William Gaddis - The Recognitions

Over this grandstand disposal of promise the waiters stared with a distance of glazed indulgence which all collected under it admired, as they admired the rudeness, which they called self-respect; the contempt, which they called innate dignity; the avarice, which they called self-reliance; the tasteless ill-made clothes on the men, lauded as indifference, and the far-spaced posturings of haute couture across the Seine, called inimitable or shik according to one's stay. Marvelous to wide eyes, pricked ears, and minds of that erectile quality betraying naive qualms of transatlantic origin (alert here under hair imitative long-grown, uncombed, on the male, curtly shorn on the girls) was this spectacle of culture fully realized. They regarded as the height of excellence that nothing remained to be done, no tree to be planted nor building torn down (they had not visited Le Bourget; found the wreckage up behind the Hotel de Ville picturesque), no tree too low nor building too high (those telescoping lampposts on the Pont du Carrousel), no bud of possibility which had not opened in the permanent bloom of artificial flowers, no room for that growth which is the abiding flower of humility.

"A mon très aimé frère Lazarus, ce que vous me mandez de Petrus 1'apostre de notre doux Jesus.," wrote Mary Magdalen. "Notre fils Césarion va bien.," wrote Cleopatra to Julius Caesar. There was a letter from Alexander the Great to Aristotle ("Mon ami. "); from Lazarus to Saint Peter (concerning Druids); from Pontius Pilate to Tiberius; Judas's confession (to Mary Magdalen); a passport signed by Vercingetorix; notes from Alcibiades, Pericles, and a letter to Pascal (on gravitation) from Newton, who was nineteen when Pascal died. But M. Chasles, eminent mathematician of the late nineteenth century, paid 140,000 francs for this collection of autographs, for he believed them genuine: they were, after all, written in French. So the Virgin appeared to Maximin and M^'lanie at La Salette, identified Herself by speaking to them in French which they did not understand, broke into their local patois for long enough to put across Her confidences, and then returned to Her native language for farewell: any wonder that transatlantic visitors approached it with qualms? murmured in tones spawned in forests, on the plains in unrestricted liberty, from the immensity of mountains, the cramped measure of their respect, approached in reverence the bier where every shade of the corpse was protected from living profanation by the pallbearers of the Academic Française.

Before their displacement from nature, baffled by the grandeur of their own culture which they could not define, and so believed did not exist, these transatlantic visitors had learned to admire in this neatly parceled definition of civilization the tyrannous pretension of many founded upon the rebellious efforts of a few, the ostentation of thousands presumed upon the strength of a dozen who had from time to time risen against this vain complacence with the past to which they were soon to contribute, giving, with their harried deaths, grounds for vanity of language, which they had perfected; supercilious posturing of intellect, which they had suffered to understand and deliver, in defiance; insolent arbitration of taste, grown from the efforts of those condemned as having none; contempt for others flourishing from seedlings which they had planted in the rain of contempt for themselves; dogmata of excellence founded upon insulting challenges wrought in impossible hope, and then grasped, for granted, from their hands fallen clenching it as dogma.

From the intractable perfection of the crepusculous lie de la Cite (seen from the Pont des Arts) to the static depravity of the Grands Boulevards, it was unimpeachable: in superficiating. this perfection, it absorbed the beholder and shut out the creator: no more could it have imitation than a mermaid (though echoes were heard of the Siren of Djibouti).

— Voici votre Perrier m'sieur. — Mais j'ai dit cafe au lait, pas d'eau Perrier… A small man in a sharkskin suit said, — Son putas, y nada mas. Putas, putas, putas. Someone said, — Picasso. Someone else said, — Kafka… A girl said, — You deliberately try to misunderstand me. Of course I like art. Ask anybody. Nearby, a young man with a beard received compliments on his recent show. It was a group of landscapes in magenta and madder lake. Très amusant, gaí, très très original (he was French). It was quite a rage. He said he had walked four kilometers out of Saint Germain en Laye, found he'd forgotten all of his colors but magenta and madder lake, so he went ahead and painted anyhow. He said, — Quelquefois je passe la nuit entière a finir un tableau. Someone said that there was a town in Switzerland called Gland. Someone told the joke about Carruthers and his horse.

On the right bank, a lady said, — You'll like Venice. It's so like Fort Lauderdale. At the same table, a man said, — I'm going to look her up. She's lived here for years, right outside Paris, a place called Banlieu. At another table someone said, — By God, you know, they're almost as rude to us as they are to each other.

On Montmartre, someone looked up at the Sacré Coeur and said, — What the hell do you think they call that? The woman with him said, — Why bother to go all the way to the top, I haven't got my camera. A girl said, — Voulez vous voir le cine cochon? Deux femmes.

Above, the thing itself towered exotic and uninvited, affording the consolation of the grotesque: that dead white Byzantine-Romanesque surprise which was heaped in bulbiferous pyramids atop the Hill of the Martyrs in the late nineteenth century, soon after the city had finished installing a comprehensive new sewage systen. It was a monument (the church) not, as many had it, to the French victory over Prussia, but to the Jesuit victory over France. The birth of Ignatius of Loyola was early understood to have erred only in its location: Spain was origin, but none has ever excelled France in vocational guidance for the ideas of others, and it was obvious (in France) that his Society of Jesus could be best advanced through the medium of the French mind. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Society was having difficulty with the Jansenists, and the contributions of Pascal upset them almost as much as did the Miracle of the Holy Thorn, a relic which cured little Marguerite Périer of fistula lachrymalis: it was a Jansenist miracle. The Society recouped: found its own Marguerite and, with the kindly instruction and encouragement of Père La Colombière, her confessor, she revealed to the world a parade of the marvelous which shocked even those who were compelled to believe, an account which made a cure of fistula lachrymalis, never a pretty thought, pale into organic commonplace. The searing narrative of Marguerite Marie Alacoque passed from hand to hand for some two centuries until at last, in 1864, Pope Pius IX was assailed with a petition asking highest recognition for the Sacred Heart (the afflicted organ). In fact the petition itself participated in the miraculous, bearing as it did twelve million signatures forth from a country whose district records showed three-fourths of its brides and grooms unable to write their names. A bare decade after the beatification, papal decree consecrated the Universal Catholic Church to the Sacred Heart, and the Society has since defended its successful exploit against all comers with the same dexterous swashbuckling that was shown in its achievement: against the Virgin of La Salette, against promoters of the Devotion of the Perpetual Rosary, even against the prodigal (85 liters per minute) Virgin of Lourdes, whose bottled testimonials were soon flowing broadcast when proved not liable to the excise levies and export taxes of the Republic. Amid a crowd equaling the population of Afghanistan, the Sacré Coeur launched its church on the crown of that hill Saint Denis had once approached carrying his head under his arm. The new "public utility," so it was called, was dedicated by Cardinal Archbishop Guibert, disdaining insular mutterings which insinuated that the Society had plagiarized the Sacred Heart from England's leading philosophe, William Godwin, who thought of it first. And eventually, the Devotions within the favored land made truce: after all, as Monseigneur Ségur said, the Virgin shows very good taste in choosing France as the theater for her apparitions.