Creatures Great and Small

Last Thursday, I accompanied École Dirigeable on a school trip to Paris, where we visited the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée and the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution at the Museum of Natural History.  The trip had all the predictable pleasures of looking at dinosaurs and stuffed giraffes in the company of children: the childlike wonder with which the students admired the tail bones of an Apatosaurus; the childlike mischievousness with which students who had illicitly touched the taxidermied specimens sought to “contaminate” their classmates; and the all too adult anxiety with which the students fussed over their digital cameras.  Between gallery visits we had a rainy picnic in the Jardin des Plantes and played What Time is it, Mr. Wolf?, churning up the gravel alleys under the horrified eyes of the paramilitary gardeners who consoled themselves by rigorously enforcing the prohibitions of walking on, placing bags on or even looking at the garden’s lawns.  How did you say pelouse interdite in English, the small French children wanted to know, and I had to resist the temptation of offering them the unidiomatic calque of ‘forbidden lawn.’

The day’s real surprise was the museum itself.  Unlike its gleaming analogues in London or New York, redolent of cutting edge museological pedagogy, the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée seems to have survived the last half-century virtually untouched.  The ground floor of the imposing 19th-century pavilion (Figure I) is filled with skeletons of extant species, while display cases around  the walls are packed with smaller specimens, each with a handwritten label; the upper floor contains a similar gallery of vertebrate fossils, overlooked by the invertebrates in the mezzanine.  Aside from the labels, there is little explanatory material, and almost no printed or electronic graphical content; and the labels themselves casually assume that the visitor is familiar with both caecum and duodenum.  Yet, rather than rendering the collections dry, or uninteresting, this intellectual seriousness and simplicity of presentation conveys magnificently the curiosity about the world and the excitement of discovery which surely underlies the entire project of natural history.  Who needs shiny pictures and dumbed-down exegesis?, the gallery seems to ask – look, here is nature! And here is nature, in all its variety: items which, at other museums, are hidden away in subterranean storage closets – cyclopic kittens, two-headed ducklings, kangaroo livers and crucified and dissected cats – here appear proudly, floating their jars of formaldehyde.  As realized here, the museum is not only a ghetto for hyperactive children, but proudly advertises its original function, as a place for serious scientific contemplation, and a monument to human curiosity.  It is surely no accident that first sight on entering the gallery is model human body, striding forward, arm raised triumphantly – an appropriate avatar for the museum’s curators and visitors alike.

While the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée seems to have passed through recent decades unchanged, the Grande Galerie d’Évolution spent much of the last half-century in a state of total neglect.  Closed to the public in 1966 as a result of leaks in its roof, the Galerie de Zoologie, home to the museum’s collection of stuffed animals, was covered by an emergency metal roof in 1968, plunging it “dans la pénombre,”  according to the font of human wisdom, and transforming it into “une immense cathédrale immobile” (Figure II); only in 1994 was the space reopened as the Grande Galerie.  Owing to this recent restoration, this gallery is unmistakably modern, complete with explanatory displays, video presentations, and electronic activities.  Even so, it, like the gallery of comparative anatomy, retains a not-quite-contemporary aura, some vestige of the orientalism and exoticism which must have motivated the men who hunted and collected these specimens in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a spirit exemplified by a reconstruction of a tiger attack experienced by the Duc d’Orléans and Prince d’Orléans while on a tiger  hunting expedition in India, a display in which the unlucky stuffed tiger is reprising his role from the day itself (Figure III).  Within the vast, dimly lit, Eiffel-era pavilion, dramatic spotlights pick out the specimens which, rather than being confined in glass cases, stand exposed behind low guardrails.  With the exception of the Tiger and the Elephant there are no dioramas here, no attempts made to situate the creatures among the authentic grasses and rodents of their native habitats.  Instead, the pièce de résistance is the cavalcade of African savannah mammals which snakes diagonally across the gallery’s central floor, giraffes leading hippopotamuses marching in step with water buffalo.  Although entirely unrealistic, the display doesn’t come across as cheap sensationalism, but rather as a healthy embrace of spectacle, a fitting acknowledgement that we want to see these animals not simply (or even primarily) to learn about them, but also because they excite our imaginations.  Like the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée, the Grande Galerie captures the specificity of a museum’s public function: in this case as not only a neutral repository of information and dispenser of educational activities, but also a kind of theatre to which we come in order to be amazed, delighted, and entertained.

At the end of the day, our return to Beauvais was delayed by a large demonstration directly in front of the Jardin des Plantes – linked to the day’s national strike in protest against the government’s proposed reform of the retirement system – which prevented our buses from returning on time to collect us.  The small French children were very taken with the protest: “ah yes,” they said, matter-of-factly, “those are the fonctionnaires on strike.”  As the wait dragged on, their attitude towards the strikers shifted from interest to unconscious emulation.  “There’s no way I’m coming to school tomorrow,” more than one student declared, “It’s just ridiculous.  I won’t be home until 11 PM, and then I’ll have to eat dinner, and I won’t be in bed before midnight.  How could I possibly get up for class in the morning?  Outrageous!”

 

***

 

Then again, perhaps the real reason I so enjoyed this trip to the museum was simply the joy which every overgrown child gets from looking at wild animals.  On Sunday, I returned to Paris by myself to see a retrospective of husband-and-wife sculptors and furniture designers François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne at the Musée des Arts décoratifs.  Animals and plants are the sole subject of the Lalannes’ whimsical oeuvres, and my visit to the exhibition was one of the most joyful hours I have ever spent in a museum.  A wonderful spirit of magic realism suffuses many of the pieces on display, ranging from François Xavier’s larger-than-life sized sheet metal sculptures of minotaurs and hoofed rabbits, standing calmly on strips of Astroturf, to Claude’s cabbages with feet and miniatures of snails metamorphosing into human thumbs (although the exhibition is entitled Les Lalanne, the two artists rarely collaborated on individual pieces).  François-Xavier’s work, in particular, blurs the line between sculpture and furniture to terrific comic effect: a hippopotamus whose belly opens up into a bathtub, and whose mouth becomes a sink; birds with lamps for tail feathers; a series of rhinoceroses which fold out into writing desks or disassemble into armchairs.  Most magical of all, though, are his monumental, gimmick-less animal sculptures which blend realism with the irrepressible joy of plush toys and cartoons: a herd of bronze-and-wool sheep, on casters for easy realignment, or a pair of impossibly shaggy metal and wool camels, perched contentedly on their Plexiglas dunes.

 

May Daze

And so, Dear Reader, another month has come and gone without any updates to the Historiae.  For the last three weeks your correspondent had the pleasure of an extended visit from his girlfriend, whose lovely presence permitted him to pour his burden of trivial observations and failed witticism into an actual human ear, rather than spewing it forth solipsistically into the silence of cyberspace.  Now, sadly, she has returned back across the pond and I, with apologies both for the Historiae’s cessation, and for its recommencement, turn to my recherches des billets du blog perdus.


The end of April and beginning of May saw the first coming of sustained spring warmth to Bellovacum.  Even as the giant cloud of volcanic ash cast a shadow  over Europe, the town enjoyed two weeks of unbroken sunshine and cloudy skies.  Indeed, by the time transatlantic links had been restored, it felt like Bellovacum had shot through spring into a Mediterranean summer.  Conditions inside school rapidly deteriorated, as the small French children yearned to abandon lists of English words for sandwich ingredients and return to the sunny asphalt of the cour.  My policy of celebrating good weather with outdoor games of “What Time is it Mr. Wolf?,” honed during greyness of February and March, threatened to derail the entire English-language curriculum, a problem exacerbated by the ability of my charges to manipulate the game in order to both prolong it indefinitely and drain it of any educational value.   At École Dirigeable, the students discovered that by taking miniscule steps forwards they could remain forever out of range of Messrs. Loup, while at École Rex the fastest runners in one class decided that the chase would be more exciting if they ran away from safety and taunted their chubbier pursuers.   Inside, École Rex was transformed into a greenhouse, as classrooms, their red and yellow curtains vainly shut against the sun, heated and filled with a sweaty vapour, whose remarkable extent only became apparent when one stepped back into the Alpine coolness of the hallway.  Students returned from recess panting, with glassy eyes and fevered cheeks, and wet out again rosier and damper than before.  The miasma brought with it a predictable lethargy: during one sleepy afternoon review of the words for pizza toppings, a seven year-old, without any particular surprise or interest, looked at a pair of onions on a flashcard (Figure I) and remarked “ah, un soutien-gorge.”

In a way, then, it was a relief when, by the end of the first week of May, normality, grey skies, and chilly rain had all returned.  Mental acuity also put in a renewed appearance, and the curiosity of small French children turned once again to questions of language.  “Léwon, Léwon” cried one ten year-old, her mispronunciation of my name betraying an alarming ignorance of great leaders of the Front Populaire, “how do you say ‘Michael Jackson’ in English?”  Other groups of students were fonder of pronouncements.  One class of seven year olds, confronted with the fact that only one of their number had managed to learn any of the weather vocabulary on which we’d been working for two weeks, observed that Fatima’s aptitude for English was only natural, since she was Spanish.  My own ability to speak the language of Shakespeare occasioned more interest: how, they wanted to know, had I learned English?  I parried: how had they learned French?  This response was clearly unsatisfactory: it was obvious how one learned French, the question was how one learned English.  Finally, one of the brighter students burst out: “It’s obvious: he comes from Canada where there are many people who speak English; he must have learned it there!”  Most remarkably of all, this same class finally determined, after seven months of following my instructions given in French, that I actually spoke the language.  How, they wondered, could I speak both French and English?  After much puzzlement, the same class wise man gave his judgement: “You see, he speaks English to people who speak English, and French to people who speaks French.”

This was only a passing moment of lucidity, however.  By last week the heat had returned, with its attendant neural haze.  After taking my girlfriend to the airport on Monday,ⁱ I wandered sweating through the northern arrondissements of Paris, weighed down by shopping bags full of clothes and sleeping bags, the debris of a weekend trip to Amsterdam.  As I paused before entering a small supermarket near the Gare du Nord, a middle-aged woman asked me, with an unexpected intentness, “Is this supermarket new?  I haven’t seen it before.”  Before I could finish mumbling my uncertain reply, a young man, unshaven, in a black woollen trench coat and wire-rimmed glasses stuck his thumb, green under the nail, into my face.  “A Euro?  I’m unemployed.”  As I was taking a bottle of shampoo down from the shelf, the woman reappeared. “This supermarket is very expensive,” she observed, fixing her gaze on me.  “There’s a cheaper one around the corner.  I could take you there?”  Excusing myself, I came up against a familiar coat, a familiar thumbnail.  “Give me a Euro.  I’m unemployed.”  On the stifling train, I sat next to a man who was unaccountably agitated by his failure to validate his ticket; crushed by the late-afternoon sunlight, I fell asleep on his shoulder.

Back in Bellovacum, the small French children weren’t much better.  The ten and eleven year-olds at École Rex had passed some kind of event horizon and were sliding inexorably towards the hormonal cesspool of puberty and juvenile delinquency.  One girl got up to distribute the day’s exercise, and a boy, fat and soprano, squeaked, “Ha ha, she’s wearing a soutien-gorge.”



ⁱMonday was Pentecost, one of May's four public holidays, the others being Worker's Day (May Day), V-E Day and Ascension.

De Piscibus Aprilibus

Faithful Reader, this entry should have appeared on the first of the month; vacations, however, intervened, and your correspondent was prevented from filing it by a lengthy detour over the Massif Central.  He presents it now, with his most heartfelt apologies. 

Today was poisson d’avril, which is the French version of April Fool’s Day, and a pretty big deal for the small French children at École Rex.  Poisson d’avril seems to work largely on the same principle of April Fool’s Day – humiliating your peers and colleagues by revelling in their hopeless gullibility – with two key differences, which I adumbrate here for anthropological interest:

1. The Fishes. While in Canada, being able to to carry out a successful April Fool’s joke requires the ingenuity to come up with a conceivable and, if not clever, then at least cruel falsehood, as well as ability to deliver it convincingly, the French offer the convenient fall-back option of sneaking up behind your target and sticking a paper fish – a literal April Fish – to his or her back.  This happened a great deal at École Rex.

2. The Day. Unlike in North America, where a mean-spirited conspiracy of elementary school teachers has put it about that if you play an April Fool’s prank after noon, you, rather than your evidently clueless target is the fool, poisson d’avril lasts all day long.  That’s time to affix a lot of fishes.

In theory, poisson d’avril entails a Saturnalian reversal of scholastic authority, as teachers furnish their students both with a supply of paper fish, and the principal targets for them.  Practice did reflect this, to some extent: my colleagues frequently arrived back in the staff room sporting their colourful marine accessories, and I was intermittently besieged by fish-wielding juveniles, although the boys who stuck fish in the girls’ hair were still efficiently reduced to tears in the director’s office.  More generally, however, the teachers had the upper-hand, tormenting their classes with fake assignments and impossible collège entrance exams.  One problem gave the quantities and prices of fish purchased by Madame Avril, before asking the age of the fishwife; an answer posted in the staff room confidently declared that she was 24.30€ old.  On second thought, though, she was only four years old, “since April is the 4th month.”

My own poisson d’avril was to tell my students that, as they had learned enough English, we would be learning Latin in the future.  My last class of the day, a group of seven and eight year-olds, took the exercise very seriously; one seven year-old also gave my gravitas a welcome boost by telling me, “Leon, quand tu parles latin, tu as l’air d’un homme sérieux.”  If there was ever going to be a providential confirmation that a PhD was the right path for me, this surely must have been it.

The Beatles meet Small French Children in the Age of YouTube

A minor emulous craze for singing Beatles songs in English class has overtaken the teachers at École Rex, who generally stay out of language lesson planning.  One teacher – who, notably, is possessed of both a singing voice and guitar – taught his class “Hello Goodbye” a month ago, and in the last couple weeks I – who possess neither – have been asked to teach that song to one class, and “Yellow Submarine” to another.  Despite my initial scepticism, the experience has been delightful; among its singular pleasures has been observing my students’ reactions to latter song’s lyrics (“they sailed to the sun?  the sea is green? le pays des sous-marins?) and listening to a chorus of nine year-olds singing the “oh no’s” of the former.

Being eager to further discharge my responsibility for cultural education, I also showed all three classes videos of the Beatles performing these songs,  in a clip from the eponymous film for “Yellow Submarine”, and in an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show for “Hello Goodbye.”  The small French children watched gravely, clapped dutifully, and then consigned the sexual obsessions of the 1960s to the poubelle of history by remarking wonderingly, “mais, ils sont moches, les Beatles, n’est-ce pas?”

Roissypensées

When you travel in France you come into frequent and heavily armed contact with the various branches of French law enforcement. The train from Bellovacum to Paris usually carries a complement of either railway police, or gendarmes, six or seven bulky, crew-cut men, who thunder through the train in a tight peloton once or twice, and look threatening when we stop at Méru, where two conductors were seriously assaulted in the fall (the perpetrator, who has been caught and jailed, told police that he was just “getting back at the SNCF”). In the Gare du Nord, I buy my ticket for the RER, the suburban train that will take me to the airport, under the watchful gaze of two camouflaged soldiers with berets and submachine guns. Moving from the great industrial-age train shed to the concrete utopia of Aéroport Charles de Gaulle, the policing becomes subtler, but no less awesome. The border guards may seem barely able to muster the effort – or too busy doing calisthenics – to focus their gaze onto your passport, but through the power of one mistranslated adverb, a routine security notice – bagages laissés sans surveillance seront immédiatement détruits- becomes a promise of superhuman retribution: “Unattended baggage will be instantly destroyed by the police.”

***

At De Gaulle, service jobs seem to be divided into ethnic fiefs (this happens elsewhere – at O’Hare, the entire maintenance staff seems to hale from Eastern Europe). At check-in, most of the Continental staff are African, as are the security screeners. The border police, unsurprisingly, are all white. Strangest of all – since this is not one of the principal immigrant populations of France – the men who check passports and boarding cards before allowing you onto the squishy escalator tubes that connect the different levels of Terminal 1 are, without exception, Indian, as are the women who run the supplementary gate side security clearance.

***

Since most US-bound flights depart from Terminal 1, the donut-shaped building is always full of Americans, who – whether because they’re still groggy from their early starts or because they feel that being only two hours away from the Anglophone haven of their Continental Airlines 757 gives them license to be cranky – are mostly complaining. The worst are the well-off couples in late middle age or early retirement, the women with their too-crisp makeup, the men wearing small fedoras and light-coloured slacks. They present as worldly, experienced travellers, well-dressed (although depending on their politics, this may mean North Face and Lululemon, rather than jacket and tie), with their smooth-rolling Nautica suitcases and frequent flyer club luggage tags. Two weeks along the Loire valley have, however, reduced them to helplessness, and husbands splutter in anger to wives about how the cashier at the newsstand not only spoke to them in French, but also had the effrontery to expect them to be able to pay for their copy of Time in Euro coins. “France is a wonderful country” says one woman, while waiting for the CDGVAL, the automated inter-terminal shuttle which runs along a straight line with five stops, and on which all signage and announcements are bilingual, “except that there’s no one to help you and it’s impossible to figure out where you’re going.” Her consort quickly agrees: “it wasn’t this bad five years ago.”

Other subspecies of homo americanus are also in evidence. As I wait in line at the check-in counter, at immigration control, at security, and at the mandatory secondary manual security screening – for I am flying from Europe to the United States – I find myself keeping pace with a group of latter-day high school Daisy Millers, on some mass-market Grand Tour. Their overweight and overfriendly chaperone sports a long-sleeved “Run for the Cure” t-shirt and a back pack declaring her allegiance to “EuroAmerican Tours: The Best in Educational Travel.” The girls are silent and dead-eyed through check-in, immigration control, and security. Only when we reach the gate do they show any signs of life. One girl begins excitedly comparing Roissy and the airport in Gainesville, Florida. One of her friends listens without much enthusiasm, but another – whose spectacular hickeys rebuke the chaperone and can only derive from a night of passion with a dissolute Romanian aristocrat – calmly ignores her, puts on her iPod headphones instead, and begins to dance in slow-motion. The fourth girl joins her, although since she doesn’t have an iPod, she’s slow-motion dancing to complete silence.

And the cruel irony of it all – and perhaps the reason why I’m sitting at the gate, writing nasty things about my fellow man – is that, for today at least, I’m one of them. Like the proto-Byronic hero of Gothic novel struggling beneath a family curse, I wield an American passport through Right of Blood. When I hand the gaudy booklet to the man who controls access to the hallway in which you line up for immigration control, he points to the flyleaf image of the defence of Fort McHenry, and asks me, in French, who the most prominent figure is. I tell him that I don’t know, and that I’m not really American (though I have to be careful here that I don’t present myself as a forger of passports). He’s shocked – “you should still know” he tells me, “it’s Christopher Columbus!”

Epiſode Eleven: Return to Bellovacum; in which the Author apologizes for his Prolonged Silence

Last week, I returned to Bellovacum after two weeks of vacances d’hiver, a period of time in which all French teachers go skiing, along with many small French children (and, presumably, their larger French parents).  Less fortunate small French children remain home watching television, although at least this year they were able to watch skiing at the Winter Olympics: the imaginations of my students seem to have been particularly captured by the biathlon.  The French often refer to les jeux Olympiques by their initials, and my trip to my home and native land have encouraged both my students and colleagues to ask me about “les geo”; my blank stares in response have, I feared, gone some way to undermining my cultural authenticity.

Although this is now the third time I have come back here from a vacation (and there’s still one more to go!) this has been the most defamiliarizing homecoming yet, perhaps because spending two weeks amid the old scenes and routines of Montreal has restored some of Bellovacum’s novelty.  The march of the seasons also seems to have accelerated in my absence: the days have lengthened enough that it’s now always worthwhile to roll up my blinds, and during the sun’s two brief appearances last week one could clearly catch the scent of spring.

This same sense of newness is particularly noticeable in the classroom.  On Thursday, for example, while teaching a class of seven and eight year-olds and still possibly experiencing the hallucinatory effects of le décalage horaire, I was suddenly overcome by an epiphanic realization of how strange a place primary school actually is.  It is an oddly coercive environment, in which what are essentially administrative punishments – being made to stand behind in another teacher’s classroom, deprived of recess, or hauled before the director – take on an awesome juridicial force, and in which the entire enterprise of teaching sometimes seems best understood as a struggle to force children to attend to their better natures, to their curiosity and eagerness, in the face of their evident preference for talking and playing amongst themselves.   Perhaps what was most startling was my realization that this has all come to seem perfectly natural to me, that in six months I too have come to think in a currency of lost recrés and punitions served.  At the same time, because I will have no real long-term involvement in my students’ education, my time in the classroom still feels like competitive play: each lesson is a game, in which, if my students end up learning something, I can declare myself the winner.

Friday brought another reminder of the personality-altering power of classroom discipline over small French children.  At École L’Arlésienne,  the teacher-cum-drill sergeant of my first class has decided to divide the class in two each week, so that we can work more flexibly in small groups.  Despite my initial laid-back scepticism about traditional French scholastic authoritarianism, I’ve come to relish the angelic regimentation of this class, particularly as the remainder of each Friday afternoon usually leaves me feeling like Yeats’ falconer.  In other circumstances I would have been concerned about this strategy of divide-and-rule, which the other teachers at L’Arlésienne have also tried, with near-apocalyptic results; this class, however, seemed so dutiful, so eager, that I couldn’t quite believe that their attentiveness derived purely from fear and oversight.  And yet, no sooner had the teacher departed with the other half of the class and with her dire warnings still hanging in the air, than an insurrectionist cell of boys declared itself in a chorus of complaints, recriminations, snitching and gros mots.  Suddenly aspects of the class of which I’d thought nothing became meaningful: that’s why little Yann always sits by himself at the front of the class, that explains adorable Ahmed’s special seat in the back corner.  As one boy whined, another sulked, and a third hit both of them over the head with an empty water bottle, I found myself wishing that the ideological state apparatus would hurry up and get this whole interpellation business over with.

This Week in Francophilia

One of the unanticipated effects of writing these Historiae - or, to be more accurate, one of the unanticipated effects of thinking about writing the Historiae – is that I now find myself thinking more about what makes my experiences this year particularly Beauvaisien as opposed to particularly French.  This habit of mind would probably alarm my French friends and acquaintances who, despite being internal exiles themselves, all immediately wonder why I’ve come to Bellovacum (their relief at learning that I didn’t choose Bellovacum is quickly tempered by dismay that I did ask to be sent to Picardy).

Yet, at risk of becoming simply another Anglophone pedlar of clichés, this year continues to have many distinctly French pleasures.  Parisian newsstands advertise prominently serious popular history magazines alongside their pornographic offerings.  While once-great English broadsheets fall over themselves to fuel popular outrage over voting irregularities on BBC talent shows, the French papers remain pleasingly and unabashedly serious.  Libération responded to Eric Rohmer’s death last week by devoting the first seven pages of its Tuesday edition to discussions of the director, including both a full-fledged obituary and a four-page critical consideration of the aesthetics and development of Rohmer’s filmmaking.  The unselfconscious intellectualism of public discourse extends even to the museum programs designed for small French children: the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie is presently putting on a special exhibition, “Bon Appétit: l’Alimentation dans Tous les Sens,” which promises to use a mechanical model of the human digestive system to lead 9 year-olds to “la découverte de l’Autre à travers sa nourriture et ses habitudes alimentaires.”

These discoveries serve mainly to confirm my own imaginings of a France where responsible critical theorists have rehabilitated the concept of Truth.  My most recent pleasant French experience, in contrast, took place in countryside reminiscent of the other half of the Keatsian equation.  Along with some friends, I took a day trip to Picardy’s Channel coast.  Arriving at a village dominated by spired brick houses twice as tall as they were either long or broad, with names like L’Esperance, we picnicked above a small cove, where the spectacular white cliffs descended on each side towards la Manche.  Fed, we climbed to an overlook, from where we could survey the line of cliffs; the spot in the middle distance where they crumpled down like crushed corrugated cardboard; and, farther off, the town of Ault, to which we walked over the fields, under a huge blue sky that seemed taken from a painted landscape.  Ault, weathered by the spray and pale in the bright January sunshine, was almost deserted, its houses shuttered up for the winter.  We descended and climbed through empty sea- and cliff-front parking lots, before finding a tiny one room bar, attached to the barman’s house.  We were the only customers, and as he poured our drinks, the proprietor lovingly described the properties of each of his Belgian beers; jazz guitar played on the hi-fi.  It was a perfect afternoon.