0 come, 0 come, Emmanuel

Eric Christiansen

Love, Death and Money in the Pays d'Oc Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Scolar Press £17.50)

One evening, on the highway not far from Nimes, a nobleman overtakes a peasant. The peasant, dressed in mourning, but singing for joy, explains that he has just buried his wife. Why is he so happy? He tells the nobleman the story of his life. His father was a wretched cobbler who married a pretty girl and spent his all on the wedding feast. He then sold the bridal clothes, and brawled with the bride in public. His mother-in-law advised him to set up as a dealer. He did so, and made his fortune in company with three sharpers; but he was suddenly arrested and executed for theft.

His widow went away with a knife- grinder; his orphan, Jean, was brought up by his Huguenot grandmother. She tried to teach him manners, and sent him to school, but to no effect; he became a clumsy urchin and a petty thief. He was caught stealing peaches, but managed to outwit his captors and get himself made vineyard-keeper by the owner of the peaches. When his grand- mother died, he found a fortune in her chest, presumably of stolen goods. He set about courting his master's daughter, but his master tried to foil him by getting a hideous local girl with child and making her swear that Jean was the father. The sheriff's officers arrested Jean, and carried him off to be married; but one of them hap- pened to a former associate of his dead father, and revealed to him how he had been tricked. He advised him to go through with the marriage nevertheless, as his master would provide a dowry and the pregnant girl was half-dead of disease.

Jean did so. His hideous wife died, after giving birth to dead twins. He now found himself with two fortunes at his disposal and the chance of marrying the girl of his choice. Hence his joy. The nobleman warns him that he will come to no good, and they go their separate ways.

That is the bare outline of a story called Jean-l'ont-pris, which was written in the Occitan tongue by the priest Fabre in the middle years of the 18th century. It has many merits, not least that of ending at ex- actly the right moment: when it becomes clear that the hero expects to get what he wants, but, on past form, is unlikely to do so. It may come as a salutary surPrise„et English readers that one of the ane'."e languages of Southern France was still Oil, and kicking as late as this, and that a ve t educated cleric chose to use it for his writerw or work. in any perhaps,langnage that nomuch eshh shots -tseivacctlib• him about the technique. Let us be thank therefore that the first 30 pages of L'9,/1.0' Death and Money in the Pays D'Oc coat English translation of a French trans'

tion of Father Fabre's story. al?

Why not a translation of the originos Like the early translators of ne Andersen, Mr Sheridan prefers 011%-d. else to boil his potatoes before he 113'; them. But no matter: his version counted as good news, along with the Tithe ty of the paper and the type-face anQIE'et, quietly pompous purple of the dust-Jac'' o The bad news is that Love, Death aid Money is not 30, but 608 pages lung' a,,h that the buckshee 578 contain a thoroac explanation of the story by one of Frarcoce. foremost historians. We should all be nah of ing in the streets at the opportunitY both of discovering a hidden masterpiece an' 05 finding out exactly what it means. Perbajle most of us are. However, there must io some who at the conclusion of this great,:ot tellectual adventure find themselves left " of the party.t Reading Ladurie's explanation Is is demanding and dismal experience- Ito dismal because it reeks of the classrooma _e the professor's study: it is the quintessenc- of the sort of academic mail-bag mattned ture for which universities were cle":eir and which is normally confined to 0`,, premises. This is a harmless and volunt6"he occupation, which keeps thousands off try'e streets, and would normally dese. ke respect; but when this sort of stuff sells lithe hot cakes in France, and is presented t° tiol English public in the guise of a Pnteri-ve best-seller, something would appear to Poo gone badly wrong. It seems that the jajq„g, of symbolism, functionalism, decuni,"io. hyper-realism and structuralism has 11°!ie vaded our lives so successfully that Pe" actually enjoy it.nag' There was a time when professors marling ed to avoid publishing books by pretend!og to leave their manuscripts in railway waitrbe rooms and hansom cabs, secure in ,.01 knowledge that anyone who found t''' would consider them worthless and throw them away. Have we actually sunk so low that this method will no longer work? When the stranded reveller, having missed the final stopping train to Haywards Heath, stumbles over the wad of typescript by the weighing machine on Victoria Station, and picks it up, will he, on finding the words 'Jean-Pont-pHs is anchored on all sides, in his real or humorous genealogy and in his own person, to a triple paramedical base,' conclude that he has discovered a gold-mine and rush it to the nearest publisher? If the answer is yes, the bore has truly come into his own.

The sad thing is that Fabre's tale is a good one, but it would never have been heard of over here if it had not been saddl- ed, bridled, and sat on by this immense pro- fessorial Humpty Dumpty. Nevertheless, Ladurie has three quite interesting things to say. One is that Jean-l'ont-pris is not simply a realistic picture of peasant life in 18th- century Languedoc. Perhaps that is ob- vious, but to give credit where it is due, he wastes very little time in making the point. Number two is that the marriage-plots resemble dozens of other marriage-plots in Occitan literature, and are not untrue to the known details of real-life marriage- contracts and deals in that region. This in- volves a survey of all works of Occitan literature in which the love interest can be schematised in a quadrangular diagram called 'the Occitan Love-Square'. Number three is that most of the detail in the story is reminiscent of a widely known folk-tale called Godfather Death. This involves linking almost everything in the Cure's story to everything in every version of the folk-tale that the professor can find, as analogy, contrast, equivalent, burlesque, allusion or transposition.

No one quotation can do justice to the abandoned luxuriance of this method of `explanation', but the diagram on page 329 will serve. It is entitled 'Negation of the Negation', and consists of six partitions, four of them linked by double arrows. Two sentences are distributed along the top and bottom rows of the partitions. One says that in the Godfather Death stories the hero cures the powerful man's daughter of sickness; the other says that in Jean-font-pris the hero kills the rival of the powerful man's daughter.

Not quite true, the last statement (you murmur); and the two statements seem not to describe the same set of events. But Ladurie has thought of that; he insists that 'to 'save the health is to affirm the being' and that to kill the rival 'is to replace this affirmation by a double negation which amounts to the same thing.' This is all in the day's work for Ladurie, because he is in the process of demonstrating that every character in the story apart from the hero represents Death, and therefore almost everything in it has to 'amount to the same thing' as something else in another story. Why the diagram? Why the lordly super- scription of 'Table 12'? Why the sentences chopped up and fitted into rectangles? Can-

not two statements jog along together in the usual way, and let the reader decide whether they are equivalent? Not here, mon vieux, not here.

For this is Structure-land, where it is an axiom that the writer 'encodes' and the critic 'decodes' and everybody else keeps quiet. Thus the hero of Jean-l'ont-pris, the one character who doesn't represent Death, is given three 'functions': he is 'a little dragon,' a 'kindly hobgoblin' or a 'Christ of the Passion' depending on which of three codes you apply: the Folklorico-diabolic, the Christian-Christic, or the Dis- criminatory. All good clean fun, you urge, and so it is, for some.

For others, this way of thinking is simply a pain in the neck. It depends on the trick of

The Spectator 27 November i982 using word-association and similarity °f shape as substitutes for logic, not once or twice or now and then, but continually a remorselessly and ad nauseam. As a method of critical analysis it has been much derided

. and parodied over the last few years, and It

only really thrives in the ri language periodicals and critical quarterlies to which the sound of laughter seldom peuettat•es. Why an industrious local historian hke. Ladurie should have adopted it and shoui.d be pursuing it with this single-minded zeal Is something of a mystery. A keen student °f French intellectual fashion might be able t° explain it; I cannot. In any case, this is ntll the way to keep the Montaillou fan-cluu better. The professor really ought to kit°