Saturday, February 28, 2015
Jacques Coulardeau at Academia.edu (22)
A CONTRADICTORY BACKDROP FOR C.S. LEWIS
MARTYRDOM VERSUS
EUGENISM
Dr Jacques
COULARDEAU
UNIVERSITÉ CATHOLIQUE DE LILLE
FACULTÉ DES LETTRES ET DES SCIENCES HUMAINES
Colloque C.S. LEWIS - 2-3
juin 2011
C.S. LEWIS & THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA
BBC REWRITING AND ADAPTATIONS
RADIO AND TV
And other films
Dr Jacques
COULARDEAU
All Amazon reviews of CS
Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles
and various adaptations for
TV and the cinema
A CONTRADICTORY BACKDROP FOR
C.S. LEWIS
MARTYRDOM VERSUS EUGENISM
I would like to say from the very start that I will only
consider The Chronicles of Narnia
in their seven volumes (1950-1956), and the four BBC adaptations. So I will not
consider the various cinema adaptations and the other works by C.S. Lewis
(1898-1963).The second thing I want to be
very clear about is that I am not going to psychoanalyze neither the
author nor The Chronicles.
It would be interesting to do so from a certain point of view. This is not mine
here.
I will concentrate on the political and ideological model that can
be found in The Chronicles. But I want to be clear
about one thing before starting. For me children’s literature is just as mature
as any other form and type of literature and it deserves to be analyzed exactly
the same way as any other fiction. We do not have to suspend our disbelief but
as C.S. Lewis says himself: “You cannot know, you can only believe or not.”
And I have chosen to believe what C.S. Lewis tells us, no matter how
creative and imaginative it may be. I will
start with the background I have chosen, i.e. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and H.G.
Wells(1866-1946).T.S. Eliot,
particularly in his play Murder in the Cathedral (1935) deals with the
question of martyrdom when a church official is confronted to an attempt
at limiting the church’s freedom from the state or any other institution.
This vision of martyrdom became a real backdrop for C.S. Lewis because of the play at the end of the 1930s in
the Canterbury Festival, then the film at the beginning of the 1950s and
finally the opera by Pizzetti in Italian and in German (for Karajan) at the beginning
of the 1960s, too late for The Chronicles.
H.G. Wells defends a eugenic vision of the
world and he is a backdrop for C.S. Lewis because of the vast and lasting success of his early novels like The Time Machine (1895) or The Invisible Man (1897) at the end of
the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century and
because of his commitment to eugenics all his life in many writings, in film
with his 1936 Things to Come by Alexander
Korda and William Cameron Menzies in which he envisaged the
end of the world we know by a universal war in 1940 and the rebuilding of a
truly human society.
The Time
Machine was
adapted a first time by George Pal in 1960, an adaptation that may have come
across to C.S. Lewis though too late for The Chronicles. Of course the second
adaptation by Simon Wells in 2002 does not
have to be considered, though the great-grandson of the author corrects part of
the eugenics of his great-grandfather.
A proletarian pamphlet from Prolebooks
CABOODLE – Karina
Vidler, Gill McEvoy, Russell Jones, Kate Garrett, Angela Croft, Rafael Miguel
Montes – Edited by Brett Evans and Phil Robertson - Prolebooks, 2015
This only concerns
Russell Jones
These poems that are very modern
sonnets as for their form which is rather iconoclastic of Shakespeare's model
present a vision that is desperate, desolate, disheartening, frightening.
The man who sees visions he
cannot share because one cannot share what one sees if one is mute and this man
is mute: he does not speak, and certainly not to us. Even in the Beauty Parlour
the initial "we" does not really include us because it is the royal
"we" of one amplifying himself or disguising himself away into a
forest that hides the isolated tree, and then he shifts to "you"
which is a similar way of avoiding "I" and neutralizing himself by
treating himself as someone else, as an interlocutor, which he is not really.
What he sees is from the past,
most of the time, and the past cannot be shared since that man is the only one
who lived it, the only possible voyeur. He did not share this past with us. And
he is not even sharing it with us in his words. He depicts it as if it were
some picture in the back of his eye or mind and as if the desription were for
himself only. It is distant, cold. It does not speak to us. It is frightening
because of this distance.
A woman is there dominant and
fascinating, dominant for the man and fascinating for him too, even mesmerizing
if not hypnotizing, reducing him to being a passive voyeur who will not even do
what all voyeurs generally do. She is like a dragon and the man is nothing but
a pet she transports in the air to the seventh heaven of dragon love. She is
also inspiring to that man. On the other hand the man is noting but a sea gull
when it comes to being some flying animal, a seagull in a harbor in which all
the exhaust pipes of all rejects and trash of this society are flushed down
into the water of the harbor and the sea gull is just feeding on this trash, on
these social feces in the port till it is satisfied and flies away.
The concept of a haven widens
that of the port of the seagull, and this haven is a real protection but a
protection because the man is the recluse in this haven. And if there is a
festive party in this haven, a birthday party probably, it is performed and
offered by a whole city of blind people. And the woman who is the beneficiary
of this feast just has to jump into the mess and then she can move away with
the prize, the prey, the present for her birthday and we are back to the man
who is enslaved to the woman he is in a relation with. Is that submission love?
Some might think so, just as much as an addiction to heroin is a love affair,
at least we may think so.
The form that makes us such
contemplative readers is disquieting and as such manipulating us in our
expectations that are manhandled and given the lie, run-on line after run-on
line, perfect rhyme after imperfect rhyme or even the absence of a rhyme. But
the last poem is surprising in its use of a ternary patterns balancing binary
couples and quaternary extensions. And everything is good to produce such
groups.
to love and
life
to port and
sport
Alliterations, assonnances, and "love" becomes
"a loft" and the “port” a “haven” and then we have parallel ternary
structures
loft (is)
haven of eyes
desert (of)
blind city
and we see the chiasmic oxymoron of haven - city versus eyes
- blind and this oxymoronic chiasmus is then retrospectively projected into the
even more orxymoronic loft - desert, the loft that always contains something
rich like hay or beautifult like an organ, and yet is desertic though it is in
the very center of a city. Blind then tells us the loft is empty and the desert
makes us understand that the city is depopulated which explains why it is blind
since there is no one to look at anything. The voyeurs have been put on
permanent recess.
The man can then let himself go
to have a drink but that solves nothing because "man and mind meet in the
memory of a chase." Can you hear the alliteration in /m/ for
"me" the man would say, for "meat" the man will be when he
is captured at the end of the chase, hunted down to be the subservient and
docile pet of the hunter. The pet or the prey? Since the hunter is also a
taxidermist.
And more oxymorons in that
balancing act.
On one hand "forgotten
things he finds in a trail through the hills of youth." He thus remembers
things from the past. He is a puppet of this memory that remembers or does not
at will. And yet what's undone, what's not done, hence what is nothing but a
potential, or a recollection, a remembrance, a recall, will never be since it
will be preserved by a taxidermist for eternity, eternally dead. What is that
life in which only the past exists in our memory while the future is dead and preserved
in an icon of death, in some dead surviving illusionary trophy of a hunt the
prey of which you were.
Every one of these sonnets is
thus the most fascinating mirror in which my more or less dead eyes are seeing
nothing but dead past that has no future since it is a skin filled up with
straw. We are the hollow men of T.S. Eliot, the Scarecrow od The Wizard of Oz,
a straw man who wants to get a brain from the Wizard of Oz, oh my foot he will
get nothing but a disgraceful dismissal. We are impotent in front of the world
and can only know the pleasure, satisfaction or satiety a woman can provide us
with if we are humble enough to submit. And why on earth does it have to be a
woman? Why not a dog or a goat, because I suddenly feel like a Billy goat.
"Once upon a time there were
three billy goats, who were to go up to the hillside to make themselves fat,
and the name of all three was "Gruff."
That will give me some nightmares
but what can we do when ISIS is sweeping in front of our door and the Ukrainian
more or less would like to get rid of the Russians though of course they would
never accept to work in the mines and the steel mills. The menace of a
cleansing, or a genocide, of a man hunt that has though little to do with
manhunt.net since the prey is the man and the hunter seems to be an Amazon.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Jacques Coulardeau at Academia.edu (21)
H.G.
WELLS
THE
TIME MACHINE
THE
NOVEL AND THE FILM ADAPTATIONS
Dr
Jacques Coulardeau
THE TIME
MACHINE, A DYSTOPIC UTOPIA
Dr
Jacques COULARDEAU
H.G. WELLS, THE
TIME MACHINE
Dr
Jacques COULARDEAU
Université Paris Dauphine
Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne
Herbert Georges Wells (1866-1946) witnessed
eighty years of our developing industrial world during whichall basic
productive activities bloomed to produce our present mass consumer society
based on mass productionand the industrial and agricultural, financial,
services, communications, entertainment and labor mass markets.He witnessed the
growth of the two extreme ideologies produced by this industrial world,
communism (or Stalinism) and Nazism (or fascism). He also witnessed the
development of biology and particularly Darwinismand his evolution
of species, the survival of the fittest, and the birth and elaboration
of the theory of relativityand the physics that emerged from it or at
the same time. Finally, he witnessed, both in Europe and the USA, the junction of
the analysis of society in two antagonistic classes and their class struggle for
domination, evenreduced to the American simplified approach of the rich and the
poor, what he calls himself the “haves” and the“have-nots” (53) on one hand,
and Darwinism on the other hand. He died in 1946 after witnessing the fall
of the extreme racist form of this social Darwinism (Nazism and fascism)
but also the seemingly triumphantexpansion of the second form of it, Stalinism.
The Time
Machine
was published in 1895.We should also consider Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897). Wells first warns us about the
biological-and-social-danger of our social Darwinism in The Time Machine and about the plain criminal danger of the
uncontrolled development of science in The
Invisible Man.
I will concentrate on the ideological message of
The Time Machine along with two
adaptations of this short novel to the silver screen. George Pal’s (1960) shows
how the book was read before 1968, the turning point towards mass-consumerism
and mass-communication. Simon Wells’ (2002) shows how it is read after the
no-return turning point of globalization, September 11 and the war on terror.
These two adaptations deviate from the original novella in concordance with
their times. I will consider these two films in Marshall McLuhan’s perspective that
states the message is the medium, which implies the meaning of the films can only
be considered from the moment the films meet an audience. The audience gives
meaning to the film that is nothing but a hollow shell otherwise. Note this approach
is similar to Kenneth Burke’s dramatist theory. This implies that a film’s
meaning will change through time along with the audience that builds meaning
into the film.
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
SARI-2015 Conference in Paris "Héritages et Ruptures" Programme
SARI - 2015
Héritages
et Ruptures
Programme
du Colloque annuel international Société d'activités et de recherches sur le
monde indien 2015
Langues
du colloque: anglais et français
Jeudi 28
mai, Campus de l'Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
Vendredi 29
Mai, Campus de l'Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La défense
Samedi 30
mai au Campus de l’Université deVilletaneuse Paris 13
Jeudi
28 mai, Campus de l'Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
Sesssion
1 : Ouverture
9h Mots de bien venue Corinne
Alexandre-Garner, Directrice du Centre Espace/Ecritures, Université Paris
Ouest, Nanterre la Défense.
9h10 – 9h30 Allocution du représentant/de la
représentante de l'Université Paris Ouest-Nanterre la Défense
9h30 – 9h50 Allocution du représentant/de la
représentante de l'Ambassade de l'Inde
9h50 -10h10 Allocution du représentant/de la
représentante de la région Ile de France
10h10 - 10h30 Cornelius Crowley, Directeur du laboratoire
CREA, Université Paris Ouest, Nanterre la Défense.
10h30-10h 45 Pause
10h 45-11h 45 Session 2
(plénière) : Sangeeta RAY (University of Maryland
11h45-12h discussions
Déjeuner 12h-14h
Session 3 : Mise en débat théorique
14h-14h30 Michel Naumann (Université de
Cergy-Pontoise) : "J'aime tellement les traditions que j'en crée de
nouvelles" (Jean XXIII). L'exemple de la transmutation des valeurs."
14h30-15h Rada Ivekovic (CNRS) : "Heritage and
Ruptures - A Fine Balance Difficult to Obtain."
Session 4: Héritage et ruptures dans
l'enracinement et dans la migration
15h-15h30 Ludmila
Volna (Charles University ,
Prague / Université de Paris Est Creteil
15h30-16h Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru (University
of Bucharest
16h-16h30 Celia Wallhead (University of Granada
16h30-17h Evelyne Hanquart Turner (Université Paris Est Créteil/ Cambridge ) :"'Who shall inherit Bengal
?' Une lecture de An Atlas of Impossible
Longing d'Anuradha Roy
17h-17h30
Ahmed Mulla (Université de la Réunion) : "Transcending the Dual
Heritage of Exile in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction: Desire for a Chosen Realm."
17h30-18h Geetha
Ganapathy-Dore (Université Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité) : "Family,
Ideology and Geography in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The
Low
Land
18h
– 19h Assemblée générale de la SARI
(pour les membres uniquement)
20h Diner libre
Vendredi
29 Mai, Campus de l'Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
Session
5 : Tradition et modernité, langues et cultures en contact et en conflit
9h – 9h30 R.
Azhagarasan (University of Chennai
9h30-10h Jacques
Coulardeau (CEGID) : "Hidden or Unrevealed Buddhist Meaning in the
Sigiri Graffiti."
10h-10h30
Shruti Das (Behrampur University,
Odisha) : "Ethnic
Violence As Rupturing History- A Reading of Select Sri Lankan Fiction"
Pause 10h30-10h45
Séance 6 (plénière) : 10h45-11h45 Debasish LAHIRI (University
of Calcutta
Discussions
– 11h45-12h
Déjeuner 12h-14h
Session
7: Héritage et ruptures dans l'histoire
14h-14h30 Madhu
Benoît-Jain (Université de Grenoble) : ‘The Legacy of the Hastings Circle
14h30 -15h Belkacem
Belmekki (Université d'Oran) : "Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Approach to
Muslim-Christian Relationship: Rupture with Old Practices?"
15h-15h30 Ingrid Sankey (Université de Lille 3) : "Héritage
et patrimoine colonial après la décolonisation."
15h30-15h45 Pause
Session
8: Ecriture du passé douloureux
15h45-16h15 Fewzia
Bedjaoui (Université de Siddi Bel Abbès) : "Indian Women Writers at the Crossroads of Tradition and Modernity."
16h15-16h45 Lalitha Naumann (Université du Havre) :
"Throwing off the Yoke of a Repressive Heritage in Some Novels by Shashi
Deshpande."
16h45-17h15
Tina Harpin (Université Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité) : "Legs honteux :
viol, inceste et parricide dans Cereus Blooms at night (1996) de Shani
Mootoo et Bitter Fruit (2005) d'Achmat Dangor, ou comment surmonter
l'héritage mortifère?"
Samedi
30 mai au Campus de l’Université de Villetaneuse Paris 13
Session
9: Filiations et affiliations identitaires dans le cinéma et fiction indiens
9h10-9h30 Allocution par le représentant/la
représentante de l'Université Paris 13
9h30-10h Jitka de Preval (Doctorante, Université
de Paris 3, Sorbonne Paris Cité) : « Héritage et ruptures :
Négociations identitaires du héros dans les adaptations cinématographiques de Devdas. »
10h-10h30 Caroline
Trech (Université du Littoral Côte d’Opal) : "Ethnoscapes identitaires dans les films British-Asian:
héritage ou rupture."
10h30-11h Bisweswar Pattnaik (SP College, Odisha) :
"Queering the Masculine Space: A Study of Rabindranath Tagore's Shorter
Fictions."
11h-11h30 Lecture des poèmes de Sirigiya traduits
par Jacques Coulardeau
11h30-11h45
Conclusion Geetha Ganapathy-Doré (Université Paris 13,
Sorbonne Paris Cité)
Editions Amazon Kindle
Jacques Coulardeau at Academia.edu (20)
MARSHALL
McLUHAN
UNDERSTANDINGMEDIA, THE EXTENSIONS OF MAN
ROUTLEDGE,
LONDON
Monday
October 14, 2013 – 9,400 words, 18 pages
Dr Jacques
COULARDEAU
INITIAL STUDY / STARTING
POINT REVIEW(S)
MARSHALL
McLUHAN, A PROPHET
THE APOCALYPSE OR SPIRITUAL SALVATION?
FOR A GLOBAL
APPROACH OF MENTAL POWER AND CONCEPTUALIZATION
Wednesday January 21, 2015 – 2,700 words, 5 pages
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
POST SCRIPTUM
AVENTURE À SUIVRE / AN ADVENTURE TO FOLLOW
RESEARCH UNDER CONSTRUCTION WITH IVAN EVE
This is the
first leg of a longer study that is in the process of being written.After the
review and its illustration I added the 2006 review I posted onAmazon.co.uk,
and its comments, for the sake of perspective.
This review is
the prolongation of a long study that dealt with, among other topics but essentially,
Ray Kurzweil’s “popular-science”-fiction wrapped up as MIT expertise. Marshall
McLuhan ...
[Herbert Marshall McLuhan
(1911–1980), a Canadian philosopher in communication theory and he became one
of the cornerstones media theory with practical applications in the advertising
and television industries. McLuhan coined phrases like “the medium is the message”
and the “global village” and for his prediction of the Internet medium he could
not know in his life time though the invention of the transportation of data
from a computer to another via a telephone line was invented in the Fall 1969
between Stanford, California’s military laboratory and Oakland, California’s US
Armed Forces Headquarters for the Pacific (and at the time the Vietnam war). I
would refer you to the Official Site of the
Estate of Marshall McLuhan at http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/ if you want to know more about him. Accessed October 8, 2013.]
… is
essential here because he deals with the media and not the machines, or rather
with all inventions, mechanical or not, starting with oral language, considered
as media all of them extending man’s body, body parts, central nervous system
and even “consciousness” as he calls the mind. We will concentrate on his 1964
book Understanding Media, The extensions
of Man.
We have to get
some detail on his theory and, to remain in our own logic, consider it in a
phylogenic perspective though Marshall McLuhan does not envisage any other
human phase before the invention of writing systems (even his short chapter on
“The Spoken Word” is entirely oriented towards writing systems).
Hence he starts
considering humanity around 5,000 years ago in a sequential presentation of various
inventions one after another in chronological order. What’s more he centers his
interest on what he calls the “electric age” that starts with the “discovery”
of electricity and the invention of means to produce, store and transport it.
His electric
age is based on the stage of universal (though even today it is still not fully
achieved)
networked distribution (the electrical grid) of this electricity characterized
as continuous and instantaneous, meaning we
can use it at any time and in any place we want at the commanding tip of one
finger pressing a button on or off.
In other words
his discourse is centered on the last one hundred years when he wrote this
essential book in the 1960s and today for us on the last 150 years.
I will consider
his approach in both phylogenic and psychogenetic perspective.
The first thing
we have to do to penetrate his meaning is to list the various inventions he considers
in the book and try to find out what extensions of man’s body or body parts he
refers them to. We will present this list in the form of a table. He considers
26 inventions in 26 separate chapters. We have to keep in mind this conclusion
of chapter 21:
“The owners of
media always endeavor to give the public what it wants, because they sense that
their power is in the medium and not in the message or the program” [Marshall
McLuhan, Understanding Media, The extensions of Man , Routledge, London, 1964,
p. 216)
Monday, February 23, 2015
Jacques COULARDEAU, Grammaire anglaise complète en ligne (19)
LA
GRAMMAIRE DYNAMIQUE
DE
L’ANGLAIS
Dr
Jacques COULARDEAU
Pour étudiants ou enseignants
d’anglais francophones
INTRODUCTION
Cette grammaire de 301 pages et de 153 mille 153 mots (dixit
Word) fut commandée par un éditeur pour le public des étudiants préparant le
CAPES ou l’Agrégation, ainsi que les professeurs du secondaire. Chaque chapitre
a une unité presque totale au niveau de ses références et citations. Toute la
grammaire est fondée uniquement sur des exemples tirés d’œuvres littéraires
récentes.
C’est un corpus de citations sur un point ou un chapitre de
grammaire, toutes issues d’un même auteur qui permet d’éviter l’éclectisme des
citations et qui donc permet d’arriver à une vision plus synthétique.
L’ensemble de cette grammaire a été mis en ligne sur le
site de l’Université de Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, à disposition gratuite pour
les étudiants en 2007 (et doit toujours y être) après avoir été mis à
disposition informatique gratuite des étudiants de l’IUP Tourisme de l’Université
de Perpignan à Mende (Lozère) en 2002-2003.
J’ai mis les cinq parties en ligne sur www.academia.edu il y a déjà quelques
années. Je propose ici les cinq liens des cinq parties sur ce site pour
faciliter la navigation.
1ère partie : Le syntagme nominal
2ème partie : Le syntagme verbal
3ème partie : L’énoncé
4ème partie : Les utilitaires
5ème partie : Introduction aux exercices
(tous corrigés)
Je vous prie instamment d’utiliser sans modération ces 301
pages. Si vous remarquez des erreurs – et je suis sûr qu’il y en a – veuillez avoir
la gentillesse de me les signaler. Je mettrai à jour régulièrement.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
ADDENDUM :
REFERENCES
Alex, T.S., Mind Mine, recueil de poésies autoédité,
San Antonio, Texas, 1999
Bellow, Saul, Ravelstein, Viking, New York , 2000
BizRate.com®, Online Research Panel, Official
Sweepstakes Rules, The Internet, Los
Angeles , 2000
Borland, Hal, When the Legends Die, Bantam, New York , 1984
Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Whitaker House , New
York
Burghardt DuBois, W.E., The Souls of Black Folks,
Fawcette Publications, Greenwich ,
Connecticut
Chapman, Robert L., PhD, American Slang, Harper
and Row, New York ,
1987
Conrad, Earl, The Premier, Lancer Books, New York , 1963
Dickens, Charles, The Mystery of Edwin Drood,
OUP, Oxford ,
1956
Drapeau, Louis L., The Future of Risk
Management : Are You Reading the Signs of the Times ?, The
Internet, 2000
Ellis, Bret Easton, American Psycho, Picador,
Londres, 1991
Ellison, Ralph, Juneteenth, Vintage
International, New York ,
1999
Goddard, Robert, Set in Stone, Bantam, Londres,
1999
Harris, Robert, Archangel, Jove Books, New York , 1999
Hodge, John, The Beach A Screenplay, Faber
& Faber, London ,
2000
Huebner, Andrew, American by Blood, Anchor,
Londres, 2000
Joyce, James, Ulysses, Penguin, Londres, 1975
Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus, Manchester University
Press, Manchester ,
1993
Mumia, Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row, Avon
Books, New York ,
1995
Murdoch, Iris, Bruno’s Dream, Dell Publishing
Company, New York ,
1970
Murdoch, Iris, The Green Knight, Chatto and
Windus, Londres, 1993
Peter, Dr Laurence J., The Peter Principle,
Bantam, New York ,
1970
Reed, Ishmael, The Free-Lance Pallbearers,
Bantam, New York ,
1967
Rice, Anne, The Queen of the Damned, Futura,
Londres, 1990
Seeger, Pete, American Favorite Ballads, Oak
Publications, New York ,
1961
Shakespeare, William, Antony
Skeat, Walter W., Concise Etymological Dictionary
of the English Language, Oxford University Press, Oxford , 1965
Taylor, Richard J., « The Art of Digital
Techniques in the Broadcast Studio », SMPTE, Scarsdale , New York
Townsend, Sue, The Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾,
Methuen ,
Londres, 1982
Tropper, Jonathan, Plan B, St Martin’s Press, New York , 2000
Jaroussky se mue en dandy verlainien pour notre plus grande désorientation
PHILIPPE JAROUSSKY – PAUL VERLAINE – GREEN, MÉLODIES
FRANÇAISES – 2015
Une fois n’est pas
coutume, mais les textes étant français, les compositeurs pour la plupart
français et les artistes eux aussi français, il va de soi que la critique doit
l’être tout autant. Tant pis pour ceux qui ne parlent pas cette langue.
Verlaine fut une
coqueluche en son temps, à la fin du 19ème et au début du 20ème
siècle. Puis il fut aussi un favori de Ferré, Brassens et autres interprètes
plus ou moins anarchistes de l’après Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, comme pour
compenser je ne sais quelle souffrance intime de ce peuple français pour lequel
ils chantaient. On essaie sans cesse de retrouver le Verlaine jeune, coureur,
grivois, obscène, langoureux, sensuel, érotique pour ne pas dire pornographique
de ses pratiques adolescentes et de jeune adulte saltimbanque qu’il perpétrera
dans son âge avancé où les abats lexicaux remplaceront les ébats sexuels.
Rimbaud en tourne toujours dans sa tombe.
Je ne ferai que
quelques remarques sur ce double CD qui devrai fasciner le public qui
simplement aime la musique simple de la chanson française, une musique rarement
simpliste dans ce cas du fait de la variété des compositeurs, tous chevronnés
et experts dans la musique de salon, d’opéra lyrique, ou bouffe, de théâtre de
boulevard ou de cour, si cela existe encore après la chute de l’empire, bien
que les cours républicaines sont parmi les plus courues du pays. La diversité
permet de donner plusieurs versions de certains poèmes, ce qui ne peut être
qu’amusant et même distrayant, sinon instructif. Pourquoi tant de gens de
genres (pour toute question de genre voir plus loin vers la fin de cette
critique) parfois si différents se sont-ils intéressés à ce Verlaine ?
Certains disent pour la musicalité naturelle de sa langue. Certes, même si de
nombreuses rimes sont plus anglaises que françaises. D’autres disent que sa
langue est naturellement rythmique. Certes à nouveau mais l’irrégularité de
certains vers, les enjambements et autres trouvailles modernistes sont là plus
que nécessaire pour faire rugir les classicistes de la rythmique poétique
alexandrine ou romantique. On oublie la troisième qualité de Verlaine. Sa
poésie est sensuelle, aguichante et très savamment surprenante dans ses
orientations diverses.
Verlaine a une
langue de sucre gentiment bien travaillée en surface pour qui aime les choses
fondantes et quand ces choses fondent elles commencent à dégouliner et voilà
que c’est alors et alors seulement que la chose dont ces sucreries sont
fourrées, le fourrage si vous voulez, vous déboule sur la langue et dans le
gosier et ce fourrage est définitivement du poivre, du piment basque, de
l’harissa et du pili pili et que ce chili plus que sensiblement charnel en
devient un chili con carne plus que chaud au ventre, à la tripe et à la
bedaine. Verlaine en surface est un Baudelaire sans absinthe et sans opium,
mais en profondeur il vous redresse d’un coup de trique qui prend par surprise,
mais une surprise attendue, donc ce n’est pas un viol. Vous saviez à quoi vous
attendre, et si vous n’êtes pas trop subtil vous ne le saurez jamais car dans
ces poèmes jamais Verlaine n’appelle un chat un chat ni un fouet un fouet.
La voix de Philippe
Jaroussky dans ces chansons pour soprano, ou transposées pour soprano réussit
parfaitement parce qu’on n’a surtout pas une voix sur-articulée aux voyelles
incompréhensibles de la scène d’opéra français mais au contraire une
articulation d’opérette, d’opéra lyrique ou d’opéra bouffe qui laisse donc
l’auditeur au plaisir de comprendre cette langue sans avoir besoin d’un
dictionnaire phonétique biscornu pour oreilles torturées. La voix en plus est
délicate presque fragile, jamais précieuse, surtout quand il joue sur les
demi-tons un peu tristes mais toujours langoureux. Et quel plaisir de ne pas
avoir une de ces performances de salons bourgeois et petits bourgeois de la
troisième république, encore en vigueur dans certains festivals de province,
performance où l’accent circonflexe de « tempête » que Philippe
Jaroussky ne prononce pas aurait sonné comme un coup de canon funèbre et
funéraire à la fois.
On se prend même au
jeu de l’espièglerie de Fisch-Ton-Kan qui joue de l’haltérophilie comme
d’autres jouent de la cuillère à absinthe ou du flûtiau encore appelé pipeau à
cinq doigts. Et de toute façon vous ne saurez pas qui il est, mis à part qu’il
altère l’orthographe des haltères, sans qu’on l’entende, et il doit se faire
une gorge chaude de cette désaltérante altération. Et pourtant il sait
maintenir ce qu’est la plus grande tristesse en forme d’extase ultime comme
dernière planche du salut avant le saut de la mort dans quelque cirque urbain.
Mais écoutez un peu
ce petit quatrain de rien du tout :
Et
quand, solennel, le soir
Des
chênes noirs tombera,
Voix
de notre désespoir,
Le
rossignol chantera.
A quoi donc peut
bien ressembler un « soir des chênes noirs » ? Est-il différent
d’un soir des saules pâles ? Et il faut être vraiment tordu dans le sens
du désespoir pour voir une prison comparable à je ne sais quelle ballade de
Villon sur quelques pendus qui ne savent quel vent choisir car les vents c’est
faux et en choisir un cela dépend de beaucoup de choses, ce qui est ironique
pour un pendu. Mais vraiment ce douillet cocon d’une maison ou un quelconque
vieillard s’imagine qu’il peut encore se souvenir de ce qu’il aurait fait entre
ses draps s’il était encore jeune, mais il ne l’est justement plus, transformé
en prison est plus que généreusement ironique. Il ne lui reste plus que ses yeux
pour jouer au voyeur pleureur, qui le con-saule d’une certaine façon.
Léo Ferré perd de sa
gouaille de sombre Titi parisien vieillissant et gagne en frivole, grivois,
espiègle luron qu’il n’est plus tout à fait. Brassens d’ailleurs lui en devient
un véritable chasseur de chats et chattes en chaleur à la tombée de la nuit à
l’orée de quelque forêt et il s’en revient bredouille comme un chasseur
éconduit ou un amoureux déchargé. Il ne faut jamais oublier ses cartouches, mon
cher Georges. Mais que dire de Charles Trénet qui troque dans sa Chanson
d’Automne la danse des vagues sombres de l’écume maritime pour les soubresauts
de quelque dauphin mélodique dans la baie de San Francisco, de quelque saumon
mélodieux en remontée du Mississippi pour pondre son avenir dans la liqueur
aqueuse d’une beauté douce de nature naissante bercée par un pianistes
grappillant ses notes avec volupté.
Certains
compositeurs cependant arrivent à créer des atmosphères qui auraient surpris
Verlaine lui-même. Gabriel Fauré dans son adaptation du Clair de Lune joue à
l’archange Gabriel en pleine extase d’Annonciation et nous restitue
l’atmosphère recueillie des langoureuses prières que des religieuses
bénédictines adressent à leur époux Jésus Christ du cœur sombre de quelque
abbatiale romane comme Lavaudieu.
On peut alors finir
sur ces poèmes amoureusement érotiques mais dont l’orientation sexuelle est
aussi imprécise que trouble pour les gens qui ne confondent pas un chien et un
pigeon. Le plus beau dans ce genre indéterminé est Green qui commence en son
premier vers par planter le décor d’un corps végétal plus que mâle
(« Voici des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches ») qu’il
offre aux yeux voyeurs et aux mains de blancheur de la personne qu’il aime,
mais sans même qu’un genre grammatical comme celui de « personne » ne
vienne préciser si on a affaire à un mâle ou une femelle. Puis il nous refait
le coup dans son Colloque Sentimental où un couple de spectres et une paire de
formes sont de toute évidences mono-sexués que ce soit au féminin des formes ou
au masculin des spectres.
La musique est belle
et variée, la voix est divine et angélique, mais les paroles ne sont pas à
mettre entre toutes les mains et ne donnez surtout pas d’explications aux
enfants. Qu’ils fassent usage de leur imagination ou de leurs phantasmes pour savoir
ce que sont des fruits et des branches dans le monde dévoyé de Verlaine.
Dr jacques
COULARDEAU
Friday, February 20, 2015
Jacques Coulardeau at Amazon (18)
LOONY-LU & LULU
THE BELOVED SACRIFICED TO AND BY THE
BELOVED
A MYSTICAL PARODY
Jacques COULARDEAU
This is the love story of two people who cross all limits of moderation
or even intensity to reach beyond into the land where suffering becomes
pleasurable, where dependence becomes bliss because submission is real
happiness. They get and find their inspiration in real life for sure but also
in their culture deeply animated by all kinds of blood sacrifices from Jesus to
the Incas, from Isaac to the Mayas.
These two, a man and a woman, do not believe one moment they are
perverse or abnormal. They are just doing to each other and to some other more
or less, often less, consenting actors what they see going on in all war zones.
For them life is a war and living is survival, a constant battle against forces
that want their doom, their end, their death.
For them, both of them who are both dominant and submissive, master and
slave or mistress and slave, suffering is an offering to the person you love,
to the person who loves you. It is an honor just like it was for Jesus to die
for his father and for the sacrificed young men to die for their Sun god, the
sun god of the Mayas or the Aztecs.
Enter that deep jungle of sorrowful pleasure and blissful pain.
Jacques COULARDEAU
Olliergues, November 13,
2014
Amazon.com;
Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.fr; and all other Amazon stores. KDP Edition
File Size: 1067 KB
Print Length: 96 pages
Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Publisher: Editions
La Dondaine; 1st edition (November 12, 2014)
Sold by: Amazon
Digital Services, Inc.
Language: English
ASIN: B00PKFVNVU
Text-to-Speech: Enabled 
Price: US$4.63 – EUR 3,72 – IndR 277.00 – ￥ 516
