The Glory of my father

the Glory of my father is an Autobiographical novel of Marcel Pagnol published in 1957, first tome cheese of the series “Souvenirs of childhood”.

Summary of work

Marcel Pagnol tells, in the capacity as witness, the characters of his childhood and the life in the family of a Instituteur of Aubagne, which will become animated with the hiring of a country house in the Garrigue of the back-country Marseilles where they will spend summer holidays.

the glory of the little boys

Entered with the French Academy, Pagnol forsakes for the first time the theater and the cinema to write, in prose, its own history dedicated “ To the memory of the miens ”, and that it will qualify modestly in the last lines of its Foreword: it is only one testimony over one disappeared time, and a small song of filial devotion, which will perhaps pass aujourdh' today for a great innovation .

However, at the evening of its life, he insists on the contrary on the universality of infantile psychology, in Post face of cover, where he declares: For me, I preferred to tell you the childhood of a little boy because the little boys of all the countries of the world and all times always had the same problems, the same mischievousness, the same loves.

One sees there how the small Marcel manages to open out little by little his personality, that of an oldest son of Provence, impassioned by the reading and the adventures in the hills, divided between his exclusive love for the beautiful dressmaker, eternal young girl incarnated by Augustine, which will be a mother tender and discrete, and admiration for his father, Joseph the schoolmaster, be-saying anticlerical and anti-alcohol, but deeply human. He will become completely his hero only by proving to him that he likes as much as him his dear hills , glorifié by an exploit of hunting. The child struggles between his dreams and the discoveries sometimes distressing of the reality of the world where he saw: the adults can also lie…

To feel that he is liked and surrounded, to manage to be to trust of his/her parents and itself is the challenge even of this beautiful and poignant history…. at the same time single and universal.

Authenticity

If one is obstinated to want to visit the memories of a child as one would do it of an ethnographic museum or to make a critical reading of it as an employer would do it Curriculum vitæ of an unemployed, one is fatally disappointed. It is thus necessary to accept this amount of imaginary at Pagnol, without which nothing authentic would have been born. With the Belon oysters, it read Fenimore Cooper, the last of Mohicans, etc With the small Paul, they transformed the cicadas and the lizards into snakes boas, tigers or elephants. The imaginary one is everywhere at this age. Moreover, the adults are well-known for their memories screen who, behind all appearances of reality and the clear conscience, are mended and bent white wire, elements moved, amalgamated and transformed, that it is by the desire or, generally, by the censure and the hygienic need to gum what gene. Pagnol is well-known editors for its ceaseless modifications with the original text…

The victory with the contest of balls , the blow of the king , the snake of pétugues , etc all that makes of his/her father a hero is probably altered more or less consciously by the author, because, which precedes for him, it is to return the tonality to them which they had for the child who it was.

In addition to the fact that he tells “a history with his grandchildren”, like he confesses it in foreword, Marcel Pagnol pays here a homage late to his father in the rehabilitating . Indeed, four years after the death of his wife Augustine, mother of Marcel Pagnol, Joseph Pagnol remariait themselves, which his/her son never accepted, him which was however remarié so much of time. Joseph would die in 1951 scrambled with his son. The publication of the glory of my father in 1957 can thus seem at the same time a posthumous reconciliation and an act of tolerance “deferred action” between the father and the son. It is thus to some extent a psychoanalysis successful, because accomplished before the blindness of Oedipus.

Adaptation

A film adaptation of the first two volumes of the Souvenirs of childhood was carried out by Yves Robert in 1990, in simultaneous Diptyque. See: the Glory of my father and the Castle of my mother .

See too

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