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The Sundays of Jean Dézert by Jean De La Ville De Mirmont
3.75
[a:Jean de La Ville de Mirmont|1373242|Jean de La Ville de Mirmont|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1488483629p2/1373242.jpg] is not a household name, even among lovers of literature. He lived and died in relative obscurity, lacking popular renown or acclamation. In late-1914, when he was buried alive by a German shell at Verneuil, he was a nonentity outside of his intimate literary circle. Yet, before war swept him away and he reached what friend and fellow author François Mauriac called "destiny's final terminus", Mirmont left to posterity a gleaming pearl: his self-published novella, [b:The Sundays of Jean Dézert|42458747|The Sundays of Jean Dézert|Jean de La Ville de Mirmont|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1545617895l/42458747._SX50_.jpg|6719520].
On the surface, The Sundays of Jean Dézert appears quiet and unassuming. It is a work of silent struggle; one that evokes the famous words of Henry David Thoreau: "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation". Its eponymous protagonist is entirely unremarkable. An everyman who pushes papers in a tedious bureaucratic job and looks forward to each Sunday which he passes in a sort of insouciant languor. Every day, he eats with his friend Léon Doburjal at the same restaurant though they never see each other outside of this setting. Jean is mildly envious of his friend who has "seized life by the horns", but, as a character, he is defined by his benignity - his "lack of evil thoughts and intentions". He is, in a word, relatable, even likeable, but seems resigned to mediocrity as Mirmont notes in the following:
But above all, Jean Dézert has mastered one of life's great virtues: the art of waiting. All week long he waits for Sunday. At the Ministry, he patiently awaits a promotion while waiting for a pension. Once he retires, he will wait for death. He thinks of life as a waiting room for third-class travellers. The moment he purchased his ticket, nothing remained for him to do but stop moving and watch men pass him by on the platform. An employee will let him know when the train departs; but he is still clueless as to its destination.
Jean Dézert, it seems, is merely waiting for time to elapse. He lacks dreams and ambitions; a sense of what he wants; a sense, even, of who he is. His life is timetabled in a strictly bureaucratic fashion so much so that he jots down the following lines while wiling away time at work:
Conscious of my vague role, I take another breath,
I'll write memos, reports, right up till my death.
Stylistically terse and ever so slightly prosaic, Mirmont purposefully eschews over-embellishment and his tone, at times, verges on the sardonic as he dissects Jean. However, this actually serves to evince the tragic nature of Jean's plight. In a roundabout way, Mirmont's candour demonstrates a rare understanding of the predicament of so many who are not typically the focus of great art. This goes a long way to explaining the book's enduring appeal and continued re-publication in France. Mirmont brings to life the man who is lost and interchangeable among the throngs of the crowd. Jean is a universal symbol for the individual we brush past on the train who is caught in the doldrums. The lost souls who are resigned to the emptiness of modernity.
The text's most sombre moment's are those of extinguished hope. When Jean meets a young, capricious girl called Elvire he seems to grasp hold of a mooring. Life is, for an ephemeral moment, imbued with real meaning and direction. He proposes and she accepts, but her father warns Jean that she is liable to change her mind. In the end she jilts him because he has a long face mere moments after he finally says something sincere and self-aware, admitting that she has suffused his life with some meaning after "centuries of boredom" as an office employee. In the aftermath of the separation Mirmont brilliantly encapsulates, through Jean's state of mind, the process by which smouldering disaffection gives way to complete indifference:
In such a case, there are three cardinal points which allow one to obtain oblivion. The first consists in throwing oneself headfirst into pleasures, in other words, in living it up. The second lies in alcohol. The third - there's no lack of precedents - is death. This last recourse is the least expensive and the most reliable. But before resorting to that, perhaps it's a good idea to exhaust the other two first.
Herein lies the true tragedy of this book which places it amongst the classic portraits of modernist discontent. Jean does not kill himself. Nor does he experience the radically alienating transubstantiation of Kafka's Gregor Samsa or the inexplicably violent impulses of Camus's Meursault. Debauchery, likewise, fails him and he lapses back into a state of passive indifference. The book's epigram is taken from Cervantes and in it lies a bleak sentiment: "Of the plebeians I have nothing to say, except that they serve to increase the number of the living". Jean, and all too many of us, Mirmont suggests are just making up the numbers. This is expressed with blistering power in the final paragraph of the book when its entire premise crystallises:
Then he raised up the collar of his overcoat and went home to go to sleep, because even that, a suicide, struck him as useless when balanced against his awareness of being an interchangeable part of the crowd and truly unable to completely die.
Critically, however, Mirmont does not present Jean's fate as especially poignant or pitiable. He is just one of many dislocated souls, mired in the routine and monotony of their day-to-day lives, that have succumbed to cynicism and slowly had dreams shattered and ambitions beaten out of them. Mirmont does not offer us answers, but provides a resonant portrait of the alienation of modern life.
On a different note, the other - perhaps deeper - tragedy of this book is imagining what could have been. Mirmont is a unique voice. His friend François Mauriac wondered what his literary destiny would have been. We, too, are left to wonder. War deprived us of his authorial voice, but, at the very least, he died at peace with himself believing in the righteousness of what he was doing.
The Sundays of Jean Dézert is, in the words of Michel Houellebecq, a meditation on "escaping[ing] despair by means of emptiness". Largely neglected outside of its native France, it is a searing reflection on an all too universal experience.
On the surface, The Sundays of Jean Dézert appears quiet and unassuming. It is a work of silent struggle; one that evokes the famous words of Henry David Thoreau: "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation". Its eponymous protagonist is entirely unremarkable. An everyman who pushes papers in a tedious bureaucratic job and looks forward to each Sunday which he passes in a sort of insouciant languor. Every day, he eats with his friend Léon Doburjal at the same restaurant though they never see each other outside of this setting. Jean is mildly envious of his friend who has "seized life by the horns", but, as a character, he is defined by his benignity - his "lack of evil thoughts and intentions". He is, in a word, relatable, even likeable, but seems resigned to mediocrity as Mirmont notes in the following:
But above all, Jean Dézert has mastered one of life's great virtues: the art of waiting. All week long he waits for Sunday. At the Ministry, he patiently awaits a promotion while waiting for a pension. Once he retires, he will wait for death. He thinks of life as a waiting room for third-class travellers. The moment he purchased his ticket, nothing remained for him to do but stop moving and watch men pass him by on the platform. An employee will let him know when the train departs; but he is still clueless as to its destination.
Jean Dézert, it seems, is merely waiting for time to elapse. He lacks dreams and ambitions; a sense of what he wants; a sense, even, of who he is. His life is timetabled in a strictly bureaucratic fashion so much so that he jots down the following lines while wiling away time at work:
Conscious of my vague role, I take another breath,
I'll write memos, reports, right up till my death.
Stylistically terse and ever so slightly prosaic, Mirmont purposefully eschews over-embellishment and his tone, at times, verges on the sardonic as he dissects Jean. However, this actually serves to evince the tragic nature of Jean's plight. In a roundabout way, Mirmont's candour demonstrates a rare understanding of the predicament of so many who are not typically the focus of great art. This goes a long way to explaining the book's enduring appeal and continued re-publication in France. Mirmont brings to life the man who is lost and interchangeable among the throngs of the crowd. Jean is a universal symbol for the individual we brush past on the train who is caught in the doldrums. The lost souls who are resigned to the emptiness of modernity.
The text's most sombre moment's are those of extinguished hope. When Jean meets a young, capricious girl called Elvire he seems to grasp hold of a mooring. Life is, for an ephemeral moment, imbued with real meaning and direction. He proposes and she accepts, but her father warns Jean that she is liable to change her mind. In the end she jilts him because he has a long face mere moments after he finally says something sincere and self-aware, admitting that she has suffused his life with some meaning after "centuries of boredom" as an office employee. In the aftermath of the separation Mirmont brilliantly encapsulates, through Jean's state of mind, the process by which smouldering disaffection gives way to complete indifference:
In such a case, there are three cardinal points which allow one to obtain oblivion. The first consists in throwing oneself headfirst into pleasures, in other words, in living it up. The second lies in alcohol. The third - there's no lack of precedents - is death. This last recourse is the least expensive and the most reliable. But before resorting to that, perhaps it's a good idea to exhaust the other two first.
Herein lies the true tragedy of this book which places it amongst the classic portraits of modernist discontent. Jean does not kill himself. Nor does he experience the radically alienating transubstantiation of Kafka's Gregor Samsa or the inexplicably violent impulses of Camus's Meursault. Debauchery, likewise, fails him and he lapses back into a state of passive indifference. The book's epigram is taken from Cervantes and in it lies a bleak sentiment: "Of the plebeians I have nothing to say, except that they serve to increase the number of the living". Jean, and all too many of us, Mirmont suggests are just making up the numbers. This is expressed with blistering power in the final paragraph of the book when its entire premise crystallises:
Then he raised up the collar of his overcoat and went home to go to sleep, because even that, a suicide, struck him as useless when balanced against his awareness of being an interchangeable part of the crowd and truly unable to completely die.
Critically, however, Mirmont does not present Jean's fate as especially poignant or pitiable. He is just one of many dislocated souls, mired in the routine and monotony of their day-to-day lives, that have succumbed to cynicism and slowly had dreams shattered and ambitions beaten out of them. Mirmont does not offer us answers, but provides a resonant portrait of the alienation of modern life.
On a different note, the other - perhaps deeper - tragedy of this book is imagining what could have been. Mirmont is a unique voice. His friend François Mauriac wondered what his literary destiny would have been. We, too, are left to wonder. War deprived us of his authorial voice, but, at the very least, he died at peace with himself believing in the righteousness of what he was doing.
The Sundays of Jean Dézert is, in the words of Michel Houellebecq, a meditation on "escaping[ing] despair by means of emptiness". Largely neglected outside of its native France, it is a searing reflection on an all too universal experience.