"Gigi", Colette
24 March 2023 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodehttps://www.ebooksgratuits.com/html/colette_gigi.html
My immediate reaction to this was that, as a short story, it felt like about half of a book with a chunk missing :( If the author had written the whole thing out with the same level of detail that she devotes to the initial set-up, then it would have been twice as long and probably a novel in its own right. But she spends a lot of time depicting her characters and their situation at the start, and then the dènouement feels suddenly stuck in out of nowhere, in a handful of scenes that feel disjointed with no clear progression between them. There didn't seem to be any stage of development or change from the initial relationship.
Perhaps this was because I was reading in French at about three am and thus not sensitive to all Colette's subtleties; there was certainly a large chunk of vocabulary at the start that was simply unfamiliar. (Mme Alvarez toisa sa petite-fille, du canotier en feutre orné d’une plume-couteau, jusqu’aux souliers molière de confection -- I'm assuming from context that this is describing Gigi's clothing, but without looking up all the period vocabulary I have no idea what it means, and have only learned that toiser means to look at somebody because I *did* have to look that up at a later point where it was plot-significant!) But Gaston seems to switch from viewing Gigi as a refreshingly unaffected child to viewing her as a potential mistress to acting the despairing lover without any obvious trigger or transition at all: there isn't any "But without your glasses you're beautiful, Miss Jones!" moment, or even any point where we see it visibly dawn on him for the first time that she has become an adult.
Nor is there any progression by which Gigi is shown, for example, to become conscious of her own dawning powers of allure, or to try them innocently out on him to unintended and dismaying effect, all of which I could imagine happening in the plot development of a full-length romantic novel. She shows no sign of being anything other than the same worldly-wise but naive schoolgirl who is the despair of her family ambitions at the start of the story, right up to that painfully direct childish counter-proposition of "why can't you just come and visit as a friend of the family, and we can play cards and eat sweets, and not worry about any of that stupid adult business".
And then suddenly, the very next time they see each other she marches up to him and accepts his indecent proposition with the bald statement that she would rather be unhappy with him than without him. (It wasn't even particularly apparent to me at first glance that this *was* what she was doing; her acceptance speech is simply Bonjour… Bonjour, Gaston, of which I *think* the significance is that she doesn't normally address him on an adult-to-adult level as 'Gaston'...!)
Upon which 'the happy man' promptly addresses her grandmother to ask instead for her hand in marriage, and the story ends abruptly.
It's a perfectly good plot, in theory; it just feels as if the entire 'second act' is terribly rushed and underdeveloped. (In fact I gather that the musical adaptation pretty much did just that: add an entire extra act between the 'monkey' scene and Gigi's realisation in the finale, during which we can see the relationship gradually shifting on both sides.)
And it doesn't help that Colette -- presumably deliberately -- doesn't tell us anything about what is going on in either protagonist's head at this point but only gives an onlooker's viewpoint of what they do and say, while Gaston is 'off-screen' for most of the final section, such that we have no idea of what he is even doing (he turns up thin and sunburnt; marooned on a desert island for a week? :-p) let alone what his motivations are...
On the other hand, as with "Love Never Dies", I spent a lot of time thinking over it afterwards, and coming up with theories of things that *could* have been happening, and then going back over the text with a fine-tooth comb to see how well that interpretation chimed with what was actually said. (At which point, since I was no longer skimming for plot in the small hours, I was in fact able to pick up on some of the more subtle hints about Gigi's unhappiness after her grandmother forbids her to go out in Gaston's motor-car, and which leads her later to accept his offer; she is 'in love with' him in some sense from a fairly early stage, even if she continues to treat him with all the rudeness and bounce of a gauche schoolgirl, and deliberately chooses to dress as such on the afternoon that he is due to make her his offer face-to-face.)
But we are still given virtually no idea of what was motivating Gaston, other than that he appears to have been genuinely smitten by the time of that disastrous interview -- despite having barely spoken to her since the 'monkey incident'! -- and to have addressed himself to her grandmother in terms deliberately calculated to appeal on a cynically mercenary level, and in which he did not wish Gigi to see their relationship. Grandmama, of course, is all in favour of inducting the girl into the practicalities of such affairs without any starry-eyed nonsense, and Gaston's flinch when Gigi starts to innocently repeat back the intimate details of what he had said to her grandmother in her absence, and his furious outcry at the old lady (who protests "As God is my witness, Gaston, I *told* her--") that she has been responsible for saying more than enough, both ring emotionally true to me.
The result of which was... I ended up writing fanfic again. For another canon which, when I check, turns out not even to have a fandom: I was astonished that "Carmen" existed on FFnet as a category, I was taken aback at how tiny the number of fics for "Sunset Boulevard" across all adaptations was, but I really hadn't anticipated that, given the popularity of both Colette as an author and of the film version of the musical "Gigi", there wouldn't be *any* fanfiction at all on either site (so far as I can tell) for any of the versions of the story. I didn't think it was terribly likely that there would be anything under Books, but I did expect at least some entries for the musical, given that AO3 has multiple entries for things as obscure as Akhnaten by Phillip Glass, never mind Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along", or "Guys and Dolls". But weirdly, apparently not... even though there are several stories tagged for an Indonesian band called 'Gigi'!
Although I was distinctly surprised to discover that, despite my speculation, there is in fact apparently next to no "Marie Antoinette" fanfiction either, at least on AO3. https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Marie%20Antoinette%20(TV%202022)/works )
My immediate reaction to this was that, as a short story, it felt like about half of a book with a chunk missing :( If the author had written the whole thing out with the same level of detail that she devotes to the initial set-up, then it would have been twice as long and probably a novel in its own right. But she spends a lot of time depicting her characters and their situation at the start, and then the dènouement feels suddenly stuck in out of nowhere, in a handful of scenes that feel disjointed with no clear progression between them. There didn't seem to be any stage of development or change from the initial relationship.
Perhaps this was because I was reading in French at about three am and thus not sensitive to all Colette's subtleties; there was certainly a large chunk of vocabulary at the start that was simply unfamiliar. (Mme Alvarez toisa sa petite-fille, du canotier en feutre orné d’une plume-couteau, jusqu’aux souliers molière de confection -- I'm assuming from context that this is describing Gigi's clothing, but without looking up all the period vocabulary I have no idea what it means, and have only learned that toiser means to look at somebody because I *did* have to look that up at a later point where it was plot-significant!) But Gaston seems to switch from viewing Gigi as a refreshingly unaffected child to viewing her as a potential mistress to acting the despairing lover without any obvious trigger or transition at all: there isn't any "But without your glasses you're beautiful, Miss Jones!" moment, or even any point where we see it visibly dawn on him for the first time that she has become an adult.
Nor is there any progression by which Gigi is shown, for example, to become conscious of her own dawning powers of allure, or to try them innocently out on him to unintended and dismaying effect, all of which I could imagine happening in the plot development of a full-length romantic novel. She shows no sign of being anything other than the same worldly-wise but naive schoolgirl who is the despair of her family ambitions at the start of the story, right up to that painfully direct childish counter-proposition of "why can't you just come and visit as a friend of the family, and we can play cards and eat sweets, and not worry about any of that stupid adult business".
And then suddenly, the very next time they see each other she marches up to him and accepts his indecent proposition with the bald statement that she would rather be unhappy with him than without him. (It wasn't even particularly apparent to me at first glance that this *was* what she was doing; her acceptance speech is simply Bonjour… Bonjour, Gaston, of which I *think* the significance is that she doesn't normally address him on an adult-to-adult level as 'Gaston'...!)
Upon which 'the happy man' promptly addresses her grandmother to ask instead for her hand in marriage, and the story ends abruptly.
It's a perfectly good plot, in theory; it just feels as if the entire 'second act' is terribly rushed and underdeveloped. (In fact I gather that the musical adaptation pretty much did just that: add an entire extra act between the 'monkey' scene and Gigi's realisation in the finale, during which we can see the relationship gradually shifting on both sides.)
And it doesn't help that Colette -- presumably deliberately -- doesn't tell us anything about what is going on in either protagonist's head at this point but only gives an onlooker's viewpoint of what they do and say, while Gaston is 'off-screen' for most of the final section, such that we have no idea of what he is even doing (he turns up thin and sunburnt; marooned on a desert island for a week? :-p) let alone what his motivations are...
On the other hand, as with "Love Never Dies", I spent a lot of time thinking over it afterwards, and coming up with theories of things that *could* have been happening, and then going back over the text with a fine-tooth comb to see how well that interpretation chimed with what was actually said. (At which point, since I was no longer skimming for plot in the small hours, I was in fact able to pick up on some of the more subtle hints about Gigi's unhappiness after her grandmother forbids her to go out in Gaston's motor-car, and which leads her later to accept his offer; she is 'in love with' him in some sense from a fairly early stage, even if she continues to treat him with all the rudeness and bounce of a gauche schoolgirl, and deliberately chooses to dress as such on the afternoon that he is due to make her his offer face-to-face.)
But we are still given virtually no idea of what was motivating Gaston, other than that he appears to have been genuinely smitten by the time of that disastrous interview -- despite having barely spoken to her since the 'monkey incident'! -- and to have addressed himself to her grandmother in terms deliberately calculated to appeal on a cynically mercenary level, and in which he did not wish Gigi to see their relationship. Grandmama, of course, is all in favour of inducting the girl into the practicalities of such affairs without any starry-eyed nonsense, and Gaston's flinch when Gigi starts to innocently repeat back the intimate details of what he had said to her grandmother in her absence, and his furious outcry at the old lady (who protests "As God is my witness, Gaston, I *told* her--") that she has been responsible for saying more than enough, both ring emotionally true to me.
The result of which was... I ended up writing fanfic again. For another canon which, when I check, turns out not even to have a fandom: I was astonished that "Carmen" existed on FFnet as a category, I was taken aback at how tiny the number of fics for "Sunset Boulevard" across all adaptations was, but I really hadn't anticipated that, given the popularity of both Colette as an author and of the film version of the musical "Gigi", there wouldn't be *any* fanfiction at all on either site (so far as I can tell) for any of the versions of the story. I didn't think it was terribly likely that there would be anything under Books, but I did expect at least some entries for the musical, given that AO3 has multiple entries for things as obscure as Akhnaten by Phillip Glass, never mind Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along", or "Guys and Dolls". But weirdly, apparently not... even though there are several stories tagged for an Indonesian band called 'Gigi'!
Although I was distinctly surprised to discover that, despite my speculation, there is in fact apparently next to no "Marie Antoinette" fanfiction either, at least on AO3. https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Marie%20Antoinette%20(TV%202022)/works )