We watched Stephen Frears’ 2016 Florence Foster Jenkins the other night. It’s an enjoyable movie, sometimes funny, always charming, with a splendid main performance by Meryl Streep that expertly balances real pathos with actual ridiculousness, and sterling support from Hugh Grant doing his Hugh Grant act (the film includes yet another splendid scene of Hugh Grant Dancing Badly, which has clearly become a thing). Simon Helberg, also up there on the poster, does less well, I’d say: over-playing his character: mugging and exaggerating his role. Less is more for this kind of comedy I think. But the movie has some splendid moments, not least a doubled-up The Producers-style punchline. First Cosmé McMoon (Helberg’s character), hired to accompany Jenkins on the piano, walks into her luxury hotel room for the first time believing her to be a proper singer and realises, as the rehearsal proceeds, how dreadful she is. And then, later in the movie, there’s a repetition of this on a larger scale: Jenkins has hired Carnegie Hall and a large audience turns up to hear her sing (badly). The audience are mostly in on the joke this second time round though, so this scene doesn’t have the sheer glory of the moment in Brooks’ film when the curtain falls on the first scene of Springtime For Hitler and the camera pans across an absolutely silent audience, every jaw slack and every eye wide. But there’s some of the same pleasure to be had here.
About halfway through our collective watch, my daughter asked: ‘but doesn’t she realise now bad her singing is?’ This, it seems to me, is the really interesting thing about Florence Foster Jenkins, and what, in one sense at least, elevates it above The Producers. I mean The Producers is a sort of masterpiece, don’t get me wrong. Still, it is a film that can comprehend only three kinds of character: the innocent (Bloom), the schemer (Max Bialystock is really quite a simple figure: in thrall to his appetites — ‘if you got it baby, flaunt it!’ — and desperately casting-about for a way, howsoever shady, to indulge them) and the actively bonkers (several characters in this film are hilariously deranged of course). There’s something that Frears’ film does that is both fascinating and insightful, in a way that goes beyond the simple generation of laughs.
I’d put it this way: Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins is a version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
There’s, perhaps, a less commendable gendered aspect to this. Quixote flees the oppressive, depressing mundanity of reality into a fantasy life and it’s riding around as a knight errant, fighting giants and freeing slaves. Florence Foster J. does the same thing, but it’s dressing up in pretty frocks and singing for applause. I’m not convinced that reality-fugitive fantasy falls quite so neatly into boy/girl-coloured boxes for actual boys and girls, actual men and women in the world. But put that on one side for a moment.
I’ll say something very obvious about Cervantes’ 1605 novel: it is not really a story about the comic misadventures of a loony who thinks he’s living a real-life chivalric romance, accompanied by his trusty, unillusioned sidekick Sancho Panza. Which is to say, the novel obviously is about that: a series of episodes based on that premise and those characters. Read on this level the book is sometimes entertaining, although it is also (we can be honest) often over-extended and tiresome, and the whole thing is too samey and broken-backed to really work as a novel, for all that it retains its place in the panetheon as a timeless classic of European literature etc etc. But there’s something else going on in this text, and it’s exactly about Cervantes’ relationship to ‘the novel’.
So: one of the things that ‘the novel’ innovates, in terms of representation, is the interiority of characterisation, or more precisely the sense that characters are complex rather than simple entities (Shakespeare also does this of course, and there’s a book to be written on the way the 17th- and 18th-century habits of reading Shakespeare’s plays as quasi-novels fed into the development of le roman as such. But not to get distracted). In pre-medieval and medieval romance, allegory or epic narrative, characters are what they are: heroes are heroic, villains are villanous, not only action but subjectivity is exteriorised (epic doesn’t ‘do’ interiority: I talk about this a little here). But then along comes the novel, and in particular the development of the Bildungsroman (from the later eighteenth-century, if you believe Franco Moretti), and now character becomes understood in a new way. It is no longer typologically ‘fixed’, no longer an iteration of a divinely-gifted and therefore fundamentally unchangeable ‘soul’ (unchangeable except along one axis, sin/repentence); it is now something dynamic, a process, a growth, an iteration of change, and moreover something that contains multitudes, complexities, even contradictions and paradoxes. Then we’re on the road to the nineteenth-century dramatic monologue, which sees those contradictions and paradoxes as constitutive, actually, of our subjectivities, and which, as Ekbert Faas argues convincingly in his Retreat Into the Mind, feeds directly into Freud. (Faas’s argument is that Wordsworth and Coleridge sort-of invented the idea of the unconscious mind, which Arnold, Tennyson, and Browning developed in their poetry, so that it was ready for Freud to pluck from the tree and put in his books. Arnold’s “Buried Life” is 1852 and it’s all in that one poem). We’re all post-Freudians now. We take it as axiomatic that human subjectivity — the characters we are in life, as well as the characters we read about in fiction — are complex, not simple.
But this reaches backwards too. Quixote models his adventures on the simple characters of medieval chivalric romance, but he himself is not simple, and that’s what makes the novel in which he appears so interesting. Now it’s true that other characters in the novel think he is simple: that he is simply ‘mad’, let’s say (early in the story his niece, housekeeper, the parish curate, and the local barber burn his books, beliving that reading these romances has driven him from his wits and that destroying them will return him to sanity). We could follow this ‘simple’ reading of him. Or we could, though it would be more of a stretch, follow a different ‘simple’ reading — believe, with Terry Gilliam, that Quixote has accessed a simple truth about the world, that it’s better to live in fantasy than in reality, and all the other characters, who refuse to play along or who actively try to stop him, are in the wrong. But here’s a more plausible reading of Quixote as a character: he both knows his knight-errantry is a mere fiction, and he absolutely believes he is a real knight errant. It looks contradictory, but that’s the nature of consciousness.
Indeed, asserting X whilst knowing, ‘on some level’ (it’s a beautifully Freudian phrase, that: our consciousnesses layered like parfait) that X is what we wish to be true not what is actually true, will, when other people contradict us, only make us assert X more vehemently. This is how people are. Point out the facts to a Trump supporter and they will only yell more loudly that Trump won the election. ‘On some level’ they know he didn’t; but they want it to be true so very much.
This isn’t a very profound or original observation, really. It’s just to say that the way the world is and the way we want the world to be are so very often in conflict that we must develop, as we grow up, a psychological dynamic for dealing with that fact —and that this dynamic cannot either simply dismiss the world, nor abandon our fantasies (what would we be without our fantasies? Not fully human, certainly).
It’s a negotion between the two, something actually dialectic, and it informs both Don Quixote and Florence Foster Jenkins. In the latter case — and to return to my daughter’s question — it is clear from the movie that Jenkins not only loves music, but that she has herself a significant musical education and skill. As a girl she played piano for the President, until syphilis (contracted on her wedding night from her deplorable husband) caused chancres that ruined her left hand and she couldn’t play any more. She turned to singing even though she can’t sing, because singing is a way of making music that doesn’t need hands. It’s true that she has musical ability; it’s false that she can sing; and the dialectic of these two things, propelled by the intensity of her desire to make music, results in the charade, or ‘play’, by which she sings badly and people are paid (by her complaisant partner, Hugh Grant’s St. Clair Bayfield) to act appreciatively, or else people act appreciatively because her singing, by being so bad, is delightful and cheering to them. It’s, to use the cliché, a victimless crime; everybody wins — until the spoilsport New York Post columnist Earl Wilson ruins everything by writing a ‘truthful’ review and puncturing the bubble. The film plays several variations on this. A ‘simple’ reading of Hugh Grant’s character, for instance, would be: he is exploiting Jenkins’ love for him, cynically enabling her fantasy so as to extract money from her to fund his luxurious New York lifestyle with his actual girlfriend (Kathleen Weatherley, played by Rebecca Ferguson). But in fact the movie makes it clear that, although he is doing this, he also genuinely loves Jenkins, and genuinely cares about maintaining the Quixotic fantasy that she is a great operatic soprano. Likewise Cosmé McMoon agonises that becoming known as the accompanist of so terrible a singer will damage his reputation as a serious pianist — although, at the same time, he really needs the money , and so is on his dilemma’s horns, trying to resolve to give up the money and retain his integrity. But in the end, he steps up, not for ‘simple’ reasons for greed but because, like St. Clair, he has in some sense fallen in love with the old woman.
The ‘act’ here is a performance, one that requires, in order to uphold it, a good deal of running-around and financial redistribution by St. Clair; and it’s particularly nice that this performance — upholding Jenkins’s fantasy version of herself over the cruelities of the reality principle — involves, precisely, a performance: standing on a stage in front of an audience. It is, in a sense, a more radical version of Quixote than Quixote, whose adventures always happen in front of only a few random people encountered on his journeys. This, in Frears’ film, pushes Quixotism to a kind of extreme. People will play-along with your fantasy (if you pay them, if it makes them laugh, if they love you) or else they won’t. If they don’t you can simply dismiss or ignore them, which is what Don Quixote does; for there are only ever a few of them at a time, and Quixote can always tell himself they are mistaken, or mad, or wicked, or else they have been enchanted by an Arabian enchanter not to see what he, the Don, plainly sees. But when you are faced with Carnegie-Hall quantities of people, or New York Post-readership quantities of people, them not playing along becomes harder to integrate into your fantasy, to the point of collapsing the fantasy altogether. Frears (or rather his screenwriters Nicholas Martin and Julia Kogan) twist reality a little here: in the movie the bad review leads, the day after the concert, directly to Jenkins’ collapse and her death bed. In real life she had an unrelated heart-attack whilst shopping and died a month after the concert. But the movie is saying: this balance we all must maintain, of which Jenkins’ case is only a more extreme version of our common state of affairs, between keeping our fantasies alive and encountering the reality principle — this complex negotiation — is so fundamental, it’s necessary to our very continued life. That seems to me both true and, actually, rather moving.
A brief coda to this post. After watching the movie, and thinking a bit about its relationship to Don Quixote, I remembered another version of that so-often reworked and reconfigured novel: Graham Greene’s late work Monsignor Quixote (1982). It’s not Greene’s best, it must be said — and it’s been many decades since I read it — but one thing I remember from it is the way it recasts Cervantes so that its mild-mannered Spanish priest protagonist (notionally a descendent of the ‘actual’ Don Quixote) is the sane one, and the various organisations that misunderstand and persecute him — his own Church, the Spanish police, respectable citizenry — are out of touch with what really matters. My memory of the novel is that Greene is using this Quixotism as a way of talking about religious faith, as he understands and practices it: not as an absolute and unwavering certainty but as a set of desires about the nature of the universe. Greene's Monsignor exists half-way between dogmatic assertion of faith on the one hand, and the grimly ‘reality principle’ denial of spirit and miracle on the other, and in this novel Greene honours his half-belief: ‘How is it that when I speak of belief, I become aware always of a shadow, the shadow of disbelief haunting my belief?’ the Monsignor asks at the tomb of Unamuno in Salamanca. ‘I am riddled by doubts. I am sure of nothing, not even of the existence of God … Oh, I want to believe that it is all true — and that want is the only certain thing I feel.’
About halfway through our collective watch, my daughter asked: ‘but doesn’t she realise now bad her singing is?’ This, it seems to me, is the really interesting thing about Florence Foster Jenkins, and what, in one sense at least, elevates it above The Producers. I mean The Producers is a sort of masterpiece, don’t get me wrong. Still, it is a film that can comprehend only three kinds of character: the innocent (Bloom), the schemer (Max Bialystock is really quite a simple figure: in thrall to his appetites — ‘if you got it baby, flaunt it!’ — and desperately casting-about for a way, howsoever shady, to indulge them) and the actively bonkers (several characters in this film are hilariously deranged of course). There’s something that Frears’ film does that is both fascinating and insightful, in a way that goes beyond the simple generation of laughs.
I’d put it this way: Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins is a version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
There’s, perhaps, a less commendable gendered aspect to this. Quixote flees the oppressive, depressing mundanity of reality into a fantasy life and it’s riding around as a knight errant, fighting giants and freeing slaves. Florence Foster J. does the same thing, but it’s dressing up in pretty frocks and singing for applause. I’m not convinced that reality-fugitive fantasy falls quite so neatly into boy/girl-coloured boxes for actual boys and girls, actual men and women in the world. But put that on one side for a moment.
I’ll say something very obvious about Cervantes’ 1605 novel: it is not really a story about the comic misadventures of a loony who thinks he’s living a real-life chivalric romance, accompanied by his trusty, unillusioned sidekick Sancho Panza. Which is to say, the novel obviously is about that: a series of episodes based on that premise and those characters. Read on this level the book is sometimes entertaining, although it is also (we can be honest) often over-extended and tiresome, and the whole thing is too samey and broken-backed to really work as a novel, for all that it retains its place in the panetheon as a timeless classic of European literature etc etc. But there’s something else going on in this text, and it’s exactly about Cervantes’ relationship to ‘the novel’.
So: one of the things that ‘the novel’ innovates, in terms of representation, is the interiority of characterisation, or more precisely the sense that characters are complex rather than simple entities (Shakespeare also does this of course, and there’s a book to be written on the way the 17th- and 18th-century habits of reading Shakespeare’s plays as quasi-novels fed into the development of le roman as such. But not to get distracted). In pre-medieval and medieval romance, allegory or epic narrative, characters are what they are: heroes are heroic, villains are villanous, not only action but subjectivity is exteriorised (epic doesn’t ‘do’ interiority: I talk about this a little here). But then along comes the novel, and in particular the development of the Bildungsroman (from the later eighteenth-century, if you believe Franco Moretti), and now character becomes understood in a new way. It is no longer typologically ‘fixed’, no longer an iteration of a divinely-gifted and therefore fundamentally unchangeable ‘soul’ (unchangeable except along one axis, sin/repentence); it is now something dynamic, a process, a growth, an iteration of change, and moreover something that contains multitudes, complexities, even contradictions and paradoxes. Then we’re on the road to the nineteenth-century dramatic monologue, which sees those contradictions and paradoxes as constitutive, actually, of our subjectivities, and which, as Ekbert Faas argues convincingly in his Retreat Into the Mind, feeds directly into Freud. (Faas’s argument is that Wordsworth and Coleridge sort-of invented the idea of the unconscious mind, which Arnold, Tennyson, and Browning developed in their poetry, so that it was ready for Freud to pluck from the tree and put in his books. Arnold’s “Buried Life” is 1852 and it’s all in that one poem). We’re all post-Freudians now. We take it as axiomatic that human subjectivity — the characters we are in life, as well as the characters we read about in fiction — are complex, not simple.
But this reaches backwards too. Quixote models his adventures on the simple characters of medieval chivalric romance, but he himself is not simple, and that’s what makes the novel in which he appears so interesting. Now it’s true that other characters in the novel think he is simple: that he is simply ‘mad’, let’s say (early in the story his niece, housekeeper, the parish curate, and the local barber burn his books, beliving that reading these romances has driven him from his wits and that destroying them will return him to sanity). We could follow this ‘simple’ reading of him. Or we could, though it would be more of a stretch, follow a different ‘simple’ reading — believe, with Terry Gilliam, that Quixote has accessed a simple truth about the world, that it’s better to live in fantasy than in reality, and all the other characters, who refuse to play along or who actively try to stop him, are in the wrong. But here’s a more plausible reading of Quixote as a character: he both knows his knight-errantry is a mere fiction, and he absolutely believes he is a real knight errant. It looks contradictory, but that’s the nature of consciousness.
Indeed, asserting X whilst knowing, ‘on some level’ (it’s a beautifully Freudian phrase, that: our consciousnesses layered like parfait) that X is what we wish to be true not what is actually true, will, when other people contradict us, only make us assert X more vehemently. This is how people are. Point out the facts to a Trump supporter and they will only yell more loudly that Trump won the election. ‘On some level’ they know he didn’t; but they want it to be true so very much.
This isn’t a very profound or original observation, really. It’s just to say that the way the world is and the way we want the world to be are so very often in conflict that we must develop, as we grow up, a psychological dynamic for dealing with that fact —and that this dynamic cannot either simply dismiss the world, nor abandon our fantasies (what would we be without our fantasies? Not fully human, certainly).
It’s a negotion between the two, something actually dialectic, and it informs both Don Quixote and Florence Foster Jenkins. In the latter case — and to return to my daughter’s question — it is clear from the movie that Jenkins not only loves music, but that she has herself a significant musical education and skill. As a girl she played piano for the President, until syphilis (contracted on her wedding night from her deplorable husband) caused chancres that ruined her left hand and she couldn’t play any more. She turned to singing even though she can’t sing, because singing is a way of making music that doesn’t need hands. It’s true that she has musical ability; it’s false that she can sing; and the dialectic of these two things, propelled by the intensity of her desire to make music, results in the charade, or ‘play’, by which she sings badly and people are paid (by her complaisant partner, Hugh Grant’s St. Clair Bayfield) to act appreciatively, or else people act appreciatively because her singing, by being so bad, is delightful and cheering to them. It’s, to use the cliché, a victimless crime; everybody wins — until the spoilsport New York Post columnist Earl Wilson ruins everything by writing a ‘truthful’ review and puncturing the bubble. The film plays several variations on this. A ‘simple’ reading of Hugh Grant’s character, for instance, would be: he is exploiting Jenkins’ love for him, cynically enabling her fantasy so as to extract money from her to fund his luxurious New York lifestyle with his actual girlfriend (Kathleen Weatherley, played by Rebecca Ferguson). But in fact the movie makes it clear that, although he is doing this, he also genuinely loves Jenkins, and genuinely cares about maintaining the Quixotic fantasy that she is a great operatic soprano. Likewise Cosmé McMoon agonises that becoming known as the accompanist of so terrible a singer will damage his reputation as a serious pianist — although, at the same time, he really needs the money , and so is on his dilemma’s horns, trying to resolve to give up the money and retain his integrity. But in the end, he steps up, not for ‘simple’ reasons for greed but because, like St. Clair, he has in some sense fallen in love with the old woman.
The ‘act’ here is a performance, one that requires, in order to uphold it, a good deal of running-around and financial redistribution by St. Clair; and it’s particularly nice that this performance — upholding Jenkins’s fantasy version of herself over the cruelities of the reality principle — involves, precisely, a performance: standing on a stage in front of an audience. It is, in a sense, a more radical version of Quixote than Quixote, whose adventures always happen in front of only a few random people encountered on his journeys. This, in Frears’ film, pushes Quixotism to a kind of extreme. People will play-along with your fantasy (if you pay them, if it makes them laugh, if they love you) or else they won’t. If they don’t you can simply dismiss or ignore them, which is what Don Quixote does; for there are only ever a few of them at a time, and Quixote can always tell himself they are mistaken, or mad, or wicked, or else they have been enchanted by an Arabian enchanter not to see what he, the Don, plainly sees. But when you are faced with Carnegie-Hall quantities of people, or New York Post-readership quantities of people, them not playing along becomes harder to integrate into your fantasy, to the point of collapsing the fantasy altogether. Frears (or rather his screenwriters Nicholas Martin and Julia Kogan) twist reality a little here: in the movie the bad review leads, the day after the concert, directly to Jenkins’ collapse and her death bed. In real life she had an unrelated heart-attack whilst shopping and died a month after the concert. But the movie is saying: this balance we all must maintain, of which Jenkins’ case is only a more extreme version of our common state of affairs, between keeping our fantasies alive and encountering the reality principle — this complex negotiation — is so fundamental, it’s necessary to our very continued life. That seems to me both true and, actually, rather moving.
A brief coda to this post. After watching the movie, and thinking a bit about its relationship to Don Quixote, I remembered another version of that so-often reworked and reconfigured novel: Graham Greene’s late work Monsignor Quixote (1982). It’s not Greene’s best, it must be said — and it’s been many decades since I read it — but one thing I remember from it is the way it recasts Cervantes so that its mild-mannered Spanish priest protagonist (notionally a descendent of the ‘actual’ Don Quixote) is the sane one, and the various organisations that misunderstand and persecute him — his own Church, the Spanish police, respectable citizenry — are out of touch with what really matters. My memory of the novel is that Greene is using this Quixotism as a way of talking about religious faith, as he understands and practices it: not as an absolute and unwavering certainty but as a set of desires about the nature of the universe. Greene's Monsignor exists half-way between dogmatic assertion of faith on the one hand, and the grimly ‘reality principle’ denial of spirit and miracle on the other, and in this novel Greene honours his half-belief: ‘How is it that when I speak of belief, I become aware always of a shadow, the shadow of disbelief haunting my belief?’ the Monsignor asks at the tomb of Unamuno in Salamanca. ‘I am riddled by doubts. I am sure of nothing, not even of the existence of God … Oh, I want to believe that it is all true — and that want is the only certain thing I feel.’
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