Category: Books, Documentaries, Reviews

Turkey Tracks:  November 8, 2010

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery is a French professor of philosophy.  Her novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog has been enormously popular in her native France, England, and in America. 

I do not see why.

I believe the novel’s success to be partly due to a lack of critical reviews.  The reviews on-line are all laudatory.  So is the novel’s popularity due to some popular idea that this is a philosophical novel that produces cultural capital if one has read it because it does discuss various philosophical ideas along the way?   But, for me, Barbery’s philosophical stance in the novel is incoherent.  And, Barbery shocks the reader by killing her protagonist just when the three central characters have come together in an interesting way.  It’s as if Barbery does not know what to do with them once she’s set their stage.  And, I found it very difficult to capture the large cast in my head as I read.  I kept having to page back to see “who is that again?”

But, let’s look at how Barbery handles philosophy.  She, as is customary, divides the subject into two major camps:  idealism and materialism.  Idealism comes from the mind of the individual interacting with the world, as in Descartes “I think, therefore I am.”  And, phenomenology, a subset of idealism and the subject of a debunking discourse in the novel– is the belief that the real world in inaccessible  because all that exists is perception formed in the mind.   Materialism, on the other hand, believes that there are bones, dates, and observable constructs in the world.  Marx, for instance, is from the materialistic camp.  But, Barbery dismisses Marx on the first page of the novel.  Not all of materialism, but Marx, who writes of capital and its impact on class–a major subject in the novel as the main protagonist is a concierge in a fancy apartment filled with rich people. 

With idealism dismissed and Marx dismissed, what remains?  For Barbery it’s a particular material moment of viewing Beauty.   ART, thus, gives us the power to erase desire because we can look at beauty/art without wanting the objects portrayed in the art.  Further, the still life, or the objects within art, hold beauty in a timeless moment.  Barbery describes other such timeless beautiful moments of beauty in the novel.  So, all of materialism is reduced to beauty held in a moment seen only by the observant–like the petal of a flower falling that one of the protagonists sees. 

But, but, but–isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder.  And, aren’t notions of beauty formed by one’s culture and by the context within which one lives?  History shows shifting notions of beauty.  Yet, a key scene that sketches out Barbery’s philosophy is when the concierge visits the apartment of a wealthy Japanese man and sees a western still life from several hundred years ago.  Together the two people–one Asian and one French–salivate over this very Western picture.  Would the Japanese man really have this notion of beauty?  Would the concierge really enjoy esoteric Japanese movies that display Japanese notions of beauty?  This is the great bourgeoise move that makes all people alike under the sun.  By drawing a notion of universal beauty that can be seen by all, Barbery erases the very real differences that exist between cultures, between ages.  What has followed that idea around the world has been a violence carried out by those with the power to do so.  The different are made to want the same things as the conqueror when their culture was/is very different. 

Aha, but maybe that’s where the popularity lies.  It’s the same old Western story told yet another way, isn’t it?  And, isn’t the viewing of ART actually a moment of idealism, not materialism.  Isn’t that moment mediated by the mind and the cultural knowledge of the mind?  So, what’s really going on here is an entrapment within the idealistic circuit which maintains the status quo of… class reality, for instance.

Yes, that’s it.