Introduction

This page is a collection of extracts from the story “The Odyssey of Bibolé,” where we discover the history behind the term “bibolé.”

The Odyssey Of Bibolé: Preface - The Origins

The goal of this preface is to introduce the term “bibolé” and its origins. While we discuss about the essence of bibolé, we also identify when, how and why the term “bibolé” is introduced to the world.

First, we would like to thank Madame Lougarou, our French teacher, who was very influential in our interest for French literature of the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century. We learned a lot as far as literature and poetry from these eras, and everything we gained was prominent to the existence of bibolé.

To define bibolé we use past research and compare it to other similar terms, such as the French term “morgane.”

The history behind “morgane” goes back to the 19th century. At that time, “morgane” was associated with “biting” (eating), “take a bite of a food, or a meat.”

Then, from the term “morgane” came out a French slang “to be morgane of someone,” which meant the same as “to be bitten by someone.” Basically, once you were bitten, you were hooked to that person, you were crazy in love with that person or you fell deeply in love with that person, and you lost all your senses. A similar American slang term is “love jones.”

Thus, being bibolé of someone is to be morgane of someone, to be bitten by someone, having a love jones for someone, being crazy in love with someone.

As mentioned earlier, back in school, the literature we were exposed to included lots of poetry and passionate love stories. The chapters in The Odyssey of Bibolé discuss further some of the influential literature.

We understand that the literature from the 16th through 19th century usually depicts passionate love that ends with deaths, but bibolé is the crazy in love feeling without the violent and tragic ending. Being bibolé is indeed losing yourself into some intense feelings for someone (crazy in love or love jones), which could be considered an addiction, but bibolé is more like a mutual love. It feeds of the love of someone else.

The Odyssey Of Bibolé: Chapter 1 - La Ze, Lanangbol, De La Panchoyat

This chapter introduces the protagonists: La Ze, Lanangbol, and De La Panchoyat. Three teenagers, best friends, leaving in the same city - Babi, attending the same school, in the 90’s. They live in different neighborhoods, but they spend a lot of time together in school and outside of school. They love music, dance, fashion, and French literature. What is unique about these three teenagers, they are not intimidated to share with each other their feelings and emotions regarding the girls they admire. The Odyssey of Bibolé analyses their friendship and their freedom to connect with the deepest leaving and breathing emotion a human being can feel - bibolé.

Part of the story is a direct reference to the book De L’Amour, published in the 19th century – 1822, by Stendhal, a French author. Maria Popova, a blogger, describes the book as “a timeless treatise attempting to rationally analyze the highest human emotion.” In the book, Stendhal writes a letter to a woman he is passionately in love with, Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski, in an attempt to dissect and explain his deepest feelings to her. This book is a good reference in the quest to understand the term “bibolé.”

In The Odyssey of Bibolé story, one of the three protagonists, La Ze, is passionately in love with a girl, La Dembowski, and his friends can see that his feelings are uncontrollable, but also contagious. Thus, La Ze and La Dembowski are the first people the three friends associated with the terms “bibolé” and “to be bibolé of someone.” They are part of the reason the term “bibolé” takes off and become part of these three teenagers’ everyday conversation.

In De L’Amour, Stendhal introduces the famous term “crystallization,” and he describes it as “the projective idealization with which we tend to see our beloveds, submerging their complete humanity in our selective, romanticized versions of reality.” He also adds that “the crystallization is the operation of the mind that draws from all that presents itself the discovery that the loved object has some new perfections.”

After school, during their downtime, Lanangbol and De La Panchoyat compare the feelings of being bibolé of a girl with the concept of “crystallization.” Fascinated by Stendhal’s point of view, who uses the phenomenon of salt “crystallization” as a metaphor for human relationships, Lanangbol and De La Panchoyat can draw the similarities with the phenomenon of being bibolé of someone. While brainstorming their ideas on a daily they discover the seven stages to get to the “crystallization.”

Per Stendhal, what happens in the soul can be divided in 7 stages:

Admiration

You think (Aknowledgment)

Hope

Love is born

The 1st crystallization

Doubt

The 2nd Crystallization

Thus, Lanangbol and De La Panchoyat, following the same process, analyze the stages of being bibolé. They discover that when one is bibolé, they go through these seven stages, and when they arrive at the 2nd crystallization, their feelings become uncontrollable. During their investigation, they try to answer the following questions: How does an individual become bibolé of someone? How does an individual arrive at the second crystallization?

Taking from Stendhal definition of the 2nd crystallization: “It is the pre-eminence of this truth (she loves me) and the road to it, with a fearsome precipice on one hand and a view of perfect happiness on the other, which sets the second crystallization so far above the first.” As mentioned before, by the time one arrives at the 2nd crystallization we can discover the highest level of bibolé emotion. Lanangbol, De La Panchoyat, and La Ze used various terms to express that feeling: “Gazbibole”; “butagazbibole,” etc…

These three friends fully embrace the feelings of being bibolé by comparing it to Stendhal’s crystallization, and they are also captivated by the term “crystallization.” Despite being teenagers, they open their arms to the emotions associated with deeper love. Furthermore, they are excited to find some connection with something so powerful and beautiful, being bibolé of someone. Although they often tease each other regarding being bibolé, there is a bit of a jealousy when one of them is bibolé of someone. The others desire that same feeling.