The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Renée introduces herself to the reader. At 54 years old, she has been a concierge for a luxury apartment building in Paris for 27 years. She is a widow and calls herself ugly. She lives alone with her cat. She is not friendly and not well-liked. While on duty, Renée indulges her interests in art and culture through reading and television.

Profound Thought number 1 contemplates the goldfish bowls adults construct for themselves. Rather than teach children to work hard for a bright and stable future, children should be taught the absurd reality of life. The thinker of this profound thought identifies themselves as a 12-year-old girl, later confirmed to be Paloma Josse, whose wealthy family lives in the building in which Renée works. Paloma is extremely intelligent and has decided to embrace absurdity and avoid the fishbowl of society. She has resolved to die by suicide on June 16, the day she turns 13, because she refuses to leave childhood to suffer like all the adults she knows. She plans to set the apartment on fire and take her mother’s sleeping pills.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Renée’s only friend Manuela, a house cleaner, visits with her. Renée refers to Manuela as an aristocrat because “What is an aristocrat? A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, although she may be surrounded by it” (28). Renée worries about Manuela moving back to her home country, Portugal. Without Manuela, Renée would have virtually no one in her life. They are interrupted by a resident of the building, food critic Pierre Arthens, who asks Renée to receive and look after an important package for him. Instead of saying “please,” he says “I beg you”, which is off-putting to Renée, who sees it as dismissive of her understanding of nuance. The package is an incunabulum. It amuses Renée to imagine Pierre with his old text, mocking his concierge with his friends by imagining that she doesn’t understand what an incunabulum and believes it is something offensive.

The same 12-year-old narrator of the “Profound Thought” contemplates her goal to die by suicide. She reminds herself that she can only kill herself if she finds nothing to be passionate about. She decides to write the Journal of the Movement of the World as an homage to the beauty and grace she sees in the world around her because “If I find something, then I may rethink my options: if I find a body with beautiful movement or, failing that, a beautiful idea for the mind, well then maybe I’ll think that life is worth living after all” (34). Entry number 1 is devoted to the haka—a Māori ceremonial dance the New Zealand rugby team performs before the match—she watches with her father. She notes that most times, when people move, it is evidence that they are heading toward something and not living in the present moment. However, the haka moves her because she sees the dancers as both in movement and in one present moment. The inspiring movement is short-lived for the narrator of the journal when a French player loses his shorts and the crowd laughs at him.

Renée grew up in a household devoid of deep conversations. She didn’t feel her own consciousness until her first day of school, when a teacher called her by her name and complimented her eyes. Renée’s first encounter with this teacher and her consciousness inspires her to learn to read, but she drops out of school at 12 years old to help work her family’s land, then she marries at 17.

Renée uses the symbol of a poodle as a juxtaposition to her marriage. While a poodle is representative of a bourgeois lack of romance, Renée notes that she and her husband never owned a poodle and thus, according to the logic of her metaphor, had a successful marriage. Renée had met her husband through her brothers, who worked at the same factory. Renée had always felt she was an ugly young girl who looked like an older woman at age 15. She was surprised that her husband wanted to marry her given the societal import of beauty, but he wanted loyalty and intelligence above all.

The diarist of these profound thoughts contemplates the role of her family’s cats. She notices that her mother treats them as decorative, even though she attempts to talk to them. The narrator decides that the cats are only projections of her family because “[y]ou won’t find anyone less proud and sensitive than the three aforementioned members of the Josse family: Papa, Maman, and Colombe. They are utterly spineless and anesthetized, emptied of all emotion” (48).

Renée has read many books, but as an autodidact she worries that she doesn’t grasp the entire meaning of them. However, despite her outer exterior, Renée sees her internal mind and life as vast and Olympian. She is practicing that vastness with the books of philosopher Edmund Husserl. In reading Husserl, she realizes that her readings of Kant and Descartes are not enough to help her understand Husserl’s full scope. Renée loves Kant and believes he passes her cherry plum test. The cherry plum test is based on the idea that once humankind tasted delicious fruit, they began their relationship with pleasure that eventually morphed into expressions of art. Renée tests the potential pleasure of a piece of literature by eating a cherry plum while starting a book, and “[i]f each resists the powerful onslaught of the other, if the cherry plum fails to make me doubt the text and if the text is unable to spoil the fruit, then I know that I am in the presence of a worthwhile and, why not say it, exceptional undertaking” (51). In Husserl’s case, Renée struggles to understand his theories of phenomenology and decides to get an introductory book from the library to help her.

The third profound thought deals with the idea that the dominant people in a society are the weakest. A statement from her father’s friend about “those who can’t do, teach” makes her contemplate her family’s cynicism born from their privilege. Ultimately, words, not deeds, have power.

After a month of reading Husserl, Renée decides that phenomenology is nonsense. She extrapolates that phenomenology asks two questions: What is the nature of human consciousness and what do we know of the world? Because Renée finds the question of human consciousness obvious and over-discussed, she doesn’t think phenomenology is all that inventive.

Next Renée deals with phenomenology’s second question: What do we know of the world? She compares Kant’s answers of transcendental idealism to Husserl’s idealism. Transcendental idealism would say that people know only what they perceive about the world around them, which does not reveal the truth of what the world truly is. Husserl’s transcendentalism proposes that the only thing that truly exists is the perception itself and attempting to understand the world is impossible. Renée finds Kant’s answer sad, but Husserl’s response to this second question is even more depressing and equates it to phenomenology. Phenomenologists do not bother with understanding the things around them, they simply accept that everything is a product of their mind and perception and go about their business. She uses an example of Manuela using a flyswatter and being fully aware of its existence and makeup from every angle but then points out that imagining Manuela with a flyswatter is absurd because she cleans rich people’s apartment’s, and rich people do not have flies or anything else unpleasant for that matter.

Manuela visits with Renée. They chat about Neptune, a cocker spaniel who belongs to one of the families in the building. Renée believes that Neptune is underappreciated by his owner because Neptune acts like a dog with his natural instincts, whereas his owner would rather him act like “the young ladies of antebellum high society in Savannah in the Confederate South […] instead, Neptune carries on as if he were some famished Yankee” (58).

The narrator of the journals notices two dogs, Athena the whippet and Neptune the cocker spaniel. She notes that it’s the owners, not the dogs, who are leashed. Diana, Athena’s owner, twists her ankle trying to separate Athena and Neptune when the dogs run into each other, and Neptune attempts to mount Athena. The narrator pictures the scene like a Bacon painting, but it’s not enough to make her want to keep living because she feels bad that Neptune didn’t get his walk or his treat.