Electioneering French Style: the Red, the Rose and the Black

I periodically like to take a ramble through the French on-line press. Lately the coverage seems to be all presidential election news all the time, which, since DSK was eliminated, can be almost as boring as the American Republican Primary campaign. Sometimes, though, an interesting item or two will pop up. Today I came across a story about candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, operating in full-throated electoral mode.

It seems that last Thursday, about 200 metal workers from a company called ArcelorMittal came to Paris to meet with the President. But instead of a welcome mat, they were greeted in front of his campaign headquarters by "an accueil musclé"-- i.e., they were blasted with tear gas. Outraged, the metal workers marched on to the Eiffel Tower, intending to post a banner identifying the tower's steel as from their own region. You'd imagine that a sensitive candidate might want to apologize for such an ugly incident. But when questioned about it by a TV journalist, Sarkozy was his typically irascible and vulgar self. He responded (this is a loose translation): "What do you want me to say-- you think I give a damn?" He followed this remark by turning on the journalist, calling him a "couillon," and then attempting to make a lame joke about it. In the French Le Huffington Post article at this link, you can see a video of the exchange. Note the astonished looks of those around the reporter.

Meanwhile today, elsewhere in Paris, there was a large, cheery march from the Place de la Nation to the Bastille in support of the Front de Gauche party and their candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Melenchon and backers of the Front de Gauche on their way to the Bastille/photo Bastien Hugues sur Twitter

The crowd-- estimated at about 100,000-- carried various quotable banners. The one I liked best: "Mettez à la mode la couleur rouge!" I suppose Mélenchon has as much chance of becoming President of France as Ron Paul has of winning the Republican nod. But Mélenchon's campaign has lately been gaining a surprising amount of enthusiasm. If he gets the approximately 10 per cent of the vote that pollsters consider likely, he could make a serious dent in the turnout for the Socialist party candidate, François Hollande. Consequently, there's been a bit of snarky chatter in the media about the purposes of the Front de Gauche campaign. Cynics ask: Is Mélenchon, a radical leftist, actually a "coqueluche" of the arch-conservative Sarkozy?

Hubert and Jan van Eyck: Extremely Close and Incredibly Beautiful

Thanks to a grant from the Getty Foundation, anyone can now examine in stunning detail-- up close and at astonishing magnification-- the splendid Ghent Altarpiece. The high-definition digital images of Hubert and Jan van Eyck's masterpiece, The Mystic Lamb (1432), have been made freely available at a newly established interactive website.

As reported by Melissa Abraham (February 24, 2012, getty.edu), the Ghent Altarpiece recently underwent emergency conservation at the Villa Chapel in St. Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium. At that time, the polyptych was removed from its glass-enclosed setting and dismantled, an unusual event which provided an extraordinary opportunity for scholars to study and document the altarpiece and for professional photographers to produce high-resolution images of the work's individual panels. Subsequently, the photographs were stitched together to create the digital images now available on the interactive website. That site is said to contain 100 billion pixels.

Further details about the images, the team who developed the website, and the decision to use an open-source approach are available in Abraham's report as well as at the site itself.

Super-Vapid Tuesday

The New York Times today (the morning after so-called "Super Tuesday") had an excellent editorial on the depressing Republican primary and the obnoxious positions taken by the candidates. Here are a few excerpts:

"Long before Super Tuesday, the Republican Party had cemented itself on the distant right of American politics, with a primary campaign that has been relentlessly nasty, divisive and vapid.... This country has serious economic problems and profound national security challenges. But the Republican candidates are so deep in the trenches of cultural and religious warfare that they aren’t offering any solutions....There are differences [between Romney and Santorum]. Mr. Santorum is usually more extreme in his statements than Mr. Romney, especially in his intolerance of gay and lesbian Americans and his belief that religion — his religion — should define policy and politics. Mr. Santorum’s remark about wanting to vomit when he reread John F. Kennedy’s remarkable speech in 1960 about the separation of church and state is one of the lowest points of modern-day electoral politics....
Mr. Romney has been slightly more temperate. But, in his desperation to prove himself to the ultraright, he has joined in the attacks on same-sex marriage, abortion and even birth control. He has never called Mr. Santorum on his more bigoted rants. Neither politician is offering hard-hit American workers anything beyond long discredited trickle-down economics, more tax cuts for the rich, a weakening of the social safety net and more of the deregulation that nearly crashed the system in 2008."

The editorial goes on to berate the candidates for their mindless and vicious attacks on Obama and for their potentially explosive position on Israel and Iran:

"There is also no space between Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum in the way they distort reality to attack Mr. Obama for everything he says, no matter how sensible, and oppose everything he wants, no matter how necessary.... They also have peddled the canard that the president is weak on foreign policy. Mr. Romney on Tuesday called President Obama 'America’s most feckless president since Carter.' Never mind that Mr. Obama ordered the successful raid to kill Osama bin Laden and has pummeled Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, all without the Republicans’ noxious dead-or-alive swagger. Now, for the sake of scoring political points, Mr. Romney, Mr. Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who is hanging on only thanks to one backer’s millions, seem determined to push Israel toward a reckless attack on Iran."

The entire editorial should be widely read. One wonders how relatively sane Republicans (are there any left?) have been responding to this despicable primary campaign. If such temperate right-wingers do still exist, perhaps they will demonstrate their sanity at the ballot box in November.

The Business of Coincidence

Coincidentally, in the recent past I've run across a number of references to the subject of coincidence in fact and fiction. But perhaps it's no coincidence. I'm probably extra-sensitive to the issue because of my own use of the device in a novel I'm currently writing. Here are some of the comments I've seen:

The narrator in Raul Ruiz's film Mysteries of Lisbon observes that "in life, there are events and coincidences of such extravagance that no novelist would ever dare to invent them." Ruiz (or, one should say, the novelist who wrote the book on which Ruiz's movie is based) does of course dare to invent precisely such extravagant coincidences.

W.G Sebald, in an interview at Queens College in 2001, wondered about the function of coincidence-- how he/we use it to make sense out of nonsense:

"I think it's this whole business of coincidence, which is very prominent in my writing. I hope it's not obtrusive. But, you know, it does come up in the first book, in "Vertigo," a good deal. I don't particularly hold with parapsychological explanations of one kind or another, or Jungian theories about the subject. I find those rather tedious. But it seemed to me an instance that illustrates that we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. You meet somebody who has the same birthday as you—the odds are one in three hundred and sixty-five, not actually all that amazing. But if you like the person then immediately this takes on more . . . and so we build on it, and I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of our creed, all constructions, even the technological worlds, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, when there isn't, as we all know." (from The New Yorker, August 30, 2001)

Julian Barnes is not averse to using coincidence in his fiction. Or to wryly commenting on it. Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator of Flaubert's Parrot may or may not speak for Barnes. Braithwaite, who is full of snap opinions about life and literature, "doesn't much care for coincidences" in either. "There's something spooky about them; you sense momentarily what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with Himself looking over your shoulder and helpfully dropping coarse hints about a cosmic plan... I prefer to feel that things are chaotic..." But what snappish Braithwaite finds particularly annoying is that "in the more bookish areas of English middle-class society, whenever a coincidence occurs there is usually someone at hand to comment, 'It's just like Anthony Powell.'"

As for coincidences in books, Braithwaite calls them a lazy stratagem. "There's something cheap and sentimental about the device; it can't help always seeming aesthetically gimcrack." Examples he cites: the troubador who passes by just in time to rescue the girl from a hedgerow scuffle; the sudden but convenient Dickensian benefactors; the neat shipwreck on a foreign shore which reunites siblings and lovers-- in other words, all the staples of old romance fiction.

But, as Braithwaite does not mention, coincidence is also central to the even older traditional kinship reunion plot-- what some critics have called the most powerful use of coincidence, as in the Oedipus story.

For modernists, and post-modernists, Braithwaite does have a way of making coincidences acceptable: call them ironies, he says. The modern mode. In that form, who could be against it? "And yet," he continues, "I wonder if the wittiest, most resonant irony isn't just a well-brushed, well-educated coincidence." Which is presumably Barnes's own ironic opinion on the subject.

China Mieville: Evading the Boundaries of Genre

The genre of China Miéville's The City and the City is not easy to pin down. Though the novel can be read as a dark, quasi-realist police procedural, it can also be viewed as a dystopic urban fantasy. I prefer to see it as both simultaneously. Or, better yet, as a terrific instance of the Genre sans Frontières movement. Miéville himself has said that he considers his book to be, above all, a "crime novel," yet he does not abjure the sci-fi side of his fiction, nor will the reader be likely to ignore the fantastical elements of the narrative.

The novel's hero, Tyador Borlu, is a not unfamiliar noir figure-- a downbeat detective, burdened by moral issues, personal failings and the frustrations of trying to operate effectively under the oppressive tyranny of an amoral and dangerous bureaucracy. Borlu's homicide case presents unusual difficulties-- primarily that the detective works in a strangely divided world. The setting is an urban area split into two overlapping yet distinctly separate cities-- Beszel and Ui Qoma. At one level, this separateness can be seen as an analogue of the familiar income and/or ethnic-based divisions common to urban existence. And Breach, the Big Brother-like institution that enforces the geographic and psychological separation of the two cities, could be interpreted as the over-arching police power of a totalitarian state. But the city divisions are uncanny and Breach's powers seem to operate in a fantastical milieu rather than a neo-realist world. The overlapping area between the two cities-- Breach's home base, as it were-- is an opaque region of the magical. And when Borlu, late in the story, is absorbed into that region, the novel turns echt-sci-fi.

The City and the City's ambiguous genre and its multiple uses of doubling have inspired some to refer to the book's "interstitiality." Miéville seems a bit uncomfortable with that fashionable characterization. "Interstitiality is a tremendous buzzword," he says. It's a theme that is "simultaneously genuinely interesting and potentially quite useful, and also a terrible cliché, so if you're going to use it, it helps to be at least respectfully skeptical about the wilder claims of some of its theoretical partisans..." Rather, he likes the idea of a "shared terrain" between the fantastic and the realistic noir.

Which may simply be another way of saying that his fiction thrives within the non-category of the Genre sans Frontières....