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A "Little Tour" of the USA in Contemporary French Children's Literature

1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.1998.0011

1080-6563

Jean Perrot,

Canadian Identity and History

A “Little Tour” of the USA in Contemporary French Children’s Literature Jean Perrot (bio) Travel, Marriage, and Writing For the specialist on Henry James who, like me, has read “A Little Tour of France” (1885) and spent so many hours pondering over The Ambassadors, The Portrait of a Lady, or Daisy Miller, the vision of the United States is suffused with the mellow memories of “scenes” and arresting characters. Paul Newman, “the Western Barbarian”; but also Isabel Archer, the tragic American girl; Chad and Strether, these mystic addicts to Parisian life; and all the children, Maisie, Pansy, or Maureen Morgan, are figures that tend to blur the present and seem to be still waiting for the occasional foreign visitor. “The lesson of Henry James,” to use a formula dear to James himself when he wrote about “The lesson of Balzac,” should not be lost, since the novelist inspired by “the Sense of the Past” (34), the theme of his last, unfinished novel in 1917 was concerned with international loves and friendships that helped bridge the gap of misunderstandings over the ocean. 1 James’s “lesson” still keeps its power of seduction, to my eyes, at least, and I hope my readers will not find it preposterous of me to call up this venerable figure to speak about contemporary French literature, when so few contemporary French children’s books have crossed the Atlantic Ocean to reach the New World. I believe that cross-fertilization, comparisons, and evaluations-a major feature of Henry James’s literary activity-are the dutiful manifestations of comparatist scholarly practice as well as signs of mutual recognition between civilizations. Such cross-fertilizations and comparisons act as the most effective catalysts of humanist cosmopolitanism that helps people overcome their instinctive [End Page 70] tendency to turn inward around their individual “barbarism.” Naturally, I will try to ground the subjective preferences of my research on solid methodological assets: those, for instance, provided by the theoretical approach of “Imagology.” 2 As far as the French young readers’ interest in the United States of America is concerned, they receive an introduction to this country through the lessons in their geography or history textbooks. But one might object that to cross the frontiers between France and the USA should bear more than the fruit of the historians’ and geographers’ supposed objectivity in students’ manuals. The consumers of the new basic “world-culture,” who are easily persuaded by the advertising to make the “American way of life” their own through the use of a few coded items, such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Levis, or “rap” music, must be helped to decode the less obvious differences that distinguish our countries. One may wonder whether there is an osmosis between two sealed systems of culture other than those provided by television thrillers, old Dallas reruns, or The X-Files series. A first breach in the wall of reciprocal misunderstanding is provided in the form of au pairs and university exchanges. Love, close behind trade, is also a means of contact between peoples who tend to view each other on the basis of stereotypes. This is the impression that one would gain by reading Susie Morgenstern’s novel L’Amerloque (The Yank), 3 in which the myth of the liberated trans-Atlantic girl-lively, naive, carefree, bouncy, and audacious-is alive. What has changed in Morgenstern’s book is that the girl is no longer an heiress, as were Henry James’s Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer: now she is an African-American au pair and far more daring than her predecessors. Susie Morgenstern, who comes from an American Jewish background, is now living in France, and has indeed read Henry James, as well as other American classics. She is also familiar with contemporary authors writing for children in the United States, and she has perfected her French by writing books for her own children. For her, writing and learning a new culture have gone hand in hand. In contrast to Morgenstern’s book, most children’s novels dealing directly with the United States are the work of French women who have lived in the States either as students-Anne-Marie Chapouton, Hél...