I confess: this is only a partial “rereading.” After laying my hands, almost by chance, on a copy of Tartarin of Tarascon, which to tell the truth I had remembered with considerable accuracy, I lacked the courage to reread the other two books that make up the trilogy: Tartarin on the Alps (even though it ought to strike us today as a singular piece of reporting on the hotel-keeping customs of the Belle Époque), and the hypochondriacal and rheumatic Port-Tarascon. Tartarin celebrated its first centennial in 1969: a rare commemoration among books fortified by the passing centuries, and also among those which the centuries simply bury under new and incessant stratifications of printed paper, but it seems to me that Tartarin does not deserve the renown it still seems to enjoy, and that it remains exactly what it always was, a thin, facile, and basically jejune piece of writing. It’s time to state it clearly: this book, far too celebrated, and all too often proffered to young people as a first acquaintance with the French language, owes its reputation to little more than a crude and unreliable humorous vein. The place that Daudet assigns his hero (with not a little arrogance), midway between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, is decidedly a usurpation: Tartarin lacks the substance, the universality, not to mention the dignity of those two progeny of Cervantes, which comes from the clear consciousness each of them has (in his way) of his own worth. One need only skim the book to realize this, to sense that Tartarin is vile and small.
Just as quickly one notices that there’s “something not quite right” in the core, in the heart of the book, that is to say, in the relationship that joins the writer to his character. Daudet doesn’t love his Tartarin; indeed, he scorns and hates him. This, in my view, is quite a rare case in all of literature, because that love is necessary, indispensable to any poetic creation. It is a love unique unto itself, which allows Dante to love Malacoda, Manzoni the Griso, and Pasolini Tommasino Puzzilli; a pure and disinterested love, the love of Pygmalion, which binds a creator to his creation once perfected, or in the process of being perfected; a love that must be present, because without love there can be no creation. By which I mean: without it, you cannot create characters, pierres vives (“living rocks”), human beings; instead, you create ghosts, marionettes held up by the force of words. That, in fact, is an apt description of this Tartarin, in my view.
Tartarin is a character out of a children’s comic book: he has two contradictory shortcomings—he is schematic and at the same time inconsistent. We know nothing about—and we could not even begin to imagine—the past or the background of this nebulous little man, wealthy but already idle at forty, without friends, without wit, without women. His obsession, hunting, is too petty a pursuit to serve as his soul: and so he is vacuous, he is a substrate for clichés and depressingly predictable adventures. At the same time, his characterization lacks a firm hand, like the buffoon you cast in any role that’s sure to get a cheap laugh. He’s a character of convenience: by turns, he is an experienced and thoroughly prepared hunter, and yet he has no idea where lions are found; he’s a bourgeois from the provinces who grew up on garlic, and he parades around Algiers dressed as a Turk; he’s a cowardly visionary, but he doesn’t think twice about waging battle unaided against the ship’s stevedores, whom he mistakes for pirates.
There’s no mistaking the fact that the book is childish in its appeal, and the nature of the readership that it has found over its century-long existence abundantly confirms this. Yet it’s childish in spite of itself—not by chosen topic but through ineptitude: there could be no clearer evidence than the clumsy, ham-handed sentimental adventure of Tartarin and the Moorish chanteuse. Nor can we say that it’s “also” childish: abundantly, universally childish—“also” childish—are such books as Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe, and yet they appeal to all ages; in contrast, a reader older than eighteen who takes pleasure in Tartarin must be either a bumpkin or a dimwit.
Or a racist. This doubt, this suspicion of a subtle and subconscious hatred on Alphonse Daudet’s part, not only for Tartarin but for his sweet town and his fellow townspeople, persisted throughout my reading. Moreover, it seems to me that his aversion is part of a larger attitude, a vague and muddled rebellion and intolerance that arm the Nîmes-born author against his homeland and against himself: perhaps an echo of artistic dissatisfaction? Or the infinitesimal seed of that subversive animus, that reactionary frenzy that led his son Léon so badly astray, making him a regrettable tool of the right-wing monarchists and Action Française?
Whatever the deeper motivations, the irony that Daudet employs in his portrayal of Tartarin, the Tarasconais, and the Méridionaux, while jocular on the surface, is profoundly acrimonious. “The man of the Midi does not lie, he deceives himself. . . . His untruth, for him, is not a lie, it is a sort of mirage”: this is not the sort of statement that we listen to or tolerate lightheartedly today. If we’ve learned anything in the past forty years in Europe, it is certainly this: that any generalization about the defects (or even the virtues) of this or that group of human beings is dangerous and reckless; that, when we speak of the Tarasconais, or the blacks, or the Russians, or the Italians in general terms, we are in danger of getting things wrong, and are certain to offend someone. Tartarin, however abortive and rudimentary he may be, has a fair claim to be defended from his own creator: if he was a coward, a liar, and a fool, then he was so in his own right, and not because of the blood in his veins, or the sun of Provence that “transfigures everything.”
With all this, I have yet to show that Tartarin of Tarascon is a bad book: but it is, no matter how you want to look at it. I don’t believe that my negative judgment is a product of that phenomenon so frequently noted, whereby books read as an assignment in school (and for the most part, unfortunately, these are the greatest works the human mind has conceived) are as a result permanently discolored, or even poisoned and unreadable. This book is bad from start to finish, practically every page of it. If I were asked to spare a few pages, for an unnecessary anthology, I would have no doubts: the description of the harbor of Marseille, which is scanned with a lively and acute eye, and sketched without lengthy digressions, with unaccustomed confidence; and the curious and quick-moving encounter with the “real” hunter, Monsieur Bombonnel, the sole dignified character in the book (though he remains onstage for only a few minutes).
Otherwise, the composition is dreary, devoid of verve and imagination: Algiers and Algeria are secondhand descriptions, all the human figures are cardboard, the adventures of the unfortunate hunter repeat themselves in the course of two hundred pages. And those feeble, worn-out sentence openers! “For instance,” “Picture this,” “Just imagine” (the reader must never be asked to imagine something: it is the writer’s job to make the reader imagine it), “I need hardly tell you,” “Calamity!”; and the profusion of ellipses. And yet this is France, in the years of Flaubert and Zola: Tartarin of Tarascon is a twin of Sentimental Education.
Nor can the fact that the book is humorous be adduced as a mitigating circumstance. Any comic potential is restricted entirely to the first few pages and to the premise, and declines rapidly as description gives way to narrative. There is not a single scene that prompts open, liberating laughter; in fact, condensing around Tartarin (and this is perhaps the greatest surprise of this rereading), we see an increasingly grim aura of failure, of definitive shipwreck, of frustration; and we are tempted to think that if Daudet had fully understood this tragic vocation of his little man, instead of stubbornly perceiving in him a comic miles gloriosus, we would have had a different and better book.