On Christopher Moore's "Sacre Bleu"

Sure, I could talk about how the President visited Newport News Shipbuilding the other day, and how his visit disrupted traffic and shook down hot dog vendors and emptied parking garages, and how he talked about this and that in an effort to deflect blame for Sequestration away from him and on to Congress, and how I didn't get to see him because I had mandatory training, and how as a consolation prize I happened to run into Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus at the IHOP where we had an epic game of Battleship over a few short stacks.  I would have won if my Submarine hadn't defected.  Damn you Jack Ryan!  I don't care if you are the shit, those Irish terrorists should have had the experience and tactical acumen to waste you when they had the chance.

But I won't talk about any of that, because I just finished Christopher Moore's Sacre Bleu, and I would rather write about that.

The plot is complex, and even now only a day after finishing the book it is difficult to remember the many twists and turns.  But I will try to summarize it enough to talk about some salient points (I wonder how many readers I just lost with the phrase "salient points"?  Stick with it.  I promise you, there will be boobs):

Lucien Lessard is an aspiring painter working in his family's bakery in Montmartre, Paris, in 1890.  It is not the happiest of lives for him, especially as the family tests their freshly baked baguettes by cracking them over Lucien's head (if the crust wraps around his skull with a satisfying crackle, perfection is achieved).  After the death of Vincent Van Gogh (whom Lucien studied with briefly at one of the many art schools in Paris) the lovely Juliette, the woman who broke Lucien's heart when she suddenly vanished two years ago, returns.  After some brief re-introduction she pretty much demands Lucien paint her nude.  He, with little hesitation, obliges.

Lucien gets sort of unstuck in time.  He and Juliette work on the painting as artist and muse, they take go to resorts on the Seine that burned down in 1873 (it is 1890, mind you), they go to London to see the Toilet of Venus by Velasquez.  When he returns he is near death, practically in a coma and Maman Lessard cracks Juliette over the head not with a baguette but with a crepe pan (Ah....the food of France).  Despite the heavy blow to the skull Juliette escapes into the night.

The Lessard family, worried about Lucien's health and sanity, calls on his friend Toulouse Lautrec to try and reach him, to try to get him to stop seeing this girl, and to get the garish yet masterful Blue Nude he and Juliette created out of the house.  When Lucien comes to he is convinced that the ultramarine blue that Juliette supplied him for the painting is driving him insane (not a bad theory....there are some who say that Van Gogh's habit of actually eating paint while he worked poisoned his mind and made him mad...though there is probably some kind of chicken and egg thing going on there).

So over the rest of the book they try to solve this mystery.  And it turns out that Juliette actually is a muse, a spirit who inhabits the body of different people in the lives of artists.  She is working with a shamanistic,  little, twisted, awful man named The Colorman -- who is basically a paint maker with magical powers.  For centuries, CENTURIES, he and the muse have roamed the earth creating art.  The muse inspires the artist, gives the color that The Colorman makes to the artist, and eventually takes some of the paintings they produce back to The Colorman.  In a strange ritual the painting is drained of its color and it winds up on the muse's naked body as a powder, and The Colorman scrapes the color off of her skin and stores it in jars.  In this ritual their strength is renewed and...

Yeah, I know.  It sounds dumb.  And for a while, around page 100 or so, as things were just beginning to take shape, I thought that the book was indeed going to turn out to be really stupid.  But it didn't.  It turned out to be profound.

I think, in a hilarious and vulgar sort of way (the book is actually quite funny - Christopher Moore is a gifted humorist if you didn't know.  I will be reading more of him) the book is trying to get at what makes great art. In the ritual we see a couple of things that suggest what Moore thinks about that.

First, there is a price to be paid for great art.  It may not be a universal truth, but to me it seems that the greatest works of art have been created or composed or written by those who have not only great talent but also a certain depth of spirit and a certain willingness to pour themselves into what they are creating.  Even on a lesser mode of creative output the creative act takes something, it costs something.  Even this crappy little blog costs something (this blog post alone has taken me 6 fucking hours....which makes me think maybe I am missing the point of blogging....).  I think that is something worth pointing out in an age where I want the world's entire library of cute cat videos to be accessible by a device I can carry in my pocket and I wanted it yesturday.

You know something?  If Obama actually HAD made a Royal Presidential Decree (or an RPD for you military types) that now all Newport News Shipbuilding Employees could have smartphones with cameras (there are very few without them), than maybe I would have actually had that yesterday   Another opportunity missed, Number 44.  Another opportunity missed.

Where were we?  Ah.  Point number 2.....uh, I can't remember it.  Something about how art feeds on itself, how it inspires itself, it regenerates itself.  Lets move on.

Any book about artists living in Monmartre is going to have a good bit of seedy sex, and as a counterpoint to all the serious insights Moore has the Touluse Lautrec's of the world who seem to draw their inspiration not from depth of spirit but by spending their days at the bars and brothels in a happy kind of debauchery, giving way utterly and completely to a blotted experience.  Juliette herself, as a muse, is suggestive of the criticism from a  few circles that great swaths of Western art is more about "Hey, look at these" than anything else.

See?  I told you there would be boobs.  

Now, I don't know if that's quite true (if nothing else its certainly a grand, Freudian over-generalization), but Moore definitely keeps pointing to the nexus between sexuality and creativity throughout this book.  Though, naturally, he does so in a hilarious way.

Okay, so what have we learned?  If you want to create great art, just take two parts passion, one part pain, some old ideas, a good dollop of sex, and mix it all up.  Bake it in the oven at 350 degrees for two hours and Voila!  A souffle fit for a King (if you have the talent to actually keep it from all falling apart, that is).  Did I just compare Van Gogh's "Starry Night" to a cheese soufle?  Yep.  Reckon that I did.  And Art is now ruined.

As a side note, this book really was right up my alley.  It had everything I could ever ask for:  Paris, the 1890s, sex, absinthe,  art, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and lots and lots of humor.  Its the kind of book I wish I could write one day.

Art Credit:  Bather Arranging Her Hair, Auguste Renoir, 1893.  Downloaded courtesy of the National Gallery of Art; deemed public domain.