Godard’s Books.

I recently got the Blu-ray of Godard’s Hail Mary (Je vous salue, Marie) and watched it for the first time in almost forty years, once straight and once with the commentary track (and please allow me to vent my frustration about commentators who spend most of their time on bloviating and generalities rather than focusing on what is happening onscreen). Back when I saw it in the theater I was young and foolish and too proudly rationalist to be able to accept its premise of a virgin birth, not to mention that any Godard movie has to be seen more than once to be appreciated; now, with more Godard under my belt and more intellectual humility, I can enjoy its extraordinary beauty and its intellectual and psychological musings, and those musings bring us to the topic of this post.

Godard is surely the most literary of major directors — not in the sense of making movies out of books, which he rarely does, but in the sense of dealing with ideas in a literary way. Virtually all of his movies have characters quote from books, sometimes in extenso and sometimes reading from the book itself, and he will occasionally break up the action with his own ruminations (as in the famous coffee-cup scene from 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle). For this reason, you would think that analyses of the movies would routinely discuss the books he draws from, just as the Annotated Alice or Lolita describe the literary references used in those classics. But alas, the people who write about movies tend to care much more about camera angles and acting techniques than about literature and literary references, so a basic feature of the films goes more or less ignored.

I will provide some examples from Hail Mary, with brief explanations of their relevance to the film, in the hope that someone will pick up the baton and do a Books in Godard parallel to Eric Karpeles’s wonderful Paintings in Proust.

Early in the movie we see Joseph (a taxi driver) holding a copy of a book called Demain les chiens. It is the work of a moment to discover that this is the French translation of Clifford Simak’s very famous (in sf circles) City, which (in the words of Wikipedia) “describes a legend consisting of eight tales that the pastoral, pacifist Dogs recite as they pass down an oral legend of a creature known as Man. Each tale is preceded by doggish notes and learned discussion.” Big deal, you might think — he’s a proletarian who reads lowbrow lit, we get it. But in point of fact the Simak is closely tied in with the themes of the film, which features an exiled professor (apparently Czech) who tells a class that there has been far too little time since the creation of earth for chance evolution to work, and humanity must be the result of seeding by aliens. (This also greatly bothered my youthful rationalist self.) Of course, this resonates with the idea of a child being born by divine impregnation, but it also resonates with this passage from the book (the end of NOTES ON THE SECOND TALE), much of which we later hear in voiceover:

Dans ce conte, on rencontrera également une idée qu’on retrouve tout au long de la légende et qui a longtemps déconcerté les savants et les lecteurs. C’est qu’on peut quitter ce monde et traverser l’espace pour atteindre d’autres mondes. Cette idée a le plus souvent été tenue pour une pure fantaisie, fort à sa place dans une légende, mais il n’empêche qu’elle a fait l’objet d’études approfondies. La majorité de ces études a confirmé l’opinion que c’est là une entreprise impossible. Il faudrait admettre, pour que pareil voyage fût réalisable, que les étoiles que nous voyons la nuit sont de vastes mondes situés à de grandes distances du nôtre. Et nul n’ignore, bien entendu, que les étoiles ne sont que des lumières accrochées au ciel et dont la plupart sont très près de nous.

Bounce a peut-être donné la meilleure explication de l’origine de cette idée d’un autre monde situé plus loin dans l’espace. Ce n’est, dit-il, qu’une déformation légendaire de la notion de mondes de « horlas » dont les Chiens connaissent l’existence depuis la plus lointaine Antiquité.

Simak’s original English:

In this story likewise is introduced an idea which runs through the rest of the legend and which for long has puzzled all students and most readers. That is the idea that one may move physically off this world, out into space, crossing it to reach other worlds. While the idea in most part has been regarded as pure fantasy which, of course, has its proper place in any legend, a good deal of study has been devoted to it. Most studies have confirmed the belief that such a thing is impossible. Such a belief would argue that the stars which we see at night are mighty worlds at great distances from our worlds. Everyone knows, of course, that they are only lights hanging in the sky and that most of them are very near to us.

Bounce advances what may be the best explanation for the origin of the across-space world idea. It is, he says, no more than an ancient story-teller’s twist on the cobbly worlds, the existence of which the Dogs have known since dim antiquity.

(It is not clear to me why “cobbly worlds” is rendered as “horlas.”) This, of course, wrong-foots the proudly rationalist viewer who has been dismissing the professor’s theory: what makes us think we know any more than the Dogs? After the voiceover, we see a closeup of a dog, upon which the commentator says: “Knowing that nothing in a Godard movie is there by chance, the dog must mean something.” It’s from the Simak novel that was just quoted! Les chiens, c’est nous!

At another point a character says (I quote the subtitles) “We each go on, and each of us attains what he can reach”; someone else says “Hölderlin… his last work.” Sounds like merely a random quote without much relation to the movie, but if you do a little digging you find that it’s from the third stanza of his elegy “Brod und Wein” (Bread and Wine, and yes, that’s Brod, not the modern Brot):

Allen gemein, doch jeglichem auch ist eignes beschieden,
Dahin gehet und kommt jeder, wohin er es kann.

Each is allotted his own [Maß ‘measure’]; each of us travels towards it
Or is returning from it, and travels the distance he can.

The description of the poem at the linked webpage should give an idea of how it relates to Godard’s themes:

With his last elegy, Bread and Wine, written in 1801, Hölderlin is at a psychological and poetic pivot. He already stands in the shadow of illness, and his mother’s anxiety for him to return to a more Christian standpoint is gaining a greater hold over him. In parallel, poetically, his former attachment to Greek arts and values loosens: recent travels across to France and Switzerland have opened his eyes to grand natural landscapes and brought him to visualize a national poetry that could have a serenity quite different from flambent Greek inspiration. In this elegy, night is the symbol of a time of preparation for a new era. Resting, poets must now find the strength and discipline they will need to be worthy not only of the ancient writers but of restored divine revelation. Expressing what is still a vague, semi-internalized Christianity, Hölderlin sees Christ as the last of the old gods and the first of the new, bringing gifts of bread and wine to symbolize his fusing of the two in an age when ‘eyes thaw out in the light’.

My final example was the hardest to research, since there’s no overt indication that these are quotes, let alone what they might be from, but I won through in the end. Here are the English originals from which the bits in the movie are quoted in French translation:

For I do think that the spirit makes herself busy about the body, and breathes through it, and throws a veil over it to make it more fair than it is of itself. For what is flesh alone? You may see flesh alone and feel naught but loathing. You may see it in the butcher’s shop cut up, or in the gutter, drunken, or in the coffin, dead. For the world is full of flesh as the chandler’s shelf is full of lanthorns at the beginning of winter. But it inna till you take the lanthorn home and light it that you have any comfort of it.
[…]
How did he look? What like was he? Was he well−favoured? It be hard to say. There are no looks in love, no outward seeming, no telling over of features. When you are but a moth in the candle of his eye, can you tell his stature, or if he be dark or fair? Did Magdalene, that was like Felena, know, when she lay at the feet of the only man she ever loved yet never loved, whether the carpenter’s Son featured His mother or not, whether He was big or little in stature? Shall we know, when we be come into His presence that made us, what outward seeming His majesty has? No. Only our hearts will tremble in the light. I could never tell you how he looked as he stood there; but I can tell you how the women looked that glassed him.

These turn out to be from the long-forgotten 1924 historical romance Precious Bane by the long-forgotten (as far as I know) Mary Webb; again, the Wikipedia summary should give you an idea of its relevance:

The story is set in rural Shropshire during the Napoleonic Wars. It is narrated by the central character, Prue Sarn, whose life is blighted by having a cleft lip and cleft palate. Only the weaver, Kester Woodseaves, perceives the beauty of her character, but Prue cannot believe herself worthy of him. Her brother Gideon is overridingly ambitious to attain wealth and power, regardless of who suffers while he does so. Gideon is set to wed his sweetheart Jancis, but he incurs the wrath of her father, the cruel and scheming self-proclaimed wizard Beguildy. An act of vengeance by Beguildy makes Gideon reject Jancis and tragedy engulfs them both. Prue is wrongly accused of murder and set upon by a mob, but Kester defies them and carries Prue away to the happiness she believed she could never possess because of her deformity.

(The French translation is called Sarn; I’m guessing that that obscure surname is from the Welsh village.) Nobody else seems to have noticed the quotes — at least, when I google [godard “mary webb”] the only hit is the Cine-Tourist page an A to Z of Bande à part, where we find:

Godard’s press release compares Karina as Odile to three literary heroines: Sarn from Mary Webb’s Precious Bane, Ottilie (or Odile) from Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbevilles​ (1892).

So the Webb novel had been important to him for at least twenty years. I may have to read the damn thing. (And kudos to Cine-Tourist for the many references they provide on that page!)