An Unlikely Friendship

Alexis de Tocqueville is not the first person that comes to mind when thinking of fun. Famous for his nine-month trip to America and the book, Democracy in America, that came out of that trip, Tocqueville does not leave one with the impression that his tour was a wingding. Although he had a few rugged, adventure-like situations with his friend and travel companion Gustave de Beaumont, for the most part Tocqueville’s journey consisted of moving from place to place, eating a lot, and listening, culminating in a book that, while lauded, is hardly a beach read. That is, unless you have an imagination, as does Peter Carey, who wrote a novelistic imagining-with-a-twist of Tocqueville’s trip entitled Parrot & Olivier in America.

The title is a takeoff of Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, the rather definitive biographical account of the real Tocqueville’s trip. Olivier is Tocqueville but Parrot is not Beaumont. In Carey’s telling Beaumont is Blacqueville, and he is killed off in an antic duel before the trip even begins. Parrot is a fictional character, sort of a manservant cum secretary who accompanies Olivier for much of his trip. Olivier’s trip was much more exciting than Tocqueville’s. Carey conjures a one-armed man, late-night contretemps with the New York City police, and an American fiancée to alarm Olivier’s mother and break his heart.

While the fiancée is created, the exploration of American democracy is not. Tocqueville and Olivier both traveled for the ostensible purpose of visiting American prisons as research for a planned reform of the French penal system. The real reason was to escape the difficulty of being an aristocrat born just after the French Revolution into a family that had a knack for being on the wrong side of events. The other real reason was to study American democracy in order to intellectually prepare for the impending arrival of democracy to French soil.

Carey considers the exploration of democracy in a metaphoric way, using Parrot, an illegitimate and itinerant Englishman, and his unlikely quasi-friendship with the educated, cultured aristocrat to explore how newly possible relations might work. Tocqueville had no such relationship that has been identified by his biographers nor his own writings and correspondence. I am not sure that he ever would have. Tocqueville admired American democracy and its achievements, not necessarily out of a personal preference but rather an intellectual acceptance of what he viewed to be inevitable. While it is certainly possible that an aristocrat and a servant could form a friendship, (Tocqueville’s real-life traveling companion Beaumont seems a much more likely candidate for the aristocratic side of such an affinity.) is creating one a good way to explore the experiment of American democracy? Are cross-demographic boundary friendships a result of democracy or a demonstration of individual character? Or both? Perhaps a democratic society, with all its leveling possibility, creates the sowing ground for individual character to transcend demographic boundaries. Either way, Parrot & Olivier in America is a manic mash-up of literature and history that, in Carey’s hands, is a hilarious take on a classic tale and maybe an intimation of one result of the running experiment called American democracy.