robbe-grillet, le dico
this is just a blog for r-g really isn't it? damn it!
with all the other many writers i've studied in my time, and boy have there been many i must say, i have never come across examples of their work in the dictionary. with the exception of r-g. and i wonder if it's always as reflective upon their work as the r-g examples i've noticed in le nouveau petit robert.
under the entry for 'fourvoyer' : “de s’être fourvoyé dès le début et n’apercevant pas le moyen de se tirer d’affaire” robbe-grillet.
(which is for those concerned page 151 of dans le labyrinthe. always convenient to have the word you’re looking given as the dictionary’s example.)
i have come across other r-g’s citations too, which also match up with other r-g preoccupations, like torture, and sexual abuse. will post in due season. (haha! “season”)
******************
Update.
just proved myself wrong. nothing overtly r-gesque about 'béquilles':
béquille: 'il marche à l'aide d'une béquille de bois placée sous l'aisselle" robbe-grillet. surely this is also from dans le labyrinthe.
reading the dico for quotes is fun! look! godard and truffaut are also here under 'foutre'! how befitting. a lovely quote too:
'si vous n'aimez pas la mer, si vous n'aimez pas la montagne, si vous n'aimez pas la ville, allez vous faire foutre!' (godard et truffaut, 'à bout de souffle', film.)
(i love here how the dico is playing 'can't be sure who wrote this bit' game. truffaut script, godard brillant improviser.... discussion!) makes you wonder if there is a list of quotes that le petit robert draws on? why does it like dans le labyrinthe so much? wouldn't it do better picking from r-g's most celebrated, la jalousie? and films! i've never noticed that before. that's great! belmondo should get cited here too.
with all the other many writers i've studied in my time, and boy have there been many i must say, i have never come across examples of their work in the dictionary. with the exception of r-g. and i wonder if it's always as reflective upon their work as the r-g examples i've noticed in le nouveau petit robert.
under the entry for 'fourvoyer' : “de s’être fourvoyé dès le début et n’apercevant pas le moyen de se tirer d’affaire” robbe-grillet.
(which is for those concerned page 151 of dans le labyrinthe. always convenient to have the word you’re looking given as the dictionary’s example.)
i have come across other r-g’s citations too, which also match up with other r-g preoccupations, like torture, and sexual abuse. will post in due season. (haha! “season”)
******************
Update.
just proved myself wrong. nothing overtly r-gesque about 'béquilles':
béquille: 'il marche à l'aide d'une béquille de bois placée sous l'aisselle" robbe-grillet. surely this is also from dans le labyrinthe.
reading the dico for quotes is fun! look! godard and truffaut are also here under 'foutre'! how befitting. a lovely quote too:
'si vous n'aimez pas la mer, si vous n'aimez pas la montagne, si vous n'aimez pas la ville, allez vous faire foutre!' (godard et truffaut, 'à bout de souffle', film.)
(i love here how the dico is playing 'can't be sure who wrote this bit' game. truffaut script, godard brillant improviser.... discussion!) makes you wonder if there is a list of quotes that le petit robert draws on? why does it like dans le labyrinthe so much? wouldn't it do better picking from r-g's most celebrated, la jalousie? and films! i've never noticed that before. that's great! belmondo should get cited here too.
posted by goguenard at
7:50 PM
2 Comments:
i think this is a rich mine waiting to be seamed for cultural studies... there really are certain biases to those who are cited. maybe it's also used to a certain extent to reinforce certain critical leanings and biases. for instance there's always heaps of zola and balzac but never any lautreamont. yes, the count wrote less, but it seems also less easily institutionally justifiable. so this maybe happens, and to an even greater extent, with more contemporaneous moments.
as for the souffle quote, funny story: i was once in a cafe in the 19th after a poetry gig and these two french friends, one an actor one a writer with French radio starting "dramatically" arguing (one of them had insulted the other's gf or whatever) and then the radio writer guy got up and said "si vous n'aimez pas la mer, si vous n'aimez pas la montagne, si vous n'aimez pas la ville" and walked out. maybe it was a running joke between them. but i laughed and laughed and laughed...
on another note, maybe it was belmondo who deserves authorial credit? he improvised too. so there.
haha! that's a funny damn story! were the 'insulted' party laughing as well? vis-a-vis belmondo that's just my point. how can you be sure where that line has come from? in america maybe they'd put the producer's name there instead.
yeah the underlying question to my post was clearly 'where do these cultural biases come from?' you would perhaps think that a dico is really just a business and so presumably separate from the workings of any governing body like the académie française. so how do they follow these trends? as similar as the dico and académie might appear to be, the dico is clearly opposed to the académie in its approach to language, because it will always be more keen to put whatever words are in 'current usage', rather than keeping the language pure. so i suppose it's not surprising to find a film quote in there, especially a film like à bout de souffle, which was apparently so faithful in its language use.
in an australian context, when the macquarie first came out, which was pretty late in '81, there was at the time some discussion about certain australian colloquial words and uses making it into the dictionary. the idea being let's keep our australian language as close as possible to the queen's, please! probably words like dingo, weren't the greatest: 3). 'dry as a dead dingo's donga'. or something.
but i don't know about there being no lautréamont quotes in the dico. i'm pretty sure i've seen some of him in there. there's not so much hugo though. apparently there's 'hugophobie' around despite his pre-eminence in american french departments. wow! sounds a bit like r-g. ha!
fyi:
"As someone specialising in Hugo, I'm currently writing an 'État présent' on
Hugo studies and have come across this very question myself. Whilst Hugo is
not entirely absent on many degree courses in UK universities, he arguably
does not receive the same attention as, say, a Balzac or a Flaubert;
'Hugophobie' lives on, perhaps, drawing on the same cultural reactions to
him as those famously demonstrated by Gide and Cocteau. Furthermore, it
would appear that, where 'le grand homme' is present, he tends to figure
more as a poet and a dramatist (in keeping with conventions of teaching
Romanticism) than as a novelist. The realist model of narrative writing
undoubtedly looms large in this kind of approach, echoing criticisms from
hugely influential figures such as Goethe and Zola, who could not abide
Hugo's Romantic melodrama. To be fair, degree programmes in the United
States seem more inclusive of Hugo on the whole, although again Hugo
appears to be overshadowed by other nineteenth-century figures.
Such a trend curiously runs counter both to public interest in Hugo and
indeed to a wealth of scholarly activity since the 1950s on both sides of
the Atlantic. Hugo's popular appeal remains solid: there are over 30
American and French websites devoted to him; a Google search for 'Victor
Hugo' returns some 3.2 million hits (to put that figure in context,
searches for other cultural icons Elvis Presley and Darth Vader returned
3.8 million hits and 2.4 million hits respectively); and the musical of
'Les Misérables' has been seen by 54 million people worldwide in 249 cities
and in 21 different languages. On the academic front, groundbreaking works
by Pierre Albouy (1963), Richard Grant (1968) and Jean Gaudon (1969)
broadened the scope of approaches and assessments of Hugo's writing, whilst
Jean Massin's chronological 'Oeuvres complètes' edition in 1969 greatly
enabled research on Hugo's oeuvre. Seminal studies by Henri Meschonnic,
Victor Brombert, Kathryn Grossman, and Myriam Roman, to name but a few,
have since followed, all exhibiting a renewed interest in Hugo's narrative
style and compelling us in our reading of him to widen our critical
perspective beyond that of realist writing (to which Hugo as an
arch-Romantic is self-evidently unsuited).
These public and academic interests are reflected in the work of both the
Société des amis de Victor Hugo and the Groupe Hugo (Paris-based research
network); for more, please look at the following links
http://www.victorhugo.asso.fr/page_archive.htm (the Société des Amis
de Victor Hugo here compiles and lists, from 2003 to the present, any
Hugo-linked French or international event such as exhibitions, theatre,
talks, films etc)
http://www.festival-victorhugo-egaux.fr (currently events are being planned
in France for the Victor Hugo and Égaux Festival in Feb/March 2008; this
year’s 'égal' will be Voltaire; all events for both the upcoming Festival
in 2008 and this past year’s are listed)
http://groupugo.div.jussieu.fr (excellent webpage of the Groupe Hugo,
including copies of past talks and papers, as well as transcripts of the
discussions afterwards, along with member information and upcoming dates)
I have personally found that such scope and availability of information and
ideas, along with Hugo's appeal to the imagination and his undeniable
standing in French culture, make him an 'easy sell' to students. His
cultivation of the fantastic can save him from being a boring read, whilst
library holdings and online resources assuage any student fears about the
dreaded 'reading list'. I myself have taught 'Notre-Dame de Paris' and
'Quatrevingt-treize' on the undergraduate course at Cambridge, and will be
doing the same here in Bristol when I launch a new 4th-year unit on the
Romantic Imagination. I am also in discussions to bring 'Les Mis' onto our
graduate courses as part of our comparative units on the nineteenth-century
novel (given the length of the text, I feel that it is more appropriate to
oblige graduates rather than undergraduates to deal with this particular
novel)."
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