contempt

 

Mépris is French for contempt. Among aging American cinephiles, Godard’s film Le Mépris is enjoyed best if one retains the title without translating it, much as oeniphile prefer French terms to talk about wine.

The multi-disciplinary Jean Duvignaud – a sociologist, novelist, theater critic and the lover of Clara Malraux – wrote an essay on mépris which takes the word into an etymological socio-historical frolic – my fave kind of thing. The title of the essay is The counterfeit of contempt (La fausse monnaie du mépris) and he finds, in the word’s base, pris, or prendre – to take – a market gesture:

"Here we are at the market or the fair, long before Rabelais. “priser » to take or retain, as one does with a fish or game because it responds to a need, a desire, an expectation. And this give it a price (prix). To take is also to sniff, to aspirate by the nose, and the word was recognized by the Academy in 1878 in a hoomage to this secular practice.

From words grow gestures. Those who turn away from the fish or the duck – it smells bad, or its color is repugnant – disdain or have contempt for, as was meant in the 12th century the prefix “mes”. At what moment, and why here rather than there, did these words become ideas?”

This passage struck me, because lately I’ve been reading Jenny Erpenbeck’s The end of days, and there is a powerful passage connecting the collapse of the Austrian economy at the end of WWI with the daily life of a Jew among anti-semitism. They are somehow joined by the way the vendors of fruit and meat in Vienna are dealing with the influx of refugees, country people who come to a market and touch the goods: by posting signs forbidding, harshly, handling the goods and showing shopkeeperly contempt for those people who look like the type of people who handle goods.

“Every morning she goes to the market and gets in line. In the second year of the war, when she was still new in Vienna and there wasn’t yet a vegetable shortage, she liked to finger the carrots, potatoes, or cabbage, just like back home.

Hands off the merchandise! the Viennese shouted at her, sometimes even slapping her hand away as if she were a disobedient child.

Surely it isn’t forbidden to look a bit before one buys.

Look all you like, but no pawing.

Later they simply pushed her away when she wanted to touch something intended for her stomach. Fire, locusts, leeches, plague, bears, foxes, snakes, insects, lice. But did these people ever stop to think about what it really meant to introduce things growing in the world into their bodies?”

The vast contempt of the Viennese shopkeepers for the peasant, the urban ethnic contempt that flowered there, the way it is connected with touching, smelling, and forbidding touching and smelling – there’s a powerful nexus, here, the way contempt transmits itself in the socius, through small but forceful gestures. Erpenbeck is a marvelous suggester – the whole that waits out there, that the reader is conscious of, intrudes in these market interactions.

“In her own shop back home, if she had forbidden the customers to touch her wares, she’d have gone out of business right away. When she thinks of all she left behind when she fled — the eggs, the sacks full of flour and sugar, the barrels of herring, all the apples — she could weep. People here are insolent, and they won’t even give you what you are entitled to according to your ration card. When she stands in line unsuccessfully, she sometimes gathers up a few cabbage leaves, rotten potatoes, or whatever else may have fallen into the snow around the vegetable sellers’ stands, and puts them in her bag.”

I have been away long enough from Publix, from Winn Dixie, from Krogers that I don’t entirely remember the protocol. But I always handle the veggies. Smell strawberries. Sort through the vrac, to use the French term. And I’ve noticed that increasingly, the veggies are put in plastic. Nothing shocks me like seeing broccoli, which you should pick through, feel with you fingers, embalmed in plastic. I feel like they are being strangled in there. It is a feeling that leaps out of my heart of digestive system without me thinking about it at all.

Ah, the sources of contempt, it is a long topic casting a vast shadow over us, the fingering masses.