Daily Blague

Into the funk of not feeling very well yesterday came the light of Cyrille de Lasteyrie, a French advertising man who amuses himself by filming short monologues, under the rubric Bonjour America, about popular topics in an English that is far from perfect and delivered in an accent quite unlike any that I've heard before. His imitation of Robert de Niro broke me up, even if it was the only good imitation in his repertoire (he can do Meg Ryan's twisty fingers, though). His explanation of the American conviction that the French are arrogant shows how dependent a certain type of French humor depends on highly animated facial expressions. The whole production - there are eight shorts as of this writing - is preposterous and impudent, and just what I needed.

Equally entertaining, if far more substantial, is Raymonde Carroll's Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience (Carol Volk's translation of Évidences invisibles). This slim book put me in mind of a really entertaining Vanity Fair article, only one that was also thoughtful and lasting. An anthropologist who taught for twenty years in the United States before she sat down to write her book in 1987, Mme Carroll undertook to apply professional rigor to the accumulation of exasperated stories that she had gathered up from friends and family on both sides of the Atlantic. There is an almost slapstick fun to her account of cultural pratfalls, but in the end the importance of her book for an American reader is not its explanation of the French, but rather its insight into unconscious American motivation.

I'm not sure if I'm using the word correctly, but Mme Carroll presents her findings on a series of topoi. She begins with the home: how differently Americans and the French build and occupy their habitats. It takes her no time to polish a revealing anecdote that I shall copy entire. 

An American student who spent a year living with a French family told me that an uncomfortable situation had developed toward the end of her stay, that there had been a kind of estrangement, for reasons which she did not understand. After she answered all kinds of questions from me, we reconstructed the misunderstanding as follows. At the beginning of her stay, as she did not yet know the family, she spent a good deal of time chatting with the mother and children on returning from school, before going to work in her room. Since she didn't feel quite comfortable yet, she kept the door to her room open. Much later, when she thought that she had become "a member of the family" and really felt at home, she (unconsciously) began acting exactly as she did at home. That is, on returning from school, she simply said hello and went directly to her room to work, automatically closing the door. It was at this point that the family, who must have felt she was rejecting them without understanding why, began to treat her with greater distance, "like a foreigner." Only after our discussion did she realize that what was for her a kind of compliment to the family (they made her feel at home) was on the contrary an insult (undeserved, and therefore all the more baffling) to the family, who had treated her as one of them.

The mutuality of misunderstanding is quite elegant, but more remarkable still is the amount of information that can be mined from the story. It teaches us a great deal about the greater obligation, in France, to participate actively in family life, and how quickly familiarity in America leads to autonomy. Later in the book, Mme Carroll counsels Americans with fantasies of "becoming French" that, time and time again, she has heard of expatriates who suddenly couldn't take the insistence of French personal contact anymore. The girl in this story wasn't headed down that pathway, which is usually peopled by adults, but we can infer the effort of "going native" from the unconscious ease with which she slipped the lead of her hosts' interest in her as soon as she felt comfortable in their home. And as for the family's interest - would you characterize it as generous or as nosy? They meant it generously, but it could only have been felt as an oppression.

The second topos is conversation. This was mortifying for me to read, because I know that I have a tendency to lecture at the dinner table, and this is something that the French can't abide. The other night at the dinner table I found myself conversing in both modes (at different times). In American conversation, people are allowed to present what, in their view, is the complete expression what they have to say about something. What they have to say will often take the narrative form and consist of a beginning, a middle and an end, without all of which the point of the story will be lost and the speaker might as well never have opened his mouth. The French conceive of conversation differently. If you looked at Monday's entry, "Le Sérieux," you'll have read an outsider's somewhat acid evaluation of French conversation. It is not that Mme Carroll is more indulgent, but simply that, as a Frenchwoman, she understands it from inside.

The interruption-punctuations [of French conversation], then, are proof of spontaneity, enthusiasm, and warmth, a source of unpredictability, interest and stimulation, a call for participation and pleasure. They are the ties that bind, that bring the conversants closer together. This explains why very animated conversations (at cafés for instance) are a source of pleasure and stimulation (just like a wild game of soccer at the beach). These conversations take place among people who have already established a relationship (that of being "old regulars" may be sufficient in order to "talk politics"), who meet at the café expecting such conversations. The rhythm of the exchange, the tone of the voices, and the frequency of the laughter are indications of the pleasure that the participants draw from the conversation. The faster the rhythm, the higher the voices go, and the more the exchange is punctuated with laughter, until the final explosion.

Has Mme Carroll just explained, in passing, why Americans can't seem to enjoy soccer?

Ensuing chapters discuss important human relationships - parents, children, lovers, and friends, and then turn to troublesome areas, such as the use of the telephone, the different ways of handling minor accidents (such as breaking a wine glass), seeking information. There is something very interesting on every page; Cultural Misunderstandings, despite its clunky title, is almost a guilty pleasure to read.