Much of high school and lower-level college foreign language teaching these days focuses on the study of the cultures where those languages are spoken. Literature, though it once figured prominently in these classes, now receives less attention. Convinced that it still has important things to offer students even at these earlier levels of study, but cognizant of the change in focus of modern foreign language teaching, I have created this website to make available to teachers and students at those levels a significant full-length work of French literature, Pierre Loti's Pêcheur d'Islande, in a format that emphasizes and facilitates the presentation of French culture.
In addition to dealing with the beginnings of the French involvement in Vietnam that eventually led to our own embroilment there and that gives the work a contemporary relevance, Pêcheur d'Islande contains a rich picture of life in late nineteenth-century Brittany. Many particularly unique and interesting elements of Breton culture figure prominantly in the novel, allowing for much discussion of cultural issues, including those of diversity and the problems that result when a minority culture attempts to function inside a majority culture. This work is also well suited to late adolescents and readers in their early twenties, as it presents the lives of several young Bretons who are coping with issues common to anyone of that age: unrequited love, the assertion of one's independance, the problems posed by elderly relatives, etc.
This website is far more than a simple digitalized presentation of an appropriate
literary text, however. Realizing that many teachers might appreciate help in
explaining and making real the unique and fascinating aspects of French culture
presented in this novel, I have incorporated into this website pictures of many
of the things mentioned in the text with which American students are unlikely
to be familiar, linking them to the relevant passages. Indeed, since creating
the first version of this site, I have spent many fascinating hours scouring
the web for pictures of objects and places mentioned in the novel, and have
traveled repeatedly to Paimpol and the region to take pictures. In the process,
I have made available a wealth of material on Breton culture that should greatly
ease and enrich the teaching of this fascinating narrative from a cultural perspective.
Some of my more traditional colleagues have faulted this, accusing me of making things too easy for the students by allowing them "not to use their imaginations." In saying this, however, I think that they misunderstand a problem that present-day American students, and therefore their teachers, have with foreign literature, a needless obstacle that discourages them from enjoying or even bothering with works that deal with anything other than the world that they already know.
To explain this point best, let me recount an anecdote concerning one of Pierre Loti's favorite writers, and a master of French literature, Gustave Flaubert.
When he was arranging for the publication in book form of his second novel,
Salammbô, Flaubert had a major argument with his publisher over whether
the volume should include illustrations. The publisher wanted to commission
an artist to provide drawings of scenes from the novel, Flaubert adamantly insisted
that he had carefully crafted his text to evoke certain images in the reader's
mind, and that he did not want any images other than those that he was sure
that his text would invoke to alter the way in which a reader would visualize
the characters, events, and settings of his work. In a letter of 24 July, 1862,
he wrote: "Ah! qu'on me le montre, le coco qui me fera le portrait d'Hannibal...
Ce n'était pas la peine d'employer tant d'art à laisser tout dans
le vague pour qu'un pignouf vienne démolir mon rêve par la précision
inepte".
This attitude is justified to the extent and in the way that Flaubert intended it for Salammbô. When he wrote that work, he could assume that his readers had no images of second century B.C. Carthage, and therefore that his text could and would provide their sole visualization of it. He was, in short, writing a fantasy, and like any fantasy writer, he wanted to control what his work evoked in the minds of his readers.
For most literature, however, especially that with a more contemporary setting, this is never the case. If we turn to the text in question, Loti's Pêcheur d'Islande, for example, Loti knew that his nineteenth-century French readers, the audience whom he had in mind when he wrote the novel, were aware of what Breton fisherfolk looked like, what the women's coifs looked like, the men's boats, sailors' uniforms, etc. When he described these things in his text, he wrote with the understanding that his descriptions would work in tandem with images already present in his readers' minds.
Contemporary American high school and college students, through no fault of their own, do not possess this mental image bank. It is therefore only appropriate that the editor of a text designed for them provide photographs of such "realia," as it is called today in language pedagogy circles, so that these readers can have the same imagistic background with which and against which to read the text, the one that the author imagined his readers possessing.
This is particularly vital when presenting literature to today's high school
and college students. One could, of course, as has been done in traditional
school texts, simply provide verbal definitions or descriptions of the unfamiliar
things mentioned in the text and, to quote my colleagues, "let them use their
imaginations." Because of their forms of entertainment--movies, videos, computers,
etc.--today's high school and college students are accustomed to the visual
acquisition of knowledge, however, and they expect to have clear visual images
of things. In a recent Washington Post article on the problems of teaching
even literature in English to current American high school students, one such
student, saying that she "just doesn't get books written in the olden days,"
complained that "I couldn't really visualize a lot of things." ("Teachers shelving
the classics to get middle school kids reading," Cleveland Plain Dealer
2 April, 2000) If we teachers want to make literature, and in particular literature
that deals with cultures other than their own, accessible and appealing to such
students, it only makes sense to present the new and different in a format with
which our students are familiar, and that allows them to have the sharp visual
images to which the forms of entertainment that are competing for their attention
have accustomed them.
To take one example: at one point in Pêcheur d'Islande, one of the characters,
lying on his deathbed, is compared to a "marbre couché." While Loti's envisioned
readers, inhabitants of nineteenth-century France, were familiar with such sculptures,
often found in the churches that they attended each Sunday, most contemporary
American students have no visual image of what such a thing might be and would
find the metaphor to be a roadblock rather than an elucidation. It is true that
an instructor could describe a marbre couché with an extended definition. Some
might even go further. (I once stretched out on a table to try to make the point,
which the students found funny but which was not ideal for my forty-eight year
old arthritic back.) Some students will make an effort to visualize what it
might look like, with more or less success, others will not. If, however, while
reading the text, the student is able to see a picture of a marbre couché with
a brief explanation, he or she will immediately possess a clear image, with
no effort. The student will therefore encounter no obstacle in comprehending
the passage, and a cause of potential discouragement will have been removed.
This is one purpose for my visual presentation of the culture portrayed in Pêcheur d'Islande. By linking photos of objects and places mentioned to relevant text, I am able to remove obstacles to comprehension while providing visual tools for the teaching of what is different in French culture.
Along the same lines, I provide maps of the locations mentioned, again to give contemporary American readers the geographical literacy that Loti knew his original French readers would have possessed.
In addition, I have incorporated many contemporary paintings, particularly those of Claude Monet, both to facilitate the teaching of a related aspect of turn-of-the-century French culture, Impressionism, and to give teachers the material with which to show the connections between the arts of writing and painting. Again, Pêcheur d'Islande is particularly well suited for this. By the time he wrote it, Loti had had a long involvement with the contemporary visual arts scene in France. His older sister, Marie, had several times won scholarships to study painting in Paris, and the house in which he grew up was filled with examples of her work. (Some of them can still be seen there today.) Loti himself studied art in the French capital while a student there in the late 1860s, and subsequently published drawings in some of the big Parisian illustrated weeklies of the exotic locales he visited as a young sailor. When, in Pêcheur d'Islande, he incorporated rhetorical techniques to break down clear-cut form and outline, Loti was therefore aware that the Impressionists, and in particular Monet, were doing the same in their visual art.
As John Canaday has written, "the impressionist does not analyze form but only receives the light reflected from that form onto the retina of the eye and seeks to reproduce the effect of that light, rather than the form of the object reflecting it" (Mainstreams of Modern Art [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981] 222). Similarly, in Pêcheur d'Islande, Loti created a language that does not clearly describe objects, but rather undercuts the possibility of any sharply defined contours or forms. The play of light becomes particularly important, and the text talks often of what something "seems" or "appears" to be, rather than what it is. It is therefore appropriate to present paintings by some of his impressionist contemporaries, in particular Claude Monet, not as illustrations of scenes in the novel, the sort of thing that Flaubert understandably opposed, but as illustrations of the stylistic similarities between Loti's technique and that of his painterly contemporaries. "Interdisciplinary studies," to use the current buzzword. By surrounding Loti's text with relevant contemporary artworks, I hope to encourage teachers and students to explore the larger world of French Impressionism of which Pêcheur d'Islande is a verbal component.
While it is wonderful to be able to see reproductions of great art in books
and on the web, that does not equal the effect produced by seeing the works
in person, in all their physical reality. I was reminded of this again when,
while putting this site together, I visited some of the museums that own the
Monet paintings I present here. For that reason, I have indicated which museums
have the paintings I feature, so that readers are aware of their locations should
they find themselves in their vicinity.
A brief note also on what is not in this edition of the text. While I have glossed terms that cannot be found in standard French or French-English dictionaries, I have not glossed words that are simply outside a language-learner's basic vocabulary, as is done with many texts edited for students of foreign language. There is a pedagogical reason for this. This edition of Pêcheur d'Islande has been prepared for students who have already completed at least four semesters of college language study or three years of high school study, who are now going on to higher-level classes and preparing themselves for a serious study of language and literature. Part of that preparation involves learning to use a dictionary. I therefore felt it would be wrong, at this level, to provide glosses that would render such learning unnecessary. As I do with my own students, I would urge readers of this text to keep a log of the words that they do not know, to look up definitions for them, and to review that log on a regular basis. As my students find semester after semester, the new vocabulary that they encounter in this novel keeps returning in chapter after chapter, so once they learn it it is repeatedly reinforced and the text becomes progressively easier.
(This is one of my arguments for the importance of using extended texts in upper-division foreign language classes: the repetition of vocabulary and structures that one experiences when reading one longer text provides a reinforcement crucial for the expansion of a student's command of the language that anthologies of shorter pieces by various authors simply do not offer.)
The digitalized text of the novel that I use is made available free of charge by the internet services of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, with the following note:
Auteur(s): Loti, Pierre - 1850-1923
Titre(s): Pêcheur d'Islande [Document électronique] / par Pierre Loti
Publication: Numérisation BnF de l'édition de Paris : INALF, 1961- (Frantext ; K684). Reprod de l'éd. de Paris : Calmann-Lévy, 1886
Description: 345 Ko
Identifiant: N088873. Numérisé en mode texte
Ce document est libre de droits. Cet ouvrage peut également être consulté sous forme imprimée à la cote Smith Lesouëf Rés.-8179.
I precede all the names of Monet paintings with a W number. This is the number assigned to the work in Daniel Wildenstein's remarkable catalog of the complete paintings of the artist, Claude Monet, biography and catalogue raisonné (Köln : Taschen, 1996).
I hope, all this said, that both students and teachers of French find great
use and enjoyment in my web presentation of a truly remarkable masterpiece of
French literature. I would appreciate hearing the reactions of those elsewhere
who have made use of this site in their teaching or study of French.
Richard M. Berrong
Professor of French
Kent State University
Kent, Ohio 44242
rberrong@kent.edu