the plot no doubt.

The General scorns rape as undignified – she falls in love with him, truly, after being totally in his power, power which he disdains to exercise over her.  (He drops the branding idea when she instantaneously, under the influence of her helplessness, goes from ice-queen coquette to passionate adorer of him.)

Balzac is always very discreet, but the overtones of sadism, misogyny, kinky sexual passions, and brutal sexual warfare are quite strong.  My apologies to J. A. D. Ingres for defacing his masterpiece, Madame Contesse D’Hausonville, now hanging in the Frick Collection in New York, one of my favorite museums.