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.
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