I was sitting on my bed one night, last week, reading De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period, and I couldn’t put the book down. This story is so good! I thought. And then the next day, when we had our discussion, a common opinion was that we kind of start to hate “Jean de Daumier-Smith” from the first page and question his credibility as a storyteller after all his lies. But… but these lies, and this obnoxious character, are the beauty of this story!
Okay, I won’t say that I’d like to be that bus driver Jean insults in French, or his student at that time, or really anyone else interacting with him in the story. But, as a reader, I found him to be one of the most effective characters and narrators. For different reasons.
Look at this guy! He is probably the most stuck-up, pretentious, and just obnoxious nineteen-year-old we’ve encountered in any book. Overflowing with ambition, he presents himself as a very mature individual and a skillful artist—which maybe he is, but as I was reading, he reminded me of Esmé trying to use all the big words she had learned to appear adult-like. I enjoyed the scene we read in class, when Jean (his name isn’t even Jean, but let’s let him have it for a bit) “informed [the bus driver], in French, that he was a rude, stupid, overbearing imbecile, and that he’d never know how much [he] detested him” (p. 200). Setting high expectations for himself, he feels like he has the right to criticize people around him. Once he finds out that Sister Irma can’t join the art school, he passionately writes letters of rejection to all his other students. “I told them, individually, that they had absolutely no talent worth developing and that they were simply wasting their own valuable time as well as the school’s” (p. 243).
Jean sets his standards high, but he does have a pretty darn good opinion of himself. In his spare time, “Noteworthily enough,” seventeen of his eighteen oil paintings are self-portraits. As soon as he reads about the job opportunity, he feels “insupportably qualified” to apply (pp. 202, 204). To appear more educated and high-class, he uses French in his letters, as “[he is] able to express [himself] very precisely in that language.” He writes pages (or “cubic feet”) of comments and advice to Sister Irma and believes that he’ll be able to bring a great talent out (p. 233).
And then my favorite thing about the story: the absolutely ridiculous lies! Jean starts from his letter to M. Yoshoto and then digs himself deeper and deeper. His paintings are hanging in “some of the finest, and by no means nouveau riche, homes in Paris,” He’s the man who won three first-prize awards and who has asked Picasso many times “M. Picasso, où allez-vous?” as he saw the great artist losing his standing (p. 212) Every time there’s an awkward silence, Jean is coming up with new Picasso anecdotes to share to continue his lies. That’s some dedication.
Everything about this character made me laugh, which is the main reason I loved this story, but having the perspective of the narrator, the same man reflecting on his past life and his actions, made me think more about the theme we’ve pursued with many stories: lies and the storyteller’s credibility. As I read about Jean and his lies, he suddenly seemed more real than many of the normal, everyday characters who seem to accept the reality and share it with us. Here the narrator specifically tells us that he was lying, but I get the interpretation that was suggested in class, that as he’s writing he’s thinking Oh God was that really me? He seems to depict his younger self in a pretty comical light, and this (what seems to be) openness and willingness to share these embarrassing memories really draws me to the narrator.
After reading this story, I realized that the characters who are “pathological liars” are the ones I find the most appealing. Not just for the fun of their lies, but because they find enough meaning and motivation in life to see the point of relying on lies to get somewhere. I might be confusing, but I feel like Esmé trying to sound more grown-up, Jean trying to get a job that requires skill, and O’Brien trying to write “a good war story” all have something in common: they care about life and about achieving their goals. For me their lies make them not less credible, but more real and more likable as characters or narrators.
I agree that I really loved this story. He is definitely very self-indulgent but I actually really liked him. I thought he was comical too but a lot of times when people overcompensate with arrogance and lie, they are hiding from others and maybe from themselves some clear insecurities. Especially in his profession, I believe this may have been the case.
ReplyDeleteSome people I've talked to said that they didn't like this story because it was dull—but I'm on your side; I think it's anything but if you're willing to go along with the narrator's sense of humor. He's self-centered and pretentious and we have no way to tell how much of what he says is the actual truth, but he strikes some comedic effect in his matter-of-fact style that absolutely made me take everything at face value, even after he tells us outright that he's constantly lying. Salinger writes many a great pathological liar, doesn't he?
ReplyDeleteI totally see where you're coming from. When I say I want to throw the book across the room when reading this one, I'm only half serious. The writing is so *bad* at times, so impossibly overblown and pretentious and self-indulgent, I wonder if it's doing actual *harm* exposing young writers like yourselves to this style. (Please don't imitate this guy when writing your own essays and blog posts!) But at the same time, Salinger does such a *good* job doing a particular form of "bad writing"--it's excellent from the point of view of characterization. As you say, we get such a distinctive sense of this guy, and his unbearableness is maybe leavened by the fact that his "present" narrator is also rolling his eyes pretty intensely ("can you believe what an insufferable ass I was back then?"). He's so bad, he's good.
ReplyDeleteAnd, of course, this all sets him up for a transformative spiritual epiphany at the end: it's the story, in part, of how he got *out* of this way of seeing himself.