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
University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
University of Paris Dauphine*

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. This cannot represent a fear of the modern world since Wells was a socialist, but the sign of an independent mind in symbiosis with a quickly changing world.

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) : "South Asian Fiction and Environment."
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) : "Cooperation of Opposites: The Home and the Foreign in R. K. Narayan’s Novels."
15h30-16h      Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru (University of Bucharest): "Community Ruptures: Individual Refashionings of Postcolonial Migration in Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You."
16h-16h30      Celia Wallhead (University of Granada) : " Three Generations of Migrancy in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss: the focus on material things."
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) :       "Reading the Contemporary through Classical"
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) : "In the City they Come and Go: Dialogical Modernism in Indian English Poetry"
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: Heritage or Rupture ?’
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 – 1964
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
Africa, Frank, in Mumia, Abu-Jamal, 1995
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, 1981
Burghardt DuBois, W.E., The Souls of Black Folks, Fawcette Publications, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1961
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
Garland, Alex, The Beach, Penguin Books, Londres, 1996
Goddard, Robert, Set in Stone, Bantam, Londres, 1999
Harris, Robert, Archangel, Jove Books, New York, 1999
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter, Washington Square Press, New York, 1970
Hodge, John, The Beach A Screenplay, Faber & Faber, London, 2000
Huebner, Andrew, American by Blood, Anchor, Londres, 2000
Hull, Raymond, « Introduction », in Peter, Dr Laurence J., 1970
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 and Cleopatra, Spring Books, Londres, 1965
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, 1982
Townsend, Sue, The Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, Methuen, Londres, 1982
Tropper, Jonathan, Plan B, St Martin’s Press, New York, 2000

Walker, Margaret, Jubilee, Bantam, New York, 1967

 

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

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