"Bonjour Tristesse": A Moral Chess Board
"Bonjour Tristesse": A Moral Chess Board
On Françoise Sagan's novel "Bonjour Tristesse", and how moral failings either break your ethics or fracture your identity.
Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan (1954)
There’s a moment in Françoise Sagan’s first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, in which seventeen-year-old Cécile discovers how life fractures a person, forcing them to remake the broken halves into something like a whole. “For the first time in my life,” she says, “this ‘self’ of mine seemed to divide in two and I was quite astonished to discover such a duality within me.” Not incidentally, this observation comes in the second part of this short novel; the structure of the book reflects the structural division within its central character.
Bonjour Tristesse is the story of young Cécile and her sybaritic father, Raymond, who spend a summer at a beach house. Raymond exercises for vanity, and Cécile avoids her studies, languorously reflecting that the sand pouring through her fingers is “trickling away like time, and that it [is] facile to think like that and that it [is] pleasant having facile thoughts.” Their lazy hedonism is interrupted by the arrival of Anne, whose opposition to their lifestyle is seen in the social circles Anne belongs to:
“She spent her time with people who were sharp, intelligent and discreet, whereas the people we spent time with were noisy and insatiable.”
The only expectations Cécile and Raymond have of their acquaintances is “they be either good-looking or amusing”. Anne demands more of her friends, and will demand much more of Cécile and of Raymond, to whom she becomes engaged. This cardinal division between two radically different lifestyles leads to further divides, like the hairline fractures radiating out from a shattered hole in a window. Cécile mistrusts Anne’s world-weary aloofness and her serious pose against frivolity.
“Anne gave things a certain shape and words a certain sense that my father and I preferred to disregard. She set the standards for good taste and discretion ...”
Anne orders Cécile to study hard every day, at the expense of time spent lounging on the beach or making love with her boyfriend, Cyril. Cécile is also under Anne’s command to eat more and care about passing her university entrance exam in the autumn. “Because of her,” she thinks bitterly of Anne, “I was entering a world of reproaches and guilt.”
The expectant reader might well assume that the novel will centre on an antagonism between the self-indulgent teenager and the ruthless stepmother as a kind of Parisian Miss Havisham. A didactic novel might be set up this way, but Sagan has instead set up a moral chess game in which she plays both sides of the board. Sagan once said, “I never make moral judgments ... The only morality for a novelist is the morality of his esthétique.”
Instead of an all-consuming conflict between Cécile and Anne, the real conflict is within Cécile herself, as she struggles to find a landing place for her feelings about the newcomer, the new rules, and the new self emerging in response to this new way of living. In a single page, we watch Cécile swerve from a grateful young adult, who appreciates the maturing effect Anne has on her, to a spiteful child that resents Anne for making it impossible to live apathetically:
“The way she gestured to [Raymond], isn’t that love, and isn’t it a kind of love he’ll not find again? And the way she smiled at me with that trace of anxiety in her eyes, how could I resent her for it?
...
She is cold whereas we are warm-hearted ... Only we two are truly alive and she is going to insinuate herself between us with her impassiveness. She is going to warm herself by gradually drawing from us our lovely, carefree warmth. She is going to rob us of everything like a beautiful serpent.
...
But this is ridiculous! It’s Anne, intelligent Anne, the person who has taken care of you.”
Each of these versions of Cécile has an idea of how the future will be, and within each picture of the future is an image of who she will be — a hardworking student and doting daughter who becomes a woman like the sophisticated, if somewhat staid, Anne; or a femme fatale in a bar who sidles up to an attractive man “just as world-weary as [she] was” to wistfully recount the lovers she’s laid and the loves she’s lost.
It’s here that the novel finds philosophical bedrock: the relationship between one’s identity and one’s set of ethics. Committing to a sequence of coherent actions means committing to a unified self. When I behave in a way that breaks an established code of behaviour, a code on which I’d built my identity, I feel shame. I label this breaking of my own code as “unethical”, meaning out of synch with the values that define who I am. Shame is what we call the moral discomfort and narrative friction caused by contradicting our own life story.
It’s possible to circumvent this discomfort by rewriting your identity, so the action is no longer out of line with the kind of person you claim to be. I’ve known people who’ve opted for this option. They tell a new story about who they are seemingly every six months. Sometimes it comes about because they want something out of line with their current values, and their will-power and/or self-identity is so insubstantial that they bend to the force of whim, rather than stand fast against it. Other times, it’s simply because they’ve failed — as we all do — and the pain of reconciling themselves to their own failure is worse than the effort of overhauling their identity. In all cases, they never strike me as very happy people.
Cécile, too, comes out of the novel burdened by what she’s done and who she’s been. The joy and frivolity of the start of summer have been abandoned, or have abandoned her, and she finishes her story greeting her heartache by its name: Bonjour tristesse. But there’s a way out of the madness of chasing selves, of being buffeted from one identity to another, of spinning and bouncing like some pinball ego careening from one version of a personality to another. We can commit to a unity of the self, a hard-won freedom, rather than being slaves to circumstance, tossed from one set of ethics and values to another. In this commitment, we are forced to face and transfigure our failings, rather than compromise to accommodate them.
Reading has long been a vital tool for many of us in this endeavour. Early in Bonjour Tristesse, Cécile notes, “Love of pleasure seems to be the only consistent side of my character.” She wonders about the reason for this superficiality: “Is it because I have not read enough?” Readers experience the lives of others as if performed in a kind of hypothetical experiment. We can “try on” an infinite number of identities through reading. I don’t need to actually become a self-centred narcissist willing to hurt others That’s why, for all of its dramatised misery, Bonjour Tristesse makes me say, “Bonjour bonheur”.
Marginalia, plur. noun:
“In getting my books, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin … for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe