We'll Never Have Paris

by Andrew Gallix

  Could she have ever made Paris her own? What would it have taken: writing fiction in French; having a French family; finding more time for French intellectuals? She never did any of these things. But in May ‘68 she was at the centre of the action, enquiring, listening, watching, waiting, occasionally interfering. A woman she once met around town pointed to a group of students nearby, saying she was frightened of them. “Where my mind would have registered something like ‘Students, intellectuals, readers of Combat and Le Monde’,” Gallant writes, “her mind said to her, ‘Dangerous, brutal, will hurt you’. I took her by the arm and we walked into the group, which, of course, took no notice of us.” Perhaps that was the moment she knew she couldn’t have her Paris and write it. The moment she had to choose between without and within.

  Manna in Mid-Wilderness

  Natalie Ferris

  As dusk falls, the strip lighting intensifies. No notice, scuff-mark or glob of spittle is exempt from its scrutiny. This light, so sharply white, strikes the darkening windows, sending darting lines across the chequered panes. Every door I pass is closed, the length of my route blurring into the same faded green. Sound seems to shrink, voices drawing further and further from me and bouncing off the walls in dull thuds. Walking down these hallways, deserted at the close of the day, I’m no longer quite sure what I hoped to find. Searching online for images of this institution some days before my arrival, I was met with a stream of black and white photographs immortalising the chaos of its early years; the floors of classrooms awash with discarded pamphlets, the projection screens of lecture theatres slashed, the gardens strewn with glass, the classrooms densely packed with chanting students. What could navigating these endless corridors possibly reveal, so many decades later? How could my aimless pacing bring me any closer to the writer who had taken hold of my waking hours? In the high exposure of this municipal light, any faint trace of the novelist who made Paris VIII her home for twenty years was bleached from view.

  From 1968 to 1988, at the beginning of each academic year, her name, Christine Brooke-Rose, was typed into the tabulated “Liste Alphabétique du Personnel Enseignant, Administratif de Service et Technique” of Université de Paris VIII, Vincennes. A register recording some of the most eminent thinkers in post-war philosophy and politics, her name shares squares with Hélène Cixous, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. She taught Anglophone literature at this newly created “experimental” institution on the outskirts of Paris, founded by Cixous and a number of her colleagues at the Institut d’anglais, most notably Bernard Cassen and Pierre Dommergues. The Paris riots in May 1968 had prompted, among other measures, the reappraisal and overhaul of higher education by Charles de Gaulle’s new government. The creation of this Centre universitaire expeéimental in Vincennes heralded a more interdisciplinary, informal and interactive approach to study, as observed across the Atlantic, in an effort to dispel further student insurrections. Strangely, and unlike her colleagues, Brooke-Rose’s date of birth is often omitted from these tables, a solitary blank space issuing from her name as if she had sprung from thin air. She thought of Paris as a place of renewal, rejuvenation, even rebirth, offering her the chance of a “second career, a second life”. It was deliverance — “manna from Heaven” extended as an invitation to her by Cixous — from a life in London that no longer made sense. Arriving by second-hand car bought with a publisher’s advance, she briefly resided in Rue de Picpus before moving to a flat on Rue Saint Victor, in the Latin Quarter. This flat would be her home for most of her twenty-year tenure.

  It is difficult to imagine Brooke-Rose at home. I am not alone in this — other correspondents longed to see her in her “milieu”.1 The rooms and routines of the domestic rarely feature in her novels of the 1960s onwards, concentrating instead on transitory spaces of migration, evolution, or theoretical discourse. It is a window at 9 Rue Saint Victor, with its brittle frames and shifting veiled curtains, from which she stares at the beginning of a BBC Bookmark programme. The film does not lay her home bare, but stages her in a classroom she rarely occupied and on a walk she rarely took along the Seine. As she later lamented, the British press often presented her as a caricature of the nouvelle romancière, all YSL scarves, slender cigarettes and scholarly severity. There is a sense, however, that she cultivated a personal sense of spectacle in Paris: in her correspondence, she mentions the “scarlet” walls of her “marvellously arranged” flat, as well as the tall luminous column by sculptor Susan Glyn that took up residence in her front room in 1974. I am particularly fascinated by this sculpture, a large “seagreen” and blue column of circles, chains and spirals made to Brooke-Rose’s exacting specifications. The opportunity to ask Cixous about Brooke-Rose’s private space, during a brief visit to her home close to the Paris Catacombs, was derailed by the insistent vomiting of her cat. In the previous months, Cixous had recalled Brooke-Rose’s detachment, particularly from the establishment of the Centre d’Études Féminines founded by Cixous in 1974. As the latter made clear, “Christine did not come for women… I was trying in every way possible to open ways for women, and she didn’t want to take part in that”. They “drifted apart” as a result of these “different investments”; Brooke-Rose’s in the “semantic and rhetorical aspect of things” whereas Cixous’s allegiance was also driven by the “human aspect of things”. For her, an engagement with what was “experimental… Robbe-Grillet for example,” was not enough.2

  Brooke-Rose is now widely acknowledged as one of the foremost emissaries of the “experimental” movement in France, writing some of the earliest and most accessible critical essays in English on the nouveau roman and penning amusing dispatches for her “Letters from Paris” series in The Spectator. Although the majority of these pieces were sympathetic to the kinds of work undertaken by writers in Paris and made pleas for a diligent British readership, some of them betrayed a creeping exasperation with the impermanence of 1970s Parisian culture. In 1973, she described life in France as a kind of tidal existence that could only reap a few glimmering bagatelles:

  [It is] […] rather like walking around a national exhibition, entering one fantastic and beautiful structure after another, the Levi-Strauss Palace, the Derrida Daedalus, the Lacan Labyrinth, the Kristeva Construct, the Barthes Pavilion, the Planetarium showing the Sollers System. They are very impressive, but there is a temporary feeling about them, not so much in the sense that they may disappear altogether but because the pavilions are apt to look quite different when visited at different times: another wing has been added, a fancy bridge or a strange trompe l’oeil. And the walk can be very tiring. There is the perpetual recyclage, as re-training is called, the getting-acquainted with yet another theory, yet another structure, until one wants to cry out “All systems go”, and find oneself on the moon, which is of course very scientific, but lunatic; very beautiful, with unearthly colours, but what does one bring back? A bag of stones and moondust for the analysers.3

  When Brooke-Rose recollects her first semesters at Vincennes, she speaks of “bewilderment”, of “endless meetings […] astonishing rudeness […] blind fanaticism” and of a culture of convolution: “everyone having to speak, in several points premièrement deuxièmement troisièmement and subpoints a, b, c, d and long subordinate clauses and sudden d’autre part and par ailleurs whenever the end seems in sight, so nothing is ever concluded”.4 This uncertain climate — in which strings of interrelated code, theories, beliefs, analogues of meaning, “items” that crossed and meshed to build her own “vast powerhouse of knowledge” — produced her most ambitious novel, Thru (1975).5

  Exiting into the chill December air, into one of the many concrete forecourts, I find some small suggestion that Université de Paris VIII is still attuned to one of its own. Language covers almost every inch of these smooth exterior walls, inflated to human scale or scrawled in empty corners. Names, entreaties, expletives and tags mix and merge to form a constellation of letters and symbols, “Sonibel”, “J’ama
aaa”, “5000”, “Texas”, “Demandez”, “1968”. The riot of graffiti across every façade is evidence of the lasting spirit of those radical years, in which language itself began to disintegrate. For Brooke-Rose, the power of recall resides in the acts of “intercepting and decrypting”, in perceiving the “thousands of messages missed, or captured but not decrypted, and even the captured and decrypted now burnt or not released”. After Brooke-Rose left Paris, she seldom returned, sequestered in her stone village in the south of France. Paris persisted only in the “variable geometry” of her memory.

  1 Mary de Rachewiltz, letter to Christine Brooke-Rose, dated 26 March 1973, Box 19, folder 1, Christine Brooke-Rose papers, HRC

  2 Hélène Cixous, Interview with the Author, 15 March 2013, Paris.

  3 Christine Brooke-Rose, “Viewpoint”, Times Literary Supplement, 3717 (1 June 1973), p. 614.

  4 Christine Brooke-Rose, Remake (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), p. 166.

  5 Brooke-Rose, Remake, p.106.

  Central Committee

  Owen Hatherley

  On my first visit to Paris, in my early thirties, I didn’t have high hopes. I had avoided the city for some time, and walking through places like the Marais, I was reminded why. The things I had been warned about — architectural and social homogeneity, self-satisfaction, wearying historical preservation — practically radiated off the limestone. Having grumpily found what I had expected, I was just about ready to return to the vital pile-up of South London, when I went for a walk in Paris’s north-east.

  The hills in Belleville and Ménilmontant were as full of street life, weird buildings, social housing and odd vistas as anywhere in inner London, although somewhat more architecturally coherent. Further north were genuinely bizarre things like the housing complexes of the Orgues de Flandre or the beige streets suddenly pockmarked with organic concrete outgrowths. Further on, at Place Colonel Fabien, was the headquarters of the Communist Party of France (PCF), designed in the 1970s by Oscar Niemeyer — a sinuous, gleaming building of concrete and glass.

  Coming from a country where the Communists were at best a mildly eccentric fringe party with a presence only in a few pit villages in South Wales and Central Scotland and for a time in enclaves of London’s East End, such a building is always going to be a surprise. So too, is how it contrasts with the French capital’s achingly bourgeois self-image. What is it doing here?

  The Communist Party’s administrations in suburban Paris built most of the banlieues, the (now notoriously racially segregated) modernist grands ensembles that, here in the east end, begin already before you reach the Périphérique. Nowadays, they’re better known for having been one of the most cravenly Stalinist of European Communist Parties, with dissident Marxists like the Situationists or the enragés of 1968 far better known and respected, and with their old base often as not voting for the Front National (or Rassemblement National, as it is now called). Once, however, they were a force in French politics, given enormous moral authority by their dominance of the Resistance, and they came first in the polls on more than one occasion. This building would see them finally building that authority into something permanent — finally, a built monument to the political tradition behind the Commune, the Popular Front, the Maquis, and so forth. Commissioning the Brazilian exile and CP member Niemeyer, the creator of the new capital of Brasilia, as architect, was a sign that this was intended to be a monument to the future, not to a glorious past.

  If you visit it now, you’ll find a surprisingly welcoming place — if you get past the security infrastructure, visitors are encouraged, and merch is sold. Pass a high fence and walk across a concrete bridge over an artificial landscape of mounds, and you get to an opening under a curved curtain wall of glass, housing the Party’s offices. Inside, you’re in a futuristic cave, a coven for fomenting world revolution. On most days, they’ll let you in to see the grand hall that contains the Central Committee, a breathtaking dome that suggests interplanetary Communism has already been reached. You’re thousands and thousands of miles in orbit, and well above the Sacré-Coeur.

  Quite soon after the building was finished, in 1979, the PCF, scuppered by a shift leftwards by the Socialist Party and the general decline of working-class politics, began its slow, still ongoing diminution. It is as if in order to build this extraordinary monument to French Communism, it had to die in the process.

  No Baudelaires in Babylon

  Tom Bradley

  Remarks Presented to 3:AM Magazine’s

  International Conference on Electronic Literature,

  Held in the Paris Sorbonne at Millennium’s Turn,

  When “the New Medium” Still Seemed to Hold Promise

  E-literati, might we dignify

  our kaffeeklatsch within a bottle’s toss

  of yonder bosky flâneur’s boulevard,

  named for a dragon-stabbing stalwart? There,

  some eight-times-four annìs domìni gone,

  our betters, moral and political,

  engaged gendarmerie with bones and blood

  while chanting hatred of technocracy,

  as foisted by the university

  now hosting our chit-chat of net and web.

  No one among us bleeds; interesting times

  aren’t everyone’s life-lot; Hell’s only raised

  to that slim bolgia history allows.

  But time-holes countersunken in the mind

  can draw the consciousness further afield

  than single thirds of latter centuries.

  If yours admits spelunking, let’s return

  to classically antique days, when this town,

  “Lutetia” on milestones, in extent

  was but a mini-Patmos on the stream

  whose eponym’s a Gallic water goddess.

  You play the pagan; I’ll feign Jewishness.

  We’ll wander through a chilled Aprilis night

  with elbows linked, on torchlit cobblestones,

  where one big-buttressed fane’s destined to loom

  one thousand and a hundred twelvemonths hence….

  Waiting For Nothing to Happen1

  Andrew Gallix

  It is a testament to the loving preservation of the French capital that a guidebook, published in 1968, should still be fit for purpose. The quaint period detail (snacks “for five or six bob”) must not distract us from the enduring brilliance of Nairn’s Paris, republished by Notting Hill Editions with an introduction by Andrew Hussey. The author’s descriptions — crystalline, lapidary — are still in a league of their own. Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin? “Simple really; just a straight street with something solid at either end and a firework in the middle”. La Trinité’s façade, he observes, breaks out “into cupolas and groups of statuary on the least provocation”. From the side, Porte Saint-Martin really does resemble “a slice of highly vermiculated slab-cake”. The buttoned-up naughtiness of Pigalle is, perhaps more than ever, “like a matron of forty-five unhooking her corsets with a simper or two”. Conversely, Goujon’s nymphs, with their “[f]ull breasts and infolded thighs” do indeed “suggest devotion beyond the line of public sculpture”.

  Ian Nairn was a celebrity during his short lifetime. He found instant fame, at the age of twenty-five, by launching a high-profile campaign against the blandness of what he called “Subtopia”. He soon became one the country’s foremost architectural critics, writing a string of essays and books, including his masterpiece, Nairn’s London (1966). He also produced several travel series for the BBC. Driven by his demons, he drove a Morris Minor convertible around the country, resulting in a very British take on the road trip format. He eventually drank himself to death in 1983, aged just fifty-two.

  One of the reasons why Nairn’s works were out of print for so long is — as Owen Hatherley pithily puts it — that he was “too modernist for the preservationists, too much a preservationist for the modernists”. His travel writing is impressionistic, guided by his “uncommitted eyes”; energised by
what moved him, what he “enjoyed”. Scourge of “gratuitous notice-boards”, he railed “at the way people try to put words all over the landscape”. Nairn’s Paris could thus be seen, in part, as an act of erasure. The city’s romance is arrived at adventitiously, like the serendipitous poetry of Métro station names: “What administrator could invent a poetic conjunction as rich as Sèvres-Babylone?” His guidebook is “an invitation not to argument but to discovery”. Yet, for all his vision of an uncharted Paris, cut adrift from cliché and dogma, some passages remain resolutely and endearingly English. Apropos of a department store, he writes: “An incautious step will put the male visitor in a landscape which looks as though it is panties as far as the eye can see. The same situation could occur, doubtless, in Selfridge’s or Barker’s, but it wouldn’t feel the same”.

  Nairn’s relationship with the French capital began rather inauspiciously. On his first visit he suffered from a mild case of Paris syndrome — the (then undiagnosed) malady said to afflict some tourists when the City of Light fails to live up to their expectations. Of all the “world-famous attractions”, only the Palais Garnier, Louvre Colonnade and Eiffel Tower passed muster. He cleaves to this heretical view in the guidebook, describing Notre-Dame as “one of the most pessimistic buildings in the world”. Several entries — including such crowd-pleasers as the Sacré-Coeur — are cordoned off within sanitary square brackets, making it perfectly plain that these landmarks did not appeal to the author, although it would have been remiss of him not to cover them. Nairn’s Paris — for that, after all, is the title of the book — is a “collective masterpiece”, not “a place for individual wonders”. It may be glimpsed at in the interstitial spaces when “travelling from one piece of architecture to another”. Paris is what happens, unseen, in between the sights, unless you (like him) have the “ability to turn off the main road” in pursuit of a “topographical hunch”.