Etc.

In case you haven’t read Gregory Petsko’s amazing, stirring, inspiring letter to the President of SUNY-Albany taking him to task for his “deactivation” of the Departments of French, Russian, Italian, and Theater, you can read it here and should do so.

I recently wrote to the Great Man to thank him for his intervention on our behalf:

Dear Professor Petsko,

I know you’re probably receiving thousands of emails like mine, but I
just read your open letter for the second time and it brought tears to
my eyes.  I’m just depressed that we needed a scientist to express so
beautifully what we ourselves, in the humanities, so beaten down, had
begun to doubt.  A thousand thanks my friend,

Greg answered my email, and confirmed that he had received over 500 emails thanking him for his letter.

Then, having seen from my signature line that I teach French, added,

My pleasure.  It may interest you, but perhaps not surprise you, to know that one of my inspirations was Zola’s magnificent J’Accuse!, which I first encountered in a French course, a thousand years ago it seems.

I think he put perfectly how I feel:

Quant aux gens que j’accuse, je ne les connais pas, je ne les ai jamais vus, je n’ai contre eux ni rancune ni haine.  Ils ne sont pour moi que des entités, des esprits de malfaisance sociale.  Et l’acte que j’accomplis ici n’est qu’un moyen révolutionnaire pour hâter l’explosion de la vérité et de la justice.

Je n’ai qu’une passion, celle de la lumière, au nom de l’humanité qui a tant souffert et qui a droit au bonheur.  Ma protestation enflammée n’est que le cri de mon âme.

And don’t despair: la vérité est en marche et rien ne l’arrêtera!

Those inspiring words from Zola reminded me of another beautiful example of epistolary polemics, the letter from Toussaint Louverture to the French Revolutionary Directory when he feared that the reactionaries in France were going to re-instate slavery in Saint Domingue.  See especially the stirring part in italics (underlined by Toussaint himself):

Ils ont supporté leurs chaînes tant qu’ils ne connaissaient aucune condition de vie plus
heureuse que celle de l’esclavage. Mais aujourd’hui qu’ils l’ont quittée, s’ils avaient un
millier de vies, ils les sacrifieraient plutôt que d’être de nouveau soumis à l’esclavage.
Mais non, la main qui a rompu nos chaînes ne nous asservira pas à nouveau. La France
ne reniera pas ses principes, elle ne nous enlèvera pas le plus grand de ses bienfaits, elle
nous protègera contre tous nos ennemis ; elle ne permettra pas que sa morale sublime
soit pervertie, que ses principes qui sont son plus grand honneur soient détruits, que ses
plus belles acquisitions soient avilies, et que son décret du 16 pluviôse qui est un
honneur pour toute l’humanité, soit révoqué. Mais, pour rétablir l’esclavage à Saint-
Domingue, on faisait cela, alors je vous le déclare, ce serait tenter l’impossible ; nous avons su
affronter des dangers pour obtenir notre liberté, nous saurons affronter la mort pour la
maintenir.

Who could forget this scene?  (I could only find it in Spanish)

“Si la ayudo, Clarisse, Ud. y yo nos tornaremos. Quid pro quo; yo le digo cosas y Ud. me dice cosas”

So quid pro quo means “this for that”, an exchange, barter, I’ll give you something and you give me something, presumably of equal value, like in Spanish when they say te pago en especie(s) (or “I’ll pay you back in like kind”).

Only problem is, here in France, quid pro quo doesn’t mean that at all; it means a misunderstand, taking (the meaning) of something for something else, a semantic snafu if you will.  So is the French usage of quid pro quo a quid pro quo (in the French sense)?

I’ve known about this discrepancy for years and have never really gotten to the bottom of it.  I’ve always been amused that for us non-ambiguous, utilitarian Anglo types, the phrase means simply a trade, our favorite activity; whereas for the Gauls it has a much more nuanced reference to semantic slippage. We’re talking about the people who invented (modern) literary theory.

But who’s right?  What did the phrase really mean in Latin?  There’s the rub.  My French interlocutors on the subject have insisted quite virulently that their usage is true to the original Latin meaning.  So ancient Romans said “quid pro quo” to mean a misunderstanding, not an exchange.  Except that doesn’t appear to be the case.  Just for the hell of it I wrote an email to a few randomly chosen Latin professors (only in the U.S.–to be equitable I should write to Latin professors in France too, but this only a blog).  I had fun writing this email:

“I’m writing to you to settle a long-standing dispute.  I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times!  In the Anglo-saxon world, quid pro quo means an exchange, barter, this for that.  But in France (where I am living this year), quid pro quo means a misunderstanding, taking this to mean that. Not only does this discrepancy exist, I’ve seen people get quite upset if you challenge their respective meaning of the phrase.  Both camps (Anglos and Gauls) seem to insist that the ancient Romans really used the expression they way they do.  So who’s right?”

The answers I got were not very engaging.  One was,

“I don’t think they used it at all.  If they did, it would mean the former.”

Another, a bit more so:

“It looks as if the French really ought to be saying ‘qui pro quo’ if they want it to mean ‘a misunderstanding’, not ‘quid pro quo’.  So, a misunderstanding over a misunderstanding….Neither of these phrases is in fact an ancient Latin phrase; they are medieval.”

Ah hah!  So if the French want to say “misunderstanding” it should be qui pro quoi, not quid, and secondly, it wasn’t even Roman at all.  In truth, all of this information was available on wikipedia.  So yes, my Gallic friends and family, say “quid pro quo” or “qui pro quo” to mean misunderstanding if you want, but don’t think that Cicero and Jules César ran around saying it; it was probably invented by someone in the Latin quarter of Paris, maybe Abelard. Let’s not even TALK about his quid pro quo.

As I was jogging today my favorite ABBA song came on the iPod:

My my! In Waterloo Napoleon did surrender
Oh yeah! and I have met my
destiny in quite a similar way.

And let’s not forget these stirring lines,

The history book on the shelf
Is always repeating itself!

Perhaps this is my favorite ABBA song for the wrong reasons.  I happened to be enamored of the history of Revolutionary France and the Napoleonic reaction.  So the evocation of that turbulent period of human history in which the ideals of the Revolution were both betrayed and consolidated in a militaristic imperial expansion, all as metaphor to say, I can’t resist your love baby, has always struck me as just delightfully campy.

Is this campiness, the way that ABBA treats history, a staple of the postmodern?  Think back on an another (I was going to write “earlier”, but it turns out ABBA’s “Waterloo” is from 1974) evocation of revolutionary history by the French bad boy pop artist, Serge Gainsbourg, who notoriously (and scandalously) adapted the words to the Marsaillaise to a 1978 (a mere 4 years after “Waterloo”, though somehow it sounds older) hip reggae version:

Allons enfants de la patrie
le jour de gloire est arrivé
contre nous de la tyrannie,
L’étendard sanglant est levé

The difference between ABBA’s evocation of the revolutionary period and Gainsbourg’s is that Gainsbourg’s was essentially contestatory.  Indeed, Gainsbourg’s version of the French national anthem earned him death threats from the right-wing veterans of the Algerian war of independence.

It seems to me the the difference between Gainsbourg’s “Marsaillaise” and and ABBA’s Napoleon might be one of the symptoms of the break between the modern and postmodern in popular culture.  Is there another example of history being evoked and then entirely “reabsorbed,” gleefully emptied of its historical content?  Well there is a French children’s song

Le bon roi Dagobert
a mis sa culotte à l’envers

But that is a reference to the King Dagobert of the Merovingien dyansty, king of the Franks in the 7th century.

Oh, and for good measure:

"Napoleon lodged here" (Cassis, France)

Thanks for reading my new blog, everyone.  I’d like to start off with a brief comment about Mad Men, the show everyone is mad about, me included.  (It’s pretty embarrassing that I don’t get around to “discovering” shows, music, etc. until about 5-10 years after they appear, but it’s been an unbreakable pattern since childhood.  I “discovered” the Beatles in 1976 and the Clash in 1983).

I love this show, and one of the things I love about it is its attention to visual and narrative detail.  Here’s an example.  In the opening episode of season 4, Don Draper is interviewed by a reporter from Advertising Age.  When the biographical sketch is released, the journalist has published an unflattering portrait of Draper, much to the chagrin of the SCDP partners, who sense a lost opportunity.

We get a brief glimpse of the physical newspaper itself–3 or 4 seconds– before Roger Sterling reads: “Donald Draper, or Don as he is known, perhaps in an attempt to appear humble, is a handsome cipher.  One imagines somewhere in an attic there is a painting of him that is rapidly aging.”  Ouch!  I thought it would be fun to freeze frame the image of the newspaper to see if the producers had really gone to the trouble to create a fictitious article and if the quotation really appeared. Here’s what we see for a few fleeting seconds:

As we can see, they did indeed go to the trouble of writing an entire article, and the words that Roger Sterling reads aloud about Don being a “handsome cipher” appear in the lower left hand corner.

Another observation about that image–the photo of Don Draper reminded of something.  I looked at it for a long time before I realized it was perhaps a visual wink referencing another “secretive genius”,  J.D. Salinger, one of whose rare portraits appeared on the early editions of Catcher in the Rye (is that why Don Draper prefers rye whiskey? And why Betty and Henry are moving to Rye?).

J.D. Salinger