On the Class Character of Desire: Romantic Heroics in the Contes moraux

Abstract

There are worse things one could do on snowbound December nights in New York than to attend an Eric Rohmer festival or, as the lead characters of André Aciman’s Eight White Nights (2010) put it, to go to France. The unnamed narrator and his love interest Clara—both Jewish, well educated, and twentysomething—have elective affinities to spare. But there’s a hitch: while he is an inveterate Rohmerphile, she has yet to see a single film—not even Ma Nuit chez Maud. In a nod to that international art-house success of 1969, the narrator invites Clara at midnight Mass to join him for a screening on Christmas Day. Skeptical at first, she warms up to the idea in front of the theater: “`I just hope they’re good films,’ she added as if she hadn’t quite believed they might be until she’d seen the line and managed to get two tickets minutes before the show sold out. Or was this her way of paying me a compliment, because, left to her, she would never have stepped out into the cold for a Rohmer film unless she trusted the man who loved these films:”¹ Each evening after the double feature, these independent spirits retreat to a bar to sip whisky and gauge each other’s readiness for love, forging expressions (otherpeoples, Knöwitall Jäcke, What’s your hell?) that strengthen the impression that they might be compatible after all. They steer clear of what some readers may hold to be a truth universally acknowledged: that two adults predisposed to one another might just have sex. Like their Rohmerian screen counterparts, Aciman’s girl and boy frown on casual relations.