On Ne Peux Pas Depasser L'Horreur De la Bourgeoisie

[poliphilo]

French provincial towns are the stuffiest, most stultifying provincial towns in the world.

Or so one would gather from a crash course in French literature and cinema.

The one word- bourgeois- says it all. We don't have an English equivalent.

I just watched Chabrol's Les Noces Rouges. God, but these people are dim; they commit two unnecessary murders because they can't imagine moving out of the ugly little town that accords them status.

We English have a different attitude. Cranford, Middlemarch, Barchester are well-loved places; quite lively really; no-one is stifled by them the way Emma Bovary is stifled.

I put it down to France being such a big country. English towns are all squashed up close together; escape is easier. French towns are cut off from one another by miles and miles of prairie.

Physical isolation breeds cultural isolation.

No English town is as deaf and blind to London as any French town is deaf and blind to Paris.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Physical isolation breeds cultural isolation.

We have dangerous towns.

I'm thinking of Briceville, a little place up in the mountains, where there's supposed to be inbreeding and violence.

I drove up to Laurel Grove long ago, and the road went steeply up--I remember the entire trip as claustrophobic and dark, the woods close to the road, no houses--and then the line of cars had to stop because a man with a gun was threatening a woman with a suitcase; they were putting on a drama yards away from our cars--he was drunk...

I had children in the back seat. They kept coloring in their books, but I was transfixed: Old mountain man.

I don't remember what happened. They must have taken their argument back into the dark woods. I drove on to the Laurel Grove music festival, where we hippies danced in the grass...