Part One: Moratorium
I am mildly embarrassed to have let my feathers ruffle so because of a puff piece in the Wall Street Journal called “Why the Expats Left Paris.” For me, it was one puff piece too many, because the more these articles are published, the more a certain idea about Paris is reinforced, and the American reading public deserves better stories of that city than what they’ve been getting. I am not naive enough to think that because one writer voices her
discontent, the quality of articles about Paris will improve; still, I
must speak up.
I hereby call for a end to clichéd articles about literary Paris, all those which invoke the names of the deities (“Sartre” and “Beauvoir”) in an incantation to raise from the dead the spirit of a Paris that never existed.
Newspaper editors must think these stories are romantic in some way, but the subject has been utterly emptied of its original meaning, and now signals only “here is another article about that place everyone likes with the tower and the bridges.” What is written is incidental to the fact that it is being said, again, and it is in this way that sloppy mistakes and misconceptions creep in. Besides which, aren’t newspaper editors in the business of printing news? It seems to me that any other travel story on any other location would have been researched and fact-checked. But because it’s Paris, and we’ve heard this story before, touchy-feely clichés based on one person’s very limited experience are apparently acceptable. This is called “reification.”
Do not misunderstand me: this is not a moratorium for all invocations of literary Paris: only those which tell us nothing, add nothing, and flatten out an important moment in literary history. I call for this moratorium in favor of better, truer writing about Paris. Let us agree no longer to reduce Paris to this tired cliché, and to produce, if not works to rival Being and Nothingness or The Ethics of Ambiguity, at least better travel writing.
What is the difference between a cliché and a myth? Myths are stories we tell ourselves, to explain why we form affinities with certain things, or to help cope with a necessary but unpleasant rite of passage. Myths can be productive; myths can be powerful. But they can also create a false sense of communal agreement—false because the terms are assumed, not specified. Myths can also be untrue.
Literary Paris is a potent myth. An entire cottage industry of books has cropped up around it, some of them quite good, some of them horrid. But how do we tell the difference? Not long ago, I reviewed a book called Paris Cafe: the Select Crowd. This book treats the myth in a way that both pays homage to the past and makes it relevant to the present. The ineffable quality of the cafe comes through in the gossipy and insightful writing, and the visceral, well-wrought illustrations.
Clichés, on the other hand, are dead thoughts. The term cliché, in French, can also be used to mean “snapshot.” As in “here, let
me show you the banal pictures I took on my last trip to Paris.” The article
in question employed enough clichés to fill up a Flickr account.
In writing about Paris, clichés are easy to use and hard to avoid. They must first be acknowledged, and then excised: a new way of speaking about an old subject must be sought, and failure to conquer the cliché will ensue your argument rests on a weak foundation. The writer or the artist with Paris as his subject must find his own vernacular.
*
This “manifesto,” if you will, may seem out of proportion to this particular article. Surely it is a bit of light reading for the weekend’s Wall Street Journal, destined for the trash bins on Monday. Nothing anyone should take seriously.
But the writer, Dinaw Mengestu, is the kind of guy you do take seriously. He has written a well-received first novel (The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, which won the 2007 Guardian First Book Award as well as the Prix du Meilleur Premier Roman Etranger that year, which is more than most of us can say), and he has also published engaging articles on Darfur and Uganda. Surely what Mengestu writes bears the stamp of thoughtfulness and commitment— is worthy of our scrutiny more than, say, some hack journalist trying to make a buck off of a pile of clichés. (I say this with all due respect for hack journalists, being one, on occasion, myself). It is all the more disappointing, then, that instead of delivering an insightful look at Paris, we are served an interesting idea wrapped in nonsense.
His premise is that black American writers once fled the racial (no mention of homophobic) discrimination of their native land for the “refuge and sanctuary” of Paris, whereas nowadays, America has caught up with France, and France has in fact become more conservative, judging at least from the suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis.
This is an interesting and thought-provoking basis for an article. But then he gets bogged down with wondering where the expat American literary community has gone, looking from left to right on the Blvd St Germain, finding only tourists in a café lamenting the price of a bottle of water (presumably they are too dense to know they could get a carafe of water for free). He concludes, like Robinson Crusoe, “I am alone on the island,” and goes on to extol the joys of being in a Paris that is no better or worse than any American city. Moreover, he rejoices that there are no other American writers hanging around to cramp his style or force him to feel “fashionable.”
The Wall Street Journal’s weekend paper was perhaps not the market for a 9,000 word think piece on the comparative environments for African-Americans in the US and African immigrants in France, which I am sure Mengestu could write ably, given more time in France. But to make the article marketable—for the editors, the readers, and the advertisers—it needed a catchier hook. And this is how Paris becomes a cliché: when it is reduced to a marketing concept. The result: “Why the Expats Left Paris.”
Sorry to disappoint you, Dinaw, but we haven’t left. You’re just not looking for us in the right places.
Part Two: Now versus then
Mengestu has been living in the 6th, he tells us, where he finds the lure of nostalgia too strong to resist; he fantasizes sitting in the Café du Flore with Sartre and Beauvoir, overhearing an argument between Wright and Baldwin. Fair enough; we all have these moments (they do tend to happen more in the beginning of one’s time in Paris, and fade after the first year or so).
His version of the “good old days” is as vague and unspecific as the bad new days. It amounts to a misreading both of our era and of theirs. Paris then is presented as a grand old place to live, with Sartre and Beauvoir placidly presiding over the intellectual scene. Nevermind that Beauvoir and Sartre sat and wrote for hours in the Flore, or was it the Magots, because they couldn’t afford to heat their apartments. Mengestu’s version includes no mention of the vicious infighting amongst the literati, the casual racism and anti-Semitism, even after the Holocaust. Richard Wright moved to Paris in 1946, Baldwin in 1948. Where is the post-war épuration in Mengestu’s account? Where is the Sétif massacre? The rumblings of war in Algeria? No, in the mythic version of the postwar days, Paris was just a happy land of philosophers. But to romanticize this era within the context of an article that ventures into the political waters of our day (at least by the invocation of “Seine-Saint-Denis” and the 2005 riots, which have acquired a mythic stature of their own), is in bad taste.
There was indeed a culture of relaxed mores which flourished in Paris between
the wars, as well as in the 50s and 60s, which attracted writers and
artists from around the world; and yes, Wright and Baldwin did enjoy
more freedom from prejudice in France than they did in the States. This
is not in dispute. But building a mythology around those eras because
of those freedoms is kind of a flat, un-nuanced reading of history. What were Baldwin and Wright arguing about? This article gives us myth without matière.
Blinded by his nostalgia for Paris in the 50s, Mengestu has a hard time seeing contemporary Paris. “What’s really missing these days isn’t just café literary life, but a palpable and vibrant American cultural life.” Missing from where? From the Blvd St Germain? Or from Paris altogether? The first might be accurate; the second would be deluded. Does he hang out with no one
under the age of 40? Francophone or Anglophone, they would have
informed him that the creative types are hanging out predominantly in
northeast Paris. He need only look away from the 6th to find communities of writers and artists making a living as best they can, and living in Paris for one reason or another—some, like James Baldwin, just to get away from where they’re from, some because they are inspired by and in sync with the city. Look to the 13th, to the Butte aux Cailles, where American blogger Aimee Gille has recently opened her own cafe. Look to the outskirts of Pere Lachaise. Look to Belleville. These are places that have their own mythologies as well now (which I’ve complained of in the past, but it seems amazing to me that Mengestu would not mention them). If Baldwin and Wright were to sit down over coffee today, they would do it at Café Chéri(e), and it would cost €2,20, or $3.50 a cup– roughly what they’d pay in a cafe in Brooklyn
“Today it’s impossible for me to imagine the sense of refuge and sanctuary that other Americans once found here,” Mengestu writes. But even if the atmosphere “back home” these days is kinder to racial and sexual minorities than it was in Wright’s day, Paris is still a refuge and a sanctuary for the expatriate, by virtue of its being far from home, a different culture, a place to reinvent oneself in a completely foreign context. If Mengestu had bothered to talk to any expatriates other than himself, he might have found this out.
Still to come: Part Three: Beyond an “American” in Paris, and Part Four: So who are these creative types and where can I find them?
