Rive Gauche: Paris As a Site of Avant-Garde Art and Cultural Exchange in The 1920s [1 ed.] 9789042031791, 9789042031784

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Rive Gauche Paris as a Site of Avant-Garde Art and Cultural Exchange in the 1920s

144

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

Rive Gauche Paris as a Site of Avant-Garde Art and Cultural Exchange in the 1920s

Edited by

Elke Mettinger, Margarete Rubik and Jörg Türschmann

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover image: Jörg Türschmann Montage: Stefan Grote Cover design: Pier Post Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-3178-4 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3179-1 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

Elke Mettinger, Margarete Rubik and Jörg Türschmann Introduction

7

Dieter Fuchs Judgements of Paris and Falling Troy – The French Metropolis as a Site of Cultural Archaeology in James Joyce’s Ulysses and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”

21

Elke Mettinger Midwives to Modernism: Three Women’s Contributions to the Making of the Avant-Garde

41

Margarete Rubik Jean Rhys’s Vision of the Left Bank

61

Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss “La vie toute faite des morceaux”: Intermediality and Impressionism in Jean Rhys’s Quartet

79

Elke Frietsch The Surrealist Artist is Strolling around with the Little Puppy-Dog Sigmund Freud at his Heels: Perceptions of Space, the Subconscious and Gender Codifications in 1920s Paris

99

Petra Löffler Picturing the Metropolis: Paris in the Eye of the Camera

121

Birgit Wagner Topography of a City of Differences: René Crevel’s La Mort difficile (1926)

145

Sylvia Schreiber The Pull of the Metropolis: The Années folles from a Belgian Perspective, or the Paris of Maigret

161

Manuel Chemineau “Black Paris” in the 1920s and René Maran’s Novel Batouala

181

6

Friedrich Frosch Americans in Paris: Huidobro. Girondo. Tarsiwald. Vallejo

201

Martina Stemberger The Plague in Paris or Burning Cities: Bruno Jasieński versus Paul Morand

229

Jörg Türschmann Claire Goll: Eine Deutsche in Paris (Une Allemande à Paris)

251

Herbert Van Uffelen Studies in buitenkant – Studies in Surroundings: Edgar Du Perron and the Modernists

267

Bettina Thurner “It is evil; it is beautiful; it is fascinating; it is bewildering”: Thomas Wolfe’s Paris of the 1920s

289

Astrid M. Fellner “At Last Lost in Paris”: A Canadian View on the Avant-Garde Paris of the 1920s

311

Elke Mettinger, Margarete Rubik and Jörg Türschmann

Introduction

The Parisian twenties – the années folles – are a perfect example of the Bakhtinian chronotope: a neatly defined period starting with the post-war optimism of creating something radically new, and ending with the American stock market crash. In between Paris witnessed an unequalled decade of artistic and creative achievements that was – according to the American expatriate Archibald MacLeish – part of the “greatest period of literary and artistic innovation since the Renaissance” (qtd. in Fitch, Beach 12). Paris – as Gertrude Stein famously remarked – “was where the twentieth century was” (11). But why did Paris, of all cities in the world, attract so many artists from all over the globe and offer such a fruitful ground on which the avant-garde could develop and prosper? From the late 19th century onwards Paris had been a congenial site for the needs of bohemian life. Between 1910 and 1920 the Montparnasse began to replace the Montmartre as the heart of intellectual and artistic Paris. It was above all Picasso who transferred modern art from the Montmartre to the Montparnasse. Impoverished painters, sculptors, photographers, novelists, poets, composers, dancers from all over the world chose to live in cheap studios and work in the creative atmosphere of literary and artistic cafés around the Carrefour Vavin, later renamed Place Pablo Picasso. The English journalist Sisley Huddleston (in Fitch, Cafés 16) living in Paris characterized the French cafés of the 1920s and 1930s like the Dôme, the Sélect, the Coupole or the Rotonde as the matrix for art and literature. And if the artists could not pay cash, they painted something on the walls instead that would be worth millions today. La Rotonde was the favourite place of an international group of artists such as Picasso, Derain, Max Jacob, Modigliani, Nina Hamnett. But the rudeness of the owner soon made the artistic scene change to the Café du Dôme, which was described in a large number of literary works, Hemingway’s Fiesta and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer being the most prominent. In La Closerie des Lilas Hemingway wrote his short stories, sometimes being joined by Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish or other American expatriates. He also frequented La Coupole, where he quarrelled with Robert McAlmon, whose Contact Editions published Hemingway’s first book in 1923 despite their enmity. Kay Boyle and Henry Miller here either found new partners or drowned their marriage problems in alcohol. Louis Aragon met Elsa Triolet in the Coupole, although the

8 Elke Mettinger, Margarete Rubik and Jörg Türschmann French avant-garde writers like Léon-Paul Fargue or François Coppée also assembled in the Café François Coppée or in Le Jockey, where Cocteau, Duchamp or Aragon and others witnessed Kiki’s seductive performances on the small stage. Claire Goll in her Chronique scandaleuse confirms that you had to take just a few steps around the Coupole in the evening to meet people like Cendrars, Darius Milhaud, Aragon, Man Ray, Derain or Fernand Léger (87). Hemingway and Fitzgerald were also often to be found in the Dingo Bar where Picasso had a drink or two with Jean Cocteau (Fitch, Cafés 41-57; “Montparnasse”). One could see the particular conditions that combined to make Paris and the 1920s such a fruitful symbiosis for the artistic production in a Bakhtinian light. The destabilization of social, cultural and artistic forms in Modernist Paris has something carnivalesque about it. The Left Bank community in the 1920s seems to have a great deal in common with what Bakhtin describes as carnivalesque collectivity bound together by ‘unofficial’ ways of living and of creativity. Bakhtin speaks of the marketplace crowd, and interestingly enough the Left Bank community is also referred to as “The Crowd” for instance by Sylvia Beach in her memoirs Shakespeare & Company (112). The Left Bank with its bars, literary cafés, salons and studios and its bohemian way of life in some ways reminds us of the medieval marketplace with its music, dancing, drinking, feasting, its rejection of conformity, its relatedness to transition, metamorphosis and renewal, its peculiar interrelation of reality and fiction. It is not only Paris itself that evokes comparison with the Bakhtinian carnival, but also the Paris that is depicted in the literature of the time, the well-known novels by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, but also lessknown works that have a voice in this volume. The avant-garde that left the old-world order behind and led to the modern era is related to the carnivalesque renewal, spring, transition or even a turning of things upside down. Hemingway calls the city a moveable feast in his memoirs of the same title. And his first major novel Fiesta was later renamed The Sun Also Rises but retained its original title in most other languages. The idea of the feast is constantly touched upon by Bakhtin. Even the aspect of (self-)performance that is so crucial to the Parisian avant-garde, is taken up by Bakhtin who mentions “all ‘performances’ [...], from loud cursing to the organised show” (153) of the marketplace. For almost all artists of the rive gauche, no matter what their nationality, being avant-garde was a matter of spectacular selfperformance through scandal, provocation, deconstruction of gender. Just as gender is not an expression of what one is, but what one does, the 1920s avant-garde artists constructed themselves as a bohemian provocation

Introduction

9

“through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social sign” (Butler 270). This self-performance and self-construction is also visible in the appearance of the new woman, the garçonne or flapper, who, however, was not an emancipated woman in the modern sense; she was part of the general admiration for technology and the machine. By means of clothing and haircut the female body was reduced to an abstract shape. Fashion replaced the fanciful designs of art nouveau by elementary colours and geometric forms. The interrelatedness of different spheres of avant-garde art such as painting, fashion, photography, dance and stage design made the individual completely merge into its surroundings. However, individuality was by no means lost, but indeed enhanced, for the self-performance in suitable surroundings had an ecstatic dimension to it. Josephine Baker, for instance, embodied this uncompromising self-realization on stage. In the domain of fashion Sonia Delaunay collaborated with Coco Chanel, who together with Isadora Duncan popularized short bobbed hair. Duncan is intimately connected with modern dance that was also influenced by the American Jazz, which, in its turn, had an impact on fashion. The models often were the object of photography. The famous photographers all came from abroad and their work made them famous in Paris: the Polish-born Germaine Krull came to Paris in 1924, where she was supported by Robert and Sonia Delaunay and soon exhibited her work together with Man Ray, André Kertész or Berenice Abbott. The American Man Ray set up his studio on the rive gauche in 1921 and did portraits of the famous American writers like James Joyce or Gertrude Stein. Ray also started taking photos for famous couturiers, which became a regular practice in the thirties for Coco Chanel or Elsa Schiaparelli. He became famous for his ‘Rayographies’, photographs that were taken without a camera. The purity of form and self-performance celebrated in the aesthetics of the body corresponded to the artificiality and self-referentiality of the cinéma pur. The film of the twenties telling no stories and not documenting reality can be considered as Dadaist. The Surrealists are concerned with dream visions, e.g. Man Ray’s L’étoile de mer (1928), Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929, in collaboration with Salvador Dalí) and L’âge d’or (1930) (Albersmeier 203ff). As regards music, rhythm and synaesthesia shaped the artists’ ideas. Music often collaborated with the fine arts. Picasso did the stage design for Stravinsky’s Pulcinella in 1920. Stravinsky was the most important representative of the “new music”, living mostly in Paris as of 1920. George Antheil came to Paris in 1923, giving many scandalous concerts. Sergei Diaghilev was renowned for his scandalous Ballets russes, a gesamtkunstwerk brought

10 Elke Mettinger, Margarete Rubik and Jörg Türschmann about by artists like Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Michel Fokine, Jean Cocteau, Eric Satie or Pablo Picasso. Fokine’s choreography for Le Sacre du Printemps is generally considered the beginning of Modernism in ballet. Dance also played a significant role in the Music-Hall and in revues. The interface between painting and literature was perhaps most visible in Surrealist art. The French Surrealist poet Paul Éluard, for instance, had a great interest in painting. In 1920 Max Ernst met Éluard and his wife Gala (who soon was to leave her husband for Salvador Dalí, the Surrealist artist excelling in a variety of media) and followed them to Paris, where he became one of the most important representatives of Surrealism. Gertrude Stein, the prototypical American Modernist writer, was, together with her brother Leo, an important art collector. She supported Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso with her famous salon. Applying Lawrence Rainey’s terminology one might regard the literary cafés as “social spaces” just like the salons and bookstores, which also provided “staging venues” (xxix) for Modernism to operate. The most important salons were Gertrude Stein’s Saturday evening salons in the rue de Fleurus and Natalie Barney’s Friday afternoon salons in the rue Jacob. Adrienne Monnier’s leading French avant-garde bookshop La Maison des Amis des Livres became the meeting place of the avant-garde with writers like André Gide, Paul Valéry, Jules Romains, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Claudel or Colette but also many painters. Sylvia Beach’s English bookshop “Shakespeare and Company” helped Paris get acquainted with Anglophone literature and offered a forum for American and British writers. What attracted foreign writers and artists to Paris was, of course, also the chance to be discovered, for instance in the salons, and later on to be published, when at home conservative tastes and censorship foreclosed the chance of their works reaching an audience. From Paris a number of small presses operated and contributed to the spreading of avant-garde works, like William Bird’s Three Mountain Press, Harry and Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press or Robert McAlmon’s publishing company Contact Editions. The little magazines like Broom, transition, Gargoyle, and above all The Little Review fulfilled the same function. Among the expatriate communities the largest and most well-known was formed by the Americans. “The local American colony was the largest of any in Europe”, says Janet Flanner in her introduction to Paris was Yesterday (xxiv). For many of the writers and artists the American dream began to crumble, the New World did not hold what it had promised. This is why they fled Prohibition and the narrow-minded climate of Puritanism (which was also blamed for suppressing art) and settled in Paris (Hoffman 36, 53). Paris

Introduction

11

was a lovely and alluring city, a hedonistic, bohemian and anti-bourgeois site, famous for wine and haute cuisine; and a good exchange rate with a stable dollar enabled Americans to enjoy Parisian life at low prices. Perhaps more importantly, Paris offered tolerance in terms of individual and deviant ways of life. It was strikingly often lesbian literary women who settled on the Left Bank, since Paris was renowned for not bothering about foreigners and not interfering with their homosexuality – though the myth of liberal Paris had its limits when it came to coping with its own citizens. Gertrude Stein praised French tolerance towards artists in her Paris France: “So Paris was the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth century art and literature, naturally enough” (12). “Then there is their feeling about foreigners that helps a lot. After all to the french [sic] the difference between being a foreigner and being an inhabitant is not very serious” (18). The American correspondent for the New Yorker Janet Flanner said about her time in Paris, “the capital of hedonism of all Europe” (xxx): We were the Americans who for one reason or another chose to dwell in Paris – for writing, for work, for career, for the amenities of French living, which was cheaper and more agreeable than life in the United States. My satisfaction in living there was double: I felt I was living both at home and abroad – living surrounded with the human familiarity of American friends and acquaintances, and the constant, shifting stimulation that came from the native French. (xxiv)

What she loved about Paris, apart from its inexpensive Left Bank hotels, was its charm, which “lay in its being in no way international […]. There were no skyscrapers. The charm still came from the démodé eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture” (xxxi) which – interestingly enough – means that the seeming anti-modernity of Paris was appealing to some Americans. Artists that were to become icons of Modernism, to be sure, also had other motives for settling in Montparnasse, as the Russian-born painter Marc Chagall explained: I left my native land in 1910. At that time I decided that I needed Paris. I came because I sought the light of Paris, its freedom, its refinement and the skills of the craft. Paris lit up my shadowy world like the sun. [...] I aspired to see with my own eyes what I had heard of from so far away: this revolution of the eye, this rotation of colours, which spontaneously and astutely merge with one another in a flow of conceived lines. That could not be seen in my town. The sun of Art then shone only on Paris. (qtd. in “Montparnasse”)

It is, however, not on the famous artists who have become part of the canon that the present volume will concentrate, but on the less-known artists and their works. Our rive gauche volume is a joint project of several scholars working at the University of Vienna who come from the Departments of

12 Elke Mettinger, Margarete Rubik and Jörg Türschmann English and American Studies, Romance Studies, Theatre, Film and Media Studies, Dutch Studies, and Art History, and who analyze the appeal and creative inspiration the Left Bank exerted on individuals from many different cultures. Dieter Fuchs and Elke Mettinger set the scene by providing a general survey of Paris in its relation to mythology and in its capacity as the headquarters for promoting and marketing the avant-garde, respectively. Dieter Fuchs argues that Joyce’s Ulysses and Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” draw a link between 20th century Paris and Homeric mythology. After all the name of the French capital happens to be identical with that of the Homeric character of Paris, whose unfortunate judgement ultimately resulted in the Trojan War at the beginning of our cultural memory. The analogy Joyce forges between Paris the man and Paris the city can be attributed to the Irish tradition of learned wit. As this Parisian duplicity is further elaborated in Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”, Joyce’s high Modernist poetics of mythical realism may be considered as a hitherto unacknowledged model for Fitzgerald’s art. Both Joyce and Fitzgerald use art to reconstruct the roots of contemporary civilization. Sharing a traditionalist point of view, these avant-garde artists refer to ancient mythology as a structural device that gives meaning to a seemingly chaotic contemporary world. Whereas Joyce refers to the Judgement of Paris as the pre-history of the Odyssey, Fitzgerald regards the Judgement of Paris as the preliminary event leading up to the Fall of Troy presented in the Iliad. In contrast to Joyce’s trust in the peaceful potential of human civilization, Fitzgerald’s reconstruction of contemporary meaning from ancient mythology is deeply pessimistic: like Troy its modern counterpart Paris is doomed to fall to prefigure the decline of the Christian Western world. Elke Mettinger analyzes the crucial contributions of three rather neglected but pioneering American women to the birth of high Modernism at the Montparnasse. Natalie Barney had a famous salon in the rue Jacob, where for decades she provided a forum of exchange for writers, artists, editors, critics, sponsors, translators, thus contributing to the dissemination and publication of avant-garde literature and art. Sylvia Beach’s bookshop “Shakespeare and Company” became the Paris headquarters of (above all expatriate) high Modernist writers and is most famously known for the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the epitome of English Modernist literature. Jane Heap was co-editor of the Little Review, which became the first vital magazine for the avant-garde, publishing radically experimental literature and art that otherwise would not have found its way to the public and promoting many little known writers who later became models for their generation. The paper focuses on the mediating and marketing roles performed by Barney, Beach and

Introduction

13

Heap, whose farsightedness, vision and courage prepared the ground for new tastes, styles, works, and authors to be accepted, thus changing and shaping the literary and artistic scene of the twentieth-century. Margarete Rubik, Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss concentrate on Jean Rhys’s work and its relatedness to Impressionism, thus focussing on intermediality. Margarete Rubik analyzes Jean Rhys’s first literary publication, The Left Bank and Other stories (1927) – much less known than her famous masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys was loosely connected to the avant-garde scene by her lover Ford Madox Ford, but in fact much more influenced by French Impressionism. In these brief tales Rhys reveals glimpses of bohemian society in Montparnasse, of social outsiders and eccentrics, thereby giving a fascinating insight into the rive gauche lifestyles. She treats her characters with deep sympathy, but without any sentimentality, and although she eschews topographical specificity, the atmosphere of these short stories is quite unmistakable. Stylistically, Rhys was clearly influenced by Modernist and Impressionist techniques. Although her early stories mainly feature first or third person narration, she also experiments with sections in unusual second person narration. In all these stories, Rhys evinces the sensitivity to sensual impressions also obvious in her later novels, and occasionally refers to specific painters, although the sensual opulence of her writing may also have been conditioned by her West Indian background. The 1927 collection was prefaced by a lengthy introduction by Ford Madox Ford, who included his own vision of Paris in the 1920s and hence provides an interesting counterpoint to her own vision. Intermediality and Impressionism are further elaborated on in Eva MüllerZettelmann and Rudolf Weiss’s joint paper on Rhys’s first novel Quartet, set in the Paris of the 1920s. They contend that the novel’s stylistic idiosyncrasies are not writerly deficiencies but a consequence of its intermedial nature. This is manifest in its interest in the visual arts and its emulation of the aesthetic and epistemological qualities of French Impressionism, especially in its use of Impressionism’s psychological, ideological and meta-aesthetic potential. The article discusses the novel’s most conspicuous modes of intermediality, like flash-of-perception, atmosphere, objective correlative and multiperspectivity. The function of intermediality in Quartet serves both as a sensual technique to paint the world in the protagonist’s mental colours and as an intellectual means for enabling implicit comment on the mimetic tradition. The novel’s indebtedness to Impressionism – the authors argue – is primarily a tribute to the genius loci of the novel’s setting. French Impressionism turns Paris into the city of Manet’s barmaids, Degas’s absinthe drinkers, Renoir’s opera lovers and Pissarro’s rainy boulevards. The novel captures the space,

14 Elke Mettinger, Margarete Rubik and Jörg Türschmann the mood and the atmosphere of the Paris of the 1920s and their reflection in the mind of Rhys’s proto-typical protagonist. Visual art becomes the focus of Elke Frietsch’s and Petra Löffler’s papers. The former is dedicated to Surrealist art, the latter to photography and film. Elke Frietsch deals with the image of Paris as a mythical place in Surrealist painting and writing and the significance of the unconscious and the feminine in this context. Although Freudian psychoanalysis exerted considerable influence on the Surrealist artists, they also distanced themselves from it in order to celebrate the independence of art. They constructed themselves as flâneurs exploring and surveying the feminized body of Paris and strolling through its streets, leading the unconscious on a leash. At the same time, they envisaged the unconscious itself in terms of metaphors of embodiment as an uncanny female figure indicating the deconstruction of reason and the reinterpretation of the relationship between body and mind. Frietsch analyzes various works by Aragon, Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Jean and others, contrasting their imagery to the visions of Claude Cahun, who, as a woman, did not share the perception of the artist as flâneur and whose work is analyzed by Frietsch in the light of Butler’s theories about the construction of gender identity. Petra Löffler considers photographic and filmic representations of Paris and traces the ways these enter into collective memory and open up a space of imagination conducive to the circulation of cultural signs. She illustrates this circulation of images by the depiction of Paris in the 1920s as a site of desire and a meeting place of the avant-garde. Her paper documents Eugène Atget’s great influence on the pictures of American cities by Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans, but also on the cultural semiotics projects of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. For these artists, Atget’s photography not only served as an artistic inspiration and motivation for various travels to Paris, but also as a visual archive bearing testimony to the rapid changes in the modern metropolis. Abbott’s rediscovery of Atget also tuned in with the fashion of making Paris itself the subject of numerous literary (André Breton, Louis Aragon), photographic (Brassaï, André Kertész, Germaine Krull) and filmic works (René Clair, G.W. Pabst). Especially Pabst in the 1920s and early 1930s contributed to German-French understanding with his films. In his Die Liebe der Jeanny Ney, filmed in Paris in 1927, the city itself takes the main stage in a plot in which imagination and representation of the metropolis coincide. Birgit Wagner introduces René Crevel, who in our volume represents high French Surrealist literature. Sylvia Schreiber, on the other hand, deals with a representative of popular European francophone literature, namely the Belgian writer Georges Simenon. Overseas francophone avant-garde litera-

Introduction

15

ture is dealt with in Manuel Chemineau’s contribution on the black African writer René Maran and Friedrich Frosch presents four Latin American authors, illustrating that the Parisian avant-garde also inspired South American Hispanic writers, who flocked to the French capital. Birgit Wagner in her contribution concentrates on René Crevel, a member of the Surrealist group “Heroic Epoch”, whose first three books, Détour (1924), Mon corps et moi (1925) and La mort difficile (1926) are novels about Paris, in which the themes of social and national differences and of ‘divergent’ sexual desire are inscribed into a specific topography typical of the Paris of the années folles. The author’s relationship to the American painter Eugene MacCown, documented in Crevel’s letters, is fictionally reworked in La mort difficile, in which the young American is portrayed as the naive savage Arthur Bruggle. He is juxtaposed to the sentimental, fragmented European protagonist. This fragmentation together with the gesture of revolt characteristic of Surrealism, the French/American auto- and heterostereotypes and the themes of gender and desire make this novel a fascinating testimony to the multi-facetted (though not necessarily hybrid) Parisian culture of the 1920s. Sylvia Schreiber focuses on the Belgian writer Georges Simenon’s emblematic figure of francophone crime fiction, Inspector Maigret, whose cases are set in Paris. Using as a starting point selected novels from the Maigret series, her article aims to show how Georges Simenon worked into a completely new kind of crime novel the dark sides of the années folles, which he himself had observed in his capacity as journalist, reporter and writer of numerous short stories of a trivial nature. The police station in the Quai des Orfèvres on the banks of the Seine, with its view of the Pont Saint-Michel, lies at the heart of the Maigret novels. Simenon glances behind the scenes of the glamorous twenties and often not only uses the Paris of the 1920s as the setting for his stories but gives it central importance. At the same time, Schreiber attempts to provide a clue to that particular aspect of Belgian literature which has resulted from Belgian writers’ attraction to France on the one hand, and their conscious emancipation from France on the other. The fascination of Paris on the one hand and the struggle for originality on the other is evident, for example, in Belgian Dadaism and Surrealism, which acquired a distinct dynamism while its representatives repeatedly found themselves in Paris. In one of her first Letters from Paris to the New Yorker Janet Flanner reports about the overwhelmingly novel adventure of La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées with Josephine Baker as its star. As a reason for its unanimous success she claims that “Paris has never drawn a color line” (3). Manuel Chemineau’s paper on René Maran’s invention of “negritude” is

16 Elke Mettinger, Margarete Rubik and Jörg Türschmann proof of this statement and of the cult of exoticism which celebrated black people as noble savages. The intellectual and artistic avant-garde became interested in African societies, which manifested itself also in an increased interest in ethnology, exoticism and cultural anthropology on the occasion of colonial exhibitions, bals nègres or the performances of La Revue Nègre featuring Josephine Baker. In 1921, Paris saw the renowned Prix Goncourt for the first time awarded to a Black African author, namely René Maran, for his first novel Batouala, un véritable roman nègre. Owing to the narrative situation the novel radically differs from Eurocentric images of the African population and its everyday life: it is the Africans themselves who are given a voice and tell most of the episodes. Maran, born in Martinique and educated in France, was a member of the colonial administration in Central Africa. In his preface he criticized the French colonial administration, and this led to his dismissal, despite his literary award. His novel was even banned in the French colonies. Friedrich Frosch compares four Latin American authors, renowned as innovators in their mother-countries (Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Peru) and spending some time in Paris between 1910 and 1930. Both Oswald de Andrade and Oliverio Girondo at the beginning of the 1920s published plaquettes in Paris which brought them immediate fame. Vincente Huidobro had paved the way for them by works like Horizon carré (1917). Especially their poetry is informed by a cosmopolitan Latin-American culture which could easily be integrated into a European artistic sensibility and the diversified, often carnivalesque experience of modernity in the metropolis. Frosch traces the contacts of these authors not only to the literary avant-garde, but also to well-known painters, sculptors and designers like Léger or Picasso. Huidobro cooperated with Robert and Sonia Delaunay: the former designed the cover of Tour Eiffel (1918), the latter cooperated with the poet on the design of the robes-poèmes. César Vallejo was less influenced by the Parisian network of artists but stayed in Paris for the rest of his life, thus witnessing the depression after 1929 that put an end to the glorious Parisian twenties. Stylistically and thematically Huidobro’s and Andrade’s manifestos feature many references to Modernist Paris although they do not centrally deal with the city. Other linguistic communities who contributed to the Parisian avant-garde are represented in contributions on Polish, German or Dutch-speaking authors. Martina Stemberger highlights a Parisian scenario from the Polish perspective of Bruno Jasiénski, Jörg Türschmann focuses on the German writer and model Claire Goll, Herbert Van Uffelen on the Dutch writer Edgar Du Perron.

Introduction

17

Martina Stemberger examines issues of cultural exchange and the interrelation of literature, art and politics in Paris in the 1920s by means of Bruno Jasiénski’s novel Je brûle Paris. Jasiénski, a Polish communist and futurist living in Paris since 1925, wrote his novel as a riposte to Paul Morand’s Je brûle Moscou. Morand’s text combined traditional Russian clichés and antisemitic stereotypes to paint the picture of a dirty, miserable Moscow terrorized by fanatical Jewish Bolsheviks and a grotesque (pseudo) avant-garde. Je brûle Paris, a highly political counter-attack, is a complex examination of the myth of Paris in the 1920s, of the contemporaneous art-scene, but also of the suffering of the proletariat hit by the global economic crisis. The novel is rich in Surrealist urban visions, which originate in the perspective of the homeless, unemployed protagonist wandering through Paris and hallucinating because of hunger and exhaustion. He infects the central water reservoir of Paris with plague bacteria, thereby isolating Paris from the rest of the world by a cordon sanitaire. In the depopulated city the former political prisoners finally form a commune modelled on the Soviet ideal. When the West prepares for war against the Soviet Union, Radio Paris proclaims the victory of the revolution to the world. Je brûle Paris was not only a subject of literary criticism: its author, expelled from France, was shot in one of the Stalinist cleansings in 1938. Jörg Türschmann discusses Claire Goll’s autobiographical novel Eine Deutsche in Paris, published in 1927. The protagonist Erika Wolff has autobiographical traits just as her lover Jacques Narval. Claire Goll, born in Nuremberg in 1890, left Zurich for Paris in 1919 together with her future husband Yvan Goll who, affiliated to the Dada movement in Zurich, became one of the leaders of Surrealism in Paris. Claire Goll herself published her novels Arsenik (1926) and Eine Deutsche in Paris (1927) and several poems during her Parisian time. The unhappy love relation in Eine Deutsche in Paris, however, is based on a number of irreconcilable oppositions between man and woman, science and art, reason and emotion, enlightenment and romanticism, France and Germany. The article shows the contradictoriness and ambivalence not only of Erika’s relation to Paris, but also of Jacques’s Narcissist egocentrism, which is incomprehensible to her. The novel was successful both in Germany and in France, contributing to a rapprochement of both countries in its own way via a common reading experience. Herbert Van Uffelen introduces Edgar du Perron, who is considered to be one of the most distinguished Dutch writers of the interwar period. He spent two longer periods in Paris: first in 1922, and then between 1932 and 1936. In 1922 he came to Montmartre leading the life of an ‘amateur-bohémien’. Although he did not live in Montparnasse, he met Oscar Duboux, Max Jacob, Pedro Creixams and Pascal Pia, who inspired his avant-garde writings under

18 Elke Mettinger, Margarete Rubik and Jörg Türschmann the pen name of Duco Perkens. In 1925, together with the painter Jozef Peeters he founded the avant-garde journal and publishing house De driehoek. However, his Manuscrit trouvé dans une poche, which he wrote in Paris (and in French), already indicates his ambivalent relation to the Modernist experiment, which becomes even more obvious in his first novel Een voorbereiding (1927). From the very beginning Du Perron is more concerned with formulating his own standpoint than with rhetorical experiments. Du Perron has always been an outsider in the Dutch avant-garde. After all he felt more akin to André Malraux and Menno ter Braak, who set the tone in Du Perron’s best known autobiographical novel Het land van herkomst (1935), which he wrote during his second stay in Paris. The last two papers in this volume cast glances on Paris from the perspective of two North American (self-willed) outsiders – the one an emotional soloist, the other writing from a temporal remove. Thomas Wolfe, the author discussed by Bettina Thurner, stresses his emotional distance from the Lost Generation in Paris. In the final roundup of the volume Astrid Fellner analyzes Gail Scott’s 20th century retrospective view of the Paris of the 1920s. Bettina Thurner’s paper is devoted to the American writer Thomas Wolfe, who visited Paris in 1924 and 1928, but whose Southern class-consciousness made him suspicious of artists. His innate psychological disdain for inclusion in the group was, however, tempered by a contradictory secret desire for belonging. Paris, for him, was thus at once the dreamed of capital of art but also the city that was to prove forever his incapability of integrating with the humanity he sought so painfully to describe. He was both fascinated and disappointed by the French capital, debunking the myth of Paris as a place to write and concentrating instead on images of erotic desire which had to be repressed in Puritan America. He veered between the stereotyped New World myth of Old Europe as a place of culture and order and the unabashed philistinism of a tourist. In spite of communication problems and personal frustrations, however, this literary soloist also recognized in Paris the Other which shaped his individuality and helped him to discover his ‘authentic’ American voice. Despite his critical stance towards France, his sojourns in Paris were thus crucial for the formation of his artistic as well as national (American) consciousness. Astrid M. Fellner in her paper presents a recent Canadian view of the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. Gail Scott’s My Paris (1999) is the story of an Anglo-Montréaler woman writer who, like Djuna Barnes’s somnambule character Robin Vote, aimlessly wanders through the city. As a parodic text, My Paris engages in a dialogic exchange with the Left Bank writers of the 1920s and is not only imbued with the ghosts of Barnes and Stein, but also revisits Walter Benjamin’s Paris as described in his Arcades

Introduction

19

Project. As a composite of Stein, Barnes, and Benjamin, Scott’s experimental text sets the scene for activating one of Modernism’s most characteristic strategies: the dialectical optics of Benjamin’s image-space. My Paris, Fellner argues, opens up a space of cultural exchange that is not only reminiscent of the Paris of the 1920s, but also self-consciously performs and thus produces the image of the avant-garde Paris through a series of citational practices. By foregrounding cultural translation in her text, Scott sets her story in Paris but in fact focuses on a space where multiple languages gather (Montreal), which derives its signifying power from Paris in the 1920s. Scott’s protagonist thus acts as a cultural translator who leads the reader from Paris to Montreal, and from Stein, Barnes, and Benjamin to experimental writing in Quebec. The volume, which started with the myth of Paris, thus ends with a retrospective recreation of the rive gauche which is, however, meant to celebrate the cultural potential of a New World Paris. We would like to thank Caterina Novák and Susanne Zhanial for translating several papers into English and also providing English translations for German quotes. We are also grateful to Bryan Jenner for proof-reading and to Bernhard Schubert for helping to prepare this volume for publication.

Works Cited Albersmeier, Franz-Josef. “Kinematographischer versus literarischer ‘Esprit nouveau’. Zur Antinomie von kinematographischer und literarischer Avantgarde in Frankreich (1895-1930).” absolut modern sein. Culture technique in Frankreich 1889-1937. Ed. Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst. Berlin: Elefanten Press. 203-210. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. 11959. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Fitch, Noël Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. New York and London: Norton, 1983. ——. Die literarischen Cafés von Paris. Zürich: Arche, 1993. Flanner, Janet. Paris was Yesterday: 1925 – 1939. London: Virago, 2003.

20 Elke Mettinger, Margarete Rubik and Jörg Türschmann Goll, Claire. Ich verzeihe keinem. Eine Chronique scandaleuse unserer Zeit. München, Zürich: Droemersche Verlagsanstalt Th. Knaur, 1980. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964. Hoffman, Frederick J. The Twenties. American Writing in the Postwar Decade. New York: The Free Press, 1965. “Montparnasse.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montparnasse (11/12/2009). Rainey, Lawrence, ed. Modernism – An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Stein, Gertrude. Paris France. New York: Liveright, 1970.

Dieter Fuchs

  Judgements of Paris and Falling Troy – The French Metropolis as a Site of Cultural Archaeology in James Joyce’s Ulysses and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”

James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald first met on June 27, 1928 at a dinner party hosted by Sylvia Beach – the owner of the rive gauche bookshop Shakespeare and Company, which has become famously known as the Paris centre of the high modernist intelligentsia. In her memoir the hostess explains that she arranged this encounter for Fitzgerald, who “worshipped James Joyce, but was afraid to approach him” (Beach 116). On subsequent gatherings Fitzgerald complimented the Irish artist with a book dedication to “James Joyce, from the humblest but most devoted of his admirers”, kissed the hand of his idol, offered “to jump out of a fourth-floor window” and exclaimed “How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir? I am so excited at seeing you, Sir, that I could weep” (Gorman 116).1 To show that these anecdotal encounters must have provided the eccentric framework of a more serious intellectual exchange, this paper will show that the high modernist poetics of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), known as mythical realism – the ironic juxtaposition of archetypal and realistic representational modes as a structural device to give meaning and order to an increasingly chaotic contemporary world – may be considered as a prototype for Fitzgerald’s short story “Babylon Revisited” (1931). It will be argued that Fitzgerald imitates the “mythical method” (T.S. Eliot) of Ulysses by rewriting a set of Joycean allusions to ancient mythology which includes two rather unknown sources waiting to be reconstructed in the following pages: Lucian’s ‘Judgement of Paris’ from “Dialogues of the Gods”, and the infernal representation of Helen of Troy in “Dialogues of the Dead” written by the same author. Whereas other works by Fitzgerald such as The Great Gatsby

                                                         1

  

The quotations are taken from Thomas 72-76, cf. also Bruccoli 264-265 and Ellmann, James Joyce 581. Joyce, on the other hand, presented Fitzgerald with copies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses inscribed: “Dear Mr. Fitzgerald: Here with is the book you gave me signed and I am adding a portrait of the artist as a once younger man with the thanks of your much obliged but most pusillanimous guest. 11.7.928 [sic]’” (Thomas 74). In commemoration of Sylvia Beach’s party Fitzgerald drew a picture (‘Festival of St. James’) of himself kneeling before the haloed Joyce who presides at dinner as a drunken Jesus figure.

22 Dieter Fuchs (1925)2 refer to myths and archetypes in a comparatively loosely connected manner, the mythopoesis of “Babylon Revisited” acquires a structural coherence and density comparable to the Joycean model. Even though Fitzgerald was deeply imbued with the heritage of mythical realism represented by Joyce, scholars have frequently denied that his work was influenced by European modernism3: The expatriates left America as an expression of their rejection of American culture. Fitzgerald remained immensely American. He was an American writer living abroad, not an expatriate. [...] Although he was on friendly terms with Stein and hailed the genius of Joyce, Fitzgerald was not influenced by [European] modernism because his style and technique were formed before he arrived in France. [...] Nonetheless, Fitzgerald’s residence in Europe provided him with material. (Baughman 177-178)

Such statements need to be reconsidered. Like Schliemann, who read the Homeric epics to rediscover Troy – the mother of all cities – , Joyce and Fitzgerald reconstruct the roots of contemporary civilization from myths and archetypes and consider 20th century Paris – the axis and centre of the high modernist world – as a site of cultural archaeology. Sharing a deeply traditionalist point of view, these artists contribute to the modernist tradition in so far as they create new meaning by welding the triviality of present-day life with forgotten knowledge reconstructed from the dunghill of history which – in the case of Western civilization – subdivides into a twofold pedigree: the Classical and the Biblical tradition, or Hellenism and Hebraism (Arnold ch. 4). As will be shown in detail, Joyce and Fitzgerald combine the intertextual framework alluded to in the titles of their works – Homer’s Odyssey in Ulysses and the Biblical Fall of Babylon in “Babylon Revisited” – with an archaeology of the origin of our collective memory recorded in one of the central foundational myth of Classical Western culture: the unfortunate Judgement of Paris – the son of king Priam of Troy – which constitutes the pre-

                                                         2

The Great Gatsby refers to Petronius’s Satyricon from the 1st century A.D., which has become famous for its parody of Classical myths and epics such as the Odyssey. An early version of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was entitled Trimalchio and carried the name of Petronius’s nouveau riche character whose famous dinner party – the “Cena Trimalchionis” – constitutes the backbone of what has survived of the Petronian text. With regard to Joyce’s rewriting of Petronius as a possible source of inspiration for Fitzgerald, cf. Murphy and Killeen, concerning Petronius and Fitzgerald, cf. MacKendrick, Endres, etc. 3   With The Great Gatsby – which he considered as “something really NEW in form, idea, structure” and “the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are looking for, that Conrad didn’t find” (Kuehl & Bryer, qtd. in Thomas 70) – Fitzgerald hoped to “become the American [...] Joyce” (Sklar 232, qtd. in Thomas 71). When The Great Gatsby, written in imitation of the European tradition (ancient and modern), failed the American market, Fitzgerald wrote that “I feel that I am going to have more + more a European public” (Bruccoli & Duggan 208, qtd. in Thomas 70).

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history of the Trojan war resulting in the fall of that city and the rise of Greco-Roman culture as a long-term shift of imperial hegemony from the Eastern to the Western hemisphere.4 Like the Biblical Fall of Mankind, the Classical Judgement of Paris and the subsequent Fall of Troy originate in a debate between God and Man over an apple as a key to potentially destructive knowledge: to take revenge for not being invited to an Olympian dinner party, Eris, the goddess of discord, throws a golden apple inscribed with the words “for the fairest one” – the famous Apple of Discord – into the round. When three goddesses – Hera, Athena and Aphrodite – claim this award of beauty, Zeus determines that it is up to Paris – the banished son of king Priam of Troy living the expatriate life of a cowherd – to decide the contest. When offered the bribe of kingship by Hera, wisdom and martial success by Athena, and the world’s most beautiful woman by Aphrodite, Paris crowns the love goddess queen of divine beauty. His reward is fair Helen, wife to the Spartan king Menelaus, whose abduction to Troy causes the Trojan War and the mortal hatred of Athena and Hera alike. Welding the real and the archetypal, Joyce and Fitzgerald apply this mythical background as means to analyse the present. With typical Irish punning and wit they link the archetypal character of Paris with the modern metropolis known by the same name in order to shed light on the more serious circumstance that the unfortunate judgement leading up to the greatest war of the ancient world and early twentieth century Paris before the Second World War share many more parallels than a common name, which is but sound and smoke. Although the fact that the name of the mythical son of the Trojan king is coincidentally, and not etymologically, identical with that of the French capital seems at first glance to offer little evidence for a structurally coherent corresponding link between these aspects, it will be shown that Joyce and Fitzgerald weave a carefully textured network of analogies between 20th

                                                         4

The Fall of ancient Troy, or Ilium situated in the Eastern borderland of Europe and Asia fosters the growing hegemony of the Greek city states described in Homer’s Iliad and the subsequent rise of imperial Rome fashioned in Virgil’s Aeneid. Welded with the Biblical tradition later on, this process is also known as translatio imperii – an approach to history, which may be traced back to Saint Augustine. Translatio imperii, or translation of imperial power, interprets the historical flow of European hegemony as a movement from the East to the West. Reading Daniel’s prophecies in the Old Testament, Augustine interpreted the history of the world as the succession of four super-powers: the Assyrian, the Persian, the Greek/Macedonian and the Roman Empire.

24 Dieter Fuchs century Paris and the archetypal judgement from the beginning of the rise of Western culture.5 Whereas Joyce focuses on this corresponding pattern as an anthropological satirist in order to shed light on the timeless folly and vanity of mankind by means of humour and laughter, Fitzgerald’s analysis of culture focuses on the topicality of contemporary history and turns out to be pessimistic, not to say apocalyptic. In contrast to Joyce, whose application of myths and archetypes to the modern world may be characterized in terms of a Comédie Humaine, Fitzgerald’s mythical realism acquires a tragic pitch triggered off by the anxieties and change of the political climate at the end of the 1920s.

‘Judgements of Paris’ – Ancient and Modern In analogy with the faulty judgement of the son of the Trojan king from the beginning of Western culture, Fitzgerald presents Paris of the 1920s as a place of discord and corruption resulting from the discrepancy of external appearance and reality. Also known as the time of the ‘Gilded’ rather than Golden Age6, this era begins with the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, gath-

                                                         5

6

Owing to the fact that the nominal identity of Paris of Troy and the French metropolis is coincidental rather than etymological (the correct etymological root would be the Gallic tribe of the Parisii), this correspondence turns out to be both analogically convincing and logically forged, and thus ‘true’ and mendacious at the same time. Such sophistically manipulated reasoning originating from Lucian’s epistemological satire of the Hellenistic world recurs in the ‘Irish’ tradition of learned wit and eccentricity represented by Swift, Sterne, Wilde, Joyce and (indirectly) Fitzgerald who was born into an American family of Irish descent. The Greco-Hibernian school of wit deconstructs the borderline between myth and reality and turns ‘Paris’ into a floating signifier. Also in this respect Joyce – who famously said that “the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church was built upon a pun. It ought to be good enough for me” (referring to Jesus who punned on Petrus the man and the rock as the fundament of the church: “tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam.” Matt 16:18, quoted in Budgen 347), and who links Paris the man and the city as a joking master punster – must be considered as a model for Fitzgerald’s art. As his comment on the foundational scene of the Roman Catholic Church and the Judgement of Paris as the prehistory of the Trojan War treated in this paper exemplify, many a cornerstone of Western history – be it the Classical (Hellenist) or the Biblical (Hebraist) tradition – is revealed as a mere juggler’s trick upon closer introspection, so that history turns out to be a concatenation of forgeries rather than facts when looked at with more careful scrutiny: Moses tricks Pharaoh, Paris tricked by Aphrodite tricks the Spartan king, Odysseus tricks the Trojans, Aeneas tricks Dido, the Pope tricks the Carolingian kings, etc. The 1920s as they are portrayed in Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story collection Tales from the Gilded Age were considered as a ‘Renaissance’ of the late 19th century Gilded Age which marks the rise of America’s upper-class families such as the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers after the civil war.

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ers momentum with the rise of the world market in the Twenties, and comes to an abrupt end with the crash of the New York stock exchange in 1929, which leads to global depression. Without trying to push an analogy too far, there might be a grain of truth in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s yoking of the mythical Judgement of Paris as the pre-history of the greatest war of the ancient world with the modern metropolis of the Roaring Twenties to throw light on the emergence of a most sinister twentieth century myth forged by the rapidly growing German fascist party, which may be considered as the pre-history of the most horrible war of the modern world: the misrepresentation of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference as an unfair trial on Germany, which believed itself to be the unrivalled military champion of the Great War and fashioned itself as the diplomatic victim of an allegedly corrupt ‘Judgement of Paris’ to be avenged by even greater martial bloodshed.7 In contrast to “Babylon Revisited” published in 1931, which is pessimistically imbued with the fear of the coming of a Second World War in the future, James Joyce’s Ulysses, written in Zurich during the First World War and completed in Paris in 1922, focuses on both myth and reality from a postwar perspective of restored order and peace. Rather than considering the Judgement of Paris as an archetypal portent of the return of a global war such as the one described in Homer’s Iliad, Joyce concentrates on the Homeric sequel to the battle of Troy – the Odyssey, which presents the events that followed the Fall of Ilium. He thus concentrates on the post-war situation, which features Odysseus as an archetypal man of peace struggling to return to civil life after having been forced by his peers to leave his home and family in order to enter the great war of Troy. Even if his return takes ten years, Joyce considers the Homeric Odysseus as a character who succeeds in coping with the traumatic experience of war that many representatives of the twentieth century Lost Generation had to struggle with (Ellmann James Joyce, 435436; Budgen 15-18). In contrast to Ulysses – which presents “gay Paree” (U 3; 249) as a flourishing metropolis of the peaceful era of the Golden Twenties – “Babylon Revisited” thus fashions the French metropolis as the doomed centre of the Gilded Age overshadowed by the portent of “ancestral voices prophesying war” (“Kubla Khan”, line 30). As it depends on the transatlantic money made at the Gilded Age stock exchange of the Big Apple and spent by American expatriates, Fitzgerald’s Paris of the early 1930s has already suffered heavily from the financial crash and is now waiting to receive its terminal blow in the course of the approaching war when the decade draws towards its end. To

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  Cf. the (in)famous ‘dagger stab legend’, which claims that the German army returned undefeated from the battlefield (“im Felde unbesiegt”).

26 Dieter Fuchs emphasize his cultural pessimism, Fitzgerald welds the intertextual background of Hellenic mythology with the Hebraic tradition of Biblical exegesis and presents the fate of modern Paris not only as a counterpart of the Fall of classical Troy, but also in parallel with the Fall of the city of Babylon presented in John’s apocalyptic Book of Revelation: Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. (Rev. 18, 2-3)

As can be seen from the fact that, apart from the allusive title, a religious dimension is notably absent8 from Fitzgerald’s short story, Paris is fashioned as a secular counterpart of ancient Babylon to be revisited by the second coming of a belligerent Anti-Christ rather than Jesus – or as William Butler Yeats puts it in 1919: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last // Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” (“The Second Coming”, lines 2122). In contrast to ancient Troy – the ‘oriental’ metropolis whose fall triggered off by the Judgement of Paris initiated the rise of Western urban civilization – modern Paris is going to fall in the near future and this indicates the approaching end of the Christian Western world.

James Joyce’s Ulysses In contrast to Fitzgerald’s topical vantage point of the Great Depression and the portent of the coming of another war, Joyce approaches the myth of Paris from an anthropological perspective. According to him, the Olympian beauty contest corrupted by the bribe of mortal Helena must be, first of all, considered as an archetypal example of the folly and vanity of mankind which – be it in public upheavals or everyday private life – recurs over and over again in the course of human history. In constant remembrance of this archetypal condition from the very outset of his work on Ulysses in 1914 Trieste onwards, Joyce decorated his study with an emblem of human vanity: a memento mori representing a shrunken old woman to which he added the lines from the Fifth Canto from the “Inferno” of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which present the mythical Paris and his spouse Helen from the under-worldly perspective of the second circle of hell reserved for the carnal sinners: “‘[...] See Helen, for whom so long a time of ill revolved; and see the great Achilles,

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Even if the lifestyle of the Peters family is notably Puritan, Puritanism is presented in purely secular terms of capitalist achievement.

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27

who fought to the end with love. See Paris, Tristan–’ and more than a thousand shades whom love had parted from our life he showed me [...]” (V.52). According to Ellmann (James Joyce 381), Joyce’s memento mori may be traced back to Lucian’s “Dialogues of the Dead” – a series of satirical colloquies from the second century A.D. belonging to the intertextual source material for Joyce’s rewriting of the Odysseus-archetype9 in which the philosopher and satirist Menippus newly arrived in Hades presents Helen of Troy as the epitome of human vanity in a discussion with Hermes: Menippus: Hermes:

Menippus: Hermes: Menippus: Hermes: Menippus: Hermes:

Menippus:

Tell me, Hermes, where are the beauties of both sexes? Show me round, as I’m a newcomer. I have no time, Menippus. But just look over there to your right, where you’ll see Hyacinthus, Narcissus, Nireus, Achilles, Tyro, Helen, and Leda, and, in fact, all the beauties of old. I can only see bones and skulls, most of them looking the same. Yet those are what the poets admire, those bones which you seem to despise. But show me Helen. I can’t pick her out myself. This skull is Helen. Was it then for this that the thousand ships were manned from all Greece, for this that so many Greeks and barbarians fell, and so many cities were devastated? Ah, but you never saw the woman alive, Menippus, or you would have said yourself that it was forgivable that they “for such a lady long should suffer woe”. For if one sees flowers that are dried up and faded, they will, of course, appear ugly; but when they are in bloom and have their colour, they are very beautiful. Well, Hermes, what does surprise me is this: that the Achaeans didn’t know how short-lived a thing they strove for, and how soon it loses its bloom. (Dialogues of the Dead 5 (18), 21-25.)

Welding the Classical and the Christian tradition as a model for Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”, Joyce’s Ulysses presents Helen of Troy as a Classical example of human vanity responsible for the Fall of Troy and as a pagan counterpart of the Biblical Eve causing the Fall of Mankind at the same time: “A woman [the Biblical Eve] brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten

                                                         9

Cf. Fuchs 2006 and forthcoming. As can be seen from Schork’s (1998) excellent survey of the state of research on Greek and Hellenic Culture in Joyce, a Lucianic dimension of Joyce’s works has not been reconstructed so far. As shown by Ellmann (1977), Gillespie (1986), and Schork (1997, 196), Joyce owned an Italian translation of “Dialogues of the Dead”, “Dialogues of the Gods” and other works by Lucian (Lucian, 1885).

28 Dieter Fuchs years the Greeks made war on Troy” (U 2; 390-392).10 In order to integrate this analogy into the main intertextual framework of the Homeric Odyssey indicated in the title of Ulysses, Helen is furthermore fashioned as the vain and infidel counterpart of Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus, who – like the Christian Virgin Mary and the Holy Family – is presented as the positive exemplum of married womanhood: “Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias […], took the palm of beauty away from Kyrios Menelaus’s brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope” (U 9; 621-623). Paris, the corrupt judge of feminine beauty – who is referred to as “the wellpleased pleaser” (U 9; 268) of himself, Helen and Aphrodite alike – enters the world of Ulysses when Stephen Dedalus – Joyce’s Telemachus figure – takes a walk on Sandymount beach and recalls the memories of the time he spent in the city of Paris in the years of 1902/3 (cf. U 3; 199 & Ellmann James Joyce, 128.) in the third chapter of Ulysses known as the Telemachus-Episode (U 3; 209-264). Even if in the following quotation Stephen may primarily recall the famous horse race known as the Grand Prix de Paris, it cannot be denied that he links this thought with the archetypal Judgement of the king of Troy’s son when an association of legal equity sneaks into his scholarly trained mind: “Prix de Paris: beware of imitations. Just you give it a fair trial.” (U 3; 483-484, cf. entry in Gifford & Seidman). As a brilliant example of Joyce’s mythical realism – which welds the topical and the archetypal – the actual horse, which won the Prix de Paris on June 12 1904, carried the name of the Greek hero Ajax11 who, like Menelaus, Achilles, Hector and Ulysses, fought the battle of Troy in order to retrieve Helen the beautiful from her illegitimate spouse Paris. As the plot of Ulysses is set on June 16 of that year, Stephen receives the topical information of Ajax winning the Paris Derby from daily gossip or from the Dublin newspaper, whereas the reader of Ulysses remains entirely ignorant of this background as a key to Joyce’s “mythical method” (T.S. Eliot) unless he actively engages in archival research. As the reader is denied such information, he has to reconstruct these archetypal layers of meaning encoded in a flood of circumstantial evidence from the actual world of 1904 as an archaeologist teased by a game of authorial irony which might be called Joyce’s ‘Trojan Hobby-Horse.’ This is the quite astonishing background of Joyce’s tongue in cheek statement that: “The demand that I make of my reader, is that he [sic]

                                                         10

This, however, is the vantage point of a minor character of Ulysses: Mr. Deasy, a pedantic and anti-semitic bromide. 11    Cf. the online archive of The New York Times: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archivefree/pdf?_r=1&res=9407E2DE113DE633A25750C1A9609C946597D6CF (7/3/2009). 

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29

should devote his whole life to reading my works” (Ellmann, James Joyce 703). When in the thirteenth chapter of Ulysses known as the Nausicaa-Episode the modern Odysseus Leopold Bloom rests at the same part of Sandymount beach where Stephen contemplated Paris as an actual place and a mythical person, his role profile not only corresponds with that of Ulysses mentioned in the title of Joyce’s book, but also with that of Paris: For Joyce layers myth in “Nausicaa”, letting the Homeric narrative conceal and […] repress one of its own causal myths, the Trial of Paris, the beauty contest whose outcome contributed to the Trojan War (Norris 37). [Thus] Joyce undermines his own mythical intertext with a hidden mythical counter-text, Homer’s “Nausicaa” reinterpreted by the Trial of Paris. (Norris 48)12

Without being consciously aware of it, Bloom re-enacts the unfortunate judgement of divine beauty and becomes the alpha and the omega of Joyce’s intertextual network owing to the fact that he is fashioned as both the Paris responsible for the Trojan War and the witty Odysseus trying to return to his home after having brought about the Fall of Ilium as the inventor of the trick of the wooden horse:13 when Bloom watches three young women – Gerty MacDowell, Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman, who take the baby twins Jacky and Tommy to the beach – he not only functions as a modern Odysseus washed ashore on the land of the Phaeacians when he is hit by a ball which escapes Princess Nausicaa and her friends during their game; he also has to cope with the task of Paris and to elect one of the three girls as the recipient of the apple-shaped toy: The twins were now playing in the most approved brotherly fashion till at last Master Jacky who was really as bold as brass there was no getting behind that deliberately kicked the ball as hard as ever he could down towards the seaweedy rocks. Needless to say poor Tommy was not slow to voice dismay but luckily the gentleman in black who was sitting there by himself came gallantly to rescue and intercepted the ball. Our two champions claimed their plaything with lusty cries and to avoid trouble Cissy Caffrey called the gentleman to throw it to her please. The gentleman aimed the ball once or twice and then threw it up the strand towards Cissy Caffrey but it rolled down the slope

                                                         12

As far as the macro-structural intertextual analogies are concerned, Norris states: “In their competition to win the attention of the exotic stranger on the beach, Cissy, I would say, takes the part of Hera, Gerty, the part of Aphrodite, and Edy Boardman […] plays the part of Athena […].” (Norris 43). 13    Like the Homeric Odysseus, Leopold Bloom constructs a ‘Trojan Horse’ in Ulysses. Although he is not aware of it, Bloom’s statement that he is about to throw his newspaper away is retrospectively taken as an inside tip that Throwaway (note the phonetic similarity with ‘Troy’!), an apparently chanceless horse scheduled for the Ascot race, will be the champion to bet upon. Quite unexpectedly Throwaway wins the derby.

30 Dieter Fuchs and stopped right under Gerty’s skirt near the pool by the rock. […] Gerty smiled assent and bit her lip. (U 13; 345-360)

Conversely Gerty MacDowell – who gets hold of the orb-like object thrown back by Bloom – is not only presented as a mock-heroic counterpart of Nausicaa meeting Ulysses while playing at ball, but also as Aphrodite flirting with ‘Parisian’ Bloom in order to receive the ball-shaped ‘Apple of Discord’ as a beauty award.14 Like the Greek goddess of love, who undresses herself and asks Paris to “examine me thoroughly, part by part, slighting none, but lingering upon each” (“The Judgement of the Goddesses”, 403), “Greekly perfect” Gerty (U 13; 89) tries to attract Bloom’s favour by showing off as much of her private bodily parts as possible. As both parties – like Aphrodite and Paris at the original Judgement – engage in this voyeuristic encounter for selfish purposes only, their flirtation on the beach climaxes in the circumstance that ‘Aphrodisiac’ Gerty and ‘Parisian’ Bloom have sex with themselves rather than each other: The eyes that were fastened upon her set her pulses tingling. She looked at him for a moment, meeting his glance, and a light broke in about her. Whitehot passion was in that face, passion silent as the grave, and it had made her his. [...]. His hands and face were working and a tremor went over her. She leaned back far [...] and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up and there was no-one to see only him and her when she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs [...] and she saw that he saw [...] and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look [...]. (U 13; 689-730)15

In addition to that, the rubber ball thrown by Bloom functions not only as an Apple of Discord among the girls, but also as a bone of contention among the baby twins in their company (“Our two champions claimed their plaything with lusty cries” U 13; 350-1), so that the Judgement of Paris is welded with the Trojan War it leads up to – a mythopoetic syncretism which can also be observed from the circumstance that Joyce presents the twin toddlers’ quarrel about a sandy toy fortification that they built on the beach as an “apple of discord” and a parody of the battle of Troy alike: “The apple of discord was a certain castle of sand which Master Jacky had built and Master Tommy would have it right go wrong that it was to be architecturally improved by a

                                                         14

15

In allusion to Aphrodite accompanied by Cupid, the eyebrows of Gerty are compared to “Cupid’s bow” (U 13; 88-9). This ‘telekinetic’ way of sexual intercourse clearly indicates the circumstance that – like Paris, who awards Aphrodite the Apple of Discord to enjoy the pleasures of Helen in recompense – it is Leopold Bloom’s wife Molly rather than ‘aphrodisiac’ Gerty who turns out to be the champion of his love in the end (cf. Norris).

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31

frontdoor […]” (U 13; 42-44). As the fraternal conflict culminates in the debate over the castle’s architectural improvement of a front door, Ulysses parodies the decisive turning point of the siege of Troy at the moment when witty Odysseus comes up with the strategy of the wooden horse, which was built in such a size that the Trojans had to remove the fortifying wall covering their city gate in order to move it into their citadel (Virgilius II; 1-245). By presenting the girls’ combat for beauty and the boys’ struggle for honour and power as two related aspects of one and the same coin of vanity and self-deception, Ulysses sheds light on the human condition and reduces the alleged greatness of Homeric goddesses and heroes to all too human dimensions. By satirizing the mythical greatness of the siege of Troy as a children’s quarrel about a sandy toy, Ulysses echoes an as yet undiscovered source for the rewriting of the topic dealt with in this paper: Lucian’s parody of the Judgement of Paris, which is to be found in the twentieth part of the “Dialogues of the Gods”, a complementary series of satirical colloquies to that of the “Dialogues of the Dead” mentioned above.16 Lucian’s Judgement presents Paris from the satirical distance of a divinely remote vantage point – a technique of petty reduction and parody known as kataskopos (von Koppenfels): when the three goddesses vying for the Apple of Discord approach the earth in a sky journey guided by Hermes, Paris – the banished son of king Priam of Troy living the expatriate life of a cowherd – appears to their eyes not as the Homeric hero responsible for the greatest war of the ancient world, but as a barely visible midget struggling to cope with the trivial pursuit of his pastoral duties: Hermes:

Hera: Hermes: Hera:

[…] in the course of our conversation we have already left the stars far behind as we pressed on, and we are almost over Phrygia. Indeed I can see [mount] Ida and the whole of Gargaron plainly, and unless I am mistaken, even Paris himself, your judge. Where is he? I do not see him. Look in this direction, Hera, to the left; not near the mountain-top, but on the side, where the cavern is, near which you see the herd. But I do not see the herd.

                                                         16

Traditional editorial policy such as the one applied in Joyce’s textbook (Lucian, 1885) places Lucian’s ‘Judgement of Paris’ in “Dialogues of the Gods” 20. The Harvard edition consulted for this paper breaks up the traditional order of the “Dialogues” (cf. editorial comment in Preface, x) and includes this text passage renamed as “The Judgement of the Goddesses” in the third volume of the complete edition of the works of Lucian. As the Homeric representation of the Trojan War in the Iliad refers to the Judgement only in the final canto by way of indirect allusion (XXIVff), Lucian turns out to be Joyce’s likeliest source of the Paris myth. With regard to Joyce’s Lucian edition containing “Dialogues of the Gods”, cf. footnote 9.

32 Dieter Fuchs Hermes:

Hera: Hermes:

What? Don’t you see tiny cattle over here in the direction of my finger, coming out from among the rocks, and someone running down from the cliff, holding a crook and trying to prevent the herd from scattering out ahead of him? I see now – if that is really he. Yes, it is he. As we are near now, let us alight upon the earth and walk, if it is your pleasure, so that we may not alarm him by flying suddenly down from above. (“The Judgement of the Goddesses” 391)

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” In contrast to Joyce, who approaches the myth of Paris for satirical reasons, Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” welds the topical vantage point of the Great Depression as the portent of a coming war sketched at the beginning of this paper with the personal tragedy of the main character Charlie Wales. Like the Classical Paris immoderately indulging in Trojan luxury with his Sparta-born spouse after his return from his banishment in the country, Charlie votes for a ‘decadent’ life with his fair wife Helen in the French metropolis of the booming 1920s rather than subscribing to the Puritan work ethos of the average WASP American represented by his in-laws Marion and Lincoln Peters.17 It is not only the fact that his wife’s first name is identical with that of Helen of Troy which accounts for the Judgement of Paris as a mythopoetic source, but also the circumstance that Charlie’s resentful sister-in-law, Marion Peters, plays the role of Hera – the shrewish goddess of marital order and cheated wives who is a sworn enemy to Paris. In contrast to the Classical Paris myth, Charlie Wales has already suffered for the vanities of his past by his wife’s death, the loss of legal guardianship of his infant daughter Honoria, and his alcohol problem when he fell together with modern Paris and the stock market at the end of the 1920s. Having established a new career in Prague and recovered from his breakdown, he returns to the French metropolis as a partly “reformed sinner” (53) at the beginning of the 1930s in order to appeal for a revised family trial of his parental rights. When he tries to persuade Marion – who Hera-like considers him an unfaithful and rude husband partly responsible for Helen’s death – to restore the guardianship of his daughter Honoria, the girl becomes – legally

                                                         17

It is no coincidence that the Classical Helen comes from Sparta, the most ‘Puritan’ of the Greek city-states and that she is the daughter of Nemesis, the goddess of punishment of human hubris. Like Nemesis as the impersonation of divine judgement of sins committed in the past, Charlie becomes a victim of his overreaching life before the fall of the stock exchange when he returns to Paris.

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speaking – an Apple of Discord. This aspect is emphasized on a symbolic level when the barman at the Ritz Hotel makes “a plump apple of his hands” (37) and shakes dice with Charlie (38) when the infant girl is mentioned for the first time. Likewise there is a deeper meaning in the circumstance that Charlie passes the Place de la Concorde (38) when he goes to see and settle his discord with Marion. Furthermore the girl is swinging “back and forth like a pendulum [or an apple on a storm-tossed tree] from side to side” (67) when the decisive interview is interrupted at the very moment Charlie is about to succeed in overcoming the conflict between the two parties. When reconciliation is about to be granted, the chambermaid enters and announces the unexpected visit of two ghosts from the reformed sinner’s past: Duncan Schaeffer, one of Charlie’s former drinking pals, and Lorraine Quarrels, a woman about town who tries to renew her boom days flirtation with the reformed rake.18 When drink and adultery enter the house of Hera-like Marion, Charlie’s hopes for a second more merciful judgement of Paris evaporate into hot air. Like Aphrodite causing the quarrel of the Trojan War resulting from the mythical Judgement by making the forbidden match between Paris and Helen, the flirtatious Lorraine Quarrels renews the initial discord between Charlie and Marion represented by Honoria as the apple of her father’s eye. The scene reverberating with sound and fury is witnessed by the chambermaid who – in contrast to Lorraine, the modern Aphrodite and her ‘Cupidlike’ companion Duncan Schaeffer – represents the wise and prudent Athena:19 whereas Lorraine and Duncan represent the Gilded Age dominated by vulgar upstarts who are unable “speak a coherent sentence” (69), the goddess of wisdom knows about and indulges in the truly golden nature of silence.20

                                                         18

When Lorraine and Duncan Schaeffer as representatives of the spirit of carnival and festivity enter the Puritan house of the Peters family, Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” presents an intertextual allusion to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night where the ‘Lords of Misrule’ Maria and Sir Toby Belch are confronted with Malvolio the Puritan. Chastised for their illicit behaviour, Sir Toby famously replies: “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” (2.3.110-111). With regard to the medieval and early modern culture of carnival and laughter, cf. Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais. 19    In contrast to that of other goddesses, ancient mythology refers to the outer appearance of Athena – the ‘masculine’ deity of wisdom and warfare – in comparatively simple terms. Like the homely chambermaid serving the Paris household of the Peters family, Athena remains outside of the central focus of attention at the beauty contest of the Judgement of Paris. 20 Such a foregrounding of linguistic incompetence and shallow speech, which recurs throughout the story, may be attributed to the Biblical episode of the confusion of tongues as a divine punishment for the building of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11). Although the Egyptian Babylon of the apocalypse (Rev. 18, 2-3) alluded to in Fitzgerald’s story title is not identical

34 Dieter Fuchs As far as the structural correspondences reconstructed so far are concerned, “Babylon Revisited” assembles Charlie (Paris), Helen (of Troy), Marion (Hera), Lorraine (Aphrodite), the maid (Athena) and Honoria (Apple of Discord) in order to discuss a potential revision of the Paris family trial that Charlie had to undergo at the time of his own breakdown and the crash of the global market initiated by the fall of the gilded Big Apple stock exchange. As Charlie’s ‘second coming’ to the place of judgement is set in the time of the fall season (“He woke up on a fine fall day”, 45), however, his struggle to receive a pardon for the follies of his past is, symbolically speaking, doomed from the outset.

Conclusion When Charlie talks about his life during the heydays of the New York “bull market” (36), he applies an idiom for the booming stock exchange which – without his being aware of it – brings the Classical analogies discussed so far full circle: like Charlie Wales – the American who went abroad to make a fortune based on his lucky judgement of stocks – the young Paris of Troy lives an ‘expatriate’ life of exile and is appointed arbiter of divine beauty owing to the precedent that he had shown exemplary fairness in a contest between the God of War Ares disguised as a bull and his own prize bull as a cowherd. By referring to the Paris myth via the bull market, Charlie is thus fashioned as a modern counterpart of the Trojan king’s son vainly struggling with his arbitral fairness as a ‘cowherd prince’ bribed by Aphrodite when he remembers being treated as “a sort of royalty, almost infallible” (41, my emphasis) in the bull days of the stock exchange.

                                                                                                                        with Mesopotamian Babel of the giant tower, popular tradition tends to treat these places as synonymous (cf. Johnson, 24-25). Among other aspects, Fitzgerald’s Biblical reference may be considered as a satire on the ‘Babylonic’ disintegration of speech in the 1920s which can be observed from the lyrics of a very popular song of the 1920s: “When The Red, Red, Robin Comes bob, bob, bobbin’ along, along, There’ll be no more sobbin’ when he starts throbbin’ his old sweet song. Wake up, wake up you sleepy head, get up, get up, get out of bed, cheer up, cheer up, the sun is red, live, love, laugh and be happy.” (1926) The most famous example of the satirical quotation of silly song lyrics of the 1920s in high modernist art is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922): “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— / It’s so elegant / So Intelligent” (lines 128-130). Finally it has to be noted that, like in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s satire on vulgar upstarts unable to “speak a coherent sentence” (69) in “Babylon Revisited” may be attributed to the Petronian background of the social upstart Trimalchio and his table round.

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Furthermore Charlie’s statement about the bull market may be considered as an authorial clue which helps us to identify Lucian’s parody of the Judgement of Paris from “Dialogues of the Gods” as an intertextual source borrowed from the rewriting of the Paris myth in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Like the Lucianic Paris satirically reduced to a cowherd struggling with the management of his cattle on the pastures of Mount Ida, the main character of “Babylon Revisited” is presented as a provincial rather than a metropolitan man with a ‘Welsh’ name, an “Irish” face (39) and a wife interred in the Green Mountain State of Vermont (45).21 More specifically such a recycling of Lucian via Ulysses by Joyce’s “most devoted admirer” (cf. Thomas, title) can be observed from the dream-like dialogue of the half-awake Charlie Wales and his deceased wife Helen, which may be attributed to the underworldly meeting of Menippus and Helen of Troy in Dialogues of the Dead: [...] in the white, soft light that steals upon half sleep near morning he found himself talking to her [Helen] again. She said that he was perfectly right about Honoria and that she wanted Honoria to be with him. She said she was glad he was being good and doing better. She said a lot of other things – very friendly things – but she was in a swing in a white dress, and swinging faster and faster all the time, so that at the end he could not hear clearly all that she said. (59-60)22

Whereas Joyce and Lucian present the infernally rotten corpse of Helen as an icon of human vanity, Charlie’s colloquy with the ghost of his wife – who, in contrast to her Classical counterpart, appears as an angelic figure dressed in white – results in an act of reconciliation. Rather than patronizing others in his former Parisian hubris of the Gilded Age of the boom, Charlie becomes aware of the vanity of his past and tries to pay fair tribute to Helen and her relatives whom he considered as self-complacent Babitts in the heyday of the bull market: It was warm there, it was a home, people together by a fire. The children felt very safe and important; the mother and father were serious, watchful. They had things to do for the children more important than his visit here. A spoonful of medicine was, after all, more important than the strained relations between Marion and himself. They were not dull people, but they were very much in the grip of life and circumstances. [...].

                                                         21

22

Even the fact that Charlie establishes a second career in Prague may be considered as a ‘Parisian’ clue owing to the circumstance that the famous Schwarzenberg Palace in Prague is decorated with Renaissance paintings representing the Judgement of Paris, the Abduction of Helen, the Conquest of Troy, and the Escape of Aeneas. Swinging to and fro, Helen is presented as a counterpart of her daughter Honoria who, as mentioned above, swings “back and forth like a pendulum from side to side” (67): like the mythical Helen indirectly responsible for the Trojan war, she is part of the disharmony caused by the ‘Apple of Discord’.

36 Dieter Fuchs Charlie got up. He took his coat and hat and started down the corridor. Then he opened the door of the dining room and said in a strange voice, “Good night, children.” Honoria rose and ran around the table to hug him. “Good night, sweetheart,” he said vaguely, and then trying to make his voice more tender, trying to conciliate something, “Good night, dear children”. (64-69)

Even if one cannot deny a melodramatic pitch – which is absent from the Joycean model as a satire on mankind – this text passage presents a latently positive outlook on life and welds Fitzgerald’s apocalyptic anxiety about the approaching war with a quest for private peace and serenity.23 As a representative of the Lost Generation, Fitzgerald projects his pursuit of happiness from the chaos of a world overshadowed with discord into an artistic vision of a utopian afterlife where judgement is tempered with mercy unattainable for man living in the ‘Parisian’ state of a fallen world characterized by prejudice, hubris, resentfulness, and, if worst comes to worst, atrocious bloodshed and warfare. To emphasize this fallen state, nocturnal Paris with its “fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs” (38) and “the two great mouths of the Café of Heaven and the Café of Hell” (44) is presented as a “strange and portentous” (35-36) place of a Hades-like underworld ruled by the memory of the dead featured in Lucian’s infernal Dialogues. Whereas Joyce’s Ulysses contrasts the vitality and the joie de vivre of the city of Paris (U 3; 209-257) with the gloomy connotations of the Paris myth re-enacted within the city and borough of Dublin, Fitzgerald fashions the French metropolis as a mythical habitation of the dead, which Charlie Wales as a subterranean traveller enters and leaves via the semantic borderline of the bar at the Ritz Hotel as the setting of the initial and the final part of “Babylon Revisited.”24

                                                         23

   This quest was without doubt triggered off and transformed into art by Fitzgerald’s personal situation at the turn of the decade. A biographical approach, however, goes beyond the topic of this paper. 24 With a grain of salt, the doorman of the Ritz Hotel may be considered as Cerberus whereas “the head barman who in the [...] days of the bull market had come to work in his own custom-built car – disembarking, however, with due nicety at the nearest corner” (36, my emphasis) functions as a counterpart of Charon – the mythical ferryman who carries the deceased across the river Styx into Hades in his barge.

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Works Cited Primary Sources: Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Ed. Jane Garnett. Oxford: OUP, 2006. The Bible. Authorized King James Version With Apocrypha. Ed. Robert Carroll. Oxford: OUP, 1997. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: “Kubla Khan.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature II. Gen. ed. M. H. Abrams. 5th ed. New York: Norton, 1986. 353-355. Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Trans. Charles Eliot Norton. Chicago: William Benton, 1952. Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature II. Gen. ed. M. H. Abrams. 5th ed. New York: Norton, 1986. 2180-2196. Fitzgerald, Francis Scott, “Babylon Revisited.” 1931. Modern American Short Stories. Ed. Ferdinand Schunck. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987. 35-70. ——. Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Bruccoli Matthew J. and Margaret M. Duggan. New York: Random, 1980. ——. Tales of the Jazz Age. New York: Scribners, 1922. ——. The Great Gatsby. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge: CUP, 1991. ——. Trimalchio: an Early Version of The Great Gatsby. Great Books of the Western World 21. Ed. James L.W. West. Cambridge: CUP, 2000. Homer. Ilias. Trans. Roland Hampe. Stuttgart: Reclam, [1979] 2007. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage, 1986. ——. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche. New York: Garland, 1993. Lucian. I dialoghi degli idii, dei morti, ed alter opere. Biblioteca universale, 129. Milano: Casa Editrice Sonzogno, 1885. ——. “Dialogues of the Gods.” Lucian. Vol. VII. Trans. M. D. Macleod. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1998 [1961]. 239-353. ——. “Dialogues of the Dead.” Lucian. Vol. VII. Trans. M. D. Macleod. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1998 [1961]. 1-175. ——. “The Judgement of the Goddesses.” Lucian. Vol. III. Trans. A.M. Harmon. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1995 [1921]. 383-409. Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. Gen. Ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. William Shakespeare. The Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. 691-714. Virgilius, Maro Publius. The Aeneid. Ed. J. W. Mackail. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930.

38 Dieter Fuchs Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature II. Gen.ed. M. H. Abrams. 5th ed. New York: Norton, 1986. 1948. Secondary Sources: Anderson, Chester G. James Joyce. With 124 Illustrations. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998.  Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Transl. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.  Baughman Judith S. and Matthew J. Bruccoli. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masters I. Detroit: Gale, 2000. Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. New York: Harcourt, 1956. Bruccoli, Matthew J. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. 2nd rev. ed. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002. Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” and Other Writings. London: OUP, 1972. Eliot, T.S. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism. Ed. Seon Givens. New York: Van Guard Print, 1963. 198-202. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: OUP, 1982. ——. “Appendix: “James Joyce’s Private Library in 1920.” The Consciousness of James Joyce. London: Faber & Faber, 1977. Endres Nikolai. “Petronius in West Egg: The Satyricon and The Great Gatsby.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 7 (2009): 65-79. Fuchs, Dieter. “Joyce, Lucian, and Menippus: An Undiscovered Rewriting of the Ulysses-Archetype.” James Joyce Quarterly. Forthcoming. . Joyce und Menippos. ‘A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Dog’. ZAA Monograph Series 2. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006. Gifford, Don and Robert J. Seidman, eds. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Berkeley: U of Carolina P, 1988. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. James Joyce’s Trieste Library: A Catalogue of Materials at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The University of Texas at Austin. Austin: The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1986. Gorman, Herbert. “Glimpses of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Fitzgerald-Hemingway Annual 5 (1973): 113-118. Johnson, S.F. “The Spanish Tragedy, or Babylon Revisited.” Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honour of Hardin Craig. Ed. Richard Hosley. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. 23-36. J. F. Killeen. “Joyce’s Roman Prototype.” Comparative Literature 9.3 (1957): 193-203.

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Koppenfels, Werner von. “Kataskopos oder der Blick von der Höhe: Ein menippeischer Streifzug.” Antike und Abendland 47 (2001): 1-20. Kuehl, John and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. Dear Scott / Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence. New York: Scribner’s, 1971. MacKendrick Paul L. “The Great Gatsby and Trimalchio.” The Classical Journal. 45.7 (1950): 307-14. Murphy, Mary C. “Petronius in Dublin: The Influence of Petronius’ Dinner at Trimalchio’s on James Joyce’s The Dead.” Essays in Literature 2 (1974): 1-10. Norris Margot. “Modernism, Myth, and Desire in ‘Nausicaa.’” James Joyce Quarterly 26 (1988): 37-50. Schork, R.J. Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce. Gainsville: UP of Florida, 1997. ——. Greek and Hellenic Culture in Joyce. Gainsville: UP of Florida, 1998. Sklar, Robert. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoon. New York. OUP, 1967. The New York Times online archive: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archivefree/pdf?_r=1&res=9407E2DE113DE633A25750C1A9609C946597D6C F (7/3/2009). Thomas , J.D. “F. Scott Fitzgerald: James Joyce’s ‘Most Devoted’ Admirer.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 5.1 (2006): 65-85.

 40

Dieter Fuchs

Elke Mettinger

Midwives to Modernism: Three Women’s Contributions to the Making of the Avant-Garde

Modernism is a movement that is usually associated with masterpieces by male artists such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, André Breton, Louis Aragon or Pablo Picasso, to name but a few. In order to understand the genesis of the Parisian avant-garde in the 1920s it is important, however, to note that it was to a great extent women – more or less forgotten or undervalued today – who had a key influence on the shaping of the modernist face of the Left Bank. This paper will analyze the crucial contributions of three American women to the birth of high modernism at the Montparnasse. They were more or less talented writers themselves but the focus here is on their achievements in terms of promoting, bringing forth, and publishing modernism via different platforms: a literary salon, a bookshop and publishing house and a little magazine, respectively.

Natalie Barney (1876-1972) A woman who did much for the modernist movement and is now almost forgotten is Natalie Barney. She is definitely remembered less for being a dedicated writer than for her eccentric and openly lesbian or bisexual lifestyle and for her famous salon. In order to escape from her puritanical American upbringing, Barney deliberately chose Paris: “Paris has always seemed to me the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please” (qtd. in Benstock 271). Her financial background – she inherited a huge fortune from her father after whose death she settled in Paris in the early 1900s – guaranteed her freedom in every sense of the word. Barney was familiar with Sappho’s poetry and appreciated Greek culture as an alternative to the heterosexual Christian code. Paris seems to have been an ideal place for the recovery of Sappho since “the notion of lesbian eroticism had, by the 1890s, permeated the Parisian imagination” (Benstock 281). Natalie surrounded herself with women who practised pagan rituals similar to Sappho’s in her Temple à l’amitié, a small Doric temple in the garden behind her house at 20, rue Jacob. It was only in the twenties that the extravagant outsider and her salon reached their heyday. “Just as the salon reached its apotheosis of greatness in the 1920s, so too did Natalie’s relationships with women. [...] Never again

42 Elke Mettinger would this intricate web of female associations be as consistently rewarding” (Rodriguez 262). Barney also encouraged the participation of heterosexual women and of men, as Truman Capote would later confirm that Miss Barney’s circle wasn’t limited to lesbians, for she received tout Paris (Weiss 107). For decades the Friday afternoon salons would follow a similar pattern and attract the famous and eccentric. In the early twenties a Chinese butler received the guests; as of 1927 this duty was performed by Natalie’s housekeeper Berthe Cleyrergue. Established French authors like André Gide, Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel or Colette mixed with avant-garde writers like Louis Aragon or Jean Cocteau. Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner or Isadora Duncan met with less regular attendants like Sherwood Anderson, the Fitzgeralds, Thornton Wilder, Edith Sitwell, Sylvia Beach, Nancy Cunard, Caresse and Harry Crosby, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Marie Laurencin, Tamara de Lempicka, Edna St. Vincent Millay or Rainer Maria Rilke (Fiala 162, Weiss 101). Natalie was an important patron of music and acquainted with many composers, such as Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Armande de Polignac or Florent Schmitt. Virgil Thomson’s opera “Four Saints in Three Acts”, based on a libretto by Gertrude Stein, was performed in her salon. On New Year’s Day 1926 George Antheil’s First String Quartet – sponsored by Barney – was premiered there and resulted in a commission to write his Second Symphony. Antheil’s most notorious work Ballet Mécanique premiered as a curtain raiser for the opening night of the Ballets Suédois with Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie, James Joyce and sponsor Natalie Barney being present. Outraged spectators made Antheil famous as the sauvage overnight. The work’s title was a clever bit of Dada combining the fantastic with the banal, suggesting not only the dance of the machines, but also the carpet sweeper, the balai mécanique. “Antheil was all that Paris loved, the last word in fashion, a brilliant, iconoclastic youth who seemed destined to revolutionize music” (Wickes 208). He had come from Berlin to Paris when he was only 22 and taken a one-room apartment above Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, who in her memoirs proudly proclaims: “Adrienne and I were in on the Ballet Mécanique from the beginning” (123). Pound had introduced Antheil to Barney who allowed him to practise on her piano. Antheil’s first performance at Barney’s salon took place in January 1924 with his “Symphony for Five Instruments” (Fiala 165). Antheil’s promising career suddenly turned into anticlimax on which he later reflected in the following way: “Paris, although more sympathetic to new art than any other city, was a difficult one in which to hold one’s artistic integrity” (qtd. in Wickes 212). Antheil was well known to readers of the little magazines through his own and Pound’s contributions.

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Pound, immensely interested and talented in music, urged Antheil to compose two violin sonatas for his protégée Olga Rudge (Wickes 205), whom he had first met (and later fallen in love with) at Barney’s salon. Rudge was a famous violinist residing on the luxurious rive droite. Barney also had at her disposal a profound network in the literary scene of the rive gauche from which even established authors like her friend Ezra Pound profited immensely. She helped him not only in his musical enterprises but also in his efforts to support T.S. Eliot or Paul Valéry financially. In contrast to Gertrude Stein she trusted fully in Pound’s critical judgement; he even mentioned her casually in the Pisan Cantos 80 and 84 (Wilhelm 262264). Barney fought against male-dominated criticism of literature written by women. Her vision of a foundation of a French Academy of Women as a countermovement to the all-male Académie Française was finally realized in 1927. French- and English-speaking women writers met regularly in her salon to read from their works, thus gaining the recognition otherwise denied. Invited (male) guests – editors, critics, sponsors, authors or translators – were to contribute to the dissemination and publication of these works. The successive Friday afternoons of January 1927 were dedicated to Madame Aurel, Colette, and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, respectively. In February Gertrude Stein was celebrated, making for one of the most frequented meetings and on the other hand marking Stein’s coming out in Paris – an event that proves the importance of Barney’s salon. Mina Loy and Ford Madox Ford made laudatory speeches on behalf of Stein, Natalie did a reading of her own French translation of passages of Stein’s The Making of Americans, and Stein read from the original. Virgil Thomson presented musical renderings of two of Stein’s poems accompanied by his piano playing. The developing friendship between Barney and Stein was cemented by this homage. There was no real rivalry between them because they were doing different things. Natalie’s salon centred on literature and writers whereas Gertrude’s real purpose was to promote modern art. Both were lesbian American writers sharing mutual friends like Sylvia Beach (Rodriguez 263-64), but in other respects they were ages apart. Barney with her conventional writing and her extravagant lifestyle had nothing in common with Stein’s avant-garde writing and rather traditional (though lesbian) partnership. Barney’s unpublished poetry is mostly written in traditional French prosody and thus formally not experimental or avant-garde at all, however radical its homoerotic content may be (Benstock 282-285). Taking into consideration her interest in Sappho, her preference for poetry and her close relationship to Pound, one might have expected Imagist poetry from her pen. Sylvia Beach even wondered if Barney, one of her first subscribers, took literature seriously at all, for she only borrowed books by

44 Elke Mettinger authors who would attend her Friday meetings. In her memoirs “Aventures de l’esprit” Barney narrates her friendship with celebrated authors like Oscar Wilde or Marcel Proust and in the second part describes the women authors of the Académie des Femmes, among them also Anna Wickham, Elisabeth de Gramont, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks, or, posthumously, Renée Vivien and Marie Lenéru (Fiala 167-177). The Académie des Femmes in its strict sense did not exist much beyond the year 1927, but the Friday afternoons continued with famous guests who became Natalie’s personal or intimate friends and who often immortalized her in their work, e.g. Colette in Le Pur et l’Impur, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus in L’Ange et les Pervers, Djuna Barnes in her Ladies Almanack or Radclyffe Hall in The Well of Loneliness. Hall’s scandalous novel – featuring Natalie Barney as the American Valerie Seymour who can openly live her lesbian life in Paris – was banned in England and New York but escaped condemnation in Paris. It thus attracted a wide and curious audience to Barney’s salon one Friday in 1929, where they could first meet its author and discuss the overrated novel, as Janet Flanner remarked slightly ironically (56-57). Although Flanner distanced herself from Barney on the pretext of not knowing her well, she relied on her personal contact for her “Letters from Paris” for the New Yorker. But her information about Natalie’s salon concentrated more on social than on literary aspects (Weiss 121). In 1924 Ford Madox Ford introduced Djuna Barnes to Natalie, who dedicated a Friday afternoon to her work, thinking that Barnes’s marketing endeavours were too little to earn enough money. So she decided to promote the woman she considered a literary genius. She used her network and her contacts with internationally renowned authors like Gabriele d’Annunzio or T. S. Eliot, who wrote a laudatory preface to Barnes’s novel Nightwood for publication with Faber & Faber. Barnes was very grateful to Barney for getting the manuscript accepted after many unsuccessful attempts. The two women exchanged manuscripts and discussed their mutual reading experiences. Barnes’s Ladies Almanack, anonymously published in 1928, satirically describes Natalie as Evangeline Musset and her lesbian circle in early modern modes. Natalie loved this booklet that was quite a sensation in lesbian circles, and she was grateful to Barnes for this literary immortalization. Barney also supported Barnes financially on a number of occasions and in a number of emergencies (Fiala 183-194). Weiss maintains that in her own unofficial manner Natalie did more than anyone else – except for Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier – for the exchange between the French and the foreign literary scenes. Barney’s economic independence enabled her to support many writers and artists by providing financial help and above all by introducing young talents to more

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established writers, finding publishers for their works and providing a forum and an audience for their art in her salon, where their manuscripts were evaluated and the latest publications on the book market were discussed (Weiss 101, 113).

Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) According to Wickes “[t]he most persistent enterprise for the encouragement of writers in Paris was Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare and Company” (187). In 1919 Sylvia Beach opened the first English lending library in Paris, Shakespeare and Company, at no. 8, rue Dupuytren, later 12, rue de l’Odéon. The opening of the bookstore owed much to Beach’s personal and professional relationship with Adrienne Monnier. The latter’s French bookshop was frequented by established and avant-garde French writers who all were helpful for Shakespeare and Company, which attracted French, English, Irish, and American avant-garde writers alike, making Beach a key figure in establishing Franco-American relations and a fruitful (American) cultural life in Paris. In contrast to many other women of the period Beach lacked formal education and writerly ambitions except for her anecdotal memoirs Shakespeare & Company, which reads like a Who’s Who of the Left Bank despite its somewhat misleading title. In the fourth chapter Beach talks about American customers, writers who published, for example, in the Little Review and were then flooding the Left Bank. Her unmistakable instinct for avant-garde literature made her one of the most important literary figures, who was also acquainted with all the important writers and artists of the day. They frequented her bookshop which profited from suppressions and prohibition in America and “was the practical and symbolic hub of activity for exiled American and British authors” (Kennedy 83). Thus Hemingway established connections with Beach upon his arrival in Paris in 1921. In A Moveable Feast he dedicates chapter 4 to her bookshop and portrays her in an exceptionally favourable way: In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company [...]. On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. [...] Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes [...] and wavy brown hair [...] and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me. (35)

46 Elke Mettinger F. Scott Fitzgerald, already an established and well-to-do writer by the midtwenties, was also among Beach’s customers. The well-known story of his shy admiration for Joyce is told by Beach in chapter 13 of her memoirs. To arrange a meeting Adrienne Monnier invited them all to a dinner party, where Scott drew a picture of the guests in Sylvia’s copy of The Great Gatsby subtitled ‘Festival of St. James’, with Joyce at the table wearing a halo and Scott kneeling at his feet (116-117). Gertrude Stein also subscribed but took interest only in her own books. Beach was invited to her salon in the rue de Fleurus and acted as an important mediator who accompanied shy Stein fans like Sherwood Anderson to Stein’s salon. Their friendship experienced a serious break when Beach published Ulysses and the all-too-jealous Stein wrote “The Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded.” It is above all Ulysses and its author with which her bookshop is connected. Beach met Joyce, who had moved from Trieste to Paris on Pound’s advice, at a party in the summer of 1920, and this was the beginning of her nearly lifelong involvement with Joyce and his problems, such as his finances and his health, but above all the fate of Ulysses, for which Shakespeare and Company acted as publishing house. Beach gave birth to the epitome of modernist literature, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and she details the genesis of this major enterprise in many chapters of her memoirs: Serialization of Ulysses in the Egoist and in the Little Review had proved failures, and when all hope of publication in the English-speaking countries was gone Joyce joyfully accepted Beach’s offer “Would you let Shakespeare & Company have the honor of bringing out your Ulysses?” (47). Full of admiration for Joyce and his work but totally inexperienced, Beach negotiated with Monnier’s printer, Maurice Darantière from Dijon, who agreed to the printing on the financial terms of paying with the money raised from subscriptions, for example by Gide, Yeats, Hemingway, McAlmon and many others. In December 1921 a reading from the French Ulysses by Valéry Larbaud at Monnier’s bookshop was a great success for Joyce. But gradually Ulysses was occupying its printers’ lives. A third of it was written on the proofs, which meant a lot of extra expense. Joyce’s caprices like Greek blue paper and troubles with the Circe episode additionally delayed the publication. Joyce was working night and day to finish Ulysses but earned nothing. On the verge of bankruptcy a large sum of money by his patron Harriet Weaver, The Egoist’s editor, saved the whole enterprise, so that on 2 February, 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday, one copy for him and one for Shakespeare and Company were finished. Joyce celebrated the appearance with parodying verses from Two Gentlemen of Verona:

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Who is Sylvia, what is she That all our scribes commend her? Yankee, young and brave is she The West this grace did lend her That all books might published be… (85)

Critics have judged this as ingratitude on Joyce’s part, but Beach never really complained about the more or less obvious exploitation. She continued to be generous and unselfish towards Joyce, also acted as his banker and sometimes referred to her shop as the “Left Bank.” Joyce had practically taken over the bookshop, which attended to his correspondence, appointments, and the translations of his work being published in Germany, Poland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia. “It was a time before universities and foundations supported artists to the extent they do today, and [Beach] would spend a great deal of time finding financial backers for the artists” (Fitch 88). This quotation elucidates Beach’s roles of mediator and marketing agent, whose personal and practical help was of utmost importance to the budding writers. When copies of Ulysses to the US were confiscated at the port of New York, Beach resorted to Hemingway’s help, who managed distribution via a courageous Canadian friend. With Joyce’s growing fame, more and more friends, strangers, fans, and members of the press had to be dealt with at the bookshop. Joyce was soon deriving a steady income from Ulysses. And, of course, its reputation as a banned book helped the sales. The second edition at Weaver’s was like the first one printed in Dijon, but with the note: published by John Rodker for the Egoist Press. Copies to England and to the US perished. All efforts to bring out Ulysses in England or the US were useless. The Shakespeare and Company edition of Ulysses went through printing after printing and, despite its typographical errors, sold very well, mainly to the big English and American bookshops on the Right Bank. Beach was admired as the publisher of a bestseller. Copies were sent to India, China, and Japan. Those sold directly to American or English customers were disguised as Shakespeare’s Works Complete in One Volume, but it was still very difficult to get Ulysses into England. As Ulysses was not protected by copyright in the US, the novel was pirated as of 1926. Beach organized a protest (which remained ineffective) signed by all the great writers all over Europe, printed in newspapers, reviews and magazines and mentioned in Janet Flanner’s 1927 Letter from Paris: “Sylvia Beach, Parisian publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses, has collected a protest against Samuel Roth’s pirating of her unprotected bookrights in America. The list of signatures is amazing in its literary dignity and length” (20).

48 Elke Mettinger Joyce generously spent all the money earned from Ulysses and – as Beach put it – “the pleasure was mine [...]; the profits were for him” (201). She did not even receive anything for relinquishing her rights when Ulysses was brought out in the English-speaking countries. The existence of a contract was denied and finally Sylvia resigned with the strangely modest words “A baby belongs to its mother, not to the midwife, doesn’t it?” (205), and told Joyce he was free to dispose of Ulysses; he got £45000 for the Random House edition. Beach published three more works by Joyce. A section of Anna Livia Plurabelle, the heroine of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, then called “Work in Progress”, was the first English contribution in Adrienne Monnier’s French review Le Navire d’Argent. In 1927 Beach published 13 poems by Joyce under the title Pomes Penyeach printed by Herbert Clarke, who produced a little book which she sold for 1 shilling in accordance with the title. Beach’s last Joyce publication Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination came out in 1929 as a collection of twelve critical studies on Joyce’s “Work in Progress” by twelve writers like Samuel Beckett, Eugène Jolas or William Carlos Williams. Beach herself contributed the design on the cover (177-179). Morrill Cody called Shakespeare and Company the “cradle of postwar American literature” (qtd. in Fitch, Beach 16), Benstock referred to it as the centre of expatriate literary life (211), Wickes spoke of “the headquarters of many writers” (161), and Fitch of “a literary center for the cross-fertilization of cultures” (Beach 16). But it was also the major source of distribution in Paris for the little magazines, defined by Hoffman as “designed to print artistic work which for reasons of commercial expediency is not acceptable to the money-minded periodicals or presses” (2). As it was difficult to distribute little magazines in the larger bookshops, Shakespeare and Company performed this duty, distributing T.S. Eliot’s Criterion, Scofield Thayer’s Dial, and Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s Little Review, and a few other small publications from the United States. The little magazines of the twenties and thirties, like Egoist, Little Review, Contact, transition, the transatlantic were not profit-oriented and targeted a select readership. Thus, they were more or less free from censorship, primarily fostering art and secondarily providing a forum for evaluating this modern art. Moreover, they sponsored every literary movement of the period and first published some 80% of the best Anglophone writers since 1912. Ezra Pound’s work for these magazines as either critic or editor was of great importance (Fitch, Beach 61). Beach herself said: “The best way of following the literary movement in the twenties is through the little reviews, often short-lived, alas! but always interesting. Shakespeare

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and Company never published one. We had enough to do taking care of those published by our friends” (137). Shakespeare and Company was thus in close touch with the small presses in Paris that published books in English like Transatlantic Review, Contact Editions or transition. Beach proposed to Eugène Jolas, a young FrancoAmerican writer from the Lorraine, that Joyce should publish “Works in Progress” in monthly instalments in his new review transition. Jolas and his wife were enthusiastic about it and Joyce owed much to their friendship and collaboration. transition had a wide scope. All the best Anglo-Saxon and European work of the period appeared in it, much of it for the first time. It was the most persistent and vital magazine, devoted to the interests of new writing, but rather a magazine of the thirties. This is why the Little Review as a journal of the 1920s is focused on in the following section on Jane Heap, one of its editors. The (non-profit) success story of Beach’s bookstore was a story of the twenties. When the American dollar was devalued, many of her customers left Paris, and in 1941 Sylvia was forced to close her bookstore. By the thirties, the Left Bank had changed. The so-called “lost generation” […] had grown up and become famous. Many of my friends had gone home. I missed them, and I missed the fun of discovery and the little reviews and the little publishing houses. It had been pleasanter emerging from a war than going toward another one, and of course there was the depression. (206)

Jane Heap (1883-1964) “Writer, artist, Manhattan gallery owner, and co-editor of the Little Review, Jane Heap was one of the most dynamic figures of the international avantgarde, creating a life that defined the ‘modernist experience’ as a syncretic one” – this is how the blurb of Holly Baggett’s The Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds evaluates Heap’s achievements, considering her “one of the most neglected contributors to the transmission of modernism between America and Europe during the early twentieth century” (2). Heap had a very strong-minded, unconventional, and eccentric personality (Zucker 63). Her physical appearance was rather masculine, she sometimes cross-dressed, but remained in relative obscurity, quiet and prone to depression. Her move to the Art Institute of Chicago to be part of ‘the new thing’ led her into the modernist enterprise. Meeting Margaret Anderson and joining her Little Review changed her private and professional life, but also triggered a new phase of the magazine. Her first appearance in August 1916, as a figure in her own

50 Elke Mettinger sketches, anticipated her humorous and ironic work. She kept a low profile under the pseudonym jh and this is why she was consistently underestimated. Her critical pieces generally stressed the importance of avant-garde ideas in a direct, bold, and aphoristic style with provocative opening statements and a sharp sense of irony, honesty and humour (Marek 65). Anderson stated in 1967 that most of the success of the Little Review was due to Jane Heap and the brilliant expression of her thoughts (11). The Little Review renounced long editorial proclamations in favour of a free stage for the artists. Its editors resisted traditional “voices of authority” by encouraging controversy among multiple literary and critical voices. The Little Review’s tone, selection, and opinions reflected and enacted many of the modernist characteristics, thus challenging the parameters of modern aesthetics and of little magazines themselves (Marek 100). The free exchange of ideas was put into practice with Jane Heap’s “Reader Critic” column, which invited reader response and encouraged readers to define the directions the journal might take. Inviting and enacting discussion about the nature and value of art between the magazine and its readers and contributors reflected the nature of modernism itself and was one of the forces that moved modernism (Marek 60-61). The editors’ achievements are all the more admiring if seen in the light of their resistance against the dictates of a patriarchal “world that had little place for intelligent, self-reliant women” (Marek 66). They challenged traditional assumptions about women’s roles as ‘midwives’ or muses for men who were really writing literary history. So especially in the case of Heap the midwife metaphor does not go far enough. Heap and Anderson changed the role of the editor by inviting critical controversy, and including their own responses to articles and to letters in the “Reader Critic” and “Comment” sections. They presented experimental writing not simply for shock value, but for providing a discussion forum for and with modern artists in times of radical change. The magazine discussed aesthetic principles, censorship, and the roles of artist and critic (Marek 61, 80). “Paris was the center of the nonprofit publishing industry” (Wickes 172) in the 1920s. Little magazines were ready “to lose money, to court ridicule, to ignore public taste [...] rather than sacrifice their right to print good material” (Hoffman 2), printers and editors of the Little Review sometimes being on the verge of starvation, surviving only on donations and subscriptions (Hoffman 61). But most of them felt it was worth the effort for [i]t was largely through such magazines that the evolving works of Modernism achieved their transmission, sought out their audiences, as Ulysses did through the American Little Review. And, gradually, it was the self-consciously small paper [...] that began to take over […] the larger tasks of cultural transmission. Such papers […] became the

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primary expressions of new talent. […] Indeed as the little magazines became the primary centres for establishing new taste, they also found a role in establishing new writers. (Bradbury and McFarlane 203-204)

The Little Review had the special status of being the first to fight for experimental writing, for the new movements and for many little known writers who later became leaders of their generation. It became a vital organ for avant-garde work, with an impressive list of contributors. Other little magazines like Broom, Secession, This Quarter were in many respects modelled on the combative Little Review. By 1929, it had not only presented many great works of literature and visual arts but also had permanently changed the nature of literary periodicals (Hoffman 65-66). It was “the premier forum for avant garde literary and artistic activity. Even for the explosively creative age in which the magazine arose, the accomplishments of the Little Review are impressive...” (Marek 60). Like other women editors after them – Nancy Cunard, Caresse Crosby or Maria Jolas – Anderson and Heap published radically experimental avantgarde literature and art that otherwise would not have found its way to the public – so radical that they were fined $100 on obscenity charges arising from their serial publication of Ulysses in 1921 – the most notorious event in the Little Review’s history. Later Heap tried sarcastically to draw attention to the fatal consequences of the critics’ misjudgement on the example of Burton Rascoe: Ulysses ran serially in the Little Review for three years … scarcely a peep from the now swooning critics except to mock it. […] Burton Rascoe […] perhaps speaks for them all: when challenged for a past valuation of the book he explained that he didn’t know it was a masterpiece when it was running in the Little Review […]. None of these makebelieve critics knows anything about the creation of a work of art. […] If there had been some of this camp-meeting ecstasy about Ulysses when it was appearing in the Little Review the book might have been saved for American publication, the audience that was reading it in the Little Review might have been able to own the book, Joyce might have had enough in royalties to ensure him treatments for threatened blindness – and the disgusting profiteering on the part of dealers might have been less fat. (Little Review vol. 9, no 1, 34-35) Mr. Rascoe made a little mistake in the beginning about Ulysses. He has been informed, in print, that the version of Ulysses which appeared in the Little Review was Mr. Joyce’s version and not a stray document which Joyce later doctored into a world-beater. However, I gather from other statements made by Mr. Rascoe that he wouldn’t be able to recognize the Sphinx outside Egypt. (qtd. in Anderson 330)

Apart from the witty irony something more serious is conveyed here: the keen sense of literary (and artistic) judgement that Rascoe and others were lacking is exactly what women like Heap possessed. In the case of Ulysses

52 Elke Mettinger their (and its) success came about only later, but in numerous other cases the Little Review and its editors did pioneering work. Furthermore, the fate of Ulysses gives us an idea of how much the publication (also in the sense of ‘making public’) of this work is indebted to immensely important women, namely Anderson and Heap for the serial publication and Beach for “bringing the book into the world” (Wickes 172), a term that perfectly fits the ‘midwife’ metaphor and Beach’s role, but plays down Heap’s achievements. Baggett sees the trial over the publication of Ulysses much more in connection with authoritarian distaste for the editors’ gender and lesbianism than with the book’s immorality (qtd. in Marek 88). In this context Heap’s (and Anderson’s) at times strained relationship with Ezra Pound as a foreign editor remains controversial. He brought some money to the magazine and – one has to admit – added significantly to the Little Review’s success in its early years from 1917 onwards. He had an immense influence on art, was acquainted with many European experimentalists, and was obviously best qualified to “acquire” the art which Anderson sought. On the other hand, he pursued selfish goals looking for an official medium where he, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis could appear monthly (Hoffman 59). His interference and influence also bothered contributors. In the Paris years the magazine withdrew from his influence and he disappeared from the editorial board. The Little Review had different faces in its three different stages that are characterized by Hoffman (245) as the early formation years from 1914 to 1917, followed by the experimental Pound period lasting up to 1921 and finally the Paris years with a focus on Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism, which are important in our context. The early 1920s meant a great change for Heap. Her intimate relationship with Anderson, who withdrew from the periodical, had ended. By 1923 Heap, living mostly in Paris, for instance in the rue Delambre (Fitch, Cafés 48), assumed the main editorial work for the Little Review although this does not show on the title page. Heap’s interests in aesthetic and experimental forms turned the direction of the Little Review to modern visual art, reflecting her passion for modern art and the avant-garde. She kept the literary serialization and critical articles and expanded the magazine’s coverage. Heap’s interests in Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism are reflected in theoretical articles, manifestos, critical responses, and many reproductions (Marek 91-93), as a closer look at the contents of the individual numbers as of 1920 will confirm: Volume 7 is called The Little Review: A Magazine of the Arts Making no Compromise with Public Taste. In No 3 Jane Heap’s contribution “Art and the Law” sarcastically attacks the American confiscation of Joyce’s Ulysses

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on account of obscenity charges: “Mr. Joyce’s young girl is an innocent, simple, childish girl who tends children ... she hasn’t had the advantage of the dances, cabarets, motor trips open to the young girls of this more pure and free country” (6). No 4 contains the famous Dada Manifesto. As of Volume 8 the Little Review calls itself A Quarterly Journal of Art and Letters. No 1 (Autumn 1921) is dedicated to the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who is discussed by Ezra Pound and then figures with 24 reproductions, some of which are interspersed between the pages of Jean Cocteau’s early poem “Cap de bonne espérance” in French and English synoptical juxtaposition. No 2 (Spring 1922) is dedicated to Francis Picabia, one of the magazine’s editors, who opens the number with a French poem and ends it with a praise of the Little Review: “‘Little Review’ is certainly the only magazine which at the present moment desires to give the public the work of men whose new quests are the aim in art – whether in painting, music, sculpture or literature” (42). Many of his artistic works are reproduced in this number. Jane Heap contributes “Exposé”, “The ‘Art Season’” and “Dada”, where she courageously defends Dada and Else von FreytagLoringhoven – considered mad by some contemporaries – against Harriet Monroe’s assertion that the “trouble is the Little Review never knows when to stop. Just now it is headed straight for Dada; but we could forgive even that if it would drop Else von Freytag-Loringhoven on the way” (46). Volume 9 has a Stella Number including many reproductions by Joseph Stella and three pieces by Jane Heap: a very short sarcastic scene called “Gardening with Brains”, “Ulysses”, “Notes” and of course the “Reader Critic” column, in which William Carlos Williams praises the Little Review. In the Picabia Number, Harriet Monroe clears up the misunderstanding that she did not want the Little Review itself to stop (59-60). Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Aesthetic Meditations on Painting” are continued in the Miscellany Number of Winter 1922. Heap’s unsigned “I Cannot Sleep” treats a homosexual topic. Heap relied “on incisive criticism and dry wit in her signed pieces, and usually print[ed] her imaginative writing – which often explored lesbian themes – anonymously. Anonymity helped to preserve Heap’s image as austere and demanding while allowing her to play with words in a way not traditionally permitted to critics” (Marek 65). She also makes “Comments on Theatre, Music, Exhibitions etc.”. A piece on Picabia by André Breton is – like many other French contributions – translated into English by Heap’s benefactress Florence Reynolds, who also supports the magazine financially. Under “Comments” (25-29) Heap explains the label “Exiles’ Number” of Spring 1923 with the fact that all its contributors are (exiled) in Europe. NonAmericans are Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Jean Cocteau, and Dorothy Shakespear, English artist and wife to Pound. Except for Antheil and the score of

54 Elke Mettinger his Airplane Sonata the rest of this number is devoted to American and British literature by Hemingway, Stein, Loy, Cummings, H.D. and Robert McAlmon. The French Autumn/Winter 1923-24 Number (without any foreign editor) offers works by the most important French Surrealist poets like Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Pierre Reverdy, co-founder of the influential journal Nord-Sud in 1917, or the very young Jacques Baron. Taking some pride in her pioneer work Heap adds: We advise our readers to save this issue of the Little Review for future reference … in years to come one of these young men (at the age of Anatole France) may be given a prize, or may be printed in the “Dial.” Don’t find yourself in the position of the man who cried out when “Waste Land” appeared ... “If I could only get hold of some old copies of the Little Review I could show these people who this Eliot is.” (35)

The poems are printed in the original French, the prose pieces are translated into English. At the end of the volume four so-called ‘Rayographs’ by Man Ray are added. These are kind of photographic images made on paper without the use of a camera. The Spring 1924 number of Volume 10 continues to present French writers such as Marcel Arland, co-founder of the Dada journal Aventure and 1929 winner of the Prix Goncourt for L’Ordre, Tristan Tzara or Hart Crane. The luxuriant Juan Gris number of Autumn/Winter 1924/25 – “the Little Review – An International Journal of Art and Letters” – offers elaborate reproductions of Gris’s work and a Dada kind of appreciation of him by Gertrude Stein. Volume 11 has a Spring 1925 number with reproductions of recent work by Man Ray and others and articles on modern architecture and Dutch literature and an article by Heap on the Machine-Age Exposition: The experiment of an exposition bringing together the plastic works of these two types of artist has in it the possibility of forecasting the life of tomorrow. All of the most energetic artists, both here and in Europe: painters, sculptors, poets, musicians are enthusiastically organized to support this exposition, the Engineers are giving it their interested cooperation. (24)

The Winter 1925 number is a theatre issue “[w]ith 75 reproductions … presenting the work of the foremost theatre-artists in fifteen countries”. The title page has the following note by jh: The idea for an International Theatre Exposition, New York, 1926, originated with me, in Paris, last summer. Tristan Tzara advised me to invite the cooperation of Friedrich Kiesler, director of the Theatre Exposition of the city of Vienna, 1924, and famous theatre-architect … in the organization of the project. […] I alone am responsible for contents, format and printing of Catalogue and Little Review.

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Volume 12 has a Spring/Summer 1926 “collection of work by some young Americans – in contrast with the work of some young Europeans: mostly French – surrealiste [sic]”. Among the Americans are Hemingway, Hart Crane and Malcolm Cowley, but also Jane Heap with her anonymous “Paris at One Time”, whose “beautiful and powerful imagery surpassed anything that the Surrealists had done”, according to Margaret Anderson (344). This number also contains reproductions of paintings, constructions, photographs, for example by Moholy-Nagy and the Machine-Age Exposition Catalogue. The famous final number of May 1929 assembles music, poetry, literature, painting, criticism, sculpture, architecture, machinery, theatre, cinema, photographs and “Confessions and Letters: more than fifty of the foremost men in the arts tell the truth about themselves”. A questionnaire with questions such as – beside very personal ones – “What is your attitude toward art today?” (11) contains answers and statements – often rather empty ones – by former contributors (including Natalie Barney and other ‘foremost’ women), and farewell editorials. Jane Heap’s “Lost: A Renaissance” is a disillusioned confession asserting the superiority of the Little Review: The revolution in the arts, begun before the war, heralded a renaissance. The Little Review became an organ of this renaissance. Later magazines, perhaps, had somewhat the same intellectual program, but the Little Review had the corresponding emotions; and consequently an energy that nothing has been able to turn aside … except itself. […] For years we offered the Little Review as a trial-track for racers. We hoped to find artists who could run with the great artists of the past or men who could make new records. But you can’t get race horses from mules. I do not believe that the conditions of our life can produce men who can give us master-pieces. Master-pieces are not made from chaos. If there is confusion of life there will be confusion of art. (5)

At the end – instead of answers to the questionnaire – Heap hangs “a few wreaths of affection and remembrance on some of those who were our contemporaries in this road-breaking business” (60), for instance, to “our contributors: The ugly ducklings of yesterday, the swans of today” (62). It is not without pride that she retrospectively points to her achievements in the Paris period: “Contacts were made with groups of the advance-guard everywhere, the scope of the magazine being extended to cover 19 countries” (63). Gertrude Stein’s Dada “Appreciation of Jane” was obviously done in return for her commitment to the publication of The Making of Americans: “… Jane was her name and Jane her station and Jane her nation and Jane her situation. Thank you for thinking of how do you do how do you like your two percent...” (10). From Heap’s letters to Florence Reynolds it is clear that she surrounded herself with and personally met the avant-garde artists who appeared in her

56 Elke Mettinger magazine, among them Gertrude Stein: “… in a few moments I go out to bum with G. Stein tonight. … I had a great time with G.S. yesterday. We went to see Lipchitz and Brenner, two sculptors who have done heads of G in the past – we rode in her little Ford” (Baggett 122). Heap and Stein were friends sharing tastes in avant-garde ideas and modern art. They had literary acquaintances in common and knew many members of the lesbian community in Paris. Heap believed in the value of Stein’s writing, and besides printing parts of it in the Little Review she also tried to secure publication for some of Stein’s books, most notably her Making of Americans. Heap took over the role of a literary agent, for example, by making T. S. Eliot aware of Stein’s literary œuvre in their correspondence between 1923 and 1928, which traces her endeavour to sell Stein’s The Making of Americans to an American publisher. Her attempt to buy back the original and the rights from Robert McAlmon failed. Several rumours existed around the disagreements and misunderstandings of the novel’s distribution. It is likely that Heap intended to overcome McAlmon’s resistance, who did not do much to promote its publication in Paris while Heap tried to find publishers in England and America. His inexperience and inefficiency were in stark contrast to Heap’s experience and connections with many other publishers. Heap’s not very successful efforts were not in vain since she brought Stein’s whole œuvre to the attention of publishers and prepared the grounds for the acceptance of avantgarde writing (Marek 95-99). Hemingway was also a close friend of Heap’s. They attended bullfights together and exchanged letters. In a letter of 31 August 1925 she told Reynolds “We are trying to get a book from your little pet Hemingway. […] I made a big poster for my gallery” (120). In an unpublished letter of the same month (25/8/1925) Hemingway wrote to Heap about his growing dislike of Paris: “Paris is getting shot to hell. Not like the old days” (qtd. in Kennedy 119). Through the publication of six stories of In Our Time in the Little Review (and further early publications) Hemingway came to the attention of writers, critics, and publishers like Edmund Wilson, who recognized his talent and reviewed his first two books (Wickes 175). Other acquaintances were Tristan Tzara, Lawrence Langner or László Moholy-Nagy: “I went to Paris late yesterday to have a last rendezvous with Tzara and to meet his wife” (19/8/1925, Baggett 117) and “I can’t start the next number – without the Tzara stuff …” (21/9/1925, 122). … I had to come to town on Sunday for a conference with Lawrence Langner. … Lawrence wants to combine efforts – takes the expense of the exposition etc – which will be over $5.000 and let us or anyone have the credit – yes – yes – yes. I could never have raised the money – so I am happy – We will have tons of publicity – and much fun of it – so we go ahead for January… (10/9/1925).

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“I am on the train going to Paris to see Moholy-Nagy of the Bauhaus-Nieman to arrange an exhibition for next winter. … I have all the copies for my next issue – but it is in French…” (25/8/1925, Baggett 118). Heap’s many contributions to modernist art and letters extended beyond the Little Review and the promotion of artists she believed in into the fields of architecture and theatre. One off-shoot of the magazine was the already mentioned Little Review Gallery, founded in New York in 1924 and the only “gallery of its kind in America”, as she proudly summarized in her farewell number (63). In 1926, Heap helped develop the International Theatre Exposition with “Russian constructivist stage-sets shown in America for the first time” and in 1927 organized the Machine-Age Exposition: “First showing of modern architecture in America” (63). Art historian Susan Noyes Platt is a notable exception in acknowledging Heap’s merits in bringing the European avant-garde to the attention of American art critics. Like no other editor Heap acquainted English-speaking audiences with European art that she promoted in New York. Her work also paved the way for important explorations that the Surrealists published later in transition. Also, by introducing American art critics to Dadaism and Surrealism, Heap helped set the stage for accepting and understanding Stein’s style, and thus strongly encouraged the acceptance and dissemination of modern avant-garde writing as well as art (Marek 93-94). Heap and Anderson were more influential than has been acknowledged. Their anti-authoritarian opinions redefined the roles of both women and literary editors. They promoted women writers such as May Sinclair, Amy Lowell, Dorothy Richardson, Mary Butts, and Djuna Barnes and Dada poetry by Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, the latter in particular being proof of their courage and their concept of artistic freedom that allowed experimental art and writing to reach the public (Marek 100). They “shap[ed] twentiethcentury literature” (64), as Donna Zucker puts it, who summarizes Heap’s merits in the following way: Poet, painter, carpenter, editor, gallery owner, teacher – Jane Heap was a visionary force in a time of literary and artistic revolution. She was an embodiment of the modernist movement that emerged at the end of the nineteenth-century. […] In an era in which artists and intellectuals questioned and redefined the world they lived in, Jane Heap emerged as champion of art and expression. (53)

Conclusion The achievements of Barney, Beach and Heap have only gradually begun to receive some attention. All too often their work of promoting the avant-garde

58 Elke Mettinger – via the platforms of a literary salon, a bookshop, lending library and publishing house and a little magazine – continues to be overshadowed by the great men of their period. The efforts made by these women on behalf of modernism involved considerable financial risk and hard work and often went far beyond midwifery performances, although these are in themselves more than important. They were acquainted with and believed in the writers that have only retrospectively become part of the modernist canon (like Joyce, Stein or Hemingway). Their work might never have come down to us if it had not been for the unflagging commitment of these ‘mediators’, who had an unmistakable eye for literary talents and valuable literature in combination with the farsightedness, vision and courage to foster, promote and transmit works which often enough nobody else took any interest in or which were simply regarded as worthless or obscene. So they also prepared the ground for a new taste, for a new style, for new works, for new authors to be accepted. We have to keep in mind after all the total shift of paradigm, the revolution in the arts and in literature that Modernism meant along with the breaking down of previous structures and the immense pioneering and shaping force of the avant-garde for the understanding of twentieth-century literature and culture. In other words, the ‘marketing’ role performed by women like Barney, Beach and Heap cannot be overvalued. They prove what Shari Benstock said about the nature of the new movement: “Modernism […] was a literary, social, political, and publishing event. And these women saw to it that this message had its medium” (21). Barney offered her salon as a forum for young artists, a whole network of experts for evaluation and dissemination and also financial support. Beach’s bookshop was the meeting-place and mediating agency of the American avant-garde. It published Joyce’s Ulysses despite all resistance and distributed the little magazines of the day. One of these – the pioneering Little Review – was edited by Heap during the magazine’s Paris years. Heap not only contributed articles of her own but also defended and promoted nonconformist writers and artists, thus changing the literary and artistic scene and giving a lasting shape to twentieth-century literature and art.

Works Cited Anderson, Margaret, ed. The Little Review Anthology. New York: Hermitage House, 1953. Baggett, Holly A., ed. Dear Tiny Heart: The Letters of Jane Heap & Florence Reynolds. New York: New York UP, 1999.

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http://books.google.at/books?id=5zr7LEgUrw4C&dq=Baggett,+Heap&prin tsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=ZLQD2D0SUT&sig=niA_b1kVBfB7c2 VsLbVyHPhuNFE&hl=de&ei=pwzKSZ_QD8GOsAbv_aGuAg&sa=X& oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPR13,M1 (13/11/2009). Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare & Company. 11959. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991. Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. London: Virago, 1987. Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane. “Movements, Magazines and Manifestos: The Succession from Naturalism.” Modernism: 1890 – 1930. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978. 192-205. Fiala, Michaela. “Der literarische Kreis um Natalie Barney: Eine amerikanische Salonnière und ihr Beziehungsnetzwerk in Paris von der Belle Époque bis zu den StudentInnenunruhen im Mai 1968.” Diss. U of Vienna, 2004. Fitch, Noël Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. New York and London: Norton, 1983. ——. Die literarischen Cafés von Paris. Zürich: Arche, 1993. Flanner, Janet. Paris was Yesterday: 1925 – 1939. London: Virago, 2003. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964. Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947. Kennedy, J. Gerald. Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1993. Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History. Lexington, Kentucky: UP of Kentucky, 1995. Rodriguez, Suzanne. Wild Heart: A Life: Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2002. http://browseinside.harpercollins.com/index.aspx?isbn13=978006093780 5 (12/12/2009). The Little Review 7 (1920-1921) and 8 (1921-1922). New York: Kraus Repr. Corp., 1967. The Little Review 9 (1922-1924) and 10 (1924-1925). New York: Kraus Repr. Corp., 1967. The Little Review 11 (1925-1926) and 12 (1926-1929). New York: Kraus Repr. Corp., 1967. Weiss, Andrea. Paris war eine Frau: Die Frauen von der Left Bank. Trans. Susanne Goerdt. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006.

60 Elke Mettinger Wickes, George. Americans in Paris. New York: Doubleday, 1969. Wilhelm, James J. Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908 – 1925. Univ. Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1990. Zucker, Donna. “Jane Heap – The Quiet Revolutionary.” America – Meet Modernism! Women of the Little Magazine Movement. Ed. Barbara Probst Solomon. Great Marsh Press, 2003. 53-68. http://books.google.com/books?id=5KHR_pEQqhsC&printsec=frontcove r&dq=Donna+Zucker,+Jane+Heap&hl=de#PPP1,M1 (8/10/2009).

Margarete Rubik

Jean Rhys’s Vision of the Left Bank

A Different Sense of Place: Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford In 1927 Jean Rhys, the West Indian writer best known today for her novel The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), made her literary début with a collection of short stories entitled The Left Bank and Other Stories. Most of the narratives in the volume are indeed set in the Montparnasse area of Paris, but there is none explicitly called ‘The Left Bank’ which might have given the title to the collection, as Howells (31) has noted. There is, however, a Preface entitled “Rive Gauche” in which Ford Madox Ford, who had already published some of her stories in his avant-garde magazine The Transatlantic Review, not only introduced his protégée’s work but provided a topographical frame for it. His Preface is wordy, concentrating not so much on Rhys’s writing as on his own vision of and response to the modernist locus amoenus of the South Bank, which to him is a place of “perfection,” “the region of Pure Thought and of the Arts” (Ford 11),1 the centre of artistic and intellectual innovation. He deals with Rhys in only five pages at the end of his foreword, but devotes sixteen out of twenty-one pages to describing the topography, the landmarks and boulevards, the history and the type of people living on the rive gauche. He must have felt the need for such a contextualization since he claimed – as V.S. Naipaul was to do in his much later appreciation of Rhys’s œuvre – that for all her “singular instinct for form” (Ford 24) her stories lacked geographical explicitness (Naipaul 54). Speaking from “a position of urbane authority” which, as Howells (31) complains, drives Rhys “to the margins” of her own collection, Ford confesses himself baffled by his mentee’s downright refusal to supply a more detailed topography of that region [...] With cold deliberation, once her attention was called to the matter, she eliminated even such two or three words of descriptive matter as had crept into her work. ... But I, knowing for my sins, the book market, imagined the reader saying: ‘Where did all this take place? What sort of places are these?’ (Ford 26)

1

I will quote from the comprehensive Collected Short Stories edition since I occasionally also refer to stories contained in later collections. Ford’s Preface, however, is not contained in this edition, so “Rive Gauche” is quoted from the Left Bank and Other Stories edition.

62 Margarete Rubik Feminist critics have since risen to Rhys’s defence, arguing that Ford overlooks the fundamentally different possibilities open to men and women in an urban environment. After all, most of her characters are female, and metropolitan spaces are masculine and basically hostile to women (Howells 27). The flâneur strolling along the urban boulevards and surveying their pulsating life is a quintessentially male concept (Iskin 242); women are disabled by social conventions and “by their feminine conditioning from taking advantage of the metropolitan experience” (Howells 27). For them, the “myth of the artist as wandering exile” could therefore offer merely an illusion of liberation (Parsons 124) and ultimately leads to “psychic disillusionment” in an “urban wasteland” (Benstock 433). Besides, a city can only be truly read and surveyed from above (De Certeau, “Walking in the City”, qtd. in Zeikowitz 1). Rhys’s impoverished protagonists, however, cannot afford spacious terraces with panoramic views; they are moored in the narrow streets or inside small cafés. “Paris, for all its bohemianism, is a place which pays close attention to codes of gender, class and money” (Howells 34), and Rhys’s characters are disadvantaged on all these grounds. Ford, it is argued, frames his protégée’s works by the “aesthetic assumptions of a white, male establishment expatriate” (Parsons 138) who viewed the Left Bank as his cosmopolitan ideal. It is, perhaps, characteristic that he speaks of Paris as a female (Ford 7), whereas Rhys “constructed a poetics of urban space” from a “feminised perspective” (Howells 26), focussing on experiences neglected by the male writers of the Lost Generation. Paris in the 1920s was the hub of the international avant-garde and the temporary home of a whole host of ‘expatriate’ British and American artists who were eventually to reach fame in their home countries, but were inspired and encouraged by the artistic and personal freedoms the French metropolis afforded them and by its atmosphere of artistic innovation and mutual support. Rhys, however, never really belonged to this expatriate set, although she shared their nihilism and pessimism, wrote in a similar style and, like many modernists, concerned herself with topics which were dismissed as shocking and violent by the conservative reading public – her work was labelled as brilliant but sordid by the critics (Castro 13, 8). Shy and painfully conscious of her West Indian background she did not fit in with the proudly avant-garde Anglo-American artist community. She was married to the Dutch adventurer John Leglet, she was bitterly poor, she did not think of herself as a writer yet, and as a colonial all her life felt ill at ease with the Anglo-Saxons, whom she generally portrayed as cold, prudish and heartless. To be sure, under Ford’s wing, she met such modernist icons as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce, but her contact with the Lost Generation lasted less than three years (Castro 10, 11), and in all this time she remained on the periphery of

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the Anglo-American expatriate set, who, with the exception of Ford, evinced little interest in her writing (Howells 26). Her vision of Parisian life was different from theirs, and she assumed an ironic distance from their “ethos” (Howells 33). For her, Montparnasse “was not the setting of an exciting literary revolution” (Benstock 449), of bohemian ease and intellectual exchange, but of a struggle for survival in which those without money and social power were bound to fall victim to sexual and economic exploitation. Indeed, she felt that the expatriate coterie and their hangers-on of would-be bohemian artists and rich cultural tourists going for a bout of slumming in Paris before scuttling back home did not paint an authentic picture of the Left Bank. Years later, in a letter to Diana Athill (1964) she would say: The ‘Paris’ all these people write about, Henry Miller, even Hemingway etc was not ‘Paris at all – it was ‘America in Paris’ or ‘England in Paris’. The real Paris had nothing to do with that lot – As soon as the tourists came the real Montparnos [sic!] packed up and left. ... These so called artists with dollars and pound sterlings at the back of them all the time! As immoral as they dare ... and when they return to their own countries it’s always on the back of Paris they put everything they have done. Considering no Parisians will have anything to do with them... And if I saw something of the other Paris – it’s only left me with a great longing which I’ll never satisfy again. (Letters 1931-66, 280)

Already in the Left Bank story “Tout Montparnasse and a Lady” she sarcastically remarked on the inauthenticity and sham Parisian ambience of their meeting place, which was “Chelsea, London, with a large dash of Greenwich Village, New York, to liven it, and a slight sprinkling of Moscow, Christiania and even of Paris to give incongruous local colourings” (17). In a similarly hostile way, she scoffed at “Montparnasse, that stronghold of the British and American middle classes ....” (51) in another story, “In the Rue de l’Arrivée”, showing her distrust of and contempt for an artistic set which played at being bohemians yet basically retained their middle class sensibilities and financial securities. Though Rhys’s stories paint a picture of the rive gauche consciously opposed to the schemata we associate with the Anglo-American expatriate community and resist Ford’s “territorialising imperative” (Howells 32), they are by no means devoid of a distinct sense of place and atmosphere. Contrary to Ford’s foreboding, readers do not really ask themselves, “Where did all this take place? What sort of places are these?” (Ford 26). Indeed, though explicit landmarks are scant and low-key, the Parisian atmosphere in her short stories is very distinctive and clearly distinguishable, as Parsons (137) emphasizes, from post-World War I Vienna, which comes alive in the long narrative “Vienne”, or from London, which features in later short story collections and novels, or from the Antilles, where two stories of the Left Bank

64 Margarete Rubik volume are set. Nor do her stories completely lack topographical signposting. Of the twenty-two stories collected in The Left Bank, seventeen are set in Paris, most of them in Montparnasse. The narrator of “The Blue Bird” meets her down-and-out friend Carlo in the famous Café du Dôme, and the latter tells her about an incident in the village of Barbizon in Fontainebleau forest. Another story is set “In the Luxemburg Gardens”. “Grey Day” takes us to the Boulevard Raspail. The alcoholic female artist in “In the Rue de l’Arrivée” walks up and down the boulevard Montparnasse and lives somewhere behind the railway station. The Bal Musette in “Tout Montparnasse and a Lady” is held in an establishment in the rue St. Jacques. The painter in “Tea with an Artist” lives in the Quartier Latin, which is “shabbier and not cosmopolitan yet.” (30). “In a Café” takes place somewhere in the “Quarter”; “Illusion” and “Trio” somewhere on Montparnasse. “Learning to Be a Mother” is set in a midwife’s clinic in Paris, possibly in the hospital district of the XIIIth Arrondissement, since the “Sage-femme” must “keep one large room for overflowings from the hospitals” (55); there, the young mother is visited by a “Montmartroise, which is a Parisienne raised to the nth power” (56). “A Spiritualist” has the Place de L’Odéon as its setting (indicating a bourgeois display of wealth as opposed to the more bohemian South Bank) and “Mannequin” takes the heroine right to the heart of the world of fashion, to the designer Jeanne Veron, Place Vendôme. “The Sidi” and “From a French Prison” are set in the Santé prison in the XIIIth Arrondissement and probably the prison at Fresnes respectively (since the visitors take the tram back to the city); Rhys knew both locations, since her husband was imprisoned there from 1924 to 1925 (Angier 138, 140 and 145). The Lady Standing a Dinner to a Down-and-Out Friend holds her “Discourse” in an unspecified restaurant, probably in Paris (since Neuilly is not too far off). The settings of “Hunger” and “A Night” are also unspecified, though the interspersed French words suggest that the narrators are Englishwomen living in Paris. “At the Villa d’Or” and “La Grosse Fifi” are set in Cannes, but the atmosphere in the villa of the kind but philistine art patrons sponsoring a penniless Parisian singer on the one hand and in the cheap, dingy hotel in which the narrator lives before her return to Paris on the other, are strongly reminiscent of the Left Bank stories. “Vienne” takes us to Vienna, Budapest and Prague. Two stories, namely “Mixing Cocktails” and “Again the Antilles” are set in the West Indies; in these narratives, topography features more precisely (Savoy 41). In the course of her long writing career, Rhys only returned to the rive gauche twice in her short stories: “Night Out 1925” and “The Chevalier of the Place Blanche”, both published in the collection Sleep It Off Lady in 1976 but, as Angiers (223) surmises, probably written in the twenties, take us to a

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sleazy Parisian nightclub and the boulevard Montparnasse, the Place J.B. Clément, and 139 rue Vincent respectively. The latter story, however, is probably a translation or rewriting of a short narrative written by her husband, John Leglet, which is noticeable not only in the unusually likeable male focalizer through whose eyes the story is narrated but also in the amount of detail with which the setting is anchored in a Parisian topography. Rhys is always more interested in people and their emotions than in a city’s buildings, boulevards and other landmarks, and more concerned with evocation than analysis.

Jean Rhys’s Impressionist Style Rhys’s short stories are generally exceptionally short; some, like “In the Luxemburg Gardens” or “Trio” cover just over one page, only “La Grosse Fifi” and “Vienne” are longer narratives of some 15 or 30 pages respectively. Hence there is little space for lengthy descriptions. What references to locations there are, are meant to evoke a general atmosphere of bohemian low life rather than authenticating the setting by drawing a detailed and mimetic picture of specific places. A reader will immediately respond to the Parisian ambience, but generally cannot really follow her protagonists’ wanderings around Montparnasse on a map (Zeikowitz 3) or identify the exact name or address of the restaurants or cafés they frequent. Angier (202) has argued that Rhys’s topography is, in fact, imagery: these descriptions paint images of the heroines’ emotions. In order to bring the city to life, Rhys, in typical impressionist fashion, records apperception rather than objects – the random, selective details contingent on mood or momentary interest which register on a character’s consciousness, rather than systematic, fully-drawn cityscapes. In doing so, Rhys in fact fulfilled Ford’s literary programme, although her mentor failed to acknowledge this: as a theorist of literary impressionism, he “foregrounds the activity of perception in a receptive mind [...]” (Bender 5). The narrator on a visit to the Latin Quarter for “Tea with an Artist”, for instance, has an impression of “an ancient, narrow street of uneven houses, a dirty, beautiful street, full of mauve shadows. A policeman stood limply near the house, his expression that of contemplative stupefaction: a yellow dog lay stretched philosophically on the cobblestones of the roadway” (30). Similarly, “In the Rue de l’Arrivée“ describes Miss Dufreyne’s subjective impression of a side street she hates to walk through: It was full of cheap and very dirty hotels, of cheaper restaurants where the food smelt of oil and sweat, of coiffeurs’ shops haunted by very dark men with five days’ blue growth of beard. Never a pretty lady. [...] Even the pharmacy at the corner looked sinister and

66 Margarete Rubik unholy. During the day the waxen head of a gentleman with hollow eyes, thin lips and a tortured and evil expression was exhibited in the window in a little box. A legend on the card under the head read: ‘I suffered from diseases of the stomach, liver, kidneys, from neurasthenia, anaemia and loss of vitality before taking the Elixir of Abbé Pierre ...’ (52-53)

In the same way, interiors are sketched with a few quick brushstrokes illustrating the blurred, fleeting perception of a character. In “Mannequin” Anna, with all her various senses roused, spends a sensuous hour in the Haute Couturiere’s dressing room “in an extraordinary atmosphere of slimness and beauty; white arms and faces vivid with rouge; raucous voices and the smell of cosmetics; silken lingerie.” When the nameless first person narrator of “Illusion” opens Miss Bruce’s wardrobe, she is first struck by “a glow of colour, a riot of soft silks ... everything that one did not expect” (3). Only then is she able to make out the various items of clothing. Memory only allows a selective glimpse of the narrator’s rooms in Vienna’s Rasumofskygasse: “Very big, polished floor, lots of windows, little low tables to make coffee – some lovely Bohemian glass” (100). The first thing the prim Englishman Mark registers when entering the cheap restaurant in “La Grosse Fifi” is that “[i]t was so dark, so gloomy, so full of odd-looking, very oddlooking French people with abnormally loud voices even for French people. A faint odour of garlic floated in the air” (80). Then his eyes focus on the striking figure of Fifi. The first person narrator going into labour in “Learning to Be a Mother” only registers a babel of noise in the midwife’s clinic: “Inside there was a turmoil –loud voices, mewing of babies, a warm smell of blankets, a woman moaning” (55). What is especially striking in all these fragmented glimpses is the extraordinary sensuousness of the descriptions, and the appeal to all the senses. Although Rhys was not really part of the avant-garde expatriate set, there is general agreement that Rhys is at the vanguard of literary impressionism. From her writing it becomes clear that she was familiar with modernist fiction and poetry (Howells 26). However, she also learned from French writers such as Flaubert and Maupassant,2 whom she had already read at school in Dominica and now studied under Ford’s tutorship (Howells 26). Angiers (174) even suggests that stylistically both Ford and Rhys were, in fact, French writers writing in English because they both loved economy, clarity, strong emotion and hated moral and political preaching. As Baudelaire (553) 2

The fact that she knew Maupassant well is also proved by her reworking and reversal of motifs from “Mademoiselle Fifi” (1882) in her own “La Grosse Fifi”. In Maupassant’s story, set in the Franco-Prussian war, a sadistic officer is murdered by a French Jewish prostitute. In Rhys’ narrative, Fifi is stabbed to death by her gigolo, who is trying to get rid of her. (Howells 38f)

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demanded of the modern(ist) artist, Rhys painted in her stories “le transitoire, le fugitif, le contigent”. Like all typical impressionists, she is interested in fleeting impressions, in ephemeral and inconstant moods, momentary elation or depression, fluctuating moods, subjective worlds. Like them, she favours discontinuous plots whose meaning remains elusive and ambiguous and which defy a simple summary (Stowell 31, 20f). In his paper on literary impressionism Peters (3) warns against a close association of literary impressionism with impressionist painting: although writers and painters shared a similar philosophy, writers, he claims, did not directly try to copy impressionist paintings in their literary works. Yet the analogies to impressionist paintings in Rhys’s Left Bank stories are striking.3 Many of her stories are remarkable for their use of strong primary colours – either blurred, as, for instance, in “In the Rue de l’Arrivée”, where the inebriated narrator perceives the paintings exhibited as “[a]n effect of warm reds and greens and yellows and of large numbers of ladies with enormous thighs, well-developed calves and huge feet [...] (51), more often as strong splashes of bright colour. “In a Cafe” the women drink “menthes of striking emerald” (13). “Tea with an Artist” is served on blue cups and saucers on a white tablecloth. The Caribbean girl in “Trio” wears a short red dress, and Carlo in “The Blue Bird” a flashy red hat. The man who tries to pick up Dolly “In the Rue de l’Arrivée” has a crimson scarf knotted around his throat. Particularly these last three descriptions are reminiscent of the pictures of Henry Toulouse Lautrec, who also uses strong reds as eye-catchers in the Jane Avril, Moulin Rouge or Aristide Bruant posters. What makes the parallel even more remarkable is the fact that Rhys and Lautrec also often deal with similar subjects. “A Night” recreates the terrors of a nightmare in red and black, juxtaposed to a dream of security symbolized by pink silk pyjamas. “In the Luxemburg Gardens” is a composition in green: from the jade green frock of a child the depressed young man’s eyes move on to the green hat of a pretty woman, and his mood buoys up. In contrast, “Grey Day” appropriately dispenses with all colour to convey the mood of the frustrated poet in search of inspiration. In similar fashion, “Hunger” describing the disjointed thoughts and fantasies during starvation, refrains from the use of any colours. The ‘painterly’ quality of Rhys’s writing is not only evident in the colour palette, but also in the attention paid to the texture, material and cut of clothing, so that items of dress come vividly alive in the narratives. The staid Miss Bruce in “Illusion”, seemingly “unaffected, by anything hectic, slightly ex3

The grim darkness of the corridors in “From a French Prison”, on the other hand, and the image of a warder as “a huge spider – a bloated, hairy insect born of the darkness and of the dank smell” (11) suggests expressionist techniques, as do the clothes in “Illusion”, when they seem to take on a “malevolent” (4) life of their own.

68 Margarete Rubik otic or unwholesome” (1) or indeed anything Parisian at all, wears a serge dress in summer and a tweed costume in winter, projecting the image of a commonsensical Englishwoman, but her cupboard is full of brightly coloured haute couture dresses made of exquisite materials symbolizing her vain dreams of romance and sensuality. There are evening dresses of “old gold” and “flame colour”, a black dress “touched with silver”, another one with “a jaunty embroidery of emerald and blue”, a “black and white check with a haughty belt”, and a flowered “crêpe de chine” (3). Clothing is often used as a class indicator by Rhys. Mrs Valentine’s “green velvet gown with hanging sleeves lined with rosy satin” (73) in “At the Villa d’Or” shows off the wealth of the wearer, whereas the large hat “worn with a rakish sideways slant” (80) and the “transparent nightgown of a vivid rose colour trimmed with yellow lace” (83) give away the “mission in life” (80) of “La Grosse Fifi” just as unmistakably as her shrieking rouge and bright blue eyelids. The jerseys or open shirts of the “carefully picturesque” (16) young men in “Tout Montparnasse” suggest that they are trying to imitate bohemian habits. The small-minded Lady Standing a Dinner to a Down-and Out-Friend considers the latter’s elegant outfit to be inappropriate, though she has to acknowledge that “You cannot buy special clothes to starve in” (45). Rhys does not only imitate painterly techniques in her stories, she also explicitly or implicitly refers to some impressionist paintings. “Tea with an Artist” describes one of the fictional artist’s pictures in which “[a] girl seated on a sofa in a room with many mirrors held a glass of green liqueur. Darkeyed, heavy-faced, with big, sturdy peasant’s limbs, she was entirely destitute of lightness and grace” (32); it reminds the narrator of a work by Manet’s (in all probability “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” showing a barmaid with an assortment of bottles before a wall of mirrors reflecting images of the guests). The more appropriate parallel, however, would be to Degas’ painting “L’Absinthe” portraying a sullen-looking woman sitting with her back to a mirror, with a greenish drink in front of her. It is not clear whether Rhys herself confused the two paintings or whether she wanted to ridicule the selfimportance of the narrator, whose actual knowledge of art is rather scant. The idea for another (fictional) picture in the same story, showing “[a] woman stepping into a tub of water under a shaft of light” which turns her skin to “gold” (32) may also have been inspired by one of Degas’ pictures and suggests that Rhys did know his works and probably the works of other impressionist painters as well. Interestingly, both Degas and Manet, like Rhys, depicted in their works the demi-monde of dancers, models and prostitutes. There are two other stories in the Left Bank collection which contain explicit references to paintings: while Mrs. Valentine “At the Villa d’Or” has “learned to appreciate Picasso” (78), her puritanical husband, still attracted to

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19th century styles, wants “a tactful drapery” (76) to cover the nymphs an artist has been hired to paint for him. One of the dancers in “Vienne” has “a Kirchner girl’s legs” (94) – the reference not only indicating her slim elegance but also reminding the reader of the similarities in subject matter and milieu portrayed between Rhys and the German painter. However, there are also more subtle parallels: “Mixing Cocktails”, a story set in the Antilles, describes memories of lying in a hammock all day and gazing out to sea, which changes its colour in accordance with the light. The technique is amazingly reminiscent of Monet’s series of paintings of haystacks, or of Rouen cathedral, in which he traces changing colours and shapes under changing light conditions. Very early, before the sun is up, the sea in Dominica is “a very tender blue, like the dress of the Virgin Mary” (36) spotted with the white triangles of sailing boats. The midday sun makes the sea “flash and glitter: it was necessary to screw the eyes up tight before looking. Everything was still and languid, worshipping the sun”, and there was a “hard, blue, blue sky” (37). Later, there is “a purple sea with a sky to match it” (37). After the analysis of Rhys’s impressionist style let us look at another technique by which she creates a French ambience for her stories. She often uses references to French songs, or well-known cultural icons, like “an outfit for a budding Manon Lescaut” (3), as well as generally comprehensible expressions like “Mon Dieu” (8), “[p]auvre petite” 53 or drinks like “fines à l’eau” or “menthes” (13). These French words are always marked out in the text in italics and merely serve as semiotic signs indicating the foreign setting to English readers. Similarly, a few snatches of German (“Ach, meine blumen” (99) or “Schnell – eine andere platz neit Prater [sic!]” (109) serve to conjure up the atmosphere of “Vienne” – Rhys’s German was much shakier than her excellent French, and she also interspersed plenty of French expressions into the Viennese story to indicate the international set in which the characters move. Occasionally in her stories she translates a French phrase which is essential for an understanding of the plot, as in “The Sidhi”, when the abusive warders realize that the Moroccan prisoner has died: “Then a cry - half astounded, half annoyed: M - , il a clamsé, le Bicot!’ (He’s kicked the bucket)” (72). Similarly, Fifi’s advice to Roseau is translated into English: “‘Un clou chasse l’autre,’ remarked Fifi, rather gloomily. ‘Yes, that is life – one nail drives out the other.’” (85). However, not all important information is translated. For readers unfamiliar with French it must remain unclear what the sensuous West Indian girl means by singing “F’en ai m-a-r-r-e” or what she is commended for: “Mais... ce qu’elle est cocasse, quand même!” (35). Even more surprisingly, only one line out of several stanzas from the long sentimental French poem which Fifi quotes is translated (“Thou hast bound my ankles with silken cords” (87)), but the essential lines which sum up

70 Margarete Rubik Fifi’s whole attitude to life and assume such a tragic meaning after her death at the hands of the gigolo are not translated: Maintenant je puis marcher légère, J’ai mis toute ma vie aux mains de mon amant. Chante, change ma vie aux mains de mon amant. (93)

Either Rhys expected all her readers to know French (after all, the content is not too complicated), or she mischievously showed her contempt for their philistinism by leaving them in the dark about some of her stories. In her writings (“In the Rue de l’Arrivée”, “The Blue Bird”, or later stories like “Outside the Machine” from Tigers are Better Looking (1960) set in an English hospital in Versailles) likeable English people tend to feel more affinity with French culture than with their own, cold and censorious one.

Characters and Milieu Portrayed So far, we have analysed some stylistic features of Rhys’s description of the Left Bank. Let us now turn to her portrayal of life on the rive gauche. In all the short stories she de-familiarizes and de-romanticizes the stereotypical picture of bohemian low-life in Paris – the world of cheap cafés and bals musettes, of fleeting love affairs, struggling artists, fashion models and ‘grues’ - the Parisian prostitutes sentimentalized in a tearful chanson in “In a Café”, yet consciousness of whom is soon after exorcized by an innocuous American song celebrating domesticity.4 Rhys forces us to view these familiar Parisian paraphernalia from the perspective of the economically disadvantaged victims of the system and thereby deprives the rive gauche of its nostalgic flair, showing the sordid underside of the romantic city (which she herself knew only too well). Nonetheless, like Ford, Rhys loved Paris all her life: “I’ve been very faithful and never really loved any other city,” she confessed when she was old (Angiers 107). Yet most of the stories of The Left Bank are populated by frustrated characters unable to fulfil their true longings, outsiders living on the margins of a society that despises them because they do not conform to conventional norms and are, by bourgeois standards, beyond the pale of respectability. Rhys hated “[p]eople who judge, condemn and ‘sneer”, while those who try to “sympathise come closest to goodness” in her scale of values; however, “since ‘good’ people are the quickest to con-

4

Morell (96) points out the ironic contrast between the two songs and the fact that both the singer and the patrons of the café capitalize on the “grues”, but that the women themselves remain invisible and that “[t]his jolting of the habitual world of the café is brief”.

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demn, her morality neatly stands the conventional sort upon its head.” (Angiers 192) Rhys had not only a “terrifying insight” into this milieu but also what Ford has called “a terrific – an almost lurid! – passion for stating the case of the underdog” and a sympathy for “lawbreakers” unusual, at least at the beginning of the 20th century, in “Occidental literature with its perennial bias towards satisfaction with things as they are” (Ford 24). She paints empathetic but entirely unsentimental pictures of lonely and unhappy women artists hanging on to their remnants of self-respect in “Illusion” and “In the Rue de l’Arrivée” - pictures entirely different from the patronizing condescension with which Ford, in his Preface, refers to the poor women artists in the impoverished part of the XIIIth Arrondissement, where Rhys herself lived (Parsons 135). She portrays mannequins (in the story of that name), tarts (“The Blue Bird”, “La Grosse Fifi”, “Vienne”) and striptease dancers (“Night Out 1925”); prisoners and their relatives (“The Sidi”; “From a French Prison”); people starved for food (“Hunger”, “Discourse of a Lady Standing a Dinner to a Down-and-Out Friend”) and for friendship (“A Night”). Conversely, she paints savagely satirical pictures of self-satisfied, condescending, middleclass people (“A Spiritualist”, “In a Café” “Discourse of a Lady Standing a Dinner to a Down-and-Out Friend”), pseudo-bohemian Anglo-Saxon wouldbe artists (“Tout Montparnasse”, “La Grosse Fifi”) and racial xenophobia (“The Sidi”). She generally avoids explicit value judgement but clearly rejects conventional moral classifications (Savoy 20) and traditional expectations of chastity and sobriety for women (Blodgett 230), although her female protagonists often cannot quite free themselves from conventional gender roles. The masculine-looking Miss Bruce in “Illusion”, for instance, dreams of being loved for her beauty and feminine attraction; the tart in “The Blue Bird” forever regrets not having committed a double suicide with her lover; the models in “Mannequin” turn themselves into objects of voyeuristic gazing; the narrator of “Vienne” is entirely dependent on men. Several stories deal with the contrast between seeming and being, expectations and reality. Just as Rhys deconstructs the stereotype of the romantic rive gauche, she generally questions appearances and conventional beliefs. In “Illusion” Miss Bruce, in her sensible English clothes, “is masked every day, pretending to a severity which belies her secret passion for frivolity and sensuousness” (Savoy 48). Contrary to expectations, Carlo does not “go up in the world like a skyrocket” after the Bad Man’s death but goes “to pieces” (“The Blue Bird” 65). The haute couture clothes and the upstairs rooms of the fashion designer are glamorous, but the mannequins are served lunch in the cellar, on ugly and inelegant tableware, and their work is tiring, so that Anna knows that she “won’t be able to stick it” (“Mannequin” 25). In “The

72 Margarete Rubik Sidi” the warders think that the Arab prisoner is merely feigning an illness – but in fact he is dying of neglect. Sentimental propaganda is wrong to claim that motherhood is an instinctive female vocation; instead, it needs to be learned (“Learning to Be a Mother”). Although all but three of her Left Bank stories are set in France, most of them focus on foreigners – generally Englishmen or Americans, but also West Indians (three black characters in a Parisian restaurant in “Trio”; probably also Roseau in “La Grosse Fifi”, whose name means “reed” in French but is also the name of the capital of Dominica) and an Arab maltreated in prison (“The Sidi”), the international “war material” (95) of people adrift in “Vienne” after World War I. French people figure prominently only in the satirical portrait of a bon vivant in “A Spiritualist” and the sympathetic picture of an amorous old woman in “La Grosse Fifi”. The dispirited young man revived by the prospect of a flirt “In the Luxemburg Gardens” and the uninspired poet in “Grey Day” are of undefined nationality but may possibly be French as well. “The Chevalier of the Place Blanche”, contained in the 1976 collection of short stories and originally written by her husband, also focuses on a French adventurer. Most of the main characters, though not all, are women. Many of them are aimless, languid and idle, letting themselves drift (Castro 19) without fighting against their decline, as if they were indifferent to what happens to them and merely lived from one moment to the next. After the suicide of her lover Carlo in “The Blue Bird” has lost all joy of life, but continues to prostitute herself to a series of men; Dolly in “In the Rue de l’Arrivée” drowns her depression in drink; Miss Bruce buys one gorgeous dress after the other without wearing them, facing the world in her tweeds and with a stiff upper lip; Roseau in “La Grosse Fifi” prays to God “don’t let me think” (83) and only gains the energy to move out of the sordid hotel in Cannes by the news of the horrible murder of her motherly friend. In her novels Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939) Rhys would continue to create a series of such inert and self-destructive female characters. While from a feminist point of view such passivity may be upsetting, it is worth remembering that impressionists favoured passive characters who may be inactive but have “restless, alert consciousnesses” (Stowell 44) and are keenly observant of their surroundings.5

5

Appropriately, Lykiard (73) calls Roseau in “La Grosse Fifi” a typical “Rhysian mixture of impassive perception and even passivity, alongside a more active awareness within a character receptively openminded.”

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Narrative Perspective and Point-of-View Although Rhys portrays several such languid female characters lacking the energy to fight against their degradation already in The Left Bank, the young writer in fact commands an extraordinary variety of voices, ranging from detached to intimate, from sympathetic and gently mocking or self-ironic to fiercely satirical. She favours autodiegetic and homodiegetic narrators, who may be likeable but can also be insufferably conceited and hypocritical. Thus “A Night” with its striking description of a nightmare, “Hunger”, which for all its remarkably “understated” tone never gives the “impression of reticence” (Lykiard 125), and “Mixing Cocktails”, which contains childhood memories of the Antilles, are all intensely personal and ask for sympathy for the narrator. “Vienne”, however, which also contains flashes of memory drawn from Rhys’s personal life, also clearly makes the reader aware of the narrator’s weakness, passivity and recklessness. Although the West Indian “Trio” arouses feelings of homesickness in the narrator who watches them, the description of the scene itself remains detached. The narrators of “Illusion” and “The Blue Bird” are acquaintances of the main figures and basically kind though somewhat judgemental (“Everybody knows Carlo, and nobody blames her, and she is such a nice woman really and such a hopeless case. Poor soul, she loved a Bad Man – and there you are. Such a pity!” (61)); both are humbled by the insight that they, in fact, have known nothing about their friends. On the other hand, both the dramatic monologue of the “Commandant” (6) congratulating himself on his treatment of women in “A Spiritualist” and the “Discourse of a Lady Standing a Dinner to a Down-andOut Friend” mercilessly reveal the speakers’ hypocrisy and intolerable selfsatisfaction. Like most modernist writers, Rhys also employs focalization, telling the story through the eyes of the main character or a sympathetic looker-on. “Mannequin”, for instance, is narrated through the eyes of a likeable young fashion model who finds the new job much less glamorous than she anticipated, whereas “Grey Day” mocks at the moroseness and frustration of the male focalizer. The character of “La Grosse Fifi” is mostly presented sympathetically from the point of view of the girl Roseau, who sees in the old tart a mirror image of what she herself might one day become (Carr 60). The sufferings and death of “The Sidi” are narrated from the perspective of a fellow prisoner who feels sorry for the Arab. The impoverished singer’s point of view in “At the Villa d’Or”, on the other hand, wavers between gratitude and a satirical portrayal of her patrons’ philistinism. Occasionally, Rhys even employs omniscient narration –sometimes a coolly observant camera eye perspective, as in “From a French Prison” or “In a Café”, where the narrative

74 Margarete Rubik moves from one group of people or scene to another, without (explicit) evaluation, sometimes even intrusive narration, as in the sarcastic comments on the Anglo-American cultural tourists in “Tout Montparnasse and a Lady”. Thus one evening a very romantic lady, an American fashion artist, who was there to be thrilled, after having read the Trilby of du Maurier, and the novels of Francis Carco, which tell of the lives of the apaches of to-day, expressed her candid opinion of a supposed Dope Fiend [...]. He was as a matter of fact a very hard-working and on the whole abstemious portrait-painter [...]. Melancholy descended upon that romantic fashion artist, and discontent with her milieu. In her youth she had considered herself meant for higher things! ... Artificial lemonade of the sort supplied at the Bal Musette is greatly conducive to melancholy. (17f)

There is even one story in The Left Bank, namely “Hunger”, which could be classified as a second person narrative. It starts out with a first person voice, but then quickly switches into an address of the reader, explaining to the uninitiated what it feels like to starve: Last night I took an enormous dose of valerian to make me sleep. […] I could of course buy a loaf, but we have been living on bread and nothing else for a long time. It gets monotonous. Also, it’s damned salt. … Starvation – or rather semi-starvation – coffee in the morning, bread at midday, is exactly like everything else. […] To begin with it is a frankly awful business. For the first twelve hours one is just astonished. […] Full of practical common sense you rush about; you search for the elusive ‘something’. At night you have long dreams about food. On the second day you have a bad headache. You feel pugnacious. You argue all day with an invisible and sceptical listener. (42)

The ease with which Rhys slips from first person narrative to the general “one” and then to the intimate “you” draws the reader into the story and contributes to the immediacy of the reading experience, but the bourgeois audience’s voyeurism and craving for sensation are at the same time satirized: “I have never gone without food for longer than five days, so I cannot amuse you any longer” (44), the narrator says in the end, sarcastically disappointing hopes of further lurid details. Other narratives, too, illustrate the extraordinary sophistication and sense of form the young author evinced already in her first collection. Thus “A Spiritualist” is actually comprised of a long monologue by a “Commandant” who claims to “adore women” (6) and tells about his late mistress and the uncanny incident of a large marble block suddenly crashing into the sitting room when he came to remove the dead woman’s belongings. The story starts, however, as a first-person narrative of an unknown female addressee of his story, who remains completely in the background; her function is merely to trick the reader into first trusting the voice of a seeming figure of authority and later on to show, implicitly, the man’s insensibility of narrating his story to a woman in the hope of eliciting admiration and support. Rhys

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even includes a second female voice, a former addressee of the narrative, whom the Commandant quotes with indignation as failing to understand that his dead lover, by throwing the ghostly stone, simply wanted to remind him of the white marble tombstone he had promised her. The female listener, however, just laughed – “[u]n fou rire” (9), as the man scolds – “And do you know what she said? She said: How furious that poor Madeleine must have been that she missed you! Now can you imagine the droll ideas that women can have!” (9). Rhys thus indirectly manages to make even the mute Madeleine heard, thereby exploding our belief that rich old Frenchmen know how to treat women and hinting at “the suppressed energy coming in from the silent margins of life, where women who have never had the freedom to live for themselves carry an immense burden of rage” (Savoy 46). On the other hand, “Discourse of a Lady Standing a Dinner to a Downand Out Friend” ought, to all intents and purposes, to be a dialogue between two female friends; however, the poor woman can never get a word in, she is constantly being talked at by her wealthy acquaintance, who offers to help her, but whose true thoughts are added in brackets in the form of interior monologue: “What did you say? … You cannot buy special clothes to starve in. Naturally not. But it is a question what people think, is it not? (Now she is not pleased. But is this my fault? A woman supposed to be starving ought not to go about in silk stockings and quite expensive shoes.)” (45). In “La Grosse Fifi” she presents the eponymous protagonist, who is murdered by her gigolo, through a variety of different perspectives: that of the tolerant and empathetic Roseau, whom Fifi befriends in her fit of depression, that of a pseudo-bohemian Anglo painter6, who is shocked by what he sees as a grotesque old whore, that of the clichéd newspaper report about the murder, and through Fifi’s own self-image, epitomized in her quoting of “Le Livre Pour Toi”, by Marguerite Burnat-Provins, “a woman’s song of joyous submission to her romantic ideal” (qtd. in Howell 39). The reader is finally left to form her own opinion. However, the story’s “undertow” is not against the old woman’s foolish belief in romantic love, but “against assumptions that women are discreet, quiet, dainty and tasteful” (Savoy 45). Despite shifts and changing foci in the story, from Fifi to Roseau and her Anglo-American friends, “La Grosse Fifi” is a comparatively linear narrative, following the changing relation of the older woman with her gigolo and her motherly support of the unhappy West Indian girl. Stories like “Illusion” are similarly mono-directional: telling about an English painter who does not dare to wear the lavish dresses she has bought for fear of giving away her loneliness and vain longing to be loved and desired; the narrative starts out 6

Angiers (158) suggests that the fictional painter Mark Olson may be based on the artist Paul Nash whom Rhys disliked for his disingenious pseudo-bohemianism.

76 Margarete Rubik with the sensible, masculine image in accordance with national stereotypes (Savoy 47) that Miss Bruce projects, proceeds to the incident when the narrator finds the robes of the sick Miss Bruce in the cupboard, and ends with a return to ‘normality’, namely to Miss Bruce’s wonted, tweed-clad self. Other stories, however, are much more fragmented. “In a Café”, for instance, gives various glimpses, first of the patrons and regular musicians, then of a new singer and his chanson about “grues” causing some vague unease which is quickly overcome by another innocuous song. “Hunger”, though following chronologically the effects of starving over five days, moves in flashes of thoughts, unstable emotions and hallucinations, without a clearly defined ‘plot’. “At the Villa d’Or” also seems to move fairly randomly from one scene and impression to the next, and “Vienne”, the first story Rhys ever wrote and published in Ford’s Transatlantic Review, is completely composed of fleeting recollections of colours and smells, brief memories of people, emotions and broken-up scenes, in a whirl of changing moods and sentiments. A few of her stories have an epiphany – a feature typical of the modernist short story. The narrator of “Illusion” learns something of the true nature of Miss Bruce. “In the Luxemburg Gardens” ends with the cynical advice that there is always another pretty woman to alleviate the last heart-ache. Dolly “In the Rue de L’Arrivée” “[f]or the first time [...] dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy – even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery” (54). But, as in many modernist narratives, such “crystalline instants” are rarely durable; they may “evaporate” and be forgotten in “the flux and flow of durational time” (Stowell 38). Indeed, in most of Rhys’s stories, there are no epiphanic insights at all, only an inconclusive breaking off, which leaves the reader strangely haunted by the scene she has just witnessed and pondering its meaning.

Conclusion Rhys was an accomplished stylist, carefully editing her own work and cutting ruthlessly whatever seemed verbose and unnecessary. Even Ford had to acknowledge that her “sketches begin exactly where they should and end exactly when their job is done” (Ford 25) and predicted that a hundred years hence “her ashes [would be] translated to the Panthéon” (Ford 27) of literary fame. “Economy and pace would always be Jean’s great strengths: the ability to evoke a complex mood and story with a few accurately seen and felt details, leaving us to imagine their connection and explanation. She would work

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extraordinarily hard to get the details right [...]” (Angier 198). In The Left Bank she found not only her style but also her subject straightaway (Angier 215). All her life she remained faithful to that keen, uncompromising vision which pared away cliché and sentimentality, received opinions and conventional perspectives, to give a voice to those who are usually silenced. In her greatest literary success, The Wide Sargasso Sea, she forces us to review Charlotte Bronte’s literary classic Jane Eyre from the perspective of the Creole madwoman locked away in Rochester’s attic. You can never again read this famous Victorian novel without the rankling consciousness that Bertha Rochester may have been unfairly dealt with. In a similar manner, you can never again indulge in romantic pictures of the Parisian Bohème à la Puccini or the 1920s avant-garde without remembering Rhys’s reverse side of the picture – the world of drunken Dollys and degraded Carlos, fat old Fifis and exploited mannequins, failed artists and imprisoned Arabs, rootless people who live only for the moment and a supposed avant-garde expatriate community which, in reality, attracts middle-class voyeurists and hangers-on turning the rive gauche into a suburb of London or New York.

Works Cited Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys: Life and Work. Boston, Toronto, London: Little, Brown and Company, 1990. Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres complètes. Ed. A. Ruff. Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1968. Bender, Todd K. Literary Impressionism in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and Charlotte Brontë. New York and London: Garland, 1997. Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900 – 1940. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. Berrong, Richard M. “Modes of Literary Impressionism.” Genre. Forms of Discourse and Culture 39.2 (2006): 203-228. Blodgett, Harriet. “Tigers Are Better Looking To Jean Rhys.” Arizona Quarterly 32 (1976): 227-244. Carr, Helen. Jean Rhys. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996. Castro, Joy. “Jean Rhys.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 20.3 (2000): 8-45. Ford, Madox Ford. “Preface. Rive Gauche.” The Left Bank and Other Stories. By Jean Rhys. New York: Books for the Libraries Press, 1970. 7-27. Howells, Coral Ann. Jean Rhys. New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

78 Margarete Rubik Iskin, Ruth E. “Selling, Seduction, and Soliciting the Eye.” Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism. Ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. 235257. Lykiard, Alexis. Jean Rhys Revisited. Exeter: Stide, 2000. Morrell, A.C. “The World of Jean Rhys’s Short Stories.” Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys. Ed. Pierrette Frickey. Washington: Three Continents Press, 1990. 95-102. Naipaul, V.S. “Without a Dog’s Chance.” New York Review of Books 18 (1972). Repr. in Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys. Ed. Pierrette Frickey. Washington: Three Continents Press, 1990. 54-58. Parsons, Deborah L. Streetwalking the Metropolis. Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford: OUP, 2000. Peters, John G. Conrad and Impressionism. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. Rhys, Jean. The Collected Short Stories. Introd. Diana Athill. New York and London: Norton, n.d. ——. Jean Rhys: Letters 1931-66. Ed. Francis Wyndam and Diana Melly. London: André Deutsch, 1984. Savoy, Elaine. Jean Rhys. Cambridge: CUP, 1998. Stowell, H.P. Literary Impressionism, James and Chekov. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1980. Zeikowitz, Richard E. “Writing a feminine Paris in Jean Rhys’s Quartet.” Journal of Modern Literature 28.2 (2005): 1-17.

Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss

“La vie toute faite des morceaux”: Intermediality and Impressionism in Jean Rhys’s Quartet

Introduction Jean Rhys’s first novel Quartet (1928) is set in the Paris of the 1920s. It recounts the vagabond days of a young English expatriate stranded on the rive gauche who, like the author herself, is hopelessly entangled in a fated ménage à trois with an influential British “picture-dealer” (8) and art patron and his socialite amateur painter wife. Ford Madox Ford, Stella Bowen and Jean Rhys met in Paris in 1924. When Rhys’s Polish husband Jean Lenglet was imprisoned for theft, leaving his young wife alone and destitute in a Montparnasse hotel, the couple took her under their wing. Ford, who was famed for his instincts for spotting promising young writers, discovered her literary talent and encouraged her to write. Subsequent to having an affair with Ford, Rhys immediately set about turning the experience with its triple ingredients of obsession, hatred and selfvictimization into a novel. The text’s emotional intensity and attention to factual detail – the Paris cityscape, for instance, is rendered with conspicuous precision – are responsible for Quartet traditionally being read as a twentiethcentury roman à clef and “autobiographical act of vengeance” (Draine 318). While an all too facile equation between fiction and fact, between Jean Rhys and her alter ego Marya Zelli, has recently been called into question (Draine), psychoanalytical approaches which situate Marya within an oedipal framework and locate her as “the daughter sacrificed to the father’s incestuous wishes with the sanction of a mother whose primary concern is to maintain some form of control of the father’s illicit sexuality” (Simpson 67) belie the critical literature’s continuing preoccupation with matters autobiographical.1 At the time when Rhys met Ford, Paris was a fulcrum of literary and artistic creativity. At the various parties held by Ford and his then girlfriend Stella Bowen, Rhys met with many of the philosophers, writers and painters who

                                                            1

For studies exploring Quartet’s autobiographical dimension see Gilson, Kappers den Hollander (1982, 1988), Draine and Angier; Abel, Thomas, Maslen and Simpson offer psychoanalytical readings; for a predominantly formal analysis see Savory, Sternlicht, Seshagiri and Staley; for feminist approaches see Borinsky, Maurel and Zeikowitz.

80 Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss have collectively come to be named as the rive gauche (Patey).2 Painters and painting also feature prominently in Rhys’s first novel, which starts with a chance encounter between the protagonist and Miss de Solla, “who was a painter and ascetic to the point of fanaticism” (8). The two women walk back to the painter’s studio near the Lion de Belfort, where Miss de Solla shows Marya her latest acquisition: ‘I bought these this morning. What do you think of them?’ Marya, helped by the alcohol, realized that the drawings were beautiful. Groups of women. Masses of flesh arranged to form intricate and absorbing patterns. ‘That man’s a Hungarian,’ explained Miss de Solla. ‘[…] He’s a discovery of Heidler’s. You know Heidler, the English picture-dealer man, of course.’ Marya answered: ‘I don’t know any of the English people in Paris.’ (8)

While this scene serves to introduce Heidler as a prominent figure within Anglo-Saxon expatriate circles, it is only one of the many instances in the novel where painters and pictorial art are foregrounded. At a later point in the work, Marya casually remarks on Lois’s skills as a painter (“There was a portrait on the wall above the looking-glass, carefully painted but smug and slightly pretentious, like a coloured photograph”, 41), her remarks being cleverly offhand in the way they denigrate the protagonist’s rival. They imply an intimate, almost iconic connection between the artist and the aesthetic product. In the light of the novel’s focus on a young woman’s idiosyncrasies in matters of love and life and its much noted (and frequently criticized) peculiarities of style and structure, the work’s predilection for the visual arts is due for a reassessment. Instead of deploring the text’s supposed formal deficiencies, its alleged lack of “objective distance from the persona and plot” (Sternlicht 47, cf. also Staley 130), its episodic, fragmentary nature and curiously inconclusive ending, this study posits a close structural relationship between Jean Rhys’s Quartet and the visual arts, and, more precisely, between the novel’s formal make-up and French pictorial impressionism.3

Ekphrasis and Beyond: Intermediality Revisited The transgression of medial boundaries is a venerable phenomenon which reaches back to the beginnings of art and its medial and generic differentia-

                                                            2

3

Rhys’s first collection of short stories, which was published in 1927, is also called The Left Bank. Occasional comments on Rhys’s intergeneric and intermedial leanings have concentrated on her ‘lyric’ prose (“Her novels work like poems, evoking enormously much more than they actually say”, Angier 198) and the novel’s cinematic qualities (Sternlicht 47).

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tion. Verses set to music, dramatic performances incorporating song, music, text and dance and ancient temples adorned with mural artwork are only a few of the examples of early intermedial cooperation. This has long been realized by interarts studies, which has primarily been concerned with conspicuous forms and isolated cases of heteromedial cross-fertilization. Traditional concepts such as ‘ekphrasis’, i.e. the verbal representation of a visual representation, have been studied for their formal, meta-aesthetic and ontological potential. What has been lacking, though, has been a general, more up-to-date model which explains the forms and functions of mixed media, regardless of the semiotic systems involved. In recent years, there have been several promising attempts (Wagner, Lagerroth), with Irina O. Rajewsky (2002) providing a comprehensive systematization of inter- and transmedial phenomena.4 An intermedial relation can be established via an explicit reference to, or an imitation of, the source media, analogous to the narratological distinction between telling and showing, or between discursive abstraction and textual enactment. Explicit references to other art forms often occur alongside the more oblique simulative techniques, whether to their characteristics and typical components or to representative individual works. Very often, the mere naming or abstract discussion of another medium fulfills the important function of marking a text’s intermedial orientation. Whatever other functions an explicitly heteromedial thematization may assume, it will always signpost a text’s intermedial focus. The multiple explicit references to visual art in Jean Rhys’s Quartet thus serve as valuable indicators of the text’s possible intermedial nature. In texts which solely use the explicit reference variety, the alien medium is merely present as a conceptual abstraction and signifié. The target medium itself remains medially homogenous and is not affected by the specific aesthetics of the source medium. In the second type of intermedial relations, however, the simulative enactment of the source medium results in an ‘invasion’ of the target text by the imitated medium or media in question. In the intermedial mode of showing, the target text can be seen to partially abandon its characteristic constitutive features in favour of the aesthetics of the source media. What must be made clear, however, is that an intermedial ‘imitation’ can only ever be an approximation, a kind of attempt at a text’s transposition. It does not invoke the actual compositional means of music, painting or film but only acquires some of their underlying aesthetic principles and their media-specific effects.

                                                            4

The following typology of intermedial forms is a simplified version of Rajewsky.

82 Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss Literature is a language-based semiotic system. It is thus intrinsically dynamic and non-spatial and cannot profess to convincingly recreating the concrete, the visual or the spatial. What it can do, however, is to modify its own poetological make-up so as to partially abandon its aesthetic terrain in favour of alien aesthetic principles, of histoire and discours elements whose exotic character is emulated via the semiotically limited means of the target text. The result of this “system contamination via translation” (Rajewski 83; our translation) can be likened to a figurative use of the media evoked. It activates and emulates some of the underlying precepts of the source medium, lending the dominantly literary work a heteromedial ‘as if’ quality. There are limitations implicit in any intermedial venture of this kind, i.e. in one which is imitative, and these have been frequently subject to censure. Critics have remarked on the technique’s poverty and obliqueness, contending that one cannot “seize upon the mode of a spatial art and appropriate it wholesale into the temporal experience of literature” (Stowell 15) or “identify the techniques of impressionist painting and then insist on transferring them to impressionist writing” (Peters 15). Indeed it is true that an intermedial imitation qua partial translation can never be ‘the real thing’ but will always remain a partial approximation. Approaches which see this merely as a defect choose, though, to ignore the essence of intermedial art. Its aim is not to faithfully reproduce one medium via the means of another, since if this were the case, one could just as easily switch media altogether. The aim of any intermedial endeavour is the expansion of aesthetic potential, the creation of a hybrid medium which shares certain elements with both the source and the target system but which essentially constitutes a novel type of artifact, leading to often unpredictable results. An approach which tries to do justice to the programme of intermediality will thus be less concerned with the question of whether an intermedial work of art has ‘copied well’ than with assessing what semiotic strategies it has taken over from the target system, what transformative mechanisms have been used to achieve this and what new functionality has arisen from the heteromedial blend. By seeking to integrate alien aesthetic material, simulative intermedial works become alien themselves. Transcending medial boundaries means transgressing medial conventions, and the heteromedial discours is foregrounded (Leech) and defamiliarized (Shklovsky) as a consequence of this. Intermedial works which make use of ‘system contamination via translation’ therefore have a strange feel to them; they often do the unexpected and have a slightly bewildering, at times even self-reflexive and thus anti-illusive quality. .

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The fact that critics have picked on Quartet’s alleged “limitations” and “technical problems” (Staley 131) takes on a special significance when bearing in mind that simulative heteromediality will always tend to be intrinsically unorthodox. Another notable fact is that most studies have commented on the novel’s fragmentary, non-coherent nature and strong visual focus – it is purported to be “almost made of imagery” (Angier 200). This study contends that the novel’s stylistic idiosyncrasies are not merely symptoms of writerly inexperience nor of the author’s inability to achieve the appropriate emotional distance from her plot material, considering its clearly autobiographical source. Instead, we see its formal deviance as a direct consequence of its intermedial scheme: to emulate, in literature, the specific aesthetic and epistemological qualities of French impressionism and to make use of impressionism’s psychological, ideological and meta-aesthetic potential.

Emulating French Impressionism The loosely connected school of French impressionism (1850 – 1920) evolved as a reaction against the style favoured by the École des Beaux-Arts and its chief representative, Dominique Ingres.5 Ingres’s neo-classicism demanded a lofty subject matter and formal traditionalism which entailed the precedence of line and composition over shape and colour. Following in the wake of Eugène Delacroix’s anti-classicist display of passion and his unorthodox use of colour a few decades earlier, artists such as Édouard Manet, and later Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, abandoned the notion of the solidity of the object and made light and its metamorphing influence their primary concern. Depicting the timeless essence of an object came to be regarded as futile, as an altogether unattractive endeavour. Pictorial impressionism sought to highlight an object’s phenomenology and to perceive its atmospherical value as being construed in equal measure by temporary conditions of light and the onlooker’s similarly temporary standpoint. Unlike neo-classicist painters with their penchant for pathos and a sultry eroticism, the impressionists did not resort to classical mythology for their subject matter. The impressionist’s choice was less guided by a morally uplifting theme than by a sensually attractive motif. Impressionism no longer fell back on canonical narratives in order to lend its artworks dynamism, authoritative weight and pre-ordained meaning, meaning that ultimately resides outside the aesthetic construct. Impressionist art tended to be static, concentrating exclusively on the sensual moment and the potential effect that

                                                            5

For a more comprehensive account see Brenneman, Crepaldi and Düchting.

84 Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss a conglomeration of visual impressions might produce in the recipient. To stress the irreducible subjectivity of perception, impressionism typically used an innovative brush stroke technique. Similar to the pixels in a digital image, unmixed colours were applied side by side so that the synthesis of colour and form occurred not on the canvas itself but in the eye of the beholder. In his study on impressionist elements in the works of Henry James and Anton Chekhov, Stowell has a point when he claims that it would “strain[…] interdisciplinary enthusiasm” to assume that it is possible even for the most ingenious of writers to be able to “directly transpose[…] the techniques of a visual medium into language” (15). As outlined above, different media operate within separate semiotic realms, and any intermedial transposition can only be partial and indirect, with the target medium imitating the generative principles, and not the actual operative means of the foreign medium. This may also be the reason why there was a crucial delay before impressionism, which first developed in the pictorial arts, began to influence music and subsequently literature. On the producer’s side, an imitative intermedial reference requires abstraction and intellectualization, calling for levels of poetological expertise which can only be achieved when the aesthetic tendency to be imitated has evolved into a full-blown, generally recognized ‘school’ or ‘style’ with its own set of distinctive characteristics and deducible rules. On the receptive side, intermediality is constructed by the recipient on the basis of his or her active and detailed knowledge of the media involved. It takes time before a general audience will recognize an intermedial allusion and the more recent the aesthetic trend is, the less certain that recognition will become. It took thirty years for impressionism to enter musical composition and another thirty years for it to make its debut within the realm of literature.6

Visual into Textual: Forms of Intermedial Transposition in Quartet French impressionism is a perfect intermedial mould for a novel which takes place (and indeed was written) in Paris in the 1920s and which sets out to retrace the life of a woman driven by desire and her love for sensual beauty. As in the works of Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt and Gustave Caillebotte, Paris street scenes and the interiors of smoky cafés and dingy bars frequented by disillusioned petites femmes, burly barkeepers, second-rate accordion players and the occasional artiste, feature

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For studies on literary impressionism see Stowell, Gunsteren, Peters and Matz.

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prominently both as an atmospherical backdrop7 and as objects of interest in their own right. However, the intermedial transposition in Quartet goes far beyond a mere affinity of subject matter. What attracted Rhys to impressionism was its focus on atmosphere, its attention to the corporeal, to texture and the visual surface and, perhaps most importantly, to the way it lent prominence to the fleeting moment, preferring the atomistic and the fragmentary to coherence or closure. It was the three notions of atmosphere, sensuality and fragmentation that Rhys identified as the key notions in impressionist art. She could endeavour to copy these without needing to emulate their actual techniques. As with any intermedial venture, the challenge she faced in Quartet was to find suitable linguistic correlatives whose newness and amalgamation were not analogous in form, but managed to be analogous in effect.

Light into Perspective In view of the impressionist notion of atmosphere, this proved a comparatively straightforward equation, with perspective taking over the function of light and light’s determining influence on a picture’s sujet. In pictorial impressionism, an object’s metamorphosis is instanced by a change in light conditions. Claude Monet’s famous series of paintings of the Rouen Cathedral from the early 1890s all depicted the cathedral’s façade from the same angle, focusing on a single section of image throughout. In more than thirty paintings, therefore, the depicted object remained exactly the same. The object’s atmospherical value, however, did not, its temporary meaning being exclusively determined by the change in light conditions and the concomitant change in colour, shape and shades. In Quartet, the specific focus on atmosphere and temporary meaning is effected by the focalizer, as are the characters’ emotional states. Through the nature of this focalizer, the meanings of scenes are rendered ephemeral and evanescent, so that the origins of mood and atmosphere in Quartet are never determined by an exterior, (pseudo)neutral instance but lie solely in the fictional onlooker’s psyche. The church was very cool and dark-shadowed, when they came in out of the sun. It smelled of candles and incense and ancient prayers. Marya stood for a long time staring at the tall Virgin and wondered why she suggested not holiness but rather a large and peaceful tolerance of sin. We are all miserable sinners and the dust of the earth. A little more or a little less, a dirty glass or a very dirty glass, as Heidler would say… ‘And you don’t suppose that it matters to me,’ said the tall Virgin smiling so calmly above her candles and flowers. (74)

                                                            7

For space and its atmospherical function see Hoffmann.

86 Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss When Marya and her lover Heidler visit Saint Julien Le Pauvre, one of the few remaining Romanesque churches in Paris, Marya finds herself facing a statue of the Virgin Mary. Her reading of the statue is not so much prompted by the sculpture’s physiognomy than by her own current state of mind. When she imagines the Holy Virgin, who incidentally is her patron saint and namesake, looking with a benevolent eye at sin and the sinners, she exteriorizes and appeases her own moral scruples. In paying back Lois’ hospitality by seducing her husband and becoming his mistress, Marya certainly has reasons for doubting the rightfulness of her current behaviour. Quartet largely deploys a heterodiegetic narrator, who in turn externalizes the protagonist’s psyche in something amounting to an impressionistic mode. The method of characterization is subtle, making the reader experience one of the central aesthetic maxims of Rhys’s own brand of impressionism: she believed that the form of the world is inseparable from the emotional and attitudinal values superimposed upon it by a perceiver.8

The Optical Turned Objective Correlative Light is a key to impressionism, but so too are texture and surface as they are presented to the senses. A painting’s significance rests in its power to sensualize the moment, where perception becomes spatialized and time becomes momentarily suspended. Rhys is drawn to this insistence on what is sensually given and finds impressionism’s refusal to instill meaning conducive to her aims, as are its refusal to add significance or extrapolate a story. In Quartet, the external takes precedence over the internal; the dramatic mode of rendering conversations verbatim outstrips the narrative mode, just as description far exceeds argumentation. When the author does choose to let the reader share in a more general assessment of the protagonist and the situation she has placed herself in, Rhys often resorts to the device of the ‘objective correlative’. According to T. S. Eliot’s definition, which he famously expounded with reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an objective correlative is a “set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in a sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (“Hamlet” 144). As is typical in intermediality, Rhys thus takes recourse to a vener-

                                                            8

The statue in St Julien Le Pauvre is a Virgin with Child. The fact that this is never alluded to lends additional poignancy to Marya’s constructive subjectivism.

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able literary device, allowing it, though, to acquire an innovative intermedial function. In Quartet, music can serve as an objective correlative (68, 87, 108, 114) and so can other people, for example, when the narrator describes the patrons in a bar: “Opposite her a pale, long-faced girl sat in front of an untouched drink, watching the door. She was waiting for the gentleman with whom she had spent the preceding night to come along and pay for it, and naturally she was waiting in vain. Her mouth drooped, her eyes were desolate and humble” (28). This is a narratorial comment, whose superior knowledge about the girl’s personal past and immediate future mark it as such. Any connection between this isolated scene and the novel’s protagonist must be drawn solely by readerly inference. Nowhere on the text’s linguistic surface is there any explicit signposting as to the passage’s possible deeper significance (unless one wishes to count the mere fact that it has been chosen to be there). As with the impressionist emphasis on the visual and the empirical object, Rhys prefers the sensually given to the abstractly intellectual, however trite and trivial its surface meaning. Most telling of all is the short description of a young fox in the concluding section of the book.9 As one of the last instances of the novel’s animal isotopy which subtly punctuates the text, the fox in fetters functions as the living and breathing essence of Marya’s being: There was a young fox in a cage at the end of the zoo – a cage perhaps three yards long. Up and down it ran, up and down, and Marya imagined that each time it turned it did so with a certain hopefulness, as if it thought that escape was possible. Then, of course, there were the bars. It would strike its nose, turn and run again. Up and down, up and down, ceaselessly. (124)

What is striking in these examples,10 and indeed in the novel as a whole, is the almost complete absence of denotative comment and abstract analysis. Even if there is an occasional sense of narratorial presence as in the examples above, the text is largely made up of “a heap of broken images” (Eliot, “The Waste Land”, l. 22), of a sequence of disjunct vignettes with a very strong visual bias. Nowhere is the novel’s indebtedness to the visual arts more visible than in the following passage, where Marya, Heidler and Lois dine together at Lefranc’s: She watched through a slight mist a party of people who had just come into the restaurant, the movement of arms taking off overcoats, of legs in light-coloured stockings and

                                                            9 10

See also Staley 47 on this passage. For further uses of an objective correlative see 22, 25, 46, 52, 108 and 121.

88 Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss feet in low-heeled shoes walking over the wooden floor to hide themselves under the tablecloths. Against a blurred background she saw, with enormous distinctness, a woman’s profile, another’s back, the row of bottles on the counter, a man’s shoulders and his striped tie. (33f)

Not only is this a very sensual description, but it is also a very painterly one. It refuses to provide causal linkage, concentrating instead on that which chances to catch the onlooker’s eye. The passage’s structuring principle is not its temporal or logical sequence but the optical categories of proximity and focus, of foreground and background, of optical perspective, observer and vanishing point.

Snapshot into Fragmentation In impressionist art, “the basic unit is a single moment of experience, what the French painters called a ‘flash of perception’ and Debussy and Ravel translated into fragmentary musical compositions” (Gunsteren 143). Transposed into the realm of literature, the concept resulted in “disconnected fictional episodes, brief scenes that require unique organization in order to give [the text] a satisfying artistic order” (143). This literary flash-of-perception method recreates the ‘snapshot’ quality of impressionist painting, which was achieved in terms of technique by using short and thick strokes of paint to express substance rather than detail (Düchting 8f). The much noted (Howells 50, Maurel 26, Angier 197, Staley 132) episodic and fragmentary nature of Jean Rhys’s first novel is thus a direct consequence of its allegiance to the impressionists. Through it the novel seeks to emulate the flash-of-perception method of impressionist paintings and to convey something of the actual sensation of living. Like Rhys’s contemporary Virginia Woolf, who wanted her art to mirror the “myriad of impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel” (2089), Rhys considered human experience as consisting of sensual and emotional fragments, and, in the words of her London counterpart, sought to convey “this unknown, this varying, uncircumscribed spirit […] with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible” (2089). The fact that this implied transgressing many of the timehonoured precepts of narrative mimesis was a risk both authors seem to have been willing to take.11 As already noted, one of the most conspicuous characteristics of impressionist painting was the way unmixed primary colours were applied side by

                                                            11

For studies on intermediality in Virginia Woolf see the contributions in Gillespie.

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side, so that their fusion would occur in the eye of the viewer. In a similar way, if the many disparate, fragmented or ambiguous elements in Quartet are to be at all naturalized, that task has to be taken over by the recipient. On a macrolevel, the text’s lack of coherence makes itself more felt by what it does not say, than by what it does. A case in point is Marya’s unexpected behaviour when her husband is released from prison. Throughout the novel, Marya’s weekly visits to her husband, who has been imprisoned in Fresnes for multiple thefts, are shown to be rare moments of comparative peace and tranquillity. “Marya thought of her husband with a passion of tenderness and protection. He represented her vanished youth – her youth, her gaiety, her joy in life. […] She went to the prison gaily, as if she were going to visit a friend, and all the way there she would revolve her plans for Stephan” (98). In the later stages of her affair when staying with the Heidlers had become unbearable, Marya would stay indoors in a seedy hotel room lying “huddled with her arm over her eyes” (97) waiting for her lover’s brief daily visit. On the seventh she would go to Fresnes to see her husband and would “return[…] soothed, comforted, and because she reacted physically so quickly, once more desirable” (97). Yet only three pages later Marya declares, “I shall never live with him again. That’s finished” (100). And although upon his return Stephan is as gentle and solicitous as ever despite her physical withdrawal (a fact which Marya herself seems to be aware of as she ponders on her sudden “irrational feeling of security and happiness” and is surprised to see her mouth look “so smiling and peaceful” 104), the novel still ends with Marya viewing her husband as a symbol of “everything that all her life had baffled and tortured her” (143). While Marya is doubtlessly a highly irrational character who is shown to be a slave to her instincts and mood swings, her decision to leave her husband is a weighty one, strangely out of keeping with the only element in her life marked by regularity, constancy and selfless behaviour. If she did make a conscious decision at some point, it is a decision the narrator chooses to ignore and refuses to make plausible. Marya’s unexplained flightiness is only one example of the novel’s characteristic absence of a logocentric, linear and unified structure. There are a number of ellipses (for example between chapters 12 and 13 and between 14 and 15), as well as apparently unrelated scenes and most certainly a denial of closure. Two of the longer scenes, both of which feature Cairn, a young American who takes some interest in Marya, have no apparent plot function – the impression is that they are there precisely because they are irrelevant; or, as Marya says after her second and last meeting with Cairn, “Before she had walked three steps from the Closerie des Lilas she had forgotten all about him” (74).

90 Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss Although the ending does furnish a provisional solution – Marya is doubly victimized, dropped by Heidler and left by Stephan – the protagonist’s future fate is left open. Moreover, in a final ironical twist, Stephan is allowed to indulge in self-pity for having fallen prey to female predators. In terms of the time structure of the text, there is one major anachronic discrepancy between story-order and text-order, namely that of the analeptic exposition of chapter two. In the impressionist snapshot technique, we are presented with short episodes, fragmented scenes and minimal narrative units. While all of the twenty-three chapters are very short, some of them are even further subdivided into several subchapters or sections. Some are no longer than a couple of paragraphs, or even only a single paragraph, as for example in two scenes with Heidler and Marya in a taxi (75, 84), the scene in the church (74f) and Marya’s last visit to the prison preceding Stephan’s release (98). These macro-structural features are mirrored by various techniques of fragmentation on the micro-structural level. At the novel’s beginning, the impressionist brush stroke aesthetics are particularly prominent. On pages 8 to 10 almost every other paragraph introduces a new thought, a new impression, a new idea, another memory, another perception; the reader is virtually hurled into the idiosyncratic world of disparate sense impressions, the world in which Marya moves. Less frequent but all the more significant are the instances of this style on a syntactic level. The fragmented syntax of halfsentences, connected or unconnected phrases or individual words emulates impressionist processes, both perceptually as well as cognitively: Voices, steps, a knock on the door. She held her breath. (58) No past. No future. Nothing but the present: the flowers on the table, the taste of wine in her mouth. (67) Little wheels in her head that turned perpetually. I love him. I want him. I hate her. And he’s a swine. He’s out to hurt me. What shall I do? I love him. I want him. I hate her. (97)

Sternlicht in his 1997 monograph on Jean Rhys’ narrative art describes the narrative situation in Rhys’s first novel as straightforwardly monoperspectival: “The novel’s point of view is simple and consistent: Marya’s perspective on her life” (47). This is an unfounded simplification which does not do justice to the perspectival complexity of the text: the following analysis of authorial interference will show how Rhys’s subtle use of multiperspectivity is one of the novel’s major means for translating impressionist heterogeneity and atomisation into verbal art.

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Within the framework of Stanzel’s theory of narrative, Quartet can be defined as an authorial narrative with a number of figural elements. On the typological circle, the narrative situation in Quartet can be located within the authorial-figural continuum. The novel features an authorial narrator who is able to move freely in space and time. Although the characteristics of a tellercharacter are not a typical feature of the narrative voice in the novel, they do surface, particularly in chapter two, at the beginning of which we find a reader-address as well as a manifestation of the pseudo-omniscience of the authorial narrator, who assumes a decidedly ironical stance: “Marya, you must understand, had not been suddenly and ruthlessly transplanted from solid comfort to the hazards of Montmartre” (14). This analeptic expository chapter provides the antecedents of the story, i.e. Marya’s life prior to her move to Paris, in the sense of a summary. Here we are confronted with the narrator’s authorial distance vis-à-vis the characters concerned. The narrator recapitulates Marya’s life as a chorus girl and the circumstances of her involvement with, and marriage to, Stephan, doing so with a certain ironical detachment: “Marya, who had painfully learnt a certain amount of caution, told herself that this stranger and alien was probably a bad lot” (16). Strictly in accordance with the maxim of authorial fairness the narrator then goes on to disclose Stephan’s perception of Marya: “As to Monsieur Zelli, he drew his own conclusions from her air of fatigue, disillusion and extreme youth, her shadowed eyes, her pathetic and unconscious lapses into helplessness” (17). There are a number of other instances of authorial interference in the rest of the novel. At the beginning of chapter four the authorial narrator not only affords us brief glimpses of Madame and Monsieur Hautchamp’s petitbourgeois thoughts but also demonstrates his superior knowledge, when she (according to Lanser’s rule) feels obliged to comment on Madame Hautchamp’s somewhat cryptic thoughts: “Madame Hautchamp meant all of them. All the strange couples who filled her hotel – internationalists who invariably got into trouble sooner or later” (27). Occasionally, the narrator offers an outside view of Marya, either in terms of an authorial description or through the eyes of other characters. First the narrator introduces Marya as “a blonde girl, not very tall, slender-waisted. Her face was short, high cheek-boned, full-lipped; her long eyes slanted upwards towards the temples and were gentle and oddly remote in expression” (7). Shortly afterwards we receive an impression of her through a direct quotation from Miss De Solla’s thoughts: “Is she really married to the Zelli man, I wonder? She’s a decorative little person – decorative but strangely pathetic” (8). When the Heidlers are waiting for Marya in a restaurant we receive another external view of the protagonist upon her arrival: “She was very pale,

92 Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss her eyes were shadowed, her lips hastily and inadequately rouged. She was wearing a black dress under her coat, a sleeveless, shapeless, sack-like garment, and she appeared frail, childish, and extraordinarily shabby” (38f). In order to balance Marya’s strongly biased judgment of Lois, the narrator’s quasi-omniscience allows the reader to become acquainted with an entirely different attitude towards Lois, Marya, Heidler and their inter-relationship at the beginning of chapter twelve – that of a stranger, that of an outsider. Monsieur Lefranc, owner of a restaurant much frequented by Anglo-Saxon expatriates “admired Lois Heidler. He considered her a good-looking woman, a sensible, tidy, well-dressed woman who knew how to appreciate food” (66). To underline this narratorial statement we are granted a glance into Monsieur Lefranc’s mind: Then Monsieur Lefranc cast an astute glance at her deeply circled eyes, another at Marya’s reflection in the glass and told himself: ‘Ça y est. I knew it. Ah, the grue!’ So he waited on Lois with sympathy and gentleness; he waited on Marya grimly, and when he looked at Heidler, his expression said: ‘Come, come, my dear sir. As man to man, what a mistake you’re making.’ (66)

The external authorial view highlights the narrator’s superior knowledge of the protagonist’s inner life: “Marya was unconscious of Monsieur Lefranc’s hostility” (67). The reader then becomes acquainted with yet another perspective on Marya, that of the American writer Cairn, who appears to disapprove of her entanglement with the Heidlers and who cannot make up his mind whether she is taken advantage of or whether “she knows perfectly well what she’s up to, and can bargain while the bargaining’s good” (71f). Another, highly critical, view of the protagonist comes from a minor character, Miss Anna Nicolson, an American painter of landscapes, whose thoughts we are allowed to share: “The idea of a woman making such an utter fool of herself. It’s hardly to be believed. Her hand is trembling. No poise … Lois needn’t be afraid of her. But then, Lois is a bit of a fool herself. Englishwomen very often are” (91). In chapter seventeen we are also granted a brief look into Heidler’s mind, which reveals him as a rather sensitive man, quite in contrast to what we have been made to believe from Marya’s point of view, while this throws a more critical light on the protagonist’s unreasonableness: “‘I’m still fond of her,’ he told himself. ‘If only she’d leave it at that’” (101). At the very end of the novel we follow Stephan after he has abandoned Marya and is being picked up by Mademoiselle Chardin. In a significant reversal of the gender roles and the power structure in the Heidler-Marya relationship, we are left with the desolate and disillusioned male comforted by the authoritative female:

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‘Encore une grue,’ he was thinking. At that moment women seemed to him loathsome, horrible – soft and disgusting weights suspended round the necks of men, dragging them downwards. At the same time he longed to lay his head on Mademoiselle Chardin’s shoulder and weep his life away. She put her warm hand over his firmly and said: ‘My little Stephan, don’t worry.’ (144)

Although the narrative focus is clearly on the protagonist, her inner life and her impression of the outside world, the authorial narrator is nevertheless a palpable presence, reporting, describing, very rarely commenting but always moving from character to character and introducing their perspective and subjective evaluative viewpoints, which substantiate, complete or challenge Marya’s vantage point. The reader is left with a kaleidoscopic image, a perfect rendering in literature of the impressionist brush stroke technique. Like unmixed primary colours placed side by side, the protagonists’ subjective standpoints are placed alongside each other, each important, each equally valid. As with impressionism and the particular responsibility it confers on the perceptive act, in Rhys’s novel it is the reader who synchronises the disparate views into an organic whole, one entirely of the reader’s own making.

Functionalising Intermediality: Modernism, Meta-Aesthetics, and, always, Paris Now that some of Quartet’s more conspicuous modes of intermediality have been discussed, the question arises about how they are employed and what purpose they are expected to fulfil. With the novel following a single character and the story of her ill-fated liaison, there can be little doubt about there being a particularly intimate connection between protagonist and pattern, between Marya’s psyche and the novel’s underyling generative principle of intermediality. A character who is made to say of herself, “I don’t think I’d ever plan anything out carefully” (43) and who is described as having “made an utter mess of her love affair” and “an utter mess of her existence” (91) finds in literary impressionism a perfect formal equivalent. Torn as she is between reason and feeling, between knowing what is right and desiring what is wrong, Marya has even been read as showing distinct signs of schizophrenia (Abel 171). While we acknowledge Abel’s construction of Marya as being caught in a double bind between the quest for paternal support and the need for freedom, we prefer to place the conception of her character in the larger context of modernism and its preoccupation with the divided self (Kronfeld 19). As with Virginia Woolf’s intermedial ‘word music’ experiments, where music serves as a means of unveiling deeper and contradictory

94 Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss levels of a protagonist’s psyche,12 Rhys’s literary renderings of impressionist technique develop novel ways of putting the divided self into textual practice. The same can be said about the novel’s implicit world view. The “essential craziness of existence” (44), the “utter futility of things” (46), the fact that life is “an appalling muddle” (70), a “dark river that swept you on you didn’t know where” (112) is textualized via a set of techniques which deliberately forego the use of narrative logic, coherence, dénouement and closure. The novel takes its erratic beginning somewhere along the course of that dark river, never reaching an estuary. One lonely night after taking her meal in a shabby students’ restaurant, Marya walks home to her hotel and experiences a negative epiphany: “‘It’s a dream’ [...]; ‘it isn’t real’ [...]. ‘La vie toute faite des morceaux. Sans suite comme des rêves.’ Who wrote that? Gauguin.” (96). Life to Marya appears chaotic, fragmentary, appears to be in pieces and to have become as meaningless and inconsequential as a dream. What is vital in the context of our approach, is that the author does not direct her protagonist to say this in her own words, but in those of a painter who has spent his formative years in impressionist circles, who has been taught by Pissarro and Cézanne and who has contributed to five of the eight impressionist exhibitions between 1880 and 1886 (Brettell 23). This explicit heteromedial thematization of painting and impressionist art is the intermedial pivot around which the text’s multifarious heteromedial devices revolve. Signalling the novel’s intermedial focus, it is also one of the most important passages to explicitly establish a close link between intermedial modes of fragmentation and the text’s inherently modernist world view. Because it endorses some of the generative principles of pictorial impressionism, Rhys’s Quartet has a slightly deviant feel to it. It does not read like a traditional mimetic novel. Its tone is a different one, one that is disturbing and therefore at times anti-illusive. The text’s unconventionality distracts the reader from following the story line, alerting him instead to the novel’s formal make-up and the way it deviates from what is expected, and from what is cognitively schematised.13 The novel’s anti-logocentric elements – its sensuality, ambivalence and fragmentation – are responsible both for the text’s ‘writerly’ (Barthes 5) character and its concomitantly active readerly stance. Quartet’s anti-logocentric features are also responsible for its meta-aesthetic character: the novel probes the boundaries of the narrative genre and explores innovative ways of capturing the sensation of a life “sans suite”. Intermedial-

                                                            12

13

Cf. “The String Quartet” (1921) and The Waves (1931). For an investigation into Woolf’s use of ‘word music’ see Jacobs. For general schema theory see Schank and Abelson; for the use of schema theory in literature see Thorndyke.

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ity in Quartet thus serves both as a sensual technique to paint the world in Marya’s mental colours and as an intellectual means for enabling implicit comment on the mimetic tradition. Those means also serve in general to broaden the aesthetic scope of the narrative genre. Whatever other functions intermediality may perform in the book, Quartet’s indebtedness to impressionism is primarily a tribute to the genius loci of the novel’s setting. French impressionism lends Paris a meaning all of its own, turning the capital into the metropolis of Manet’s barmaids, Degas’ absinth drinkers, Renoir’s opera lovers and Pissarro’s rainy boulevards. When Quartet describes Paris as the city of the demimonde, it draws on precisely this set of culturally pre-given images.14 In fact, it is striking to see just how close the novel remains to its intermedial source-texts, faithfully reproducing the entire repertoire of stock ingredients – we are given the smoky café, the dingy bar, the cheap restaurant and various other établissements of a shadier kind. It is, however, Rhys’s additions to the intermedial sources that are vital, with the expatriate “Montparnos” (96) being made to carry the action where the stereotypical barmaid, waiter and concierge would not. It seems more appropriate then, to imagine Quartet as an impressionist picture turned alive. Instead of wandering through a literary rendition of an empirical city, Marya takes her solitary walks through a city twice removed. She is a literary character made to act in front of an ekphrastic backdrop which is an ostentatiously intermedial emulation of the late nineteenth-century painterly imagination of the city. It is hard to imagine anything more consciously aesthetic and further removed from the solely cathartic impetus that has so often, and we think wrongly, been imputed to Jean Rhys’s early masterpiece.

Works Cited Abel, Elizabeth. “Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys.” Contemporary Literature 20:2 (1979): 155-177. Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys: Life and Work. Boston: Little, 1990. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. 1973. Trans. Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Borinsky, Alicia. “Jean Rhys: Poses of a Woman as Guest.” Poetics Today 6.1-2 (1985): 229-243. Brenneman, David A. Paris in the Age of Impressionism. Masterworks from the Musée D’Orsay. New York: Abrams, 2002. Brettell, Richard R., and Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, eds. Gauguin and Impressionism. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.

                                                            14

In an alternative reading, Zeikowitz sees Marya as constructing her own, feminine version of Paris, thus undermining Le Corbusier’s masculine-based cityscape.

96 Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Crepaldi, Gabriele. Impressionismus: Die Kunst in Frankreich zwischen 1850 und 1920. Trans. Christina Ammann. Cologne: DuMont, 2002. Draine, Betsy. “Chronotope and Intertext: The Case of Jean Rhys’s Quartet.” Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History. Ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991. 318-337. Düchting, Hajo. Die Kunst des Impressionismus. Stuttgart: Belser, 2003. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “Hamlet and His Problems.” 1919. Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1951. 144-5. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “The Waste Land.” 1922. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Vol. 2. 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2006. 2295-2308. Gillespie, Diane F., and Leslie K. Hankins, eds. Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Selected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. New York: Pace UP, 1997. Gilson, Annette. “Internalizing Mastery: Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, and the Fiction of Autobiography.” Modern Fiction Studies 50:3 (2004): 63256. Gunsteren, Julia van. Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990. Hoffmann, Gerhard. Raum, Situation, erzählte Wirklichkeit. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978. Howells, Coral Ann. Jean Rhys. New York: Harvester, 1991. Jacobs, Peter. “‘The Second Violin Tuning in the Ante-Room’: Virginia Woolf and Music.” The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane F. Gillespie. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993. 227-260. Kappers den Hollander, Martien. “Jean Rhys and the Dutch Connection.” Maatstaf 30.4 (1982): 30-40. ——. “Measure for Measure: Quartet and When the Wicked Man.” Jean Rhys Review 2.2 (1988): 2-17. Kronfeld, Chana. On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Lagerroth, Ulla-Britta, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling, eds. Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. Leech, Geoffrey N. A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London: Longman, 1969. Maslen, Cathleen, and Sue Thomas. Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women’s Melancholia. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009.

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Lanser, Susan Sniader. “Sexing the Narrative: Propriety, Desire, and the Engendering of Narratology.” Narrative 3.1 (1995): 85-94. Matz, Jesse. Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. Maurel, Sylvie. Jean Rhys. London: Macmillan, 1998. Patey, Caroline. “Right Bank, Left Bank and an Island: Ford’s Fragmented ville lumiere.” Ford Madox Ford and the City. Ed. Sara Haslam. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 153-167. Peters, John G. Conrad and Impressionism. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. Rajewski, Irina O. Intermedialität. Stuttgart: UTB, 2002. Rhys, Jean. The Left Bank, and Other Stories. London: Cape, 1927. ——. Quartet. 1928. London: Penguin, 2000. Savory, Elaine. Jean Rhys. Cambridge: CUP, 1998. Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson. Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977. Seshagiri, Urmila. “Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century.” Modernism/Modernity 13.3 (2006): 487-505. Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” 1917. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. London: Longman, 1988. 16-30. Simpson, Anne B. Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Staley, Thomas F. “The Emergence of a Form: Style and Consciousness in Jean Rhys’s Quartet.” Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys. Ed. Pierrette M. Frickey. Washington: Three Continents, 1990. 129-147. Stanzel, Franz Karl. A Theory of Narrative. Trans. Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: CUP, 1984. Sternlicht, Sanford. Jean Rhys. New York: Twayne, 1997. Stowell, Peter. Literary Impressionism, James and Chekhov. Athens: University of Georgia P, 1980. Thomas, Sue. “Adulterous Liaisons: Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen and Feminist Reading.” Australian Humanities Review. June 2001. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-June2001/thomas.html (16/5/2009). Thorndyke, Perry W. Cognitive Structures in Human Story Comprehension and Memory. Santa Monica: Rand, 1975. Wagner, Peter, ed. Icons –Texts – Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Woolf, Virginia. “The String Quartet.” 1921. A Haunted House. The Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Susan Dick. London: Vintage, 2003. 132-135.

98 Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” 1925. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Vol. 2. 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2006. 2087-2092. ——. The Waves. 1931. Ed. Gillian Beer. Oxford: OUP, 1992. Zeikowitz, Richard E. “Writing a Feminine Paris in Jean Rhys’s Quartet.” Journal of Modern Literature 28.2 (2005): 1-17.

Elke Frietsch

The Surrealist Artist is Strolling around with the Little PuppyDog Sigmund Freud at his Heels: Perceptions of Space, the Subconscious and Gender Codifications in 1920s Paris J’oubliais donc de dire que le passage de l’Opéra est un grand cercueil de verre et, comme la même blancheur déifiée depuis les temps qu’on l’adorait dans les suburbes romaines préside toujours au double jeu de l’amour et de la mort, Libido qui, ces jours-ci, a élu pour temple les livres de médicine et qui flâne maintenant suivie du petit chien Sigmund Freud, on voit dans les galeries à leurs changeantes lueurs qui vont de la clarté du sépulcre à l’ombre de la volupté de délicieuses filles servant l’un et l’autre culte avec de provocants mouvements des hanches et le retroussis aigu du sourire. En scène, Mesdemoiselles, en scène, et déshabillez-vous un peu… (Aragon 70)

In the art and literature of the 1920s, big European cities were frequently imagined in terms of the feminine. This may come as a surprise in view of the fact that life in the metropolis is usually characterized by anonymity, speed and technology – aspects to which one traditionally would more readily ascribe masculine terms. However, it might become more understandable if one bears in mind that, from the nineteenth century onwards, middle-class values increasingly came to be represented in terms of feminine allegory. Women, who were almost entirely barred from participating in political life and generally perceived as ‘other’, as more natural, could, precisely because of this ‘otherness’, serve to symbolize aspects of the world from which they were excluded.1 The fact that teeming urban life was associated with processes of the subconscious might further clarify the feminine encoding of the European metropolis, since the female body at that time frequently served to symbolize the sensual.2 As far as Berlin is concerned, two motifs dominated at the time: that of the apocalypse, and that of progress. The apocalypse was frequently symbolized by the image of the metropolis as the “whore Babylon” (Bergius); progress by that of the “new woman” (Kupschinsky; Volkening); at times, these clichés could even overlap. While Berlin in the 1920s was, in terms of avantgarde art, dominated by expressionism and Dadaism, in Paris surrealism 1

2

For political and artistic allegorizations, cf. Wenk; for the embodiment of the “true, good and beautiful” in female shape in particular, cf. Warner. For the analogy of metropolis and the subconscious, cf. Hank. For the interior, femininity and psychoanalysis, cf. Pollak.

100 Elke Frietsch reigned supreme. Expressionism and Dadaism rebelled against the Kaiser’s antiquated dictate regarding all matters of artistic expression; consequently, the metropolitan imagery of Berlin abounds in fantasies of violence, the crime of passion being a popular motif. Destroying the image of the woman was, to the artist, tantamount to the destruction of bourgeois values and a celebration of anarchy and the cult of genius (Täuber 113-137). In contrast, surrealism concerned itself with the relationship between body and mind, the dream-like and bizarre. Consequently, destructive fantasies of violence occur much less frequently in the imagery of Paris than in that of Berlin. In the case of the former, violence was more closely linked to productivity, vision and creation, while at the same time the bourgeois code of reason was being criticized.3 Surrealist artists made use of Freudian psychoanalysis, but also distanced themselves from it in order to celebrate the independence of art.4 When Louis Aragon ironically writes, in the passage from Le Paysan de Paris quoted above, that Libido has taken to strolling around followed by the little puppy-dog Sigmund Freud, he imagines himself as a flâneur at his leisure leading on the leash the subconscious ‘discovered’ by psychoanalysis. In the following article, I shall examine how the surrealists imagined Paris as a mythical place, and what significance was assigned to images of the subconscious and the feminine in this context. Taking as a starting point an analysis of Le paysan de Paris (1926) and Nadja (1928), two manifestoes of surrealist painting, I will examine surrealist pictures of Paris and their encoding in terms of metaphors relating to the human body. The surrealists’ relationship with text and image was many-layered and at times ambiguous. As Rosalind Krauss has shown, Breton, in his essay “Le surréalisme et la peinture” (1928), gives precedence to seeing above all other forms of perception. At the same time, however, he prefers the automatism of writing to the visual sign. In a panegyric on ‘the image’, the author proclaims that “[l]’œil existe à l’état sauvage” (Breton, “surréalisme” 11). In another passage, however, he criticizes the illusionary nature of painting and emphasizes the intellectual value of writing (Breton, “surréalisme”; Krauss 137). Krauss explains that the “distinction between writing and seeing” is one of the many antonymies of which Breton claims that surrealism will “obliterate them in the higher synthesis of a surreality” (Krauss 137).5 Hence it appears to me both

3

4

5

For the relationship between eroticism, violence and gender in surrealism, cf. e.g. Gauthier, Krieger, Werner 70-74. While the surrealists made use of individual results and problems of Freudian psychoanalysis, they were not interested in a scientific examination of the topic and had only a very limited knowledge of relevant literature (Bauer, Krieger 152). All German quotes in this paper were translated by Caterina Novák.

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adequate and interesting to analyse written and visual productions of surrealist art in terms of complementary and interrelated forms. It is a well-known fact that surrealist artists were often wont to combine words and images unsystematically and haphazardly: it is said, for example, that the titles of René Magritte’s works were usually ‘found’ at random by friends and acquaintances. In the same vein, the illustrations to Breton’s major works also appear to have come about ‘without meaning’.6 In my opinion, however, the use of female imagery in literature as well as in artistic productions runs like a ‘red thread’ through surrealist art. Though these images are varied and impossible to reduce to individual meanings, what is striking is the recurrent surrealist image of the woman as phantasm. Surrealists saw women on the one hand as natural, on the other as enticing and deceptive creatures – in this respect, surrealist interpretations of the feminine complement Breton’s praise as much as his criticism of visual signs. I shall analyse the means by which the surrealists used the equation of the feminine with ‘the image’ in order to stage and to naturalize the mysterious, the incomprehensible, the contradictory while strolling through the metropolis. In doing so, I shall broach the issue of how traditional myths of nature and femininity came to establish themselves within the framework of surrealism, but also how, at the same time, surrealism opened up the way for a critique of these myths.

Paris as Text – Paris as Image In the 1920s, Paris fascinated artists from all over the world. The city became “Europe’s hedonist metropolis” (Fraquelli 106), symbolizing artistic liberty, all that was new, exotic and ‘other’. It was already in the middle of the nineteenth century that the then popular combination of cities with feminine codifications began to emerge in its 6

For the mysteriousness of these photographs, cf. Krauss 140. Krauss then goes on to develop her theories concerning the “photographic circumstances of surrealism”. Bürger stresses the alienating effect of the photographic illustrations in Nadja (Bürger 124). Faber explains that the function of the photographs with which the text of Nadja is interspersed and which do not stand in any direct relation to the text is “to allow a freer interpretation of the ‘settings’ of the novel” […] Following the example of Breton in Nadja, the surrealists roamed Paris in a state of consciously enhanced perceptivity in search of marvellous encounters – such as that of the oft-quoted “sewing machine with the umbrella on the dissecting table.” This explains their admiration for photographs in which such scenarios were apparently to be found, regardless of whether these were selected from already existing pictures […] taken a priori without any underlying surrealist intention, or – to remain with the example of Nadja mentioned above – taken in this spirit, like those of Jacques-André Boiffard (Faber 12, 15).

102 Elke Frietsch full significance.7 As Linda Hentschel, following Michel Foucault, shows, the association of urban spaces with the feminine,8 which dates back to classical antiquity, was enhanced by the increasing prominence of sexual discourses in the course of the nineteenth century. In Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, first published in 1857, the city becomes, in the words of Hentschel, “the space of self-performance of the modern, male subject, of that man in the crowd who fights for his self by situating himself towards and within the city as towards the other sex” (Hentschel 90). In the surrealist movement of the 1920s, this fight for the self found a new expression. The surrealists chose Paris as their “headquarters”.9 The first joint exhibition of surrealist painters was opened in November 1925 in the Galerie Pierre and included works by Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Man Ray and André Masson (Fraquelli 110). André Breton’s “Manifeste du Surréalisme”, published in 1924, became the basis for the artistic movement. In his manifestoes, Breton opposed the dictate of thought and the control of reason, advocating “purely psychical automatism”. In line with Breton’s automatism, the artist was to allow himself to be determined by coincidence and led by instinctive processes. Max Ernst’s painting “Paris – Rêve”, dating from 1924-25, serves to exemplify this method (see Fig. 1).

7

8

9

Especially for the perception of gender and space in the nineteenth century, cf. D’Souza/McDonough. By now, there exists a wealth of feminist literature dealing with gender codifications of urban spaces. A few examples: Weigel Traum – Stadt – Frau, Weigel “Die Städte sind weiblich und nur dem Sieger hold”, as well as Nierhaus. Paris became the “Centrale Surréaliste” (Breton, Nadja 51).

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Fig. 1: Max Ernst: “Paris – Rêve”, 1924/25. Oil on canvas, 64,7 x 54 cm; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. © VBK Wien, 2009

It shows a dream vision of the metropolis created at random. What is characteristic is the fact that the randomly created shapes are converted into some sort of order. The blue stripe on the upper edge of the paining evokes the sky, the round shape emerging from the white background seems like the sun or the moon, and the colourful shapes which dominate the cityscape in lieu of roads and houses resemble fishes which dissolve into geometrical shapes. What appears as giving oneself up to coincidence is, in the end, usually converted into a particular form, structured by physicality. The fishes in Max Ernst’s painting “Paris – Rêve” are, according to Freudian psychoanalysis, a

104 Elke Frietsch clear symbol of sexuality.10 What is here symbolized by fishes is in other pictures and texts often represented by women as mystical creatures. The artist becomes a flâneur conquering the body of Paris encoded in feminine terms. Walter Benjamin remarked about the surrealist method: “At the centre of this world of objects there is the most dreamed of all its objects, the city of Paris itself” (150). In Nadja and Le Paysan de Paris, the novelists André Breton and Louis Aragon hand their protagonists over to the city by sending them, driven by chance, on interminable walks.11 The male flâneur explores, the woman serves as his medium. In his text, Aragon takes on the role of the first-person narrator, a naïve peasant who surrenders himself to the mysterious spaces of Paris, in which mythology lives.12 Like Max Ernst he perceives Paris as an ocean teeming with mysteries. Paris strikes him as a “[l]ueur glauque, en quelque manière abyssale, qui tient de la clarté soudaine sous une jupe qu’on relève d’une jambe qui se découvre” (Aragon 50). For him, the urban space constitutes a refuge for endangered thoughts of a world already almost submerged: Le grand instinct américain, importé dans la capitale par un préfet du second Empire, qui tend à recouper au cordeau le plan de Paris, va bientôt rendre impossible le maintien de ces aquariums humains déjà morts à leur vie primitive, et qui méritent pourtant d’être regardés comme les recéleurs de plusieurs mythes modernes, car c’est aujourd’hui seulement que la pioche les menace, qu’ils sont effectivement devenus les sanctuaires d’un culte de l’éphémère, qu’ils sont devenus le paysage fantomatique des plaisirs et des professions maudites, incompréhensibles hier et que demain ne connaîtra jamais. (50-51)

While the first-person narrator roams the city in search of the mysterious, feminine, which takes on a wide variety of shapes, in Nadja the mysterious is embodied in a sole female protagonist. By chance Breton meets Nadja, dishevelled and shabbily dressed, in the streets of Paris.13 Her unusual beauty and her spontaneous nature are to him both fascinating and foreign. The text centres not on Nadja or Breton’s love for her, but the things which are con-

10

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12

13

During this period, Max Ernst was often guided by Freudian psychoanalysis (Spies 33-35). For the allegorical connotation of the feminine with the body of fishes and water, cf. Wagner 29-31. Interpretations can be found for example in Bürger (104-138); for the surrealist link between nature and the ‘feminine-subconscious’ in Aragon and Breton (among others), cf. Werner 75-80. For Aragon’s life and his relationship with women at the time of writing Le Paysan de Paris, cf. Hörner 169-93. For the avant-garde moments in Aragon’s concept of the flâneur, cf. Neumeyer 266-294. Historical documents and attempts at an interpretation of Breton’s relationship with Nadja can be found in Hörner 72-91.

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veyed through Nadja as a medium. As Walter Benjamin writes, Breton is “closer to the things to which Nadja is close than to Nadja herself” (149). Nadja stands for the subconscious, which, according to Breton, ultimately cannot be grasped by psychoanalysis. Breton explains that he values the findings of psychoanalysis, but that it is unable to solve life’s real mysteries, continually producing new errors in its attempts to explain Freudian slips (Breton, Nadja 23-24). It could not venture as far as the fundamental, real things of one’s own experience. In the following experience he describes what he in the end perceives as the inexplicable and esoteric: Le jour de la première représentation de Couleur du Temps, d’Apollinaire, au Conservatoire Renée Maubel, comme à l’entracte je m’entretenais au balcon avec Picasso, un jeune homme s’approche de moi, balbutie quelques mots, finit par me faire entendre qu’il m’avait pris pour un de ses amis, tenu pour mort à la guerre. Naturellement, nous en restons là. Peu après, par l’intermédiaire de Jean Paulhan, j’entre en correspondance avec Paul Eluard sans qu’alors nous ayons la moindre représentation physique l’un de l’autre. Au cours d’une permission, il vient me voir: c’est lui qui s’était porté vers moi à Couleur du Temps. (Breton, Nadja 24-25)

Breton is not looking for logical explanations for coincidences, for which the experience quoted above becomes the archetype. He strives to transcend the traditional barriers between body and mind, logic and unreason, in order to let himself be enchanted by the mysterious. The telepathically gifted Nadja, whom he meets in the metropolis, becomes a substitute for his wish “de recontrer la nuit, dans un bois, une femme belle et nue” (33-34). With Nadja, the mystery is transferred from nature into civilization.14 Everything about Nadja is mysterious. In contrast to other passers-by, she walks with her head held high. Her way of walking is so dainty that her feet barely touch the ground. Her face is curiously made-up, her eyes exude a peculiar magic. Their chance encounter strikes Breton as eerily fateful: “Sans hésitation j’adresse la parole à l’inconnue, tout en m’attendant, j’en conviens du reste, au pire” (59). In reply to his question concerning her identity she answers simply “Je suis l’âme errante” (69). In the weeks following this encounter, Nadja and Breton have the strangest adventures, visiting places of historical interest and attempting to trace their history, historical events and their longdead protagonists. Not only Nadja’s psyche but also her outward appearance seems hard to grasp. She is not always shabbily dressed; at times she even appears strikingly elegant. She is very receptive of the surrealist texts which Breton gives her to read. However, his talks with her can, at times, be very complicated and exhausting. Breton finds peace from the maelstrom of his 14

For the mythological aspect or rather the transformation of culture back into nature in Breton’s Nadja, cf. Steinwachs.

106 Elke Frietsch walks with Nadja at home with his wife, while his medium is left behind alone. Although Breton is convinced that he has Nadja in his power, that he controls her thoughts and actions, she seems to exude a danger which cannot be tamed and which threatens her surroundings as much as herself. When Breton asks the artist Max Ernst whether he wants to paint a portrait of Nadja, Ernst declines on the grounds that he has been warned by a clairvoyante that he will meet a woman named “Nadia ou Natacha qu’il n’aimerait pas et qui [...] causerait un mal physique à la femme qu’il aime” (104). When Nadja one day tells Breton about physical violence once inflicted on her, he feels irrevocably disgusted by her. Although he is still fascinated by her capacity for pure intuition, he is convinced that she will inevitably fail and perish when he leaves her. This realization of her inability to survive drives him to slowly abandoning her. When he is told that she has gone mad and has been committed to an asylum, he does not visit her. “J’avais, depuis assez longtemps”, he sums up, “cessé de m’entendre avec Nadja. A vrai dire peut-être ne nous sommes-nous jamais entendus, tout au moins sur la manière d’envisager les choses simples de l’existence” (125). He finds redemption in his love for a woman whom he does not see as a mystery, a chimera, and who obscures his memories of Nadja. His quest for coincidence and knowledge thus comes to a kind of end. On his rambles through Paris, Breton had been looking for ‘the truth’ in Nadja’s manifold faces. At this point, he explained: “J’aime beaucoup ces hommes qui se laissent enfermer la nuit dans un musée pour pouvoir contempler à leur aise, en temps illicite, un portrait de femme qu’ils éclairent au moyen d’une lampe sourde. Comment, ensuite, n’en sauraient-ils pas de cette femme beaucoup plus que nous n’en savons? Il se peut que la vie demande à être déchiffrée comme un cryptogramme” (112). Given the fact that he equates femininity with life itself, Breton has to rid himself of the complicated Nadja if he does not want to hurt himself. Nadja could provide a moment of inspiration, but not the basis for a lasting relationship. Breton’s imagery of the museum in which the visitor locks himself in order to decipher life in the picture of a woman is characteristic of the surrealist flâneur. What is exposed in individual pictures in the museum, can be found in living pictures in the space of the metropolis.15 Aragon too makes use of images of femininity in his quest for knowledge. He mentions “le vaste corps de Paris” (51) and ponders the probable conse15

Breton himself seems to suggest this interpretation when he writes, in “Le surréalisme et la peinture” (1928): “Or, je l’avoue, j’ai passé comme un fou dans les salles glissantes des musées: je ne suis pas le seul. Pour quelques regards merveilleux que m’ont jetés des femmes en tout semblables à celles d’aujourd’hui, je n’ai pas été dupe un instant de ce que m’offraient d’inconnu ces murs souterrains et inébranlables. […] Dehors la rue disposait pour moi de mille plus vrais enchantements.” (Breton, “surréalisme” 13)

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quences of intended changes in urban development: “On peut se demander si une bonne partie du fleuve humain qui transporte journellement de la Bastille à la Madeleine d’incroyables flots de rêverie et de langueur ne va pas se déverser dans cette échappée nouvelle et modifier ainsi tout le cours des pensées d’un quartier, et peut-être d’un monde” (51). The district is so attractive to Aragon because it nearly belongs to the past and represents a treasure trove of myths and mysteries. He roams the city, past women whom he perceives as sphinxes and sirens. He feels at home in the Passage de l’Opéra with its many female strollers, who are “femmes, femmes vraiment, et sensiblement femmes, et cela aux dépens de toutes les autres qualités de leurs corps et de leurs âmes” (71). These women resemble a barometer on which one can read the time of day, the season, current fashion. For Aragon, the small universe of the passage mirrors the universe as a whole. The experiences on his rambles through the metropolis merge into images: Le vice appelé Surréalisme est l’emploi déréglé et passionnel du stupéfiant image, ou plutôt de la provocation sans contrôle de l’image pour elle-même et pour ce qu’elle entraîne dans le domaine de la représentation de perturbations imprévisibles et de métamorphoses: car chaque image à chaque coup vous force à réviser tout l’Univers. Et il y a pour chaque homme une image à trouver qui anéantit tout l’Univers. (125)

He describes the surrealists as “buveurs d’images” (125) who try to transcend the confines of the mind and its code of reason. In a life determined by the laws of chance, “la nature est mon inconscient” (194). Aragon is searching for a “sentiment de la nature”, a “sens mythique” (196). For him, the “external world” is a space of the “unconscious”, “le mythe est le chemin de la conscience, son tapis roulant” (196). In this respect, psychoanalysis must seem ambivalent to him. While he values the fact that it has opened up an understanding of subconscious structures, he criticizes the fact that it destroys the magic of natural myths. Aragon loves the esoteric, embodied by ‘the woman’ and ‘the image’: Dans l’amour, par le mécanisme même de l’amour, je découvrais ce que l’absence de l’amour me retenait d’apercevoir. Ce qui dans cette femme au-delà de son image se reformait reprenant cette image, et développant d’elle un monde particulier, le goût, ce goût divin que je connais bien à tout vertige, m’avertissait encore une fois que j’entrais dans cet univers concret, qui est fermé aux passants. L’esprit métaphysique pour moi renaissait de l’amour. L’amour était sa source, et je ne veux plus sortir de cette forêt enchantée. (266-267)

For him, ‘the image’ promises the greatest possible amount of truth: “Et l’image n’a-t-elle pas, en tant que telle, sa réalité qui est son application, sa substitution à la connaissance? Sans doute l’image n’est-elle pas le concret,

108 Elke Frietsch mais la conscience possible, la plus grande conscience possible du concret” (268).

The Surrealists as “buveurs d’images” When Aragon describes the “surrealists” as “buveurs d’images” (125), this not only refers to the quest for poetic images, which they search for in the city and capture in literary texts, but also to the process of realization inherent in the act of seeing which is reconstructed and fixed in artistic pictures. As Silvia Eiblmayr has shown, women become key figures for the surrealists: Her erotic and phantasmatic body serves as an indispensable instrument of the avantgarde for breaking with conventional patterns of perception and depiction, and it appears in a two-fold function in surrealist productions: it represents a destructive force, seemingly an aesthetic risk for the work of art, and at the same time it also is the material body of the picture on which the destructive effect of this aesthetic risk is enacted. (“Gewalt am Bild” 341)

In this sense, Nadja can be interpreted as an instrument of the avant-garde. As “l’âme errante” (69), she represents mystery and phantasm par excellence. She is the productive force which breaks open the prevailing code of reason and redefines the relationship between body and mind. At the same time, however, she also embodies that which can never be accomplished. When the first-person narrator abandons Nadja to her fate in the lunatic asylum and surrenders to the ‘true love’ of a woman, he not only demonizes Nadja as an object and ‘other’, he also saves his own status as a subject.16 Surrealist stagings of the uncanny woman (Lampe 25-48) can thus also be interpreted as a deconstruction of the traditional code of reason and a new interpretation of the relationship between body and mind as well as a naturalization of conventionalized gender images. An illustration from Max Ernst’s collage-novel “Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel” (see Fig. 2) dating from 1929 shows a so-called 16

Peter Bürger interprets the fact that Breton leaves Nadja to her fate in a lunatic asylum as an example of the general failure of human relationships in surrealism: “No moral judgement shall here be passed on the fact that Breton no longer takes care of Nadja after her internment; however, it shows a failure in interpersonal relations […].? Nadja speaks a language which isolates her from all other people and, in the end, even from herself; only a psychotherapist would have been able to translate this language into colloquial speech and thus save Nadja from the asylum. Breton, however, marvels at the exotic strangeness of this language. He, who, however rebellious, has his place within bourgeois society, can admire and enjoy Nadja’s eccentric situation.” (Bürger 137-138)

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stroboscope, a fore-runner of film, which was used to produce moving images.

Fig. 2: Max Ernst: „Das Karmelitermädchen. Ein Traum.“ (“Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel”). Trans. Werner Spies. Köln: DuMont, 1971. n.p. © VBK Wien, 2009

The figure of a swaying girl is caught in this contraption, circled by birds. The caption explains: “... you head-shaven pigeons, under my white dress, you will be richly rewarded in my columbarium. I’ll bring you a dozen tons of sugar. But don’t you touch my hair!” The reference to shaved heads (tonsures) transforms the doves into a metaphor for monks, whose desire is to be appeased by a sweet erotic promise. In addition, when the machine is turned the female figure creates the illusion of film images (Eiblmayr, “Gewalt am Bild” 343). While the figure of the girl remains imprisoned in the machine, the doves are able to fly away.17 17

For an interpretation of this collage as a symbolization of processes of perception and insight, cf. also Eiblmayr, “Gewalt am Bild” 341. Eiblmayr then enlarges on the fact that in the course of the 1970s, feminist theory distanced itself from the destruction inherent in such visualizations and tried to reoccupy the female body beyond phallogocentrism (344-346). Criticizing these attempts as essentialist, she explains that women are inextricably linked to

110 Elke Frietsch

Fig. 3: details from: Max Ernst: “Leçon d’écriture automatique” (“L’aimant est proche sans doute”), 1923. Biro and ink on eight connected sheets, 17,3 x 169 cm; private collection. © VBK Wien, 2009

This distillation of the feminine in a pictorial image is continued in the imaginations of the surrealist artist-flâneur. Images of the feminine created by these Paris surrealists in the 1920s can be regarded as snapshots capturing impressions on their visual rambles, in their quest for coincidence and knowledge. Max Ernst’s “Leçon d’écriture automatique” (1923; see Fig. 3) for example shows a female countenance appearing above a fantastic landscape, its gaze fixing the spectator. On its forehead is written “L’aimant est proche sans doute”. The writing is an allusion to André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s first publication based on the method of automatic writing and entitled Les Champs magnétiques. In Max Ernst’s picture, the woman appears to be woven into the dream landscape, her body dissolves, body and mind are taken apart and reassembled. In Marcel Jean’s water colour “Les eaux dormantes” (see Fig. 4), dating from 1925, a well-shaped, idealized female nude is literally cut to pieces by shelving.

their representation: “[…] for women, this liberating strategy is continually being undermined as far as they, as imaginary figures, are linked to the system of representation through a symbolic function, which is not even cancelled out by an attempt to create one’s own image of ‘oneself’” (338-339). In her later book Die Frau als Bild, Eiblmayr derives this theory from the work of Lacan (18). From the perspective of later theoretical works on the subject, it is however possible to point out that the concept of a natural, indissoluble tie between the feminine figure and its representation is itself based on an essentialist viewpoint which can be deconstructed. On this topic, cf. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky’s criticsm of Lacan, pointing out that woman is not the image itself, but that the equation of woman with the image is a “symptom of phantasmatic thought” (26).

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Fig. 4: Marcel Jean: “Les eaux dormantes”, 1925. Pencil and water colour, 32 x 24 cm; private collection. © VBK Wien, 2009

112 Elke Frietsch The surrealist artists were wont to record their experiences while strolling through the city in female picture elements. In his painting “Nu couché à la toile de Jouy” (1922; see Fig. 5), the artist Tsuguharu Foujita showed a female nude on a bed against a blue background.

Fig. 5: Tsuguharu Foujita: “Nu couché à la toile de Jouy”, 1922. Oil on canvas, 130 x 195 cm; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

The drawn-back curtain exposes the body and at the same time leads into the pictorial space. The model for this painting was Alice Prin alias Kiki de Montparnasse, a well-known figure at the time. In the 1920s, Kiki lived in Montparnasse as model and muse; she was the mistress of a number of famous artists, the most prominent of whom was Man Ray. The fascination and inspiration which she must have exuded at that time are still reflected in the memoirs of Frederick Kohner as late as 1967.18 He describes his brief sojourn in Paris as a student during the 1920s, when he fell in love with Kiki. When he returns to Paris for the first time after World War II, he not only finds that the city and his memories have been destroyed; the femme fatale of the twenties has sunk into alcoholism, her beauty utterly destroyed. For the writer, her face becomes that of an epoch irrevocably past. This romanticizing is an example of the fascination emanating from the images of the feminine in the 18

Kiki’s own memoirs (Souvenirs), published at the height of her fame and providing insight into the artistic atmosphere and the glamour of the Parisian1920s, are likewise of interest. They include an introduction by Ernest Hemingway.

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twenties. They were not merely traditional, but also allowed new perspectives on gender relations.

The De-Naturalization of the Pictorial Space Challenging the prevailing code of reason and redefining the relationship between body and mind, as the surrealists began to do in Paris during the twenties, had the potential to question nature metaphors and traditional images of femininity. This is expressed, for example, in the self-portraits of the artist Claude Cahun, whose work has received increasing attention since the eighties.19 I am aware of the fact that it is somewhat problematic to contrast her work directly with that of other surrealist artists, since this could suggest ‘artistic intention’, which would be inadequate for the surrealist movement. And after all, Cahun did belong to the surrealist movement, even if she chose to stay at its fringes.20 What is also somewhat problematic is the theory that she was already anticipating during the twenties and thirties contemporary feminist theories such as those of Judith Butler, if this assumption is interpreted in terms of an ‘artistic intention’.21 However, my opinion is that an interpretation of Cahun’s work against the background of contemporary feminist theory has great potential, if Cahun is regarded as a courageous artist who was ahead of her times in many respects and who can hence in some respects, though by no means systematically, be put into the context of later feminist theories.22 Despite the fact that Cahun’s work, like that of the surrealists, is based on the principles of montage and collage, she does not share their perception of space and interpretation of the artist as flâneur. With her, pictorial space 19

20

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22

François Leperlier was one of the first post-war authors dealing with Claude Cahun, publishing a biography on Cahun (1992), a catalogue of her works (1995) and her writings (2002). The last few years have seen the publication of a staggering amount of literature on Cahun showing that she anticipated contemporary artistic, feminist and social positions as early as the 1920s and 1930s (Ander/Snauwaert, Caw 127-140). At this point, I would like to draw attention to a much cited letter by André Breton to Cahun: “By the way, you probably possess great magical powers. In addition, I am of the opinion – and I continually repeat this – that you should write and publish. You yourself know quite well that I regard you as one of the (four or five) most curious minds of our time, and still you shroud yourself in silence at your whim.” (Letter from André Breton to Claude Cahun, dating from 21 September 1938, qtd. in Ander and Snauwaert xiii-xiv). For criticism of the assumption of an ‘artistic intention’ with regard to surrealism (among others), cf. Krauss 132. Moreover, the assumption of a non-intentional ‘anticipation’ permits the contradiction of a positivist image of art history as progressive and goal-oriented.

114 Elke Frietsch becomes denaturalized, as it were. Plate X of the publication “Aveux non avenus” (see Fig. 6), created in 1929-30, depicts a fantastic landscape with female faces and womb-shaped objects with foetuses.

Fig. 6: Claude Cahun: “Aveux non avenus”, Plate X, 1929/30. Photomontage (Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore), 15,4 x 10,4 cm; private collection, courtesy Galerie Zabriskie, Paris – New York

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Above this scenario, a tetrahedron is floating, in the middle of which is depicted a small, naked family. With one hand, the man is hurling thunderbolts, with the other he holds a child by the hair; by his side there is a wispy woman. On a banner one can read the ironic legend “La sainte famille”. The lower corner of the tetrahedron points into an ensemble of female faces. They are framed by writing: “Sous ce masque un autre masque. Je n’en finirai pas de soulever tous ces visages.” The montage can be analysed according to Judith Butler’s theory that gender identities are socially constructed rather than determined by nature. Butler criticizes Lacan’s theory according to which the subject comes into being through the repression of incestuous desires projected on to the body of the mother. According to Lacan, language evolves through the disappointment generated by the incest taboo. The place of original jouissance is taken by the sign, “which is similarly barred from the signifier and which seeks in what it signifies a recovery of that irrevocable pleasure” (Butler 55). The fact that language inevitably fails to signify is thus a consequence of the prohibition on which language is founded. Butler shows how the symbolic, with its connotations of ‘male’ and ‘female’, becomes for Lacan a universal structure of signification. On the basis of Foucault’s anti-repression hypothesis, she tries to break apart the concept of a complete subjection to the chain of the signifiers. She reads Lacan’s theory in terms of a romanticization of failure, terming it “a kind of ‘slave morality’” (Butler 72). She objects to Lacan’s use of the term “masquerade”, since this would suggest that there is an authentic form of being beneath the mask. For this, she substitutes her concept of parody (181-190), with which she also criticizes Julia Kristeva. Julia Kristeva modified Lacan’s theory by postulating that the semiotic is a dimension of language occasioned by the maternal body. According to her, the semiotic comprises multiplicity and semantic non-closure as well as the potential to subvert and displace the “paternal law”. Butler criticizes: … Kristeva describes the maternal body as bearing a set of meanings that are prior to culture itself. She thereby safeguards the notion of culture as a paternal structure and delimits maternity as an essentially precultural reality. Her naturalistic descriptions of the maternal body effectively reify motherhood and preclude an analysis of its cultural construction and variability. (102-103)

Cahun’s use of masks in plate X of “Aveux non avenus” (see Fig. 6), and the reference within the picture to the fact that her work of uncovering all faces will never be completed, can be interpreted as a criticism of concepts of the authenticity of the body and gender. Her visualization of the inharmonious nuclear family and the ironic comment “La sainte famille” bears a strong resemblance to Butler’s concept of parody. While in Max Ernst’s “Leçon

116 Elke Frietsch d’écriture automatique” from 1923 (see Fig. 3), the female body in a way merges with ‘the image’ and ‘the phantasmatic’, plate X from Cahun’s “Aveux non avenus” (see Fig. 6) de-mystifies this fantasy and deconstructs the myth of the artist-flâneur. One of Cahun’s photographs dating from 1930, entitled “Femme au balcon” (see Fig. 7) for example, shows the face of a building from the point of view of a passer-by.

Fig. 7: Claude Cahun: “Femme au balcon”, 1930. Photography. 23 x 17 cm; collection of the Galerie Berggruen, Paris

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The ground floor is surrounded by metal railings designed to keep out intruders. Next to a first-floor window there is a niche sheltering a female sculpture. The title “Femme au balcon” is misleading – neither is the niche a balcony, nor the female figure a living woman. The photograph of the building is overlaid by calyxes of flowers, hands and indefinable shapes. It almost seems as if one were looking at the mirror image of a house reflected in a lake. The surrealist habit of strolling through Paris in search of fetishes and objects appears deconstructed. A dream scenario opens up which does not expose any essential truth of a sphinx or siren.

Works Cited Ander, Heike, and Dirk Snauwaert, ed. Claude Cahun. Bilder. München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1997. Aragon, Louis. Le paysan de Paris. 1926. Paris: Bibliothèque Gallimard, 2004. Bauer, Gerd. „Die Surrealisten und Sigmund Freud.” Jahresring 27 (1980/81): 139-154. Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. Paris: Roches, 1929. Benjamin, Walter. „Der Sürrealismus. Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz (1929).“ Walter Benjamin: Passagen. Schriften zur französischen Literatur. Ausgewählt und mit einem Nachwort von Gérard Raulet. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2007. 145-159. Bergius, Hanne. „Berlin als Hure Babylon.“ Die Metropole. Industriekultur in Berlin im 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Jochen Boberg. München: Beck, 1986. 102-119. Breton, André. Nadja. 1928. Paris: Gallimard, 1963. ——. “Le surréalisme et la peinture.” 1928. Le surréalisme et la peinture. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. 9-72. ——. and Philippe Soupault. Les Champs magnétiques. Paris: Au sans pareil, 1920. Bürger, Peter. Der französische Surrealismus. Studien zum Problem der avantgardistischen Literatur. Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum, 1971. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Caws, Mary Ann. Glorious Eccentrics. Modernist Women Painting and Writing. New York: Palgrave: 2006. Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid. „Geschlecht und Repräsentation oder, wie das Bild zum Denken kommt.“ Die Philosophin (Oktober 1998): 24-41.

118 Elke Frietsch D’Souza, Aruna, and Tom McDonough, ed. The invisible „flâneuse”? Gender, public space, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris. Manchester et.al.: Manchester UP, 2006. Eiblmayr, Silvia. „Gewalt am Bild – Gewalt im Bild. Zur Inszenierung des weiblichen Körpers in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts.“ Blick-Wechsel. Konstruktionen von Männlichkeit und Weiblichkeit in Kunst und Kunstgeschichte. Ed. Ines Lindner, Sigrid Schade, Silke Wenk and Gabriele Werner. Berlin: Reimer, 1989. 337-357. ——. Die Frau als Bild. Der weibliche Körper in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Reimer, 1993. Faber, Monika. „Das Innere der Sicht.“ Das Innere der Sicht. Surrealistische Fotografie der 30er und 40er Jahre. Ed. Monika Faber. Wien: Österreichisches Fotoarchiv, 1989. 11-51. Fraquelli, Simonetta: „Montparnasse und das rechte Ufer: Mythos und Realität.“ Paris – Metropole der Kunst 1900-1968. Ed. Sarah Wilson. Ausstellungskatalog Royal Academy of Arts. London/Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 2002. Köln: DuMont, 2002. 106-117. Gauthier, Xavière. Surrealismus und Sexualität. Inszenierung der Weiblichkeit. Wien, Berlin: Medusa, 1980. Hank, Rainer. „Topik und Topographie. Seelenlandschaft und Stadtlandschaft im Wien der Jahrhundertwende.“ Die Großstadt als Text. Ed. Manfred Smuda. München: Fink, 1992. 217-238. Hentschel, Linda. Pornotopische Techniken des Betrachtens. Raumwahrnehmung und Geschlechterordnung in visuellen Apparaten der Moderne. Marburg: Jonas, 2001. Hörner, Unda. Die realen Frauen der Surrealisten: Simone Breton, Gala Éluard, Elsa Triolet. Mannheim: Bollmann, 1996. Kiki de Montparnasse. Souvenirs. Introd. Ernest Hemingway. Paris: Broca, 1929. Kohner, Frederick. Kiki von Montparnasse. Roman. Wien, München, Zürich: Molden, 1969. Krauss, Rosalind E. „Die fotografischen Bedingungen des Surrealismus.“ Die Originalität der Avantgarde und andere Mythen der Moderne. Ed. Rosalind E. Krauss. Amsterdam, Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1985. 129-162. Krieger, Verena. „Zur (Un-) Fruchtbarkeit der Liebe im Surrealismus – Die weibliche Gebärfähigkeit als Kreativitätsparadigma.“ Metamorphosen der Liebe. Kunstwissenschaftliche Studien zu Eros und Geschlecht im Surrealismus. Ed. Verena Krieger. Münster: LIT, 2006. 123-152. Kupschinsky, Elke. „Die vernünftige Nephertete. Die ‚Neue Frau’ der 20er Jahre in Berlin.“ Die Metropole. Industriekultur in Berlin im 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Jochen Boberg. München: Beck, 1986. 164-173.

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Lampe, Angela, ed. Die unheimliche Frau. Weiblichkeit im Surrealismus. Heidelberg: Wachter, 2001. Leperlier, François, ed. Claude Cahun. L’Écart et la métamorphose. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1992. ——. Claude Cahun photographe. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1995. ——. Claude Cahun. Écrits. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 2002. Neumeyer, Harald. Der Flaneur. Konzeptionen der Moderne. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999. Nierhaus, Irene. ARCH6. Raum, Geschlecht, Architektur. Wien: Sonderzahl, 1999. Pollak, Sabine. Leere Räume. Weiblichkeit und Wohnen in der Moderne. Wien: Sonderzahl, 2004. Spies, Werner. „Meine Unruhe, meine Glauben.“ Max Ernst. Retrospektive zum 100. Geburtstag. Ed. Werner Spies. München: Prestel, 1991. 9-53. Steinwachs, Gisela. Mythologie des Surrealismus oder die Rückverwandlung von Kultur in Natur. Eine strukturale Analyse von Bretons „Nadja“. Neuwied et.al.: Sammlung Luchterhand, 1971. Täuber, Rita E. Der hässliche Eros. Darstellungen zur Prostitution in der Malerei und Grafik 1855-1930. Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1997. Volkening, Heide. „Körperarbeiten. Das Working Girl als literarische Figur.“ Leibhaftige Moderne. Körper in Kunst und Massenmedien 1918 bis 1933. Ed. Michael Cowan and Kai Marcel Sicks. Bielefeld: transcript, 2005. 136-151. Wagner, Monika. „Gustav Klimts ‚verruchtes Ornament’.“ Die weibliche und die männliche Linie. Das imaginäre Geschlecht der modernen Kunst von Klimt bis Mondrian. Ed. Susanne Deicher. Berlin: Reimer, 1993. 27-49. Warner, Marina. Monuments & Maidens. The Allegory of the Female Form. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985. Weigel, Sigrid. „‚Die Städte sind weiblich und nur dem Sieger hold.’ Zur Funktion des Weiblichen in Gründungsmythen und Städtedarstellungen.“ Triumph und Scheitern in der Metropole. Zur Rolle der Weiblichkeit in der Geschichte Berlins. Ed. Sigrun Anselm and Barbara Beck. Berlin: Reimer, 1987. 207-227. ——. „Traum – Stadt – Frau. Zur Weiblichkeit der Städte in der Schrift.“ Die Unwirklichkeit der Städte. Großstadtdarstellungen zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne. Ed. Klaus R. Scherpe. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1988. 173196. Wenk, Silke. Versteinerte Weiblichkeit. Allegorien in der Skulptur der Moderne. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 1996. Werner, Gabriele. Mathematik im Surrealismus. Man Ray – Max Ernst – Dorothea Tanning. Marburg: Jonas, 2002.

120 Elke Frietsch

Petra Löffler

Picturing the Metropolis: Paris in the Eye of the Camera To make the portrait of a city is a life work, and no one portrait suffices because the city is always changing. (Berenice Abbott)

The Legible City Paris was, as Walter Benjamin has pointed out in his monumental but unfinished Arcades Project, the capital of the 19th century, and it was the first city to be called a metropolis by contemporaries (Stierle 282). The term ‘metropolis’ has become a metaphor and a myth owing to its long tradition in western culture. It circumscribes not so much a definite structure on a certain location with fixed dimensions, but rather the search and the desire for a special kind of urbanism (Zohlen 24). This makes the metropolis both a special object for scientific investigation and for political observation. It is because of this double epistemological impulse that theorists of urbanism like Michel de Certeau have divided the urban space in a transparent part, which is legible and governable on the one hand and an opaque part, which is not legible and not governable on the other. It is clear that the modern sciences and governments have made enormous efforts to reduce that opaque part. For this reason it is no wonder that at the end of the 19th century the metropolis, in the eye of contemporary critics, had become fully investigated in many respects. As Maxime du Camp wrote with considerable regret in the first volume of his great survey about the French capital, Paris was “enregistré, catalogué, numeroté, surveillé, éclairé, nettoyé, dirigé, soigné, administré, jugé, emprisonné, enterré” (qtd. in Prendergast 2).1 Thus at first sight it seems that the urban space had become fully open for a panoptic view and hence also fully legible. This is very much the case with Paris. Under the rule of Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann realized his revisionist “vision of the modern city as unified, centred and fully legible, opened up as a safe and regulated space of leisure and pleasure to all its citizens” (8). But his radical demolition and rebuilding of the old quarters resulted in a monotonous urban landscape which deleted the old characteristics and visual identities of the various boroughs and thus, paradoxically, made the city less legible. 1

See Maxime du Camp. Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle. 6 vol. Paris, 1883-98. The following quotation is from vol.1, 7.

122 Petra Löffler As Siegfried Kracauer often observed during the 1920s, this monotony is very characteristic of the modern metropolis. For him, it is an effect of the increasing industrialization and urbanization in the western world: “The metropolitan centres, which are also sites of glamour, resemble each other more and more. Their differences are fading.”2 As editorial journalist of the Frankfurter Zeitung Kracauer also noticed such effects during his various visits to Paris in the late twenties. In short prose-miniatures he described the ambivalent and even conflicting implications of modernization for the millions of city dwellers. For instance, in the collection of international newspapers and magazines at the bookstalls that can be found at busy streets or corners in every metropolis in this world, he saw a striking metaphor of the increasing monotony of the modern cities that makes them less and less legible. In the already quoted text, Analyse eines Stadtplans (Analysis of a Map), he noted in 1928: “Out of the hurly-burly kiosks arise, tiny temples in which the publications of the whole world meet up. Despite the close bodily relations that these papers cultivate, their items of news are so unrelated that they give no news about themselves.”3 Kracauer criticizes the fact that the news items reported by the papers are not connected – that is to say, although the newspapers and magazines are in close proximity on the shelves in the kiosk they do not constitute any coherent knowledge about the current world. Kracauer never tires of focussing on this blindness inside modernity – he is looking, always and everywhere, for signs that make the antagonistic developments of the metropolis more legible for him, more accessible for an understanding of life in a modern city. Such signs he finds, first of all, in visualizations that mirror the metropolis itself – for instance in a schema like a city map. In doing so he creates meaning about the metropolis through an image: this means, first, that in Kracauer’s descriptions the city is regarded as a schematic image and second, that one needs such a symbol to obtain some knowledge of it: “Broad thoroughfares lead from the Faubourgs to the splendour of the centre. But this is not the intended centre. The happiness allotted to external poverty is touched by other radiuses than the existing ones. But the streets must be walked towards the centre, for their emptiness is real today.”4 2

3

4

„Die weltstädtischen Zentren, die auch die Orte des Glanzes sind, gleichen sich mehr und mehr einander an. Ihre Unterschiede vergehen” (5.1 403). All German quotes in this paper were translated by Caterina Novák. „Aus dem Trubel erheben sich die Zeitungskioske, winzige Tempel, in denen die Publikationen der Welt sich ein Rendezvous geben. [...] Der engen körperlichen Beziehung ungeachtet, die von den Papieren gepflegt wird, sind ihre Nachrichten so außer jeder Verbindung, dass sie ohne Nachricht über sich sind.“ (5.1 403) „Breite Straßen führen aus den Faubourgs in den Glanz der Mitte. Sie ist die gemeinte Mitte nicht. Das Glück, das der Armseligkeit draußen zugedacht ist, wird von anderen Radien ge-

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This dense description of the cityscape of Paris evokes the difference between the centre and the periphery, the city and the suburb, which is so important for any conception and reception of the metropolis. Here Kracauer claims that the urban landscapes and architecture of his time no longer create meaning for the people living in them – the antagonistic poverty of the faubourgs and the glamour of the city centre reveal for him an emptiness which signifies the transcendental shelterlessness of the modern human subject. Regarding the problem of social interaction which is so necessary for the people living in a big city, the great boulevards in his Denkbild (mental image) do not function as connecting lines between the poor and the rich, between suburban and metropolitan life. Instead they reveal the absence of a fundamental social relationship between the metropolitan architecture and the city dwellers. Paradoxically, for Kracauer, the modern city no longer forms a coherent image. The difficulty of making sense of the modern city is, as Christopher Prendergast has explained, that of “a multiplicity of given perspectives, a juxtaposition, and often a clash, of representation” (3). Following Kracauer’s insights, the desire for legibility has much to do with scientific and cultural practices that use technical media for registration and for visualization. In photography, there has been a special interest in picturing the metropolis since its beginning in the 19th century – Daguerre’s famous picture of Vue du Boulevard du Temple, dating from 1838 or 1839, shows a view of the probably crowded street from a position above, where, as a result of the long exposure time, only a man getting his shoes polished is visible in the resulting photographic image. There was not only an interest in preserving the city’s important monuments, as the French poet Charles Baudelaire had defined the function of photography in his Salon of 1859, but also the beginning of an aesthetic interest in capturing the ever-changing shapes of modernity. This impulse questions not only the modes of portraying an unstable object like the ever-moving life of a city, but also establishes knowledge about what pictures are. So that, following Baudelaire, one might think the modern city changes our relationship to the image, or as Ackbar Abbas has put it: “We learn more about the image through the city than about the city through the image” (143). But what exactly do we learn about the image through the city? What kind of images does the city help to create? And furthermore, what is the special impact of their relationship? These questions will be answered in the following pages.

troffen als den vorhandenen. Doch müssen die Straßen zur Mitte begangen werden, denn ihre Leere ist heute wirklich.“ (5.1 403)

124 Petra Löffler

The City as Imaginary Object Walter Prigge has shown in an article about the mythological implications of the metropolis that because of the increasing industrialization and urbanization in the western world architecture loses its autonomy and is supplemented by other symbolic practices (73-86). In the modern metropolis, he argues, real locations are replaced by imaginative spaces. The modern city thereby sets free the forces of imagination and the collective unconscious. Thus it becomes a kind of a second nature, that is to say, a mythological one (77). Following this argumentation, one has to conclude that every image of the modern city constitutes the urban space as an imaginary object. An example might be Kracauer’s description of the subway of Paris as an archaic labyrinth that is “directly wrested from nature”5. The city, in this perspective, is regarded as an aesthetic object producing images of a special kind – a proliferation of images which are, as the photographer Berenice Abbot has observed, never sufficient, because the city is always changing. Thus, images of the city always produce other images, which intervene in the collective unconscious and change the cultural memory of it. Regarding the city as an aesthetic object first and foremost means, as Henry James has declared, to be fascinated by the surface of things: “The city becomes an aesthetic object when you become totally fascinated by the energy and the multifariousness of the surface” (qtd. in Prendergast 4). To be fascinated by the surface of the city means nothing else than putting it into a chain of images. This idea of the metropolis as a series of multifarious images became popular in the late 18th century in literature, for example with Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris and with the invention of the panorama. Robert Barker’s successful panoramic views of Edinburgh and London, for instance, were not only visited by curious city dwellers who wanted to see their hometown as a painted image overwhelming their senses. The panoramas also travelled around Europe to recoup their high production costs. Furthermore the “panoramic vision” (“der panoramatische Blick”) was, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued, an effect of modern transportation systems like the railway, which established the perception of things in motion (59). The panoramas can also be seen as a nostalgic compensation for the fragmentation of the urban space provoked by the growing modern cities and their needs for transportation systems. Such images find their way also into literature: in his novel Notre Dame de Paris (1831) Victor Hugo calls the overview over the city from the top of the famous cathedral “Paris à vol d’oiseau”. Such a visu5

“unmittelbar der Natur abgerungen” (5.2 299)

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alization of the metropolis in a “bird’s-eye view” was needed by city dwellers who wanted to conserve a permanent image of their town as a whole as well as by visitors and maybe tourists who wanted a reliable image of a city which most of them knew only by name. That might explain why the panoramas experienced a renaissance in popularity in the second half of the 19th century, when modernization had taken command and sensational pictures of events of national importance, like battles or catastrophes, were highly esteemed. A notice of Gertrude Stein proves that panoramas were images that played an important role for the cultural memory and the collective unconscious. Stein lived in Paris for a long time, from 1903 until her death in 1946. In her book on Paris, published in 1940, she documented her first encounters with French culture. Long before she came to Paris in person, that is to say since her childhood, she had a dreamlike vision of the city, which she imagined obsessively. Stein remembers the sensuous impressions activated by imported French commodities like perfume and fashion items or by the smell of French dishes. Moreover she was impressed by the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was regularly invited for guest performances at theatres in San Francisco, the city where Gertrude Stein had been raised. She was especially impressed by a panorama showing the historical Battle of Waterloo from 1815. Mainly, the sheer volume of the circular painting that surrounded the visitors completely astonished her. This visit helped her gain an important insight: It was then I first realised the difference between a painting and out of doors. I realised that a painting is always a flat surface and out of doors never is, and that out of doors is made up of air and a painting has no air, the air is replaced by a flat surface, and anything in a painting that imitates air is illustration and not art. I seem to have felt all that very intensely standing on the platform and being all surrounded by an oil painting. (Stein 4)

The panoramas almost vanished from public visibility around 1900 and gave way to a new kind of imagination: the city as a mediated space seen through the eye of a camera. Georg Simmel, in his essay on Rodin, has claimed that modern art did not merely reflect a world in motion; its very mirror had itself become more mobile (Prendergast 6). To think about this mirror means to think about the media of reflecting this world in motion – photography and film. In the twenties both technical media were more and more regarded as modern art forms that were able to capture the mobile and labile modern world. The idea of a new visibility affected many photographers and filmmakers as well as theorists of modernity. That is why it is important to investigate what kind of pictures of a metropolis like the French capital were made in the first decades of the 20th century, what their special characteristics were and how they were regarded by the contemporaries.

126 Petra Löffler There is no doubt that Paris was the meeting point of the European and American avant-garde during the twenties and early thirties. But what was so fascinating about this city? There is no simple answer: first, one has to remember that there was a broad discussion of the consequences of urbanization in the 19th century, and Paris was seen as the right place for this enquiry. In French literature and journalism, there was a strong criticism of the modernization and the demolition of the old Paris. The often nostalgic perception of the old Paris found its way into the 20th century – last greetings from a sinking world, so to say. In his Pariser Beobachtungen (Parisian Observations), for instance, Siegfried Kracauer noticed in 1927 that for the German observer French life and society seemed to be “like a hundred years ago”: “The German, who is abreast of his time, rediscovers the past.”6 Second, in the view of many European observers, the heavy and in many cases brutal impact of modernization was regarded as less effective, less obvious in Paris (see Fig. 1). Kracauer’s fascination with Paris had much to do with the notion of the different atmospheres in the French and the German capitals, where he lived until his emigration to Paris in February 1933, shortly after the burning of the Berliner Reichtstag. Kracauer often described the differences in architecture, space and lifestyle between the two cities. He experienced the change in the architecture of Berlin as a violent form of modernization. Therefore for him, Berlin, as opposed to Paris, was no place for flâneurs: The tempo is a result of the layout of the cities. Can anyone proceed with a Berlin tempo in Paris, even if he is in a great hurry? He cannot. The streets in the inner districts are narrow, and if you want to walk them, you must be patient. And although the great boulevards are broad, they connect heavily populated districts, which send a never ending steam of people along them.7

For Kracauer, the great interventions of the Haussmannian era did not really change the identity of Paris as the capital of the flâneur or the obscurities of the passageways. On the contrary, the crowded boulevards of the new Paris could be seen as actual signs of the illegibility of the modern city: the flâneur of the 20th century, a figure who was in former times the gifted reader of city

6 7

„Der Deutsche, der mit seiner Zeit lebt, findet die Vergangenheit wieder.” (5.2 25) „Das Tempo ist eine Folge der Bauart der Städte. Kann einer in Paris ein Berliner Tempo anschlagen, selbst wenn er es überaus eilig hat? Er kann es nicht. Die Straßen in den inneren Stadtteilen sind eng, und wer sie passieren will, muß sich nach unseren Begriffen in Geduld üben. Und sind auch die großen Boulevards breit angelegt, so verbinden sie doch dichtbevölkerte Bezirke miteinander, die einen Dauermenschenstrom über sie schicken.“ (5.2 298)

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signs, had become an anonymous passer-by. He was now part of the metropolitan crowd, and could not keep a certain distance or get an overview.8

Fig. 1: Germaine Krull: Billboard Paris-Matinal, 1927; estate Germaine Krull; © Museum Folkwang, Essen

The fascination with Paris has much to do with the images that this city has always produced in the minds of its visitors. In 1928 Kracauer collected a summary of his impressions of the French capital. In his short essay Die 8

Tom Gunning has reconstructed the destiny of the flâneur in the 20th century who had become a detective or a gawker (1997). Here I accentuate instead the passer-by on the crowded street.

128 Petra Löffler Berührung. Sieben Pariser Szenen (The Touch. Seven Parisian Scenes) he designs a kaleidoscope of various sights and insights on Parisian life. It begins – in a seemingly touristic manner – with a boat trip on the Seine and the impressions he gained alongside the river. The perspective of this panorama of vistas is very unusual primarily because of the lower standpoint of the observer on the deck of the boat. From that point of view, he saw, like a child, only the lower parts of the famous buildings at the riverside again and again interrupted by blocked sights so that they evidently revealed snapshots rather than full views: “The top of the Obelisk is sitting on the quay wall, the lower part of the Eiffel tower covers the sky with arabesques. These architectural fragments are messages in code which only the initiated can decipher.”9 In the opening part of his Parisian impressions Kracauer describes the famous landmarks of the French capital from a very exceptional perspective: he takes a mole’s-eye view in contrast to the more common bird’s-eye view, which is the normal touristic viewpoint in order to gain an overview. Through this change in perspective he practises an alienation of the common, the all-too-familiar. Thus, the alienated image of the city reveals itself as a chain of snapshots that have to be deciphered. And this new sight produces new insights. Nevertheless, in the photography of the twenties there is an analogy for this change in perspective. Following the calls for a “new vision” that avant-garde artists like Alexander Rodtchenko or László Moholy-Nagy had sent out, many photographers made experiments with extreme camera positions and astonishing perspectives, cuttings and croppings of the things they photographed. As David Frisby has pointed out, the change from the panorama image to the more ephemeral, snapshot-like photographic or filmic image also changed the practices of the observer of urban landscapes: “The ‘panorama’ of the city differs from the ‘snapshot’, just as the ‘narrative’ differs from the ‘image’. In part, these differences were contingent upon the development of new techniques of representation. But, at the same time, the observer of the city and the practices associated with that observation were also changing” (6). Who should know better than a professional chaser of images how difficult it is to capture a portrait of a vivid city. The American photographer Berenice Abbott explains: Everything in the city is properly part of its story – its physical body of brick, stone, steel, glass, wood, its lifeblood of living, breathing men and women. Streets, vistas, 9

„Die Spitze des Obelisken sitzt auf der Kaimauer, das Fußgestell des Eiffelturms bedeckt den Himmel mit eisernen Arabesken. Die Architekturfetzen sind chiffrierte Mitteilungen, die nur der Eingeweihte zu entziffern vermag.“ (Schriften 5.2 129f)

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panoramas, birds-eye views, the noble and the shameful, high life and low life, tragedy, comedy, squalor, wealth, the mighty towers of skyscrapers, the ignoble façades of slums, people at work, people at home, people at play – these are but a small part of the subject matter of the city. Nothing is to humble for the camera portraitist. (qtd. in van Haaften 25-26)

In Abbott’s view, the photographer relates to the historian as a collector of ephemeral things and to the painter who captures the surfaces of these things. Abbott’s first contact with photography took place in Paris. She was, like many American artists and bohemians of her time, fascinated by the atmosphere of artistic freedom at the French capital (Levy 15). In 1921 she followed Man Ray to Paris, who had a flourishing portrait studio in Montparnasse, where the avant-garde and high society of Paris stopped by for regular visits. From Man Ray she learned everything about photographic techniques; she also worked as his assistant. Abbott soon became very successful with her own portraits of high society ladies and avant-garde artists of the rive gauche, Jean Cocteau, James Joyce, Peggy Guggenheim and Sylvia Beach, among others. The latter, who was a proprietor of the famous avant-garde bookstore Shakespeare & Company, remarked that to “be ‘done’ by Man Ray or Berenice Abbott meant you rated as somebody” (qtd. in Yochelson 11). In 1926 she opened a photo studio of her own on the rue du Bac, after a wellreceived solo exhibition at the gallery Au Sacre du Printemps, to which Cocteau contributed a poem (van Haaften 11). Nevertheless, her main artistic interest was to record reality. Through the mediation of Man Ray Abbott made the acquaintance of Eugène Atget, who had made countless photographs of his hometown since the 1880s, but remained largely unknown to his contemporaries. From Atget, who had travelled a lot and worked as an actor before he started his career as a photographer, Abbott learned that the “photographer of the city needs many kinds of knowledge, besides how to operate the camera” (van Haaften 27). His experiences as an actor formed also his view on Paris as a photographic subject, “so that truly to him the city was a stage and all the men and women merely actors” (27). Abbott particularly emphasizes Atget’s ability to fix the small everyday dramas on the photographic plate – that means to represent the city and city dwellers in the best sense: as main actors in the history of civilization. She was fascinated by the transience of Atget’s motifs, which revealed the uncanny in everyday life. Atget very often photographed the small streets of the vanishing old quarters of Paris and their petty bourgeois and proletarian residents, but almost never the touristic sites of the metropolis, such as the big representative monuments. Abbott states that this was a very conscious choice: “Selection makes the photographer a true historian. He must know what to photograph and what not to photograph, to give meaning to his visual

130 Petra Löffler chronicle of civilization” (van Haaften 26). Abbott not only took the portrait of Atget shortly before his death in 1927, but also bought, with the financial help of friends, 1400 exposed glass plates and 7800 negatives from his estate (Yochelson 12).10 Benjamin in his survey Kleine Geschichte der Photographie (Short History of Photography) of 1931 mentioned Atget as an ancestor of surrealistic photography: “Atget’s Parisian photos are the precursors of surrealist photography, the vanguard of the only truly broad column Surrealism succeeded in setting in motion. It initiated the liberation of the object from the aura, which is undoubtedly the achievement of the most recent school of photography.”11 For Benjamin, Atget’s merits consisted in liberating the photographic object from what he himself had called the “aura”. In this respect one might think of Atget’s preference for the detail, the fragmentation of things by making cutouts and his corresponding avoidance of photographing major touristic sites and landmarks. Atget’s photographs always dealt with the transience and fluidity of things that make the city an object of history and change. Berenice Abbott herself reflected on the task of documenting the city from time to time. Her great photographic project Changing New York, which she started in 1929, directly after her return to the American metropolis from Paris, absorbed her for many years. In 1942 she wrote about this ambitious project: Truly the city reflects life at its greatest intensity, for it represents the most powerful, complex, coordinated, and dynamic structure of civilization. In its nexus all forces of contemporary society unite. Its facilities for dwelling, travelling, eating, recreation are keyed to the highest pitch of sensation. In the city, modern life’s complexities are accentuated, exaggerated, heightened to unbearable tension. No other theme is as compelling for the photographer who seeks to express life today. (van Haaften 25)

10

11

The recent catalogue of the last retrospective exhibition speaks of 1.787 negatives and 10.000 prints (Atget 281). „Atgets Pariser Photos sind die Vorläufer der surrealistischen Photographie; Vortrupps der einzigen wirklich breiten Kolonne, die der Surrealismus hat in Bewegung setzen können. [...] er leitet die Befreiung des Objekts von der Aura ein, die das unbezweifelbarste Verdienst der jüngsten Photographenschule ist.“ (378)

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A Variety of Vistas Most of the young photographers, hungry for the comforts and thrills offered by modern metropolitan life, came to Paris during the 1920s and met there. Besides the Americans Man Ray, Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans for instance the Hungarian André Kertész, the German Germaine Krull, who influenced a lot of young photographers such as the Romanian Eli Lotar and the Transylvanian-born Brassaï, came here. They all stayed for an extended period in Paris. Evans, for instance, spent a year, from 1926 to 1927, in the French capital to hear lectures on literature at the Sorbonne and to study European modern art. Kertész lived in Paris from 1925 until 1936, when he settled in New York. He not only photographed the art scene of the rive gauche and made many wonderful moody portraits of the “city of his dreams” (Sandra Philipps 11), but also dedicated two books to Paris: Day of Paris (1945) and J’aime Paris (1974). In 1927 he also had a solo exhibition in the avant-garde gallery Au Sacre du Printemps. Krull came to Paris in 1926 and soon entered the bohemian scene in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where she met the filmmakers René Clair, Alberto Cavalcanti, Luis Buñuel and the photographers Berenice Abbott and Man Ray at the Café aux deux Magots (Sichel 84). She soon opened up her own studio for fashion and portrait photography in several locations in Montmartre. She became friends with the artist couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who introduced her to the glamorous art scene and supported her in finding clients for portraits. The photographer made also a portrait of Robert Delaunay that shows the painter on a ladder in front of his painting of the Eiffel Tower, Les jardins du Champ-de-Mars from 1922. At the beginning of the thirties, Krull moved to the rive gauche and lived in a flat on Boulevard St. Michel. She became also friends with Jean Cocteau, whom she accompanied during his adventures of the Parisian nightlife. She made some portraits of the French writer and was, as well as Berenice Abbott, especially fascinated by his long expressive hands. In the twenties many actors of the international art scene focussed their activities on Paris. The year 1928 saw the “First Independent Exhibition of Photography”: the so-called Salon d’Escalier. The exhibition took place from May 24th to June 7th 1928 on the stairway of the Comédie des ChampsElysées and was organized by Lucien Vogel, editor of the avant-garde magazine Vu, the filmmaker René Clair, the writer Jean Prévost and the art critics Florent Fels and Georges Charensol. The organizers wanted to present photography as a new art form. The extraordinary exhibition was dedicated to the avant-garde photography of the “new vision”: Kertész’s views of Paris, Krull’s visions of iron constructions and the photographs by Man Ray were

132 Petra Löffler regarded as the most exciting objects. A retrospective of Atget and Nadar was also part of the exhibition – as a celebration of the realistic heritage of that new constructivist realism in artistic photography. The late twenties were also a time when many photo books were published which proliferated the image of the metropolis. One of them was Germaine Krull’s 100 x Paris from 1929, part of a book series of city portraits, which was published in Berlin under the title Die Reihe der Hundert (The Series of the Hundred). Another one was Paris, a book with photographs by Krull and Mario Bucovich, published in 1928 with an introduction of Paul Morand, as part of a book series entitled Das Gesicht der Städte (The Face of Cities), which also offered a city map to the reader. Krull’s 100 x Paris consists of a series of black-and-white photographs of touristic views, public sites and common urban scenes of everyday city life like streets crowded with passers-by or blocked with cars. The book contains an interesting introduction written by the art critic and publisher Florent Fels. Here he compares his hometown with an adorable woman’s body: “This large extended body is Paris. Spread diagonally across the Seine is this city, which itself entrances bewitching sirens, surrounded by hills whose names are a hymn: Argenteuil – Meudon – Le Valérien – Chaville – Montfermeil – Montfaucon.”12 Fels places the exceptional attractiveness of the French capital in a visionary mythological scene. In his vision even the sirens are bewitched by the beauty of the hills of Paris and by the sounds of their names. The mythological theme also introduces the transfiguration of the past – that is, the invention of a past that never existed. For Fels, Paris is the city of beautiful memories: for him there is no quarter, no single place in that metropolis, that does not evoke a reminiscence of happiness; so that even the stranger, who enters the city for the first time, finds his dreams fulfilled: “It would be difficult to find in any part of the city a place which does not recall moving or amorous memories and the stranger visiting Paris easily finds his dreams fulfilled.”13 Again, Paris reveals itself as the very place for dreams come true. This is because everything in this city, especially in a nostalgic perspective, is full of memories of historical and individual events, so that cultural memory and individual memory merge. This constitutes, in the words of Florent Fels, the “magic of Paris”:

12

13

„Dieser große hingestreckte Körper ist Paris. Quer über die Seine gelagert wird diese Stadt, die selbst bezaubernde Sirenen bezaubert, von Hügeln umgeben, deren Namen ein Gesang sind: Argenteuil – Meudon – Le Valérien – Chaville – Montfermeil – Montfaucon.“ (V) „Man hätte Mühe, in allen seinen Stadtteilen auch nur einen Ort zu treffen, der nicht eine rührende oder galante Erinnerung wachriefe, und der Fremde, der Paris besucht, findet dort mühelos seinen Traum erfüllt.“ (V)

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You must look at these monuments as an ensemble and let yourself be moved by their great names. Then one day – and this is the day in which Paris softly pours itself into the foreigner’s soul – you will see, at a streetcorner, through the crown of a tree decorated by spring, the small needle of the Eiffel Tower, a buoy in the air; the Arc de Triomphe stands outlined against a sky of fire, the morning sun trembles around the columns of the Louvre and makes flowers blossom on the balconies of the Place des Vosges, and you are forever addicted to the magic of Paris.14

Germaine Krull’s certainly most famous photo collection, however, is Métal, which, in contrast, celebrates the comforts of modern iron architecture and industry with highly elaborated photographs. The collection of 64 plates was published in 1928 by the Librairie des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and earned remarkable resonance among art critics as well as among journalists. It included photographs of industrial iron constructions such as mines or port installations, which were shot in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Paris and Marseille. Krull’s photographic style was influenced by the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, with whom she lived in Amsterdam. During the twenties, Ivens had experimented with extreme camera positions and astonishing perspectives, fast camera movements and montage. His film De Brug (The Bridge, NL 1928) was definitely a source of inspiration for her. One of the most photographed objects of her collection is the Eiffel Tower, mostly taken from a low viewpoint. The cover shows a photo of the elevator wheels seen from a near distance. The Eiffel Tower, inaugurated at the World’s Fair of 1889, became not only the city’s landmark, but also a famous photographic and filmic object. Because of its rank and metal construction, which seems to be simultaneously aerial, the tower inspired many photographers and filmmakers. Its penetrable construction offers a variety of spectacular views – André Kertész’s very suggestive photograph Shadow of the Eiffel Tower, for instance, taken in 1929, shows only a small part of the basic construction seen from a very high standpoint, so that the passers-by at the ground look like small black dots. Nevertheless, Germaine Krull has reported that for her the tower was not primarily an interesting photographic object – she first regarded it as an “old black and inert thing” (Sichel 97). Thus, the search for interesting perspectives became, as she later wrote, an investigation of unusual ways to get a new vision of that “old black and inert thing”: 14

„Man muß diese Denkmäler im Licht ihrer Gesamtheit, unter der Erschütterung ihrer großen Namen, sehen. Dann sieht man eines Tages––und es ist der Tag, da sich die Seele von Paris sanft in den Fremden ergießt––an einer Straßenbiegung, durch die Haarkrone eines Baumes, den der Frühling schmückt, die schmale Nadel des Eiffelturmes, eine Boje in der Luft; der Arc de Triomphe steht gegen einen Himmel aus Feuer, die Morgensonne umzittert die Säulen des Louvre, läßt Blumen auf den Balkonen des Place des Vosges erblühen, und Du bist für immer dem Zauber von Paris verfallen.“ (VI)

134 Petra Löffler Finally, I found a small door at the very top of the staircase that no one uses and no one knows. I climbed and descended, and suddenly there was the magic of the iron, those great wheels that turned the elevators, those crowns of iron, the lace work of small ironwork that served as decoration, seen against the sky like huge spiders. Everything had come to life and no longer had anything to do with the Eiffel Tower as we know it: the iron was alive!15

Florent Fels once more contributed an essay to the remarkable success of the portfolio, in which he praised the lyrical mood and the transformational power of Krull’s pictures: “L’acier transforme nos paysages. Des forêts de pylônes remplacent les arbres séculaires. Les hauts fourneaux se substituent aux collines” (Krull, Métal 4). In Fels’s view, the signs of the industrialization not only change the landscapes, they replace nature and thus become a second nature. This argument frames his whole essay, as the following quote proves: “L’activité industrielle de notre temps met sous nos yeux des spectacles auxquels ils sont encore inaccoutumés. / Leur nouveauté nous saisit et nous effraie à la manière des grands phénomènes de la nature. A leur tour, ils créent un état d’esprit auquel sacrifient parfois les peintres et les poètes” (Krull, Métal 3). Another critic celebrated the “brutal beauty” of Krull’s photo collection, which indeed shows many machines, motors or wheels (qtd. in Sichel 94). Still other critics also praised the lyrism of Krull’s shots of industrial constructions and the melodious rhythm of the photographic series, which makes them comparable to cinematic symphonies of images like Joris Ivens’s De Brug (The Bridge, NL 1928) or Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin. Die Symphonie der Großstadt (Berlin. Symphony of the Metropolis, GER 1927). Like many other photographers at that time Krull was fascinated by abstract industrial forms – forms that were excised by means of photography from their former environment and in many cases could not be identified in the photographic pictures. She isolated and fragmented the shapes of things in order to transform them into visionary objects, until they became uncommon, sometimes even uncanny. But nevertheless, they remain very beautiful fetishes in the eye of the observer (Sichel 76) – and at the same time nonlegible as industrialized forms. The portfolio includes, for instance, a multiple exposure of bicycle wheels against an architectural backdrop that produces a phantasmagorical image of motion – a motion that can be seen at the 15

„Endlich fand ich ganz oben eine kleine Tür, sie führte zu einer Treppe, die niemals benutzt wurde und die wohl keiner kannte. Ich kletterte hinauf und hinunter, und auf einmal nahmen die mächtigen Räder, die den Aufzug in Gang hielten, die schweren Eisenkonstruktionen, die kleineren Verstrebungen, die nur der Dekoration dienten, im Gegenlicht betrachtet, die Form riesiger Spinnen an. Alles war lebendig geworden und hatte nichts mehr mit dem Eiffelturm, wie wir ihn kennen, zu tun: das Eisen lebte!“ (qtd. in Sichel 97)

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same time as an expression of progress and of loss of control. The photographs of these isolated forms are presented in a dynamic motionlike order so that the viewer loses his stable viewpoint when he leafs through the pages (77). Such a kaleidoscopic view is highly characteristic of the modern regime of seeing, because its quality is very cinematographic. It combines different viewpoints and picture formats, and also prefers experiments in geometry, montage and formal breaks in the layout. That is why Krull’s photographs are mentioned in Benjamin’s Kleine Geschichte der Photographie as an example for constructivist photography which can arouse critical questions – and it is for this reason that they have a certain social dimension. Her interest in formal experiments is shown in a number of photographic montages, which combine pictures of very different objects. In a series she did for the art magazine L’Art vivant there is a rude montage of the facade of the Palais Royal, of the gate to the Louvre court and of an unidentifiable industrial building with two big chimneys that must have a disorienting effect on the eye of the beholder (94). This photographic image can be seen as a sign of the antagonistic forces that characterize modernity (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Germaine Krull: Paris (photo montage, undated); collection Le Clézio, Paris; © Museum Folkwang, Essen

In 1928 Krull also started collaboration with Lucien Vogel’s avant-garde magazine Vu, where photographs of Abbott, Man Ray, Kertész and many

136 Petra Löffler others were published. There some of her most inspiring reportages of modern life in Paris were announced. In the first issue, for instance, one of her street-photographs, Chariot des Alfredistes, was printed. Her first photo reportage, Fêtes foraines, was published one month later, in April 1928. The collage-like layout of Vu functioned as a model for the photo books of Krull, Kertész and Brassaï (Sichel 100). Krull also worked for more exclusive art magazines like Jazz, Variétés or the surrealistic art magazine Bifur, where she published more photographs than many other photographers at that time (101). This shows that her photographs were circulating in the art world and at the same time in the world of the illustrated press, for whom she worked regularly until 1936. In Vu she released many photo stories about the modern city and street life, for instance “Une Porte Moderne: Une Ville d’Art: Anvers” (Vu, no. 38/1928), “Le Pardon des Terre-Neuvats” (Vu, no. 49/1929) and “Eden de Banlieue” (Vu, no. 331/1934). But her most famous project for Vu was the series of the Eiffel Tower, printed in the 11th issue of the magazine, in May 1928 with an essay by Florent Fels. These photographs created a kaleidoscopic image of the rapidly changing city, which in 1929 celebrated the 40th anniversary of the world-famous tower.16 At the end of the twenties, Krull was widely accepted in the Parisian art scene, where she was praised for bringing constructivist architectural photography to France. Berenice Abbott, for instance, named her “the Margaret Bourke-White of Paris” (Sichel 91). Brassaï, who was influenced by Germaine Krull’s visualizations of modernity, remembers especially her photographs of the Eiffel Tower as something undeniably new. And Jean Cocteau, in a letter, gave her the title “miroir reformant” and declared: “Vous et la chambre noire obtenez un monde neuf, un monde qui a traversé des méchanismes et une âme” (qtd. in Mac Orlan 16). Her abstract pictures of industrial objects were often interpreted as a metaphor of modern life, but at the same time she was praised for her poetic visions and the realism of the photographs, which creates a new visual language. In his review of the exhibition in the Salon d’Escalier Fels, the most influential art critic of this time and an enthusiastic fan of photography, called her the “Valkyrie of photographic film” (qtd. in Christopher Philipps 25). Nevertheless it was still a great honour for her that in 1931 the prestigious publishing house Librairie Gallimard released a book on the photographic work of Germaine Krull, which included an essay by the novelist and critic Pierre Mac Orlan. His essay “Les sentiments de la rue et les accessoires de la 16

Some of Krull’s Eiffel Tower photos had already been published in the German magazine Uhu together with a text about the tower’s history, but it was their release in Vu that made them popular and famous (Sichel 102).

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rue” not only praises her industry pictures, but also emphasizes her street photographs of Paris. Que Germaine Krull transpose un paysage de machines en une sorte de symphonie stupéfiante, qu’elle joue littérairement avec les lumières de Paris entre la place Pigalle et celle de la Bastille, elle ne crée pas des anecdotes faciles, mais elle met en évidence le détail secret que les gens n’aperçoivent pas toujours, mais que la lumière se son objectif découvre là où il se cachait. (7)

In his essay Mac Orlan focuses on Krull’s ability as a photographer to reveal the relevance and beauty of the small things, the importance of details, which are often overlooked by common viewers.17 It is their very dynamic viewpoint and almost cinematographic style of shooting that makes these photographs so important for the image of the metropolis. They are snapshots from a mobile point of view, forming a modern vision of the ever-changing city (see Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Germaine Krull: Eiffel Tower (from: Métal, plate 2, 1928); estate Germaine Krull; © Museum Folkwang, Essen 17

Mac Orlan also wrote an introduction to Kertész’s book Paris vu par André Kertész, which was published in 1934 by Editions d’Histoire et d’Art in Paris, including 48 photographs made in the French capital.

138 Petra Löffler The critic Marcel Auclair, in an article for L’Art vivant from October 1928, has compared the structure and the details of Krull’s photos with René Clair’s fantastic feature film Paris qui dort (F 1925). This comparison is anything but surprising. In using a panoramic view from the Eiffel Tower the film offers “a variety of vistas that turn the city into a cinematic event” (Bruno 22). The city itself is imagined as “the product of a scientific experiment” (22), because there is a machine called “ray” that brings it to life and to death. In the photographic as well as in the cinematographic vision the interplay of light and shadows is very symbolic, because it enforces the dematerialization of the object.18 So Auclair’s comparison can be seen as voiced evidence of an aesthetic regime that visualizes the metropolis as a fragmented cinematographic structure.

The Cinematic Vision of the Metropolis Since the early days of cinematography, shots of metropolitan life belong to the very heart of cultural memory. The cinematic visualizations of busy streets, municipal buildings and crowds of passers-by have formed our picture of the metropolis. Paris soon became a site of cinematic investigation. In 1900 American cinematographers came to the city in order to record the ‘event of the year’: the World’s Fair. James H. White’s Panorama of Eiffel Tower/Scene from Elevator Ascending Eiffel Tower (US 1900), for instance, shows a series of views of the exposition area, which approaches, step by step, the main visual object in this area, la tour Eiffel. First the camera was positioned among the endless stream of visitors who often noticed they were filmed and reacted to the camera. At the end of the short film the camera climbs inside the elevator to the top of the tower. There the circulating camera gives an overview over the French capital, over the network of streets, places and municipal buildings. In this moving bird’s-eye view the city itself becomes a mobile image. Such views are, as Tom Gunning has argued, a common genre of Early Cinema and stand for the availability of the metropolis as a mobile image – an image that was seen as a realistic and ‘vivid’ reproduction of the real world. Gunning has convincingly demonstrated how people’s curiosity made such views very attractive for early film audiences (“Before Documentary” 9-24). 18

An example of such a dissolution of the visualized object is Robert Delaunay’s painting of the tower Les jardins du Champ-de-Mars from 1922. Kertész also shows in his photographs of the Eiffel Tower abstracted details and the shadows of the great iron construction.

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The Lumière brothers and other filmmakers quickly broadened the collection of images of metropolitan life. Their then well-known actualities pictured not only the railway as the epitome of the modern transportation systems (see for instance L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat, F 1896), but also made the everyday-life of the working class and the bourgeoisie a part of the visual memory (see for instance La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon, Démolition d’un mur, Les repas de bébé, F 1895 or Bataille de boules de neige, Partie de cartes, F 1896). Early filmmakers also often focussed on urban sites, which are in many cases architectural sites of transit like city skylines, traffic lines or railway stations. Michel Foucault called such locations heterotopias, because they are places where no one stays for a long time. As Giuliana Bruno has pointed out in her study about the modern spatiovisuality as a “product of the era of the metropolis and its transits, film expressed an urban viewpoint from its very inception” (18). Thus, the film camera mobilizes the gaze of the viewer and the screen mirrors the urban audience. The German sociologist Emilie Altenloh, in her book Zur Soziologie des Kinos (A Sociology of the Cinema), published in 1914, praised France as a country born for the cinema and declared: “Where else would I find an audience of such mobility, with such a pronounced penchant for quick sensation, with so much taste for anything intrinsically cinematic”19. The French film audience is regarded as very mobile and thus with a great affinity to the image-in-motion on the cinematographic screen. On this screen the modern city regularly reveals itself as a visionary object: “a composite practice of spatiality was born in film that mobilized place and transformed it into a site of landscaping” (Bruno 19). The montage cuts the continuous cinematic space into pieces. That is why the city space, in the eye of the filmviewer, is dispersed to a kaleidoscope of moving vistas and has to be recomposed. In the twenties many films were released that belong to the genre of metropolitan film – to name only one: Fritz Lang’s utopian feature film Metropolis (GER 1926) plays with the antagonistic consequences of modernity, the struggle between nature and civilization in a very artificial metropolitan set design. Other films of that genre, like Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant (F 1925), are located in a more ‘realistic’ environment and are even sometimes shot outside the film studio on ‘real’ locations, which thus become visionary objects, too. Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney, GER 1927) is a good example of this cinematic view of the urban space that has become an imaginary object. The film is based on a novel of the 19

„Wo fände sich sonst noch ein Publikum von solcher Beweglichkeit, so ausgesprochener Vorliebe für rasche Sensation, von soviel Geschmack für alles von Natur dem Kinematographen Eigene.“ (8)

140 Petra Löffler Russian writer Ilja Ehrenburg which was published a year before.20 In this highly melodramatic feature film Paris is the arena of a love story set in the dubious milieu of exiled Russians. A revolutionist and his beloved were separated because of the troubles of the Russian Revolution. The girl moved to Paris, where she is waiting for her lover. The city functions in this film first and foremost as an ideal backdrop for their reunion. No wonder that their first meeting point is a great municipal park, which creates an atmosphere of innocence, security and happiness. As Christopher Prendergast has pointed out, the big municipal parks, which were built under Haussmann’s rule, adopted a pastoral imagery for the absurd sake of “suspending the frictions and divisions of social hierarchy and class conflict” (9). These parks were enriched with phantasmagorical images of an idyllic life and thus themselves became imaginary objects. One of the most notable municipal parks of this kind is the ButtesChaumont located in the XIXth arrondissement, in the northeast of the centre of Paris. It was inaugurated on April 1st 1867 at the opening of the World’s Fair. The park consists of a big lake, waterfalls and a rope bridge, green hills, a temple dedicated to the goddess Sybille at the top of a cliff and many rocks, which offer terrific sites. Louis Aragon has drawn a portrait of this park in his often quoted surrealist novel Le paysan de Paris of 1926, which is also an outstanding tribute to the antagonisms of modernization. In this nostalgic park the reunion of the couple in Pabst’s film takes place, and there is no other arena that could have been more adequate. The film shows the protagonists sitting and flirting on a rock with municipal buildings and the Sacré Cœur in the background. This camera position offers, apart from the couple’s interaction, a wonderful touristic view of Paris as the ideal backdrop for a love story (see Fig. 4a and 4b).

20

Siegfried Kracauer wrote a review of Ehrenburg’s novel for the Frankfurter Zeitung that focuses on the highly melodramatic story (5.2 36-37). Ehrenburg himself has criticized Pabst and the film very much for his false adaptation, which overemphasizes the melodramatic elements and changes even the end of the novel.

Picturing the Metropolis: Paris in the Eye of the Camera

Fig. 4a: G.W. Pabst, Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney, GER 1927): The Couple at the Buttes-Chaumont; DVD still, Kino Video, 2001

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Fig. 4b: G.W. Pabst, Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney, GER 1927): The Couple at the Buttes-Chaumont; DVD still, Kino Video, 2001

The other main locations of the film also evoke central urban spaces like the marketplace or the railway station and activities like driving in a car. Pabst’s film prefers to show the city life of Paris in full daylight, and one has to remember what Florent Fels has written about the “magic of Paris”, which appears together with the morning sun. At the same time he refuses to record the well-known touristic sights of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Elysées or the Louvre. Instead, his film focuses on the visionary old Paris with its small alleys illuminated with gas lanterns, where the reunited couple strolls around looking for a good night’s lodging. Nevertheless, the car rides through the city and the couple’s stroll across a typical French market on an early morning look very realistic, because they were not filmed in a studio (see Fig. 5). The ordinary people of Paris appear in these shots – mostly without noticing that they were being filmed.21 These scenes are reminiscent of the views of early cinema, which was popular more than two decades before. They bear the charm of a day in the real life of a metropolis, not without evoking the imaginary memory of the city at the same time.

21

There is one noticeable exception: a middle-aged man with a hat is crossing the camera standing at the crowded market and watching for seconds in the lens. Pabst has not cut off this sequence, so that it may be a conscious reminiscence of the early days of cinematography.

142 Petra Löffler

Fig. 5: G.W. Pabst, Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney, GER 1927): The Couple at the Market; DVD still, Kino Video, 2001

First of all the car rides offer an image of the city that is always changing, and undoubtedly an image-in-motion can be very emotional, that is, an image of the imagination. This fact can be proved by a look at the already mentioned scene of the first meeting of the couple at the Buttes-Chaumont. When the car with the girl arrives at the park the lover cannot wait to see her and runs alongside the running car. The camera, which is installed on a driving vehicle, simulates the view of the girl on her running lover, who is only partly seen, because the sight is blocked of trees and bushes. This short scene demonstrates the ability of the film camera to capture motion of every kind: human, mechanical and imaginary. At the end, these few marginal sequences give Pabst’s film and its conventional melodramatic plot a definitely ‘realistic’ look that makes it, at the same time, interesting for an analysis of modernity as an imaginary object. The very randomness of their use in Pabst’s mediocre film is an indication of a circulation of an image of Paris that is always an object of the imagination – an imaginary object that is shared by literature, photography and film. That is why the last word of this paper belongs to Kracauer, who has envisioned the striking power of regeneration that Paris possesses – a power that, for him, reveals itself as a woman with white hair and, paradoxically, a fresh young face: “Paris, too, bears the signs of age on her forehead. Out of the pores of its houses memories spring, and time and again rain washes the columns of the Madeleine, so that they are white like

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snow. The white of age is the city’s colour. Beneath this cover, however, she lives protected and fresh as on the very first day.”22

Works Cited Abbas, Ackbar. “Cinema, the City, and the Cinematic.” Global Cities. Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age. Ed. Linda Krause and Patrice Petro. New Brunswick, N.J./ London: Rutgers UP, 2003. 142-156. Altenloh, Emilie. Zur Soziologie des Kino: Die Kino-Unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer Besucher. Jena: Diederichs, 1914. Atget, Eugène. Retrospektive. Berlin: Nicolai, 2007. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. London/New York: Verso, 2002. Frisby, David. Cityscapes of Modernity. Critical Explorations. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Gunning, Tom. “Before Documentary: Early Non-Fiction Films and the ‘View’ Aesthetic.” Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film. Ed. Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk. Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997. 9-24. ——. “From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls. 1913.” Wide Angle 19/4 (1997): 25-61. Haaften, Julia van. Berenice Abbot, Photographer: A Modern Vision. A Selection of Photographs and Essays. New York: New York Public Library, 1989. Kracauer, Siegfried. Schriften. Vol. 5.1-5.3: Aufsätze 1915-1926. Ed. Inka Mülder-Bach. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990. Krull, Germaine. Métal. Paris: Librarie des arts décoratifs, 1926. ——. 100 x Paris. Berlin: Verlag der Reihe, 1929. Levy, Sylvie. A Transatlantic Avant-Garde: American Artists in Paris, 19181939. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. Mac Orlan, Pierre. Germaine Krull. Paris: Gallimard, 1931. Pabst, Georg Wilhelm. Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney [1927]. Kino Video, 2001. Philipps, Christopher, ed. Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989.

22

„Auch Paris trägt Zeichen des Alters auf der Stirn. Aus den Poren seiner Häuser quellen Erinnerungen hervor, und immer wieder wäscht der Regen die Säulen der Madeleine, sodaß sie weiß sind wie Schnee. Das Weiß des Alters ist die Farbe der Stadt. Unter der Hülle aber lebt sie geschützt und ist frisch wie am ersten Tag.” (5.3 300)

144 Petra Löffler Philipps, Sandra. “André Kertész, ein Tourist in Paris.” André Kertzész in Paris: Photographien 1925-1936. Ed. Collection Donations (The French Ministry of Culture). München/Paris/London: Schirmer & Mosel, 1992. 11-19. Prendergast, Christopher. Paris and the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass./Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Prigge, Walter. “Mythos Architektur.” Mythos Metropole. Ed. Gotthard Fuchs, Bernhard Moltmann, and Walter Prigge. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. 73-86. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise: Zur Industrialisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert. München/Wien: Hanser, 1977. Sichel, Kim. Avantgarde als Abenteuer: Leben und Werk der Photographin Germaine Krull. München: Schirmer & Mosel, 1999. Stein, Gertrude. Paris, France. New York: Scribner, 1940. Stierle, Karlheinz. Der Mythos von Paris: Zeichen und Bewusstsein der Stadt. München: Hanser, 1993. Yochelson, Bonnie. Berenice Abbott: Changing New York. New York: New York P, 1997. Zohlen, Gerwin. „Metropole als Metapher.“ Mythos Metropole. Ed. Gotthard Fuchs, Bernhard Moltmann, and Walter Prigge. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. 23-34.

Birgit Wagner

Topography of a City of Differences: René Crevel’s La Mort difficile (1926)

In the year of his birth (1900) René Crevel’s family lived in the rue de L’Échiquier, a bourgeois neighbourhood of the rive droite near the Place de la République, and later on in the upper middle class district of Passy in the western part of the city. Yet everything his parents, and particularly his mother, represented, namely a bourgeois lifestyle, well-planned industriousness, respectability, and anxious conformity, René rejected radically and early in his life. His short journey through life was characterized, as long as he could decide his affairs for himself before he fell ill with tuberculosis, by steps and decisions made in the spirit of avant-garde revolt. Crevel was one of the founding figures of surrealism, he loved the night, bars, jazz, and what was described at that time with the new vogue word cocktails1; in the 1930s he was politically committed to Communism; he lived in Paris, in the French Midi and in Berlin, and finally, repeatedly in various Swiss sanatoriums.2 In 1935, in an advanced stage of his illness, he chose to take his own life: in a way that he had quite uncannily foreshadowed in his first novel Détours (1924). The focus of this essay, however, will not be on this first novel, but on Crevel’s second one3, La Mort difficile (1926), in which the author deals, amongst other things, with the multinational art scene of Paris in the 1920s, of which he was a member. Especially the introduction of a character from the United States, Arthur Bruggle, permits Crevel to confront the welldocumented picture which American authors living in Paris had disseminated about French art, French intellectuality, and French lifestyle, with an appropriate counter-image: an American in Paris seen from the French point-ofview. 1

2

3

“Cocktail” was used as an expression for mixed drinks only from the 20th century onwards, although the word already existed in the French language in the 19th century. See Dictionnaire culturel en langue française (Le Robert). Crevel’s long ordeal through the usual contemporary medical and surgical treatments of tuberculosis, which was probably aggravated by syphilis, was described by doctor Michel Gazeau in the form of a “Fiche médicale” (Mélusine 22). Chronologically, Mon corps et moi (1925) was written between Détours and La Mort difficile, but this text must rather be described as a self-reflection, written in poetic prose and containing small narrative inserts, and is thus related to texts like Aragon’s Paysan de Paris (1926) and Breton’s Nadja (1928).

146 Birgit Wagner Crevel, a member of the surrealistic group of the “heroic epoch” of surrealism (Nadeau 41), – a term used to describe the years around the publication of the first surrealist manifesto and the establishment of the journal La Révolution Surréaliste – is an author who has been rediscovered in the last few years after a long period of time during which he was known and loved only by a small circle of readers. Today his texts, which Jean-Jacques Pauvert had already re-published after the Second World War, are printed in editions of the “Petite Bibliothèque Ombres” and can be found in French gay and lesbian bookshops, a fact which also indicates from which point-of-view his texts are re-read and appreciated in literary studies. Such an attribution to gay genealogy can, however, conceal what characterizes Crevel as much as his (not exclusively) homosexual inclinations: namely his innovative literary position within the surrealist movement, a position which is due to texts oscillating between poetic prose and the novel and developing a distinctive tone. Henri Béhar was able to confirm and objectify this reading experience with statistical analyses carried out with the help of the FRANTEXT database.4 Klaus Mann, a friend of Crevel’s, expressed his admittedly subjective reading experience of La Mort difficile with the following words: “the language of the story is of such vitality, and possesses such a brilliancy and beautiful clarity that one must be blind and deaf not to appreciate its sound, which is so true to and full of life.”5 Crevel’s positioning as a novelist with homosexual preferences was bound to lead to a discord with Breton, whose definition of freedom, as is generally known, did not include a sexuality that differed from the normative6 and who, additionally, rejected the novel because it represented a bourgeois form of art. According to a legend, Breton returned the manuscript of Crevel’s first novel, which Crevel had shown him, without a single word (cf. the testimonial of Maxime Alexandre, quoted in Dehésa, Europe 38). However, Crevel’s name can be found in the Manifeste Surréaliste of 1924 among those who “ont fait preuve de surréalisme absolu” (Breton 35), and the young man appeared in the first number of Révolution Surréaliste. In October 1925 he was officially excluded from the group, but he nonetheless declared himself a surrealist; it was only at the end of the 1920s and because of his politi4

5

6

“Je ne dis pas qu’on puisse, sans erreur, identifier l’auteur d’un récit surréaliste, mais il me semble que l’œuvre de Crevel est reconnaissable entre toutes” (Béhar 99). „Die Sprache der Erzählung ist von solcher Vitalität, ihr ist eine solche Leuchtkraft, eine solch hinreißende Deutlichkeit zu eigen, daß man blind und taub sein müßte, um sich dem Klang ihrer Lebensnähe, ihrer Lebensfülle, zu verschließen“ (Prüfungen 29). The German quotes in this paper were translated by Susanne Zhanial. An example can be found in volume 4 of Archives du surréalisme, which documents the “Recherches sur la sexualité”, especially the “Première séance” of 27th January 1928. Crevel, excluded from the group at that point of time, did of course not attend the “meeting”.

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cal engagement that there was a rapprochement between Crevel and Breton. In the Second Manifeste du Surréalisme (1930), Crevel is explicitly praised for the “valeur subversive” of his texts (Breton 173). This “valeur subversive” is only to a certain degree due to the literary techniques praised and practised in the surrealist manifestos. As has already been said, Crevel developed a completely independent écriture. This can be clearly seen in La Mort difficile – a text whose structured narrative corresponds most closely to the contemporary forms and standards of the genre, yet whose style, at once polemical and lyrical, differs noticeably from that of other famous contemporary authors, who in their novels also dealt with the topic of male homosexuality in connection with Paris, namely Marcel Proust and André Gide.

Space-Time of Modernism: The Chronotope of the Novel For the analysis of La Mort difficile the Bakhtinian term ‘chronotope’ proves to be very useful, although the Russian theoretician concludes his survey of the history of literature with Rabelais and even his references to later centuries only reach as far as the 19th century. Yet, as a “formally constitutive category of literature” (Bakhtin 84), the term ‘chronotope’ can be applied in principle to every narrative universe that necessarily unfolds in space and time. What Bakhtin calls “the chronotope of threshold” and “the chronotope of crisis and break” (248) corresponds, for example, exactly to the organization of space and time in Crevel’s novel. A detailed analysis of the spacetime structure of the novel reveals other characteristics of this chronotope, which have to be linked to a particular experience of time and its related experience of urban space in the era of the avant-garde. The structure of the novel resembles the structure of a classical tragedy: four chapters narrating the events of a single day are followed by a short fifth chapter functioning as an epilogue (Cornacchia 81; Devésa, René Crevel et le roman 109). However, in the course of this narrated day the settings change as well as the acting characters; the three main characters form a Racinian love chain: Diane Blok loves Pierre Dumont, who loves Arthur Bruggle, who primarily loves himself. The first chapter starts in the afternoon in a bourgeois salon in the uppermiddle class part of the city called Auteuil on the rive droite: two middleaged ladies, Mme Dumont-Dufour and Mme Blok, talk about their marriage problems. The chapter ends with Pierre Dumont rushing into the drawing room of his mother with whom he has a love-and-hate-relationship; he arrives just in time to overhear what the two ladies say about him in their con-

148 Birgit Wagner versation: the adjectives “anormal” and “dégénéré” are used. The second chapter starts with a quarrel between Pierre and his mother, in which the latter scores a point. She reminds him that his father’s fate, namely madness and confinement in a psychiatric hospital, is also in store for him. Pierre decides to move out of his mother’s flat. “La porte claque” (MD 89). At the beginning of the third chapter, Pierre is standing in a street, still in Auteuil, phoning his lover Arthur Bruggle from a telephone box, but Arthur does not want to hear his cry for help and is not available for him, whereupon Pierre makes an appointment for dinner with his sisterly friend Diane, Mme Blok’s daughter. During the scene in the restaurant truths are voiced which have never been mentioned so far in their friendship, which is not really sincere – truths about their real desires. Disturbed, Diane and Pierre ultimately part in a nocturnal street. In the fourth chapter, the place of action changes more often: Pierre rushes to Arthur’s flat, where a party is going on. Closing his eyes to the inner frailty of his friend, Arthur drives him jealous and into deep despair. After a fight Pierre is removed from the flat by some friends; they go to the bar Négrito’s, and finally, in the early hours of the morning, Pierre searches for a park bench in an “avenue déserte” (MD 151) to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. In the short fifth chapter or epilogue, the two mothers as well as Diane and Arthur are shown in the hospital, leaning over the “mort enfantin”, “un garçon si beau” (MD 151). This summary only contains the skeleton of the chronotope unfolding in the novel. The flesh and blood is made of numerous insights into the minds of the individual characters, where many different places and time levels are intertwined.7 The reading experience is therefore completely different from that which a summary of the ‘plot’ can offer. The “space-time [is] more like an agent than a simple backdrop”8, the authors of the afterword to the German edition Chronotopos write; it plays a decisive part in the constitution of meaning in the narrative, determines the fictitious possibilities for the characters’ actions and can, at the same time, document the spatial and temporal range of experiences possible at the time of the text’s production – in this case the range of experiences possible in a metropolis like Paris in the 1920s. In La Mort difficile fragments of memories and associations of all the main characters are presented. The narrated time therefore reaches far back into the past – for example as far as Mme Blok’s wedding night –, but it also reveals the immediate past of the younger generation (Diane, Pierre and Ar7

8

I borrowed the metaphors of skeleton and flesh from Bakhtin, who writes the following about the “representational importance of the chronotope” on page 250: “Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins.” “Raumzeit [ist] eher Agens als bloße Kulisse” (Frank and Mahlke 215).

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thur). The stylistic devices used by the author for these flashbacks, as critics have noted9, do not always conform to the sophisticated narrative art of the 1920s; free indirect discourse and authorial comments alternate without much artfulness; the persuasive power of the text is due to the simultaneously vehement and lyrical style, not to its fine narrative structure. Nevertheless, the impression that the chronotope creates in the narrative is a profuse illustration of urban modernity in the early 20th century; the experience of an accelerated life style is inscribed in it as well as the mutual penetration and close interlocking of urban spatial fragments, which offers itself for comparison to cubist aesthetics. Even if La Mort difficile certainly fulfils the chronotope of “threshold” and “crisis” and outlines the path of a crisis to and beyond the threshold of death, this novel also expresses a specifically modern experience of what Bakhtin calls “space-time”. The different settings, embedded in the fictitious space-time, and therefore always connected with the experience of time, together produce an incomplete, but typically avant-garde mosaic of the city of Paris.

Paris: A Topography of a City of Cubist Interlocking The settings, placed on different time levels, can be divided into three categories, which are interwoven and simultaneously present in a conflict-ridden way in the consciousness of the main characters. These three categories are the places of the despised bourgeoisie, the Paris of the international art scene, and a heterotopia, namely the psychiatric hospital in which Pierre’s father is kept. Each of these spatial categories is attributed a distinctive experience of time. With all the “brilliant violence” which Gertrude Stein attributes to him (226), Crevel describes the upper middle class milieu of Mme DumontDufour: “Reine dans son salon d’Auteuil”, she has a “chauffage central, l’eau chaude et froide sur les cuvettes, une sale de bain, l’électricité, le gaz, l’ascenseur, le monte-charge” (MD 49). The interior reflects her mental state as well as her precarious social status. The mixture of furniture and decorations of different origins is to maintain her position as the all-but-widow of a colonel turned mad, and to provide the stability for which she looks in vain to her husband and son. Her tea table is a symbol of this pursuit of inner and outer stability: “la table bouillotte, où sont encore sucrier, napperon, tasses, 9

Crevel’s novels “présentent certes de grandes qualités d’écriture. Cependant ils se font maladroitement l’écho des recherches stylistiques alors en cours” (Devésa, René Crevel et le roman 33); “recherches stylistiques” here refers to experiments with narrative forms.

150 Birgit Wagner soucoupes et tous ustensiles dont une honnête femme, amie de l’ordre et d’une pompe raisonnable, use pour le thé” (MD 42). This bourgeois repository does not fail to impress Mme Blok, a not very wealthy widow with a more modest social position. Her flat with a “petit salon” is in the avenue d’Orléans in the south of the city, and so she cannot make an impression on Mme Dumont-Dufour. She must be satisfied to evoke her “grand-mère de la rue de Grenelle Saint-Germain” several times.10 The flow of time the two women experience is characterized by a recurrence of the same and a boredom which undermines everything: “Mme Blok a l’imprudence d’avouer qu’elle s’ennuit quasi uniformément du ler janvier à la Sainte-Sylvestre, sans autre distraction que le concert Colonne, une fois par semaine en matinée le samedi après-midi” (MD 11). Diane and Pierre are constructed as figures of revolt; they try to escape from the maternal prison despite the fact that both still live at home at the beginning of the novel (as did the author himself, who also lived in the house of his mother in the rue de la Muette). They met each other in an academy of art in Montparnasse, where both take lessons in nude drawing. Diane is proud of her athletic body, she smokes, she is (in the eyes of her mother) “toujours par monts et par vaux – entendez au cinéma, au théâtre, chez des amis et Dieu sait dans quels autres lieux, partout où une jeune fille d’aujourd’hui ne craint pas de s’aventurer” (MD 9), but nevertheless Pierre suspects her of leading this life only to be liked by him and to be close to him. Her life as a ‘modern’ young woman, is from his point-of-view, only a mimicry, while of course his rebellion against the maternal world and its values has to be taken seriously – here gender constructions of the 1920s are obviously inscribed in the characterization. Pierre and his friends are to be found in cafés and nightclubs in Montmartre and Montparnasse, consuming alcohol and drugs; they frequent the “foires” and the popular “bals-musette”, where Arthur, who has a weakness for bodies of the proletarian and subproletarian classes, uses his charm to seduce boys from the boxer and casual labourer milieu.11 A counter-space to Mme Dumont-Dufour’s upper middle class apartment is Arthur’s studio near the Jardin des Plantes on the rive gauche. Arthur lives, as befits his position as an artist, under the roof of the house and his studio is described as follows: 10

11

The rue de Grenelle, fringed by several prestigious hôtels particuliers, which are today mainly occupied by French ministries, runs from Invalides to Saint-Germain. An elaborate description of the bars, in which the alternative society of homosexual and heterosexual night owls met, can be found in the volume Paris Gay 1925: the Select (Montparnasse), the bars in the rue de Lappe (near the Place de la Bastille) and Place Blanche (below Montmartre), and, last but not least, the annual meeting point of transvestites, the “bal de Magic-City” in the rue Cognac-Jay near the Quai d’Orsay.

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Le studio est éclairé par des lanternes vénitiennes, tout un mur garni de bouteilles, en réplique au Steinway, un piano mécanique, par quoi ont été remplacés le gramophone et les disques. Ainsi M. Arthur a créé une atmosphère, la même que celle des endroits où se réunissent les petits boxeurs, marlous, putains, truqueurs, à ses yeux tout neufs, curiosités d’un usage plus intimement voluptueux, mais curiosités et au même titre que les statues nègres, la psychanalyse, l’île Saint-Louis12. (MD 128-129)

This critical view of an artist’s life, which exposes the non-authenticity of this style of life and living as well, is narrated from the point-of-view of Pierre, who is constructed as the author’s alter ego. In contrast, the streets of the city, the banks of the Seine and above all, Paris by night are always presented in a positive light. In the tradition of Apollinaire’s Flâneur des deux rives (1918), the streets invite one for a stroll, yet this strolling is considered less an activity, but rather a condition in which one can lose oneself. Pierre’s lonely walks through the streets lead him “jusqu’à l’aube dans les rues d’une ville où les passants ont retrouvé leurs yeux de fauve” (MD 63). This shows that Crevel shares the surrealistic gaze at the temptations of the urban jungle with authors like Aragon and Breton, and he also shares the experience of time linked with this gaze, of the metropolitan flâneur. The seemingly dualistic structure of space in the novel – the Paris of the bourgeois “cadavres” and the nocturnal city with its international society of artists and bohemians – has a heterotopic counter-space, the psychiatric hospital with which Mme Dumont-Dufour is constantly threatening her son. This institution is the place where Pierre’s father is being treated or rather imprisoned. Crevel shares the surrealists’ distrust of the asylum as well as the fascination which this “folie” exerts. Ever since his father has lost his mind and instead gained an in-sane lucidity, he has surprisingly become an interesting character for Pierre. Yet the place of his detention is a terrifying one, a place in which time is out of joint, because each morning the colonel writes exactly the same letter to Mme de Pompadour: the (historical) past is transformed for him into the constantly present present. According to Foucault, heterotopias are places that are connected imaginatively to all other places and simultaneously negate all other places (755); the psychiatric hospital belongs to the heterotopic category of “de déviation” (757), and is a part of the big lock-up of modern societies. In La Mort difficile the heterotopic place is present in a dangerous manner in Pierre’s thinking: “Il se sent l’ombre d’un monstre […]. Une invisible charnière le rive à cet homme […] certaines tentations, certains jours de Pierre, ne coïnciderontils point avec certaines tentations, certains jours du colonel, tout comme coïncident entre elles, les lettres écrites par un fou?” (MD 47). 12

On the Ile Saint-Louis lived, for example, Nancy Cunard, whose house Crevel and Mac Cown visited regularly.

152 Birgit Wagner Also the space-time of Pierre is in danger of culminating in such a heterotopic experience. In this finally tri-polar chronotope, it is, after all, convincing from a narrative logic that the protagonist at the end of the novel restricts his space to a park bench in an “avenue déserte” and brings his lifetime to an end. Before that, however, the relationship between Pierre Dumont, the sentimental Frenchman, and Arthur Bruggle, the naïve American, unfolds in the same space-time dimension.

“Ce félin transatlantique”: An American Savage in Paris As is well known, the personal contacts of the surrealists with the AngloAmerican art scene of Paris in the 1920s were not very intense. Crevel’s access to it is therefore an exception; he was a friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas and Nancy Cunard, he knew Ezra Pound and Sylvia Beach.13 Crevel’s letters to Gertrude Stein in their faulty English14 document his familiarity with the two occupants of the flat in the rue de Fleurus, an important meeting place for English-speaking artists and authors. According to Klaus Mann, whom Crevel met in 1926, the Frenchman spent “his days with Americans, Germans, Russians and Chinese, because his mother believed that all foreigners are criminal or pathological creatures. […] she was a nationalist; he told disrespectful jokes about la douce France and its most sacred objects.”15 La Mort difficile is a novel which transfers this attitude to Crevel’s fiction. The main character in the novel, Pierre Dumont, can be easily recognized as a “portrait of the author”, but also Arthur Bruggle is based on a historical person, namely the painter Eugene Mac Cown, whom Crevel first met at Nancy Cunard’s and with whom he had a relationship from the end of 1923 to 1926, which is exactly the period of time in which he wrote La Mort difficile. Mac Cown, whom Crevel also calls Coconotte and Eugénie in his letters, was from Kansas City (Missouri). According to the testimony of a friend, he came to France as an extremely poor man – indeed, as the cliché

13

14

15

Through the help of Gertrude Stein, Crevel undertook a lecture tour to London, Oxford and Cambridge in 1925 and 1926; however, the English audience was apparently taken aback by his performances done in the spirit of Actionism, cf. Devésa, “René Crevel et le monde anglo-saxon” (241). In the first letter one can read: “a poor man who writes a so bad English” (Correspondance à Gertrude Stein 60) „seine Tage mit Amerikanern, Deutschen, Russen und Chinesen, weil seine Mutter alle Ausländer für kriminelle oder pathologische Subjekte hielt. […] Sie war nationalistisch, er machte respektlose Witze über la douce France und ihre heiligsten Güter“ (Der Wendepunkt 167).

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demands, as a dishwasher on a ship – in order to become famous as a painter, but first had to work as a jazz pianist in the Bœuf sur le Toit: C’était un jeune Américain du Missouri. Il était pianiste de jazz au Bœuf. Il y avait très peu de jazz à Paris à ce moment-là. C’était un très beau garçon. Cocteau16 recevait dans un décor très pâle et très français, quelques tables de bar et un comptoir au fond, la musique très américaine de Mac Cown créait un décalage amusant. (Bernard Faÿ, qtd. in Buot 72)

Mac Cown at least managed to hold an exhibition in Paris: in 1925 in the art gallery L’Effort Moderne of Léonce Rosenberg, a patron of the avant-garde (Carassou 92; Rotily 192); Crevel wrote the introduction to the catalogue (Buot 133). This event, however, did not lead to a long-term success for Mac Cown; he returned to the United States around 1930 and today has disappeared from relevant books on art history.17 He therefore represents the reverse side of the successful American artists’ colony in Paris: people who were attracted by the splendour and lifestyle of the Ville Lumière during the années folles, but whose artistic emigration did not result in lasting advantages or at least in a steady degree of visibility. With Mac Cown Crevel had a passionate love relationship, in which the author played the part of the suffering lover, if one trusts his letters: “Eugène, c’est la vengeance qui me fut envoyée par tous ceux à qui j’ai fait mal” (Lettres de désir et de souffrance 48). Apart from other things, Crevel suffers, because he regards his thoughts and emotions as broken in multiple and reflexive ways and also as old-fashioned European; he ascribes to his American lover that animalistic innocence regarding good and evil which also characterizes his character Arthur Bruggle: Eugène, et avec lui pas mal de ces diables d’Américains, ont une innocence! Nous, on a la force […], mais comme on a la conscience – hélas – aussi, ça explose. […] Les Américains ça sent l’animal, la plante. Et c’est l’odeur des livres que j’ai aimée enfant, où il y avait des ballons qui emportaient des orphelines dans le ciel, c’était à cause de leur parfum. Maintenant on nous donne des livres inodores. (Lettres 49-50)

This excerpt gives an idea of how the cultural imaginary developed by the French for the inhabitants of the New World, (also) shaped the loverelationship. Mac Cown, who recognized himself only reluctantly in the character of Arthur Bruggle, responded very fiercely to the reading of his friend’s novel manuscript: 16

17

Cocteau was not the owner of the Bœuf sur le Toit, but he was permanently present there and so many took him as the owner . Cf. Paris gay 30. He is, for example, not mentioned in Rotily’s extensive work about the “Artistes américains à Paris”.

154 Birgit Wagner Eugène a lu, et nous avons eu une conversation où j’ai vu toute la grandeur de cet être qui passe actuellement par une telle crise qu’il a déchiré cinq tableaux faits depuis son retour à Paris. Et ceux de cet été il n’a pu les finir. Si j’avais assez de forces et si je n’essayais pas de me donner quelque illusion par un orgueil égoïste, je serais plus simple et meilleur avec lui. Et je lui ferais du bien comme il serait juste qu’il m’en fît, étant donné que c’est à lui que je dois mon inspiration, donc le meilleur, le plus exaltant de ma vie. (Lettres 35)

Actually however, it seems that the roman à clef brought the love relationship to an end (Buot 158), even though they remained in contact as long as Mac Cown lived in Paris.18 The American Mac Cown, “poisson lumineux de l’océan” (Lettres 56), and Arthur Bruggle, his fictional counterpart, are described throughout with discursive elements that are taken from (European) exoticism: young savages, who have been cast from an unspoilt continent on to Old Europe. It is interesting to observe how the identity construction, which attributes a high degree of self-reflexivity to being French, is reinforced by a hetero-stereotype which Gertrude Stein uses in the typical fake-Alice Toklas style of her autobiography. From 1926 onwards Stein received Crevel in her Parisian flat near the Luxembourg Park: “He was young and violent and ill and revolutionary and sweet and tender” (Stein 237), and she saw him as a typical French representative of the avant-garde: “René was then and has remained ever since a devout surréaliste. He needs and needed, being a Frenchman, an intellectual as well as a basal justification for the passionate exaltation in him. […] Surréalisme has been his justification.” (Stein 226-227). The fictional characters of Pierre and Arthur are faithful images of these auto- and hetero-stereotypes; their mutual attraction and Arthur’s failure at the decisive moment of Pierre’s existential crisis are motivated by the difference in their ‘national’ characters and mentalities. Arthur, who is a musician and not a painter in the novel, is first introduced from Mme DumontDufour’s point-of-view, and thus through the eyes of a xenophobic who perceives in every type of alterity a danger to the self: Les Russes, les juifs et cette invention d’après-guerre, les Américains, voilà qui ne vaut pas lourd. Le meilleur ami de Pierre est un Américain. Mme Dumont-Dufour a déjà parlé à Mme Blok de cet Arthur Bruggle, venu en Europe comme laveur de vaisselle. […] A noter que cet Arthur Bruggle est un adolescent aux mains longues qui marche en dansant comme une panthère et a des yeux d’animal. (MD 33)

18

Crevel writes in a letter in June 1928: “Lettre de Nancy [Cunard] que je verrai le 5 août à Côme. Tout le monde est du même avis sur notre Coconotte. Pour moi je suis heureux d’en être guéri, mais toujours ému quand je vois des photos de lui, dans ses poses si ingénument prétentieuses” (Lettres 91).

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It is exactly what repels his mother that fascinates Pierre about Arthur: Bruggle est venu d’Amérique en lavant la vaisselle et les verres. Au Havre, il n’avait pas même de quoi prendre un billet de troisième classe pour Paris. Alors, il a échoué comme pianiste dans un petit beuglant. Pour les marins américains, les nègres qui venaient user la nuit avec un dernier alcool, il se rappelait certains rythmes, bouquets cueillis dans une vie antérieure, sauvage. (MD 77)

The isotope ‘wild’, which is ascribed to the American continent, subsequently branches out into numerous animal and plant metaphors and comparisons; they dominate those parts of the text in which Arthur is present. Arthur possesses “la grâce cruelle et sûre d’un jeune animal” (MD 58) as well as “des doigts plus frais que plantes” (MD 82); “son œil sent la forêt, le bois sec, la pluie” (MD 101); repeatedly he is called from Pierre’s point-of-view “petit sauvage”, “joli animal”, “panthère” or “félin transatlantique”. Conversely, Arthur feels and describes his friend’s state of mind and takes advantage of this knowledge: “Toi et Diane, votre faute c’est de trop regarder en vous” (MD 85). The savagery of Bruggle (his “cruelle innocence”, MD 103) is due to his animalistic innocence, which places him beyond good and evil. “La force d’un Bruggle […] vient de ce qu’il est dans son égoïsme aussi naturel qu’un fruit” (MD 97). At the same time however, Arthur is not ‘primitive’; his life is characterized by immoral aestheticism and hedonism. Arthur’s character and behaviour are situated in a way exactly in-between the ‘savage’, as the surrealists tried to see him, and the type of the immoralist, as introduced into French literature by André Gide. “Il [Pierre] sait bien que pour Arthur l’amour jamais ne perdra sa gaieté de jeu ni son assurance esthétique. Le jeune Américain aime la mise en scène des pyjamas, des caleçons surprenants, du linge savant” (MD 85). Out of that results the anxious question: “Le monde pour Arthur, ne serait-il qu’un jeu esthétique ?” (MD 136). However, it is precisely this that life cannot mean for Pierre, because he possesses the self-reflexive nature of the melancholic. This also forces him incessantly to compare himself to and measure himself against Bruggle: “Pierre se sous-estime pour admirer Bruggle” (MD 95), Pierre “n’a jamais cherché en Bruggle qu’une perfection qui serait un Pierre réussi” (MD 95). The character thus represents the French (European) longing for the naturalness and innocence, which in the 20th century was no longer personified by the ‘noble savage’, as in the Enlightenment, but by the ‘savage’ immoralist. ‘America’ therefore represents an alternative to the fascination exerted over the surrealists and their contemporaries by the African continent which they liked (not without colonial implications) to construct as a ‘savage’ counterpart to European culture and civilization. Arthur Bruggle represents a culture

156 Birgit Wagner which is certainly civilized, but untouched by reflection and self-doubt – and which therefore embodies youth, vitality, and sexual attractiveness as well as ruthlessness and the capacity to act. “C’est que les enfants des vieux pays, si, parfois il leur arrive de devenir libres, innocents, jamais, ne naissent ni libres ni innocents” (MD 137) – this is the summary from Pierre’s point-of-view.

Contacts, Convergences and Differences In the autobiographical surveys of the années folles, as they are documented in a series of interviews in the volume Paris gay 192519, a point-of-view dominates which characterizes the fashionable places of the Parisian 1920s as spaces in which social classes and sexual preferences mingle: brasseries, bars and dance halls, in which hetero- and homosexuals, intellectuals, workers and unemployed persons, artists and prostitutes of both sexes spent their time, coexisted and got in touch: “Il y avait un brassage extraordinaire qui correspond à ce côté des Années folles”20. “Brassage”, a word applied in its figurative sense to cultural processes of blending from the 1920s onwards21, is a term which comes close to today’s familiar category of hybridity. One would therefore expect that this intermingling of cultures and subcultures is reflected in La Mort difficile as well. This question will be investigated in the last part of my paper. The term “métèque”, a pejorative name for immigrants, which appeared in French at the end of the 19th century22 and has almost disappeared from colloquial French today, is used by Pierre’s mother, Mme Dumont-Dufour, to separate her everyday world linguistically from the dangers emanating from anything non-French: […] comment ne pas redouter les pires catastrophes de l’amitié qu’il [Pierre] a pour des métèques venus on ne sait d’où. Des métèques, oui. La France, Paris et, qui est plus grave, Pierre Dumont se trouvent en leurs mains. La jeunesse perd la tête. […] Aujourd’hui les femmes du Maxim’s sont remplacées par on ne sait quelles aventurières, des prostituées de tous les pays et de tous les sexes. Il n’y a plus de tsiganes, mais des nègres qui jouent du saxophone. (MD 12-13)

19

20 21

22

The interviews with Daniel Guérin, André du Dognon, Jean Weber, Hélène Azénor, René Rédon and Édouard Roditi were carried out at the end of the 1980s. Entretien avec Jean Weber (Paris gay 1925, 68). “Le brassage des races (métissage), des peuples, des classes sociales. Un brassage de cultures, de civilisations” (Dictionnaire culturel en lange française, Le Robert). The word, which appeared already earlier as scholarly term, is taken up by Maurras in 1894 and is used in its pejorative sense since the early 20th century (Dictionnaire culturel en langue française, Le Robert).

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This series of prejudices, told in free indirect discourse from Mme DumontDufour’s point-of-view, is well motivated by the narrative. Yet those judgements and sentences which have to be ascribed to the narrator or Pierre are also not free of binary distinctions. This is not only true for the characterization of Arthur (“ce félin transatlantique”), but also for the stereotypes applied to members of other ethnicities who appear in the course of the narrative. And it is also true for the construction of femininity and masculinity. Diane’s father, who committed suicide long before the actual narrative takes place, was Russian. From the point of view of the two mothers, there is an edifying selection of hetero-stereotypes about him, which characterizes the highly ambivalent relationship of French and (Soviet)Russian culture in the inter-war years.23 Mme Dumont-Dufour, who classifies the marriage of her friend with a Russian as mésalliance, suspects that she has become “victime du charme slave” (MD 28); Mme Blok, in contrast, reports that the deceased fell victim to the melancholy of the “sainte Russie” (MD 31). Yet also Arthur’s successful patroness, a Romanian “adventuress”, who poses as a comtesse in Paris, is drawn with remarkable malice: […] une Roumaine qui, en vingt années, avait cinq fois changé de nom, de religion, de patrie. Elle était alors la femme d’un diplomate scandinave et comme telle du comité d’honneur des Ballets danois. […] quoi qu’elle passât pour ce qui se fait de mieux dans le genre “aventurière” et eût, disait-on, mené une vie des plus mouvementées, Arthur ne la jugeait guère pittoresque. (MD 79)

The Romanian patroness and her exuberant way of life are judged hardly less critically than the bourgeois way of life of the two mothers: there is little space in this novel for alternative models of feminine life-styles. Even Diane, the ‘modern’ young Frenchwoman, only performs modernity without really having internalized it; at least her friend Pierre wants to see it in that way. Diane embodies a type of woman well known from Verlaine: the consoler of the man hurt by virile love24: “Diane aux doigts de paix” (MD 68), the “vierge sage” (64), for Pierre will always only occupy the position of a “soeur d’ombre”, beside Arthur, the “frère de lumière” (103). In a detailed analysis La Mort difficile thus proves to be a text which carefully maintains the boundaries between ethnic and gender identities. To be sure, it is exactly the construction of these borders which allows the desire characteristic of exoticism, as Tzvetan Todorov argues in his book Nous et 23 24

Cf. Martina Stemberger’s paper in this edition. Cf. N° XVII in the series Sagesse: “Ment-elle, ma vision chaste /d’affinité spirituelle, /de complicité maternelle, /D’affection étroite et vaste? /Remords si chers, peine très bonne, /Rêves bénits, mains consacrées, /O ces mains, ces mains vénérées, /faites le geste qui pardonne!” (Verlaine 91).

158 Birgit Wagner les autres. Arthur remains desirable for Pierre as long as he can preserve his state of ‘savagery’: “[…] je n’attendrais pas une semaine pour le juger insupportable s’il cessait d’être l’animal sauvage dont j’ai peur et que je tente par tous les moyens d’apprivoiser” (MD 121-122), Pierre realizes in a moment of lucidity. The faultlines caused by the surrealist gesture of rebellion, the French-American auto- and hetero-images and the different forms of desire, turn the novel into an interesting testimony of the many-facetted, but not necessarily hybrid urban culture of Paris in the 1920s.

Works Cited Archives du surréalisme. Vol. 4. Recherches sur la sexualité. Janvier 1928aout 1932. Ed. José Pierre. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 84-258. Barbedette, Gilles and Michel Carassou. Paris gay 1925. Paris: Non Lieu, 2008. Béhar, Henri. “Spécificité du discours romanesque chez René Crevel.” Mélusine 22 (2002): 99-114. Breton, André. Manifestes du surréalisme. Edition complète. Paris: Pauvert, 1979. Buot, François. René Crevel. Biographie. Paris: Grasset, 1991. Carassou, Michel. René Crevel. Paris: Fayard, 1989. Cornacchia, Francesco. René Crevel, il romanzo contro la regione. Bari: Graphis, 2001. Crevel, René. Détours. Paris: Éditions Ombres, 2007. ——. La Mort difficile. Paris: Éditions Ombres, 2007. ——. Lettres de désir et de souffrance. Préface de Julien Green. Paris: Fayard, 1996. ——. Mon corps et moi. Préface de Jean Frémon. Paris: Pauvert, 2008. ——. Correspondance de René Crevel à Gertrude Stein. Traduction, présentation et annotation par Jean-Michel Devésa. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000. Devésa, Jean-Michel. “Voix des profondeurs, écriture de l’image.” Europe 679–680 (1985): 37-48. ——. René Crevel et le roman. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. ——. “René Crevel et le monde anglo-saxon.” Mélusine 22 (2002): 231244. Dictionnaire culturel en langue française. Paris: Le Robert, 2005.

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Foucault, Michel. “Des espaces autres.” Dits et écrits. Vol. IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 752-762. Frank, Michael C. and Kirsten Mahlke. Afterword. Chronotopos. By Michail M. Bachtin. Trans. Michael Dewey. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2008. 201242. Gazeau, Michel. “Fiche médicale de René Crevel.” Mélusine 22 (2002): 173182. Mann, Klaus. Prüfungen. Schriften zur Literatur. München: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1968. ——. Der Wendepunkt. Ein Lebensbericht. München: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1969. Nadeau, Maurice. Histoire du surréalisme. Paris: Seuil, 1964. Rotily, Jocelyne. Artistes américains à Paris. 1914–1939. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998. Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Vintage Books, 1960. Todorov, Tzvetan. Nous et les autres: La réflexion française sur la diversité humaine. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Verlaine, Paul. La bonne chanson. Romances sans paroles. Sagesse. Paris: Le livre de poche, 1963.

160 Birgit Wagner

Sylvia Schreiber

The Pull of the Metropolis: The Années folles from a Belgian Perspective, or the Paris of Maigret Je suis né dans la noirceur et la pluie et je me suis enfui1 Police Judiciaire 36 Quai des Orfèvres Paris2

On Friday, 20 February 1931, the Boulevard Montparnasse was the site of a lavish celebration in honour of the launch of a new crime series. Although the first two volumes of the Maigret series had been written during the previous two years, the chronotope of these and many other cases situates them fairly precisely within those années folles which Maigret’s creator, the Belgian writer Georges Simenon, spent in Paris. It is the famous inspector’s office on the Quai des Orfèvres on which investigations centre, where they start and often also end. Gallimard recently added the third volume by Simenon to its renowned Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series,3 a special honour for the Belgian writer of crime fiction. On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Simenon’s death and eighty years after the invention of Maigret, the Zurich publishing house Diogenes announced the completion of its 75-volume hardcover edition of its Maigret series in September 2009, each of the volumes including a map of Paris4 and sporting a black-and-white photograph of a typically Pari-

1

2 3

4

cf. TV5TEXTES PROGRAMMATION TV5MONDE EUROPE – JANVIER 2009: Announcement of the film Simenon, L’homme qui n’était pas Maigret. 2003 – 52 min (France) Réalisation: Manu Riche, 2003. (17 February 2009, 17h30) www.france.fi/ccf/IMG/rtf/PAP_Fevrier_2009.rtf (1/3/2009). Maigret’s office with a view of the Seine The book launch was held on 3 June 2009 at the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles near the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and was attended by Jacques Dubois, the co-editor of the series. The first two volumes of the Pléiade series had been published in 2003 on the occasion of the centenary of Georges Simenon’s birth; the third volume was published on 7 May 2009, in time for the 20th anniversary of his death. This applies to the volumes predominantly set in Paris. Unfortunately, a relatively recent map rather than a contemporary one was selected for inclusion; similarly, the map of France which is included in those volumes in which Maigret has to leave Paris does not really date back to Maigret’s times.

162 Sylvia Schreiber sian image on its cover.5 In Maigret traversées de Paris – les 120 lieux parisiens du commissaire, Michel Carly uses period photographs to reconstruct the locations which Simenon traversed between 1922 and 1928, whose sights and sounds he recorded and committed to memory, and which, despite their temporal and spatial distance, he was still able to describe long after he had turned his back on the city: “De Montparnasse à Pigalle, du quai des Orfèvres à Montmartre, des Champs-Elysées au Marais, […] le Paris des bistrots et des palaces, des petites rues et du coude à coude populaire, de la P.J. et du grand monde. Le Paris du jour et de la nuit, toute une humanité observée par Simenon et débusquée par Maigret lors de ses 63 enquêtes parisiens” (Carly, back cover). In Paris chez Simenon, Michel Lemoine refers to the complete works of the Belgian writer and painstakingly lists all the streets, places and quartiers which the author described, first writing under various pseudonyms and later under his real name, Georges Simenon. Pictures of Paris taken by famous photographers are compiled into Simenon photobooks (e.g. La France de Maigret), and, last but not least, the Tout Simenon series published by Omnibus features photographs of Paris taken by Simenon himself. How then could one justify the omission of the famous Belgian from a book dealing with the Paris of the 1920s? Even though the topic of “Simenon and Paris” seems well-nigh exhausted by now,6 there is sufficient justification for taking up the subject in the present context by focusing on the années folles and taking into account literary interrelations between France and Belgium. Using as a starting point selected novels from the Maigret series, this article aims to show how Georges Simenon worked into a completely new kind of crime novel the dark sides of this glamorous epoch, which he himself had observed in his capacity as journalist, reporter and writer of numerous short stories of a trivial nature. At the same time, an attempt will be made to provide a further clue to that particular aspect of Belgian literature which has resulted from Belgian writers’ attraction to France on the one hand, and their conscious emancipation from France on the other.

The Pull of the Metropolis: Attraction and Differentiation In their socio-historic study of the Littérature belge, Denis Benoît and JeanMarie Klinkenberg characterize the relationship between French and Belgian 5

6

The covers of the ten-volume anniversary edition Tout Simenon (published by Omnibus in 2002/2003) feature photographs taken by Simenon himself during his career as a journalist and reporter. cf. e.g. Lemoine, Carly, Décaudin, Marinx, to name but a few.

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artists and writers – which has always tended to be one between centre and periphery – in terms of an interplay of centripetal and centrifugal forces (Benoît/Klinkenberg 33). Despite the much-proclaimed tendency towards a “Belgique malgré tout” (Jacques Sojcher) and the struggle for cultural independence, a large number of Belgian writers and artists made their careers in France, where they found an audience as well as a financial basis. Many of them settled in France, some of them even relinquishing their Belgian nationality. Klinkenberg regards “monter à Paris” as one of the “petites mythologies belges”, and the fact that this “monter” has no geographical connotations but rather promises prestige, success and social advancement, is evidenced by the continuous pull which the French capital exerts on proponents of Belgian culture. Only a few examples from the history of Belgian literature can be mentioned here: Félicien Rops (1833-1898), who illustrated Charles de Coster’s Légende […] d’Ulenspiegel, came into contact early on with the world of French publishers as well as French poets and writers,7 for whom he produced illustrations and title pages. His letters and his Feuilles volantes tend to be quite as provocative as his drawings – a first typical example of that particular brand of irrégularité which is the hallmark of many Belgian artists, especially those who have to prove their mettle in Paris. The so-called Irréguliers du langage are a constant of Belgian literature. This term subsumes a species of writers and artists recurrent in literary history, but which, in the case of Belgium, implies an additional dimension of identity problems. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Belgian symbolists, first of all Georges Rodenbach, and later Émile Verhaeren and Maurice Maeterlinck, founded a distinctive Belgian colony in Paris and frequented the literary and artistic circles of the fin de siècle. The Mercure Français served as a medium for the distribution of their writings in France, while French writers in turn published their works in Belgian journals. This “interconnexion entre les deux champs” (Quaghebeur, “Les écrivains belges” 145) seemed to work fairly well at the time. However, the game of differences continued after World War I, despite the Belgians’ original contribution to symbolism and Maeterlinck’s international success.8 The fascination of Paris on the one hand and the struggle for originality, the so-called belgitude, on the other, lost none of their topicality. Although Belgian Dadaism and surrealism acquired a distinct dynamism which paralleled activities in France (Weisgerber), its proponents repeatedly found themselves in Paris. In August 1920, the Dadaist Clément Pansaers 7

8

Particularly with Charles Baudelaire, but also with Huysmans, Villers de l’Isle-Adam, Péladan or Barbey d’Aurevilly, among others. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1911.

164 Sylvia Schreiber met Breton, Picabia, Tzara and Aragon at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes in Paris. When the Académie royale de langue et littérature française was founded in Brussels in 1921, Belgian novelists writing in French did not entrench themselves in their own nation but rather intensified contacts with their colleagues in the neighbouring country (Bitsch 198, Lope 862). In the twenties, one might have met Jean de Boschère (Jehan de Bosschère 1878-1953), “poète graphique”, writer, painter, sculptor and “lonely rebel”,9 who in France sought contacts with the surrealists as well as with Antonin Artaud. André Baillon (1875-1935) immigrated to the French capital in 1920, where he was for some time confined to the Salpêtrière because of his mental condition. In his novels dating from the 1920s, he took up the topic of mental illness, long regarded as a taboo, for example in Le Perceoreille du Luxembourg (1928), whose title already hints at its Parisian setting. Franz Hellens (1889-1971), the novelist, poet, art critic and essayist from Brussels, only “emigrated” to Paris during the forties and fifties;10 however, he already began to cultivate his ties with France during the 1920s with his revue Le Disque vert, which he published from 1921 onwards together with Michaux. Henri Michaux (1899-1984), “le plus parisien des Belges” (Robert 854), settled in Paris in 1924 and there met Jean Paulhan, who opened to him the doors of the Nouvelle Revue Française. In 1925, the year of the great Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, the signatures of Camille Goemans and Paul Nougé could be found under the Parisian surrealists’ manifesto La Révolution d’abord et toujours11 against the war in Morocco. Goemans moved to Paris in 1925 and founded a gallery in the rue de Seine which showed works by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Magritte, Hans Arp, and Yves Tangy. René Magritte settled in Perreux sur Marne in 1927 and participated in the activities of the Paris surrealists. It is somewhat ironic that even the Cobra movement (developing out of surréalisme révolutionnaire), which derived its name from the three European capitals of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam with Brussels as its centre, and whose aim it was to establish a cultural centre beyond Paris, was to constitute itself as a group in Paris twenty years later. After the twenties Hubert Juin (1926-1987) also lived in Paris, to whom we owe a monumental biography of Victor Hugo, Charles Plisnier (18961952, who was awarded the first foreign Goncourt (1937), Werner Lambersy, Susanne Lilar, Françoise Mallet-Joris (Prix Goncourt 1971), Alain Bosquet, 9

10

11

His diary is entitled Fragments du Journal d’un rebelle solitaire. Texte établi et présenté par Yves Alain Fabre. Mortemart, Rougerie 1978-1980. During World War I, Hellens was already in Nice, where a small artistic avant-garde had developed. Reproduced in La Révolution surréaliste 5, 15 October 1925, 31-32.

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Dominique Rollin, Géo Norge, and many others. They all published in France or made their careers there.12 The Belgian novelist Marguerite Yourcenar was the first woman to be admitted to the Académie française in 1980. Renowned Belgian authors are so firmly integrated into French culture that they are not even perceived as Belgians. The French literary market is not averse to incorporating them into its rows of books.

Georges Sim13 monte à Paris Georges Simenon, whose Inspector Maigret developed into the emblematic figure of francophone crime fiction, can deservedly be apostrophized as one of the most enduringly well-known Belgian novelists. “ Je suis né dans la noirceur et la pluie et je me suis enfui,”14 he is reported to have said. After his journalistic beginnings as a local reporter for the conservative Catholic Gazette de Liège he takes “la fuite vers Paris” (Album 52), possessed by the dream of becoming a novelist. Tigy, his future wife and painter (Régine Renchon), was attracted by the city of avant-gardes, because “être belge en ce temps-là comportait en soi des obstacles à surmonter” (Album 51). Upon his arrival in Paris, George Sim accepted a position as secretary to the now forgotten writer Jean Binet-Valmer, who employed him mainly as a 12

13

14

For more information on this so-called “entrisme” cf. Denis/Klinkenberg. According to them, various intentions lie behind this push towards the centre: the short-term “emigrés” hope to publish their works in France, to achieve renown, to establish relations with French writers in order to bolster their authority in Belgium. Despite their links with France they retain their “belgitude”. Others, having won a degree of recognition in France, attempt to purge their work of its Belgian characteristics and to frenchify themselves completely. Hergé (Georges Rémy), the famous father of the European bande dessinée, for example, after the war substituted French uniforms for the Belgian ones of his characters and frenchified details such as street signs and number plates. Others attempted a symbolic submission to French literature, even though their work was intended for Belgian audiences. In their case, the rapprochement to France is a mere “fait de discours” which aims at securing the author’s position in his literary field in Belgium; this applies to many Belgian authors after World War II (Denis/Klinkenberg 157-159). From the eighties onwards and especially through the foundation of the Communauté française de Belgique, the Belgian government has laid increasing emphasis on encouraging Belgian literary production by various means. One of the most frequent pseudonyms under which Georges Simenon published before he used his full name. cf. TV5TEXTES PROGRAMMATION TV5MONDE EUROPE – JANVIER 2009: Announcement of the film Simenon, L’homme qui n’était pas Maigret. 2003 – 52 min (France) Réalisation: Manu Riche, 2003. (17 February 2009, 17h30) www.france.fi/ccf/IMG/rtf/PAP_Fevrier_2009.rtf (1/3/2009).

166 Sylvia Schreiber courier. He made use of these missions to establish a dense network of connections. He also acquainted himself thoroughly with the lives of the common people, the concierges and hotel porters, the singers, dancers and prostitutes, the small artisans and the clochards. In the Mémoires de Maigret (1950), in which the character of his novels in a kind of reversed mise en abyme also recounts the story of his creator, the first-person-narrator remembers his first years in Paris: Il est peu de rues de Paris dans lesquelles je n’ai traîné mes semelles. L’œil aux aguets, et j’ai appris à connaître tout le petit peuple du trottoir, depuis le mendigot, le joueur d’orgue de Barbarie et la marchande de fleurs, jusqu’au spécialiste du bonneteau et au voleur à la tire, en passant par la prostituée et la vieille ivrognesse qui coule la plupart de ses nuits dans les postes de police. J’ai « fait » les Halles. La nuit, la place Maubert, les quais et le dessous des quais. J’ai « fait » aussi les foules, qui constituent le grand boulot. La foire du Trône et la foire de Neuilly, les courses à Longchamp et les manifestations patriotiques les défilés militaires, les visites de souverains étrangers, les cortèges en landaus, les cirques ambulants et la foire aux Puces. Après quelques mois, quelques années de ce métier, on a en tête un répertoire étendu de silhouettes et de visages qui y restent gravés pour toujours. (Mémoires 262)

During a short stint as secretary to the Marquis Raymond d’Estutt de Tracy, who abducted him to his country seats during most of his employment, Simenon gained some insight into a hitherto unknown aristocratic society and became acquainted with the French provinces, which, next to Liège and Paris, provide the settings for his novels. After George Ista, a Belgian novelist living in Paris, had introduced him to the yellow press, George Sim became a monthly contributor of stories to magazines such as Frou-Frou, Sansgêne, Le Sourire, Le Rire, La Vie parisienne, Paris-Plaisirs, Paris-flirt, Ric et Rac, Le Merle Blanc, Le Merle Rose, L’Humour, Gens qui rient, etc. (Lacassin 8, Assouline 145). And it was none other than Colette who provided an opportunity for the young scribbler, after a number of attempts “trop littéraire[s]” (Album 69), to publish in the Paris Matin. Subsequently, the publishers Ferenczi, Fayard and Tallandier became his most important employers and Simenon developed into the Eugène Sue of the 1920s. Between 1924 and 1931, writing under 17 different pseudonyms, he produced roughly 190 “romans populaires”, potboilers, “romans alimentaires”, as he himself called them, as well as innumerable penny dreadfuls, detective and adventure stories. Some themes, characters and even stories recur in different series (Assouline 151). Simenon’s increasing earnings from these sources enabled the couple from Belgium to leave Montmartre for the Place des Vosges; they also allowed them to move upwards on the social ladder and to participate in the entertainments of the années folles. While Simenon spent his days feverishly producing stories, his nights were spent in

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the Rotonde, the Coupole, the Dôme and the Jockey, in the bars and night clubs, but also in the cinemas of the rive gauche. He made the acquaintance of painters such as Vlaminck and Derain, Picasso, Pascine, Kipling and Soutine (Assouline 167), but also that of Josephine Baker, whose performance in the Revue nègre took Paris by storm (cf. also Mes dictées. Vent du nord, vent du sud, 917). The author obligingly allowed himself to be photographed together with the black singer and dancer in the company of his wife Tigy in the Coupole.

Fig. 1: Josephine Baker and Georges Simenon in the Coupole (1928); on the far left Tigy, alias Régine Renchon; from: Lacassin, vraie naissance 48. © Collection Fonds Simenon

The ABCdaire of the still famous gourmet mecca of the rive gauche lists “Maigret Jules” as a separate entry (96), with a reference to the renowned Barman Bob, whom Simenon, or rather Maigret, knew very well (cf. La Tête d’un homme). Moreover, the Simenons took part in the “concerts de musique mécanique” in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,15 as well as in the “nuits folles” at the Bœuf sur le Toit, the meeting point of the Parisian artistic and literary avant-garde founded in 1922. Jean Cocteau, Raymond Radiguet, Paul Morand, Maurice Sachs, Serge Diaghilev, André Gide, Maurice Chevalier,

15

Assouline reports for example of a scandalous concert by Stravinsky which appears to have affected Simenon deeply (168).

168 Sylvia Schreiber François Mauriac, Léon-Paul Fargue, Coco Chanel and many others belonged to this set (Assouline 168-169). In the Mémoires de Maigret, the first-person narrator looks back on the années folles as experienced by the young Simenon: Le dollar valait je ne sais quelles sommes invraisemblables. Les Américains allumaient leur cigare avec des billets de mille francs. Les musiciens nègres sévissaient à Montmartre, et les riches dames mûres se faisaient voler leurs bijoux dans les thés dansants par des gigolos argentins. La Garçonne atteignait des tirages astronomiques, et la police des moeurs était débordée par les “partouzes” du bois de Boulogne qu’elle osait à peine interrompre par crainte de déranger dans leurs ébats des personnages consulaires. Les cheveux des femmes étaient courts, les robes aussi, et les hommes portaient des souliers pointus, des pantalons serrés aux chevilles. … (Mémoires 214-215)

The novelist devoted all his energies to the enhancement of his fame and fortune, and his publishers also contributed their share. There was the legendary project of the “homme-qui-a-écrit-un roman-enfermé-dans-une-cage-deverre!” (Assouline 186)16, and the year 1927 saw the birth of the “phénomène Simenon.” In 1928, however, the man himself left Paris for a naval voyage of discovery on the canals of France, and later even far beyond the borders of the country. Apart from a prolonged stay in Neuilly (autumn 1936 until spring 1938), the travelling novelist only sporadically returned to the French capital. His work, however, remains firmly anchored in Paris. At Delfzijl, a Dutch port at the Eems estuary, in 1929, the name Maigret was reported to have appeared for the first time.17 The first novel that Simenon signed with his full name was Pietr le Letton, which was originally published in instalments in the weekly Ric et Rac.18 Fayard, who twenty years previously had already published Fantômas, initially appeared sceptical towards this new kind of detective fiction featuring the sedate, placid inspector who peacefully chats with the culprit in a hotel room at the end of the story. Simenon’s inspector is not one of the coldly analytical, infallible detectives who discover the culprit and bring him to justice; instead, he aims at the intuitive, psychological investigation of his cases. He is neither irresistible nor infallible nor invulnerable. In Pietr le Letton, the inspector is wounded by a gunshot, and 16

17

18

Simenon was to have written a novel for Paris-Matin at record speed within the space of a week, locked into a glass cage expressly designed for the purpose and stationed on the veranda of the Moulin Rouge. Simenon joined in the game, which had previously provoked highly ambiguous reactions and, in the end, was not realized. This was not Pietr le Letton, as is generally assumed and even maintained by Simenon himself, but La Maison de l’inquiétude, which is rejected by Fayard and published in March 1930 by the newspaper L’Oeuvre. For the genesis of Pietr le Letton cf. Claude Menguy and Pierre Deligny 27-43.

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one of his colleagues is killed.19 Consequently, Maigret can first of all be described as a kind of Irrégulier of the polar (i.e. roman policier, detective story). Nevertheless Fayard agreed to the publication of a new “Collection des romans policiers” after receiving a number of instalments in advance and being guaranteed one new novel per month. As already indicated at the beginning of this article, celebrations of the appearance of the first volume of the Maigret series took place within the framework of the lavish and extravagant “Bal anthropométrique”, which was held at the Boule Blanche, a wellknown Paris night club situated on the boulevard Montparnasse, at the corner of 33 rue Vavin, near the Jardin du Luxembourg. More than 400 guests had been invited, among them Philippe de Rothschild, Francis Carco, Armand Salacrou, Kiki de Montparnasse, the painters Derain and Kisling, the architect Mallet-Stevens, and many others (Lacassin 1). At the entrance, they all had to submit to having their fingerprints taken on their invitation cards, which featured quotes from the new novels.

Fig. 2: Quelques invitations au “bal anthropométrique”; from: Lacassin, vraie naissance 31. © Collection Fonds Simenon

Artists were encouraged to sign the walls. At four o’clock in the morning, the ravaged buffet was replenished by waiters from the near-by Dôme. “La salle 19

Un Échec de Maigret, Maigret a peur, Maigret hésite, Maigret se trompe, are titles which highlight the famous inspector’s human weaknesses.

170 Sylvia Schreiber est encore pleine à craquer. Cocottes et parlementaires, comédiens et écrivains, journalistes et avocats continuent de s’écraser les uns sur les autres au rythme d’une musique assourdissante. Des infatigables se dénudent et se douchent au champagne” (Assouline 220). At seven, breakfast was served at the Coupole. The event on the rive gauche was a terrific publicity stunt20 commented on by the entire Parisian press, though not entirely positively.21 Francis Lacassin spoke of the “événement parisien le plus médiatisé de l’avant-guerre.” By March 1934, eighteen volumes of the Maigret series had been published. The inspector had temporarily been retired by his author; however, he was still present in the novellas of 1936-38 and reappeared as the hero of the novels published by Gallimard in 1942. From 1945 until 1972, the newly founded publishing house Presses de la Cité brought out at first one and later two to three new volumes per year.

The Paris of Inspector Maigret “Je n’ai jamais écrit sur des lieux que je ne connaissais pas,” the novelist maintains in his autobiographical text Des Traces de pas (740). Even though such statements are always to be taken with a grain of salt, Simenon’s assertion may hold true where Paris is concerned. He had lived in Paris long enough to be able to infuse his novels with the atmosphere of the city. The setting of the first Maigret novels does not change significantly in the course of the series, apart from a number of technical appliances which have yet to be invented, such as the TV set or the electric coffee-maker in the inspector’s household on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. In order to do justice to the time frame of this volume, a closer look at the para-literary texts from his years of apprenticeship in Paris22 might have suggested itself. However, limiting this article to the Maigret series appeared logical and reasonable in view of its focus on the Quai des Orfèvres in the heart of the city. The selection of texts could be limited and chosen at random if one agrees with Jacques Dubois and Benoît Denis, the editors of the Pléiade edition, vol. 3, who observe that “Simenon a peu ou prou toujours écrit le même roman” (XII). The diegesis of his stories, their fictional world, their 20

21

22

The publicity campaign was financed by Simenon from his earnings from the copyright of his novels. The Canard enchaîné did not put it beyond Simenon to write a novel while walking around the Bassin of the Tuileries on his hands. These have been systematically collected and annotated by Michel Lemoine in L’Autre Univers.

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themes and narrative patterns are recurrent. The precise description of their settings locates the stories in space; their temporal setting frequently remains undefined but can be deduced from a number of localizing details. The police station in the Quai des Orfèvres on the banks of the Seine with its view of the Pont Saint-Michel lies at the heart of the Maigret novels and of all their Parisian settings it is the one that is mentioned most frequently, even though the inspector’s investigations often take him far beyond the limits of the French capital and later on even to America. The Quai des Orfèvres also features prominently in other French crime novels as the seat of the criminal investigation department. Stanislas-André Steeman, next to Simenon one of the Belgian specialists of the polar, uses the address as the subtitle of his novel Légitime Défense.23 A cliché that is inextricably linked with the office on the Quai des Orfèvres is the coal-burning stove which Maigret still stokes long after central heating has been installed in the palace of justice (La Première Enquête 361). The nearby Brasserie Dauphine,24 where Maigret and his team often repair for sustenance and from where he frequently orders his “demis” and sandwiches to be brought to his office, all but functions as an extension of the palace of justice. His predilection for a cool glass of beer, which Pierre Assouline, one of Simenon’s biographers, puts in relation to the author’s Belgian origins, just like his indispensable pipe, belong to the stereotypes which make up the character of the inspector. However, he is not averse to strong spirits such as Calvados or Cognac, and plum liquor is one of the staples of the Maigret household. The inspector does not appear to regard drinking on duty as a taboo. Whenever possible, the gourmet-gourmand makes use of opportunities provided by his investigations at the Coupole or the Hôtel Majestic to dine there in style or to watch other (suspicious) guests at table. He orders “beefsteak, des frites et un double demi” (Les Caves du Majestic 392), followed by a slice of “côte du bœuf” (394) which is served on a silver trolley with big covers. In Pickwick’s Bar on the rue La-Fayette, where there is dancing to the music of a jazz band, he indulges in roasted almonds and afterwards has to quench his thirst with champagne, which one is served in such establishments without having to order it (Pietr le Letton 401). It is not cultural or tourist attractions that Simenon presents to the reader from the point of view of Maigret or the other characters; these are often only hinted at in ironic asides about tourists taking photographs. What he focuses 23

24

Légitime Défense. Quai des Orfèvres. Bruxelles, Le Jury 1942; Bruxelles, Ed. Labor 1999, 2000. This is a fictional name; it was the Restaurant des Trois Marches which was situated on the Place Dauphine (Lemoine, “Du Quai des Orfèvres” 80).

172 Sylvia Schreiber on instead is the way of life and of enjoying life of its inhabitants and visitors, the bars, cafés, restaurants, hotels and apartment blocks, but also the railway stations, the streets and alleys, the quais along the Seine and their different moods according to the time of day or night, the weather and the case under investigation. Pouring rain, the fog over the Seine or over the pipe-smoking inspector’s desk, the darkness in the narrow alleys and disreputable bars make up the atmosphere of these crime novels as much as the splendour of brightly lit halls of the hotels, the varicoloured lights of the bars and brasseries, or the sunlight flooding the Champs-Élysées. There seems to be no place or social milieu unaffected by crime. The characters are perfectly suited to their particular milieu in their habits and appearance; any deviation from the expected marks them as suspicious or even culpable within the logical framework of the crime novel. Simenon makes good use of the semantics of spaces and their inventories. Well-known places function as indicators of moods or events, as catalysts for emotions. They evoke a feeling of familiarity in the reader, of complicity with the detective and quite often also with the culprit. The precise localization of the settings lends a semblance of reality to fictional events. In the course of the novel they develop into stereotypes which serve the reader as indicators. Dumortier calls them “stereotypes spatiaux” (25), since Simenon always chooses places for his settings whose reality is attested. In this context, Roland Barthes speaks about informations or informants which serve to anchor fictional events in reality, i.e. in time and space (Barthes 16-17). The reader is encouraged to reconstruct the geography of the cases with the aid of maps. Buildings, interiors, streets, alleys, the quais along the Seine, places, gardens and other elements of the cityscape are used not only as a means of creating atmosphere or visualizing moods; they provide a quasi-documentary background for the stories. Dichotic spatial structures like that created by the juxtaposition of centre and banlieue, city and province, public and private space, create suspense and, together with the characters associated with them, provide opportunities of identification. Following Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, i.e. the interrelation between time and space (“the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature”, Bakhtin 84), it is possible, as I have already indicated, to draw conclusions concerning the novels’ temporal settings from the places of action mentioned in the texts. This method is particularly useful in view of the fact that Simenon, or rather Maigret, attaches no great importance to dates. “Je n’ai pas la mémoire des dates et je ne suis pas de ceux qui gardent soigneusement des traces écrites de leurs faits et gestes, chose fréquente dans notre métier” (203), it says in the Mémoires de Maigret. And concerning his creator the first-person narrator remembers that “[u]ne des manies qui m’a le plus irrité, parfois, est celle de mêler les dates,

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de placer au début de ma carrière des enquêtes qui ont eu lieu sur le tard, et vice versa, de sorte que parfois mes inspecteurs sont tout jeunes alors qu’ils étaient pères de famille et rassis à l’époque en question, ou le contraire” (Mémoires 301-302). Consequently it does not come as a surprise that the dates given in the various Maigret novels, if any are given at all, can be fairly vague and even contradictory. As far as the inspector’s age is concerned, there are differences of as much as 27 years. Maigret enters the literary stage at the age of approximately forty-five and remains at that age for the next forty years or so. On the basis of various spatial indicators it is possible to situate most of the cases located in Paris in the late années folles, apart from explicit flashbacks to Maigret’s beginnings as a young police officer or fast-forwards to the time of his retirement. However, the avoidance of precise dates and “historical” figures lends the stories their timeless character. The names with which the reader is supplied are as fictitious as the events of the novel. Simenon’s precision when it comes to the disclosure of settings and the indication of the time of day or year, to descriptions of clothing, jewellery and other apparel, the so-called indices, is paralleled only by the parity of his clues as to the stories’ location in time. Historical or political events by which the story might have been dated hardly ever occur in Simenon’s crime fiction, or are only hinted at. In the Première Enquête de Maigret (1949), one of the few stories which provide a precise date, there are references to a state visit which keeps the police busy, there are reports of a gala performance at the opera, a display of fireworks, festive parades; however, no names of historical personages are mentioned. On était le 15 avril 1913. La Police judiciaire ne s’appelait pas encore ainsi, mais s’appelait la Sûreté. Un souverain étranger avait débarqué le matin, en grande pompe, à la gare de Longchamp, où le président de la République était allé l’accueillir. Les landaus officiels, flaqués de gardes républicains en grand uniforme, avaient défilé avenue du Bois et dans les Champs-Elysées entre deux haies de foule et de drapeaux. (La première Enquête 361)

In this flashback, Jules Maigret is 26 years old and has been married for five months. He has been a member of the police force for four years, has worked his way upwards through the lower ranks of the profession and has for the past year held the post of secretary to Inspector Le Bret at the Saint-Georges police station.25

25

In contrast to other instances, this moves the year of Maigret’s birth to 1887. If one assumes the inspector to be forty-five years old, he would have to have been born either in 1884 or 1885 (cf. also Bandou 9).

174 Sylvia Schreiber The “case” in the coffee dynasty Gendreau-Balthazar takes the reader back to the Paris of horse-drawn carriages and tramways, although the metro is already in existence and there are also omnibuses and taxis. On the wooden pavement of the rue Chaptal one can still hear the muffled sound of horses’ hooves (390). Maigret’s superior Le Bret, presumably the only inspector in Paris to possess an equipage of his own, happens to be acquainted with the Gendreau-Balthazars, lives in the elegant neighbourhood of Monceau in one of the new houses on the boulevard de Courcelles (373) and wears suits made by the best tailor of the Place Vendôme (377). Maigret’s sensitive investigation in this first case, during which he comes into painful contact with the ups and downs of high society, and in whose course he has to discover the laws governing social hierarchies, surprisingly ends with his promotion to the rank of inspector and his move to the Quai des Orfèvres. In the police report in Pietr le Letton (1931), the date is deliberately omitted or replaced by a series of dots (443, 459). However, the strains of music which waft upwards from the lower storey of the Hotel Majestic on the Champs-Élysées26 hint at the jazz age. The fact that the Coupole, opened in 1927, is mentioned places the events of the novel, which was written in 1929, at the end of the 1920s. Maigret, now chief inspector, is explicitly set off against other police officials: “[i]l ne portait ni moustaches, ni souliers à fortes semelles” (Pietr le Letton 370); yet his deportment and his function make him appear ill suited to the halls of a luxury hotel. He wears woollen suits of good quality, a tie (often tied clumsily), and trousers which are slightly too wide. With his obligatory pipe, the hat, and the dust coat with the velvet collar, his appearance is such as to make him something of a misfit in elegant surroundings. “La présence de Maigret au Majestic avait quelque chose d’hostile. Il formait en quelque sorte un bloc que l’atmosphère se refusait à assimiler. […] Avec son grand pardessus noir à col de velours, il était impossible de ne pas le repérer tout de suite dans le hall illuminé” (Pietr le Letton 371). “Le Majestic ne le digérait pas. Il s’obstinait à faire une grande tache noire et immobile parmi les dorures, les lumières, les allées et venues de robes du soir, de manteaux de fourrure, de silhouettes parfumées et pétillantes” (374). Maigret’s Paris has not yet seen the invention of the TGV; trains still running on steam are popular settings, as are railway stations. The beginning of Pietr le Letton is set at the gare du Nord, where the first body is discovered in a toilet on the Northern express, while his doppelganger, who later turns out to be his twin brother, disappears at the luxury hotel Majestic on the 26

Its location is now occupied, among others, by a FNAC-Electronic-Store. The hotel, that also gives the title to a separate Maigret volume, is today’s Claridge. There was a Hotel Majestic, which was, however, situated on the avenue Kléber.

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Champs-Élysées. Later, Maigret will sit opposite him in a crowded compartment of the Le Havre-Paris express during the train journey from Fécamps, a side scene of the story, to Paris (Pietr le Letton 392). Simenon is not the only author to take a fancy to the motif of murder on a train; at roughly the same time, Agatha Christie writes The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) and Murder on the Orient Express (1934). And is it really a coincidence that the detective on the Orient Express is Belgian? While the emerging novelist, together with Tigy the painter, liked to move in the sophisticated and avant-gardist circles of the 1920s, his protagonist Maigret abhors the luxurious lifestyle and the sophistication of the socalled high society, as can often be deduced from exaggerated descriptions of usually female characters. Without entering more deeply into questions of gender – an almost inexhaustible topic with Simenon – one can state that the descriptions of “fine ladies” who attract Maigret’s professional attention in the course of his investigations – often rich Americans – range from subtle irony to something closely approaching outright caricature. In Pietr le Letton, which already displays the Belgian author’s complete range of spatial and personal stereotypes, the inspector’s attention during his prolonged wait for the Northern express is caught by a young woman “emmitouflée de vison, les jambes, par contre, gainées de soie invisible, [qui] allait et venait en martelant le sol de ses talons” (Pietr le Letton 367). In the hall of the Majestic, where the Latvian has arranged to meet the billionaire Mortimer-Levingstone, “les élégantes s’agitaient parmi les traînées de parfum, les rires pointus, les chuchotements, les salutations de style d’un personnel tiré à quatre épingles” (Pietr le Letton 371). Mrs Levingston and her necklace – worth several millions (372) – becomes his prime target for ridicule when she completely loses her nerve under the inspector’s calm scrutiny: “elle se mordit les lèvres, devint pourpre sous son fond de teint, frappa le sol du pied avec impatience. Il la fixa toujours. Alors, poussée à bout, ou peut-être ne sachant que faire d’autre, elle piqua une crise de nerfs” (375). On the other hand, his encounters with women from the demi-monde often display an undercurrent of sympathy, even if the women in question are involved in the crime, like Anna Gorskine in Pietr le Letton. At the luxurious Hôtel Majestic, a meeting takes place between the internationally wanted gangster and an American billionaire, who in the end is also murdered, but in his case by a Russian Jewess who lives with the Latvian’s twin brother in Paris. The contrast between the two worlds could hardly be greater. On the one side, there is the luxury hotel and its elegant entrance hall with its fountain and mahogany counter, which the Mortimer-

176 Sylvia Schreiber Levingstons leave in a limousine, robed in furs and evening dress, for the ‘Gymnase’, where they attend the opening night of an opera before ending the evening at Pickwick’s Bar on Montmartre with jazz, champagne, caviar, truffles and lobster. On the other side, we have the Hôtel Au roi de Sicile in the so-called “ghetto de Paris”, “dont le noyau est constitué par la rue des rosiers” with their “boutiques aux inscriptions en yiddish, des boucheries cahères, des étalages de pain azyme” (392), where the inspector during his pursuit of the Latvian surprises a Jewish family having their dinner in a kind of glazed loge on the mezzanine. Everything about this milieu is described in extremely negative terms: Une odeur rance s’échappa. Le Juif avait une calotte noire sur la tête. Sa femme obèse ne s’sarrêta pas de manger […]. Anna Gorskine […] paraissait plus que les vingt-cinq ans qu’accusait le registre. Cela tenait sans doute à sa race. Comme beaucoup de Juives de son âge, elle s’était empâtée, sans perdre pourtant une certaine beauté. […] Ses cheveux noirs, gras, non peignés, tombaient en mèches épaisses sur son cou. Elle était vêtue d’un peignoir usé qui s’entrouvrait et laissait voir son linge. (393-394)

Later, during the interrogation in her prison cell, the inspector nevertheless shows “une certaine sympathie” for the Jewish woman, “car elle avait du cran!” (438). When Anna Gorskine loses her nerve and starts to tear out fistfuls of her hair in a fit of hysterics, he bathes her face in cold water and lifts her onto the pallet with his own hands. “Il fit cela sans l’ombre d’une rancune, avec une douceur dont on l’eût cru incapable, il rabaissa la robe sur les genoux de la malheureuse, tâta le pouls et, debout à son chevet, la regarda longuement” (439). In the end, he even orders a meal from the Brasserie Dauphine to be served to her. The main culprit likewise arouses Maigret’s sympathy. At the end of the novel, after a prolonged investigation, pursued and pursuer finally find themselves in the same hotel room, drenched and wearing other people’s dressing gowns, which suggests a kind of human complicity. In the course of an almost amicable conversation Maigret gets the murderer’s confession, which uncovers a story of fraternal strife, and finally countenances his suicide. In the Caves du Majestic, which initially appeared in instalments in the publisher Gallimard’s weekly magazine Marianne and was only published in book form in 1945 in the course of Maigret revient, the atmosphere of Paris has hardly changed in comparison to Pietr le Letton. Only the places of action have changed slightly and are somewhat less gloomy than in the first novel. The reader is again confronted with the labyrinth of the luxury hotel, the hierarchical structure of its personnel, and the moral hypocrisy of the socalled high society. The exceedingly rich American Oswald C. Clark, – the

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stereotypical American in Paris apparently has to be rich – whose wife has been found dead in the cellar of the Majestic, in the meantime disports himself together with his children’s nanny at the pleasure haunts of Paris, the Foire du Trône and the Moulin de la Galette, rounding off the evening with grilled sausages at the Coupole at three o’clock in the morning and finally disappearing into the Hôtel Aiglon on the rive gauche together with his lover. At the same time, the inspector on his bicycle accompanies the chef of the coffee kitchen to his small house in St. Cloud, where he is confronted with the figure of Charlotte, a former b-girl who now works in the cloakroom of a night club on the rue Fontaine, and who turns out to have been a friend of the murdered woman. In the novel, social distance acquires a further, ironical dimension through the language barrier and the repetition of Qu’est-ce qu’il dit? (366-369, 399-402), or You we you we we well… (363-365), a phrase which Maigret finds utterly incomprehensible. To this one might add the rivalry between the police and the department of justice, which displays undue haste in its readiness to judge and condemn; in the end, however, it is the inspector – as holds true for most cases – who comes to the correct conclusion and solves the case. Large parts of La Tête d’un homme (1931) are set in the American bar of the Coupole and draw a colourful picture of the fashionable establishment on the boulevard Montparnasse, which attracted patrons of all nationalities and social orders. Les gens se coudoyaient familièrement et, qu’il s’agit d’une petite femme, d’un industriel qui descendait de sa limousine en compagnie de joyeux amis ou d’un rapin estonien, tout le monde appelait le barman en chef: Bob. On s’adressait la parole, sans présentation, comme des camarades. Un Allemand parlait anglais avec un Yankee et un Norvégien mélangeait au moins trois langues pour se faire comprendre d’un Espagnol. (760)

In this novel Maigret, relying purely on intuition, even takes upon himself the risk of organizing the break-out from the Santé prison of a criminal sentenced to death, long before he can offer proof of his innocence. Here, too, the victims belong to the circle of rich Americans so frequently found on the rive gauche during the années folles. The list of examples in which Simenon in his polar series glances behind the scenes of the glamorous twenties could be extended still further. Meanwhile, a detective of Maigret’s type is no longer an Irrégulier. Countless successors people the crime scene not only on paper, but also on the cinema screen and in countless TV series.

178 Sylvia Schreiber In many of his crime novels, Simenon not only used the Paris of the 1920s as the setting for his stories; instead, the city, together with the figure of Maigret, takes on the role of main protagonist.

Works Cited Album Georges Simenon. Iconographie choisie et commentée par Pierre Hebey. Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 2003. Arlecchino senza mantello. Fantasmi della ‘Belgité’. Direzione di Ruggero Campagnoli e Marc Quaghebeur, a cura di Anna Soncini Fratta. Rimini: Panozzo, 1993. Assouline, Pierre. Simenon. Édition revue et augmentée. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 84-258. Barthes, Roland. “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits.” Communications 8 (1966): 7-33. (Éditions du Seuil, 1981. 16) Baudou, Jacques. Les nombreuses vies de Maigret. Lyon: les moutons électriques, 2007. Bitsch, Marie-Thérèse. Histoire de la Belgique. Paris: Hatier, 1992. Brochier, Jean-Jacques. “Du chagrin d’être belge…” Rev. of Le Mal du pays, by Patrick Roegiers. Magazine littéraire 417 (fév. 2003): 6. Carly, Michel. “Simenon, une littérature de gares.” Traces 8 (1996): 187-210. ——. Maigret traversées de Paris. Les 120 lieux parisiens du commissaire. Paris: Omnibus [Carnets], 2003. Deligny, Pierre. “Les Bottes de sept lieux.” Traces 7 (1995): 89-135. Denis, Benoît and Jean-Marie Klinkenberg. La littérature belge. Précis d’histoire sociale. Bruxelles: Labor [Espace Nord], 2005. Dufresne, Thomas and Georges Viaud. La Coupole. ABCdaire. Paris: le cherche midi, 2007. Dumortier, Jean-Louis. “Le lecteur simenonien et la construction de l’espace.” Traces 7, Les lieux de l’écrit. Actes du 4e colloque international qui s’est tenu à Liège les 20, 21 et 22 octobre 1994. Université de Liège, Centre d’Études Georges Simenon 1995. Eskin, Stanley. Simenon, une biographie. Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1990. France de Maigret (La) vue par les maîtres de la photographie du XXe siècle. Textes de Georges Simenon réunis par Michel Carly. Préface de Denis Tillinac. Paris: Omnibus 2007.

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Klinkenberg, Jean-Marie. Petites mythologies belges. Bruxelles: Labor, Espace de Libertés 2003; nouv. éd. rev. et augm. 2009 [Coll. Réflexion faite] Lacassin, Francis. Simenon 1931. La naissance de Maigret. (Supplément au tome 17 de Tout Simenon), [Paris]: Presses de la Cité, 1991. ——. Simenon et la vraie naissance de Maigret. Paris: Dragon, 2003. Lemoine, Michel. “Du quai des Orfèvres à la brasserie Dauphine: état des lieux.” Traces 8 (1976): 62-85. ——. L’Autre Univers de Simenon. Guide complet des romans populaires publiés sous pseudonymes. Liège: Éditions du CLPCF, 1991. ——. Paris chez Simenon. Bibliothèque Simenon I. Paris: Société d’Editions Les Belles Lettres; Amiens: Encrage, 2000 [Travaux, 37]. Lope, Hans-Joachim. “Die französischsprachige Literatur Belgiens.” Handbuch Französisch. Sprache – Literatur – Kultur – Gesellschaft. Ed. Ingo Kolboom, Thomas Kotschi and Edward Reichel. Berlin: Schmidt, 2008. 858-866. Marinx, Gaston. “Georges Simenon de Liège à Paris.” Traces 7 (1995): 5583. Quaghebeur, Marc. Un pays d’irréguliers. Textes et images choisis par Marc Quaghebeur, Jean-Pierre Verheggen et Véronique Jago-Antoine. Postface de Marc Quaghebeur. Bruxelles: Labor, 1990. ——. “Les écrivains belges et la France. 1848-1914.” Belgique francophone: Quelques façons de dire les mixités. Vienne-Pécs: A.E.F.E.C.O., 1997 (Cahiers Francophones d’Europe Centre-Orientale, 7-8, I, 1997) Robert des Grands Écrivains de langue française (Le), sous la direction de Philippe Hamon et Denis Roger-Vasselin. [Paris]: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 2000. Roegiers, Patrick. Le Mal du pays. Autobiographie de la Belgique. Paris: Seuil, 2003. Rustenholz, Alain. Paris des Avantgardes. Aux rendez-vous des amis des romantiques aux existentialistes. Paris: Parigramme, 2004. 156-157. Simenon, Georges. La première enquête de Maigret. Tout Simenon 3. Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1988. 359-460. ——. Pietr le Letton. Tout Simenon 16. Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1991. 363461. ——. La Tête d’un homme. Tout Simenon 16. Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1991. 729-821. ——. Mes dictées: Des Traces de pas. Tout Simenon 26 (Mémoires). Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1991 [Collection omnibus]. 583-754. ——. Mes dictées: Vent du nord, vent du sud. Tout Simenon 26 (Mémoires). Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1991 [Collection omnibus]. 829-936.

180 Sylvia Schreiber Simenon, Georges. Les caves du Majestic. Tout Simenon 23. Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1992 [Collection omnibus]. 309-402. ——. Les Mémoires de Maigret. Romans II. Édition établie par Jacques Dubois avec Benoît Denis. Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 2003. 201-306. ——. Romans I + II. Édition établie par Jacques Dubois avec Benoît Denis. Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 2003. ——. Pédigree et autres romans. Édition établie par Jacques Dubois et Benoît Denis. Paris: Gallimard, [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade] 2009. Simenon, l’homme, l’univers, la création, sous la direction de Michel Lemoine et Christine Swings. Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe 1993, [Le Centre d’études Georges Simenon de l’Université de Liège]. Sojcher, Jacques. “malgré tout.” La Belgique malgré tout. Littérature 1980. Numéro composé par Jacques Sojcher. Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1980. (Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles). VII. Weisgerber, Jean, ed. Les avant-gardes littéraires en Belgique: au confluent des arts et des langues (1880-1950). Bruxelles: Éd. Labor, 1991. [Archives du futur].

Manuel Chemineau

“Black Paris” in the 1920s and René Maran’s Novel Batouala

The Prix Goncourt1 is the most prestigious and much-coveted literary prize in the francophone literary universe. This prize is associated with great expectations in the literary field and an imposing ceremony, but also with heated discussions among poets and editors. This prize was created by Edmond de Goncourt (one of the Goncourt brothers) in his last will dating from 1896. On 21st December 1903 it was awarded for the first time after consultations of the Goncourt Academy (its real name being Société littéraire des Goncourt founded in 1900). Since then this prize has been awarded annually in November2 and honours a literary work written in the French language which has been published in the current year.3 An author can receive this prize only once in his lifetime.4 The sum of fifty francs that has been granted to the laureate since 1903 (today this corresponds to 10 Euro) is not really a huge financial reward. Nevertheless, if the material gain of this award is pretty small, its symbolic capital is considerable. The Prix Goncourt promises the author sudden fame. Besides, apart from the celebrity gained, the laureate and his editor can count on satisfying sale numbers. The ten members of the Goncourt Academy which awards the Prix Goncourt gather on the first Tuesday of each month, apart from August, in their salon, the so-called Salon Goncourt, where they have their own couvert – table – on the first floor of the restaurant Drouant, in the rue Gaillon, situated in Paris’s second district. In the autumn, they announce the first and then the second selection of books. After that, the Academy elects the Prix Goncourt laureate of the year during a breakfast and a vote at the beginning of November. This procedure is held in the above mentioned restaurant in the rue Gaillon. If after fourteen ballots the judges cannot agree on a laureate, the president may take advantage of his right to a double vote and can thus determine the majority of votes. In 1919, Marcel Proust was honoured with this award.

1

2 3 4

The official website of the Académie Goncourt is http://www.academiegoncourt.fr/?rubrique=1229171232 After several pre-selections in September and November. In the statutes it says: “the best work in fictional prose published in the current year.” The author Roman Gary constitutes an exception: he received the Prix Goncourt on two occasions – in 1956 under his name and in 1975 as Emile Ajar, the author’s pen name.

182 Manuel Chemineau In 1921, two years after Proust, René Maran, an unknown author aged 34, was given the Prix Goncourt. Among the jury were Léon Daudet, Lucien Descaves, as well as Rosny father and son. Maran’s competitors were Pierre Mac-Orlan (who was about 40 years old and already famous) and Jacques Chardonne, aged 37. Maran’s victory was narrow: in the first ballot there were five votes for him and five for Chardonne. It was only in the second round that Maran obtained the necessary majority. René Maran was not present in Paris to receive the prize since he was working as an administrator in the colonial province Oubangui (in Central Africa) and learned about his election a few days later. The reason for this delay was not only the time needed by the post to reach this remote region: it was much more due to the hostile attitude towards him in the colonial administration. Maran came from the Antilles, he is the first so-called “Goncourt noir”. René Maran was born on 5th November 1887 on the ship which took his parents, who were of Guyanese origin, to Fort-de-France, where his birth was registered on 8th November 1887. He stayed there until the age of three and then left for Gabon, where his father, Héménéglide Maran, a man of black African origin, took up a position as colonial administrator. Maran’s mother was a mulatta (her father was white) and so René had a slightly fairer skin. At the age of seven the boy was sent to Bordeaux since the tropical climate led to serious health troubles. He attended the grammar school and achieved very good results. However, he could not afford to go to university and decided to go back to Africa in 1910 to follow in his father’s footsteps. For thirteen years he was employed in the colonial service (in Bangui, capital of French Equatorial Africa, nowadays the Central African Republic, situated on the Ubangi river, on the northern boundary of the Democratic Republic of Congo). Keith Cameron describes the young adult as a “well-educated Frenchman with black skin” (41) and sees him as an individual torn between two identities: “To the white colonials he was a ‘nègre’ or ‘cocotier’; to the blacks he was a turncoat” (52). René Maran considered the French project of colonization as a “mission” in order to bring civilization and wealth to Africa. At the same time, however, he felt sympathy with his black “brothers” and their yoke. Gradually he became frustrated and disillusioned with the colonial system, which can be perceived in his correspondence. In his later autobiographical work “Un homme pareil aux autres” (1947) he deals with this topic in detail. In 1923 he returned to France and gave up his service in the colonial administration. He dedicated himself to his work and threw all his energy into the support and promotion of black culture and literature in France. He was now 36 years old. After his resignation Maran had to earn his money with writing. Particularly in his study Asepsie noire (1931, re-edited in 2006)

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Maran evokes his conviction of the so–called “double heritage”, that is, the necessity in Africa to combine both the advantages of European civilization and, on the other hand, a committed cultivation of one’s own cultural traditions. However, his later work did not achieve a great success. His celebrity diminished as public attention shifted to the fascination with the négritude, which will be dealt with later. Thus, paradoxically, the acclaimed father of négritude sank into oblivion while négritude gained strength as a political and literary movement from the 1930s onwards and especially after the Second World War. In a letter addressed to a friend Maran gave an account of his life and difficulties in Paris: My dear Violaine, at times I feel a certain fatigue when I become conscious of the peevishness and the hatred with which my frankness, my straightforwardness, and my honesty are rewarded. I have against me not only my colleagues but also my publisher. They gang together to stifle me, and I must confess I am suffering because it is not my talent they object to, but my colour and my temperament. I am certainly an enemy of pretentiousness and I have never been anything other than unassuming. […] I do not impose myself, I do not think I am a genius. As I was at 18, so I am now, at 40; I am shy, still hardworking, still modest, unobtrusive, quiet. And yet, I take pride in knowing what I am worth. It is this secret pride which keeps me going, in spite of the growing sadness which is consuming me. This sadness can be easily explained. Because of my temperament, which is a mixture of timidity and intransigence, all doors are shut in my face. My situation has become worse than that of a beginner. I am working tremendously, from nine to twelve noon, one to five and then eight to two in the morning. Working brings consolation. (Cameron 10f)

In 1960 Maran died in Paris. He left behind a wide-ranging literary oeuvre, which encompasses biographies, eight novels, published between 1921 and 1953, two volumes of short stories, three volumes of poems as well as numerous essays in which he takes a stand on the current political situation in Central Africa. The novel Batouala has to be placed in a context explaining the conditions of its publication. Besides that it is also necessary to elaborate the cultural possibility of its production as well as the conditions of its reception. Indeed, one can observe that from the beginning of the 20th century signs of a so-called “cultural revolution” related to African civilization began to appear. The image of Africa in Parisian culture had been slowly changing since the

184 Manuel Chemineau reception of African art and cults began to play an important role in the artistic project of the European avant-garde5. The interest in the debate about the “savage peoples”, the controversial issues which arose from the account of Bougainville’s journey, the question of slavery and the rights of man which preoccupied the philosophers and thinkers of the Enlightenment as well as the French Revolution, the colonization of Africa in the 19th century, all find their expression in the printed media. The colonial issues as well as the fascination of the exotic fired the imagination about the still largely undiscovered and unknown black continent and the mystery of its population, especially in the review La Nature. The presence of Africa became tangible through the universal and colonial exhibitions, later in the 1920s through theatre, the museums and especially the productions of the artistic avant-garde. During the Universal Exhibitions in 1889 and 1900 African villages were reproduced in order to promote the interests of the colonial power. It was “a bazaar of climatic zones, architectures, smells, colours, cuisines and music” stated Maurice Talmayr (198). The so-called art primitif or art naïf occupied the free space left by the academic institutions and institutionalized art. At the same time, as shown by the example of the painter Henri Rousseau, also known as “Le Douanier”, the customs officer, art naïf was legitimized as subversive form of artistic expression and therefore became compatible with the aesthetic programme of the avant-garde, particularly – in France at the beginning of the 20th century – the surrealist movement. Henri Rousseau as well as Ferdinand Cheval, named the postman Cheval, found their inspiration in the illustrations of popular scientific reviews and travel accounts. Naïve art as well as primitivism draw their inspiration from circulating images and stories about Africa or at least from what is known about Africa. In Hegel’s The Philosophy of History Africa is the continent which is “faceless”, a continent which has been only partly explored, as illustrated, for instance, in the blank spots on the maps of the explorers in Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon. The unknown regions which cannot be described by the narrator are typically passed over in the course of the night or during a tempest, thus in situations when vision is impossible. Africa’s terrain was mapped during the grand expeditions in the 19th century, whose goal was to render this territory “visible”.

5

This phenomenon should not be considered as strictly restricted to France but can be seen as wide-spread among all the European avant-garde, e.g. Germany; see, for instance Carl Einstein’s essay “Negerplastik”.

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The population those explorers encountered and later described, their strange and disturbing rites, became part of the general European public imagination. They represented atavisms, the Other, the uncanny, the savage, something irrevocably different. In addition to the image of the good or bad savage, Black Africa was simultaneously identified with the irrational, the supernatural and a certain violent eroticism. Simultaneously, black skins continued to be considered a flaw. Hence from time to time some scandalous – albeit naïvely well-meaning – scientific methods were supposed to be able to deliver African people willing to be liberated from this “defect”. Figure 1 shows an article in La Nature (1908) which explains how it should be possible to “whiten” a man with black skin by use of X–rays, and hence delivering the victim from his (supposed) pain.

Fig. 1: “Peut-on blanchir les nègres.” La Nature 1814 (29 Feb. 1908): 13

186 Manuel Chemineau Despite this context, we can use the notions of ‘tumulte noir’6 or ‘vague nègre’ to describe a movement between 1900 – 1930, especially during the 1920s in Paris, which swept the ateliers, the galleries, popular dance halls and ball rooms. This cultural whirl was blended with the Dada and surrealist movements, the revue nègre and jazz7.

Historical Overview Although there has never existed an explicit racial law in France, people of African origin could seldom achieve progress in the social hierarchy. The accounts about the situation in the colonies give a detailed report about the brutal racism and humiliating discrimination8 in the colonized African countries. The careers of the composer and fencer Chevalier de Saint-Georges, also called “the Black Mozart” of the 18th century, as well as Alexandre Dumas, who was of mixed parentage, represent a rare exception. Other personalities who attained a certain success and respect were the Afro-American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937)9 whose “The Resurrection of Lazarus” obtained the golden medal at the Salon in 1896 and whose works were purchased for the collection of the Palais du Luxembourg. Tanner became an artist with an international reputation and his works were appreciated for their conventional as well as orientalist way of painting. One may also mention Tanner’s pupil William Harper.10 Thus it seems that the conditions for a “Black Paris” were slowly evolving, which was especially recognized by the artistic milieu. The artists themselves found in Paris an atmosphere of tolerance they could find nowhere else.11 Can we observe in this appreciation the first signs of interest in Black culture which will lead to a vogue nègre and had far-reaching consequences on art and Western civilization? 6

7 8

9

10 11

Title of a lithographic album representing Josephine Baker which was first published by the artist Paul Colin in 1929. Cf. also Pétrine Archer’s and Blake’s studies. René Maran, who administrated the province of Oubangu Chari, was refused access to a hotel due to the colour of his skin. See Onana’s study. He studied at the Académie Julien since 1891 in the class of J.P. Laurens and Benjamin Constant. He also joined the “American Art Students Club” of Paris. Since he had to face major discrimination and struggle in the USA because of the colour of his skin, Paris was a welcome escape for Tanner; within French art circles the issue of race was obviously of little matter. (1873-1910) During a stay in Paris from 1903 to 1905. “It must be remembered that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the myth of France as a land of political asylum and intellectual enlightenment was still alive in the consciousness of those who had not experienced the colonial yoke” (Njami X).

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Charles Baudelaire and his Fleurs du Mal represent one of the grand ancestors of the surrealist movement. Among others Baudelaire devoted a large part of his work to the need of and quest for exoticism. His relationship with the métisse Jeanne Duval lasted for his whole lifetime. One of Baudelaire’s poems evokes the “Black Venus”, a term which will be later taken up to describe Josephine Baker.

Fig. 2: Caricatured representation of Sarah Baartman, the “Vénus Hottentote”. England, 19th century; from: L’Histoire 273 (Feb. 2003): 97

The Universal Exhibition exposed the physical appearance of the first “Black Venus”, a Hottentot from South Africa.12 She was paraded through shows in 12

Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman (1789 – 1816) was one of the Khoikhoi women brought to Europe and became known as the Hottentot Venus. After being exposed to public curiosity in London, she was brought to Paris and was again exhibited there. Georges Cuvier, a French anatomist, his brother Frédéric, as well as Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire examined her in March 1815 at the Jardin du Roi, which later became the Musée de l’Histoire Naturelle.

188 Manuel Chemineau the United Kingdom and France and after her death her body was examined by Cuvier. The interest in and fascination with Sarah Baartman, usually known as the “Vénus hottentote”, continued long after her death. She was still present in several exhibitions and shows which dealt with racial, and more generally, anthropological issues in the late 19th century (Gould). The “exposition anthropologique de Moscou”, in 1879, dedicated to her an entire show-room, where a reproduction of her body was exposed (La Nature 314– 338 (1879): 32). Furthermore, since parts of her body – skeleton, genitals, brain – were conserved in Paris in the Musée de l’Homme she was used as a specimen of the “inferior races” in scientific discussions and publications.13 It must be noted that from the very beginning a great part of the public as well as scientific attention and interest in Sarah Baartman focused on some of her physical particularities (especially her genitals and her pronounced buttocks). By the standards of this time, it is clear that the term ‘Vénus noire’ or ‘Vénus hottentote’ was perceived as an oxymoron. In the context of a shared racist perspective, even if curiosity seems to be mixed with eroticism, it nonetheless appears to be based on the attraction for the other perceived as ugly and strange. One should keep this in mind when considering in what cultural and social environment René Maran was born, but one should also pay attention to the rising interest in African culture and art within the avant-garde cultural revolution around 1920.

African Art Numerous theorists like Henry Louis Gates (27) raise the question whether the different forms of modernity, be they popular or avant-garde culture, would have been possible without the reception of black African art and culture. It is certain that the art of the sub-Saharan civilizations exerted a major influence on the domain of fine arts as well as popular music.

13

Several paintings and drawings show Sarah in “Eva’s suit” (“she was obliging enough to undress and to allow herself to be painted in the nude”). After her death, she was dissected by Cuvier and her skeleton, genitals and brain were conserved in Paris together with a molded casting of her body which remained in the Parisian Musée de l’Homme until 1974. See among others La Nature 899 (5 July 1890): 65, where her lower jaw is compared to the jaw of a specific ape in order to support the theory of racial ranking and the existence of higher and lower forms of human life.

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Fig. 3: La Révolution surréaliste 7 (15 June 1926): 16. The picture showing a “scène rituelle” is embedded in the textual context of Philippe Soupault’s poem “Est-ce le vent?” without being a direct illustration of the content of the text. It is an equal art form juxtaposed with surrealist textual art.

In Paris, artists such as Matisse, Picasso, Derain and many others included in their artworks parts of African art or rather what they had access to in terms of African cultural objects. It is not certain that these African artistic productions were already acknowledged as art. In fact, the places where they came in contact with those masks and figures were not art galleries but the ethno-

190 Manuel Chemineau graphic collection of the Musée de l’Homme at the Trocadéro. Collections of this kind fulfil a solely scientific purpose. Like the artists of the naïve and primitivist movement who draw their inspiration from the illustrations in the popular scientific reviews or from illustrated travel accounts, the artistic proceeding of the painters and sculptors of the European avant-garde constitutes first and foremost a subversion of the museographic institutions and aesthetics in this particular period. Similarly, the creation of surrealist object proceeded through amnesia related to the origin, the identity and function of the original object (Brian 473-502; Chemineau). The appreciation of the Black African cultural objects and their transition into artistic productions in the 1920s required a subversive act: these objects had to be transferred into works of art. This presupposes an amnesia of their nature and original function and their legitimization through the use of those objects in a movement which claimed to be avant-garde.

Fig. 4: La Révolution surréaliste 9-10 (1 Oct. 1927): 66. Advertisement for the gallery “Ascher” and their collection of African, American and Oceanian art

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In the production of surrealist art dealing with foreign, non-familiar, unintelligible cultural objects such as African art, the role of amnesia with regard to the original nature of the object is taken over by its perceived strangeness and ugliness. Picasso’s rendering of this experience is exemplary. He describes his visit to the depot of the Musée as follows: When I became interested ... in Negro art and I made what they refer to as the Negro Period in my painting, it was because at the time I was against what was called beauty in the museum. At that time, for most people a Negro mask was an ethnographic object. When I went for the first time, at Derain’s urging, to the Trocadéro Museum, the smell of dampness and rot there stuck in my throat. It depressed me so much I wanted to get out fast, but I stayed and studied. Men had made those masks and other objects for a sacred purpose, a magic purpose, as a kind of mediation between themselves and the unknown hostile forces that surround them, in order to overcome their fear and horror by giving it a form and image. At that moment I realized what painting was all about. Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed to be a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires. When I came to that realization, I knew I had found my way. The people began looking at those objects in terms of aesthetics. (qtd. in Foster 31ff)

The masks and objects studied at the Trocadéro were initially considered as strange, distant from European rationality, and incomprehensible as far as their aesthetics were concerned. Most encounters with those objects were marked by a mixture of fascination, repulsion and sensual attraction. “I was against what was called beauty in the museum” – this sentence shows that Picasso’s interest was first and foremost motivated by the subversion of the contemporary cultural and aesthetic understanding. After the initial feeling of being ill at ease (“It depressed me so much I wanted to get out fast”) has vanished, the appropriation of the object is rendered possible: an aesthetic appropriation which is related to a formal intention and a moral one. Both are drawn from what the artist has been able to learn from those objects (through all available media the artist has access to, for example books, illustrations, ethnographic vulgarization, film, music and so on). ...But all the fetishes were used for the same thing. They were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them to become independent. Spirits, the unconscious (people still weren’t talking about that very much), emotion – they’re all the same thing. I understood why I was a painter. All alone in that awful museum, with the masks, dolls made by redskins, dusty manikins. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism painting – yes absolutely. (qtd. in Foster 31ff)

192 Manuel Chemineau This can be set in relation to the surrealist experiments with dreams and unconscious creation. This appropriation was like a return to an anti-rationalist creativity, demons, exorcism, the supernatural, thus everything the generation of those living in the second decade of the 20th century was searching for as an alternative to a world traumatized by the First World War – a war which was perceived as technological, rational, European. They were looking for a different way of life and vision of the world.

Fig. 5: La Révolution surréaliste 9-10 (1 Oct. 1927): 67. Advertisement for the gallery “Ratton” and their collection of African, American and Oceanian art

In the years to follow, African art took over the status of a leitmotiv not only in the field of dance but also popular music, especially through jazz and the

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Harlem entertainment. African art was regarded as an alternative to an epoch which was considered to be already passé. This attitude towards African art is ambivalent. Cultural art which is reduced to a fetish and primitivism, since it originates from the colonies, produces a culture which is regarded as inferior. The images and ideas about Africa are based on the cliché of “otherness”, that is, the opposition between the civilized, but petrified North and the under-developed but sensual and lively South, the constraints of industrialization versus the primitive, the wild, the erotic and the irrational of the so-called “atavistic” African societies. Almost anything related to Africa, its art, music, rituals, culture in general gained almost a cult status. The term ‘l’art nègre’ was widely used in France and encompassed music, dance (originally considered in the racial discourse as the so-called “primitive art”) and also sculptures from Black Africa or Jazz from America. European artists in general seemed to be bored with stiff concert halls and dusty museums. They looked for inspiration in the loose and wild passion which was seen as the embodiment of ‘Negro Art’. Artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were part of this ‘negrophilia’. Like many others, they drew their inspiration from Jazz music, circus shows, variétés and the music hall. Immediately after the ‘cakewalk’14 was introduced in Paris by the Nouveau Cirque in 1902/03, Claude Debussy used it at the end of his suite “Children’s Corner” (1906-1908) in the piece entitled “Golliwog’s Cakewalk”. This piece in ragtime rhythm mocks Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.

Le Tumulte Noir This atmosphere, which also seems to characterize well the years following the First World War (Favier 389) also called the années folles, became, in relation to the “Black Paris”, known under the specific term ‘le tumulte noir’. Around the turn of the century, the Parisians enjoyed ragtime and danced to Jazz music. During the First World War, jazz rhythms were imported by regimental bands and other groups touring in France. American jazz, was 14

The Cakewalk is the term for a dance of the slaves, in which they parodied the behaviour of their masters. They imitated their stiff posture, played the exaggerated way of gossiping among the ladies, swung imaginary canes and greeted each other with mostly non-existent hats. Many planters were amused by these shows and organized performances for each other and their visitors. This led to a sort of competition between the masters: they wanted to surpass each other in regular dance contests. The best dancers could win a cake, which gave this particular dance its name.

194 Manuel Chemineau played in the fashionable nightclubs and dance halls of the French capital. New Orleans musician Sidney Bechet was playing in Paris several years before his appearance with the revue nègre. Among others the figure of Josephine Baker and later the revue nègre epitomize this particular period.

Fig. 6: Paul Colin: poster advertising Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris, 1925; from: Paul Colin, Josephine Baker

In 1925, Josephine Baker (1906-1975) and the musicians and performers of her troupe, La revue nègre, introduced on the stage at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées a wild new dance called the Charleston. Paul Colin, a French lithographer, captured this exceptional performance in a portfolio entitled “Le tumulte noir”.15 Janet Flanner, a correspondent of The New Yorker, witnessed this outstanding show and described the events as follows: She made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs; she was being carried upside down and doing the splits on the shoulder of a black giant 15

The plates of this portfolio were featured in an exhibition at the Smithsonian national portrait gallery in 1997.

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[Joe Alex]. Midstage he paused, and with his long fingers holding her basket-wise around the waist, swung her in a slow cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood. . . . She was an unforgettable female ebony statue. A scream of salutation spread through the theatre. Whatever happened next was unimportant. The two specific elements had been established and were unforgettable-her magnificent dark body, a new model that to the French proved for the first time that black was beautiful, and the acute response of the white masculine public in the capital of hedonism of all Europe-Paris. (qtd. in Walker)

Later in 1927 Paul Colin organized an unforgettable event called the “Bal Nègre” – a performance inspired by Josephine Baker’s success – which was witnessed by approximately 3.000 Parisians.

Fig. 7: Paul Colin: poster for the “Bal Nègre”, 1927; from: Colin, Le Tumulte noir

Paul Colin’s lithographs draw their inspiration from African sculpture, Cubism and Art Deco. They combine jazz-music and dance. A particular geometrical figure was inspired by Fernand Léger. In one of his lithographs one can

196 Manuel Chemineau see the jazz band in front of an ocean liner, skyscrapers and construction equipment, thus combining all the iconic elements of the Parisian avant-garde modernity (Walker). In her role as Fatou in a jungle scenery, Baker descended to the stage by climbing backwards down a tree. The provocative, improvisational dance that followed appeared to Nancy Cunard as “the purest of African plastic in motion – it was free, perfect and exact, it centered admirably on the spare gold banana fronds round the dynamic hips” (qtd. in Walker). According to the New York Times Baker’s “real stardom” dates back to this performance where she is seen wearing a banana skirt at the Folies-Bergère (Walker).

Fig. 8: Josephine Baker with the famous banana skirt; from: Colin, Josephine Baker

Black dance and music attempted to resemble in a humoristic way the image of black people that the mainstream public expected to see, although origi-

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nally all those artists did not have anything in common with the African people apart from the colour of their skin, since they came from the United States, such as Josephine Baker. In this context, we should mention another icon famous for decades. In the early 1920s the trade mark Banania, a famous chocolate drink, made an offensive advertisement featuring a widely smiling “tirailleur sénégalais” (Senegalese Tirailleurs, a corps of the French Army whose soldiers were recruited from the French colonies in West Africa), which was widely posted. As in Josephine Baker’s famous Banana-skirt, Banana serves as a symbol of Africa.

Fig. 9: tin advertising the “Banania” chocolate drink; photo by the author

198 Manuel Chemineau

Batouala In this context, the publication of René Maran’s novel Batouala, written in Central Africa, far away from the Parisian turmoil, with its provocative subtitle “véritable roman nègre”, confronts the authenticity of his narrative figures with the artificial mise-en-scène of Josephine Baker’s spectacles. Describing his method as objective invention (invention objective), Maran follows an ethnological procedure in his writing. Also the study of language constitutes an essential part in René Maran’s investigative work. Language appears as a tool which constitutes both difference and identity. African words, songs, names, the evocation of myths, the behaviour and eroticism are in contrast to the classical narrative language and act as an alternative to European practices and discourses. The aim is to re-establish a discourse which allows the African people to speak for themselves, to discover their cultural purity. “Véritable roman nègre”, this programmatic title is the key to the understanding of the novel. Seemingly insignificant and polemical, these three words constitute at the same time a sociological and artistic explanation of the book, a sort of cultural manifesto. The semantic field of the word “véritable” associated with the novel places Maran’s work in a double movement of fiction and authenticity – already indicated by the term ‘objective invention’, which is explained by the author in the preface. The French word “véritable” designates alternately that which tells the truth, which is sincere, but also that which conforms to the real, to the appearance, that which is not imitated, as a term opposed to the false, the inauthentic. René Maran’s programme is based on these two poles: authenticity, the alternative to the artificial spectacle of the nègre banania or the nègrebaker, thus the nègre-spectacle, the nègre-entertainment. In Batouala, the nègre has the right to show himself as different and disturbing – he is a blend of attraction and repulsion, a mixture of emotions which is also present in the observer of the Vénus Hottentote (the irony of the name is intended to mask, to avert, the distress) as well as in the artists of the avant-garde in search of a different aesthetic. Failing to present himself as such, he would also lose his quality as nègre in his confrontation with the whites, who, the other way round, become nègres themselves in the view of Africans. Batouala’s sincerity is also due to the fact that the novel is written by a nègre. René Maran knew very well that, in spite of his double belonging, he was perceived as such by the Western people. The other meaning of “véritable”, which signifies true, conforming to the real, refers to a novelistic program which tends towards objectivity. It challenges within the literary field the accepted narrative discourse of exoticism,

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having Africa as a frame, which in return the critics have violently opposed to Batouala in response to the scandal provoked by the novel. The term “véritable roman” is of course a sort of oxymoron where the real and the fictional are opposed. What is at stake here is to find a new form which can be expressed throughout the novel, an occidental literary form, to inscribe in the French language the African reality, which is only rendered possible through the invention of a form and language inside an alreadyexisting form and language. René Maran, who sprinkles his novel with African expressions and phrases, does not intend to create local colour or exoticism but to appropriate a language where African civilization can exist, in which a genuine work of art nègre is rendered possible. The novel is characterized by a certain pessimism, a disillusionment which goes beyond the deep rift between white man and black man. This gulf is bridged by a common language but at the same time it is affirmed by the colonial reality and by the reactions of literary critics towards the novel. This split may be found in a very pathetic and exemplary manner in the person of René Maran himself. Maran’s personality as a cultural métisse appears to be condemned to an everlasting deterritorialization that is due to the conflict which confronts him with the construction of the “Black Paris” and to the colonial administration he belongs to and at the same time is rejected by. This constitutes a fundamental question: can the taking-over of elements of African art and rituals, the passion of the Parisian public for the spectacle of the revue nègre, be interpreted as a phenomenon of cultural métissage?16

Works Cited Archer, Pétrine. Straw: Negrophilia. Avantgarde Paris and black culture in the 1920s. Thames & Hudson: London, 2000. Brian, Eric. “Les objets de la chose. Théorie du hasard et surréalisme au XXe siècle.” Revue de synthese 4e série, no. 2, 3, 4 (avr.-dec. 2001): 473-502. Cameron, Keith. René Maran. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Chemineau, Manuel. “Généalogie et fortune de La Nature.” Diss. U of Vienna, 2005. Colin, Paul. Le Tumulte noir. 1927. Paris: La Martinière, 1998.

16

See Bettina Lintig’s analysis of the concept of métissage in the context of the racial discrimination and the politics of assimilation in colonial Africa.

200 Manuel Chemineau Colin, Paul. Josephine Baker and La Revue nègre: Paul Colin’s lithographs of Le tumulte noir in Paris, 1927. Introd. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Karen C.C. Dalton. New York: Abrams, 1998. Einstein, Carl. Negerplastik. Munich: K. Wolff, 1920. Favier, Jean. Paris. Deux mille ans d’histoire. Paris: Fayard, 1997. Foster, Hal. Prosthetic Gods. Cambridge, Mass., London: MIT Press, 2004. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Europe, African Art and the Uncanny.” Africa. The Art of a Continent. Ed. Tom Philips. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1995. Gould, Stephen Jay. “The Hottentot Venus.” The Flamingo’s Smile. London, New York: Norton & Company, 1987. 291-305. La Nature. Revue des sciences et de leurs applications aux arts et à l’industrie. 314–338 (1879). La Nature. Revue des sciences et de leurs applications aux arts et à l’industrie. 899 (5 July 1890). La Nature. Revue des sciences et de leurs applications aux arts et à l’industrie. 1814 (29 Feb. 1908). La révolution surréaliste. Compl. Ed. 1–12 (Dec. 1924 – Dec. 1929). Repr. Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1991. L’Histoire 273 (Feb. 2003). Lintig, Bettina. “‘Black Paris’ – über Kunst aus Afrika und afrikanische Kunst in der Diaspora.” TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 16 (Mai 2006) http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/08_1/lintig16.htm. (3/3/2009). Maran, René. Batouala. Un véritable roman nègre. Paris: Albin Michel, 1921. Njami, Simon. “Foreword.” Black Paris. The African Writer’s Landscape. Ed. Benetta Jules-Rosette. Urbana & Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1998. http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/08_1/lintig16.htm_ftn10) (26/3/2009). Onana, Charles. René Maran; Le premier Goncourt noir, 1887-1960. Paris: Duboiris, 2007. Talmayr, Maurice. “L’école du Trocadéro.” Revue des deux mondes 162 (Nov. 1900): 67-72. Verne, Jules. Five Weeks in a Balloon. Paris: Hetzel, 1896. Walker, LuLen. “Le tumulte noir.” http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/noir/broch3.htm. (12/1/2009).

Friedrich Frosch

Americans in Paris: Huidobro. Girondo. Tarsiwald. Vallejo

Among ever-repeated attempts to jettison a typical Eurocentric scheme – that of some colonial explorer’s excursion into what Joseph Conrad called The Heart of Darkness – are those involving Latin Americans who come to visit the Centre of the Old Continent, like Horacio Quiroga, attracted by the Universal Exposition of 1900. The Uruguayan-Argentine author (1878-1937) gives an account of his impressions in Diario de viaje a París (Paris Travel Diary), formulated in a tone of youthful disrespect: “Paris is a good thing, something like a succession of crowded Avenidas de Mayo, full of light, of hurrying people, of passers-by talking in the street, of Turks, of bicycles, and of dazzling.”1 The portrait sounds poor, if we take into account the image Paris evokes in a “modern” spirit à la page, as the “model par excellence of the Cosmopolis, the cultural axis mundi, around which gravitate the ‘mini’ or ‘sub-cosmopolis’: Madrid, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Milan, Lisbon, etc.”2 More to the point is Quiroga’s own elaboration, “Anexo al Diario – Dos cartas desde París para La Reforma”, which reorganizes his former notes: Now I am at last in the brain-city, in the City of cities, where everything is accumulation, palpitation and prodigy. Paris deserves priority among all dwelling places: owing to the immensity that lies within its name and wide life, and by virtue of the fame it has been endowed with. For us, poor expatriates of supreme intellectuality, the vision of Paris is the nostalgia of a place we have never seen and to which some present or future day will introduce us.3

His case resembles that of Rubén Darío (1867-1916), Father of Hispanic Modernism, whose Paris years were without lasting consequences, whereas 1

2

3

“París es une buena cosa, algo así como una sucesión de avenidas de Mayo populosísimas, llenas [de] luz, de gente corriendo, de gente hablando en la calle, de turcos, de bicicletas y de deslumbramiento.” (Quiroga 41) Translations, unless indicated otherwise, are mine. “Paris passa a representar o modelo por excelência da Cosmópolis, axis mundi cultural sobre o qual gravitarão as ‘mini’ ou ‘subcosmópolis’: Madri, Moscou, Buenos Aires, Milão, Lisboa, etc.” (Schwartz, Vanguarda 5) Heme, por fin, en la capital-cerebro, en la cuidad de las ciudades, donde todo es acumulamiento, palpitación y prodigio. París merece por dos motivos el primer lugar entre las poblaciones: por lo inmenso que lleva en su nombre y amplia vida, y por la fama que se le ha dado. Para nosotros, pobres desterrados de la suprema intelectualidad, la visión de París es una nostalgia de un lugar que nunca hemos visto, y que, hoy, hoy o mañana, nos lleva a conocerle. (Quiroga 77)

202 Friedrich Frosch the second rate Guatemalan novelist Enrique Gómez Carillo (1873-1927), with his facile Europeanizing exoticism, became the “exiled” writer who for Latin America was the incarnation of the cosmopolitan Paris of culture and fashion, and in France stood for the socially successful, largely assimilated immigrant, considered the epitome of the “tropical” genius. He promoted himself as the director of the Paris based Nuevo Mercurio, made frequent appearances in the Mundial Magazine (in charge of which was a decrepit Rubén Darío desperately in need of money) or in the Revue Sud-Américaine, run by the Argentine Leopoldo Lugones (1874-1938, an important symbolist poet, author of the Lunario sentimental). A specimen of the Paris cult still en vogue when the authors discussed in the following pages set out to publish their first texts, can be found in Darío’s late poem “France-Amérique”, part of the Canto a la Argentina (1910), which contains the following verses: Et toi, Paris! magicienne de la Race, Reine latine, éclaire notre jour obscur, Donnez-nous le secret que votre pas nous trace Et la force du Fluctuat nec mergitur! (Canto 115)4

These lines show Paris as an allegorical place rather than as a real (brick, plaster, stone or concrete) entity. Thus, the invocation has practically no share in the rhetorical tradition of the descriptio urbis, which experienced a strong after-life in the Paris chanson (Weich 19). Regarded with the eyes of a nostalgic Hispano-American imagination, again that of Darío, Paris transforms itself into a fantasy: I have dreamt about Paris since I was a child, so intensely that when I said my prayers I asked God not to let me die without having got to know Paris. Paris was for me like a paradise where one could breathe the essence of happiness on earth. It was the City of Art, of Beauty and of Glory and, above all, the Capital of Love, the realm of Dreams. And now I was going to make acquaintance with Paris, to fulfil the greatest desire of my life. And on leaving the train in the Parisian Saint Lazare Station, I felt as if I was treading hallowed soil. I took a room in a Spanish hotel which surely no longer exists. It was situated next to the Stock Exchange and bore the pompous name of Grand Hôtel de la Bourse et des Ambassadeurs … On my arrival, I put in the hotel safe deposit some big and promising rolls of shining golden American eagles, that is, of twenty dollars coins. From the following day on I had a cab waiting for me at the door any hour, and I set out to conquer Paris.5

4

5

The Latin phrase is the well-known device of the city: “Tossed by the waves, it will not sink” (Weich 55). “Yo soñaba con París desde niño, a punto de que cuando hacía mis oraciones rogaba a Dios que no me dejase morir sin conocer París. París era para mí como un paraíso en donde se respirase la esencia de la felicidad sobre la tierra. Era la Ciudad del Arte, de la Belleza y de

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Statements like those of Quiroga or Darío raise the question of what degree and to whose advantage urban ‘land’scapes are actually fixed in a literature that serves as a projection screen for the foreign, “exotic” view. Most of the texts produced in Paris by cultural immigrants, by long-time tourists or by frequent visitors, do not carry the seal of their origin, and usually avoid indications as to the place(s) where they were written or which they describe. What really counts is the “cosmopolitan” tone, the modernity and novelty of elements and the unconventional, usually telegraphic, sometimes calligrammatic6 arrangement of key elements or a humoristic distortion of mental “perspective”. Nevertheless, the old and the new collide, combine or interfere, as in Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne”, especially in part II of the poem (Baudelaire 86), a lesson never forgotten by future generations, at least until Walter Benjamin’s times. And an observation made by the poet of the Fleurs du Mal, on the occasion of the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, still proves to be valid: “La France, il est vrai, par sa situation centrale dans le monde civilisé, semble être appelée à recueillir toutes les notions [sic] et toutes les poésies environnantes, et à les rendre aux autres peuples merveilleusement ouvrées et façonnées” (Baudelaire 581-582). The Chilean Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948), on his arrival in 1916, might have perceived Paris with the eyes attributed by Ihab Hassan to a post-Baudelairean flâneur: “Literary gangsters roam the night streets of the mind while elegant or gaudy crowds jostle gaily in theatres and cafés, on the boulevards. Europe seems at the height of its brilliant pride. Yet the time is also that of prophets from other planets. Everything becomes possible, even the denial of culture, language, and art” (Hassan 48). Among those adventurers and buccaneers of the intellect and of the arts, there are also the heirs of the first generation of cultural voyagers to choose the French capital as a place for living. One of them was the clever but uninspired Gómez Carillo, famous in his own days,7 whereas the grand Darío, who lived in Paris from 1904 until the year of his death, 1916, was practically ignored by the French public at that time unable

6

7

la Gloria; y, sobre todo, era la capital del Amor, el reino del Ensueño. E iba yo a conocer París, a realizar la mayor ansia de mi vida. Y cuando en la estación de Saint Lazare, pisé tierra parisiense, creí hallar suelo sagrado. Me hospedé en un hotel español, que por cierto ya no existe. Se hallaba situado cerca de la Bolsa, y se llamaba pomposamente Grand Hôtel de la Bourse et des Ambassadeurs ... Yo deposité en la caja, desde mi llegada, unos cuantos largos y prometedores rollos de brillantes y áureas águilas americanas de a veinte dólares. Desde el día siguiente tenía carruaje a todas horas en la puerta, y comencé mi conquista de París.” (Darío, Rubén Darío 63) The adjective, a neologism, is used here in the sense given to the corresponding noun by its inventor Guillaume Apollinaire. Molloy calls him “esprit superficiel et brillant, le diseur de bons mots, le rastaquouère intelligent qui amuse mais qu’on ne prend pas toujours au sérieux” (27).

204 Friedrich Frosch to distinguish clearly between Latin-America and Spain – a vagueness enhanced by the writers themselves (Molloy 21). “Il vaut toutefois de signaler que le Mercure de France avait introduit une rubrique de ‘Lettres latinoaméricaines’ dès 1897, remplacée par la suite par celle de ‘Lettres hispanoaméricaines’: c’était une façon de reconnaître l’indépendance littéraire de l’Amérique hispanique” (Molloy 23). Brief mentions in the same study are dedicated to Amado Nervo, the brothers García Calderón, Rufino Blanco Fombona or Enrique Larreta (Molloy 18). They all – perhaps with the exception of the intricate case of Darío – suffered from a pervading sense of inferiority which made them humbly adopt the ruling aesthetic movements, Parnassianism and Symbolism (without the profundity of a Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Mallarmé). The Spanish poet Pedro Salinas (1891-1951) speaks of a Paris complex, as a lack of self-confidence and the absence of pride in one’s own American indigenous cultural traits – a defect overcome only by the truly great like Darío and Vallejo – that should be compared to the “blind unconsciousness of an insect heading to its death, dazzled by fatal ‘daydreams’. Perhaps there was something of a transgression of his own [i.e. Salinas’s] sentiments on approaching the blinding light of his idolized Lutecia: light of Paris that burns and extinguishes the weak, to thousands, like moths”.8 The urban space Paris stands for still represents the dernier cri, it synthesises, with the utmost intensity, this chaotic and exuberant moment. More feverish than ever, its life acquires a rhythm so accelerated that not even Jules Romains’ ubiquity would let him watch all the events. Before a leaf is torn from the calendar, another new journal has been founded, gone into print, disappeared and revived. The publication of a new book or the opening of a new exhibition take on the dimensions of a national event. Dissatisfied with the rubble one finds at any street crossing, the Dadaists exterminate logic, declare war on grammar, cultivate offense and words in liberty, in meetings where incongruence is applied with the same efficiency as are clubs and sticks. In a series of unforgettable events, the Ballets Russes reveal the marvels of the art of choreography, at the same time consecrating the music of Stravinsky and requiring the decorations by Picasso, Léger or Matisse ... the artists most discussed and most active. The verbal pyrotechnics of Cocteau manage to impose the Group of Six, while the twanging voice of jazz becomes the poison in vogue.9

8

9

“Inconsciencia ciega del insecto para precipitarse a la muerte, deslumbrado por fatídicas ‘ensoñaciones’. Hubo quizás algo de trasgresión de sus propios sentimientos al aproximarse a la luz cegadora de su idolatrada Lutecia: Luz de París, que quema y acaba a los débiles, por millares, como a mariposas” (Gutiérrez Soto 127. The italicized quotation is from Salinas 33). “París trasunta, con la mayor intensidad, ese momento caótico y exuberante. Más afiebrada que nunca, su vida adquiere un ritmo tan acelerado que ni la ubicuidad de Jules Romains permitiría asistir a sus espectáculos. Antes de que el calendario se deshoje, las revistas literarias nacen, se reproducen, desaparecen, resucitan. La publicación de un nuevo libro, la aper-

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None of the so-called avant-garde writers in the Spanish tongue felt like criticizing Darío, rather on the contrary, he was remembered with respect as the prophet who had opened the imaginary city gates of Paris, even more so as his importance was slowly “discovered” during the 1920s, at the same time as the various Isms – Futurism, Cubism, Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism e tutti quanti – flourished and waned. For the poets who follow Quiroga’s and Darío’s generation, Marinettian themes of speed, technology, machismo and destruction (especially that of the past) are of little concern.10 Machine vocabulary and descriptions of the latest inventions, together with the howling of the engines, aggression and violence are no literary subjects for the writers whom this paper will comment on. If modern technology is involved, it is usually limited to some new means of transport: trains, streetcars or airplanes11 endow avant-garde poems with a somewhat blurred metaphorical energy implying speed, evasion, rapid change and intensity of living. The focus is different from that

10

11

tura de una exposición, revisten el aspecto de un acontecimiento nacional. Insatisfechos de los escombros que se encuentran en cada bocacalle, los dadaístas exterminan la lógica, declaran la guerra a la gramática, cultivan el insulto y las palabras en libertad, en reuniones donde se emplea la incongruencia con la misma eficacia que los bastones. En una serie de espectáculos inolvidables, los ‘Bailes Rusos’ revelan el milagro del arte coreográfico, y al mismo tiempo que consagran la música de Stravinsky, solicitan decoraciones a Picasso, a Léger, a Matisse... a los artistas más discutidos y vivientes. La pirotecnia verbal de Cocteau consigue imponer el grupo de ‘Los Seis’, mientras la voz gangosa de la jazz [sic] se transforma en el tóxico de moda”. (Girondo, Obra completa 286) Among the most famous passages of the Manifeste du futurisme, published by Le Figaro in Paris, February 20, 1909, are the following: “Nous voulons glorifier la guerre – seule hygiène du monde – , le militarisme, le patriotisme, le geste destructeur des anarchistes, les belles idées qui tuent et le mépris de la femme. […] Nous voulons démolir les musées, les bibliothèques, combattre le moralisme, le féminisme et toutes les lâchetés opportunistes et utilitaires. […] Nous chanterons les grandes foules agitées par le travail, le plaisir ou la révolte; les ressacs multicolores et polyphoniques des révolutions dans les capitales modernes; la vibration nocturne des arsenaux et des chantiers sous leurs violentes lunes électriques; les gares gloutonnes, avaleuses de serpents qui fument; les usines suspendues aux nuages par les ficelles de leurs fumées; les ponts aux bonds de gymnastes lancés sur la coutellerie diabolique des fleuves ensoleillés; les paquebots aventureux flairant l’horizon; les locomotives au grand poitrail qui piaffent sur les rails, tels d’énormes chevaux d’acier bridés de longs tuyaux et le vol glissant des aéroplanes, dont l’hélice a des claquements de drapeaux et des applaudissements de foule enthousiaste.” Such a diction will be absent from the texts produced by Oswald de Andrade, Huidobro (with the exception of some untypical passages of Altazor), Girondo and Vallejo, the latter two being probably the most adverse to the introduction of technological issues in poetry. An online facsimile version of the text is to be found under http://www.uni-due.de/lyriktheorie/scans/1909_1marinetti.pdf . Quiroga, like the “pataphysician” Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), whose registered trademark was a Clément luxe 96, contented himself with an ordinary bicycle, as the passage mentioned above shows.

206 Friedrich Frosch of Victor Hugo, for whom (according to Roland Barthes) “la ville est une écriture; celui qui se déplace dans la ville, c’est-à-dire l’usager de la ville (ce que nous sommes tous), est une sorte de lecteur qui, selon ses obligations et ses déplacements, prélève des fragments de l’énoncé pour les actualiser en secret” (Barthes 268).12 While the general treatment of the topos of urbanity in Huidobro’s Parisian poetry is serious, sometimes even nostalgic, Oliverio Girondo (1891-1967) in his highly original plaquette, Veinte Poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía (1922, Twenty Poems to be Read on the Tram, a combination of poetry, poetic prose and ironically realistic water-colour cartoons from the hand of the author) and Calcomanías (1925, Decals), makes fun of the concept of rapidness and the commonplace train journey, contrasting modernity with a timeless, retrograde Spain. In his own time, Girondo’s pioneering texts were largely neglected, one of the few positive comments being that of the Franco-Uruguayan poet Jules Supervielle (18841960), published in 1924 in the Revue de l’Amérique Latine. The critic notes that “these poems depict people, places, and events which have been traditionally considered as anti-poetic” and stresses the importance of such a refreshing perspective (Montilla 12). Like Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954, whom he will meet in Brazil in 1943, cf. Andrade, Ponta 203), Girondo publishes his first plaquette, the Veinte Poemas, in France, in his case at Barthélemy of Argenteuil (the place famous for Renoir and Braque is today a suburb of Paris) and like Oswald, soon after that prestigious publication, loses interest in his French contacts. While Oswald, after separating from his artist wife Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), settles down in São Paulo, Girondo, after years of intense travelling, spent mainly in Spain and Latin American countries, returns to Argentina.13 Without any doubt, Oswald [de Andrade] and Girondo are those who best seize the meaning of modernity, from the poetic viewpoint: Oswald, in the cinematographic synthesis of his poetic fragments; Girondo, in the metonymical cuts and in the serialized representation of a universe already surrendering to mass production.14

12

13 14

It appears to correspond to Volker Klotz’s sketch of a contemporary megalopolis: geometrical space, metaphorical engine and psychological influence as a permanent source of irritation and disturbance of its inhabitants who feel lost in impassable urban thickets – fatal attraction and danger zone at once, especially for those that were not born in it. Cf. Klotz 312: “Die Stadt ist alles in einem: Ort, Motor und Störfaktor ihrer Bewohner. Sie schickt sie auf den Weg, um sie im Unwegsamen sich verirren zu lassen“. Until his death in 1967 he visits Europe only two more times: in 1948 and 1965. “Sem dúvida alguma, são Oswald e Girondo os que melhor captam, do ponto de vista da expressão poética, o sentido do moderno. Oswald, na síntese cinematográfica de seus fragmentos poéticos; Girondo, nos cortes metonímicos e na representação seriada de um universo que já está entregue à produção em massa” (Schwartz, Vanguarda 65). The same

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Oswald’s counterpart to Girondo’s tram-poetry – in which the car is actually absent and supplanted by the time span necessary for the consumption of a poem during a trolley ride, as cheap as the booklet itself – is a miniature poem included in Pau-Brasil (1924): BONDE O transatlântico mesclado Dlendlena e esguicha luz Postretutas e famias sacolejam15

The joke in this “international” poem, that would fit London as well as Buenos Aires or Paris, is on the cliché of the City of Light and its fame as a shrine of (venial) love. The low class prostitutes – and women in general – are sarcastically “disfigured” in linguistic terms, so as to create associations with “eating” (that is, sexual intercourse) conveyed by the Spanish word for “dessert” (postre) and the fake Italian mixture between “fame” (hunger) and “femmina” (depreciative for female) doubled by the negation-less famia (which should be read as “in-famous”). Just as the ship enters the tram, the Third World invades the First, São Paulo finds itself embodied in Paris. Huidobro, for his part, refers to the utility of modern transport, when he interprets the (Paris) “Train Station”, “Gare”, (in Poemas árticos, Huidobro, Obra poética 545-546, under the same title both in Spanish and in French) as the starting point of a military expedition to free France from the German threat lurking in the trenches of the Northern front along the Marne,16 and proposes thematic parallels in “EXPRES” and “Paquebot” (“Ocean Steamer”, 567), parts of the same collection. The war against the Central Powers inspires the poet, just as it had roused the poetic furor of Apollinaire, to develop some sort of Francophile nationalism (which is also an indirect criticism of Marinetti’s chauvinist italianità, and expression of Huidobro’s regretful dislike of the present, concealed in a pun referring to an episode of the Odyssey), such as in “Alerta” (“Warning Signal”):

15

16

Schwartz also underlines the importance of Parisian styles in the radical “visual” – that is, cubist - reshaping of the Memórias The Sentimental Memoirs of João Miramar, written between 1916 and 1923, published in 1924 (Schwartz, Vanguarda 66). Both authors are convinced of the “impossibility to copy a multiple, fleeting, ever changing reality”, “impossibilidade de copiar uma realidade múltipla, fugidia e mutável” (Nunes 23). Andrade, Pau-Brasil 101. “STREETCAR. The transatlantic steamer shuffled / Jingletinkles and spouts light / Postritutes and feemales jolted”. The only truly modern elements here are the “message téléphonique” that rhymes with a “fumée cônique” [sic] in lines 4 and 5 and the “sleeping-car” of the penultimate verse, whereas the other ingredients, as so often in Huidobro’s works, refer to traditional nature poetry.

208 Friedrich Frosch Sobre el cielo de París Otto von Zeppelin Las sirenas cantan Entre las olas negras17 (Huidobro, Obra poética 536, my emphasis),

while “a hundred planes / circle around the moon” (“Cien aeroplanos / Vuelan en torno de la luna”, 536). Characterizing Huidobro’s modernity, Jorge Schwartz speaks of an affinity to cubism, paralleled by a “parricide attitude towards futurism” (Schwartz, Vanguarda 27, “atitude parricida em relação ao futurismo”), mentioning also Huidobro’s refutation of Marinetti’s theory and practice as expressed in the article “El Futurismo”, in which the Italian is accused of a total lack of originality (Schwartz, Vanguarda 29).18 Cubistic has to be taken metaphorically here, as it refers to two-dimensional transcripts of three-dimensional objects, simultaneously represented from various angles only in a painting. This literary practice (cultivated also by Oswald de Andrade) tries to do away as best it can with linearity and temporal succession, convinced that poetry, a twin art to painting, is categorically different from prose and the logic of action. A synthetic grasp of the elements, condensed in one decisive act of understanding, should provide the mental picture of a Sachverhalt (a specific constellation of fact and circumstance). Huidobro’s affinity, by the way, is not only to Cubism, but also to Dadaism, his friend Tristan Tzara publishes the Chilean’s “Cow boy” in Dada 3 (1919, with an illustration by Hans Arp); two more texts, “Orage” and the wellknown calligramme “Paysage”, appear in Richard Huelsenbeck’s Almanach Dada of 1920 (Huidobro, Obra poética 627, introduction to Automne régulier and 1390, Chronology, both by Cedomil Goic). For our purposes it would go too far to investigate the theoretical foundations of Creacionismo (Huidobro), of the Ultraismo à la Borges and César Vallejo’s (1892-1938) rejection of vanguard aesthetics, owing to the sheer bulk of material, manifestos and pamphlets, issued over those years.19 Suffice it to state that the authors focussed on in this essay do use the weapon of the vanguard provocation, with declarations not to be taken at face value. 17 18

19

“Over the sky of Paris / Otto von Zeppelin / The sirens singing / amidst black waves”. Surprisingly enough, Darío was one of the first to comment positively the Futurist Manifesto of 1909. Marinetti, by the way, had lived in Paris for several years and was known there as a late symbolist poet, light-years away from the later parole in libertà. Consequently, in a letter he addresses Darío as “My dear Master and friend” (“Mon cher Maître et ami”, quoted in Schwartz, Vanguarda 29-30, note 26). Huidobro published a volume of his theoretical statements in 1925, in French and under the title of Manifestes (Paris: La Revue Mondiale, see also the selection of texts reprinted by Goic in Huidobro, Obra poética 1294-1375). A somewhat peculiar but nonetheless useful anthology was established by Mary Ann Caws 2001; a basic reference for Latin America is Schwartz, Las vanguardias.

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Thus their attitudes, characteristic of the historical avant-garde, oscillate between irony, persiflage, carnivalization (in the Bakhtinian sense), cultural cannibalism and simple nonchalant disrespect, both of institutions and of persons considered as petty bourgeois. In this regard we are confronted with a paradox, since, like most iconoclasts of the time, the writers mentioned – with the exception of Vallejo – belong to the upper class (and have no sanctions to fear, even if they exaggerate in ridiculing the establishment, whose jesters in some respect they are). Girondo, the mind behind the master plan (published in 1924) of Martín Fierro, the most influential Argentinean avant-garde review of the 1920s, does not reject Marinetti’s proposals altogether. Yet he also develops quite different concerns: appreciating eroticism, sexuality and self assured femininity, ridiculing male presumptions and neglecting the technological aspects of daily life, he resorts to the past, both in theory and poetic practice (especially in Calcomanías). His earlier texts, influenced by French literature in the wider sense (including the late symbolist and proto-futurist Marinetti), “reserve [...] the right to recognize artistic precursors and inherited traits as a family might its ancestors in a photo album. This assertion provides an interpretative insight into Girondo’s work because it embraces continuity rather than advocating a clean slate from which to create new art” (Montilla 3). For Girondo, the importance of Paris as a reservoir of motifs and poetological suggestions has worn away by the mid-twenties, and he consequently turns his attention back again to Buenos Aires and still later even rehearses a mock nationalist attitude in Campo nuestro (1946). His poetic evolution runs contrary to that of a typical vanguard curve (like that of Supervielle, for instance, who returns to conservatism). While Girondo’s beginnings are marked by irreverent colloquialism and witty sarcasm, only late in his life does he set out to overthrow “normal” speech with its fixed syntactic and formative rules (En la masmédula, “In the Mostmarrow”, is published in 1956). On the other hand, Huidobro, as Oswald, experiences the Poundian urge to “make it new” rather in the middle of his career – Huidobro with Altazor (published in 1931), and Oswald in the poems of Pau-Brasil (Brazil Wood, 1924) as well as in his two anti-novels Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar (1924) and Serafim Ponte Grande (1933). Both writers later return to conventional modes of expression, with disenchanted, sometimes mellowed tones and moods. What the South Americans mentioned retain from the Great Myth are some symbols (the Tour Eiffel, the Seine, Montparnasse) and a typically urban strategy of fixing synaesthetic impressions under the sign of simultaneity, but they make no coherent attempt at fully-fledged descriptions within the framework of “pictorial” urban poetry that would rely on the basic

210 Friedrich Frosch categories/parameters of “showing”: size, density, heterogeneity and rounded off compactness (Weich 57). “The successive gives way to the simultaneous, historical place is substituted by geographical space, diachronic extension by synchronicity, tradition by the instant.”20 Vallejo especially is explicit in his refutation of simplistic futurist hotchpotch: New poetry has become the term for verse whose word material is made up of expressions like ‘movies, engine, horse power, airplane, radio, jazz band, wireless telegraphy’, and in general by all the terms used in contemporary sciences and industries, no matter if this lexicon corresponds or not to a new sensibility. What matters are the words. But it should not be forgotten that such a thing is neither new nor old poetry, nor anything else. The artistic material offered by modern life has to be assimilated by the spirit and transformed into sensitivity.21

Perhaps the only truly modern fascination pervading vanguard verse, that of velocity, and the overall view of the modern world-city as a unique cosmopolitan syntagm (also Hispanic Modernismo, now ebbing and becoming trite, was fervently internationalist), testifies to an underlying concern of those “immigrants” to stress the very contemporariness of their ideas and productions, the overcoming of any major time lag, despite mostly “peripheral”, albeit bourgeois and (except for Vallejo) well-off urban origins. What unifies the texts produced by Latin American poets identified with the historical Parisian avant-garde is the conscious and willing rejection of the mimetic, of Aristotelian verisimilitude and of immediate, unfiltered referentialism to an outward reality, neglected in favour of a bricoleur attitude (in the sense of Lévy-Strauss). Cultural distance, sometimes artificially enhanced, seems to facilitate deformation and highly idiosyncratic uses of urban scenery like the Sacré Cœur, the Seine bank, the ChampsElysées, the typical Parisian café, the Louvre ... (examples taken haphazardly from Vallejo’s posthumous poetry).22 Thus we can speak of two

20

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22

“[O] sucessivo passa a dar lugar ao simultâneo, o espaço histórico é substituído pelo espaço geográfico, a diacronia pela sincronia, a tradição pelo instante.” (Schwartz, Vanguarda 4) “Contra el secreto profesional acerca de Pablo Abril de Vivero.” In Schwartz, Las vanguardias 552-554. “Poesía nueva ha dado en llamarse a los versos cuyo léxico está formado de las palabras ‘cine, motor, caballos de fuerza, avión, radio, jazzband, telegrafía sin hilos’, y, en general, de todas las voces de las ciencias e industrias contemporáneas, no importa que el léxico corresponda a no a una sensibilidad auténticamente nueva. Lo importante son las palabras. Pero no hay que olvidarse que esto no es poesía nueva ni antigua, ni nada. Los materiales artísticos que ofrece la vida moderna, han de ser asimilados por el espíritu y convertidos en sensibilidad.” This last term refers to Apollinaire’s seminal essay “L’esprit nouveau et les poètes”, of 1917. In Apollinaire 943-954. For Weich there are three main monuments that serve as condensed symbols of the city (7071), none of them actually “modern”: the cathedral of Notre-Dame (medieval), the Eiffel

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cosmopolitisms that centre on Paris: one of the “denominative and descriptive” type as (not necessarily) opposed to a “textual, autonomous and metalinguistic” strategy (Schwartz, Vanguarda 38). We might take as examples of the second category – the by far prevailing one – all of Girondo’s and Oswald de Andrade’s poetry produced in the 1920s, as well as most poems by Huidobro, like “EXPRES” (Huidobro, Obra poética 533534), written in Spanish only and welded together by the functional image of the locomotive. In this text Paris is just one city among five others and the Seine appears together with the Amazonas (which is – nota bene – in the lead), the Thames and the Rhine, while the disposal of elements approaches the ideogrammatic order and constitutes a metaphor of cosmopolitan synchronicity. A corresponding view is expressed in an often quoted declaration by Huidobro, who, interviewed in 1925 by the Chilean paper La Nación, declares a poem to be “a chess match played against infinity”.23 All possible moves are virtually inscribed in the 64 squares and the figures, all games of the universe already co-present in theory, awaiting to be executed – a truly Borgesian idea. What counts in the first place for the Latin American poet on artistically approaching the urban atmosphere is the genius loci which he tries to soak up and express to the full. Or, as a commentator of Juan Larrea’s (1895-1980) Paris experience puts it, “Paris, by the spell of the South American ambience of Montparnasse, became an atomic accelerator projected towards literature”.24 One restriction concerning modernity should, however, be mentioned at this point: the Paris of the historical vanguard may still be in the cultural lead, but it has ceased to be the spearhead of functionalist urbanism and progressive architecture. This role now is embodied by New York, or even by a rapidly evolving São Paulo, the Paulicéia desvairada (“Crazed Paulisticity”) as described by the Brazilian modernist Mário de Andrade, who incidentally never left his native country. Even such a new southern metropolis has more of the typical twentieth-century skyscraper agglomerations than an inveterately nineteenth century Paris with its monuments, riverside promenades, avenues bordered by shady alleys and picturesque bohemian quarters. Sometimes there is that one book that promises to offer the clues for investigating a specific area, and it almost exists in our case. The title which Sylvia Molloy gave to her monograph (already referred to in the beginning

23 24

Tower (by the 1920s a commonplace post-card sight) and the Sacré-Cœur (the most recent construction, but politically and artistically reactionary, cf. Weich 73). “[U]na partida de ajedrez jugada contra el infinito” (Emar). “París, al conjuro del ambiente sudamericano de Montparnasse, resultó un acelerador atómico proyectado hacia la literatura” (Nieto 26).

212 Friedrich Frosch and published in 1972, when the freshness of avant-garde of the 1920s was long gone and included in the pantheon of official modern culture) raises some expectations: La diffusion de la littérature hispano-américaine en France au XXe siècle. Well documented in the areas chosen, the study seeks to combine intertwined strains of cultural activities, in fact a network with Paris in its focus, including as local centres not only Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile or Lima, but also the axis Paris-Madrid (and the Spanish poets of the turbulent decades after 1900).25 The picture, however, needs some retouching as to the decade between 1920 and 1930, with regard to suggestions like the following: The emerging generation turns to Europe with an ambiguous sensation of insufficiency. As to the most radical contemporaneity that was to be found in Dadaism, futurism or, years later, surrealism, I might venture an explanation: they were dynamiters, points of departure for a rupture made necessary by modernist epigonism. The intransigent lightness that marks the years between 1916 and 1930 (approximately) just bears a more excessive tone in relation to the anterior movements (Romanticism, Parnassianism, or Modernism). In no culture is there to be found a transitional moment that would be exempt from a furious and provisional abolition either of the past or of the irreverent proclamation of the future.26

Whereas Óscar Collazos, author of these lines, moves on unstable ground when affirming a radicalism that was not really characteristic of the Latin

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Molloy’s panorama is worth reading for the Darío chapter. For the span between 1920 and 1940 the author focuses too much on literary magazines and the individual figures of Ricardo Güiraldes, Valery Larbaud and Jules Supervielle. The decades to follow (1940-1970) are almost exclusively identified with Borges – all in all, a rather distorted survey. So Huidobro is dealt with on meagre three pages and pioneers like Vallejo and Girondo are reduced to casual references and sundry footnotes. However, the information concerning some of the authors of the generation prior to the vanguard is of use, especially the facts about Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915), who decided over the literary fate of Latin-American newcomers, was the co-founder of the Mercure de France and a decisive influence on Cendrars. Equally enlightening is the intellectual and artistic portrait of Valery Larbaud (1881-1957), eminent translator, also of Latin American authors, and a novelist himself. His A. O. Barnabooth, son journal intime (1913) presents as the protagonist the typical young Latin American cultural tourist in Europe and sets the standards for future real travellers. “La generación emergente se vuelve hacia Europa con una ambigua sensación de insuficiencia. Si la contemporaneidad más radical estaba en el dadaísmo, futurismo o, años después, en la síntesis surrealista, puedo intentar una explicación: fueron detonadores, puntos de partida para una ruptura exigida por el epigonismo modernista. La ligereza intransigente registrada entre 1916 [the year of Darío’s death] y 1930 (fechas aproximadas) sólo tiene, en relación con los movimientos anteriores (romanticismo, parnasianismo o modernismo) un tono más desmesurado. No hay momento transicional en ninguna cultura que no produzca esta furiosa y provisional abolición del pasado ni esta proclamación irreverente del futuro.” (Collazos 10)

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American poets in question, Molloy neglects almost completely their importance for the vanguard movements. To be sure, neither Girondo nor Vallejo, and not even the indefatigable pamphleteer Huidobro wanted to do away with the past together with its poetic forms. They rather felt in need of it in order to be able to produce the effect of newness by contrast (Huidobro, Vallejo) or of irony by reference to the established (Girondo, Andrade). Thus, Girondo’s and Oswald’s travel poetry as well as Huidobro’s pictorial and proto“concretist” experiments recur to a secular tradition (which, in Vallejo’s case, assumes hermetic or political notes).27 Only some of Girondo’s Membretes (1924), namely those that mention French painters, and the witty if somewhat conventional “Otro nocturno” (Another Nocturne), make reference to Paris.28 One more case apart is “Biarritz”, also of Veinte poemas, (Girondo, Obra completa 19), a text which, despite its title, does not present the seaside resort of Parisian high society, but instead offers trenchant glimpses of nocturnal life in the casinos where millionaires meet to gamble, together with a congenial caricature showing a big-breasted lady with two casino chips imitating her bared nipples,29 surrounded by moustached onlookers and a croupier (Girondo, Obra 75). The joke is on a perverted capitalism and anachronistic city dwellers in their self imposed exclusive sort of “game reserve” on the Bay of Biscay. The fragmentary discourse voiced by an anonymous commentator could be located in Paris as well – spatial distance is abolished by (an inauthentic, displaced) social identity that seems trapped in a vacuum: “Silenced cars. Shop windows with their constellations of false stars.”30 According to Cedomil Goic, responsible for the critical edition of Huidobro’s Obra Poética, the author of Altazor is “the only one who had intimate artistic contacts with the French and European avant-garde from 1916 to

27

28

29

30

This is true even if Collazos calls Girondo – imbued by the French avant-garde, but inspired preferably by non-Parisian topics - “the most important one, always strongly and creatively bent on breaking any poetic and life-style routine” (“[E]l más importante, siempre fuerte y originalmente dispuesto a romper toda rutina vital o poética”, Collazos 25). In Girondo, Obra completa 20. Like the other texts of the plaquette, it bears the indication of both the date and place of composition, in this case “París, julio, 1921”, and does not actually develop the modernity theme. A street light (that could be a gas lamp as well) and a reference to a football game (as a simile of the footsteps echoed in the silence of the night) are the only inexpressive signs of actuality. The text is unequivocal: “Unas tetas que saltarán de un momento a otro de un escote, y lo arrollarán todo, como dos enormes bolas de billar” (“Some tits that will burst out from a décolleté from one moment to the other and will roll over everything, like two enormous snooker balls”, Girondo, Obra completa 19). “Automóviles afónicos. Escaparates constelados de estrellas falsas.” (Girondo, Obra completa 19)

214 Friedrich Frosch 1925 and from 1928 to 1932”.31 His first volume of post-modernist poetry, Horizon carré, was published in 1917 in Paris by Pierre Birault, followed by three more books (of modest size) in 1918, with texts in French (partly original, partly translations of poems Huidobro had written and published in Spanish before). Huidobro, admired by Juan Larrea and Gerardo Diego, was the driving force behind the contacts between the Parisian and Spanish avantgarde circles. Like Guillaume Apollinaire, he fashioned himself into a propagator of ‘modernolatry’ and defended the aesthetics of change.32 So even though he was on the best of terms with European avant-gardes,33 both as an artist and as a human being, Huidobro did not rely on one of the basic futurist parameters, namely the omnipresence of technology. In that respect, he is far more reticent than, say, Apollinaire, who in the programmatic “Zone” (Alcools, Apollinaire 39-44) decidedly extends the range of literary subjects. Like his Master and despite all experimentation, Huidobro, when he tries to bring about a paradigmatic change from imitation to innovation, from the poet as a mirror-man to the god-like creator (Yurkiévich XVII), never quite breaks free of the spectres of Romanticism. In his verse “the romantic [element], on the semantic level, combines with preoccupations of a radicalism never before experienced in Hispano-American poetry”.34 The traditional vein appears in a statement of 1935, “Estética”, where the poet says: “It is necessary to create in art, like in an act of magic, the purest ‘totem’. That is

31

32

33

34

“[E]l único que convivió íntimamente con la vanguardia francesa y europea de 1916 a 1925 y de 1928 a 1932” (Goic XIX). “Huidobro figura como Guillaume Apollinaire, su modelo, entre los primeros poetas adictos al entusiasmo modernólatra. Postula el culto a la novedad y, para participar en la pujanza transformadora de la era industrial, milita en la estética del cambio.” (Yurkiévich XVI). Schwartz, in his study of Girondo and Andrade, stresses the importance of Apollinaire’s Méditations Esthétiques. Les Peintres Cubistes (1913), that influenced not only Huidobro but also later poets like Girondo and Vallejo (Schwartz, Vanguarda 31). Larrea, a friend to both Huidobro (whom he alludes to in a reference to the small god) and Vallejo, calls Apollinaire the “stranded prophet of that small creating god, to the host of whose believers our Vicente Huidobro had already declared his enthusiastic adherence” (Larrea 67, “Apollinaire el malogrado profeta de ese pequeño dios creador, al número de cuyos creyentes nuestro Vicente Huidobro había sumado ya su entusiasmo”). Cf. the dedications preceding the poems of Horizon Carré, of 1917. Among Huidobro’s friends and company there are: Max Jacob, Paul Dermée, Blaise Cendrars, Juan Gris, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, Jacques Lipchitz, Jean Cocteau and Robert Delaunay. Another source for the reconstruction of this artistic network is Goic’s Chronology, in Huidobro, Obra poética 1383-1405, esp. 1390). Bary, on the other hand, speaks of Huidobro’s excessive “self-conceit” that made him admire no one else beside Apollinaire (Bary 77). “[U]ma estranha combinação em que o romântico, a nível semântico, cruza-se com preocupações de um radicalismo nunca visto antes na poesia hispano-americana.” (Schwartz, Vanguarda 24)

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the great mystery. It is the inexplicable secret”.35 “On the one hand he affirms the rationality of an abstract techno-scientific order, while on the other hand he recurs to and recuperates mystic traditions, metaphysical concepts or primitive rituals”.36 His overall theory, sketched in Chile and developed during a short-term artistic partnership with Pierre Reverdy, is known as Creacionismo. Together with Reverdy, Apollinaire and Max Jacob, Huidobro (responsible for providing financial support), founded one of the leading Parisian avant-garde organs, Nord-Sud (thus named after the Métro line linking Montmartre and Montparnasse).37 The obvious reference was to groups of artists and intellectuals who gravitated around these two poles of the city, Montparnasse being a “centre of left-wing, committed, intellectual culture throughout the inter-war years” (Hewitt 37), whereas the majority of Cubist artists lived in or around the quartier of Montmartre. However, it included also an allusion to the two hemispheres to which France (Reverdy) and Chile (Huidobro) belong. Despite the latter’s poetological “precocity”, his impact on Latin American poetry is slow, compared with that of Borges or the Andrades, mainly because of his temporary vanishing from the Chilean scene and his immersion in the Paris vanguard. The fact in itself seems curious, as the opposite might also be expected. A successful and influential South American writer ought to be the pride of his country and continent. Only the fact that the conventions of Modernismo were still strong and that for the bourgeoisie the avant-garde mind bore the stigma of destruction and provocative disrespect can explain the long silencing of Huidobro’s leading role in Paris and Madrid experimentalism.38 The contributions of the Chilean poet to literary life in

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“Es preciso creer en el arte como en un acto mágico, el más puro ‘tótem’. Es el gran misterio. Es el secreto inexplicable.” (Huidobro, Obra poética 1375) “Con una mano afirma la racionalidad de un orden abstracto tecnocientífico o se identifica con los valores del industrialismo, mientras recurre y recupera con la otra tradiciones místicas, conceptos metafísicos o rituales primitivos.” (Subirats 34) The collaboration ended in a quarrel, when Huidobro stopped financing the journal, and both authors claimed to have invented creationism. A curiosity of literary history, of no importance today, the main phases of this typical intra-poetic warfare can be found in Robles 1971. The author of the first literary history of the Hispanic avant-garde, Guillermo de Torre, played an important role in the denigration of Huidobro, cf. Robles 96-97. “L’Image”, a manifesto of 1918, that shows Huidobro and Reverdy still in unison, is reprinted in Reverdy 73-75. Its famous formula declares the Image to be a “pure creation of the spirit” and the “bringing together of two realities more or less distant” (73). Huidobro stimulated the first intense contacts between the literary avant-gardes of the two capitals. Due to his initiative, in the Spanish capital came out in April 1921 the first issue of the magazine Creación, Revista Internacional de Arte, containing poems and articles in various languages, besides musical scores and illustrations by artists like Braque, Gris and

216 Friedrich Frosch Paris are wide-ranging. They also include visual constellations in the vein of Apollinaire, developed into paintings, as in the cases of the Salle XIX series and the Eiffel Tower poems (1918), based on the 1910 homonymous series of Robert Delaunay, the orphic cubist painter, which the texts take up (for Huidobro’s “visual” work see Sarabia). On the other hand, we might consult any of Huidobro’s poetry volumes published in the Paris years between 1916 and 1925 in order to realize that the modern city remains almost completely absent from the texts, reduced to the Eiffel Tower, some casual references to the First World War (mostly in Hallali, 1918) and one or other airplane, Zeppelin or balloon crossing a rather anonymous French sky. A typical example would be “Matin”,39 where an imaginary rectangle is framed on all four sides by the word SOLEIL, two lines on the upper left introduce the “highest poplar of the riverbank”, and the other three units are set on the right (1 and 3) and the left (2). The intermittent landscape illuminated by the all pervading sun, (which wakes up Paris, as the very first line above the inclined distich says), introduces the Eiffel Tower, a three-coloured cock (the national symbol and the flag combined), the personified Seine and its bridges (“La Seine cherche entre les ponts / Sa vieille route”) and the Egyptian Obelisk (that “forgot about” its ancient inscription, pictorial as the poem itself, and “did not flourish that year”, “N’a pas fleuri cette année”).

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Picasso, Huidobro’s Parisian friends; and although this publication left little traces in the official cultural life of Spain, it was duly recorded by Juan Larrea and Gerardo Diego (Morales 1418). Huidobro, Obra poética 472, in the 1917 plaquette Horizon carré (Square Horizon), translated by the poet himself as “Mañana” (Morning).

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The text no doubt lacks iconoclastic boldness, nature prevails even in Huidobro’s “experimental” production as the main source of metaphor. A specimen representative for the typographically oriented compositions of the late 1910s and early 1920s would be “Aéroplane” (of Horizon carré, Huidobro, Obra poética 455-456), a largely de-contextualized soft-tone mocking of religious concepts, with World War I as its vaguely recognizable background. Une croix s’est abattue par terre Un cri brisa les fenêtres Et on se penche sur le dernier aéroplane Le vent qui avait nettoyé l’air A naufragé dans les premières vagues La poussée

218 Friedrich Frosch persiste encore sur les nuages Et le tambour appelle quelqu’un Que personne ne connaît Des mots derrière les arbres La lanterne qu’on agitait était un drapeau Il éclaire autant que le soleil Mais les cris qui enfoncent les toits ne sont pas de révolte Malgré les murs qui ensevelissent LA CROIX DU SUD Est le seul avion qui subsiste

From 1925 onward, with the release of Tout à coup by Cendrars’ publisher Au Sans Pareil, Huidobro considerably reduces his interest in a visual poetry inspired by Mallarmé’s Coup de dés (1897) and Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918). While verse patterns become more conventional, the attitude is playful, enriched by surrealist diction, with humoristic elements, like comic rhymes, paronomasias, allusions and similes (e. g. “Tu as la saveur d’un bon conseil / Et une barbe longue comme l’électricité”, Huidobro, Obra poética 687). And it has an astounding follow-up: Altazor (1931), subtitled O el Viaje en Paracaídas (Or, The Parachute Journey), an epic-like exploration of the realm of language and one of the great poems of the century, which Huidobro had probably begun to work on by 1919. The title bears homage to Baudelaire, replacing his proverbial Albatross by the Hawk, and to Rubén Darío, whose Azul (which for its part echoes the second central colour Mallarmé used in his poetry) became the emblem of his verse. The intermediate phase is of some interest in our context because of one of the poems of Tout à coup which had also appeared in Favorables-París-Poemas (n° 1, 1926), a legendary short-lived avant-garde revue founded by César Vallejo and the Basque poet Juan Larrea.40 40

As to personal contacts between Latin American and French or rather European avant-garde artists and writers (by birth Tzara is Romanian, Cendrars Swiss, Gris and Picasso Spanish and Apollinaire half Polish, half Italian), those of Girondo include Supervielle (half Uruguayan), Jean Cassou and Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Oswald de Andrade associates him-

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When Oswald de Andrade comes to Paris in 1913, he is artistically unaware of discussions concerning the state of culture. Only on later occasions, during the 1920s and in the course of his friendship with Cendrars will he overcome Parnasso-Symbolism, Brazilian style, and adopt the attitude of a hilarious, turbulent avant-garde. His first superficial Parisian experiences are mere cultural tourism, motivated by the unspecific desire to get to know Europe and its women (“Europe was always a fascination for me”, “A Europa fora sempre para mim uma fascinação”, Oswald confesses in Andrade, Um homem 67).41 Things changed when in December 1922 the now almost famous writer, a leading figure of the São Paulo Week of Modern Art (launched earlier that year) travelled to Europe for the second time.42 Now the project of the selfconfident visitor is to come, see and conquer, to impose himself, at least within the avant-garde circles – and in partnership with a neo-cubist painter he is in love with: Tarsila do Amaral (soon to become the platonic muse of Cendrars and disciple of André Lhote, Fernand Léger and Albert Gleizes, cf. Amaral 75).43 The passionate relationship of ‘Tarsiwald’44 at that time is carefully and cautiously protected, Tarsila still being officially married to another man. After a voyage through Spain, Portugal and Senegal, Oswald and Tarsila settle down in the French capital, where she rents a studio.45 Oswald transforms his impressions of the place into the poem “Atelier” and

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self with Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger, Max Jacob and Blaise Cendrars (Schwartz, Vanguarda 47). And he goes on to describe his first visit to Paris, which for him was primarily associated with sexual liberty and promiscuity; he mentions the manifesto of Marinetti and makes fun of his own ignorance: “At that time I was, perhaps, seated without knowing, side by side with Picasso or Apollinaire in the famous Lapin agile of the butte Montmartre [... and I] relished in spectacular crayfish and great wines, I took in the scent of Montparnasse [....] And I returned home as innocent as I had arrived, rolling down the slope of an endless sea. My spirit had won just one new dimension – it had got in touch with freedom”; “A esse tempo talvez eu estivesse, sem saber, ao lado de Picasso ou Apollinaire no celebrado Lapin agile da butte Montmartre [... e] comera lagostas espetaculares com grandes vinhos, sentira o cheiro de Montparnasse. E voltava inocente como fora, pela ladeira de um intérmino mar. Apenas tinha uma nova dimensão na alma – conhecera a liberdade” (Andrade, Um homem 70). Detailed documentation of his journeys, stays and relations is to be found in Amaral 75-202; the complementary viewpoint, that of Cendrars, is traced back in the author’s biography written by his daughter Miriam (M. Cendrars 560-594), a version that largely corresponds to the one offered by Amaral. Among the visitors of Tarsila’s studio, Miriam Cendrars mentions also Braque, Delaunay, Brancusi, Chagall and the all important art dealer Ambroise Vollard (M. Cendrars 562). As the couple was humorously called by Mário de Andrade, cf. the reproduction of his “Poema Tarsiwald” in Amaral 180. The address is 9, rue Hégésippe-Moreau (1923-1925), close to Place Clichy, the second one will be 19, Boulevard Berthier (1926). Cf. Amaral 417.

220 Friedrich Frosch speaks of his love as a “caipirinha vestida de Poiret”.46 The poem itself is baffling, as it shuffles Parisian impressions with those of the famous 1924 excursion, in the company of Cendrars and others, to the historical colonial towns in Minas Gerais,47 declaring, with mendacious poetic freedom, that Tarsila’s lazy Paulista eyes “had never seen Paris nor Piccadilly” (“A preguiça paulista reside nos teus olhos / Que não viram Paris nem Piccadilly”). Actually, the couple are introduced to the exclusive circles of Parisian society and live among diplomats, tycoons, emigrated politicians and artists.48 While Tarsila abandons orthodox cubism to become an original painter with a style of her own, Oswald represents both a wandering society event and a poet famous in his home country. For some, like the fine mind Cendrars, he is even more, the herald of a “Thirdspace” avant la lettre,49 rooted in a triple indigenous, European and African tradition. Little wonder, then, that Oswald gets the chance (denied to Darío some twenty years earlier) to entertain a select audience at the Sorbonne with a discourse on his country’s intellectual life: “L‘effort intellectuel du Brésil contemporain”. In 1923, Oswald also cheers with enthusiasm the Ballet Noir, based on a text by Cendrars, with music composed by Darius Milhaud, staged in the Champs Elysées Theatre by the Ballets Suédois (Amaral 87-91; 147).50 Cendrars not only discovers in Oswald’s cultural roots an exoticism he regards as authentic, he also promotes Tarsila’s paintings: “the importance 46

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The “caipirinha” is not only the well-known cocktail but originally also a sort of mossback – in this case paradoxically “dressed up by [Paul] Poiret”, at that time the most fashionable Parisian couturier (Andrade, Pau-Brasil 118; cf. also the reference by Amaral 166). The journey became known as the Caravana Modernista. Cendrars’ vanguard version of what he left behind, the French capital, is contained in a poem of Feuilles de Route (B. Cendrars 215). This volume mainly consists of texts written in and on Brazil, with illustrations by Tarsila. As “Paris” shows, Cendrars is not innovatory in the strict sense, his poem sounds rather lengthy, burdened as it is with perishable remarks of no lasting interest. He is definitely at his best in earlier works, like the Prose du Transsibérien, Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques and in the Kodak (documentaire) series (B. Cendrars 19-37; 63-94 and 139-175). The painters / sculptors Rêgo Monteiro and Victor Brecheret, furthermore an eminent patron of the arts, Paulo Prado, the critic Sérgio Milliet, the deposed president Washington Luís, the conservative candidate for the country’s presidency, overthrown by Getúlio Vargas, Júlio Prestes, the former minister of Agriculture Antônio Prado, among others (Amaral 9091, 99 and 167). Cf. Edward W. Soja’s study Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-andImagined Places, of 1996, an important contribution to topographical/topological studies and a valuable modification of Homi K. Bhabha’s standpoint. Milhaud had been to Brazil as the secretary of Paul Claudel, French ambassador in Rio de Janeiro, and was a friend of the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (Amaral 91). Inspired by the Ballets Suédois, Oswald planned a theatre project involving Cendrars and Villa-Lobos, a cooperation that was never carried to effect.

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and singularity of Tarsila’s work shown in Paris at the Galerie Percier in 1926 had a special projection by virtue of Blaise Cendrars, intermediary between the French intellectuality and our [i.e., Brazil’s] great painter” (Amaral 19). The Manifesto da Poesia Pau Brasil, published on March 18, 1924, in the Correio da Manhã, is hardly imaginable without Oswald’s recent Paris experience and the positive echo of Brazilian culture encountered in Paris: “Brazil began to interest Paris. [...] Exoticism really counted in those years of Modernism. [...] It was precisely this modernism that would make Cendrars accept the invitation to visit Brazil”.51 And there is no doubt that Cendrars, after Apollinaire’s death a leading vanguard figure, contributed directly to the maturation of Brazilian modernismo by providing ideas and concrete works, but indirectly also by his esteem of traditional Brazil, an appreciation which, in some phases, bordered on enthusiasm (as during the famous modernist Caravana of 1924). In 1925 Oswald takes English lessons at a Paris branch of the Berlitz language School, the result being a joke-poem (poema-piada), doubly hilarious as it ignores the French component of the linguistic mini-cosmos sketched in the poem “Escola Berlites”, so to speak exiled in the Pau-Brasil volume, where a Parisian reminiscence is fitted into a Brazilian context (the section “Postes da Light”, cf. Andrade, Pau-Brasil 117 and the biographical reference in Amaral 98). In 1924 Andrade entrusts his momentous poem book Pau-Brasil, sub-titled a “cancioneiro” (like the famous medieval poetry collections) to Cendrars’ Paris-based publishing house, Au sans Pareil, where it comes out in the same year (cf. the chronology established by Maria Alice Rebello, in Andrade, Pau-Brasil iii).52 Whereas Tarsila remains in France, Oswald returns to Paris only on the occasions of Tarsila’s second and third exhibition (1927 and 1928), his new artistic concepts leading him away from the French capital. The last among the authors to be commented on here, and the one who seems least inspired by Paris, despite the fact that actual scenery and recog51

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“O Brasil começava a interessar Paris [... O] exotismo contava nesses anos do Modernismo. [...F]oi exatamente esse exotismo que faria Cendrars aceitar o convite para a visita ao Brasil” (Amaral 109). And Oswald himself declares in retrospect, in the article “O caminho percorrido” (The Route run through): “If I brought anything back from my travels to Europe between the two wars, it was just this: Brazil” (“Se alguma coisa eu trouxe das minhas viagens à Europa dentre duas guerras, foi o Brasil mesmo”, Andrade, Ponta 165). Founded in 1919 by René Hilsum, the Éditions Au Sans Pareil won enormous prestige by their support of the early surrealist and some dada poets, publishing Philippe Soupault’s Rose des vents, Le Mont de Piété by André Breton, and Feu de joie by Louis Aragon in 1919; Francis Picabia’s Unique eunuque came out in 1920. The establishment was closed in 1935 for financial reasons. Cf. the historical note on http://www.imecarchives.com/fonds/fiche.php?ind=ASP.

222 Friedrich Frosch nizable references are relatively frequent in his late poems, is César Vallejo. During his lifetime he published only two volumes of poetry: Los heraldos negros (The Black Heralds, 1918), in which he gradually abandons Darío’s symbolism, achieving something like Tristan Corbière’s famous “mélange adultère de tout”53; and Trilce (1922), an idiosyncratic exploration of the poetic expressiveness that might arouse (as it actually did) associations with surrealist doctrines, despite the fact that it was published two years before Breton’s Manifesto and in a cultural ambiance which then had no connection with the European avant-garde.54 Vallejo came to Paris in 1923, if we believe the testimony of his close friend Larrea, during a long phase of creative barrenness that lasted, with rare exceptions, from 1923 to 1931, a period of “infecundidad lírica, extendido prácticamente, salvo excepciones contadísimas, de 1922 a 1931” (Larrea 90). The Paris years put Vallejo in contact with a world he until then knew only from books, although he has always been profoundly conscious of the “centre versus the so-called periphery” question.55 For Vallejo “Paris becomes the anthropological object, the Native Informant, its mystique evaporating as the poet grows to know it” (Sharman XX).56 His friendship with Huidobro, his contacts with other Latin American or European poets and musicians, though less numerous than those of Andrade or Huidobro, Paris itself, as a cultural hothouse in the days of Surrealism’s apogee, no doubt enrich Vallejo’s imaginary repertory, even though he is marginalized by poverty57 – and his own political radicalism, one should add. Among the authors discussed here, he is the only one who remained in Paris practically for the rest of his life (except for some travels and a forced 53 54

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The first line of his poem “Epitaphe” (Corbière 396, “adulterous concoction of anything”). The pioneer of the new surrealist aesthetics in Peru is Xavier Abril, who between 1925 and 1929 is active propagating the new doctrine, among others by articles written for José Carlos Mariátegui’s magazine Amauta (Fernández Cozman 72-75). A middle term is Spain and its culture, the poet’s information concerning Iberian literature consequently being much more ample, as is proved by his diploma thesis (Trujillo, 1915) on Romantic Poetry: El Romanticismo en la poesía castellana (contained in Vallejo, Poesía 845-906). Stephen Hart in the same volume that contains Sharman’s article remarks that whereas in anthropological discourses “the knowledge of the Native Informant is ‘stolen’, technologized and circulated as First World scholarship, in Vallejo’s text Paris becomes the Native Informant, and the dynamics of cultural counterexploitation are carried out. The mystique of the City of Light, so visible from the colonial periphery, disappeared as Vallejo approached the source of its power / knowledge” (Hart 110). “La llegada de Vallejo a París en 1923 le pone en contacto con un mundo que había conocido hasta entonces solo por la lectura. Su amistad con el poeta chileno, Vicente Huidobro, sus contactos con poetas, escritores y músicos latinoamericanos y extranjeros, el ambiente cultural de París en el momento del auge del surrealismo, sin duda enriqueció el repertorio imaginario aunque estuvo también marginado por la pobreza.” (Franco 591)

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exile of about two years spent in Spain58). He continued the independent poetic research initiated in Peru with Trilce (which was republished in Madrid in 1930), following a deductive experimental procedure, carried out in a constant movement rooted in nature and natural phenomena (thereby partly rejecting urban contexts) which finds its thematic aim and metaphorical fulfilment in comments on civilization, without ever lapsing into romantic views or nostalgia (as still present in Los heraldos negros). “Vallejo’s poetry cannot be an ‘enchanted’ poetry, as it maintains itself on the primitive level of experience where the world is felt like something obscure, full of mysterious threats that escape investigation, weighing strangely upon the body, our body, which sooner or later they will crush”.59 The Peruvian poet – who, when he wrote in French, did so to produce essays, political comments and socialist theatre plays, but no verse – distances himself from Huidobro’s Paris poetry, in which rainbows, trees, birds, clouds, moon and rivers are lighthandedly combined by means of almost neo-romantic and often all too decorative art nouveau-style gestures. It is in many cases difficult if not impossible to date the poems composed during Vallejo’s Paris years, as only the small volume España, aparta de mí ese cáliz (Spain, Let this Cup Pass from me, published in 1939, shortly after the poet’s death) can be situated in the years of the Spanish Civil War, and was probably written in 1937 and 1938. The large bulk of what became known as the Poemas de París (Ferrari) or the Poemas humanos60 is without indication of date of production.61 Let us consider now a passage of one final example.

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“Vallejo lived roughly two thirds of his life in the Third World (Peru: 1892-1923) and one third in the First (France: 1923-1938); excluding a short stay in Spain in 1930-1932 and trips to the Soviet Union in 1928, 1929, and 1931)” (Hart 107). “La poésie de Vallejo ne peut être une poésie ‘enchantée’ parce qu’elle se tient au niveau primitif de l’expérience où le monde est senti comme quelque chose d’obscur, plein de menaces mystérieuses, qui échappent à l’investigation, mais pèsent étrangement sur le corps, notre corps, qu’à la longue elles finissent par tuer.” (Coyné 140) This title, never used by Vallejo himself, was introduced by Raúl Porras and the poet’s widow, Georgette Vallejo, who excluded from this section the prose poems. Juan Larrea opted for a tripartite order: “Nómina de huesos” (“Payroll of Bones”, in the translation of Eshleman/Barcia 1980), “Sermón de la Barbarie” and “España, aparta de mí este cáliz”, suggesting that the first part contains the earlier poems. Cf. Larrea’s notes to the respective texts in Vallejo, Poesía 531-540 and 689-718. An alternative later view is presented by Américo Ferrari, responsible for the critical edition of Vallejo’s poetry (Vallejo, Obra 275-294).

224 Friedrich Frosch Sitting still on a stone, lazing, dirty, disgusting, on the bank of the Seine, come and go. From the river blooms up then consciousness, with leaf stalk and scratches of avid tree: from the river emerges and into it sinks the city, made of embraced wolves.

Parado en una piedra, desocupado, astroso, espeluznante, a la orilla del Sena, va y viene. Del río brota entonces la conciencia,

The motionless man sees her going and coming, monumental carrying his hungers in a concave head, in his breast his purest lice and below his small sound, the one from his pelvis, silent between two big decisions, and beneath still more beneath, a scrap of paper, a nail and a match...

El parado la ve yendo y viniendo,

This is, workers, the one who sweated in his outward toil, who today sweats inside his secretion of rejected blood! The cannon caster who knows how many claws are steel, The weaver who knows the positive threads of his veins mason of pyramids constructor of descents by quiet columns, by triumphant failures idle subject among thirty million of idle subjects, walking in multitude [...]

¡Este es, trabajadores, aquel que en la labor sudaba para afuera, que suda hoy para adentro su secreción de sangre rehusada! Fundidor del cañón, que sabe cuántas zarpas son acero, tejedor que conoce los hilos positivos de sus venas, albañil de pirámides, constructor de descensos por columnas serenas, por fracasos triunfales, parado individual entre treinta millones de parados, andante en multitud […]

con peciolo y rasguños de árbol ávido: del río sube y baja la ciudad, hecha de lobos abrazados.

monumental, llevando sus ayunos en la cabeza cóncava, en el pecho sus piojos purísimos y abajo su pequeño sonido, el de su pelvis, callado entre dos grandes decisiones, y abajo, más abajo, un papelito, un clavo, una cerilla...

The themes of Babylonian captivity, of the Heraclitan flow of things, of time passing and time frozen in the instant, the dive into impotent but ever present sexuality, the human condition, in short, all the predicaments to be overcome by conscious action and solidarity (instead of solitary musing) are perfectly intertwined in this title-less poem located in a vague scenery on the bank of the Seine. This very striking text thus poses the lyrical I as an individual in a Bakhtinian chronotope, but at the same time makes it clear that Paris – a

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certain Paris familiar to the author62 – is nothing more than another ingredient in the toils and frustrations of human existence, the stone of the first line being actually a tombstone, the city a dead monument, or rather a sordid dump, battleground for the instincts and the workingmen’s exploitation in the economic depression after 1929 – rather all that than a ‘post-modern’ cultural site. The scene is nearly empty, the waters carry away the glorious past but not the sexual drives, man’s ultimate truth. The Aura has gone for good.

Works Cited Amaral, Aracy A. Tarsila – Sua obra e seu tempo. Vol. I. São Paulo: Perspectiva, Ed. Da Universidade de São Paulo, 1975. Andrade, Oswald de. Um homem sem profissão. Memórias e confissões. Volume I 1890-1919. Sob as ordens de mamãe. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização brasileira, 31976. (Obras completas vol. 9). ——. Pau-Brasil. São Paulo: Globo, 51991 (Obras completas de Oswald de Andrade vol. 3). ——. Ponta de Lança. São Paulo: Editorial Globo, 52000. Apollinaire, Guillaume. “L’esprit nouveau et les poètes.” Œuvres en prose complètes. Tome II. Textes établis, présentés et annotés par Pierre Caizergues et Michel Décaudin. Paris: Gallimard, 1991 (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). 943-954. Barthes, Roland. “Sémiologie et urbanisme.” 1967. L’aventure sémiologique. Paris: Seuil, 1985. 261-271. Bary, David. Nuevos estudios sobre Huidobro y Larrea. Valencia: Pre-textos, 1984. Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres complètes. Vols. I and II. Éd. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1975-1976. Caws, Mary Ann. MANIFESTO: A Century of Isms. Modernist Manifestos and Statements. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001. Cendrars, Blaise. Poésies complètes. Avec 41 poèmes inédits. Ed. Claude Leroy. Paris: Denoël, 2005. Cendrars, Miriam. Blaise Cendrars. Paris: Balland/Seuil, 1984.

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In the prose poem “El buen sentido” (The good sense) he still speaks – clumsily as it seems about it as “a place in the world that is called Paris. A very big place, far distant and once again big” (“un sitio en el mundo, que se llama París. Un sitio muy grande y lejano y otra vez grande”, Vallejo, Obra 309-310), in the famous “Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca” (Vallejo, Obra 339), it has become the negative pole of existence: a place of torture and of death, insignificant in itself.

226 Friedrich Frosch Collazos, Óscar. Los vanguardismos en la América Latina. Barcelona: Ed. Península, 1977. Corbière, Tristan. “Les amours jaunes.” Rimbaud. Cros. Corbière. Lautréamont. Œuvres poétiques complètes. éd. prés. et ann. par Michel Dansel. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980. 387-585. Coyné, André. Medio siglo con Vallejo. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1999. Darío, Rubén. Canto a la Argentina y otros poemas. Madrid: Biblioteca Corona, 1914. ——. Rubén Darío esencial. Ed. Arturo Ramoneda. Madrid: Taurus, 1991. Emar, Juan. “Con Vicente Huidobro: Santiago 1925.” Interview for La Nación (Santiago de Chile, 29-04-1925). Site of the Universidad de Chile. http://www.vicentehuidobro.uchile.cl/entrevista2.htm (14/4/2009). Fernández Cozman, Camilo. “César Moro y los ecos del surrealismo francés en el Perú.” Boletín de la Academia Peruana de la Lengua 42 (2006): 6997. Franco, Jean. “La temática: de Los heraldos negros a los Poemas póstumos.” Vallejo 1996: 575-605. Girondo, Oliverio. Obra. Edición Enrique Molina. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1968 (Obras I – Poesía). ——. Obra completa. Edición crítica - Raúl Antelo, coordinador. Madrid: ALLCA XX, 1999. Goic, Cedomil. “Introducción del coordinador.” Obra poética. Vicente Huidobro. Madrid: ALLCA XX, 2003. XIX-LVI. Gutiérrez Soto, Francisco Jesús. El bestiario en la obra de Rubén Darío. Memoria para optar al grado de doctor. Madrid: Universidad complutense, 2003. Online: http://www.ucm.es/BUCM/tesis/fll/ucm-t26677.pdf (20/4/2009). Hart, Stephen M. “César Vallejo and the Space of Cultural Enunciation: An Analysis of ‘Fue Domingo en las claras orejas de mi burro.’” The poetry and poetics of Cesar Vallejo: the fourth angle of the circle. Ed. Adam Sharman. Lewiston, NY, etc.: Mellen, 1997. 107-116. Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature. Madison, Wisconsin: Wisconsin UP, 21982. Hewitt, Nicholas. “Shifting Cultural Centres in Twentieth-Century Paris.” Parisian fields. Ed. Michael Sharingham. London: Reaktion Books, 1996. 30-45. Huidobro, Vicente . Obras completas de Vicente Huidobro. Prólogo, edición preparados y revistos por Hugo Montes. Santiago de Chile: Bello, 1976. ——. Obra poética. Edición crítica coord. por Cedomil Goic. Madrid: ALLCA XX, 2003 (Colección Archivos, 45).

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Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine. http://www.imec-archives.com/fonds/fiche.php?ind=ASP (4/2/2009). Klotz, Volker. Die erzählte Stadt. Ein Sujet als Herausforderung des Romans von Lesage bis Döblin. München: Hanser, 1969. Larrea, Juan. “Trayectoria de Vallejo.” Poésia completa. César Vallejo. Madrid: Barral, 1978. 12-150. Marinetti, Tommaso Filippo. (Premier) Manifeste du futurisme 1909 (facsimile copy) http://www.uni-due.de/lyriktheorie/scans/1909_1marinetti.pdf (21/3/2008). Molloy, Sylvia. La diffusion de la littérature hispano-américaine en France au XXe siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972. Montilla, Patricia M. Parody, the Avant-Garde, and the Poetics of Subversion in Oliverio Girondo. New York etc.: Peter Lang, 2007. Morales, Andrés. “Huidobro en España.” Obra poética. Vicente Huidobro. Madrid : ALLCA XX, 2003. 1409-1422. Nieto, Miguel. “Vida de Juan Larrea.” Versión Celeste. Edición de Miguel Nieto. Ed. Miguel Nieto. Madrid: Cátedra, 2003. 13-36. Nunes, Benedito. Oswald cannibal. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1979. Quiroga, Horacio. Obras. Diario y correspondencia. Ed. Jorge Lafforgue. Buenos Aires: Losada, 2007. Reverdy, Pierre. Nord-Sud. Self Defence et autres écrits sur l’art et la poésie. Paris: Flammarion, 1975. Robles, Mireya. “La disputa sobre la paternidad del creacionismo”. Thesaurus XXVI, 1 (1971): 95-103. Salinas, Pedro. La poesía de Rubén Darío. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1948. Sarabia, Rosa. La poética visual de Vicente Huidobro. Frankfurt/M.: Iberoamericana/ Vervuert, 2007. Schwartz, Jorge. Vanguarda e cosmopolitismo na década de 20. Oliverio Girondo e Oswald de Andrade. Trans. Mary Amazonas Leite Barros and Jorge Schwartz. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1983. ——., ed. Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: textos programáticos y críticos. Madrid: Cátedra, 1991. Sharman, Adam, ed. The poetry and poetics of Cesar Vallejo: the fourth angle of the circle. Lewiston, NY, etc.: Mellen, 1997. Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-andImagined Places. Malden/Oxford/Carton: Blackwell, 1996. Subirats, Edmundo. Linterna mágica. Vanguardia, media y cultura tardomoderna. Madrid: Siruela, 1997. Vallejo, César. Poesía completa. Ed. critica y exegética al cuidado de Juan Larrea. Madrid: Barral, 1978.

228 Friedrich Frosch Vallejo, César. The Complete Posthumous Poetry. Trans. Clayton Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1980. ——. Obra poética. Ed. crítica, Américo Ferrari, coord. Madrid: ALLCA XX, 1996. Weich, Horst. Paris en vers: Aspekte der Beschreibung und semantischen Fixierung von Paris in der französischen Lyrik der Moderne. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998. Yurkiévich, Saúl. “Vicente Huidobro, logros y milagros.” Obra poética. Vicente Huidobro. Madrid: ALLCA XX, 2003. XV-XVIII.

Martina Stemberger

The Plague in Paris or Burning Cities: Bruno Jasieński versus Paul Morand L’écriture est un incendie […] (Cendrars, L’Homme foudroyé 9) What can I say? Paris is the capital of the world, Moscow may well become so one day. (Roth, Flight Without End 44)

Prologue In 1928, Bruno Jasieński1 published a reply to Paul Morand’s anti-communist novella Je brûle Moscou:2 the equally ‘incendiary’ novel Je brûle Paris.3 Cosmopolitan Paris, devastated by the plague, isolated by a strict cordon sanitaire, disintegrates into a series of hostile ethnic and ideological communities. Once Paris is depopulated, former political prisoners found a communist ‘new metropolis’. In this article, Je brûle Paris, in its time “le best seller absolu de la littérature prolétarienne” (Rayski 10), will lead to reflections on Paris as a site of – in this case, rather aggressive – cultural exchange in the 1920s, on the intertextual implications of Jasieński’s de(con)struction of Europe, but also on the entanglements of literature and politics, art and ideology.

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Bruno Jasieńki (1901-1938), born as Wiktor Zysman, adopted by the Jasieńkis at the age of eight (Jaworski2 29f), started his career as Wiktor Jasieński (50), before abandoning ‘Wiktor/Victor’ for ‘Bruno’. First published in Demain (n° 13, April 1925), then included in L’Europe galante (1925); henceforth ‘JbM’. Jasieński started working on his novel (henceforth ‘JbP’) in October 1927; on January 15th, 1928, a fragment (W więzieniu Santé/In the Santé prison) was published in Sovetskaja Tribuna. On April 22nd, Ja žgu Pariž appeared in Moscow; from September 14th until November 13th, 59 sequels of Je brûle Paris were printed in L’Humanité (Jaworski2 136ff, 160ff), followed by the Flammarion book edition. The first Polish edition (Palę Pariż) came out in 1929, another in 1931; both were censored with regard to ‘anti-Polish’ motifs. In this article, indications of pages refer to the following French edition: Bruno Jasienski, Je brûle Paris. Paris: Félin, 2003. All translations from French, Russian, Polish and German are the author’s, if not stated otherwise.

230 Martina Stemberger

Intertextual Fireworks or Subtle (Mis)Understandings The fiery exchange between Morand and Jasieński might have originated in a linguistic misunderstanding. Did Morand indeed ‘burn’ Moscow? Jasieński probably did not grasp the ambiguity of the French ‘brûler’ (Wat 33, Jaworski2 141). The Polish translation of Morand’s title, Palę Moskwę, suggests a serious pyromaniac project, just as Jasieński’s Palę Pariż, a flamboyant answer to Morand.4 While Morand, who ingeniously plays with the ‘masks’ of fiction (Douzou 208), whose works “caractérisent admirablement sinon la vie, du moins les rêves secrets de la classe dirigeante” (Ehrenbourg 74) and whose ambiguous title is neither coincidental nor innocent, ridicules Soviet revolutionary achievements, Jasieński restores the Russian Revolution to its dignity. Moscow is burning: like “red sparks” and “burning coals”, Lenin’s words fly over the world, setting it on fire (JbP 124).5 Je brûle Paris attacks “les fondements du mythe parisien” (Wyka 210, qtd. in Asholt 220): Paris might once have been the capital of revolution; but now, the half-effaced words “Liberté – Fraternité – Égalité” (sic) on the façade of a prison resemble “une inscription funéraire à demi illisible, sur la tombe délaissée de la Grande Révolution française“ (JbP 73). The French Revolution has degenerated into a tourist event; not for nothing, the destruction of Paris starts on 14th July, turning a discredited anniversary into an international danse macabre on the Revolution’s grave. Morand’s and Jasieński’s ‘fireworks’ not only enlighten each other, they are both part of a complex intertextual network. One of Morand’s main targets, “Mardochée Goldvasser, le poète rouge” (JbM 399) alias Vladimir Majakovskij, is immediately recognizable.6 Morand was certainly “un adversaire résolu du bolchévisme” (Sarkany 221);7 and Majakovskij a prominent figure of Soviet literary life; but what had he done to deserve such a personal-

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In 2005, Warsawian Jirafa Roja published the two works in a single volume, finally melting them into an inter/textual unity. Jasieńki is quoting no other than Lenin himself: “When we took power in October we were nothing more in Europe than a single spark. True, the sparks began to fly, and they flew from us. […] Several countries are enveloped in the flames of workers’ revolution” (from Lenin’s Speech on the International Situation, delivered on November 8th, 1918, at the Extraordinary Sixth AllRussia Congress of Soviets; qtd. in Lenin 155). Morand (who, in 1964, confirmed having portrayed Majakovskij and his “milieu”, cf. Sarkany 199) uses well-known biographic details (Majakovskij’s hypochondriac phobias, his relationship with Lilja and Osip Brik etc.). And an enemy of what he calls “le bolchevisme des mœurs, le communisme de la peau” in his Éloge de la marquise de Beausemblant (416).

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ized attack?8 Majakovskij had visited Paris in the autumn of 1924; back to Moscow, as reported in a feuilleton in 30 dnej, he declared he had felt in Paris as if he were in “the dull province” (qtd. in Stern 137), and thus aggressively questioned Paris’s status as ‘capital of the world’. This ‘impudent’ reversal of cultural hierarchies might have provoked Morand’s parody of a deeply provincial Moscow, characterized by dirt and superstition. Morand mocks Soviet claims to innovation; what pretends to be a vision of the future, turns out to be a grotesque imitation of the European past.9 This representation of an ‘other’, fatally lacking any originality, condemned to confirm, paradoxically, the authenticity of the ‘self’, combines traditional anti-Semitic and anti-Russian stereotypes.10 For Jasieński, Majakovskij was a literary and political hero; Morand’s ‘profanation’ infuriated him enough to stimulate Je brûle Paris, a double reckoning with Morand as an “enemy of revolution” and an “enemy of the beloved poet of his youth” (Stern 137).11 But Jasieński had also “huge ambition” (141), displaying, if necessary, a considerable degree of opportunism.12 Before the scandalous success of Je brûle Paris, he was known mainly as a futurist poet,13 and hardly beyond a Polish audience. Re-nationalizing plague-stricken Paris, Jasieński succeeded in internationalizing himself. If Je brûle Paris was his “first challenge” to the capitalist world (126), it was also a masterpiece of literary self-marketing that brought Jasieński right into the communist establishment.14 Je brûle Paris, a “bridge”

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Majakovskij was also a ‘favourite enemy’ for Russian émigré writers. Bunin characterizes him as a “Russian rowdy” (114), quoting his alleged nickname “Idiot Polyphemovitch” (65, 115). Goldvasser, a clever imitator, poses, at thirty-five, like “Voltaire à Ferney” before his admirers; little poet Izraïloff seems a “prestidigitateur” (118); a Soviet avant-garde performance turns out to be a travesty of Dumas’ Dame aux camélias (108f). Masson, in his Mémoires secrets sur la Russie: “Le caractère russe […] est de n’en avoir aucun, mais de savoir merveilleusement s’adapter celui des autres nations” (qtd. in Grève 1187). According to Custine, French mastermind of 19th century (Anti)Russian Studies, the Russians are mere “marionnettes” (qtd. in Grève 985): “le feu créateur leur est refusé” (1203). Aleksander Wat witnessed Jasieński’s fury at the discovery of Morand’s text; a few days later, the plot of Je brûle Paris, a counter-attack against “this scoundrel, this fascist” was ready (33; French version qtd. in Asholt 218f). During his years in Paris, Jasieński provided Polish press organs of very different political affiliations with reports, perfectly adapted to the expectations of his respective audiences (Jaworski2 55ff). In April 1921, Jasieński had published two fervent futurist manifestos, exhorting the “Polish people” to join in the “immediate futurization of life” (qtd. in Asholt/Fähnders 237ff). In Paris, he wrote his longest poem, Słowo o Jakubie Szeli (The Lay of Jakub Szela, 1926), based on a historical event (the peasant revolt in 1846, cf. Krzychylkiewicz 159ff). Henri Barbusse himself wrote the preface for Je brûle Paris’s French edition. Later, a Soviet celebrity and “terribly sectarian” (Wat 34), Jasieński attacked Barbusse in articles like Na wielkim targowisku ideologii (On the big marketplace of ideology), Feu sur les „amis” (Jaworski2

232 Martina Stemberger between Jasieński’s poetry and his prose (145), is also a pivotal text in the author’s biography; Jasieński, now definitively a political persona non grata, was arrested, and expelled from France.15 At first sight, Je brûle Paris has an overwhelmingly clear political message. But in fact it is a polyphonic text that invites readings à rebours, an experiment with different ‘perspectives’ that shows the (un)making of ideology.16 Je brûle Paris, a pamphlet against hypocritical “old grandmother Europe” (296), is a thoroughly ‘European’ novel of extraordinary intertextual density (Stern 141). The all-too-evident link to Morand should not eclipse the numerous other classical and contemporary intertexts that have inspired Je brûle Paris – a near-perfect product of its time, combining popular narratives about the ‘fall of the Occident’ with equally popular “epidemic entertainment” (Tomes, qtd. in Sarasin 35). Jasieński, immediately after publication, was accused of having plagiarized – mainly Il’ja Ėrenburg, whose novel Trest D. E. Istorija gibeli Evropy (Trust D. E. A History of the Demise of Europe), probably one of the main source texts for Je brûle Paris, parodies European fears of Soviet ‘imperialism’. Europe’s fall might be imminent, but this is not the Soviets’ fault; Jens Boot, an aristocrat’s bastard son and paradigmatic self-destructive European, frightens four American multimillionaires, all of them prototypes of arrogant stupidity,17 into sponsoring Trust D. E. (projecting the Destruction of Europe within the next 13 years), by representing it as an urgent act of self-defence against the communist ‘virus’; otherwise, the USA would risk finishing as the “S.S.U.S.A.” (54).18

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157f) or Comment ‘Monde’ combat le socialfascisme (Asholt 225). On the “Problem: Jasieński – Barbusse” cf. Stern 179ff. On the precise circumstances of Jasieński’s expulsion, see Jaworski2 145ff. Marxism provides Chinese teenager P’an with his first ‘magical glasses’, allowing him to see (through) a suddenly transparent world (110). For French proletarian Laval too, “un monde complexe et incompréhensible” becomes marvellously simple and coherent, when considered through the prism of communist ideology (192). On the way back from Europe, one of them sends his family the following telegram: “Slept well. Appetite excellent. Europe is nonsense. Arrive Wednesday, 12.47” (40). In Morand’s La Croisade des enfants with its “Union des républiques soviétiques romanes” (425), a similar anti-communist nightmare comes true. P.-J. Mézières’ La défense contre le péril intérieur: Allons enfants de la patrie..., roman d’une réalité (1928) also stages the proclamation of a “République des Soviets en France” – more precisely in Paris, isolated by “sa fameuse ceinture rouge”, an evening of July during the 1930s (Cœuré 49).

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Paris-Labyrinth or Urban (Mis)Readings Je brûle Paris stages a radical loss of urban “readability” (Barthes 263ff): the protagonist Pierre, wandering in “le labyrinthe inextricable des passages”, searches in vain for a “fil conducteur” (56) that might lead him out of this terrifying “multidimensional urban text” (Stierle 45). As in Soupault’s Les Dernières Nuits de Paris, the French metropolis, despite or because of its “virtuosité des mots” (Soupault 9), refuses to be read any longer. Pierre’s urban peregrinations end in total self-alienation; regressing beyond the mirror stage, this hallucinated urban (mis)reader – “livré[s] ainsi à la fureur des symboles, en proie au démon de l’analogie” (Breton 128), just like Breton’s narrator and his companion Nadja, “l’âme errante” (82) – is unable to recognize his own image, when staring at a madman with frightening red eyes (JbP 45). After his precarious re-socialization, he refuses to leave his small furnished room, a protective microcosm, after dark, fleeing the nightmarish Paris which, losing its “familiar forms”, metamorphoses into a ghostly labyrinth (66).19 In Soupault’s text, too, Paris dissolves at night, disappearing as if forever, “comme définitivement” (18); Soupault’s Octave also seems afraid of Paris’s nocturnal ‘emptiness’ (62). Preparing the intertextual ‘explosion’ of Paris, Jasieński layers traditional urban readings, transforming Je brûle Paris into one “big metaphor” (Stern 146), and saturating it with artistic devices (Krzychylkiewicz 218). But these metaphorical fireworks, a means of creative alienation, are not mere ornaments: a chaotic, incoherent world out of (not only) stylistic control is finally replaced by a communist cosmos worthy of that name.20 Jasieński, staging a conscious clash of metaphors, describes Paris as a “forest” (55), an “ocean” (56); a monster with “innumerable eyes” (29), crunching humans with “mâchoires de pierre” (50); a huge cemetery under the “shroud” of a Stars and Stripes-heaven (47); a street’s pavestones resemble the skulls of a crowd buried alive (23). The city’s petrified memory of crime and despair is always ready to awake: Breton’s Nadja, when looking at a seemingly quiet place, is frightened by the ghostly multitude her gaze conjures (94ff); she stumbles among “ces faits-glissades et ces faits-précipices” (21), just as Jasieński’s Pierre, half-lunatic as well. Before Pierre’s eyes, familiar objects and places suddenly defy recognition; his urban errance dismantles identities and evi19

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Jasieński might, for once, agree with Morand’s narrator ‘Paul’ in Les Amis nouveaux: “Paris est un labyrinthe […]” (353). If the world is a machine out of order, communists are competent craftsmen: “Au lieu d’une machine, ils ont le plan d’une autre”. Pierre, resigned accomplice of the existing (dis)order, is unable to believe in the reparability of the world, convinced that “l’énorme machine” of capitalist society, “ancrée profondément dans la terre”, can never be unsettled (52).

234 Martina Stemberger dences, revealing an “abyss of strangeness” (Sloterdijk 356), the nightmarish backside of Aragon’s “merveilleux quotidien” (16). Paris, “ville fantasmagorique”, (dis/re)appears as if by witchcraft (JbP 33).

Capitalist Cinderella or Politicizing Gallant Europe The subject is always already ‘subject’ to society: Jasieński challenges illusions of possible private happiness in a destructive world, ‘burning Paris’ also as a symbol of ‘love’ and ‘eroticism’. Questioning the relevance of Morand’s exploration of intercultural gallantry in L’Europe galante21 – where politics is merely “an élément du décor” (Collomb 994) –, Jasieński starts his politicization of the seemingly private with his very first sentence: “Cela a commencé par un fait minime, insignifiant d’apparence et d’un caractère absolument privé” (JbP 19). His deconstruction of ‘love’ has unmistakable misogynist accents. Je brûle Paris pays a rather irony-free homage to heroic virility; the champions of Jasieński’s Brave New Communist World are all ‘men without women’, evolving in a strictly homosocial milieu which is characterized by its disdain of sexuality, associated with femininity.22 Pierre’s ex-lover Jeannette, a contemporary and, in every respect, diminished version of Jeanne d’Arc, is a negative allegory of femininity (whose speech, idle and irrelevant, resembles colourful “confetti”, 26). As she is unable and unwilling to fulfil her maternal role, her orphaned partner mothers his own hunger, showing all the symptoms of pregnancy (42).23 Jeannette needs new shoes, which the proletarian prince Pierre is unable to pay for: this contemporary Cinderella tale ends as a European tragedy. In Ėrenburg’s D. E., too, a lady’s footwear plays a particular role in the destruction of Europe who, in the allegorical form of rich and arrogant Mlle Lucy Flamingo, has rejected Boot’s advances. When her husband, impoverished by Trust D. E.’s manipulations, refuses to buy another pair of shoes for Lucy, a worthy competitor of Imelda Marcos, she is finally ready to succumb, letting her admirer, now chief destroyer of Europe, pay for her favours by means of a small intervention in favour of the Italian lira. After an unforgettable night with Mme Blancafard,

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In Ėrenburg’s D. E., Europe is the only ‘gallant’ continent, too. US-Americans are unable to understand the very concept of love alias the “Europe feeling” (29), helplessly trying to define “certain nervous states, called ‘love’ on the other side of the ocean (amour, amore, amor, love)” (52). Communist enthusiasm frequently serves as a pretext for the re-affirmation of ‘true virility’, in pro-Soviet French texts, too (see, for instance, Vaillant-Couturier 1925/26). Ėrenburg’s Boot, also a paradoxical mother, carrying hatred in his/her womb (27), might have inspired Pierre’s desperate maternity.

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née Flamingo, astonished Boot faces a vulgar elderly woman with heavy make-up, whose symbolical sunset-colour hair turns green in the morning light; “Princess Europe” has become a shabby whore (11). US-American “Misters” enjoy the female “attractions of dying Europe” (37), all of them prostitutes, prostrated before transatlantic capital.

Paris-Babylon or Jeannette d’Arc in the Lit National Barthes considers urban “érotisme” as synonymous with “socialité”, the ‘erotic’ city being a space of exchange, of meeting the other, of becoming an/other (269); in Je brûle Paris, the city’s hyper-sexualization (“La rue était remplie de trépidation, d’une odeur de femelle en rut […]”, 56) undermines society and sociality, universal prostitution transforming human subjects into exchangeable objects. Je brûle Paris illustrates Benjamin’s vision of the prostitute as a paradigmatic figure of urban modernity as well as of capitalist alienation, interweaving traditional biblical motifs of urban decadence with trivial contemporary discourses. Nightclub advertisements, new Menetekels, illuminate Parisian nights: “Un tourbillon criard d’enseignes lumineuses, lettres de feu écrites dans l’air par une main invisible. Au lieu des mots: ‘Mane – Thecel – Pharès’, Pigall’s – Royal – Abbaye...” (44). The Babylonian imagery, frequent in the art and literature of the period, links cosmopolitan confusion and prostitution, problematizing the representability of the modern metropolis (Schmidt 66f).24 Urban space in Je brûle Paris is (de)structured by prostitution. Pierre, lost in this apocalyptic red-light zone, meets a former friend, specialized in “vieux messieurs” to whom he sells little girls’ sexual services (44).25 Looking for shelter, Pierre enters a nightclub; momentarily comforted, he believes himself to be in paradise – a strange inter-religious pseudo-paradise where “Dieu-Sabaoth”, “plantureux comme une matrone”, metamorphoses into the Buddha whom Pierre has seen at the exposition coloniale (37). Needless to say, Paris, the new Babylon, has its own tower – a hallucinatory “tour de Babel” with thousands of floors, 24

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A few examples out of many: Morand stages a Parisian Nuit de Babylone (1922). In René Crevel’s La Mort difficile (1926), Paris appears as “a modern Babylon” (Cooke 624); in his Babylone (1927), Marseilles becomes “a parodic version of the biblical Babylon, more happy hooker than satanic whore” (626). Alfred Döblin (1929) diabolizes Berlin, “die große Hure Babylon” (291). In 1934, Victor Margueritte publishes his version of Babel: no better metaphor for contemporary Europe’s terrible “confusion” (7). Solomine, Russian aristocrat and Parisian taxi driver, the main object of Jasieński’s literary psychoanalysis of anti-bolshevism, hatefully observes, in his mobile mini-brothel (“Le taxi, comme un bordel, puait le sperme à un kilomètre”), how Paris-Babylon turns Russian women into “vraies Parisiennes”, that is, into whores (173).

236 Martina Stemberger made up of dirty mattresses; on the very top, on a huge mattress of “Lit National”, Pierre’s ex-lover Jeannette lies, national whore, offering her body to the whole city, to the whole of Europe, to the whole world: endless processions of men, like ants, climb the mattress tower, waiting for their turn (49).26

City, Camera Obscura, Cinema or Urban (Inter)Medialities Krzychylkiewicz highlights the “optic quality” (222) of Jasieński’s style, its affinity with “various techniques of painting” (224). Jasieński’s Paris is a grotesque résumé of European art history, a strange museum, a “school of astonishment” (Sloterdijk 354). Windows, like paintings on walls, represent, in ironic eclecticism, different styles and periods: “Les fenêtres sont des tableaux […] Certaines sont des natures mortes […] D’autres sont des portraits ou des intérieurs. Il y a des fenêtres naïves, idylles de banlieue à la Douanier Rousseau, des incomprises et des sauvages” (30f). The Halles, at night, seem to be a piece of cubist art (32); the paradisiacal nightclub’s prostitutes are “Renaissance Madonnas” (36). But Jasieński’s (inter)medial experiments are not limited to painting; Je brûle Paris explores different phenomena of “remediation” (Bolter/Grusin 1999), rooting artistic devices in the ‘medium’ of the body, too; Pierre, mad with hunger, exhaustion and despair, offers a sophisticated surrealist’s vision of Paris (42). Human identity is ‘developed’ in terms of photography (122). Paris seems to be a huge cinematographic heterotopy (19) in the sense of Foucault’s “other spaces”: Pierre’s experience in prison resembles a Charlot picture (48); his communist coprisoners’ speeches project “un film féerique” onto their cell’s wall (51). Filmo-biography constitutes identity; but capitalist society transforms the subject into a frustrated or even frightened spectator of her/his own life-film. Russian émigré Solomine remembers his past like “un mauvais film allemand, vu dans un cinéma enfumé de troisième ordre” (171).

Paris-Ocean or Urban Underwater Worlds Barthes reflects on water as a factor of urban readability, cities “without water” offering most “resistance to signification” (270). In Je brûle Paris, 26

Jasieński’s Jeannette seems a sister of Soupault’s Georgette, “une prostituée banale” (Soupault 45), but also an “allegory for Paris” (Simon 123); following “les traces phosphorescentes de son passage”, Soupault’s narrator hallucinates her everywhere (127); Pierre is similarly obsessed with Jeannette, who also reminds of Cendrars’s “petite Jehanne de France” (34) alias “Jeanne Jeannette Ninette” (38), “La petite prostituée” (45) in Prose du Transsibérien.

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water does not structure the city, but submerges it, rendering it unreadable. First visions of a submarine Paris, reminiscent of Baudelaire’s artificial paradises, evoke jewellers’ shops, “grottes enchantées” (25); cars swim in the streets’ rivers, monstrous iron fish with fiery eyes. Paris, an underwater brothel, flooded by a “déluge de luxure” (56), is inhabited by suffocating divers (26). There is nothing worse than solitude in Paris, “dans l’océan des rues, une solitude que n’a jamais connue Alain Gerbault, ridicule Sancho Pança, bercé des mois durant sur les draps illimités de l’Atlantique” (56).27 Paris-ocean, “en ses flux et reflux éternels” (41), threatens to liquidate the subject: Pierre floats through the city, completely passive, “à la derive” (56). Only after having been “illuminated” by the idea of bioterrorist revenge, does he emerge, “comme Jésus marchant sur les eaux” (68). But also multimillionaire Lingslay is shipwrecked in a terrifying – far from ecstatic – oceanic world, desperately trying – “comme un noyé s’accrochant à une épave” – to reach a small island in the middle of “cette mer grise des chiffres” that his life consists of (247). One of the rare islands in the rough ocean of society is the prison on Boulevard Arago – a new Noah’s Ark, inhabited by “robinsons à têtes rasées” (49). Where capitalism colonizes social and psychic spaces, reclusion becomes paradoxical freedom: the prison, where society leaves its human “rubbish” (48), is the only proper place, the only possible ‘outside’ of a claustrophobic world. With his oceanic imagery, Jasieński is close to contemporary French surrealist ‘liquidations’ of urban reality. In Aragon’s Paysan de Paris, the passages with their “lumière […] sous-marine” (30) resemble “aquariums humains” (21): “Toute la mer dans le passage de l’Opéra” (31). In Soupault’s Les Dernières Nuits de Paris, the avenue de l’Opéra is a “fleuve”, a “glacier”, the opera itself an “Iceberg” (43); but his characters, despite all their ‘liquid’ affinities, are also obsessed with the idea of ‘burning Paris’; Octave, fantasizing about “le plus bel incendie du siècle” (113), repeatedly tries to set the – persistently pathologized, infected and infectious – banlieue on fire.28 But his pyromaniac projects fail, provoking a deluge of rain. In Jasieński’s main English intertext, Chesterton’s Napoleon of Notting Hill, London has the same submarine “phosphorescence” as Aragon’s Paris; people move “like 27

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Gerbault was the first to cross the Atlantic alone, without calling into port. Jasieński’s hero Laval, a former sailor on the armoured cruiser ‘La Victoire’, owes his name to Gerbault’s birthplace (Krzychylkiewicz 228). Other authors had been playing with – more or less politicized – Parisian fire; Yvan Goll in Paris brûle (1921, French version: 1923) as well as Walter Mehring in Paris in Brand (1927); cf. Asholt 219f. Goll’s poem shows numerous thematic parallels with Je brûle Paris; Mehring’s text, parabolic reflection on revolution, even evokes the idea of a possible ‘disintegration’ of Paris: “Paris va-t-il, ainsi, se désagréger tout à fait? Après Montmartre voici que l’Ile Saint-Louis a fait sa sécession” (epigraph).

238 Martina Stemberger fishes […] on the floor of a sea”, among carriages and cabs, “deep-sea creatures with eyes of flame” (16).29

Capitalism, Cannibalism or HumAnimalizations Je brûle Paris also reflects on the ‘liquidation’ of human individuality. Capitalism transforms people into exchangeable wares, one Jeannette is worth another, not only in Pierre’s troubled mind (“des dizaines, des centaines de Jeannette, toutes semblables”, 67). In René’s laboratory, where Pierre steals the plague ampullae, apocalypse is anticipated en miniature: some time before Pierre’s fatal visit, an employee inadvertently breaks a test-tube. René, who appreciates the subtle individuality of each inanimate object, being absolutely indifferent to the fate of humans, feels great satisfaction when the ‘murderer’ dies, “empoisonné par un bacille” (64).30 The plague is proudly presented as the bacteriologist’s “darling” (65).31 Pre-plague Paris is a profoundly inhuman, even anti-human world; just as in Ėrenburg’s D. E., the outcasts of capitalist society are considered as ‘animals’. Proletarian men, desperate for work, fight each other like rabid dogs with bloody eyes (33f); a prostitute – a miserable caricature of Zola’s courtesan Nana, the ‘mouche d’or’ – is perceived, by hallucinating Pierre, as an annoying “fly” (39). Jasieński, turning anti-Soviet discourses32 against capitalist France itself, describes animalized proletarians, devouring the abject contents of rubbish containers (57). But rubbish is not the only ‘food’ the starving Pierre is longing for; bourgeois bodies are perceived in terms of butchery. Pierre’s cannibalistic desire appears also as a proletarian self-defence against capitalist ‘vampirism’.33 When he tries to kill one of the sausage-necked bourgeois (41), Pierre is assaulted by a horde of policemen, compared to “bats” (47). 29

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In Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, London is compared to “a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off” (114). Pierre’s crime seems inspired by René’s fantasies about a “horde” of plague bacteria, “strong as elephants”, trampling down Paris (66). But Pierre, a paradigmatic character of capitalist (self)alienation, is also an incarnation of evil in all its banality. The 1934 Soviet version trivializes this ‘petty demon’, turning him into an involuntary tool of imperialist manipulation. Just for the curiosity of the fact, it should be noted that Alexandre Yersin, later discoverer of the plague bacillus alias Yersinia pestis, spent his formative years in Paris where, an indefatigable scientific ‘flaneur’, he created a “typical Parisian bacteriology” (Mendelsohn 195). In Joseph Kessel’s story Au marché, part of his visions of La steppe rouge (1923), a starving woman and a starving dog fight around a dustbin; the dog, having recognized his former lady, renounces, still more capable of ‘human’ dignity than the utterly animalized woman. In Ėrenburg’s capitalist England, starved out by Trust D. E., science registers an ethnographic revolution: the revival of cannibalism within the European nobility, a famished lord having devoured his fellow aristocrat.

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The flics are also fat “bulldogs”, wearing their badges like tags (22); ‘class enemies’ are systematically de-humanized and described as dangerous and/or disgusting animals.34

(Re)Medievalizing Metropolis In Nogi Izoldy Morgan (The Legs of Isolda Morgan, 1923), Jasieński already establishes the analogy between different urban ‘circulation’ systems, rendering a city terribly vulnerable: “after all, trams, as well as the water-supply system are used by everybody” (qtd. in Krzychylkiewicz 246). If circulation (of workers, wares, ideas) was perceived throughout modern times as an indicator of progress and enlightenment (Schivelbusch 173), Je brûle Paris questions this ideology of exchange. Pre-plague Paris is a desperately overheated metropolis, marked by frantic circulation. The metro, the prototype of efficient urban transport, becomes, at night, a precarious refuge for the clochardized masses;35 Jasieński ‘replies’ to Morand, who mocks the Soviet failure in housing politics (JbM 395f). The central water-supply system serves as an instrument of urban terror already in Chesterton’s Napoleon of Notting Hill.36 In Je brûle Paris, Paris is metaphorized as a fragile organism; when Pierre pours the mortal liquid into the centrifuge of the Saint-Maur water-station, its motor seems like a monstrous “cardiac valve”, pumping transparent blood into Paris’s “thirsty vessels” (69). The taps distributing the plague-infected water are the suicidal city’s “open veins” (74). Je brûle Paris reflects on the radical reversibility of progress. Pre-plague Parisian life is marked by an increasing ‘discomfort in culture’, by a growing desire for the cutting-short of circulation. As one quarter after another is (re)transformed into a pseudo-protective homely microcosm,37 many Parisians, regardless of the mortal danger, find life much easier than before. With a sigh of relief, they abandon their cosmopolitan masquerade and re-dress in 34

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Capitalists and their fetish objects join in common animalism: fashionable cars, just as their owners, are described as “dogs” (55f). In Ėrenburg’s D. E., the metro, symbol of urban modernity, becomes a mortal trap: the boss of Trust D. E. in person waits for the last Parisian to disappear into the dark labyrinth, before driving an additional tunnel and re-directing the Seine into the metro system, liquidating Paris once more. The said ‘Napoleon’ subdues a huge enemy army by occupying London’s water tower, menacing to drown the whole city (134). In Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (1842), Prince Prospero, fleeing the plague, retires with some elected companions into an isolated abbey with seven chambers, arranged in different colours. Plague-stricken Paris also falls apart into variously ‘coloured’ mini-states, each trying in vain to shut the infected rest out.

240 Martina Stemberger traditional costumes – just like Chesterton’s modern Londoners. In The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Great Britain seems to have definitively entered a post-revolutionary era of economically solid imperial boredom. But this “great cosmopolitan civilization” (24) – having, more or less peacefully, annexed the ‘rest of the world’ – implodes with Auberon Quin, the new ‘alphabetical’ king, determined to have a maximum of fun with his function: all the “glorious suburbs” (40) of London are reconverted into closed medieval cities with the corresponding décor of “local patriotism” (41). But the royal “joke” turns into popular “passion” (61) with the entrée en scène of “Adam Wayne, the intractable Provost of Notting Hill” (55) who, as a modern ‘holy fool’, sparks off a regular civil war in London (significantly, around a question of ‘circulation’, i.e. urban traffic).38 Twenty years later, London is unrecognizable, collectively “infected” (143) by the new Napoleon’s retroideology. Chesterton’s prophetic parody shows how easily a modern metropolis slides back into (European modernity’s idea of) the Middle Ages. In Jasieński’s novel, the plague, a scientifically updated paradigm of archaic terror, not only dismantles the status of Paris as the cosmopolitan ‘capital of the world’, but inverts the structures of colonial globalization, paradoxically turning Paris into a “postcolonial colony”, with formerly marginalized ethnicities ‘colonizing’ the empire’s centre (Asholt 222f).

(Re)Nationalizing Cosmopolis In a ‘Parisian letter’ for the Lvovian Wiek Nowy, Jasieński already stated that “Paris consists of a number of isolated cities […] joined only by the net of trams, buses and a metro” (qtd. in Krzychylkiewicz 241). Under the effect of the plague, this conglomerate of mini-cities rapidly disintegrates: “Paris avait craqué le long de la couture de la Seine, cousue naguère par les fils blancs des ponts” (JbP 164). This (haute) couture metaphor is followed by visions of ‘chemical’ disintegration (177).39 In the very collapse of its cosmopolitan identity, Paris, a ‘laboratory for world destruction’ (K. Kraus), is invested with an international premonitory meaning. As the city in agony drifts away from the rest of the world, death, the great equalizer, provokes a mania for difference(s), for “distinctive signs” (78f). The “Jaunes”, Asian avant-garde,

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Notting Hill’s tiny ‘Pump Street’, doomed to destruction by un-sentimental urban planners, becomes the pseudo-medieval warriors’ grotesque sanctuary of anti-modernity. Paris’s inhabitants are subject to chemical self-disintegration, too. Lingslay feels how his “moi social” dissolves, his label losing its power over his body, described as a chemical “bottle” (244) – a metaphor already used by bacteriological pioneer Pasteur (qtd. in Sarasin 39).

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are the first to accomplish their coup d’État, appropriating the Rive gauche,40 and encircling the Latin Quarter, “république autonome de Jaunes”, by a new “Wall of China” (142f). As the disintegration of cosmopolitan Paris follows an imaginary hierarchy of strangeness, the “Jaunes” are immediately imitated by the Jews, expelling all ‘Aryans’ from new “territoire autonome juif” (152). Further secessions are conditioned by political/social categories: reacting to the foundation of a “république autonome soviétique” in Belleville and Ménilmontant, the “camelots du roi” restore the French monarchy in the district of the Invalides and the Champ-de-Mars. British and American “gentlemen” declare, in a “meeting de défense contre les quartiers bolchevisants de Paris”, their territory “concession indépendante anglo-américaine” (161). Russian émigrés found a monarchy in Passy (177); a group of “anciens jazzbandistes et chasseurs” creates a “république autonome nègre” around Place Pigalle (203). The story of a particularly grotesque mini-republic is told en abyme by comrade Lecoq in his “Parabole de la République Bleue” (203ff). The flics, rejected by all the new states, gather in their barracks on the Île de la Cité, completing the colourful phantasmagoria of Paris with their own “Blue Republic”. Traumatized by the collapse of all fictions of authority, lost without government to command and citizens to discipline and to punish, the flics declare a disturbed senior their ‘dictator’, exhorting him to create new categories of criminals.41 Poly-centred Paris, “disloqué en États autonomes” (211), is torn between frank hostilities and fragile solidarities; the two forces of the future, the Asian and the Communist Republics, establish direct communication between their respective laboratories, joining their efforts in fighting the plague; the French and the Russian monarchy, forces of the past, form a precarious alliance as well. At their border at Pont d’Iéna, two boys who, some weeks ago, sat side by side in school and used to play tennis together, now play at military patriotism, resembling “deux petits soldats de plomb sur un pont en carton, dans un décor de papier mâché” (165). Between these teenage toy soldiers, once again, cultural hierarchies are renegotiated. When the Russian proudly tells his French counterpart about the White monarchy’s latest pogroms, the latter sees his ideas about Russian “savages” completely confirmed (166). The representatives of “la monarchie russe de Passy” (223) urge their reluctant co-monarchists to extradite the Soviet embassy’s staff, preparing grandstands for public execution; white Russian ladies are so excited about the event that they even forget to wash (who is dirty?). Finally, the French send a 40

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Where, as is well known, on pense… intellectual superiority, in Je brûle Paris, is definitely on the Asians’ side. All blond inhabitants are declared public enemies, dark-haired ones “bons citoyens”; the flics, both persecutors and persecuted, come to life again (207).

242 Martina Stemberger lorry full of “bolcheviques pestiférés” (227); the frightened public rapidly retires. In the meantime, practice and principles are discussed in the Soviet Republic of Belleville which threatens to run out of supplies. Some members of the ruling communist party propose a raid “chez les Engliches” (190). Laval, moral aristocrat among proletarian heroes, opposes this plan, organizing instead a secret – and bacteriologically safe! – nocturnal expedition outside the cordon sanitaire. The Jewish Republic, in its turn, feels threatened by the spectre of Bolshevism as poor citizens desert, joining the Belleville communists (231).

(Anti)Semitic Contaminations or Secret Complicities Anti-Bolshevism formed easy alliances with anti-Orientalism, anti-Asiatism and, above all, anti-Semitism, among Western enemies of the Soviet Union, denigrated as a crypto-Jewish’ power, an empire of “fascisme israélite” (Béraud 53f). According to the wide-spread stereotype of a Soviet Union dominated by “les extrémistes juifs” (Collomb 994), in Morand’s texts, most Soviet characters – not only ‘judaized’ Majakovskij-Goldvasser – are Jews (with hyper-‘Jewish’ names: Izraïloff, Judensohn etc.), revelling in megalomaniac fantasies as well as in ferocious anti-Semitic tirades (JbM 399ff).42 Jasieński dismantles Morand’s malevolent identification of ‘Bolsheviks’ and ‘Jews’; but instead, he associates Jewishness and capitalism, describing exclusively rich, hypocritical egoists as typical representatives of Jewish Paris. In the melting-pot of Paris where dozens of ethnicities are – more or less happily43 – “pulverized”, fresh “fertilizer” for French soil, only the Eastern Jews with their dubious “talent of non-assimilation” remain isolated. Responsible for their own ghettoization, they are literally identified with dirt, forming, on the surface of Paris-ocean, an indissoluble oily stain (145). The conjecture that Jasieński, whose Jewish origins were a target for political enemies, wished to avoid any suspicion of ‘Jewish’ solidarities is enforced by his portrait of David Lingslay, one of Je brûle Paris’s rare rather positive characters. When rich Jews plan their secret exodus from dying Paris, ready to leave behind “[t]oute la canaille juive” (232: just as in Morand’s text, Jews, in Je brûle Paris, are the most fervent anti-Semites), Lingslay, despite his Jewish 42

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In 1964, Morand still maintains that – at least during the “Trotskist period” (1917-1925) – the Russian Revolution (just another manifestation of ‘Jewish masochism’ and of “la profonde sémitisation du monde slave”, according to Cendrars’s Moravagine, 78f) was “en grande partie une chose des Juifs” (Sarkany 229). “Le cosmopolite heureux de l’être abrite dans la nuit de son errance une origine pulvérisée” (Kristeva 57).

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descent, is the only Anglo-American leader noble enough to refuse their proposal to take him as a passenger, too, in exchange for his support in entering the USA. When the pseudo-biblical emigration project nevertheless seems likely to succeed, Lingslay joins the community of plaguecontaminated Parisian Jews on board the Mauritanic (Ėrenburg’s Boot goes to America on the Mauretania), sailing under a false Egyptian flag.44 Sacrificing his own life, he informs US-authorities about the fraud; the steamer is torpedoed before reaching American soil. The murder of three thousand Jewish emigrants is legitimized, and Lingslay’s betrayal represented as a heroic act. Je brûle Paris, although a literally ‘virulent’ counter-attack against Morand’s novella, is complicit with Je brûle Moscou’s anti-Semitism: Morand’s Jewish communists as well as Jasieński’s Jewish capitalists represent a danger of ‘contagion’ whose elimination is a question of mere selfdefence.

Chinese Puzzles or Deconstructing Eu-Rop Across the Seine, the “République Jaune” fights the plague with its own means – under the leadership of the Chinese communist P’an Tsiang-koueï, whose ideological biography occupies a significant part of Je brûle Paris. Through the figure of P’an, Jasieński plays with an estranged vision of Europe: “loin, infiniment loin – une ville géante en fer – l’Eu-Rop” (93). P’an sees his first European cars: “Au-To-Mo-Bil. […] Bra-sié, Pa-Nar, DayMlère, Na-Pierre, Re-No. […] Mer-Ce-Des” (92).45 Amusing and enlightening though this strategy of bracketing the Eurocentric vision of the world might be, one should not mistake it for an attempt “to achieve the maximum objectivity; to show the world as others see it” (Krzychylkiewicz 241). The narrator of Je brûle Paris does not (pretend to) see the world as others really see it; P’an’s exotic perspective is the invention of a European author looking for an alternative point of view outside capitalist Europe.46 Jasieński, inverting cultural hierarchies, still confirms European phantasms about dangerous, 44

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The Mauritanic itself becomes a monstrous ‘Jewish’ body: “Lentement les yeux du rebbi s’engluent de sommeil et lentement, au rythme de la prière, se balance vers l’orient l’énorme corps ventru du navire” (256). Herbert Rosendorfer’s Chinese time-tourist in Letters Back to Ancient China, exploring late 20th century Bavaria, has a first traumatic – and almost mortal – encounter with a metallic monster called “A-tao” (20). Jasieński registered for courses in Japanese and Chinese at the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes; his studies have left some linguistic traces in Je brûle Paris. In his feuilleton Chińszczyzna (1927), he mocks arrogant “aunt Europe” (in Je brûle Paris, already a grandmother), who pretends to civilize her Chinese “charge” (qtd. in Jaworski2 52f).

244 Martina Stemberger powerful Asia, picking up the thread of traditional “Récits du péril jaune” (Moura 125ff).47 Surprisingly close to Spengler, Massis and their fellow defenders of the Occident, he merely reinterprets the ‘yellow danger’ as ‘yellow hope’. The Chinese Revolution is drastically metaphorized as the explosion of an “overheated cauldron”, as a volcanic eruption; the Yellow masses are “boiling lava”, ready to inundate the world (JbP 124). P’an’s former professor of bacteriology at the Sorbonne urgently demands to close Western universities to Asian students, who are all-too-eager to turn the intellectual weapons Europe generously provides them with against Europe itself. Western culture, transplanted to Asia, becomes a lethal “bacillus”; civilizing Asia, Europe prepares its own fall (135); P’an, living illustration of the professor’s paranoid theory (while still a boy, he decided to appropriate all the knowledge of the ‘Whites’ in order to defeat them), welcomes the ‘good old plague’, a traditional visitor from Asia, back once more to attack bad old Europe, whose destruction was imminent anyway. But “cette bonne et vieille peste asiatique” (139) is a product of European science – just as in Ėrenburg’s D. E., where a Soviet salvation army is stopped on its way West by a strange epidemic: dying people’s faces turn a ghastly white, as if covered with powder; Eastern Europe resembles a “terrible carnival” (109). A French scientist is awarded the order of the Légion d’Honneur for his serum against the new plague, brought into Europe by the Bolshevist ‘hordes’ – in fact, the epidemic is his own creation which he developed on behalf of the Ministry of War. French cosmetic labels have a new marketing gag: powder ‘Leprait’ is the hit of the season (113f).48 Anti-Soviet discourses frequently recur to metaphors of ‘contagion’, “motif fondateur de l’imaginaire anticommuniste” (Cœuré 45). According to Serge de Chessin, an extreme representative of ‘medical’ anti-Bolshevism, Soviet Russia is “le centre d’une pestilence démagogique, le foyer d’une infection mondiale”; Europe needs more effective “cordons sanitaires” against “le choléra asiatique, le socialisme asiatique” (485f). Chessin continues his fight for international hygiene with L’Apocalypse russe (1921) and La Nuit qui vient de l’Orient (1929), dedicated to “Henri Massis, le Défenseur de 47

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A few samples of the genre show how perfectly Je brûle Paris fits into this tradition: In Maurice Spronck’s L’An 330 de la République (1894), decadent Europe is ravaged by an Afro-Asian army and terrible epidemics of long-forgotten maladies (Moura 127). In Daniel Halévy’s Histoire de quatre ans (1997-2001) (1903), Europe is depopulated by an undefined “épidémie métaphorique” (Moura 134) and invaded by an Afro-Asian alliance as well. In Pierre Giffard’s La Guerre infernale (1908), a certain Dr. Essipof, “diabolique savant russe”, organizes a bacteriological campaign for the defence of Europe, contaminating the Chinese army’s subterranean water reservoirs with bacillus Koch; as the manoeuvre fails and the fatal infection affects Europe instead, Essipof commits suicide (Moura 128). Lucy Flamingo alias Princess Europe married Mister Blancafard.

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l’Occident”, who also warns of the “maladie asiatique” (Massis 276), of the Asians’ dangerous capacity, ‘observed’ already by Gobineau, to “asiatize” everything they come in contact with (145). Morand, another attentive Gobineau reader, also fantasizes, in his Bouddha vivant, about contagious yellow blood (208). This association between ‘Asia’, ‘bolshevism’ and ‘contagion’ is dismantled in Je brûle Paris. Europe itself, poisoned with “gaz asphyxiants” (300), becomes the very centre of contamination; only the first breaches in the “Wall of China” between the West and the Soviet Union allow fresh air to pass through, enabling asphyxiated Europe to breathe again.

The Resurrection of Paris or (Un)Happy Endings A few weeks after the outbreak of the plague, Paris is depopulated. But in the middle of Paris, ravaged “par le flux de la mort” (279), part of the prison population, supplied by a separate water system, has survived. Paris is ready for renaissance; although it is September, an “atmosphère pseudoprintanière” reigns over the city (285). Old society’s outcasts metamorphose into founders of a new world:49 hidden behind their cordon sanitaire, the exprisoners secretly build “une nouvelle métropole, commune modèle”; Paris, “ancienne capitale de banquiers et de prostituées” (293), purified by the plague – symbol of “the ineradicable evil”, of “the absurdity of human and historic contingency” in Camus’ La Peste (Asholt 221), radical remedy and symbol of historic fatality in Je brûle Paris –, is now inoculated by the healthy germ of communism50 and will once more play a historical role as the Western world’s ‘contagious’ revolutionary avant-garde:51 “À la place de la peste […] nous inoculerons l’épidémie de nos idées et elle inondera, de ses flots purificateurs, le vieux continent […] Paris qui, le premier, a donné la

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Due to anti-communist repression, Paris’s prisons were full of honest comrades. The fate of a minority of common criminals is discussed; magnanimously, their crimes, committed under the capitalist ancien régime, are pardoned as political, too. Questions of crime and punishment played a particular role in pro-Soviet propaganda; visits to model colonies for ex-criminals (the famous one for juvenile delinquents in Bol’ševo, for instance) were part of officially guided tours. Not coincidentally, Jasieński stages an example of perfectly successful rehabilitation in and by communist society. In his Speech on the International Situation, Lenin himself, parodying the contagion metaphor, had mocked “these Anglo-French imperialist gentlemen” trying to build “a Great Wall of China so as to keep out the plague, the plague of Bolshevism”: however, “the germ of Bolshevism” would “still penetrate the wall and infect the workers of the world” (Lenin 161; see also Cœuré 46). Moscow’s international priority remains uncontested; French comrades are eager to prove that they are capable of the same exploits as the Soviets (291).

246 Martina Stemberger Commune au monde, le premier encore en contaminera l’Europe...“ (294f).52 Outside Paris, the state of affairs is critical. The government in Lyon, the new capital of French capitalism, provokes a severe economic crisis. Finally, another penniless Pierre and another Jeannette in need of new shoes go for a walk in the streets of Lyon (299). In Deauville, “ce camp de concentration du snobisme” (Barbusse 107), ‘civilized’ Europe plots war against the Soviets, “[u]ne sorte de nouvelle croisade contre ces barbares insolents” (JbP 309).53 An aviator flying from London to Lyon (Jasieński’s Axis of Evil), realizes that Paris has been transformed into a kind of collective farm.54 As capitalist governments declare general mobilization, Europe is on the verge of civil war. This is the moment for Radio Paris to intervene: “Ouvriers! Paysans! Soldats! C’est le gouvernement révolutionnaire de Paris qui vous parle” (315). In vain, capitalist radios fight the communist message; the Revolution spreads to the whole of France.

Literature and/as Politics or Lost in Utopia (Epilogue) To Morand’s morose Soviet dystopia,55 Jasieński opposes a vision of communist happiness. But his descriptions of pre-plague Paris, a decadent Babylon, seem much more ‘inspired’ than his somewhat life- and listless Utopia, “a routine and dull propagandistic poster” (Krzychylkiewicz 269). Jasieński, providing his novel with a ‘positive’, politically correct end, also stages the death of literature, the abdication of art in favour of politics. Among the Belleville warriors, there is one last writer left: amateur historian Lecoq, although ashamed of his “atavisme d’intellectuel” (201), secretly works on a chronicle of dying Paris. But communist paradise regained has no more need for literature: this is a hopelessly transparent world, without doubts or fantasies, dreams or fears; Paris does become the dull province Majakovskij spoke 52

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Rolland, in similar terms, speaks about the Revolution’s salubrious “microbes”, invading Europe’s sickly body, triggering “une de ces grandes épidémies qui font justice des organismes sociaux ruinés et qui font place, périodiquement, à de nouvelles vagues d’humanité” (168). In his Croisade des enfants, Morand depicts a grotesque ‘crusade’ the other way round, the Soviet ‘barbarians’ invading and annexing France. But the crusade was, as he states in Le Voyage, “d’abord un voyage français”, destined to protect Europe against “l’Asie nomade, avançant comme le sable” (36). Jasieński’s visions of Paris, communist rural paradise, tragically ‘anticipated’ Stalin’s forced collectivization (Krzychylkiewicz 268). Just as old Russia, “un pays où personne n’oserait rire” (Custine, qtd. in Grève 1216), the Soviet Union is an empire of melancholia and terror: “dans la Russie nouvelle […] personne ne riait” (JbM 393). “Le rire est mort à Moscou […]” (Béraud 38). Vaillant-Couturier violently refutes Morand, Béraud and Co. in a chapter entitled L’accueil de la joie (43f).

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about. At the end of Je brûle Paris, happy proletarian masses, no longer shipwrecked, but transformed into triumphant “vaisseaux géants” themselves (317), sail to the communist Utopia. “Thrown overboard from the Third Republic” (qtd. in Berzin’ 6), Jasieński followed on board the steamer Saxonia. After some years of honour and success,56 Pravda informed him, on May 12th, 1937, of his expulsion from the Communist Party (Rayski 16). Jasieński was arrested, duly examined by the NKVD, and, one of the innumerable victims of Stalinist Purges, executed on September 17th, 1938.57 Je brûle Paris disappeared from bookshops and libraries. But, in fact, one does not need this tragic biographical epilogue to conclude that Je brûle Paris was not only a proletarian best-seller, but also, at least in its best moments, a selfdeconstructive masterpiece.

Works Cited Aragon[, Louis]. Le paysan de Paris. 1926. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Asholt, Wolfgang. “Auslöschen oder Auflösen? Zwei Reaktionen auf Globalisierungsdiskurse der Zwischenkriegszeit (1925-1928).” Globalisierung avant la lettre. Reiseliteratur vom 16. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert. Ed. Teresa Pinheiro and Natascha Ueckmann. Münster: LIT, 2005. 213-226. ——, and Walter Fähnders, ed. Manifeste und Proklamationen der europäischen Avantgarde (1909-1938). Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2005. Barbusse, Henri. Russie. Paris: Flammarion, 1930. Barthes, Roland. “Sémiologie et urbanisme.” L’Aventure sémiologique. Paris: Seuil, 1985. 261-271. Benjamin, Walter. “O [Prostitution, Spiel].” Passagen-Werk (I). Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983. 612-642.

56

57

His play Bal manekenov (The Ball of the mannequins, 1931), was introduced by Lunačarskij; he was editor in chief of Kultura Mas (Culture of the Masses), a Polish-language journal, editor of Literatura mirovoj revoljucii (Literature of the World Revolution); he occupied various posts in writers’ unions, participated in the organization of the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 etc. On Jasieński’s arrest, trial and death see Jaworski1, whose research, based on Soviet archives, disproves an older version (Stern 235, Wat 34), according to which Jasieński died from typhus near Vladivostok, on the way to Kolyma. Jasieński’s first wife Klara had already been arrested in April 1937 and executed in January 1938; his second wife, Anna Berzin’, spent 17 years in Soviet camps; his son Andrej was raised in an orphanage. Berzin’ prefaced a Soviet re-edition of Jasieński’s works (including Ja žgu Pariž) in 1961 (after his official rehabilitation in 1956), anxiously circumscribing the political circumstances of her husband’s end, euphemized as a “premature death” that “has taken away a courageous and fervent communist, a talented writer, a wonderful poet” (9).

248 Martina Stemberger Béraud, Henri. Ce que j’ai vu à Moscou. Paris: Éd. de France, 1925. Berzin’, A[nna]. “Bruno Jasenskij.” Ja žgu Pariž/Nos/Glavnyj vinovnik/Zagovor ravnodušnych. By Bruno Jasenskij. Krasnojarsk: Krasnojarskoe Knižnoe Izdatel’stvo, 1961. 3-13. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 1999. Breton, André. Nadja. 1928. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. Bunin, I[van] A. “Okajannye dni.” Sobranie sočinenij X. Berlin: Petropolis, 1935. Cendrars, Blaise. “Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France.” 1913. Du monde entier. Poésies complètes 1912-1924. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. 27-45. ——. Moravagine. 1926. Paris: Grasset, 2002. ——. L’Homme foudroyé. 1945. Tout autour d’aujourd’hui 5. Ed. Claude Leroy. Paris: Denoël, 2002. Chessin, Serge de. Au pays de la démence rouge. Paris: Plon, 1919. Chesterton, G. K. The Napoleon of Notting Hill. 1904. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1946. Cœuré, Sophie. “Endiguer le bolchevisme? La double frontière dans le répertoire de l’anticommunisme (1917-1941).” Frontières du communisme: Mythologies et réalités de la division de l’Europe de la révolution d’Octobre au mur de Berlin. Ed. Sophie Cœuré and Sabine Dullin. Paris: La Découverte, 2007. 42-63. Collomb, Michel. “Je brûle Moscou: Notice.” Nouvelles complètes I. By Paul Morand. Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade), 1994 (1991). 993-995. Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent. A Simple Tale. 1907. Ed. Bruce Harkness and S. W. Reid. Cambridge, New York etc.: CUP, 1990. Cooke, Paul. “The Paris of René Crevel.” The Modern Language Review 100.3 (2005): 621-631. Döblin, Alfred. Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf. 1929. Olten, Freiburg: Walter, 1961. Douzou, Catherine. Paul Morand nouvelliste. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003. Ehrenbourg, Ilya. Duhamel, Gide, Malraux, Mauriac, Morand, Romains, Unamuno, vus par un écrivain d’U.R.S.S. Paris: Gallimard, 1934. Ehrenburg, Ilja. Trust D. E. Die Geschichte der Zerstörung Europas. 1923. Berlin: Welt, 1925. Foucault, Michel. “Von anderen Räumen.” Dits et écrits. Schriften Bd. IV (1980-1988). Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2005. 931-942. Grève, Claude de. Le Voyage en Russie. Anthologie des voyageurs français aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. Paris: Laffont, 2002.

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Jasienski, Bruno. Je brûle Paris. Paris: Félin, 2003. Jaworski, Krzysztof. Bruno Jasieński w sowieckim więzieniu. Aresztowanie, wyrok, śmierć. Kielce: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna im. Jana Kochanowskiego, 1995. [= Jaworski1] ——. Bruno Jasieński w Paryżu (1925-1929). Kielce: Wydawnictwo Akademii Świętokrzyskiej, 2003. [= Jaworski2] Kristeva, Julia. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. Krzychylkiewicz, Agata. The grotesque in the works of Bruno Jasieński. New York, Oxford: Lang, 2006. Lenin, V. I. Collected Works. 4th English Ed. Vol. 28. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966. Margueritte, Victor. Babel. Paris: Flammarion, 1934. Massis, Henri. Défense de l’Occident. Paris: Plon, 1927. Mehring, Walter. Paris in Brand. 1927. Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1980. Mendelsohn, J. Andrew. “Der Mikroskopiker des modernen Lebens: Alexandre Yersin als Flaneur in Paris um 1890.” Bakteriologie und Moderne: Studien zur Biopolitik des Unsichtbaren 1870-1920. Ed. Philipp Sarasin. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2007. 176-219. Morand, Paul. Nouvelles complètes I. Ed. Michel Collomb. Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade), 1994 (1991) [“Les Amis nouveaux”, 353-360. “Je brûle Moscou”, 390-410. “Éloge de la marquise de Beausemblant”, 411-418. “La Croisade des enfants”, 424-432]. ——. “Bouddha vivant.” 1927. Chronique du XXe siècle. Paris: Grasset, 1980. 115-227. ——. Le Voyage. 1927. Paris: Rocher, 1994. Moura, Jean-Marc. L’Europe littéraire et l’ailleurs. Paris: PUF, 1998. Rayski, Benoît. Préface. Je brûle Paris. By Bruno Jasieński. Paris: Félin, 2003. 5-18. Rolland, Romain. L’Ame enchantée IV: L’Annonciatrice (II). Paris: Albin Michel, 1933. Rosendorfer, Herbert. Briefe in die chinesische Vergangenheit. 1986. München: dtv, 2000. Roth, Joseph. Flight Without End [Die Flucht ohne Ende]. 1927. Trans. David Le Vay and Beatrice Musgrave. London: Peter Owen, 1977. Sarasin, Philipp, Silvia Berger, Marianne Hänseler, and Myriam Spörri: “Bakteriologie und Moderne. Eine Einleitung.” Bakteriologie und Moderne: Studien zur Biopolitik des Unsichtbaren 1870-1920. Ed. Philipp Sarasin. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2007. 8-43. Sarkany, Stéphane. Paul Morand et le cosmopolitisme littéraire. Suivi de trois entretiens inédits avec l’écrivain. Paris: Klincksieck, 1968.

250 Martina Stemberger Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise: Zur Industrialisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2000. Schmidt, Dietmar. Geschlecht unter Kontrolle: Prostitution und moderne Literatur. Freiburg: Rombach, 1998. Simon, Verena. Paris – das Mysterium der Surrealisten. Duisburg: WiKu, 2006. Sloterdijk, Peter. “Museum – Schule des Befremdens.” Der ästhetische Imperativ: Schriften zur Kunst. Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2007. 354-370. Soupault, Philippe. Les dernières nuits de Paris. 1928. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. Stern, Anatol. Bruno Jasieński. Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna, 1969. Stierle, Karlheinz. Der Mythos von Paris: Zeichen und Bewußtsein der Stadt. München: Hanser, 1993. Tomes, Nancy. “Epidemic Entertainments: Disease and Popular Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century America.” American Literary History 14.4 (2002): 625-652. Vaillant-Couturier, Paul. Moscou-la-Rouge (2). Paris: Éd. L’Humanité, 1925/26. Wat, Aleksander. Mój wiek. Pamiętnik mówiony (I). Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1990. Wyka, Marta. “Paris, thème de la littérature polonaise des années 30.” Paris «capitale culturelle» de l’Europe centrale? Les échanges intellectuels entre la France et l’Europe médiane, 1918-1939. Ed. Maria Delaperrière and Antoine Marès. Paris: Institut d’Études Slaves, 1997. 207-213.

Jörg Türschmann

Claire Goll: Eine Deutsche in Paris (Une Allemande à Paris)1

1. The Bohème Erika Wolff is twenty years old and is studying art in Paris. She falls in love with Jacques Narval, the son of the French prime minister, who is of the same age. Jacques is conducting research into the causes of cancer. The relationship between the two young people is characterized by dichotomies: man and woman, France and Germany, science and art, reason and emotion, romanticism and enlightenment. Erika becomes pregnant. She conceals her state from Jacques and travels to Switzerland, where she gives birth to the child, whom she also calls Jacques. He dies of an illness, and Erika drives back across the border, where she has him buried in French ground: “From time to time, she stroked the earth or bent down to kiss it. The light, brown, valuable earth already smelling of May. The earth of France to which she was forever wedded” (Goll, Eine Deutsche 2642). Erika finds Paris attractive and repulsive to equal degrees. For her, this city represents France. The rest of France only plays a role at the end; otherwise, the metropolis, gathering place for celebrities from politics, science and the arts, is the main focus. It is in Paris that Erika encounters a life style which she takes to be typical of France. She is fascinated by the Bohème of the Quartier Latin. Paris for her is the city of ennui, of sweet melancholy and sensual world-weariness. She feels Jacques’s indifference towards herself, but is unsure whether this is indicative of a real lack of interest, or whether it is a mask behind which Jacques is hiding his true feelings. Erika sees her lover as representative of the national character, which reflects the metropolis.

1

2

Blumenthal (368, n. 7) regards Une Allemande à Paris, published in 1925, as the first edition. Glauert-Hesse (Epilogue 276) mentions the first German edition of 1927 and the French edition of 1928, which was re-published in 1959 under the title Un Amour au Quartier Latin. All German quotes in this paper were translated by Caterina Novák.

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2. Narcissism and International Relations The character type which Jacques represents is not only formed by the culture of the French capital. 1920s Paris is a special place where foreign influences converge. One of these is European literature, which helps Erika find explanations for the Frenchman’s attitude. In her conversation with “Mr. Monnier”, Erika resorts to literature in order to defend Jacques’s behaviour. Monnier, like Erika, is a painter. He courts Erika, who, however, is not interested in him. Monnier is a nationalist, a chauvinist, and an admirer of the writer Maurice Barrès, whom he regards as the prophet of French Revanchism. Monnier prefers men of deeds and refuses to give in to ennui. He rejects attempts at explaining feelings and emotions either via psychoanalytic approaches or on the basis of metabolical functions. He asserts that he is not prudish, but “pious”. He resents allegations that he thinks constantly of himself: “I am no rival of Narcissus like Narval”. In response, Erika defends Jacques by calling him the “Dorian Gray of the Rive Gauche” (183). Later, Monnier and Erika meet again in Jacques’s laboratory. The three talk about Gide, Dostojewski, Goethe and Shakespeare. Monnier denounces Gide as a corruptor of youth, advocating subjectivism and inactivity. Jacques explains his hesitation on the basis of Hamlet, who is said not to have saved a man from drowning because the “conflict of man between thought and action” had always existed. Erika agrees with Jacques: “In Wilhelm Meister, Goethe calls Hamlet’s attitude ‘active hesitation’. Quite to the point, isn’t it?” (203f). In Paris, Erika expects a kind of openness which she regards as the foundation for internationality: “I imagine the future will be somewhat like the reading room at the national library. Hundreds of people are sitting there [...] humble before the thought, the feeling of a poet. And nobody there will want to distinguish between a Frenchman and a German, a Russian and an Italian” (184). With this stance, she consciously objects to German parochialism, “the false health of the lusty outdoorsmen” (183). Erika is the daughter of a German university professor. Her father has taught her that international relations are something meaningful. However, in her relationship to Jacques, she has to realize how difficult it is for members of her generation to get closer to each other. Without explicitly stating as much, Erika’s thoughts nonetheless echo the goals of the League of Nations: “‘bleating’ pacifism, as the French say” and the “United States of Europe” (198).

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3. The Morality of Immorality Erika meets Jacques during a lecture given by one of her father’s colleagues at the Sorbonne. The lecturer is “a famous German professor”, invited by the “federation of international brainworkers”. His lecture is entitled “New Ideas on a New Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy” (179).3 Jacques scoffs at phenomenology. Erika senses a certain constraint in his friends’ laughter at the joke. Monnier, who has accompanied Erika to the lecture, explains that Jacques owed his successes to his father’s status. Apart from that, he had two “secondary faults”: “He has too much intellect and he is as beautiful as an American film star” (180). In Monnier’s eyes, America signifies a lack of morality. According to him, Jacques is somebody who constantly changes his mind. “He is very strong, since only a strong man has the moral strength to be immoral against his nature” (182). Jacques evades any synthesis of his personality and eludes all attempts at interpreting his behaviour. Erika, too, has to make this experience. Jacques explains his fickleness in Shakespearian terms: “The decline of values apparently repeats itself quite often in the world. Only it goes against the grain of a thinking individual to involve himself in this other than to deny it. And in the end, when he finally thrusts his sword through the tapestry, it doesn’t matter to him whether he kills a king or a Polonius” (204). Nonetheless, Erika defends Jacques, “completely against her own convictions”: Goethe, “despite this murder, calls Hamlet ‘a moral being, without the sensual strength which makes a man a hero’” (204). Jacques prefers the colourful life of the Bohème. The hero’s morals are reduced to fun and games. Jacques acknowledges only “one hero, and that is he who wins a car race or a boxing match” (204). Although Erika feels deterred by this role, the indifference which Jacques displays in his dealings with her nonetheless incites her to greater efforts on his behalf. Erika and Monnier find Jacques incomprehensible. He is the embodiment of an unpredictability which ill suits their ideas about the future of France and Europe. Monnier suspects that young people are dissolute and depraved, and thus, in his opinion, damage the national ideal. Erika fears that her generation cannot reach up to the sublime ideals of the entente cordiale. She is fascinated by Jacques and falls in love with him. However, she realizes that he has no intention of becoming the advocate of a rapprochement between France and Germany.

3

The “famous professor” might well be Edmund Husserl, whose Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie was published in 1913. In 1929, Husserl held two lectures at the Sorbonne (Kern 43).

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4. Street Cinema Jacques and Erika meet at a small café. It is spring. A number of people are already sitting outside. A man watches them. He wants to film them. He wants to sell them the film as a souvenir. Erika is enthusiastic, but Jacques categorically refuses the offer. Unnoticed by the couple, the man nonetheless films them. With the aid of his camera he records how Jacques humiliates Erika by condescendingly kissing her hand. Jacques wants to forbid the man “to copy [his] gestures” (213). He does not like the idea that past, present and future make no difference. Jacques regards film and photography as palliatives. In his opinion, they obscure the dark side of what they show. Much later, Jacques pretends to let Erika have a photograph of himself for which she has asked him. Instead, she receives an x-ray of his intestines before an appendectomy: “What blasphemy, what ruthless revelation!” (253). The man who has filmed them at the café compares the sound of Jacques’s invective with a stone which is thrown into a lake. The waves spread until they reach the shore. “And do we know whether the shores are really a border? So why do we want to deny the momentousness of a kiss?” (213). He succeeds in outrunning Jacques and, as a parting shot, calls out the name of his firm: “Perpetuum mobile”. Erika wants to buy the film. She discovers a means of exerting control over Jacques: “Always, whenever she wanted, Jacques would now have to bend over her hand and kiss it: ‘Perpetuum mobile!’” (214). This fantasy enables Erika to pull back from a direct encounter with Jacques. She does not see the film as a document of her humiliation. Rather, she is convinced that this film offers her a certain freedom which she otherwise would not have. Her humiliation does not end here. In addition, her choice of film as a medium is proof that she is not on the same intellectual plane as Jacques. Jacques gives her a series of books in an attempt to explain his contempt of the world to her. Those are the works of Gide, Breton and Rimbaud. She reads the books in order to please him. But since they do not rouse her enthusiasm, she continues not to understand him. The author Claire Goll distances herself from her protagonist and draws a distinction between popular media and canonical literature: “Yes, modern literature served quite well to explain Jacques to her. Is it not true that the run-of-the-mill young man of today is formed by pulp fiction and the cinema, while the more subtle youth is formed by the few ideas which the best writers of a country set down?” (214). According to Goll, Erika thus resorts to a medium which does not set her apart from the broad mass. The film not only records Erika’s humiliation, its use also denounces her as common.

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5. Love The relationship between Jacques and Erika is by no means one-sided. Jacques repeatedly arranges to meet her at various public locations in Paris, at his laboratory, in his father’s palace and at Erika’s home. Jacques ruthlessly anatomizes male-female relationships: “Love is an inflammation of the respiratory and affective organs, and tenderness is only the burdening of my shoulder with a woman’s head” (211). Ennui is accompanied by a coldly analytical perspective: “Jacques broke apart the Goddesses of Praxiteles and took to pieces the Venus of Giorgione and Botticelli in order to see what organs they contained” (222). And finally, he tells Erika about a dream in which he saw her die: “A romantic feeling took hold of me. I suppose you would call it love” (223). Erika submits to this destructive fantasy: “She kissed the hand of her fictitious murderer. A Frenchwoman would never kiss her murderer’s hand; but a Russian would also do it, she thought in apology for herself” (224). The only scene in the novel which describes their sexuality again mentions Erika’s submission: “She does not fear for her maidenhead, she is only afraid of the too great submission which she feels growing within herself. Also, he takes her quite clumsily. Both of them know love only from books” (230). Apotheosis follows: “Jacques was Erika’s god” (230).

6. Autobiographical Elements In 1919, Claire Goll (born 1890 in Nuremberg and died 1977 in Paris), together with the writer Yvan Goll, whom she married in 1921, moved from Zurich to Paris. Before that, she had had a relationship with Kurt Wolff the publisher, with whom she later lived in Cagnes in 1932 when Yvan Goll was dividing his time between her and his lover, the poet Paula Ludwig (GlauertHesse, Epilogue 273). Claire Goll had an affair with Jean Painlevé (Antretter 152), the pioneer of French documentary film, whose father was twice Prime Minister of France. The surrealists were enthusiastic about Painlevé’s films. He financed the French premiere of her husband’s drama Methusalem (156). During these many relationships, Claire Goll developed an attitude of “amour-souffrance” towards her lover: “Her ability to suffer grew in the same measure as her love. And in the end she began to love her suffering so much that she suffered when she was not suffering” (Armand Lanoux, qtd. in Antretter 160). Erika’s surname can be interpreted as an allusion to Goll’s former lover Kurt Wolff. Painlevé and Yvan Goll can both be seen as models for the character of Jacques Narval.

256 Jörg Türschmann In Erika’s case, masochism is the basis for hypocrisy. Her pregnancy provides the backdrop for an enactment of amour-souffrance: “Should he be reminded tomorrow that he had embraced her yesterday? Become the slave of a kiss?” (Goll, Eine Deutsche 241). Erika considers getting an abortion. She roams the neighbourhood surrounding the Montmartre. It stands in direct contrast to Montparnasse: no youthful elites, no refined flair, no men about town striking their poses. Rather, the atmosphere is reminiscent of a fun fair. Prostitutes line the alleys, and putative midwives offer abortions. Erika suffers from provincial ideas. When Jacques invited her to his laboratory for the first time, she already sensed danger for herself. Nonetheless, it was “the custom amongst the artists of Montparnasse to visit each other’s studios” (181). Now, on Montmartre, she is ready to see crime on every corner. In her eyes, the midwives are back-street abortionists. Erika enters the house of one such midwife. Abruptly, Goll’s style changes from the perspective of the protagonist to critical commentary: “A petit-bourgeois flat, a petit-bourgeois face, a petit-bourgeois, indignant speech. And three minutes later, Erika finds herself back in the street, with a moral slap in the face” (249). The failed abortion, however, does nothing to broaden Erika’s narrow perception of Paris. She chances upon a display of medical waxworks named “mother and child”. There, various stages of pregnancy are illustrated with the help of waxworks. The display strikes Erika as obscene and pornographic. Nonetheless, the experience convinces her to keep the child. Her pregnancy provides a longed-for opportunity to enact the amoursouffrance. Her attitude towards her own suffering is ambiguous. Goll labels moral outrage about abortion a petit-bourgeois attitude. She links this to Erika’s image of Paris. Erika, who comes from a small town in Germany, thinks that vice and crime are ubiquitous in a city like the French capital. Jacques represents the fast pace and changeability of the place. Despite the fact that this instability is criticized, it is exactly this facet which attracts Erika and probably also Goll. Erika cannot manage the transition into a metropolitan lifestyle. Instead, the author ascribes characteristics to women which are in accordance with a traditional world view: great love, idolatrous adoration of the male, submission. The moral of the immorality of giving birth to an illegitimate child lies in retreat.

7. Magical Thinking For Erika, the solution lies in having Jacques at her disposal at any time. The film which has recorded Jacques’s humiliating kiss on the hand for Erika constitutes a means of gaining control over him. The kiss can be repeated

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whenever she wants. Erika chooses the moment when Jacques kisses her hand. Thus, she subjects his authoritarian gesture to her needs. The film enables her to keep Jacques with her at all times. The man who filmed the scene had compared the kiss to a stone thrown into a lake. The spreading waves do not stop at the shores of the lake. They continue to spread in all directions. Claire Goll thus develops an image of a love relationship which is still valid today. It is directly connected to the idea of Paris as the city of love. Seen from a female perspective, love in this city is ubiquitous. Consequently, it is a telling detail that Goll intended to use the title Eine Liebe im Pariser Quartier Latin for the new German edition.4 At the beginning of the narrative, Erika is standing on the Pont St. Michel. In her imagination, the waves of the river merge with her thoughts and with the waves of the sea. She connects this impression to the work of a ‘German’ dramatist: Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen by Franz Grillparzer (175). Leander, who is in love with Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite, has to die for his love. In the course of her relationship with Jacques, Erika repeatedly wishes to die. This tragic hyperbole appears to offer an escape from unrequited love. Erika continually tries to see her love for Jacques in broader contexts: Franco-German relations, the characteristics of man and woman, the relation between men and gods. France, the male and the divine are on one side, Germany, the female and the mundane on the other. This image of man and woman is by no means unusual in German literature of the time. In 1923, Georg Simmel in his life philosophy writes about adventures (Simmel 33): the role of women in a “romance” is a passive one, characterized by “yielding” and “giving”. In contrast, men are “aggressive”, “vehement” “conquerors”. However, the male is dependent on “grace” and “yielding”, which he cannot “deserve”. In the end, he has to rely on his “luck”. He needs the “grace of fortune”, the “grace of capricious powers”. Simmel concludes: “In the proudest, most self-assured event in this field lies something which we have to accept with humility” (33). For the male, these “analogies with a deeper religious relationship” as a relationship of conquering and grace “draw apart much more decisively”, so that a love relationship is more of an adventure for him than for the woman. Jürgen Habermas criticizes Simmel’s “male fantasies” as “a bold ontological extension of contemporary phenomena”: “Once again, women are closer to the pole representing 4

cf. Glauert-Hesse (About this edition 271): “No printer’s copy of the first edition of Eine Deutsche in Paris has survived. This edition is based on the typescript of the German version situated in the Deutsche Literaturarchiv in Marbach on Neckar, which was compiled by Claire Goll on the basis of the French edition of 1959, Une Allemande au Quartier Latin, and which she had prepared for a new edition under the title Eine Liebe im Pariser Quartier Latin.”

258 Jörg Türschmann the foundation of being and subjectivity, a lack of historicity and passivity, closeness and totality, than the male” (Habermas 16). However, it is not true that Jacques adheres to this concept. Rather, Erika believes in it. This world view is also based on a belief in the ubiquity of love. Love makes waves everywhere, in all elements and in all physical and psychological forms. Goll’s novel shows an image of Paris which outside France is still readily accepted today. The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain (2001) marks the beginning of a recent series of love stories set in Paris which have found a wide audience, this time through the medium of film (Türschmann 233). Erika’s Paris, like that of Amelie, consists of a wide and magical network of thoughts and relationships between humans and objects. Paul Kammerer, the Austrian biologist, developed a theory of such an allencompassing seriality in his work Das Gesetz der Serie (1919): As a model let us take the flat stone, which – thrown horizontally on to the water – repeatedly bounces back and dances on the surface of the water in a ‘series’. Wherever the stone touches down, however, this repeated occurrence each time causes a new series in the form of waves which spread out from the point of contact in concentric circles; sound waves of the smack of the stone on water also spread; and light waves enter the eye of the beholder, there to cause a rhythmical, serial reverberation of simultaneous contrasts and complementary afterimages in the substance of the visual sense, mental images which can be recalled at will in the gray matter of the cerebral cortex, from where they can in turn be projected again on to the outside in an act of playfully empirical imitation (repetition of the throwing of the stone), in scientific description, in artistic creation and remoulding… (Kammerer 455)

Erika describes love on the basis of her knowledge of literature and art. Jacques, on the other hand, resorts to the language of science to give expression to his feelings. Erika merges science and art, perception and its recording by means of cinematography, laboratory conditions and lived experience in the world outside. As with the waves, she sees all things in an allencompassing connection with each other.

8. The Muse’s Vocation Erika’s attempts to exert power over Jacques are located in a sphere which fuses the universal and the particular, her own fate and the realm of the gods. The role of womanly passivity which Erika plays is by no means without effect. Despite her dependence on Jacques, Erika is merely humble, or rather: she displays a false humility. If we are allowed to draw a parallel between protagonist and author, some of Claire Goll’s behaviour patterns may become explicable. In her autobiographical writings, she never tires of boasting of her

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acquaintances with a number of outstanding artists during her Parisian years. Her novel Eine Deutsche in Paris also underlines this. It is dedicated to André Malraux. Goll expresses her thanks for the conversations with Malraux, to which she owed many of the ideas for her novel. The author likes to adorn herself with such famous names. Among her acquaintances are numerous wives and mistresses of men who figure prominently in the public eye. Goll knew how to make the most of the symbolic capital provided by their names. These names are what secures for the women in question their position in the public sphere. Goll’s comment on their marginalized position is ambiguous: Sonia Delaunay, Elsa Triolet and Gala Dali have lived in the shadow of their men and have devoted themselves to their success without reserve. […] They are not interested in successes of their own. […] Whether they be perverted mothers or mad wives, they are possessed by the lust for power, but the only power which has any value in their eyes is that which they exert over the man in their possession. (Goll, Ich verzeihe keinem 123)

Seen from this perspective, the men concerned cannot be said to dominate their wives or mistresses; instead, these women are fully conscious of their power as muses. Behind this combination of power and powerlessness lies the paradox at the core of every act of dominance. Jacques does not merely subject Erika to his will; Erika herself permits him to do so. Jacques tries not to commit himself to anyone. In his opinion, to make a woman happy is tantamount to despising her (Goll, Eine Deutsche 231). These feelings are as paradoxical as their influence on his partner, because Erika’s behaviour reinforces Jacques’s attitude. The more unhappy she is, the more Jacques can feel himself confirmed in the assumption that he is fulfilling his role. The relationship appears to be perverted, since in this way Erika can even exert influence over Jacques. By sacrificing herself to his lifestyle and putting aside her own interests, she determines his role in their relationship. However, the novel also recounts a more complex story. Erika’s power over Jacques can be interpreted as that of a muse. Nonetheless, one receives the impression that this explanation is one that is forced upon Erika in her attempts to explain her position to herself. She euphemises her suffering and explains it in terms of Jacques’s need for self-fulfilment. One has to take into account the fact that the novel very often allows Jacques to express himself in direct speech; however, Erika’s thoughts are offered as a commentary on his utterances. The reader’s impression of Jacques is formed to a large extent by Erika’s perception of him. Hence, her idea of a vocation to become his muse helps to confirm the unequal relationship between the two main characters,

260 Jörg Türschmann because the love relationship is supposed to serve a higher goal: love in general, international understanding and peace. In this context, Paris represents the male element as well as the foreign country.

9. The Power of Association In order to stabilize the male-female relationship, Erika translates “causality of contiguity” (“Berührungskausalität”) into “causality of persistence” (“Beharrungskausalität”) (Kammerer 365 and 453). She makes Paris and the man she loves the cause of far-reaching consequences. Her personal acquaintance with Jacques, her physical contact with him, permits her to experience directly the city of Paris, because Jacques, in Erika’s view, represents a certain indifference towards the foreign which is typical of the French. In Erika’s opinion, French people are only interested in themselves. And because Paris is the gathering place for leading figures from the fields of politics, science and the arts, the place may well be sufficient unto itself. In the course of events, Erika develops a series of associations which allow her to sustain the impression of closeness to Jacques despite their increasing distance. Like Amelie Poulain in her fantasies about a romantic Paris, she construes the experiences she makes in the course of her relationship with Jacques in terms of a relationship alternating between proximity and distance. In the course of this, however, she steadily increases her physical distance from the man she loves. She draws connections which go beyond each individual encounter with Jacques. As with a stone thrown into a lake, waves spread from a certain point of origin, only to reach it again after a long journey. The connections which are necessary to achieve this can only be guessed at. Like the beat of a butterfly’s wings, which may have unimagined consequences, this gives rise to the magical as well as physical concept of causality of persistence. Goll repeatedly thematizes the phenomenon of the voice, its tone and sound waves. The man who films Jacques and Erika already mentions this. At the end of the novel, Erika comments on her decision to flee to Geneva: “At least one speaks French there, Jacques’s language. As if that language, spoken by other tongues, was still the same! But could not a voice follow one everywhere? Sound and longing travel at 340 metres per second” (Goll, Eine Deutsche 251f). Erika’s deliberations display a strange mixture of the scientific and the emotional. In this way, she simultaneously creates proximity and distance. In the course of his last meeting with Erika, Jacques says: “How you look at me! No distance at all in your eyes. I never know whether you are too near or too far away” (253). By this means Erika succeeds in crossing the border to Switzerland without having the sensation of being in a foreign

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country. She gains a feeling for the equal value of all nations and of indifference towards the new host country: “What are the ideals of this country to her! She is no longer afraid of the border. She is travelling in company. No longer is she alone!” (259). The child Erika is expecting is to become a link between nations. Goll is ahead of her time in conceiving of a relationship between two people and three countries which can be described in terms of the theories of power of the recent past. According to these, power does not lie in the hands of individuals, it is ascribed to them. Relations between those that are assumed to exert power and those who are dominated by them are reciprocal. An actor who wants to exert power has to succeed in convincing others that he has the solution to their problems at hand. They in turn will go along with his programme. Nonetheless, the actor is dependent on this network because he needs the others to carry out his programme. Power does not lie in anybody’s hands; it is the result of this interplay: “When you simply have power – in potentia – nothing happens and you are powerless; when you exert power – in actu – others are performing the action and not you” (Latour 264f). Erika’s relationship rests on the concept of causality of persistence. She insists on her relationship with Jacques even after their child has died. After the burial of the child in the French countryside immediately behind the Swiss border, her actions are described as follows: “From time to time, she stroked the earth or bent down to kiss it. The light, brown, valuable earth already smelling of May. The earth of France to which she was forever wedded” (Goll, Eine Deutsche 264). Being the last words of the novel, these offer an ambiguous solution. The fusion of starting again and ending, life and death, France and Germany, Eros and Thanatos consists of a “shifting out” (Akrich/Latour 260). As had been the case with the filmed kiss, Erika again shifts her relationship to Jacques into a sphere over which she exerts complete control. She can decide where her child is buried. According to her view, she can by this means eternalize her relationship with Jacques. However, this shift is the consequence of experiences to which she was subjected. She suffered from her lover’s inconstant character, she had to give birth to the child on her own, and she had to watch it die. Consequently, the key question is: who in this relationship is the actor and who is part of his network?

10. Fetishes This perspective on the power from which those in power are made, describes a state of dependence between those who rule and those who are

262 Jörg Türschmann ruled. An actor is ultimately identical with his network. In addition, humans and objects are regarded as symmetrical. From this perspective, the status of objects is enhanced. They act like humans, they are part of a network. They are part of society. Objects are anthropomorphized in a three-fold way: they are made by humans, they stand in for humans, and they determine human behaviour (Johnson 266). Erika creates a fetish for herself. The film belongs to this category, the child likewise, and finally the French soil in which her child’s body rests. They are a substitute for Jacques’ presence and at the same time determine Erika’s actions. The film again and again shows her the gesture of humiliation. However, it also destroys Jacques’s love of adventure, as he himself had foreseen. It destroys the sequence of time and thus also the present of the adventure. “Adventure is pure present; past and future are immaterial” (Bolz, “Der antiheroische Affekt” 766). On the one hand, the film stabilizes their relationship; on the other, it creates submission whenever she wants, as he wants. She adores French soil in lieu of her marriage to Jacques. The non-human warmth, which she feels with French soil, offers her a lasting opportunity of being close to Jacques. At the same time, it forces her to accept the indifference of the French and of France as an adequate substitute for human proximity. In her novel, Goll creates a situation without resolution. At first glance Erika appears to have lost everything: Germany, her home country; her lover; her child; her job. At second glance there emerges a picture of Paris whose openness far exceeds the possible identification points offered by more recent nostalgic narratives such as popular films. Her love in Paris and for Paris culminates in an open ending. The character of Erika symbolizes infinite patience towards the neighbouring country. She instrumentalizes herself entirely for the benefit of a good understanding between people and nations. She does not tell the father of her child what has happened to her. She withdraws in order to stabilize their relationship. She celebrates a cult for whose continuous re-enactment she creates a number of fetishes. She relegates her relationship to objects which cannot be taken away from her. These objects permit her to experience a situation whose meaning is accessible beyond the metropolis.

11. Catechontic Power Goll thus shows that her protagonist, whose mentality reflects her origins in small-town Germany, is overwhelmed by the cultural dynamics in Paris, which she has to transfer to another place in order to participate in its network. Nonetheless, Paris retains its grip on her. On the other hand, however,

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she also finds a way of getting hold of the city from a distance. When she tries, against her better judgement, to explain Jacques’ behaviour in the words of Goethe, she already transfers the situation to another sphere, i.e. that of literature. Hamlet and his “active hesitation” permit her to place herself into a context in which she does not belong. Hamlet is an oft-quoted example in contemporary social philosophy. On the one hand, he represents more or less abstract actors in literary and scientific discourses (Johnson 266). On the other hand, he embodies an action which is carried out for its own sake. Goll thus describes the Zeitgeist of the 1920s in a way which is still valid today. She anticipates today’s “catechontic” attitude in social philosophy, which means active and permanent hesitation in order to prevent the apocalypse, and the idea of an open global space (Bolz, Weltkommunikation 45). Jacques is fickle, changing his opinion to suit the situation at hand. He embodies an opportunity which does not want to be realized. Erika cannot bear this continuous practice without an enduring goal. However, in the end she manufactures a reliable means of having his unreliability at her disposal. From Erika’s perspective, the end of the story remains completely open. Erika rules out marriage to Jacques in order to establish it as a permanent institution. In her opinion, the danger of a conflict between France and Germany is thus averted. “In the act of hesitation there remains the furtive hope of a secular catechontic power” (Vogl 111). Jacques and Erika come together. The network in which both are subsumed is a particularly powerful one in that it persists in the relationship between Jacques and Erika over a long distance. The origin of this persistence is Erika. She reluctantly understands Jacques’ openness. The Bohémien who loves car races confirms her in this attitude, because Goethe, as Erika explains, “despite this murder calls Hamlet ‘a moral being, without the sensual strength which makes a man a hero’. And the actors, chosen by God to play the role of youths in the first half of the twentieth century, might they also be such?” (Goll, Eine Deutsche 204). Its influence on political circumstances lies in a catechontic power: “And one may discern in this the shape of a new art of government, which rests no longer on potestas, the power of the sovereign ruler, but on a potentia [...]” (Vogl 41).

12. Frozen Images By the standards of her time, Claire Goll was gifted with a great amount of foresight. She translated the novel of the first black winner of the Prix Gon-

264 Jörg Türschmann court into German.5 In her novel Der Neger Jupiter raubt Europa (19266), she describes a relationship between a black man and a white woman. She thus participated in the discourse on exoticism of her time. This exoticism was called “négrophilie” (Stemmler 50f). However, her prose was often suspected of being overly pathetic (Dietrich 214-7). This may to some extent be due to the fact that Claire Goll is a poet at least as much as she is a novelist. Hence, her novels are charged with images full of deeper meaning, although they narrate love stories of a great simplicity. Another interpretation suggests that the triviality of her plots and their exaggerated emotionality might be interpreted in terms of a “subversive strategy, which exposes clichés such as the current image of femininity while at the same time reducing them ad absurdum” (Mahlow 195). Criticism arises out of anger as a “legitimate expression of female opposition”; in this context, the perversion of relationships and events previous to the novels of Elfriede Jelinek could be construed as theatrical stagings of inescapable cruelty (202-3). The contradictions inherent in Claire Goll’s novel may thus be regarded as evidence of the fact that female emancipation had not yet reached a stage of ultimate completion (204). These attempts at interpretation aim at the ornate, emphatic style which also characterizes Eine Deutsche in Paris. However, they fail to achieve the level of ideas represented by the ambiguity of the female protagonist. Erika, who – like many other female characters in Goll’s novels – is, at the age of twenty, much younger than the author at the time of writing, is exceptionally well educated for her age, as is Jacques. This is why the novel cannot be regarded as light popular fiction. Knowledge of all possible fields is the weapon in Erika’s verbal duels with Monnier and Jacques. In the end, she is clever enough to identify hesitation as the morality of the anti-hero. This “anti-heroic affect” might serve to highlight Erika’s democratic convictions, were it not for her readiness to stand in for Jacques against these very convictions. The reason for this lies in the fact that she paradoxically adores Jacques like an American movie star because “we still feel […] a need for hero worship. While the charismatic eminence of the hero is, strictly speaking, always a nuisance for democracy, celebrities in their turn offer us specimens of the commonplace” (Bolz, “Der antiheroische Affekt” 768-9). Erika admires the Frenchman as much as Claire Goll admired Yvan (Antretter 162). In Goll’s case, there is nothing trivial about kitsch, since the duel of knowledge in the amorous conflict is the expression of conflicting world views: not between a French and a German one, but between one that is adventurous and a rigid one. Erika wants to worship and de-throne Jacques at

5 6

See Manuel Chemineau’s contribution in this volume. French translation: Le nègre Jupiter enlève Europe (1928).

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the same time. She fails to understand his changeability. Paris, as a place of international exchange, strikes her as French. She neither dares to doubt this world, nor to relinquish her own view. In this openness, she is an extension of this world. But while the Parisian culture of the 1920s is completely absorbed in a continuous act of realization, Goll at the end of the novel freezes this dynamic action into the unbearable image of kissing the earth in a graveyard. This rigid gesture shows the destructive urge to be right. The oft-cited notion of good international understanding fails because it has congealed into an idée fixe.

Works Cited Akrich, Madeleine, and Bruno Latour. “A Summary of Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Non-Human Assemblies.” Shaping Technology, Buildung Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law. Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. 259-264. Antretter, Dietlind. Claire Goll: Eine Monographie. Diss. U of Salzburg, 1988. Blumenthal, Bernhardt. “Claire Goll’s Prose.” Monatshefte für Deutschen Unterricht, Deutsche Sprache und Literatur 75: 4 (1983): 358-368. Bolz, Norbert. Weltkommunikation. München: Fink, 2001. ——. “Der anti-heroische Affekt.” Merkur 63: 724/725 (2009): 762-771. Dietrich, Stephan. “Der Wilde und die Großstadt. Literarische Exotismen von Altenberg bis Claire Goll.” Die ‘Großstadt’ und das ‘Primitive’: Text – Politik – Repräsentation. Ed. Kristin Kopp and Klaus-Müller Richter. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2004. 201-220. Glauert-Hesse, Barbara. “Zu dieser Edition.” Arsenik. Ein Deutsche in Paris. Claire Goll. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007. 269-271. ——. “Nachwort.” Arsenik. Ein Deutsche in Paris. Claire Goll. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007. 273-277. Goll, Claire. Ich verzeihe keinem: Eine literarische Chronique scandaleuse unserer Zeit. München: Scherz, 1978. ——. Arsenik. Ein Deutsche in Paris. Ed. Barbara Glauert-Hesse. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007. Habermas, Jürgen. “Simmel als Zeitdiagnostiker.” Philosophische Kultur: Über das Abenteuer, die Geschlechter und die Krise der Moderne. Georg Simmel. Berlin: Wagenbach, 1998. 7-23. Johnson, Jim (Bruno Latour). “Mixing Humans and Non-Humans Together: The Sociology of the Door-Closer.” Ecology of Knowledge: Work and

266 Jörg Türschmann Politics in Science and Technology. Ed. Susan Leigh Star. New York: N.Y. UP, 1995. 257-278. Kammerer, Paul. Das Gesetz der Serie: Eine Lehre von den Wiederholungen im Lebens- und Weltgeschehen. Stuttgart, Berlin: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1919. Kern, Iso. Husserl und Kant. Eine Untersuchung über Husserls Verhältnis zu Kant und zum Neukantianismus. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1984. Latour, Bruno. “The Powers of Association.” Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? Ed. John Law. London: Routledge, 1986. 264-280. Mahlow, Verena. “Klischeebilder und Trivialität in der Prosa Claire Golls.” Yvan Goll – Claire Goll: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Eric Robertson and Robert Vilain. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. 189-204. Simmel, Georg. Philosophische Kultur: Über das Abenteuer, die Geschlechter und die Krise der Moderne. Berlin: Wagenbach, 1998 (1923). Stemmler, Susanne. “Die Kolonie in der Metropole. ‘Schwarze’ Körper in der französischen Literatur der Zwanzigerjahre.” Raum – Bewegung – Passage: Postkoloniale frankophone Literaturen. Ed. Gesine Müller and Susanne Stemmler. Tübingen: Narr, 2009. 49-65. Türschmann, Jörg. “Jean-Pierre Jeunets Die fabelhafte Welt der Amélie und das Gesetz der Serie.” Die Filmkomödie der Gegenwart. Ed. Jörn Glasenapp and Claudia Lillge. München: Fink, 2008. 216-235. Vogl, Joseph. Über das Zaudern. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2007.

Herbert Van Uffelen

Studies in buitenkant – Studies in Surroundings: Edgar Du Perron and the Modernists

Edgar Du Perron (1899-1940) is regarded as one of the most important Dutch authors of the interwar period. He established himself as a renowned writer with his novel Het land van herkomst (1935) and as a contributor to the magazine Forum (1931-1935) which he founded together with Menno Ter Braak (1902-1940). Forum propagated the relevance of an authentic personality to literature and distanced itself from formal experiment and lyricalsentimental effusion alike. What is less well-known is Du Perron’s avantgarde past, which originated in Paris in the 20s and is usually dismissed as a youthful peccadillo in view of Du Perron’s declaration that this period of his life was a mere “salutary sickness” (Snoek, E. du Perron 3701). Close inspection, however, reveals this phase to be more than a bout of sickness, albeit a salutary one. Much rather, Du Perron discovered very early a poetics that was later labelled modernist and that was to allow him to express his personality authentically in his work.2 Edgar Du Perron was born in Gedong Menu, a former Dutch colony, and moved with his – then well-off – parents to Europe. They settled in Brussels, but the barely 21-year-old Edgar was soon drawn to Paris. At that time, Paris was “the magical centre of the universe” (Snoek, E. du Perron 265) for the young European Du Perron – but his knowledge of Paris was then basically limited to Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. A major change occurred when Eddy, as he was called by his friends, got to know his first muse Clairette Petrucci (1899-1994). She not only introduced Du Perron to her “favourite authors” (Snoek, E. du Perron 262) Joris-Karl Huysmans (18481907) and Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), but he also found in her library the works of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), Max Jacob (1876-1944) and Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) (Veenstra 7). Through Clairette, Du Perron’s “romantic” (Bulhof 19) Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec was transformed into the capital of the avant-garde. 1

2

The author provided German translations of all Dutch quotes, which were in turn translated into English by Caterina Novák. Du Perron himself always spoke about ‘modernism’ or about ‘the modernists’. To better distinguish between his early period and his later modernist one (Fokkema and Ibsch), the term ‘(anti)-avantgarde’ is here used consistently (except in direct quotes) to refer to the period before 1927, while the later period is labelled modernist, or modernism.

268 Herbert Van Uffelen Eddy Du Perron realized his dream at the beginning of March 1922. He moved to Paris for a while, staying in the famously infamous Montmartre district, leading the Bohemian life of a son of rich parents with all its amenities: the father’s financial support, a room in a meagre hotel, a black hat and – if possible – a maîtresse (Du Perron, Voorbereiding 30; Veenstra 8).3 Despite the fact that, at the beginning of 1922, the heyday of Montmartre was actually over, the centre of artistic life having in the meantime shifted to Montparnasse, Du Perron could nevertheless still meet some interesting personalities: Oscar Duboux (1899-1950) and Pedro Creixams (1893-1965), who were later to illustrate some of his works; Max Jacob; and, last but not least, Pascal Pia (1902-1979). Pascal was not only his “mentor” (Bulhof 19; Pia 9), Du Perron also brought out some of his (erotic) works and in 1933, together with him, published the – unfortunately unsuccessful – Bouquet poétique des médecins. Coping with the new literary movement in Paris cost him quite an effort, since the young Du Perron was skeptical towards the so-called Modernists. In 1921 he had still written about Jean Cocteau’s poetry: “My admiration for Jean Cocteau has drowned completely after I immersed myself into the river of his verses. It was a fatal bath and I am afraid it would also result for you in admiration and suicide if you were to do the same. If not, I expect an explanation of what it is all about. Is this meant to be cubism in literature? Or just a mere farce?” (Snoek, E. du Perron 262) Consequently, it was not to be expected that this short stay in Paris and the often fleeting encounters with individual authors and artists would dispel his mistrust. On the contrary, Du Perron started with an “anti-modernist” project (Snoek, E. du Perron 273). In May 1922 he told Clairette that he had produced a long poem which was the first in a series of “verses without rhyme and reason […] without commas, full-stops, and so on, without talent, without expert knowledge and full of ideas which I myself cannot explain” (Snoek, E. du Perron 272). This long poem developed into the Manuscrit trouvé dans une poche (1923).

3

The fact that the newly-established Bohemian received financial support from his father was of course carefully concealed from his new-found Parisian friends (Snoek, E. du Perron 267).

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The Manuscrit The Manuscrit, whose title refers to Manuscrit trouvé dans un chapeau (1919) by André Salmon (1881-1961), tells the story of Bodor Guíla, who moved to Montmartre to become acquainted with the avant-garde. At the same time, the story is an obvious persiflage of the avant-garde. Inspired by the small overview by Paul Neuhuys (1897-1984, Poètes d’aujourd’hui, 1922) and by the many acquaintances which he makes in Montmartre, Bodor Guíla collects contributions of all kinds for his manuscript: texts without punctuation, like Guillaume Apollinaire’s; free verse like Walt Whitman’s (1819-1892), associations on the basis of arbitrary letters like Tristan Remy’s (1897-1977), attempts at the unexpected à la Max Jacob, imitations of Blaise Cendrars and also a poem which Du Perron dedicated to “l’intelligence du bon poète jean cocteau” (Du Perron, Manuscript 74) and in which he uses all the syllables he had previously deleted from a poem for Blaise Cendrars. In the following short abstract the reader can gain an impression of the wild ‘non-sense’ to which a method such as Du Perron’s may lead: mes yeux sont pleins comme l’armoire à provision d’un épicier mon âme est comme un couple en rutlie qui s’embrasse dans la ruemée le soleil brûlelie comme l’eau de mer sur une plaie pourrissantelète je joue avec mes doigts pourquoi que veux-je dire la vie sur les boulevards est comme des affiches bariolléesmilles sur une pissottièreval c’est je ne veux m’exprimer davantage l’autobustre ronronne comme un scarabèetre enragétre l’esprit d’oscar wilde a fait banqueroutelie je je ne puis m’exprimer davantagelie au fond c’est bêteniste du café vient le sabbath du jazzchiste tjrsst crang dreng-dreng bou bou bou bou bou bac bac riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit -.-.---..--.. .-.-. ..-.-.. lou lou lou lou lou lou lou djoutt quic quic j’suis un gosse qui cherche son papa tatatata crang dreng je suis un gramophone cassé […] (Du Perron, Manuscript 76)

270 Herbert Van Uffelen No wonder that Du Perron’s debut was regarded as a “high-spirited” (Veenstra 8) “parody” (Van der Aa, Edgar 28) of the early French avant-garde. But what was his purpose? Did he really think that he could convince his muse with this “outrageous pastiche” (Veenstra 10)? This would fit the fact that Du Perron virtually “bombarded” (Snoek, E. du Perron 277) Clairette with comments against the avant-garde. However, at the same time, he certainly did not want to convince her simply of the “ugliness of ugly things” (Snoek, E. du Perron 299). We can gather from his correspondence that he not only wanted to ‘manifest’ himself as an author, but also desired to demonstrate that he actually “was one of the initiated” (Veenstra 10) – that he, in spite of all criticism, was positioned “at the centre of […] modernism” (Snoek, E. du Perron 298). However, this latter claim was acknowledged neither by Clairette, nor by critics of the Manuscrit. Clairette was simply shocked by his first work, not least because of the rude language used. Du Perron’s attempts to revise his Manuscrit were futile: for Clairette the first work of her suitor remained “one more proof of his strange antics” (Veenstra 10). Du Perron also failed to be acknowledged as a representative of the avant-garde by Henri Michaux (1899-1984), who also saw (in the Manuscrit) a mere attempt to demonstrate the avant-garde’s weaknesses: A medical certificate by Doctor Billencratz (!) demands that the owner of the pocket with the manuscript be admitted to an asylum for at least a year. How now! The only quality of the manuscript just happens to be that the author is possessed by the devil and was very inspired. Furthermore, he belongs to that class of people who approach literature from a mechanical, technical, external angle. For them, the classics are producers of alexandrines, and the romantics collectors of the word ‘nature’. The modernists, whom he attempts to ridicule, he merely regards as language acrobats. He himself indulges in purely verbal procedures, like splitting words, putting rhymes at the beginning of verses, reversing the syllables of individual words, leaving out punctuation marks. […] The word kills, the spirit instils new life. A man standing on his head can be very interesting, but upside-down words, what nonsense! imagination ought not to concern itself with such things. The author undoubtedly appears to know something about assembling and pulling apart bicycles and machines. Why, then, did he not become a mechanic or a surveyor? That way he could probably have avoided internment (qtd. in Van der Aa, Edgar 34–35).

Clairette’s reactions may probably have been the main reason why Du Perron distanced himself from his first work already prior to its publication and wrote to Clairette that he had lost any interest in the book. However, he also added that he was now willing to appreciate the attitudes of the authors he had attacked as ‘correct’ and ‘likeable’ precisely because they had produced “what the audience deserves” (Snoek, E. du Perron 299). So that also was the

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intention underlying the Manuscrit: it should give the audience what it deserved. There are further reasons why Du Perron’s Manuscrit cannot simply be discarded as an “awkward and deliberately witty” (Bulhof 20) youthful peccadillo. In this context, it is also significant that Du Perron remained on the avant-garde track even after the debacle with his Manuscrit and that in this work he had already developed the distanced, self-critical, and antisentimental attitude which was to characterize his later oeuvre4 – an aspect I will focus on in the following pages.

De Driehoek The fact that Du Perron continued work on his avant-garde novel Een voorbereiding (1927), which he had already set about writing prior to his stay in Paris, points to a continuity between his first Parisian period and the later phases of his life. The project in which he tries to come to terms with his relationship with Clairette and his Parisian years, did not really progress – he finished it only in 1926; still, in 1924, the “mini-novel” (Van der Aa, Edgar 45) Het roerend bezit was published as a kind of preview.5 Du Perron published the work under the pseudonym of Duko Perkens – the name by which he was to go down in history as an avant-garde poet. In the 24 chapters of the allegorical tale, Perkens recounts the relationship of the “prototype of the tormented poet” (Van der Aa, Edgar 47) Nameno to his unattainable Musa who, as already indicated, is a personification of Du Perron’s beloved Clairette Petrucci. Just as in reality the relationship fails: Musa is too secular. The plot of Het roerend bezit (in contrast to Een voorbereiding) differs completely from that of the Manuscrit; in poetological respects, however, the two works are closely related. Both works are inspired by Jean Epstein (1897-1953), especially by his La poésie d’aujourd’hui. Un nouvel état d’intelligence from 1921 (Du Perron, Manuscript 93). In both his works Du Perron put into practice Epstein’s concept of essentially recording only what is “significant” (Van der Aa, Edgar 48). Bodor Guíla had already written in his manuscript: “Rédiger est réduire” (Du Perron, Manuscript 30). Epstein

4

5

Fokkema and Ibsch do not mention the Manuscrit; instead, Du Perron’s “early acquaintance” (Fokkema and Ibsch 267) with French literature for them starts with his reading of Larbaud’s Barnabooth. According to Du Perron, Het roerend bezit is in fact merely Een voorbereiding in abbreviated form (Snoek, E. du Perron 304).

272 Herbert Van Uffelen was of the same opinion. According to Epstein, only a judicious selection makes “beauty” (Van der Aa, Edgar 48). Exactly this principle of “artificial simplification” (48) will later run as a red thread through Du Perron’s work. Here is an example as an illustration: 2 He loved her like the evening air after the sweaty staleness of a Thé Dansant. Hygiene. Like a book in which one sees oneself, unnoticeably tired, reflected. Self-love. Like something that stood pressed against him as closely as possible and yet far outside the World. Sentimentality. Vulgar romanticism. Poetry for shop girls. And his love seemed to him the first love. Of a totally human first man for a totally feminine first woman. Deplorable after-effects of the Genesis. Arrogance towards Darwin and others. As she gave herself into his embrace, he understood the reason for his existence. Sexuality. Neglected factor in our life. She loved him like a nice piece of sewing or knitting which grows without much effort. And she thought: “If my Nameno now really becomes a genius, it was I who did it to him” (Perkens 8).

It is hardly possible to be briefer than that. This passage is the whole second chapter of Het roerend bezit. In the spirit of Epstein it renounces “accessoires” (Van der Aa, Edgar 48).6 In addition, in Het roerend bezit Du Perron uses a number of other techniques of the avant-garde: for example, the quick sequence of chapters without (too many) superfluous comments. Du Perron’s aim in this is something quite special: as the title of the novel, ‘moveable goods’, suggests, he tries to create an almost indefinable space characterized by movement and dynamic relations between various levels. Such a space, which already shaped the Manuscrit and which – as will be shown – also characterizes Du Perron’s masterpiece Het land van herkomst, is simultaneously pos-’session’ and yet ‘mobile’. In this space, Du Perron invites readers to decide on the meaning for themselves. In the preface of the first edition Du Perron comments on this point:7 Novel, narration, movement, way. One can move forward by straight and by oblique steps. The forward step is the bigger the more straightforward = safer, simpler it is. On the occasion of the publication of this book I can only apologize to the modern reader-

6

In Van der Aa’s opinion, the indentations are also ‘accessories’ which he could have done without (Van der Aa, Edgar 48).

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fellow walker for my distracted way of walking. I counsel him to follow only the line on the non-indented = the straight steps forward. What is indented = explanation = oblique steps. I have even been guilty of complete side-steps; viz the sentences in brackets. They are intended for the masses. (qtd. in Van der Aa, Edgar 47)7

Looking for a publisher for Het roerend bezit (with illustrations by Oskar Duboux), Du Perron contacted the constructivist Jozef Peeters (1895-1960) (Van der Aa, Edgar 37). Together with Ferdinand Berckelaers (= Michel Seuphor, 1901-1999) Peeters was running the avant-garde magazine Het overzicht. Once Du Perron received a series of issues of this magazine from Peeters, he submitted some poems for publication in 1924. Only one poem was accepted, namely ‘Restjes van den dag’ (Remains of the day).8 I quote the version that was included in the collected works of Duco Perkens (Bij gebrek aan ernst) (For want of seriousness) in 1926: Brussels, March ‘29 The sky is one storey too high, Like a forgotten football the sun lies Beneath the trees. It is time to clean up the day. The tram dutifully draws Two pencil lines, The wanderers glide into and out of The shadow of chocolate, And the balloon vendor hides Behind a varicoloured thousand-headed swelling. When does Madame Plattestien go into the woods? They hide beasts in long beards. Beasts, thoughts. And Pia is right: There is only sexuality. Erotics – but drifting away from THE WOMAN; Purgation – libel or poetry. I am telling you, you are beautiful! A thousand times will I Endlessly, – and loudly, repeat it for you! Oh I.

7

8

This shows once more that Du Perron was indeed writing for the ‘great public’ by ironically offering his readers what they seemed to expect. The poem was later included in the volume Kwartier per dag (1924). In 1928, Du Perron distanced himself from the output of his youth, like this poem from Kwartier per dag; until then, however, he repeatedly revised it. As yet, no comparative analysis of these revisions has been attempted.

274 Herbert Van Uffelen My base is made from oak, And these cigarettes Act too fairy-like; If something racy were to appear. But all knees are rusty hinges. And all that is rolling, is rolling into the direction of the woods, And all that stumbles, keeps tripping over the same road, And the thoughts in the beards Are rustling sadly. Now here. What am I doing here? A book is still to be bound. A new record is to be played on the gramophone. A cough syrup is to be swallowed. And a dirty joke to be told, To the chambermaid, who wouldn’t let her picture be taken (Perkens 26–27)

One can hardly say that this is a great poem, but it not quoted here for its excellence. It is, however, important because it shows how Du Perron creates ‘moveable goods’ for the final unanswered question: “What am I doing here?” The technique of creating ever-new, continuously moving surroundings Du Perron called ‘Studies in buitenkant’. I will comment on this presently. First, however, I want to return to the events of the 1920s. Once Het roerend bezit was published by Het overzicht, a conflict arose between Peeters and Du Perron on the one side, and Seuphor on the other: the latter was neither convinced of the quality of the work, which he rejected as “wholly retroactive, wholly outdated […] impossible to read […] banal”, nor by the illustrations of Duboux, which he called “ultra-banal […] without any meaning” (Snoek, E. du Perron 336; cf. also Van der Aa, Edgar 45). This led to Peeters’ founding of a new publishing-house and magazine, called De Driehoek, together with Duco Perkens as “financial backer” (Snoek, E. du Perron 363). From now on Du Perron was really involved with the avant-garde, yet he managed to keep his own profile. The project, however, suffered from these conditions. De Driehoek was intended to be a constructivist magazine, yet Du Perron’s wish – already articulated in his Manuscrit – that he wanted to belong ‘to the modernists’ but not to be owned by them, can have done little to simplify matters (Du Perron, Manuscript 48–49). The editorial department could not agree upon a clear profile for the magazine. From the beginning, there was an ongoing quarrel concerning “which modernism” (Snoek, E. du

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Perron 366) the magazine was to represent. Du Perron never really converted to Jozef Peeters’ radical constructivism.9 On the contrary, he circumvented Peeters’ “prohibition on rhyming” (Snoek, E. du Perron 367), for example, in Filter (1925) by having the 49 quatrains printed in Brussels instead of publishing them in De Driehoek publishing house. As Kees Snoek rightly emphasizes, Peeters was for Du Perron possibly only “a strategic ally […] not a soulmate” (Snoek, E. du Perron 369). Accordingly, Du Perron’s ‘Driehoek phase’ did not last long. In 1926, Edgar du Perron let his avant-garde alter ego Duco Perkens die and – convinced that it was meaningless to continue writing (‘s-Gravesande 33) – published his Collected Works entitled Bij gebrek aan ernst. In Nederland the following obituary was published; it is quoted here because it proves that Du Perron was not really taken seriously: A new paper, ‘Het Woord’, has broadcast the news that the Flemish poet Duco Perkens, born in Paramaribo in 1899, has died in Cap Martin in January this year. With my preference for the failures and shipwrecks of our literature I have followed his career relatively closely: a strangely fragmented life as a poet, tragic in its exuberance, typical in its cosmopolitan Cendrars character, and not without talent in its early phase. Duco Perkens wrote a few foolish books, of which ‘Het roerend bezit’ and ‘Kwartier per dag’ have achieved some notoriety even here. (Van der Aa, Edgar 99)

No Higher Aim? Du Perron had obviously failed as an avant-garde writer. Critics could not see any original contribution on his part. Still Du Perron’s ‘modernism’ did not limit itself, as his biographer Kees Snoek states, to “compositional and stylistic” (Snoek, E. du Perron 370) elements, nor did the author merely use avantgarde “alienation effects” (Snoek, E. du Perron 380) in order to overcome naturalism. Even though this might be the initial impression and even though Du Perron later distanced himself from his early work, the young author was no “teasing poetaster” (Obbema) in the grip of some “modernist caprice” (Van der Aa, Edgar 39). On the one hand, Du Perron used avant-garde techniques such as a terse style, short staccato sentences, an emphasis on rhythm and movement, multiple narrative threads, enumerations and omissions, in order to keep an ironic distance from his models; on the other hand, these 9

In Peeters’s trialogue Jousouf met Wobbe en Bodor Guila in de Square (1925), Du Perron’s real aim also immediately becomes apparent: to remain himself. At the very beginning, Bodor remarks: “I would like to be 10 years older, in order to know whether in the future all constructivists will have taken their individual places, far away from the present collective identity” (Den Boef and Van Faassen 89).

276 Herbert Van Uffelen same techniques served to create a particular space for experience. In the ‘epilogue’ to the Collected Works of his alter ego Duco Perkens he applies the attribute ‘indecisiveness’ to this space: More than anything else, the solemnity went against the grain with him. – The general solemnity of everyone. – However, as far as he permitted himself literary scorn, he was angry at those who saw him as a humorist. Therefore it ought to be stated: he was no humorist. Personally, I see two distinctive traits in Perkens: rejection of solemnity and indecisiveness, as he himself called it […] In order to round off this comment, I want to come back to this terrifying image: the gentleman for whom writing is a task, or a whim; who continually has to improve himself; in the style that he has imposed on himself. (Perkens 179)

Here, Du Perron once again makes it clear that it was not his intention to be a good avant-garde author in the style of his models. He was too much aware of the fact that any attempt to express oneself authentically in a pre-defined style was doomed to failure. Bodor Guíla, Duco Perkens and the ‘author’ of Een voorbereiding, Kristiaan Watteyn, were much happier to toy with avantgarde or (early-)modernist techniques in order to create a space which, firstly, allowed a critical distance from the chosen form; which, secondly, supported the experience of authentic personality; and which, thirdly, demanded a decision.10 It is essential always to be aware of being an artist; this was Du Perron’s leading motto. Already in 1922 he had expressed this thought in a discussion with his ‘teacher’ at the time, Jean Rolin (Snoek, E. du Perron 250). In his opinion, the personality of the artist could only appear in the fabric of the text through a critical distance (which, in Du Perron’s case, was also frequently an ironic one). Du Perron never wanted to function as “mediator” (Fokkema and Ibsch 46) of a message, but – to put it in the words of Fokkema and Ibsch – always wanted to be the “centre” (46) of his text, as we can see in the following poem written in 1921: A mosaic of pieces writ’ in gold Before me lay, into a whole now fused, by one whose talent and whose power hold the gift of plucking what the others used. And when I saw he could succeed that way, To gain a name and fame, I laughed and mused, How I would rise, if in my pow’r it lay, Myself to use the props that he had used.

10

The paradoxical character of this aim is also mirrored clearly in the way in which it is expressed: ‘rejection of solemnity and indecisiveness’ can either mean that one abhors indecisiveness or that one aims for it.

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A little romance, and some realism, And then again a grain of individualism: By this in author’s stature he grew tall. And one who strives, through him the whole to give Attempts in what he weaves only himself to weave Is lost in darkness, and remains too small. (my italics; qtd. in Snoek, E. du Perron 251)

As an anti-avant-garde writer as well as an avant-garde writer Du Perron was in search of literature as a form of expression of a personality, in search of a position which would allow him to present himself as a “poète-nu (‘naked poet’)” (Du Perron, Manuscript 54), as he says in his Manuscrit. In order to achieve this he needed an “attitude” – “What counts is the human being, and in a human being – let us be honest – attitude” (Du Perron, qtd. in Snoek, E. du Perron 370) – i.e. an attitude which would make it possible for him to define himself as ‘jeune Européen’ without becoming the victim of (literary) principles of any kind (Du Perron 1984, 94).11 In order to reach this aim, he concentrated on what he called ‘Studies in buitenkant’, a consciously chosen paradoxical title which can probably best be translated as ‘studies in surroundings’.

Studies in buitenkant It is no coincidence that Du Perron presented his literary debut as the work of a lunatic (Bodor Guíla means something like raving madman). Searching for the right attitude as an author, Du Perron analysed roles. In the words of Kees Snoek: The disguises that Du Perron imagined for himself are linked up with his obsession with playing a role: in how far am I the one whom I enact? Is my identity determined by my role? If I consciously take on another role, do I become someone else, or do I in fact fool myself and may I become the victim of my role? How must I play my role? – with full commitment or with a distance? (Snoek, E. du Perron 303)

Under the influence of Valéry Larbaud (1881-1957), whose Journal intime de A.O. Barnabooth he admired, and of Paul Morand (1888-1976), whose self-critical and ironical reservation towards his own work, elliptical style,

11

Like Larbaud, Du Perron uses the word ‘Dupe’ in this context. This term, which unfortunately appears as ‘fool’ in the English translation, means somebody who loses, but does not become aware of this fact (in time). With Du Perron, its opposite is ‘Kerl’, i.e. the modernist personality, which critically and consciously positions itself (Fokkema and Ibsch 47).

278 Herbert Van Uffelen fast rhythm and nervous changes of perspectives are also to be found in the work of Duco Perkens (Snoek, E. du Perron 313, 327), Du Perron strove in his works to investigate his own role as precisely as possible. In this context, he wrote to Clairette Petrucci in 1923: “What I increasingly appreciate about modernist thinking and modernist literature is the lack of, the abhorrence of all sentimentality, the ability to state something coolly […] in order to stop looking through very beautiful and very deceptive rainbows – and not to look at oneself in this way either” (qtd. in Snoek, E. du Perron 322). To Du Perron, distance means more than mere intellectual reserve. His is a fundamentally critical, cynical gaze, yet, above all, reserve means to Du Perron “the internalization of an action, without being too much of the hero of this action” (Du Perron, qtd. in Fokkema and Ibsch 268). Thus, the point is not a projection of an inner on an outer dimension; on the contrary: it is all about observation and consciously keeping and creating a distance (Fokkema and Ibsch 271) so that the exterior can be projected on to the interior and thereby be turned into an immediate experience which otherwise could not be put into words. In Du Perron’s perspective, it makes no sense to approach something that is not approachable. The motto of the Manuscrit is: “Beaucoup de choses sont obscures pour les hommes, mais rien, pour les hommes, n’est plus obscur que leur propre esprit” (Du Perron, Manuscript 17). He did not believe in introspection: when he wished to experience something about himself, he created a mirror, an outer world which would cast a ray onto the inside and which he could thus analyse. He already wrote in the Manuscrit: “Je suis allé à Montmartre pour y chercher un extérieur; ainsi j’appelle une ambiance qui influe, car un bon extérieur doit aller vers l’intérieur” (Du Perron, Manuscript 17). This quest for and continuous preoccupation with inspiring surroundings and the corresponding interaction within which he set himself up as focal point, characterize, in my opinion, the core of the poetics of the anti-avant-gardist Du Perron and of Du Perron the avant-gardist and later modernist.12 In this context, the last paragraph of Het roerend bezit is revealing:

12

According to Fokkema and Ibsch, Du Perron’s modernism in the mid-1920s still contained too much of the “schematic procedures” which Du Perron himself called modernism at the time. What they apparently do not realize is the fact that the “schemata, exercises in modernism” mentioned in Een vorbereiding refer to the early poems and especially the Manuscrit. In addition, they also obviously fail to notice that Du Perron had always been concerned with ‘Studies in buitenkant’ and that he had – consciously or subconsciously – employed the ‘Brulard method’ (in Het land van herkomst he mentions Stendhal’s Vie de Henry Brulard as a model) already much earlier. It is already in the Manuscrit that one can observe, to put it in the words of Malraux, a “constant détachement en face d’un monde d’apparences (‘con-

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24 He wrapped himself in a dirty cowl, gave himself a new exterior. The exterior always goes: to the inside. The costume often leads the actor. Each man plays his own life. He did not succeed in finding the father who so little resembles most of his children. Who has so little of the genius about him. Of Nameno’s idea of a genius. But he took pains to be whole: This mixture of broken bowl. Tortured rabbit and stale wine, Which – as they say – GOD finds so congenial. Brussels, Jan. ’23 (Perkens 22)

In Een voorbereiding, the novel Du Perron was working on during the whole Duco Perkens-period (with longer interruptions), we find a similar comment: Most of all, a novel has to have a title. A study in exterior, his was to be called. A daring heading over daring contents. Because the reader will start to ask himself: “In exterior? in exterior? what can he mean by that? That’s not Dutch, is it?” And then, when he turns the front page, he would find a prologue and an explanation. By the word “exterior” he means first and foremost: surroundings. […] A young man (Kristiaan Watteyn, who else?) has a surprising amount of talent. However, it cannot express itself, because of the wrong exterior. Consequently, he goes in search of a new exterior which better suits him and which will allow his talent to blossom. And he believes he has found this exterior in Montmartre (because this novel is supposed to become a study drawn from nature); but before he gets there, a beauty crosses his path – and he follows her, because he falls in love with her at first sight, but he leaves her again, because she loves someone else. (Du Perron, Voorbereiding 77)

Du Perron’s approach to his studies in surroundings is always a different one; however, there is a guiding principle. In Filter (1925) the reader is confronted with the exterior in the form of quatrains; in Voor de Famielje (1925), of which ‘Dagelijks gebeuren’ (Everyday event) and ‘De geest met de siropen’ (The spirit with the sirups) were published in De Driehoek, outer surroundings are handed out in small ‘doses’ of prose.13 In many cases the confrontation of different surroundings with each other is in the focus of his writing, and sometimes Du Perron presents the exterior in direct contrast to an inner space which then comes to function as counter-surroundings. In these cases two interdependent mirrors shape the horizon of experience. He already used this technique in the Manuscrit where he turns the manuscript of Bodor Guíla,

13

stant detachment in the face of a world of appearances’)” (qtd. in Fokkema and Ibsch 282) which characterizes Du Perron’s studies in surroundings. The third or first dose respectively is absorbed in Voor de Famielje.

280 Herbert Van Uffelen which was the result of the author’s study of the avant-garde, from outside to inside by editing it himself and by making it clear that relations do exist between author and editor. The mirroring technique is also repeatedly used by Du Perron in his poetry. The poem ‘Aan de dichteres’ (To a poetess) from Kwartier per dag, published under the title ‘Kopie brief’ in Bij gebrek aan ernst, is a good example: Lucerne, 28 April 1924 LETTER COPY (to a poetess) You ask me whether I am a poet; how would I know that? I do not know whether I am a poet. Have already pondered this painfully earlier on There is a lot to Listen closely now Bearing such a name of honour, (and to bear with it) Thinking deeply, crying copiously, lamenting beautifully, Now, this was already outdated, if regarded with hindsight, And then the applause of the audience is heard. Not that. (There were no three hundred poets, said Malte Laurids Brigge.) He who yesterday enchanted a reading humanity In the hotel they play the-cat-on-the-piano Is forgotten today; and the worst stroke of fate [...] I will venture forward As long as I can see your laugh while you’re reading The people at the lake are all looking for something: A new way of seeing? This wine is for my mania for being at your service The lake pokes out 100,000 coated tongues at the mountains (Perkens 30-31)

Already the title of the poem, ‘Kopie brief’ (‘Letter copy’) subtitled ‘Aan een dichteres’, shows that double surroundings are at stake here. On the one hand, Du Perron presents a letter which is actually a poem originally dedicated to Alice Nahon (1896-1953); this poem is interwoven with another poem (indented and italicized) which was meant for Clairette Petrucci (Snoek, E. du Perron 342; Van der Aa, Edgar 62-63). Thus, the frame for an answer to the question of what it means to be a poet is formed by two surroundings which function as mirrors of and for the two love-relationships. Du Perron’s work is neither centred on ideology nor on finding an answer; it centres on the creation of surroundings which – to paraphrase André Gide’s thoughts on influ-

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ence – shake the reader awake (Snoek, E. du Perron 320). Thus, the question is not answered in the poem. On the contrary: in the end the lake pokes out 100,000 coated tongues at the mountains. According to Ada Deprez and Manu Van der Aa, Du Perron once again thematizes his relationship with Alice Nahon in Een tussen vijf (One between five) in 1924 (see also Van der Aa, Ik 169–179).14 However, this is only of secondary importance in this context. What is important in connection with the poetics of Du Perron is the fact that, with regard to technical considerations, the novella stands in diametrical opposition to ‘Kopie brief’. In Een tussen vijf, Du Perron reverses the roles by opening the novella with a poem which – in contrast to ‘Kopie brief’ – quite obviously expresses feelings towards a particular person: The author to Betsy, Whom he has known in person and whose picture in the short skirt remains carefully preserved in his photo album: You have all of my admiration, Betsy, There are decent, But also honest girls. For me, all princesses were far away at the time. Forgive me, Betsy, when I Avoid the long word virtuousness, So many illnesses were foreign to me, Forgive me for gallantly hesitating: - do you not also sometimes need support, Betsy? (oh, I had supported you against yourself!) And you loved empty stalls in the cinema And full hands, And oh the poor kisses without sound Like cigarettes without smoke Tasteless But preferable to the only-sounds – […] (Perkens 69)15

Een tussen vijf thus opens with the inner dimension, only to turn this immediately into the exterior for the game of Bob and Betsy, which is narrated in the novella: “… there follows the game16 of Bob and Betsy, in which they are

14

15

16

Kees Snoek, however, rather thinks that in this poem the persons from the health resort where Du Perron was staying when he wrote, Een tussen vijf , are thematized. In the first edition of Bij gebrek aan ernst and in the edition from 1928 this opening poem which, according to Paul van Ostaijen was too “revealing” (Deprez 108, note 66) is still included, but it was removed when Du Perron revised Een tussen vijf. card game, flirtation or shadow play

282 Herbert Van Uffelen joined by Bob’s friends. Their names are Max, Maurits, Erik, Willie. And there is also a seventh person, the masseur. Because the setting of the story is a sanatorium” (Perkens 71). As can be gathered both from this observation and from later comments by Du Perron himself, Een tussen vijf was expressly constructed along the lines of a game of patience (Snoek, E. du Perron 321). Characters are not described; instead, one card after the other is laid on the table. The first card is Bob: BOB: A young man of independent means, twenty-four years old, but looks younger, goodlooking, but slightly plump, especially in his movements, marvellous blue eyes, the rudiments of a classical education (has read Virgil in the original and annotated the philosophers in the margins), but a sports enthusiast, rides a motorcycle, likes to camp out in the open. What is he doing in a sanatorium? (Perkens 71)

After this, the other cards follow one by one. Thus Du Perron continuously creates new surroundings, not only for the card that follows, but also for those cards, the “scenes”, in Van der Aa’s words, which have been drawn and are already lying on the table. Once again, this reveals that Du Perron is not concerned with the flow of the narrative (not even with the flow of the narrative within individual chapters, as may be seen from the quotes), but with ‘Studies in Surroundings’ that are distanced – playful and at the same time sober. The result is a space that is continually in motion and that with increasing clarity illuminates the space in which a decision can be taken, in which personality can show itself authentically. This is fairly demanding for the reader. To make things simpler, for the broad reading public, so to speak, Du Perron inserts an authorial comment after the end of the novella which ‘offers’ a decision. He testifies to his dissatisfaction with the first ending: – unfortunately, this ending does not satisfy me. Why should I not admit it to myself: I still take myself too seriously; I feel as if some task was still waiting to be fulfilled; as if I after all wanted to show something with my scribbling; as if there was a system in my obdurate wish to keep telling the story until the end, even though my characters bored me. I am afraid that I still want too much to be an artist. [...] I am not satisfied, I want to leave my characters in order: a form of bourgeoisie which I may, perhaps, permit myself? […] But the affectation? Every moderately well-executed form contains a certain amount of affectation. [...] I laugh about that, as somebody else said already. What remains for me to say is the following: Betsy gets a better revenge, and in return she must repeat the ending. (qtd. in Van der Aa, Edgar 93)

However, peace does not last long; everything is to remain in flux. A further ‘ending’ is added, in which Betsy and Bob are reconciled with the others. As in ‘Kopie brief’, however, a strange aftertaste remains:

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So they left. This is something quite different for Betsy. And especially for Bob, who has appeared so determined; because what would Betsy have done without Bob? Before they mount the motorcycle, he is duly fed and pampered: all of Betsy’s most proper kisses one after the other in one breath, and when they have gone a few metres Bob suddenly feels quite melancholy because he has noticed, that, for emotional reasons, perhaps, Betsy’s breath was no longer quite fresh. THE END (qtd. in Van der Aa, Edgar 93).

In his oeuvre Du Perron was again and again concerned with two issues: on the one hand with an analysis of roles, of how far the costume determines the actor – “Ce que le public te reproche, cultive-le, c’est toi!” (Cocteau, qtd. in Du Perron, Manuscript 17) –; simultaneously, however, with an objective description and analysis of the surroundings, because they alone point inwards and allow that which is in the interior to show itself. Du Perron is thus not concerned with a distinction between form and content; with him, form and content are inextricably linked. But form exists not merely to lend shape to the content, form is the surroundings that point inward where content can be experienced. Consequently, Du Perron cannot be understood but only read. Only by allowing oneself to be ‘grasped’ by his poetry and by his prose can one distinguish the authentic personality. In his Manuscrit, Bodor Guíla expresses this idea as follows: qui lit ma poésie lit seulement moi vive vive ma poésie j’ai pris la vieille poésie et je l’ai maltraitée j’ai donné des coups de pied à la raison j’ai mordu la rime j’ai pincé le mètre et sur toute musique j’ai pissé et chié et avec le rythme je me suis essuyé le cul je ferai mes poèmes sans effort […] ce que je dis je dis ce que je ne pense pas je ne pense pas je déteste penser (Du Perron, Manuscript 56)

If one fails to realize that Du Perron aimed at ‘studies in surroundings’, there is apparently little one can do except denigrate Du Perron’s early works as “strange printed matter” (Van Nijlen 7). Critics in the twenties (and, as the quote illustrates, even much later!) reacted accordingly: Lode Monteyne was looking – quite in the classical manner, but also quite fruitlessly – for “world art” (Van der Aa, Edgar 49); for Urbain van de Voorde, Perkens merely represented “a mixture of very unripe talent and very suspicious arrogance” (Rousseeuw 23); and in Wies Moens’s view, the poems in Kwartier per dag were merely “impressions from a journey” masquerading as “poetry” (Rousseeuw 24). Not even with the great member of the avant-garde Paul van

284 Herbert Van Uffelen Ostaijen (1896-1928) could Perkens’s poetry find much favour. Even though he was convinced that one could not deny Du Perron a certain amount of talent, since he had shown that in the novel analysis equals “action” (Rousseeuw 23), he did not appreciate Perkens’s similar attempt to present no contents in poetry but instead to let forms and surroundings cast their glow inside. On the contrary: he thought the poems “simply bad” (Rousseeuw 24) and was of the opinion that it was extremely ill-advised of Perkens to persist, “à-tort-et-à-travers” (Rousseeuw 24), in trying to write this kind of poetry (cf. also Van der Aa, Edgar 63–64).

Het land van herkomst In 1932 Du Perron was once again attracted to the city where in the twenties he had lived as an “adventurer” (Snoek, E. du Perron 485). But it was not the longing for the past that led him back there. Not that he is no longer in contact with nonconformist authors: quite the contrary, he was then close friends with André Malraux (1901-1976) whom he had met via Pascal Pia at the end of the twenties. But Du Perron’s view of Paris had changed. He was now married for the second time and had a son from his first marriage, and also his financial situation had changed. After it turned out that the family’s financial resources were depleted, he had to make a living for himself. He and his new wife were now reporting as ‘correspondents’ on life in Paris, on theatre and ballet, exhibitions, literary awards, and on the political and social events. Therefore, the Du Perrons did not go back to Montmartre, but looked for a suitable accommodation in Meudon-Bellevue, near to the couple Van Schendel, with whom they were to be in close contact during the next few years. In the thirties, Paris was a kind of ‘stronghold’ for Du Perron, which more than ever before seemed appropriate for his studies in surroundings: February 1933. Since Jane and I moved to Meudon, on the outskirts of Paris, the inner city has come to resemble a busy square where the streetcars and buses seem to take care not to run us over, now that we’re no longer strangers. The ugly Montparnasse Station has gradually become a familiar home for us, with its flat façade and its shops below. It has two entrances, to the left and right of the double staircase that leads to the trains, and there’s an unbelievably spacious elevator run by a disabled veteran. For us the station is like a vestibule where we leave the city behind, and the fifteen minutes in the train back to Meudon don’t amount to anything anymore. Particularly after my last trip to Brussels, I suddenly felt, like a child, that this unexpected fortress would protect me from a fate that was pursuing me. (Du Perron, Country 1)

It is in the thirties that the image of Du Perron gradually emerged that was to determine the nature of most comments on his person: Du Perron, who, to-

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gether with Menno ter Braak, propagated the importance of the authentic personality in literature and who distanced himself from formal experiments as much as from lyrical sentimentalities. What has hitherto not been stressed enough is the fact that this search for an authentic personality was not new with Du Perron; in fact he began to look for ways to realize exactly this aim already during his anti-avant-garde and avant-garde phases, and had all this time (transcending all phases) developed a technique, even a poetics, which he could now successfully use for his novel Het land van herkomst. When Het land van herkomst is regarded as a study in surroundings, a lot of points of contact with the works from his anti-avant-garde and avant-garde phases suddenly emerge. To name but a few, it is already in the Manuscrit that one finds a polyphonous structure, that Du Perron expounds the problems of the author’s role, that narrative elements are confronted with extracts from the ‘Cahier’, that there are poetological statements (in the Manuscrit one even finds a long “metalingual” (Fokkema and Ibsch 271) reflection), and that epistemological doubt is constantly documented. And it is no different with the novel on which Du Perron worked throughout the whole of his avantgarde period and which definitely rounds off his first Parisian period: Een voorbereiding. Fokkema and Ibsch are entirely justified in describing the structure of this novel, in which (as in Het land van herkomst) the Parisian chapters alternate with narrative ones, as “completely modernist” (Fokkema and Ibsch 269). In Het land van herkomst, however, Paris is no longer the Paris of his youth but that of the present, whereas the narrative chapters no longer deal with the present but hark back to the past, to his youth on Java. Contemporary Paris now acts as exterior and mirror for the stories of colonial times that alternate with those of Paris in Het land van herkomst. Taken together, the heterogeneous fragments in Du Perron’s great novel become – and here I expressly want to quote Francis Bulhof’s image, which has been my main source of inspiration for this article –, a “hall full of mirrors” (Bulhof 9). This hall full of mirrors is the space that is explored by the studies in surroundings. They mirror each other and at the same time also mirror the person who is standing in the middle of the hall and designing the mirror images, but who is also reflected in them at the same time. This is the only way in which Du Perron, as he himself claims, can describe anything, because “what really concerns me most I can’t describe. Absolute impossibility” (Du Perron, Country 287). Het land van herkomst is ‘no Romanticism for Jane’; neither was it meant to be (Du Perron, Country 287). On the contrary: the aim in Het land van herkomst is also to narrate events as precisely and yet as briefly as possible, so that the surroundings (no matter whether they are real or the author’s costume,

286 Herbert Van Uffelen the characters in the novel) which are being studied are kept at a distance, allowing an open, moving space to open up. On the other hand, however, this causes the characters to appear ‘bloodless’, something for which Du Perron was repeatedly criticized, not least by his friend Menno ter Braak, who was, for example, shocked by the image of him that Du Perron had drawn in Het land van herkomst. Despite the fact that Ter Braak was familiar with Du Perron’s aversion to the “acted novel”, he still missed the dimension of “emotionality” (Ter Braak and Du Perron 162). He regretted “no longer being himself” (Ter Braak and Du Perron 108), failing to see that Du Perron had made him into a shadow because he was convinced that only good surroundings bring something of the interior to the light (Du Perron, Manuscript 17).

To Sum Up On the basis of Het land van herkomst, Fokkema and Ibsch in their study of modernism in European literature “situate” (Snoek, lexicon 14) the former avant-garde writer Du Perron in the circle of modernists such as James Joyce, Italo Svevo and Robert Musil. And they are right to do so: as Fokkema and Ibsch convincingly argue, it is precisely the modernist interplay of distance on the one hand and active observation on the other which, in Het land van herkomst, leads to consciousness (Fokkema and Ibsch 45-46). As I hope I have shown in this paper, however, it was not Du Perron the modernist who discovered these techniques. It was already during his anti-avant-garde and avant-garde phases that Du Perron occupied himself with this principle. Manuscrit trouvé dans une poche was his first ‘Studie in buitenkant’, and a number of others followed. From his first Parisian period onwards, Du Perron aimed at a narrative style as precise and yet as flat as possible; it was by this means as well as through interplay and interaction that he strove to create “a sphere of truth” (Ter Braak and Du Perron 122; cf. also Du Perron, Country 287). Hence, Du Perron’s first phase was not only a ‘salutary’ one because he acquired certain techniques; its true relevance lies in his discovery that studies in surroundings would allow him to reach his goal: a critical attitude visà-vis his own role, true consciousness. Bodor Guíla, Duco Perkens and Kristiaan Watteyn all helped Du Perron to discover the techniques that he needed to embark upon a serious study in surroundings to create the space in which “an unveiled expression” (Snoek, lexicon 8) of personality finally becomes possible. Het land van herkomst does not differ markedly from Du Perron’s early work. The latter was marked by great heterogeneity. As it says already in the Manuscrit: “Ma foi, être compris par tout le monde, c’est livrer la preuve qu’on est banal” (Du Perron, Manuscript 25). True to this dictum, Du

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Perron produced, in Het land van herkomst, a pamphlet in the dual sense of the word: on the one hand an identifying account, on the other a critical comment; in short, a study in surroundings. This was the only way Du Perron could be (anti-)avant-garde without delivering himself into the hands of the avant-garde; the only way he could be modernist without losing himself in modernism; the only way he could be a ‘Kerl’ without giving up his personality; the only way he could always remain what he wanted to be: a European, without falling victim (be it in the shape of a parochial Dutchman or a PanEuropean) to this wish (cf. also ‘s-Gravesande 59). In the thirties, too, Du Perron’s relationship with Paris fits this attitude. As a young author, he had settled in Montmartre, even though the scene had moved to Montparnasse; similarly, later too, he settled not in the centre, but (initially) on the outskirts. Edgar Du Perron never abandoned his position of outsider, necessary for his studies in surroundings.

Works Cited Bulhof, Francis. Over ‘Het land van herkomst’ van E. du Perron. Amsterdam: Wetenschappelijke Uitgeverij b.v.: Synthese, 1980. Den Boef, August Hans and Sjoerd Van Faassen. “Een hoek, waar bijna geen geluid doordringt: Over de betrekkingen tussen de Groninger Kunstkring ‘De Ploeg’ en het Antwerpse constructivisme.” Avantgarde! Voorhoede? Vernieuwingsbewegingen in Noord en Zuid opnieuw beschouwd. Ed. Hubert F. Van den Berg and Gillis J. Dorleijn. Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2002. 67-91. Deprez, Ada. Edgar du Perron: 1899-1940. Zijn leven en zijn werk. Brussel, Den Haag: Manteau. n.d. Du Perron, Edgar. Een voorbereiding Omgewerkte druk. Met een tekening van A.C. Willink. Brussel, Maastricht: A.A.M. Stols, 1931. ——. Country of origin. Introd. and notes Francis Bulhof. Transl. Francis Bulhof and Elizabeth Daverman. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1984. ——. Manuscript in een jaszak gevonden: kroniek van de bekering van Bodor Guila, buitenlander. Als zodanig gepubliceerd door Eddy du Perron. Met een Portret van de Bekeerling door Creixams; en een Medische Verklaring van Dr. L. Billencratz. Foreword J.H.W. Veenstra. Trans. Arjaan Van Nimwegen. Utrecht: Kwadraat, 1988. Fokkema, Douwe and Elrud Ibsch. Het Modernisme in de Europese letterkunde. Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 1984.

288 Herbert Van Uffelen Obbema, Jinke. Foppende prulpoëten; E. du Perron en het modernisme. 1994 http://www.nrcboeken.nl/recensie/foppende-prulpo%C3%ABten-e-duperron-en-het-modernisme (20/1/2009). Perkens, Duco. Bij gebrek aan ernst, zijnde de volledige werken van Duco Perkens. Ed. E. du Perron. Cover and frontispiece C.A. Willink. Bussum: Dinger, 1926. Pia, Pascal. Praten over Du Perron. Epilogue J.H.W. Veenstra. Utrecht: Reflex, 1979. Rousseeuw, Boris. Twee heren: Over E. du Perron en W. Elsschot. Antwerpen: Dedalus, 1986. ‘s-Gravesande, G.H. E. du Perron: Herinneringen en Bescheiden. With reproductions of photos, drawings and manuscripts. ‘s Gravenhage: A.A.M. Stols, 1947. Snoek, Kees. “E. du Perron.” Kritisch lexicon van de moderne Nederlandstalige literatuur. Ed. Ad Zuiderent, Hugo Brems, and Tom van Deel. Groningen: Nijhoff, 1984. ——. E. du Perron. Amsterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2005. Ter Braak, Menno and Edgar du Perron. Briefwisseling 1930-1940. Ed. and annotated H. van Galen Last. Amsterdam: G.A. van Oorschot, 1965. Van der Aa, Manu. Edgar du Perron en de avant-garde. Amsterdam: Bas Lubberhuizen, 1994. ——. Ik heb de liefde liefgehad. Het leven van Alice Nahon. Tielt: Lannoo, 2008. Van Nijlen, Jan. Herinneringen aan E. du Perron. 2nd ed. Amsterdam: G.A. Van Oorschot, 1981. Van Nimwegen, Arjaan. Restanten van een reisjournaal. Edgar du Perron: Laatste kwartier. De verdwenen verzen van ‘Kwartier per dag’. Utrecht: Kwadraat. - Reigercahier nr. 5. 1988. Veenstra, J.H.W. Europese proeven. Manuscript in een jaszak gevonden: Kroniek van de Bekering van Bodor Guila Buitenlander. Als zodanig gepubliceerd door Eddy du Perron. Met een Portret van de Bekeerling door Creixams; en een Medische Verklaring van Dr. L. Billencratz. Utrecht: Kwadraat, 1988. 9-11.

Bettina Thurner

“It is evil; it is beautiful; it is fascinating; it is bewildering”: Thomas Wolfe’s Paris of the 1920s

Ruptures in the America dream, fissures in what could be called the perfect New World of the 1920s drove many American intellectuals and artists to seek refuge in the Paris of the day. So it came to be that America’s expatriates flooded the “laboratory of ideas”, as Ezra Pound called the city of experimental writing. Amongst these artists was a gifted young author of the Piedmont South, Thomas Wolfe (born 1900), who first visited the city in 1924. His story was marked by disavowal and difference. As an outstanding writer from the transitional American South, Wolfe sought to distance himself from the so-called “Lost Generation” in Paris: “If I have been elected [to the group of the Lost Generation], it has been against my will; and I hereby resign. I don’t feel that I belong to a lost generation, and I have never felt so” (Autobiography 105). Wolfe’s attitude towards American expatriates was characterized by his innate disdain for inclusion in the group, while concealing a contradictory desire to belong to it. His artistic credo was an antithesis to the collective thinking of his day. As a proto-individualist he was caught up in a dialectic of inclusion, yet was forced in style and ideas to distance himself from the work of his peers. Metaphysically Paris for Wolfe was a feast of foods in wax: in 1924 he would claim, “I am in possession of a beautiful fruit which I am unable to taste” (Notebooks I, 44). The city was at once the dreamed-of artistic capital but one that was to forever prove him incapable of integrating with the people he sought so painfully to describe. When he later visited the metropolis in 1928, he admitted that Paris “is essentially foreign to me. … It is not for me – this place” (Loneliness 167). Wolfe’s recognition of Paris as “the Other” paved the way for his own individuality as an artist, a soloist of life. In Paris Wolfe would undertake to further his enduring search for authenticity. If we are to look for an account of what that means we can do no better than turn to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in particular his 1994 essay “The Politics of Recognition” where he argues that without proper recognition and authenticity there can be no identity, neither individual nor collective. To date, Taylor’s ideas have neither been applied to Wolfe nor his place in the American literary movement of the Twenties in Paris, but their seminal insights on how identities are created and how they are based on acknowledgement and authenticity are

290 Bettina Thurner pertinent to both. They show that a life of self-fulfillment can be led without harming our “significant others”, as Taylor quotes George Herbert Mead (Taylor 32). This theme runs like a thread through Wolfe’s life and art. Throughout his years, Wolfe struggled with non- or “misrecognition” (Taylor), as he did too with the challenge of finding an authentic voice for his own, and for the American, self. My essay will focus on Wolfe’s second novel, Of Time and the River, in which several chapters deal with a stay in Paris and the resultant experiences; the protagonist is the author’s alter ego, Eugene Gant. In this text, Wolfe primarily deals with his first sojourn in the metropolis in 1924. In addition, I will consider a posthumously published manuscript, The Starwick Episodes. Since Wolfe was a pre-eminently autobiographical writer (“all serious work in fiction is autobiographical”, Wolfe in Look Homeward Angel, “To the Reader”), my interpretation will also be mirrored through his “factual” writings as reflected in his notebooks, letters and other autobiographical accounts. I will investigate how Wolfe’s experience of Paris and, to a greater degree, his encounters with representatives of the “Lost Generation” influenced his world view and writing. Wolfe was critical in his attitude to Paris, and this resulted in prose which transformed the cityscape into a literary site whose representations teemed with ambivalence. In December 1924, after first arriving in Paris, Wolfe wrote in his notebook: “Someone has advised young men to see Paris before they reach the age of twenty five. I am here, therefore, in good season; and everything that has been said or written about Paris is true. It is evil; it is beautiful; it is fascinating; it is bewildering” (Notebooks I, 44). Wolfe took the complexity of the megalopolis and rendered it in a text of doubt and ambiguity. The fact that his French was limited contributed to his feelings of “terrible and devastating impotence” (Notebooks I, 44). In The Autobiography of an American Novelist, he wrote that his pre-conception of Paris had been that of an El Dorado for American artists – his romantic expectations, though, had to be revised after his arrival in December 1924. One particular escapade was crucial in shaping his first impressions of the capital and its inhabitants – he lost a manuscript. His suitcase containing the manuscript of his play “Mannerhouse” which he was in the process of revising, was stolen from the lobby of his French hotel.1 The hotel’s proprietors main1

In 1922, Hemingway had a similar experience. His wife Hadley “lost a suitcase containing some of his earlier and more romantic manuscripts, carbons and all, when catching a train at the Gare de Lyon. This had a near-disastrous impact on their marriage, and marked a crisis in his writing life” (Bradbury 316). There is, however, no evidence that this experience had an influence on Hemingway’s image of Paris. Rather, Paris would stay “permanently in his mind as the ideal location of writing, the place of all his literary nostalgia” (Bradbury 328).

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tained that Wolfe was making up the story, and presented him with their own account of how the suitcase came to be lost, refusing to pay the compensation Wolfe demanded. He later wrote of their falsity and greed. There are few traumas in literary life as great as the loss of a manuscript. Wolfe’s “Mannerhouse” was not lost forever, since he re-wrote the work from memory. So it happened that Wolfe’s first weeks in Paris were marked by loss and loneliness. In addition, the Carolinian caught “a terrific cold in the foggy weather” (Letters to Mother 83). Apart from his communication problems, he projected personal frustrations he had brought from home onto the new city. A natural strategy would have been to seek out the company of his own kind. But he could not identify with the American expats living in Paris, nor with their zeal for Modernism, seeing himself – somewhat incorrectly – as a Southern storyteller, (and not the consummate stylist and sub-epidermal explorer he was to become). He avoided their Cafés. Persistent attempts by his first publisher, Max Perkins, to instigate a friendship between Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was another of Perkins’ “disciples” in Paris, failed. Quite apart from Fitzgerald, the avant-garde Americans he met only served to remind Wolfe of his fellow students at the Harvard drama class. At Harvard, Wolfe, at the time very much the unworldly Southerner, had come into contact with French literature. Back then he had gravitated towards French writers of the 19th century: Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Zola. What fascinated him least was the French concern with the opposing muses of form and aestheticism and in his readings of the French Symbolists or Flaubert, Wolfe hardly found easy access to Gallic letters. That animus had its genesis in the nature of his own structural technique, his writing being concerned with abundance rather than aesthetics. In Balzac he found an inspiration for his developing sense of detail, or for metaphorical canvases that were comprehensive and fine-grained. At this early point in his literary career, Wolfe’s profusion of detail and inclusive narratives might have functioned better had their syntactic and mid-level structure been more “French”. The New Critics were to reject him on these very grounds. But Wolfe was to become a writer by veering away from much of what he read around him. He noted with interest that Flaubert was an aesthetician, and this could have been inspirational, but on account of Flaubert’s formalism the differences between the two writers were greater than their commonalities. In general, Wolfe kept his distance from the French masters.2 On an everyday level, his lack of fluency in French caused him immeasurable difficulties in accessing French culture, where proficiency in English was a rare gift. In Of Time and the River, he mocked the plays composed in 2

For his wide reading experience see e.g. Wolfe’s Notebooks.

292 Bettina Thurner Prof. Hatcher’s class (the figure in his novel based on the then famous Prof. Baker), which are set in little French cafés. Prof. Hatcher is presented as playing the role of “the cultured man of the world” (Of Time 159), his students felt a calling to be his disciples, all too readily adopting his ‘distinguished tone’ instead of creating their own stories. An intricate part of this “cosmopolitan” stance was to have a good command of French. Speaking French meant being “travelled, urbane, sophisticated and assured” (Of Time 160) – to know French was to know the world, as Prof. Hatcher assured his students. Wolfe’s French was so poor he even failed the proficiency exam at Harvard. Even so, this deficiency became a secret strength: it was the hallmark of his authenticity, to return to Taylor, the thing that would purge his writing from the mannerisms of lesser authors. It was not about his aptitude for the French language, because he would never devote himself to learning any language well (his German was rudimentary although he admired his ancestors’ culture), because completeness in a second language would be sure to lead to “mis-recognition” (Taylor 25f), to cultural misunderstanding. Nevertheless – or maybe because of this – Wolfe adamantly resolved to go to Paris in 1924. (He was to return there in 1928.) In spite of his resistance to a faux-Frenchness, he was not immune to the orthodoxy that, for an artist, Paris was the place to be. Another attraction of the capital was its affordability. Wolfe was not of independent means and he was dependent on his parsimonious mother, whose modest income came from her boarding house in Asheville, N.C. In July 1924 his friend Jack Withrow had told him how cheaply he had lived for a year in Paris. Wolfe followed in the footsteps of so many American artists at that time, hoping not only to find artistic inspiration, but also a living without a day job. In The Autobiography of an American Novelist Wolfe recalled his expectations concerning Paris: I had come to Paris … filled with all the romantic faith and foolishness which many young men at that time felt when they saw Paris. I had come there that first time, so I told myself, to work, and so strong and glamorous was the magic name of Paris, the fascination it exerted over our imaginations at that time, that I really thought one could work far better in Paris than anywhere on earth … (26)

In his monumental 600 page novel Of Time and the River (whittled down by Max Perkins when it was published in 1935), Paris is not the centrepiece, but plays an important role. The picture Wolfe presents us of the French capital is indeed ambivalent, with two forces that are destined to clash. The first of these is embodied by the protagonist Eugene Gant. His Paris is profuse with impressions and, interestingly enough, flashbacks to his pre-notions of the capital (“I had thought it would be…”). The second force is that of the Pari-

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sian-American expats, as represented by Francis Starwick and his two friends Elinor and Ann. Through Eugene Gant’s figure Wolfe is writing literature from within. His perceptions come from a deep well of internalization and thus Eugene does not merely reflect, but converts the diffuse and myriad tributaries of thought and feeling into prose that at once articulates but remains magically inarticulate. This mapping of the internal is Wolfe’s great achievement as a writer, and the one Faulkner was referring to when he said he ranked Wolfe first amongst the young American writers, because ”he tried the hardest” (Gwynn 206). It is the art of a man who practised isolation and turned it into art, so that his was not a dialogue of social life, but a kind of listening, where Wolfe turned his ear and pen to the most subtle tremors of our interior being: his model of course was himself and his sensitivities were excruciatingly reactive to the world, to Paris in the Twenties or elsewhere. In the contrasted writing that brings Starwick, Elinor or Ann to the page, Wolfe composed prose of the external sphere. Here he played out his strengths as a Balzacian recorder, and a sometimes witty master of detail. His technique relies on his choice of what was being presented. He does not waste his readers’ time on the obvious, but tilts his glass of reality so that through it we see those details we would otherwise miss. They make up the Wolfean outside, a profuse but original catalogue that has the capacity to delight; it is this side of Wolfe that is most felicitous to read. Wolfe considers the expats to be people on the surface, theirs is a world that meets the eye. But the author does not descend to clichés about how Eugene Gant feels and the expats do not feel: he does punish their superficiality but writes beautifully of it, gathering those details that only an artist can see. Wolfe puts America and France in explicit contrast, including what he saw as ordinary life. His expats are out at night and their nuits are full of decadence; they dwell inordinately upon the tourist attractions, which are conveyed in notebook entries inserted into the novel. Wolfe’s disillusionment with Paris, starting with his stolen suitcase, and his inability to communicate or write extended his period of lonesomeness, during which he appeared only to meet waiters or taxi-drivers, who, it seems, were constantly cheating him. This fruitless time ended, however, when he accidentally met up with Kenneth Raisbeck, Prof. Baker’s assistant at Harvard, a fluent French speaker. His time with Raisbeck found its way into Of Time and the River in the largest way possible: Kenneth Raisbeck was Francis Starwick. Raisbeck and Wolfe roamed Paris, sometimes like tourists, sometimes like explorers, with the fellow Harvardian initiating Wolfe into the real Paris of the expatriates he would otherwise hardly have seen. Raisbeck was of crucial importance for Wolfe’s sharpened view on Americans

294 Bettina Thurner abroad, and without him there would be little depth to the Wolfean account. Raisbeck’s French was a key to the city. After some time, though, Wolfe wearied of Kenneth’s leisure-class life, and unable to escape his mother’s stinginess, realized he was spending too much time and money on a hedonistic life-style, worse still an unproductive one. Again, he began to project his frustrations onto the French, however unjustly. He assigned them qualities of mendacity and covetousness. He carried his arguments into the political arena too, rebelling against the depiction of his native country in the press as “a money lender and a usurer” (Letters to Mother 94). He reversed the French image of the U.S. as a nation of materialists and projected these very attributes back onto the French. Nonetheless Wolfe’s sojourns in Paris were of crucial importance for the formation of his artistic and even American consciousness. Despite his critical stance towards France and its culture, he owed much to it. He only saw what it meant for him to be American through the Gallic lens. In Of Time and the River he was in denial about this profound debt, though it shines from every page. Wolfe’s treatment of Paris is not extensive. That in itself is not remarkable; not even the Lost Generation viewed the metropolis as their major theme. Paris was meant to inspire, not, metaphorically speaking, to be the typewriter that wrote itself. Wolfe did not depict the concrete surroundings, but played off his preconceptions of Paris against their reality. He charted inner conflicts and his growing suspicion of the image of the “city of art and love,” thereby deconstructing the myth of the French as the prototype of a cultured people. Their art became a sterile “world of print” (Of Time 752), and love exists only in sexual terms. The expats are not so much Americans but figures firmly situated in the construct “Paris.” Wolfe criticized their failure to recognize their national roots; they denied their “American-ness” adopting what they imagined to be the positions of their new cultural surroundings: “They become more ‘Flauberty’ than Flaubert” (Autobiography 6). Their lack of authenticity was obvious, their national identity only stemming from their formal education: “Then there is another kind of American who has come from the more educated, university-going kind of people, and these people also become fascinated with the glamor and the remoteness and difficulty of writing but in a different way. They get more involved or fancy than the most involved and fancy European people of this sort” (Autobiography 6). Wolfe clearly distanced himself from what he considered a common misconception – especially among the Americans of his day – of the elitist position of the artist in society. This ‘warts and all’ tone in Wolfe has endeared him to latter-day disillusionists of all persuasions and indeed the renaissance

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of his work (Of Time and the River came out in the Penguin Modern classics series in 1984) is not only about his writing but his almost post-modern debunking of the myths. With The Autobiography of an American Novelist as a sub-text, the Paris chapters in Of Time and the River are self-dismantling, positioning themselves in symbolic resistance to the preponderance of France in the realm of literature and culture. The narrative voice clearly evinces a distance to the people and places narrated; it debunks the myth of Paris as the “place to write,” the “place where the very air was impregnated with the energies of art; where the artist was bound to find a more fortunate and happy life than he could possibly find in America” (Autobiography 26). As it turned out, Paris was rather the place to live out the sensual desires he had to restrain in Puritan, Prohibitionist America. The Paris Wolfe created reads like the projection of a Puritan consciousness onto the cité and serves mainly to expose a Lost Generation in the process of losing its authenticity, an authenticity Wolfe considered to be the cornerstone of true writing. The Lost Generation was merely lost in Paris rather than in America: [W]hat many of us were doing in those years when we fled from our own country and sought refuge abroad was not really looking for a place to work, but looking for a place where we could escape from work; that what we were really fleeing from in those years was not the Philistinism, the materialism, and ugliness in American life ... but from the necessity ... of finding in ourselves, somehow, the stuff to live by, to get from our own lives and or own experience the substance and material of our art ... (Autobiography 26f)

In the novel, the introductory passages to French culture testify to Wolfe’s obsession with the process of writing and reading. Wolfe took a “linguistic turn” presenting not so much his concrete experiences in France, but the linguistic deficiencies he had to cope with and the fact that he remained an outsider. In spite of Raisbeck’s input, Paris is out of Wolfe’s reach, and this is obvious from the very beginning of the French chapters in his international narrative. He introduces a list of French names that are lifeless and abstract – “their names were only names and names and names – and nothing more” (Of Time 751). Here, Wolfe raised the question of the (im)possibility of language capturing the world in its particularity, or the human in his or her individuality. Paris is a pure abstraction. He “knows” the names associated with its culture but is not able to understand them, they remain legends – vague, phantasmagorical, strange, and out of grasp. He tries to differentiate and individualize them but “all of them seemed to come from the same place, to have the same quality, to evoke the same perfume” (Of Time 752). They

296 Bettina Thurner remain at a distance, looming as “vague and shadowy figures of a charming, beautiful, and legendary kind of life” (752). Pages are thus filled with ‘wordworlds’ rather than reality, and Wolfe inflates his French chapter with segments from his notebooks, in which he tried to write down and thereby lend an everyday patina to his Paris, but as such it remains a system of empty signs. His efforts to read some of the French texts become a “savage struggle with an alien tongue” (Of Time 752). His experience with the ‘world of print’ became analogous to his experience with French reality. In this process of signification the city is filtered through the legend. French culture and life are elusive, he can only grasp the static, never changing, already familiar signposts like the Latin Quarter or the bridges of the Seine. He thus clearly separates “tourist attractions (‘Culture’) from mundane continuous life (anthropological ‘culture’)” (Buzard, “Continent” 31). Belles Lettres take up a large part of Wolfe’s “Culture.” He was obsessed with imagining how the French writers’ artistic work got done with grace and ease, and reluctantly gave credence to the hyper-myth of bohemian casualness, implicitly mocking his own loneliness and struggle to read and write. For Wolfe, to whom writing was an existential necessity and who yearned to achieve recognition for himself, as well as for his native country, his sojourn in Paris was an exquisite agony. His fragmentary knowledge of French, his own struggle to write a grand national narrative while cut off from the States, as much as his frustration about unproductive times in the cafés of Paris with Raisbeck and Co. thus generated an enviously cynical yet secretly admiring view of the stereotypical French writer, who by the fortunate accident of race and birth ... had somehow been constituted an artist who could do all things gracefully and well, and could do nothing wrong. Favoured at birth by the great inheritance of their language, blood, and temperament, they grew up as children of a beautiful, strange, and legendary civilization whose very tongue was a guarantee of style, whose very tradition an assurance of form. (Of Time 753)

A ‘Southern’ class-conscious suspicion of artists is written into the distrustful, satirical portraits of French artists, on the contrary Wolfe hoped to secure his position among “the laboring, farming sort of people from which [he] came” (Autobiography 5). Like the cities in the Northern U.S., Paris asked too much of Wolfe. He lacked the strategies to impose some kind of structure on the cultural chaos. In his notebooks he wrote of Paris: “For the first time in several years I am faced with an utter suspension of all my faculties. ... a terrible and devastating impotence has possessed me these past two days – life is passing me by which I am unable to grasp but superficially” (Notebooks I, 44).

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Writing this “foreign” Paris culture entailed the construction of America “through a process of ‘Othering,’ whereby the ‘self’ is defined in relation to the characteristics of an ‘Other’ culture” (Crang 59f). Sophisticated Paris is opposed to the wilderness of America: “And far, far away from all this certain grace, this ease of form, this assured attaining of expression – there lay America ... its unfound form, its unborn art.” (Of Time 755) After rebelling against the seductive powers of France, Wolfe became more and more its secret lover. He resurrected and refreshed the New World myth of old Europe as the land of form and culture, one which would lead to the recognition of his own otherness. Wolfe drew up a list of cultural differences: America meant chaos, the prosaic, the commonplace, and was the origin of his bitter loneliness; France was order, form, poetry, and culture. Despite the obvious virtues he was now attributing to France, it was about the States, too; his newfound acknowledgement kick-started a deeper understanding of his own land, an America he identified with, despite its “cruelty, savagery, horror, error, loss and waste of life, its murderous criminality, and its hypocritical mask of virtue, its lies, its horrible falseness, and its murderous closure of a telling tongue” (Of Time 756). He felt a nagging desire to return. During his latter period in Paris he turned inward, becoming absorbed with his own cultural self, preoccupied with his hunger, despair and desire to return or, rather, create a home in writing. Suddenly his Faustian desires about reaching out to France seemed futile.3 He wanted to absorb Paris, longing to make it part of his identity; he wanted “to compact the accumulated experience of eternity into the little prism of his flesh, the small tenement of his brain, and somehow to use it all for one final, perfect, all-inclusive work” (756). The impressions that impinged upon his artistic complexion were so multifarious that he needed some kind of intellectual support mechanism, in spite of his almost total-recall memory. With the help of a notebook, he hoped to impose order on his unstructured impressions and set out to produce a narrative construct of Paris as he lived it day by day. He tried to master its foreignness by transforming it into a set of familiar signs, thereby indulging in a process of signification. He did the museums and listed names of works of art, but his “culture shopping” soon frustrated him and he remarked, as stereotypically as a Texan tourist or a Mark Twain in Italy: “Louvre – most of it worthless old rubbish” (Of Time 763). 3

Watching the production of Faust at the Viennese Burgtheater in 1928, Wolfe realized that “Faust’s problem touches me more than Hamlet’s – his problem is mine, it is the problem of modern life” (Notebooks I, 25). “Book II” in Of Time and the River is dedicated to the protagonist’s ambitions and is called “Young Faustus.” Wolfe critics have adopted this view and tended to refer to Wolfe’s aspirations as Faustian.

298 Bettina Thurner In contrast to many members of the Lost Generation, Wolfe began to throw affirmative glances at America during his first stay in Europe, resurrecting the contentious myth of American innocence (as opposed to European “experience”): In New York the opportunities for learning, and acquiring a culture that shall not come out of the ruins, but belong to life, are probably greater than anywhere else in the world. This is because America is young and rich and comparatively unencumbered by bad things. Tradition, which saves what is good and great in Europe, also saves what is poor, so that one wades through miles of junk to come to a great thing. (Of Time 765)

His experiences made Wolfe subsume Frenchness under the label of the “Latins.” He could not detect any signs of their alleged romanticism, and for him this attribute was just a “great myth” (Of Time 768), although surely his own upbringing in small-town U.S. left him without the apparatus to sense it. American expatriates were inclined to consider the French culturally superior, simply because they were different, Wolfe surmised. They were different because, geographically, they were the first station on a journey eastwards. He started to imagine that other expatriate boroughs might be better – in pursuit of variety and difference, Americans went to Paris whereas cities like London, Vienna, or Munich might have more to offer. He even extolled New York as a place of exile. Writers ignorantly followed the call to Paris since there “[i]t is easier for a writer to secure a reputation” (Of Time 769). It was the nearest of the exotic places, it was a destination whose choosing required no thought, a cliché whose name rang a bell to the untraveled back home. Wolfe was struggling not to admit that Paris was the most enrapturing city he had seen, a font of European depth and style, which made his previous city of dreams (Boston) look like a village. In his search to discover the “authentic” American voice and see its vastly different identity from the Parisian vantage point, he was nevertheless hugely critical of the States, and this legitimized Wolfe’s catcalls about life in Paris: he was simply at variance with the entire world as he knew it. He lambasted the continuing tendency of Americans to define themselves through Europe (as Emerson had done about 90 years before): “Instead of whining that we have no traditions, or that we must learn by keeping constantly in touch with European models, or by keeping away from them, we should get busy telling some of the stories about America that have never been told” (Of Time 766). America is inclined to recognize elements of its culture only after their recognition by Europe, Wolfe maintains: “We have had niggers for 300 years living all over the place,” but recognized them as a serious part of American culture only “when the French discovered for us how interesting they are” (Of Time 766). Wolfe is thoroughly aware of the problem of misrecognition,

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due to the alleged lack of an authentic American culture, whose complexity and multi-facetedness for him took on all its clearest shape in the context of the “horrible monotony of the French” (Of Time 768). In the end, Wolfe’s presentation of everyday Paris re-appropriated the cityscape the expatriates had created, presenting it not as a site of intellectual inspiration but rather as a locus of self-destruction. Wolfe painted glimpses of Parisian night life which have a strongly erotic bias: bars, alcohol, and prostitutes created an image of French levity and lasciviousness. In his relationship to women he was as neurotic as Proust or Toulouse-Lautrec. He not only observed the prostitutes but availed himself of their services, and like others before him was fascinated by the promise of the filles de joies not only of sensuality but pretended warmth. In thinking of his prudish audience at home, Eugene in Of Time and the River is presented as an observer of the courtesans and never their client, thereby maintaining the myth of American innocence versus French decadence. Gant sees Paris but does not get close to it; he “knows” Paris by capturing its cultural signs and making mental photographs. Besides the static tourist attractions, he experiences the metropolis in full measure, but its noisy traffic, hectic people and webs of narrow streets do not energize, they depress him. For Wolfe, Parisian bustling street life echoed a previous literary gestation, his nine-month experience of New York City. While he celebrated the variety of urban scenery and was striving for inclusion, he gradually leant more and more towards his abiding artistic stance, that of selective exclusion: “Never have the manyness and the much-ness of things caused me such trouble as in the past six months. But never have I had so firm a conviction that our lives can live upon only a few things, that we must find them, and begin to build our fences. All creation is the building of a fence... But ... never an end to curiosity!” (Of Time 777). His ‘Faustian hunger’ to know it all in France was abandoned after a time. Reviewing European writers, he suspected that you need not be a genius to create great literature but simply have to possess abilities of control: “The European temper is one that has learned control – that is, it has learned indifference – Each man writes his own book without worrying very much about what the other has written” (Of Time 774). Thus while rejecting American inclinations to relate its culture to Europe, he himself was haunted by comparisons. Yet he continued to call for originality or authenticity and was critical of snobbish quotations that earned the label “Culture.” He was convinced, though, that his European experience had to be remembered, narrated and integrated into the American fabric: “I must mix it all with myself and with

300 Bettina Thurner America” (Of Time 777).4 By and by, Wolfe no longer felt bound to dichotomy, but suspended la différence in the name of unity, in the name of common human experience. Historically Wolfe was fortunate to have the expatriate culture to examine, since without it his Paris would have lacked crucial ingredients. Starwick, the writer who will never make it, represents the American aesthete in Paris, an unofficial member of the Lost Generation and offspring of those Harvard notables Malcolm Cowley described in Exile’s Return as having “good taste, good manners, cleanliness, chastity, gentlemanliness (or niceness), reticence and the spirit of competition in sports; they are virtues often prized by a leisure class” (34). The glorification of European cities was part of this education. America was devoid of such an aura: “[G]lamour belonged only to Paris or Vienna and ... glory was confined to the dim past” (28). If the “boys from very good Back Bay families would fail” to behave according to the Harvard rules, Wolfe had all the more difficulties with the code, – he was not only a Southerner but a hillbilly to boot. He was originally glad to find the support of the cultivated, slightly older Raisbeck and was ready to overlook his eccentricities, just as Raisbeck adopted the ungainly young Wolfe for his talent and mind. Wolfe’s presentation of Francis Starwick, based on Raisbeck, evinces a blending of present and past experience. While his former impression of Raisbeck in America had been coloured by gratitude and admiration, his later discovery of the “dark sides” of this character changed his benign view. This ambiguity informs the portrait of Starwick as the American expat in Paris. A suspension of disbelief is achieved when the reader sees the world through Starwick’s eyes: Eugene Gant’s (i.e. Wolfe’s own) revisionist attitudes are to be resoundingly discredited. Here we see the native intelligence of Wolfe the Writer – he is as critical of himself as he is of anything else. At any rate there are two irreconcilable strands: the mythic, enchanted vision of Starwick/Raisbeck’s Paris collides with Eugene’s/Wolfe’s inner (Puritan) resistance to a leisurely life on the Left Bank. Wolfe’s underlying theme is that however sophisticated an expat might be (and Raisbeck is one of the most sophisticated), all the interest in French “culture” is only for show. First and foremost his compatriots were out to enjoy themselves. When the novel’s Eugene Gant meets Starwick in Paris on New Year’s Eve 1924, the former is impressed by how casually Starwick fits into or rather ‘appropriates’ the culturescape of the Louvre: “Even in this foreign 4

Cf. Porter in Haunted Journeys about the problems of writers to convey an account “adequate to the reputation of a hallowed site. ... he will be ...having to add something new and recognizably his own to the accumulated testimony of his predecessors. To the anxiety of travel itself is added the anxiety of travel writing” (12).

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scene he seemed to take possession of his surroundings with a lordly air” (Of Time 778). Eugene had struggled to achieve just this but desperately failed. He would continue to be the outsider. Starwick’s statements resound with imperialist tones, as if he were saying ‘I the Harvardian assume this posture, any posture’. Eugene’s failure to communicate with the French becomes a liberating gesture to the Other, freeing the foreign culture from his approval and New World condescension. Nevertheless, compared to the people streaming out of the museum, Starwick is ascribed something that everyone, French or otherwise, lacks, an ambivalently admirable and quasi-aristocratic charisma. The supposedly cultivated French are uncontrolled, if not boorish, beside the detached Francis Starwick. Even the monumental background of the Louvre only serves to support “the glamorous personality of Francis Starwick” (Of Time 779). He is presented as having adopted the very noble culture of stasis and order which the European scene, as an objective correlate, is notable for. The notion of power looms large in these cultural interactions. The French look is “common, shabby and drearily prosaic by comparison” (Of Time 779). Starwick’s noble calmness contrasts with the French “incessant, hot sugar of that energy which drives the race and which, with its unvaried repetition of oaths, ejaculations, denials, affirmations, and exactitudes, [was] lavished at every minute upon the most trivial episodes of life” (779). The French appear as “chubby, ruddy figure[s]” clumsily clothed while other Americans visiting the Louvre are superficial tourists. Nobody is capable of standing up to the cultivated scene except Starwick: “All of these people, young and old, French, American, or of whatever nationality, looked dreary, dull and common, and uneasily out of place when compared with Starwick” (Of Time 780). He appears mysterious and unearthly, like “Lazarus returned from the tomb” (780). Starwick manages to impose order on chaos, and “this unfamiliar world, in whose alien life he [i.e. Eugene Gant] had struggled like a drowning swimmer, became in a moment wonderful and good” (Of Time 781). Although he has felt homeless and rootless, now he seems to be an integral part of life; Starwick initiates him into a different Paris (which actually mirrors Starwick’s own personality and will later be responsible for their final breach): “Even the strange dark faces of the French ... no longer seemed strange, but friendly and familiar, and the moist and languorous air, the soft thick greyness of the skies which had seemed ... to permeate his houseless soul ... were now impregnated with all the vital energies of living” (Of Time 781). He now envisions Paris filtered through his mythic vision and suddenly the chaos and unbearable noise turn into “the enormous dynamic murmur of

302 Bettina Thurner the mysterious city [that] stirred his entrails with the sensual premonitions of unknown, glamorous and seductive pleasure” (Of Time 782). Now that Starwick is here, he can identify with the city; it becomes part of him, gaining “an enormous enhancement and enchantment” (782). Eugene recognizes the mythic Paris in the figure of Francis. The city has become part of the latter’s identity. They roam Paris in a kind of Bloomsday, enjoying its shady night life, looking to all intents like American tourists, hiding their non-conformity. The unfamiliar thus made familiar, Eugene can now project his sensibilité onto the city, not only feeling part of it, but as if he had taken possession of place and time: “[A]ll the magic life of strange million-footed Paris belonged to them, ... and they knew that they were young and that they would never die, that it was New Year’s Eve in Paris, and that that magic city had been created for them” (Of Time 782f). But soon the intoxication fades and Eugene’s real Paris replaces the city of theatricality. The glamorously mystic turns into a mysterious “labyrinth of crooked alley-ways” (Of Time 783), the city is streaked with a profound sense of evil and rottenness. The waiters, having been referred to as “nos frères ... les honnêtes hommes – les ouvriers”, at the beginning of the evening, turn into “sullen evil-visaged men ... [who] gave them with a slimy hand cheap vile cognac in greasy little glasses” (783). Their hedonistic lifestyle reduces the young American’s large funds of 400 francs to less than 50. Venal pleasure, corruption, and hypocrisy replace the early evening mythic vision of the capitale. As soon as the two nocturnal wanderers enter Starwick’s studio, they are in a different world – “all the city was shut out” (Of Time 785). The magic fades, sobering reality dawns, again “life looked black and ugly” and Eugene retires to sleep it off. When he awakes, two dissimilar women (again based on real-life models) have entered the studio: the one – Elinor – gay, light, out-going and mature, at least thirty, who “made him feel instantly at home”; the other Ann, seemingly younger, taciturn and awkward, “a big dark-haired New England sort of girl; she wore dark, drab, rusty-looking clothes, and her face had a sullen, almost heavy cast to it” (785). In the course of the following weeks Eugene leads “a fine life” (Of Time 786), the narrative voice assures us. The story unravels while relating what the “fine life” means to Eugene Gant. He regularly meets Starwick and his female friends for lunch, enjoying the culinary pleasures on offer. Elinor turns out to be their guide. Her character is moulded to represent the stereotype of the expat. She had been an ambulance driver in the Great War and knows Paris inside out. She knows what it offers for the best price. She is one of Wolfe’s mother figures, directing her American friends through the “jungle” of the megalopolis. Her “attitude to [the French] was very much the

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manner of a mature and sophisticated person with a race of clamouring children” (Of Time 788). While maturity becomes her, her sophistication conceals a smugness and feeling of superiority. She dismisses the attempts of a restaurantier to welcome the Americans in English with near-colonialist condescension. While Eugene is grateful to be in the expatriate clique, Wolfe’s suspicion about their sophistication shines through every line. As an ironical take on the “primitivist” approach, he has Starwick compare the gestures of the waiter to a painting of the Gothic painter Cimabue of Florence, affecting to see the “centuries of living and tradition that have gone into a single gesture” made by the jovial restaurantier (Of Time 788). Aware that Eugene is ignorant of this cultural discourse, Starwick’s companion Elinor calms him down, in quite a blasé manner: “[Y]ou poor child! ... After all, there’s no reason why you should have to go through all this” (Of Time 789). Eugene learns that Elinor had left her husband and four-year-old child in Boston for the “pursuit of happiness”. The satirical narrative voice assures the reader that “[e]veryone was being very brave and gallant and stopping at nothing, and the French were charming, charming, and Paris gave them just the background that they needed. It was a fine life” (Of Time 789). At a safe distance to Puritan America, these expatriates lived out their desires, and the lascivious environment of Paris provided a suitable backdrop. In a typological reading, Paris thus becomes a modernised Garden of Eden where eating the forbidden fruit does not mean expulsion, but inclusion or initiation; Elinor represents the modern Eve and Starwick falls prey to her delightedly.5 In a way, these expats ‘colonise’ Paris and exert (tourist) power on their host. Elinor is very much aware of the European dependence on foreign currency and behaves “’like a great cat playing with a mouse’” (Of Time 790). As the leader of the crew she is the agent, the others her applauding audience. Yet Elinor is presented with ironic ambiguity. Her view of the French as insane – “’but then, that’s the way the poor dears are, and you can’t change them. ... we’ve simply got to make the best of it’” (790) – says less about the French than about her own ignorance. She takes a compassionate stance towards Eugene, the unsophisticated enfant from the provincial South, and the sophisticated circle never tires of making patronizing comments about him. They especially like to make fun of Eugene’s broken French – for the logomaniac Wolfe a constant source of aggression. Harping on Gant’s lack of French they indulge in a metalinguistic discourse on the refinement of the French language with which “’even in the

5

See, for instance, their excursions to the Parisian surroundings, which are guided by Elinor, “the captain.” (Of Time chapters 83 or 85.)

304 Bettina Thurner simplest words they manage to get the whole spirit of the race’” (Of Time 795). For the trio, ignorance of the language means ignorance of French culture. Their parochial vision prevents them from recognizing how narrow their view has become. They feel they are on a cultural mission, and knowledge of French grants them automatic access to that culture. In the formalist manner of a New Critic, Starwick asks Eugene not to search for the meaning of French culture because it simply “’is, you know’” (Of Time 796), implying that behind French names of cities, for instance, lie many hundred years of history – “’it gives you the whole place, its life, its people, its peculiar fragrance“ (Of Time 798) – in contrast to the U.S., where names are without a past. At first sight the expatriate studio in Paris is a microcosm of the American artistic colony, replete with serious intentions. At length, though, it turns out that it is nothing more than a cottage factory for the untrammelled production of pleasure. Art is replaced by what touches the skin: a similar elimination of the creative comes down to us, too, in Wolfe’s picture of Montmartre. The pleasure-hunting circle steers clear of Montparnasse, the site of exchange in the 1920s for artists like Hemingway, Joyce, Matisse, Kandinsky or Chagall, instead they gravitate towards their own quartier de plaisir. The gilded place is “close and hot, full of gilt and glitter, heavy with that unwholesome and seductive fragrance of the night that comes from perfumery, wine, brandy and the erotic intoxication of a night-time pleasure place” (Of Time 800). Unable to penetrate French culture, Eugene is forced by his companion Starwick to understand it in solely sensual terms. They continue to spend their days drinking and discussing in cafés, “and with the gaiety of life and voices of people all around them, the pageant of life that passed for ever on the street before them – all that priceless, rare, and uncostly pleasure and excitement of café life which seemed unbelievable and magical to these two young Americans” (Of Time 806). They seem intoxicated with the heavy odours of Paris – “at once corrupt and sensual, subtle and obscene” (806). After some time, however, Eugene undergoes an inner labour-leisure conflict. His hunger for creativity resurges. He recalls his cultural heritage, remembering “the old feelings of naked homelessness, ... the nameless sense of shame and guilt which an American feels at a life of indolence and pleasure, which is part of the very chemistry of his blood, and which he can never root out of him” (Of Time 807). What is more, neither the leisure-class attitude of his American compatriots nor the “strange dull faces of the Frenchmen, the strange and alien life of this magic city which was so seductive but so unalterably foreign to all that

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he had ever known” (Of Time 807) are compatible with his true mission – to write and thus create a home for himself. He means to initiate a discussion with Starwick, his fellow-American, about feeling out of place in Paris. Starwick, offspring of Harvard’s leisureclass education, feels pretty much at home in Paris but not at all in Puritan America. He assures Gant he is not a foreigner in Paris because “‘[y]ou can only be foreign in a place that is foreign to you. This place is not’” (Of Time 808). He does not believe in national character but rather in “elective affinities:” “‘I am an American only by the accident of birth; by spirit, temperament, inclination, I have always been a European’” (808). Soon it turns out, though, that he does not feel at home with the real city but rather with his image of a Paris that “’belongs to the world – to Europe – more than it belongs to France. One does not come here because he wants to know the French: he comes because he can find here the most pleasant, graceful and civilized life on earth’” (Of Time 809). Gradually Eugene realizes that Starwick’s easy behaviour has developed out of frustration with his writing; while pretending to live a satisfactory life, he actually feels “resignation, despair, and growing inertia and apathy of his will” (Of Time 812). He thus lives contrary to his professed ideal, appropriating an image which does not correspond to what Taylor would call an “authentic” self. Yoked under the “tyranny of pleasure” Starwick seems “completely enslaved by this senseless and furious quest, this frantic seeking after new sensations, this hopeless pursuit of a happiness, a fulfilment, that they never found” (Of Time 812). In 1989 the late Richard S. Kennedy oversaw the publication from Wolfe’s estate of the Starwick Episodes, an original part of Of Time and the River. This booklet sheds further light on the characters of Starwick and Eugene and their contrasting approach to France. In the chapters of the Starwick Episodes, Starwick and Eugene emerge more distinctly as opposite poles, much more so than in the novel. The passages omitted from Of Time disclose Starwick’s eclecticism. He follows in the tracks of George Moore, the Irish novelist who revealed his personal life and career in his autobiographical Confessions of a Young Man (1888). While pretending to sense a joie de vivre, Starwick’s behaviour is puppet-like, according to this part of the Urtext. His lack of authenticity makes him thoroughly superficial, destined to live his life without attaining individuality or real creativity.6 He poses as a Wildean enfant terrible and eccentric, anti-bourgeois dandy, a world-weary aesthete who stands above “all those swarthy squatting French” (Starwick 55) and, in contrast to the French bourgeoisie, does not 6

See for instance The Starwick Episodes 61.

306 Bettina Thurner need to stand in awe before “the picture of Dr. So-and so” (Starwick 55). Real life is of no great interest, it is the “‘bouillabaisse’” (Starwick 56); the trifles of everyday life exist only “as elements in a sensuous and graceful pattern: a design of movement, balance, mass and color, of light and shade, of foreshortenings and perspectives – a work of art, in short, created exclusively for their own delight, and able to be appreciated only by themselves, and a few of their rare and distinguished companions” (Starwick 56). In contrast to Eugene’s voraciousness concerning books and life, Starwick lives in a closed system of sophisticated exclusion. Eugene’s penchant for everyday matters and the concrete is implicitly criticized by Starwick’s favouring of the academic and aristocratic – just like his model George Moore, who solely reads the symbolists and does “everything gracefully and elegantly. This was Frank’s practice and philosophy, as well” (Starwick 56). While throughout the novel, Starwick appears as a guiding figure for the inexperienced Eugene, his lack of an identity is the dominant theme of the Starwick Episodes showing how Eugene/Wolfe, in spite of their youth, were outgrowing the bon vivant by virtue of their taste for bitter vérité. Starwick’s life was shaped according to Moore’s Confessions, “it had even shaped his conduct, his manner of speech and thought and dress; and now that he was at last in Paris, the effect of this book upon his life and habits was more strikingly apparent than ever before” (Starwick 54). Starwick’s constructed character is the antithesis of Eugene’s “authentic” identity; Starwick is the foil that mirrors the decadent aspects of Paris, while Eugene emerges as the innocent but potent writer. In art, Starwick aptly prefers the world-weary, the ahistorical and ephemeral to Eugene’s Flemish and Dutch painters. Starwick’s character reveals itself in his artistic tastes,7 which in turn show his penchant for form and aestheticism, his preference for art over life. In painting, he prefers Manet, Cézanne, and Aubrey Beardsley to “the lusty sensuality of the great men of the Flemish, Dutch, and German schools” (Starwick 52). The narrator’s suspicion of hermetic aesthetics is ever-present between the lines. While Wolfe’s texts evince traces of the Enlightenment philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ideas that promoted a revival of the myth of earthly paradise, he was in thorough opposition to the fashionable fin-de-siècle mood, which gave rise to a profound cultural pessimism. Wolfe’s beliefs in the superiority of primitive races and individuals are in line with Taylor’s ideas of originality and authenticity. The narrator rejects Starwick’s “idolatrous devotions at this period to what he called ‘the primitives’ ... his devotion to the primitive was the devotion of an exotic and mannered product of 7

In the literary field, his favourites are Oscar Wilde and George Moore. Cf. Starwick 52.

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modern society” as ridiculous or even preposterous (Starwick 53). The narrative voice rather considers “the Germanic races” as “the really great primitive painters” (53). Starwick’s infatuation with primitivism and exoticism reaches a climax when he looks at the common French people (waiters, taxi drivers, restaurantiers) with a “Western gaze”. In a primitivist pose, Starwick considers them a tribal society, conjuring up images of grandeur out of their commonality – something particularly irritating to Wolfe, who was eternally in search for the original, for innocence and authenticity. The narrative voice soon goes on to dismantle the alleged humanist attitude surrounding the Starwickian cult of primitivism and points out that “beneath his affectation of simplicity, naturalness, and warm humanity, there was nothing but the cold and insolent vanity of the self-centered snob” (Starwick 58). Wolfe reveals the vanity that permeated Starwick’s encomiums. Starwick lacks empathy and susceptibility. His surroundings have meaning, only as much as their existence confirms his grand personality. Instead of trying to find access to French culture, he appropriates it and turns it against itself: “The waiter existed, for Starwick, just as Paris, France, and the whole universe was now beginning to exist for him, as a foil by means of which he could advantageously exhibit his romantic personality” (Starwick 58). As we have seen, Wolfe’s image of Paris was marked by high expectations. At first he envisioned it as Harvard and the intellectuals of his day had promoted it: a French capital for the artists of the world, a capital of creativity. However, his everyday experience of what he deemed the “falsity” of the city and his encounters with the community of the American expats, i.e. what he saw as their hypocrisy, dispelled that conception. Forever l’étranger in his own country, his search for place took him from the discomforture of North Carolina to Harvard or New York, then England, France, Germany or Austria without him finding a place approximating to home, where happiness and creativity might conjoin. What Paris taught Wolfe was that he would never belong, neither in France nor in the States: it was his destiny, the price paid for a creative mind, to remain an outsider looking in, or one looking within himself at his own tangle of sensitivities. His bridge to mankind was not Paris, not geography, but his own literary version of his life: through literature he could join with each capital, with each arrondissement, without becoming the burgher, the citizen, the passport holder. The myth of Paris for Wolfe was universal, and it was not about selective meanings in or about the great city, nor about the fate and output of the Lost Generation, but rather about the inherent contradiction between the human equipment needed for the production of art, and that needed for an unremarkable and therefore

308 Bettina Thurner felicitous existence. The two were mutually exclusive. Belonging required a suspension of certain truths, a major revision to that which is authentic. Wolfe felt condemned as an artist of authenticity to never find his capital. He could only write Paris or write the great American novel by being peripheral to them. Wolfe’s outrage at what Paris in the Twenties did not turn out to be, was outrage at the sequestration that was his fate as a writer and a man. Long after his early demise at the age of 38, the new critical acknowledgement that has come late to Thomas Wolfe, and his four novels, are indicative of the sentiments of our age. Predominant in migrant and nomadic experience, in the global village of disconnectedness, are isolation and dissociation and these Wolfean themes populate the amorphous Paris of our time, the creative capital which is everywhere and nowhere.

Works Cited Bradbury, Malcolm. Dangerous Pilgrimages. Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel. London: Penguin, 1995. Buzard, James. “A Continent of Pictures: Reflections on the ‘Europe’ of Nineteenth-Century Tourists.” PMLA 108 (1993): 30-44. Cowley, Malcolm. Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934). New York: Viking, 1951. Crang, Mike. Cultural Geography. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Gwynn, Frederick and Joseph L. Blotner. Faulkner in the University. Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957-1958. Charlottesville, VA: U of VA P, 1959. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1934. Porter, Dennis. Haunted Journeys. Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition.” Multiculturalism. Examining the Politics of Recognition. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. 25-73. Wolfe, Thomas. The Autobiography of an American Novelist. Ed. Leslie Field. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. ——. The Letters of Thomas Wolfe to His Mother. Ed. Hugh C. Holman and Sue F. Ross. Chapel Hill: U of NC P, 1968. ——. Look Homeward, Angel. 1929. London: Penguin, 1984. ——. My Other Loneliness. Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein. Ed. Suzanne Stutman. Chapel Hill: U of NC P, 1983.

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Wolfe, Thomas. The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe. Ed. Richard S. Kennedy and Paschal Reeves. 2 vols. Chapel Hill: U of NC P, 1970. ——. Of Time and the River. 1935. New York: Penguin, 1984. ——. The Starwick Episodes. Ed. Richard S. Kennedy. Baton Rouge and London: LA State UP, 1989.

310 Bettina Thurner

Astrid M. Fellner

“At Last Lost in Paris”: A Canadian View on the Avant-Garde Paris of the 1920s

Introduction: Paris in Canadian Literature Rarely has a time and place so captured the imagination as the Paris of the 1920s. In Canadian literature, John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970) has probably offered the most popular description of expatriate life in Paris and the exploits of the lost generation. In 1928, the young Glassco arrived in Paris from Montreal and spent three wild years in this city. His book is a detailed memoir à clef of his years among the members of the Haute Bohème of those days, including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Kay Boyle. The Paris of the 1920s is also the focus of Morley Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris (1963), a memoir of his summer in Paris in 1929. Callaghan famously knocked out his friend and mentor Hemingway during a friendly boxing match while F. Scott Fitzgerald served as referee. His autobiographical reminiscence gives insight into the novelist’s relationship with the Paris expatriates and his friendships with the leading writers of that day. The Paris of these Canadian writers largely corresponds to the presentation of the Paris of the 1920s in U.S. American literature.1 Clearly in the expatriate writings by North American writers, Paris is not the Paris of the occasional tourist; it is rather the city that bears “an emotional resonance for the foreigner who has settled in” (Pizer 141). There is a level of intimacy between artist and place – Donald Pizer calls it the “Paris moment” (141) – which gave rise to literary creativity. As he states, “[i]t is this engaging and significant interplay between artist, place, and innovative self-reflexive forms that constitutes the most distinctive contribution of expatriate writing to the literary movement we have come to call high modernism” (143). This emotional investment in Paris continues to characterize many Canadian writings. While Francophone Canadian writers still have to fight the stereotype of 1

As Russell Brown states, the narratives by Callaghan and Glassco wrote themselves “into the larger and already-told story of Paris” by U.S. American writers (88). By retelling stories previously constellated around Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, and others, these two Canadian writers, however, reshaped the U.S. American myth of 1920s Paris “by offering an alternative Canadian-in-Paris narrative that inserts [their] presence into a history in which Canadians had previously been invisible” (86).

312 Astrid M. Fellner Quebec being “a cultural province of France” (Parris 431) and therefore often have an ambivalent relationship with Paris, a number of prominent Anglophone writers have found in Paris a setting and source of inspiration for their creative works.2 In fact, many Canadian writers who emerged in the past thirty years have found the experience of expatriation necessary in order to achieve recognition at home. Paris, for instance, has seduced and inspired Mavis Gallant, who moved to Paris in the 1950s and whose short story collection The Other Paris (1956) is populated by alienated expatriates and disillusioned characters in the 1950s whose depictions shatter the illusion of Europe’s most-dreamed-of-city. Similarly, Gallant’s Paris Stories (2002) focuses on expatriates in Paris, and one could say that her Paris stories derive much of their signifying power from the historical avant-garde writings of the Paris of the 1920s. To Nancy Huston, another prominent Anglophone Canadian writer who now resides in Paris, the figure of the expatriate is part of the cultural script of Paris. Paris, according to this Calgary-born writer, is a city that is densely populated with “monolingual impatriates” (26). As Huston explains, impatriates are the opposite of expatriates: they experience cultural stability and have a firm concept of a mother tongue. In Losing North: Musings on Land, Tongue and Self (2002), her self-translation of Nord Perdu (a phrase which in French means to lose the north as on a compass), Huston examines the life and language of cultural exile, describing herself as being divided in two (91). But while the foreignness of the expatriate brings about a double consciousness which might be perceived as painful, it also allows for an “acute awareness of language” (31), offering a privileged position for self-reflection. This sense of double consciousness can also be felt in the work of another contemporary Canadian writer – Gail Scott. Unlike Huston, Scott, however, never became an expatriate. In her novel My Paris (1999), she evokes the Paris of the 1920s and deals with expatriate experiences, but she clearly goes beyond the familiar engagement of the mythic Paris. A Montreal feminist who was born in Ottawa and grew up in a bilingual community in Ontario, Scott, contrary to Huston, does not translate her writings from one language into another. Instead, she “chooses to write in one mixed language that reflects her double consciousness” as an Anglophone writer in Quebec (Simon, Translating Montreal 128, emphasis in the original). Conspicuously, Scott employs the figures of the foreigner and the expatriate to refer to the multilingual realities of Montreal, a city which, following Sherry Simon, can be

2

For a detailed discussion of the difficult relation between Francophone Canadian and Quebec literature, see David Parris’s article “When French-Canadian Literature Freed Itself From the Tutelage of Paris”.

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seen as a “divided city”3. As it turns out, the “Paris moment” in Scott’s texts constitutes more than an affective engagement with Paris as a literary setting. To be precise, Scott uses the image of rive gauche as a vehicle of exploration of feminist Canadian subject positions. It reflects a conscious choice that allows the author to investigate the linguistic identity of Canada, on the one hand, and the marginal position of the female writer, on the other. In My Paris, Scott translates the experience of expatriatism of the Lost Generation in Paris into a postmodern, twentieth-first-century Canadian context. In this paper, I aim to investigate Scott’s translational poetics and politics. I want to show that My Paris is a performative text that not only enacts a dialogic exchange with the Left Bank writers of the 1920s but also revisits Walter Benjamin’s Paris as described in his The Arcades Project. Clearly, My Paris is more than a postmodernist parody of modernist avant-garde practices. This text opens up a space of cultural exchange that, reminiscent of the Paris of the 1920s, self-consciously performs and produces the image of avant-garde Paris in order to reflect back to Canada a fractured and critical image of the many diversities of Montreal.

An Affective In-Between As an English-speaking writer living in Quebec, Scott is both an insider and an outsider in the Francophone culture of Montreal.4 Having aligned herself with French-speaking Quebec writers and publishing in the French periodical Spirale, which she helped co-found, Scott’s writings introduced into Anglophone Canadian literature some techniques of feminist experimental writing 3

4

In Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City, Sherry Simon, an Anglophone Montrealer, stresses that the sensibilities of the “divided city” differ from those of multilingual or cosmopolitan cities, in which there is one dominant language that encompasses other languages. Comparing Montreal with Paris, she says, “I felt this difference starkly during my two years as a student in Paris. There I fell in with the amiable horde of students and travellers who formed their own population in that city. The elemental divide at home was forgotten, and my accent became one among many. […] To be foreign turned out to be a special way of being at home in Paris, a city that took its role as cultural capital seriously” (xiii). In “My Montréal: Notes of an Anglo-Québécois Writer”, Scott explains that as an Anglophone writer she does not feel like she lives in exile in Quebec: “No, not in exile. I have the impression that French language and culture in a sense also belong to me; it is part of my cultural background, makeup. No, I am not in exile; nor the alienating situation of a Kafka, writing in German, in Prague. For in Montréal, it is possible (try visiting some of the partitionist communities) to live (and write) almost totally in English, never reading a Québécois book, never going to a Québécois play or movie, nor even troubling to adequately speak the language of the majority” (5, emphasis in the original).

314 Astrid M. Fellner that were pioneered by Francophone writers in Quebec (Leith, “Quebec” n.p.). “Québécois women,” Scott says, “have found a place from which to write that’s somewhere between speech and writing […] Language is a voice that has more texture than just the content of what it’s saying” (Leith, “Scott” 24). Owing to the close links of Francophone Québécoise feminists with French philosophy and feminist theorists, Quebec woman writers in the English language have produced a body of work quite distinct in some ways from other contemporary English-Canadian fiction. As Leith has stressed, “[s]tylistically, the characteristic of English fiction in Quebec that distinguishes it most readily from much other English-Canadian fiction is its ready use of French language and syntax” (“Quebec” n.p.). As a result of the linguistic complexities of Quebec, feminist Québécois literature is marked by a border consciousness and an awareness of the multiplicity of languages which manifests itself in “[t]ranslation [which] involves straddling the borders between two languages, [and] two ways of organizing reality” (Wheeler 425). The feminist-inspired aesthetics, which has commonly been referred to in Quebec as écriture au féminin, is often “situated on the side of subversion or outright opposition (or both) with regard to patriarchal thought” (Gould xvi-xvii).5 Gail Scott is “one of the foremost avant-garde writers in Canada” (Moyes, “Biography” 234) and she “has become an important figure in the field of anglophone writing in Québec because of her engagement with the question of what it means to live and write ‘in translation’” (Moyes, “Biography” 233). The author herself has commented on the translational quality of her work, stating that “anglophones writing in English in Quebec are writing in an English that’s including French” (Leith, “Scott” 23). Scott’s writing practice is deeply rooted in the multilingual urban space of Montreal, and in her texts she gives voice to the “affective in-between” (Moyes 7) of the historically divided city into an Anglophone West and a Francophone East. As Barbara Godard has stated, “[w]riting between languages has obliged her to invent her very medium, to engage in ‘language-centred’ work on signs as affective and effective relays rather than as cognitive representa5

The concept of écriture au féminin developed in Quebec in the 1970s and 1980s and is a result of the influence of French feminist thought. There is, however, “a particular way in which the French call for an écriture féminine [which] appears to bridge radical feminist theories of women’s difference with a more uniquely Québécois malaise about speaking and writing that stems from their own sense of cultural marginality and otherness” (Gould 3435). Quebec’s écriture au féminin has developed as a political avant-garde writing project. This feminist approach to writing that foregrounded gender in every aspect of language and textuality is characteristic of writers such as France Theoret, Nicole Brossard, and Louky Bersianik. For more details on this feminist experimental writing practice, see Luise von Flotow, “Legacies of Quebec Women’s écriture au féminin: Bilingual Transformances, Translation Politicized Subaltern Versions of the Text of the Street”.

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tions and so to make English vibrate differently with (Latin) rhythms from Quebec” (122). As a result, Scott’s “writing bears traces of French rhythms and syntax” (Moyes, “Biography” 232). The linguistic reality of Montreal encourages a translational writing practice that reflects the author’s feelings of doubleness. In this sense, one can say that Montreal animates a specific Canadian feminist avant-garde, which, while drawing on some techniques of the European historical avant-garde, is grounded in the cultural specificity of Quebec. Deriving its inspiration from the experience of American modernity as it was lived and practised in Paris in the 1920s, Scott likens this experience of modernity to the experience of the Montreal writer, viewing it as “analogous to that of the divided city” (Simon, Translating Montreal 130). Comparing Paris with Montreal, Sherry Simon writes: Paris is the capital of a French-language culture that defines itself powerfully in terms of difference from what is foreign. The étranger is a formidable figure in the French cultural script – a figure whose meanings are shaped against the history of Paris as both a cultural capital and as the capital of a colonial empire. Montreal, on the other hand, is a city of proliferating differences, its centre already defined by competing codes. Because of its history of internal division, Montreal cannot generate the clear-cut distinction between expatrié and impatrié, between foreign and native. As such, the translational texture of Montreal life encourages forms of expression which suspend resolution (Translating Montreal 128).

My Paris hinges upon the expatrié and impatrié divide. The unnamed narrator/protagonist is an Anglo-Québécoise writer in France, who, like the author, experiences a sense of displacement and in-betweenness and lives in constant translation. The book is structured in numbered but undated journal entries. These fragmented fictional diary entries make up the story of this lesbian woman writer who, like Djuna Barnes’s somnambule character Robin Vote, wanders aimlessly through the city. The Paris in Scott’s text appears in “concrete, minute and panoramic detail from the day-to-day perspective of a visiting writer” who observes herself wandering through the city in search of topics for her novel (Chisholm, “Paris” 154). The narrator visits friends, cafés, galleries, and other locations, reads, and comments on her surroundings and herself. Imbued with the ghost of Gertrude Stein, Scott’s text appropriates some of the female experimental techniques inscribed by this modernist writer. The outcome of this engagement with the Paris of the 1920s is a novel with many of the characteristics and peculiarities of the avant-garde poetics that inspired it. Scott’s style and her use of language are certainly one of the most immediately striking aspects of the book. There is a preponderance of sentence fragments relying on gerunds and present participles, which mirror the fragmented sense of experience of the protagonist and intensify the feeling that

316 Astrid M. Fellner the story is pieced together by spontaneous association. Descriptions are often ambiguous and the events rendered are almost opaque to interpretation. The story is rendered in a staccato style evocative of Stein’s prose: “Walking yesterday. Down rue du Bac, Embarkment Street. Across pont Royal. Through jardin des Tuileries. Paris’s heart and best defence. Why defence. Because a garden. Therefore beautiful. Or defence of Cartesian way of thinking. Long straight alleys. Geometric flowers. Copses symmetrical. Every detail. Gesture. Thought out infinitesimally” (MP 15).6 Like Stein, Scott also wants to disrupt language by breaking the sequence of the sentence.7 Drawing attention to the textuality of writing, she consciously employs a language-oriented style in order to foreground the “architectonics of its own construction” (Chisholm, “Paris” 154). Intertextual references to Stein abound in the text. Scott evokes Stein’s Paris France, the anecdotal account of Paris in which Stein combined descriptions of her childhood memories with commentaries on French people and culture. Scott also references Stein’s How to Write, in which the modernist writer famously expressed her opinion on language and style, stating that she favoured verbs rather than nouns. Scott’s narrator, however, rather prefers the form of the gerund that functions as the action noun of the verb. As the narrator explains, “Thinking of Stein’s predilection for predicates. Which predicates – in multiplying – soaking up surroundings. Until mysteriously inflating subject (narrator). Into huge transparent shadow” (MP 29). Towards the end of the book, the narrator comments on her use of grammar: “Strolling. Not noun. But not verb either. I.e. neither excluding. Not caricaturally absorbing other” (MP 129). Scott’s use of the gerund places the novel “in an indefinite, ongoing present, a state of suspension and undecidability” (Simon, Translating Montreal 130). The narrator deliberately wants to create a sense of fluidity. As she comments on her writing practice: “Wanting to stay afloat. To stay out of categories” (MP 91). In order to stress this sense of undecidability, Scott only uses initials to refer to her characters, which has the additional effect of a blurring of the categories of gender and sexuality: “Walk with S along a curved white street. Rue de Varenne or rue du Bac. Hot and sunny” (MP 8). As is well-known, Stein’s experiments with language were deeply rooted in her marginalized position “as a lesbian woman writer who positioned 6

7

All quotations from Scott’s My Paris are taken from the 1999 edition. In the parenthetical citations, the text will be abbreviated to MP. Franziska Gygax has stated that Stein’s distrust in temporal linearity manifests itself in her refusal to employ narrative line. Instead, “she is bound to ‘break the sequence’ and ‘the sentence’” (8, emphasis in the original). In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf said about Mary Carmichael: “First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence” (122).

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herself not outside of patriarchy but inside it, without submitting to its linguistic codes” (Gygax 4). The question, then, as Ravvin puts it, arises as to why Scott adopts an avant-garde position. “If Stein’s motto, put a bit more pugnaciously by Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway, was to abandon dead forms and discover a script appropriate to the new era, what motivates Scott’s experiment?” (176). Ravvin gives the following tentative answer: One answer might lie in Scott’s search for a lesbian poetics – a subject that underwrites nearly every scene in the novel. In the hard, juxtaposed images of women’s clothing, faces, hair and gestures she portrays a hidden life of fantasy and fetishized desire. It may be, too, that in coming to the city of surrealists and Stein, from the frozen province the narrator calls “chez nous”, that she quite simply goes native, immersing herself in Paris’ rich and radical writerly heritage. In doing so – though Scott does not address this directly – the narrator may be describing a Francophone cultural landscape, unfindable at home, which she will transplant from the Luxembourg Gardens and Montparnasse to the somewhat less romantic routes she travels along Rue St-Denis and St-Laurent. (176)

Reducing the complexity of Scott’s text to a description of Scott’s avantgarde practice as a lesbian poetics is, however, limiting, I believe. In fact, Scott’s text offers a criticism of Stein’s sexual/textual politics by showing the ways in which a sexual poetics is also enmeshed in the politics of other identities. As an Anglophone Quebecoise, Scott’s narrator/protagonist is in the peculiar situation of having a dominant majority language as her mother tongue in a province in Canada where it has minority status. To complicate matters, Scott’s narrator is on a six-month stay in Paris, where she is, linguistically, doubly marginalized as her mother tongue is even more in the position of a minority language. Her French carries a Quebecois accent, showing the influence of her English mother tongue and setting her apart from other Francophone people. Consequently, as Moyes puts it, “the writing subject of My Paris is variously Montréalaise, Quebecoise, Anglo-Quebecoise, Canadian and (North) American” (Moyes, “Intertextual Travel” 88). Due to a mistake in the processing of her application for a work visa, she only possesses a tourist visa and is constantly afraid that the police will ask for her papers. As a result, the narrator experiences a strong sense of insecurity, almost paranoia, and has enormous problems finding her place in the new urban surrounding of Paris. Scott calls attention to the multiple layers of linguistically and culturally diverse existences, and she does so by “restor[ing] visibility to translation […] and by placing the French language within the text” (Simon, “Paris Arcades” 148). My Paris is therefore rather a text that tries to “stay out of categories” (MP 91). As such it exposes queer sensibilities that are representative of what Chisholm calls the “new narrative”, an urban genre of experimental writing “that explores and exhibits techniques of ‘narrativity’ in the

318 Astrid M. Fellner act (narrative present) of storytelling” (Chisholm, “Paris” 204, note 2).8 As it becomes clear, Scott’s narrative not only imitates Stein’s prose, but strategically uses it as a model in order to make her point. With its explicit focus on translation and the attempt of the transplantation of the Francophone cultural landscape to the Canadian context, the text engages in a conscious dialogue with the Paris of the 1920s, appropriating the politics and aesthetics of the historical avant-garde and transgressing them through a series of performative practices. The book then returns to the 1920s from the future in order to engage in “multiple acts of subversive translation/transformance” (Sojka 8). These acts of translational performances, as I want to call them, characterize the text’s poetics and politics, giving voice to the logic of in-betweenness, the “affective in-between” that evolves in the space where multiple languages meet.

Translational Performances Across the Comma of Difference The use of performance theory in the analysis of Scott’s novel is useful because it allows me to show in what ways memories of Left Bank Paris are transmitted. Performance, as Richard Schechner has famously stated, is “restored behavior” (36), which means that performance must always be reinvented, the second time, or “the nth time” (37), for it can never be exactly repeated. Performative writing then not only implies an act of doing or redoing, but involves self-consciousness and repetition with difference. Most importantly for my argument, My Paris constitutes an act of translational performance that critically reinvents what is meant by the Paris of the 1920s, that is the “Paris moment” of the Left Bank expatriates, in the moment of the contemporary, which “both carries and reinvents particular performances and moments from the past” (Román 2).9 The act of transfer involved in Scott’s 8

9

Chisholm further defines the genre of the “new narrative” as follows: “The representational function of narrative is supplemented and interrupted by theory-based interrogation of the political economy of writing. Compounding fiction, politics and autobiography, new narrative plots a construction of the ‘self’ by a language-sensitive narrating subject. The subject – invariably ‘queer’ – is a vehicle of awareness of the big-city dweller’s exposure to/seduction by urban commodity life. The ‘self’ that is created in response to this life is a precarious object of desire and exchange” (“Paris” 204, note 2). Román understands “the contemporary as a critical temporality that engages the past without being held captive to it and that instantiates the present without defining a future” (1). Contemporary performances are always “embedded in a historical archive of past performances that help contextualize the work in history. In this way, the contemporary participates in an ongoing dialogue with previously contemporary works now relegated to literary history, the theatrical past, or cultural memory” (12-13).

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translational performance works through doubling and replication, which create a hybrid literary text that revises the modernist illusion of a value-free formalism. Scott’s use of translation differs from the modernist use of translation for aesthetic innovation in that it makes the crossovers of language audible and political, “giving visibility to the French language, making explicit and present the language through which Stein designed and rethought her poetics” (Simon, “Paris” 145). My Paris is a performative text that makes writing its own object/subject. It is “writing as doing”, which “displaces writing as meaning” (Pollock 75, emphasis in the original). Working at the interstices between writing and performance, this text engages in practices of repetition that quote a series of avant-gardists that were influenced by the Paris of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, André Breton, and Djuna Barnes all haunt and leave their marks on the narrator. Performative writing is, however, not “a matter of formal style” (Pollock 75). Instead, as Della Pollock has it, it is a discursive practice that relies on six characteristics. It is evocative, metonymic, subjective, nervous, citational, and consequential (80-96.) My Paris can be said to display all of those qualities. It draws on the avant-garde tradition and experiments with verbal synaesthesia, serving as a translation of the various senses, the written and the visual (Sojka 5). The reader of Scott’s text sees what the narrator sees and feels as the text “moves with, operates alongside, sometimes through, rather than above or beyond, the fluid, contingent, unpredictable, discontinuous rush of (performed) experience” (Pollock 81, emphasis in the original). It revels in metonymy, recognizing “the extent to which writing displaces, even effaces ‘other’ and ‘other-worlds’ with its partial, opaque representations of them, not only revealing truths, meanings, events, ‘objects’, but often obscuring them in the very act of writing” (Pollock 83). Clearly, Scott’s text is subjective in that it performs a relation between the writer and her subject, or what Pollock calls the “subject-self” (86). It is nervous because the story does not settle into a linear course, but moves along restlessly. Most importantly, however, it is citational and consequential. It performs Stein’s Paris, imitating the grand gestures of this modernist writer. It also draws heavily on the influence of Walter Benjamin, the other important mythical presence in the text that allows Scott to foreground her translational performance. Lastly, My Paris operates by a code of reflexive engagement that aims at making a difference. By relying on the Benjaminian notion of translation, Scott uses translation not only for aesthetic purposes but also in order to “express the tensions of a multilingual Montreal” (Simon, “Paris Arcades” 143). In his essay “The Task of the Translator”, Benjamin uses the image of the

320 Astrid M. Fellner arcade in order to explain his views on translation.10 Interpretative translation, following Benjamin, stands like a wall before the original language; literal translation, by contrast, functions like an arcade. As he famously explained: A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade. (“Task of the Translator” 79)

The glass roof of the arcade “allows light to flow through matter, just as the literally translated text is a transparent surface which allows the light of the original to fall onto the new version, creating an interplay of surfaces” (Simon, “Paris” 146). The arcade thus makes the space in-between visible, which otherwise is hidden. My Paris uses the Benjaminian image of the arcade in multiple ways to enact the translational performance of modernist Paris. Crucially, while My Paris is set in Paris and engages in a dialogue with Stein and Benjamin, the presence of Montreal can be felt throughout the text. Montreal is mentioned on only one occasion at the end of the novel (130) but just as the light of the rive gauche falls on to the new version of this text, the light of this Canadian city shines through the new version of Scott’s Paris. To be precise, the referential connection to Montreal is upheld by a performative act of translation that constructs Paris in relation to the city the protagonist has left behind. Montreal is generally referred to through the use of the French expression “chez nous”. This phrase, literally translated as “at our place”, hints at the protagonist’s ambivalent feelings about home. Interestingly, she uses this expression not only to refer to herself in Canada. At one point in the novel, she also uses this phrase to refer to her studio in Paris: “Cops ranks growing thicker. Preventing marches from nearby ministerial buildings. And me from returning. Chez moi” (MP 122). The phrase “chez nous”, it seems, functions like a secret code that like the glass roofs of Parisian arcades constitutes a transparent surface through which Paris is reflected 10

Benjamin’s use of the arcade in this essay precedes his elaborations on the function of the arcade in his Arcades Project. Susan Buck-Moss explains the metaphor of the arcade in the following ways: “The covered shopping arcades of the nineteenth century were Benjamin’s central image because they were the precise material replica of the internal consciousness, or rather, the unconscious of the dreaming collective. All of the errors of bourgeois consciousness could be found there (commodity fetishisms, reification, the world as ‘inwardness’) as well as (in fashion, prostitution, gambling) all of its utopian dreams. Moreover, the arcades were the first international style of modern architecture, hence part of the lived experience of a worldwide, metropolitan generation” (38).

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back to Canada. On another occasion, she uses this secret code when she is sitting in a café: “At next table Frenchman eating with American family. Only men talking. How do you say hello American asking. Then losing interest. Subject changing to cost of social benefits for employees. French companies paying thirty per cent. American not knowing how much chez eux. But thinking not much. Or else woulda noticed. Making note to ask his accountant” (MP 45). Paris and North America are mirror images, but like translations, these images do not reflect back one-to-one images but reveal the (cultural) differences. In order to stress difference in her text and visibly give shape to her translational performance, Scott uses a stylistic device that carries deep cultural meaning: she employs a “comma of difference” (MP 91). The use of this comma, unquestionably, harks back at Stein’s prohibition against commas and draws on Benjamin’s notion of translation.11 While Scott’s text pays homage to Stein’s thinking about language and uses almost no commas in the book, it also takes a critical distance when she deliberately uses a sporadic comma in order to separate French from English phrases. Scott’s comma appears at the precise moment of translation in order to draw self-reflexively the attention to the process of translation: “Comme si de rien n’était, as if nothing happening” (MP 12) or “So we nasalizing pain, bread” (MP 62). She thus imbues this punctuation mark with the ideological burden of functioning like an arcade that connects the divided realities of Montreal. Sherry Simon calls Scott’s comma the “comma of translation” (Translating Montreal 129). As she explains, “the comma is […] a space in-between, a space of blurred categories and undecidability. Here alternatives are suspended, multiple realities come together, [and] differences coexist. This is the space of the act of translation’ (Simon 147-48, emphasis in the original). In “My Montréal: Notes of an Anglo-Québécois Writer,” Scott herself has commented on the political function of the comma when she writes about the complicated relations between Quebec and the rest of Canada. Here Scott takes an American friend on a tour through Montreal and attempts to explain the linguistic realities of the divided city: “Walking east, now, on Ste Catherine, the pont Jacques Cartier in front of us punctuates the horizon in the beginning of its long arc or comma over the river. I have come to think of the 11

As Stein stated, “The comma was just a nuisance. If you got the thing as a whole, the comma kept irritating you all along the line. If you think of a thing as a whole, and the comma keeps sticking out, it gets on your nerves; because, after all, it destroys the reality of the whole. So I got rid more and more of commas. Not because I had any prejudice against commas; but the comma was a stumbling block. When you were conceiving a sentence, the comma stopped you. That is the illustration of the question of grammar and parts of speech, as part of the daily life as we live it” (“How Writing is Written” 441).

322 Astrid M. Fellner comma as representing the cusp of translation; the site of drifting identity” (“My Montréal” 8). Referring to the Jacques Cartier bridge as a punctuation mark, a comma that links and divides two poles and represents the cusp of translation, Scott creates “an imaginative link between the structures of the city and the narratives that envelop them” (Simon, Translating Montreal 126). Scott then uses the encounters between languages creatively in writing, and she does not only live them, but she performs translation in Simon’s broad definition as “writing that is inspired by the encounter with other tongues, including the effects of creative interference” (Simon, Translating Montreal, 17). Scott’s use of the comma points to “the interplay of surfaces” in a Benjaminian sense, “drawing differences together and separating them at the same time” (Simon, Translating Montreal 131). “Left into café LE CLUNY. As lasse, dazed. From fatigue. As day of arrival. Being décalée, time-gapped. As French calling jet-lagged” (MP 11). Through placing French and English right next to each other, across the comma of translation, the text thus enacts translation. It thereby “destabilize[s] the notion of the linguistically foreign and calls attention to the continuities as well as the discontinuities between her ‘home’ culture and that of the ‘other’” (Moyes, “Intertextual Travel” 87). There are several instances within the text that illustrate how the text dramatizes the complexity of cultural relations. At one time, for instance, the narrator says, “Going through lobby. I believing she hates me. Giving dirty looks. Laughing uproariously when I asking where to put vidange. As we saying chez nous. For garbage. Here vidange meaning sloppail. Should have said poubelle” (MP 33, emphasis in the original). The reader cannot but notice the narrator’s sense of insecurity here. This Montreal writer in Paris is painfully aware of her “otherness” and feels insecure and inferior: Anyway running. Because meeting other writers from French-speaking America. Likewise occupying studios. Won in arts’ competitions. Your accent’s lovely saying one. Meaning not authentic (mother being English.) Measuring my heavy diphthongs. Against her rhythmic québécois phonemes. Parisians looking down on. Tu vas faire de si belles conquêtes, people will be charmed. (MP 11)

At a crucial point in the novel, the narrator criticizes Stein’s call to abolish the comma for its lack of politics: “By eclipsing I of certain early-20th travelling republicans. Who having abolished comma. Drawing all of us. In portrait of about three words. But if comma of translation disappearing. What of French-speaking America remaining” (MP 40). Conspicuously, Scott does not use any commas in these phrases, but cuts up the conditional sentence through the use of a period. Following Stein, Scott has banished commas in this sentence, but she points out the dangers that the lack of the comma – the

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bridge across the two official languages in Canada – will have. If the comma of translation disappears, Francophone America will also disappear. As Elisabeth Tutschek explains, “Without a comma of translation, the very process of translation is eliminated and the space created by its transitional function does not come into existence. Consequently, the site of cultural difference which the comma would embody is substituted by a cultural norm set by dominant cultures” (n.p.). The comma of translation, therefore, is an important political tool as it secures the linguistic identity and thus survival of French-speaking America. Interestingly enough, for all its language consciousness and criticism of the minor status of French on the North American continent, Scott’s text is written in English and only lets French shine through the text. The use of French in her novel, however, defamiliarizes English, thus subverting the cultural authority of both languages. As an Anglophone novel, this novel also reaches a wider readership in the Englishspeaking world, which makes Scott’s critique even more visible.12

Performing Flâneries in Benjaminian Space Apart from enacting translation, the comma of translation also functions as a criticism of Stein’s grand language practices that have come to serve as a hallmark of modernism. As the narrator puts it: “She inventing the 20th” (MP 28). In general, My Paris launches a critique of the U.S. American imperialist gesture involved in the expatriates’ claim of Paris as their home. “Where Hemingway declaring. Paris belonging to him” (MP 28). To a large extent, the story of the Paris in the twenties is a U.S. American narrative (Brown 85). “America is my country”, Stein famously declared, “and Paris is my home town” (Masterpieces 61). This meaning of Paris “as an extension of America” (Brown 85) seemed justified as for most of the expatriates, Paris constituted “a village or an American suburb, with Gertrude Stein as Mayor and Robert McAlmon and Harry and Caresse Crosby as Deputy Sheriffs by virtue of their having capital to publish their friends” (McCormick 5). As Scott’s narrator describes it: “Where Gertrude Stein’s poodle Basket used to shit. With other rich expatriate puppies. Thinking Paris belonging to them” (MP 12

Scott comments on her choice of writing “over the cusp between Québec’s two main language groups” in the following way: “If one falls into this stance by chance or lifestyle at the beginning, in the medium term it takes a certain rigour of intention: French, for an angloMontréaler writer working in English and dealing with English-language markets, is virtually always easier to shut out” (“My Montréal” 5). Therefore, she concludes, “I shall continue to let French interrupt, subvert, challenge that dominatrix, the English language. She can handle it. Oui, Madame” (“My Montréal” 9).

324 Astrid M. Fellner 17). Parisian culture at the turn of the century has been “overshadowed by the success of this American myth-making” (Brown 85), and it was not until the publications of the Paris memoirs by Callaghan and Glassco that the “American-in-Paris myth” (Brown 86) was challenged by Canadian writers. Scott’s title My Paris clearly alludes to the fact that the diary that her narrator records is her subjective story, a version that lays no claim to re-write literary history or invent a new century. As the narrator criticizes the 1920s American expatriates “Twas the weak franc between wars. Permitting expatriates to flock here for nourishment. Good food. Wine. Slow time. Soaking up ambience of still-19th backdrop. To invent the 20th” (MP 37). Rather than imitate this imperialist behavior, My Paris evokes the modernist avant-garde tradition in order to be able to open up a space for social transformation. As a composite of Stein, Barnes, and Benjamin, Scott’s narrator also employs one of modernism’s most characteristic strategies, the dialectical optics of Benjamin’s image-space. Relying on a translational poetics that draws on Benjamin’s method of dialectical imaging, “My Paris records flâneries in Benjaminian space” (Chisholm, “Paris” 161). In fact, Benjamin accompanies the narrator of My Paris from the very beginning. When she arrives in Paris, she finds a volume of Benjamin’s Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle (the French edition of Das Passagen-Werk) that was left in her studio by the previous tenant. She begins to browse through Benjamin’s collection of citations and soon assumes a reading technique that is adapted analogically to the montage-technique according to which the Arcades Project is arranged. She does not trace the contents chronologically, as one would proceed when reading a narrative, but rather lets the book flip open coincidentally and reads into what has thus offered itself to her, a practice that she translates into her writing practice. The narrator is fascinated by Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur and soon starts to refer to herself as a flâneur in order to legitimize her status as a writer searching for useable material in Paris. By presenting herself in the guise of Benjamin’s flâneur, she distinguishes herself from being a tourist and assigns a purpose as well as a method to her daily routines. She develops a way of cultural analysis that is based on her wandering through the streets of Paris, trailing the spirits of Stein and Barnes: “Last night crossing Saint-Sulpice … Effervescing narrow hotel in corner. Where D Barnes’ outrageous doctor. Allegedly holding forth. In silly blond wig. On how Americans hating night” (MP 69). Walking near Gertrude Stein’s place (MP 79 and 116), the flâneur’s I/eye is prone to free association and her sensibilities as a diarist require “B’s method. Of montage of found objects” (MP 9). The narrator tells how she sets out to see “one of those beautiful old commercial passages or arcades. B calling miniatures. Of 19th-

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century Paris” (MP 12). At the same time as the narrator relies on Benjamin’s techniques, she also questions them: What is it about Paris. Trying to see past sleepless nights from traffic. Choking on pollution. Overly self-conscious of appearance. Hair neat and smooth. Shiny shoes. Then one day noticing standing automatically straighter. The way Parisians do. Noticing the earthy naughty odours of a hundred different cheeses. [...] Maybe already less a traveler. Than a sort of flâneur (of interior!). (MP 9-10)

Paris traffic and pollution affect the narrator and drive her indoors. Crucially then, the narrator is not a flâneur in the traditional sense: “But exhausted. So late when slipping off cushion. Clearly not flâneur. In late 19th century sense of industriously strolling” (MP 11). The narrator is also acutely aware of the class privilege of the concept of flânerie. After all, this form of strolling was an “urban art form, a leisure habit, made famous by dandies, such as the poet Baudelaire, not the healthy exercise of strolling or walking, spazieren, prescribed by doctors as a means to ward off melancholy” (Hanssen 3).13 Scott’s narrator also undermines the traditional image of the flâneur when she genders the concept and introduces a lesbian erotics.14 As Chisholm explains: “First, it is women’s culture and a lesbian Paris that Scott’s flâneur looks for on the city’s horizon, though she is frequently, comically, disappointed. Second, it is through the lens of Benjamin’s Paris that she sees her Paris” (Queer Constellations 149). Throughout her diary, the narrator engages the Benjaminian concept of the flâneur and ironically comments on it: “B falling open at chapter on flâneur. Lost in 19th-century crowd. Yet capable of haunting. Being man (sic) in full possession of individuality. Contrary to onlooker. Who under influence of crowd. No longer one. Showering I feeling in middle. Neither one. Nor entirely bleeding into context either. I.e. haunting only concierge. In turn haunting me” (MP 25). 13

14

Benjamin first was in Paris in 1926 and 1927, working together with Franz Hessel on a translation of the work of Marcel Proust. As Hanssen states, Benjamin was fascinated by Berlin, yet “no city more than Paris provided an agreeable sensory overload to Benjamin’s perceptual apparatus. Overwhelmed by the intoxicating excitement of the French capital, Benjamin gave himself up to the pleasures of flânerie … to the point where the art of flânerie even threatened to take the place of reading and study” (3). Scott’s erotics is most visible in the final section of the book, which functions as a coda to the narrator’s translational performance. As Chisholm puts it, “a new intoxicant has been added to the dream in her drift through Paris. That intoxicant is erotic, lesbian, love” (“Paris” 198). The coda consists of paragraphs which consist of words that are separated and joined by long dashes. Periodically, the word “orgasms” appears, but it is crossed out as “perverse slips of speech” (Chisholm, “Paris” 199). The narrator’s engagement with Paris is clearly affected by the presence of her lover who has come to visit from Canada: “She beside me saying. Very pink lips. Initially not wanting to come. Preferring riding horses – Still what angels popping up.” (MP 133, emphasis in the original).

326 Astrid M. Fellner Most notably though, instead of espousing a sense of bourgeois individualism, Scott’s flâneuse, the feminized version of Benjamin’s cultural figure, juxtaposes the mythic image of the Paris of the 1920s with “a city of suffering, producing a discontinuous allegory which makes legible the ruins of capitalism and the legacy of colonialism” (Moyes, “Affective” 15). During her daily adventures, this flâneuse encounters a wide array of people whose in-between status is more precarious than the narrator’s, immigrants from former colonies who are referred to as “people from ‘the South.’ I.e. Africa. Maghrebia” (MP 8). Most frequently, she refers to the horrors in Bosnia, interspersing in her narrative various references to the Yugoslav wars. Seeing the city in Benjamin’s dialectical images, the narrator juxtaposes Parisian bourgeois history with the history of colonialism. At one point, the narrator states: “Sitting in dream café! On modest little market square. Near cimetière Montparnasse. Place Edgar-Quinet. After romantic French poet” (MP 27). The description of this scene is interrupted by a reference to Benjamin: “Whose Paris. B. saying. Haunted by lyric dancing towers. Cathedrals kneeling before sepulchers. Monuments combing columns of golden hair. On shoulders” (MP 27). This montage of images is then paired with a series of images from Muslim history, triggered by the narrator’s opening of Le Monde: “Article tracing European indifference toward current horror in Bosnia. Back to centuries-old Christian hate of Muslims. Beginning with crusade-guru Urban II. Convincing flocks to leave what they loving. Châteaux. Land. (Wives.) Taking up sword. To search for Grail. Quest marking beginning of Hell. For Arab people” (MP 27). References to the war, it seems, are interspersed in the narrator’s diary with the regularity of a weather report: “Blizzard in Bosnia” (MP 125) or “Snowing in Bosnia” (MP 129). The Paris that Scott’s narrator observes, therefore, not only performatively reanimates the bourgeois Paris of the 1920s, but also consists of a montage of juxtaposed images that the narrator finds in the streets of Paris by observing people, reading newspapers, and watching TV. After walking by the Théâtre de la Gaîté “where old Colette formerly performing” the narrator thinks “at least now no war in Europe” only to correct this thought: “Then on television: Bosnia” (MP 41). Scott’s narrator, who is shaped by the sensibilities of the divided city that characterize Montreal, is aware of the multiple divisions of other cities, the many colonial histories that have shaped the West, and the current wars that rage in the world.

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Conclusion: Paris – Montreal Scott’s My Paris presents a recent Canadian view of the Paris of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Walter Benjamin and other expatriate writers who transformed the terrain of the Paris rive gauche into Modernist, avant-garde literary pictures. By foregrounding cultural translation in her text, Scott sets her story in Paris but focuses on a space where multiple languages gather – Montreal – which derives its signifying power from the Paris in the 1920s. Scott’s protagonist thus acts as a cultural translator who leads the reader from “Paris to Montréal, from Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin to experimental writing in Quebec, from the modernist experience of expatriation to the postmodern reality of cultural hybridity” (Simon, “Paris” 142-143). At the end of the diary, the narrator is back home “trudging in snow down Saint-Denis. Montréal. Québec. Dark Paris outfit and smooth hairdo. Overdressed for here. Where loose bright thick sweaters” (MP 130). But instead of an ending, this last diary entry is followed by a coda which is set in Paris again and which “stages a final flânerie that, drifting as before but at an accelerated pace, exchanges catastrophe-ridden glances for glimpses of utopia” (Chisholm, “Paris” 197). Punctuated by yet another series of references to the ongoing war in Bosnia, the coda evokes Benjamin’s angel of history, culminating in a constellation of images, “Bosnian women. Saving culture. In chaos” (MP 138).15 As Chisholm states, the return of the narrator to Paris, infers “the dawn of a new, queer, epoch” (Queer Constellations 151). In a section entitled “Le sexe de l’art”, a caption that refers to an exhibition at Centre Pompidou, this coda, which Chisholm calls a “run-on flânerie” (Queer Constellations 151), is dated “New Year’s 199_” (MP 133). In the end, Scott’s flâneuse feels at home, at least temporarily, in the space of the affective in-between of the streets of Paris. “Lost at last in Paris” (MP 69), muses the fictional diarist at an earlier point in her diary. The intoxicating effect of the city has led her to translate the image of rive gauche into a Canadian context, appropriating Gertrude Stein’s syntactical strolls around Paris – with the help of Benjaminian translational practices – for the purposes of her own flâneries. Scott’s text is thus a constellation of images of Paris at the end of

15

Scott’s narrator frequently evokes Benjamin’s idea of catastrophe. Benjamin has famously argued that historical events do not derive from a linear cause and effect relationship but rather that events constitute a form of continuous motion. In thesis IX of his “On the Concept of History”, Benjamin presents his “angel of history”. As he states, “Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet” (392, emphasis in the original). For a detailed reading of Scott’s final section of My Paris in the context of Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, see Chisholm, “Paris” 196-204.

328 Astrid M. Fellner the twentieth century that draws its strength from the beginning of the century. The book’s last sentence “Looking—“ (MP 138) signals that Scott’s Anglo-Quebecoise flâneuse, like Benjamin’s angel of history, looks at the past while moving into the future.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 69-82. ——. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999. ——. ”On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings. Volume 4 1938-1940. Ed. Michael Jennings. Transl. Edmund Jephcott, et. al. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2003. 389-400. Brown, Russell. “Callaghan, Glassco, and the Canadian Lost Generation.” Essays on Canadian Writing 51-52 (Winter 1993-Spring 1994): 83-112. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Callaghan, Morley. That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Some Others. Toronto: Macmillan, 1975. Chisholm, Dianne. “Paris, Mon Amour, My Catastrophe, or Flâneries through Benjaminian Space.” Gail Scott. Essays on Her Works. Ed. Lianne Moyes. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2002. 153-207. ——. Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. Glassco, John. Memoirs of Montparnasse. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1970. Godard, Barbara. “Writing from the Border: Gail Scott on ‘The Main’.” Gail Scott. Essays on Her Works. Ed. Lianne Moyes. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2002. 117-141. Gould, Karen. Writing in the Feminine: Feminism and Experimental Writing in Quebec. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. Gygax, Franziska. Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein. Westport: Greenwood P, 1998. Hanssen, Beatrice. “Introduction: Physiognomy of a Flâneur: Walter Benjamin’s Peregrinations Through Paris in Search of a New Imaginary.” Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project. Ed. Beatrice Hanssen. London: Continuum, 2006. 1-11. Huston, Nancy. Losing North: Musings on Land, Tongue and Self. Toronto: McArthur & Company, 2002.

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Leith, Linda. “Interview with Gail Scott.” Matrix (Spring 1989): 23-24. ——. “Quebec Fiction in English during the 1980s: A Case Study in Marginality.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne (SCL/ÉLC) 15.1 (1990): 1-20. http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/get.cgi?directory=vol15_1/&filena me=Leith.htm (7/4/2009). McCormick, John. American Literature 1919-1932: A Comparative History. London: Routledge, 1971. Moyes, Lianne. “A Brief Biography of Gail Scott.” Gail Scott. Essays on Her Works. Ed. Lianne Moyes. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2002. 231-234. ——. “An Affective In-Between.” Gail Scott. Essays on Her Works. Ed. Lianne Moyes. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2002. 7-18. ——. “Intertextual Travel in the Writing of Gail Scott and Mary di Michele.” Etudes Canadiennes/Canadian Studies 55 (2003): 85-97. Parris, David. “When French-Canadian Literature Freed Itself From the Tutelage of Paris.” International Journal of Francophone Studies 10.3 (2007): 425-432. Pizer, Donald. American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996. Pollock, Della. “Performing Writing.” The Ends of Performance. Ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York UP, 1998. 73-103. Ravvin, Norman. “Review: Gail Scott.” Canadian Literature 169 (Summer 2001): 175-178. Román, David. Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1985. Scott, Gail. “My Montréal. Notes of an Anglo-Montrealer.” Brick 59 (Spring 1998): 4-9. ——. My Paris. Urbana/Champain, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003. Simon, Sherry. “The Paris Arcades, the Ponte Veccio and the Comma of Translation.” Gail Scott. Essays on Her Works. Ed. Lianne Moyes. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2002. 142-152. ——. Translating Montreal. Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2006. Sojka, Eugenia. “Canadian Feminist Writings and American Poetry.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. 3.2 (2001): 1-10. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol3/iss2/12 (7/4/2009). Stein, Gertrude. What Are Masterpieces. 1940. New York: Pitman, 1970. ——. How To Write. 1931. Introd. Patricia Meyerowitz. New York: Dover Publications, 1975.

330 Astrid M. Fellner Stein, Gertrude. “How Writing Is Written.” The Gertrude Stein Reader. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Cooper Square P, 2002. 438-449. Tutschek, Elisabeth. “‘Espace, Space’: Gender and Translation in Nicole Brossard’s Le Désert Mauve and Gail Scott’s My Paris.” Space and Gender – Espace et Genre. Urban and Other Spaces in Canadian Women’s Fiction/Espaces urbains et autres dans la fiction canadienne au féminin. Ed. Doris Eibl and Caroline Rosenthal. Innsbruck: U of Innsbruck P, forthcoming. Von Flotow, Luise. “Legacies of Quebec Women’s écriture au féminin: Bilingual Transformances, Translation Politized Subaltern Versions of the Text of the Street.” Journal of Canadian Studies 30.4 (Winter 19951996): 88-109. Wheeler, Anne-Marie: “Issues of Translation in the Works of Nicole Brossard.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 16.2 (2003): 425-454. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: The Hogarth P, 1954.