Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I Waiting for The Consumer Society
- II Economies of Consumption (1)
- III Small Shops
- IV Big Stores
- V Economies of Consumption (2)
- VI Reflections on The Consumer Society
- 13 Post-war Visions of Paradise: The Dawning of the Consumer Society
- 14 Managing the Consumers (1): Motivational Analysts
- 15 Managing the Consumers (2): Advertisers
- 16 The Consumers Managing 1: Making Do by Instalments
- 17 The Consumers Managing 2: Making Do and Producing
- Conclusion: A Good Buy?
- Bibliography
- Index
17 - The Consumers Managing 2: Making Do and Producing
from VI - Reflections on The Consumer Society
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I Waiting for The Consumer Society
- II Economies of Consumption (1)
- III Small Shops
- IV Big Stores
- V Economies of Consumption (2)
- VI Reflections on The Consumer Society
- 13 Post-war Visions of Paradise: The Dawning of the Consumer Society
- 14 Managing the Consumers (1): Motivational Analysts
- 15 Managing the Consumers (2): Advertisers
- 16 The Consumers Managing 1: Making Do by Instalments
- 17 The Consumers Managing 2: Making Do and Producing
- Conclusion: A Good Buy?
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Claire Etcherelli's novel Elise ou la vraie vie, though published in 1967, centres on Paris during the period of the 1950s, at the time of the Algerian war. Thus it overlaps in certain respects with Les Choses, Les Belles Images, and Roses à crédit. Its characters, however, include immigrant workers from North Africa and elsewhere, this time operating on an assembly line in a car plant (based on the Citroën factory). Elise, the narrator, tells how she fell in love with Arezki, an ouvrier spécialisé in the factory who is also a pro-Algerian activist. The daily labour on the assembly line is governed by a time-and-motion operative (‘le chrono’) and a supervisor (‘le régleur’) who monitor the pace of every sequence in the production process. They exemplify what Laurence's father, in Les Belles Images, says about a workforce enslaved by the need to increase output: ‘dans tous les pays l'homme est écrasé par la technique, aliéné à son travail, enchaîné, abêti’ (84). Their life is thus considerably removed from the pleasures of the rising consumer society, despite isolated references to certain self-indulgent individuals who possess ‘un tourne-disque’ (63) or ‘un électrophone tout neuf et quelques disques’ (231). Elise is saving money from her subsistence-level wages to buy a radio for her grandmother (104). On the one occasion when the protagonists find themselves among shoppers, at Christmas, Elise becomes aware that they are like an alien species to the people around them:
Toute une foule heureuse, bien nourrie, qui prenait en novembre les souliers fourrés et les manteaux doublés, en août les vacances à la mer, et à Pâques les habits de printemps, une foule qui gagnait ses loisirs à la sueur de son front, marchait, s'attablait au café et baissait très fort les paupières quand, dans ses eaux territoriales, se glissaient d'inquiétantes espèces mal nourries, qui gardaient en novembre les habits de Pâques et qui, malgré la sueur de leurs fronts, ne gagnaient que leur pain. Par chance, ces espèces s'aggloméraient dans les quartiers réservés. (166)
In one shop window Arezki sees a shirt he would like to buy, since it is an item one would not expect to see ‘sur le dos d'un Algérien’ precisely because it costs what for him is almost a week's wages (192–93).
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- Information
- Consumer ChroniclesCultures of Consumption in Modern French Literature, pp. 283 - 295Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011