Thanks to his sister though, he now had a bit of money, a magic dust that when sprinkled improved the mood. He’d take the coat to the dry cleaners tomorrow, and things would come right in the end. Sure, there were debts unpaid, phone calls from the landlord unreturned, disappointed girlfriends, novels — like the one he’d talked about — begun in a fervour that later broke apart like Boeings going down, first engine one, then engine three, but surely one day, and that day would be soon, it would all come right.
Paris Syndrome
Dylan Trigg
Why move… when one can travel so magnificently in a chair?
— J.K. Huysmans, À Rebours
The American and Japanese tourists who descend upon Montmartre’s Place du Tertre do so with astute foresight. They know that amongst the dense cluster of cultural and artistic heritage, surrounded on one side by the dizzying view of Paris from the crest of the Sacré-Cœur, and on the other by a series of cascading vineyards — that amongst all this, there exists a beacon of familiarity in an otherwise intoxicating world: Starbucks.
Looking at it now, it is hard to imagine that when it originally opened in 2013 in one of Paris’s most iconic neighbourhoods, that the prospect of a Starbucks in Montmartre would be met with dismay. Back then, critics anticipated that the introduction of Starbucks would undermine the ineffable soul of Parisian life so carefully constructed from the time of Hemingway and Picasso up until Woody Allen’s incisive portrayal of everyday life as told through the eyes of Hollywood’s elite. History has not been kind to the critics. Tastefully blending into the surrounding region, the Starbucks at Montmartre’s Place du Tertre has become a home for tourists who, having exhausted themselves with the grey homogeneity of the Parisian landscape, now seek sanctuary amid interchangeable furnishings and anodyne coffee.
And they are shrewd to have made this move. For them, this is not one Starbucks among many, but instead a site where memories will be forged and dreams fulfilled. In the nostalgia that lies ahead, their recollections will draw back to those carefree afternoons, which in their languid rhythm mirror the days of Rimbaud and Verlaine, but are now augmented — perhaps even improved — with the introduction of an Iced Caramel Macchiato. The tourists who have taken up residence in Starbucks at Montmartre’s Place du Tertre have done so, not with a view of effacing the soul of Paris, but precisely in order to preserve the city’s genius loci. Theirs is a Paris that is best viewed from behind the veneer of artifice, and for this reason, theirs is a Paris that is more Parisian than the city itself.
The American and Japanese touristswho descend upon Montmartre’sPlace du Tertre know the dangers that lie just beyond Starbucks. Looking out from the peak of the Sacré-Cœur, they will be greeted with a cityscape, as vast as it is iconic. But in the romantic alleys and imposing boulevards there grows a quiet anxiety. Many of the tourists who have arrived in the city have found themselves strangely depressed. The excitement that often accompanies their walk from the anonymous hotel to the Place du Tertre is offset by a lugubrious atmosphere, which is beginning to infect Starbucks itself. At the coffee counters overlooking the venerated square, a young Japanese couple sit with their heads in their palms, their expression of grief visible through the cracks in their fingers while their skinny lattes sit untouched.
Some of the Japanese tourists had apparently taken a wrong turn one morning and discovered a dimension of Paris that they weren’t expecting. Emerging from the picturesque squares populating Saint-Georges, it seems as though they strayed too far to the east before ending up on Boulevard Barbès. Overwhelmed by the maddening panoply of sights and smells, a small section of the Japanese tourists entered what can only be called a fugue-like state. For about ten minutes, they lost sight not only of their surroundings but also of their own identities. When they emerged from their slumbers, they were in Clignancourt at the back of Montmartre. Were it not for the sight of the Sacré-Cœur high on the hill, there would have been no small danger that the group would have strayed towards the Périphérique, at which point contact would have been lost with the group indefinitely. Of those that did return, several had to be escorted to the Japanese Embassy for counsel.
Might it be that the American and Japanese tourists who seek home at the Starbucks on Montmartre’s Place du Tertre have discovered a truth about Paris that the locals themselves are oblivious to — namely, that the city is best viewed through the prism of artifice? The Japanese tourists prone to Paris Syndrome — a term given to tourists who are ill-prepared for an experience of Paris that dissents from their dreams — merely exemplify the need to frame the romance of Paris through the lens of a simulation. The severity of their symptoms and the long-term damage caused by their breakdowns attest to the urgent need to map out carefully delineated pathways that ensure this simulation of Paris is never disrupted, much less erased.
Siren Orgasms: Leftovers From an Unfinished Novel
Fernando Sdrigotti
Siren Orgasms. One more novel set in Paris. But from the title onwards this one is different.
The name refers to a cocktail once served in a nightclub in Ibiza. The connection between sirens and Paris might seem wanton but in the opening paragraph, Alex — the main character —is woken up by the sound of a police car rushing past. Siren Orgasms starts with this very Parisian music: the coincidence of sign (siren) and sound (siren) is too obvious to miss. Alex wakes up longing for a beach, recalling in his lethargy the sound of orgasms coming from the ocean. This clash of spaces is unexpected. There are many allegorical possibilities here. This is the kind of thing good books are made of. It’s also the kind of thing that makes an unfinished manuscript.
*
Room 29. A hotel at the top of the steps between Rue Lamarck and Rue Caulaincourt, where else if not in Montmartre.
Alex arrived some days ago. Although he seems to be on some journey — in between places — he hasn’t left the hotel and will spend a lot of time in his room. There’ll be a lot of watching TV shows he can’t understand. There’ll be page after page of being in a room he doesn’t want to leave [CONFLICT UNSPECIFIED]. There’ll be moments when the telephone rings and Alex doesn’t answer; there’ll be moments when he calls an international number and hangs up. There’ll be references to a book he’s reading — Dostoevsky’s The Gambler and Alexei Ivanovich in Paris who has no idea what he’ll do with his life. Perhaps that’s what keeps Alex indoors: maybe he needs to figure out what’s going on and what will go on. So he doesn’t leave for pages on end and thinks a lot without thinking anything but then he does leave, and heads to a café on the corner.
He orders a café au lait and sits down and looks at the photos in Le Monde. From the images it seems someone has attempted to kill Chirac in Paris during the Bastille Day parade (which locates the novel in 2002). And from behind the bar, two twins —barmaids, not mermaids —stare at him. There’s also a guy operating the espresso machine and he stares at Alex too —the guy moves his arms a lot, he has to be Italian. The Italian guy makes some comment in French to the twins and the twins laugh —the situation is awkward. But just when Alex is about to leave, a middle-aged woman with a poodle walks in and sits at the table opposite him. She looks like Delphine Seyrig in Baisers volés and she’s elegant and her toenails are nicely done and her feet wave at Alex from behind a pair of high-heel sandals. Then the dog starts fucking the table leg and then it pisses on the floor and the woman leaves, cursing the dog in French. Delphine Seyrig won’t return to the bar or the novel, which feels like a missed opportunity.
So Alex goes back to the hotel, masturbates and ejaculates in a sock. Whereupon he recalls the dream, and tries to imagine how sirens might orgasm. Has anyone ever survived hearing a siren climax?
*
Soon Alex starts to acknowledge the existence of other people, beyond their role as props. He meets two Canadian women in the hotel, filmmakers. They’re working on the script for a film called Diary of a Dead Dog, probably unfinished, like this novel. With th
e Canadians [DESCRIBE — DON’T FORGET THE BIRKENSTOCKS]Alex spends some hours drinking warm white wine on the esplanade of the Sacré-Coeur. The Canadians are having a great time. But the wine gets Alex in one of his moods. Or maybe he had expected something else, ending up instead hanging out with film students surrounded by tourists — and everybody knows how much students and tourists suck in novels. So he offers a vague excuse and walks away on his own in search of the real Paris [HIS MOTIVATION NEEDS TO BE CLEARER]. On his way back to the hotel, he stops in a tiny café (Café de la Butte) on Rue Caulaincourt. There are old photos on the walls and two or three old punters who look his way. A waitress, old too, comes to serve him and he orders a bottle of wine pointing at the menu with his index finger. The waitress asks something in French and he thinks she must be asking if he wants the whole bottle. Yes he wants the whole bottle —oui, oui.
On the telly, a talk show. Alex can’t understand a word but it keeps him entertained. He drinks and watches, oblivious to what everyone else in the café finds so funny —héhéhé, hihihi, hohoho. It goes on for a while. A lot of effort has clearly been expended on the presenter’s hair. And then the telephone rings and the waitress mutes the television and has a heated argument over this or that with whoever called — je te dis que c’est un trou du cul. This juxtaposition of French and English is a nice touch, even if it doesn’t add much to the story per se. In any event, Alex soon finishes his bottle of wine, stumbles out of the café and into room 29, just around the corner.
Back in the hotel room he’ll dream about the sirens once more [DON’T OVERDO THIS].
*
The next day, hungover and forlorn, perhaps anticipating the rather precarious state of the rest of this manuscript, Alex takes the Métro to Père Lachaise, visits some of the dead buried there, in a passage made up mostly of notes [TO BE WRITTEN LATER —PENDING RESEARCH] and then he ends up walking all the way to République [FIND RATIONALE FOR THIS]. Perhaps he needs to be out and about in Paris, looking for those random encounters so many have already written so much about. Yes, it must be that, and at some stage in his peregrinations he stops in another café and orders a beer pointing at the word bière on the menu —une bière s’il vous plaît, he even says, feeling that he is beginning to master the basics of the French language. The waitress happens to be from Spain — she’s called Neva — and they end up chatting in Spanish. When Neva spots his accent, we realise that Alex is Argentinean: a perfect opportunity to recycle some stereotypes about Argentine men and Spanish women. Then Neva gets him drunk and refuses to charge him. And Alex stays in the bar for several hours, thinking that he should buy a Rhodia and start writing [HE WOULDN’T KNOW WHAT A RHODIA IS, WOULD HE?]. When the bar starts to get busy —this being Friday night — they arrange to meet the following day. Neva jots down her address on a napkin because that’s what people do in 2002. And they’ll meet tomorrow around 1pm for lunch in her flat, Rue Saint-Maur, near Belleville.
That night he dreams of Neva — Neva is a siren.
*
Alex wakes up early. He has a quick shower and gets the Métro to Assemblée Nationale [WHY?] and then walks by the Seine, on the Left Bank [WHY?]. On some indeterminate quai he sits by the river, watching the water for a while [WHY?]. A clocharde approaches him, starts chatting him up in French. Alex excuses himself saying, je ne comprends pas. The clocharde keeps on monologuing anyway, going over something Alex misses but that the reader may be able to get, depending on their level of French, or their inclination to do some translation work [THIS WILL BE THE KEY TO THE NOVEL]. Alex then walks away, and bumps into a police boat by the Pont Neuf. Divers are trying to fish something out of the water. Alex thinks it may be a suicide [INSERT PASSING REFERENCE TO L’INCONNUE DE LA SEINE] and he walks away from the scene as quickly as possible. Maybe that was what the clocharde was trying to tell him [THIS PART SOUNDS NICKED FROM HOPSCOTCH].
At this point the novel starts floundering. Too many mental monologues and narrative lines that go nowhere. Alex is supposed to be meeting Neva for lunch and there’s all this disjointed bollocks. And there’s even a badly executed involuntary memory scene about his dead grandmother, the aim of which must have been to insert a reference to how the city affects people; how it might trigger different memories and moods [RESEARCH PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY]. This may also explain Alex’s dark thoughts at the time [DOESN’T WORK]. It could also simply be some half-baked attempt to fill a few pages with nice, evocative images of Paris.
Eventually he gets to Neva’s and they smoke weed and drink wine and click and have a great conversation [TO BE WRITTEN LATER —RESEARCH WOMEN]. And then Alex finds himself infatuated, walking with her around town [TO BE WRITTEN LATER —RESEARCH PARIS] in scenes that several years later will be deemed too corny to even consider thanks to that awful film starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.
Soon, out of nowhere, the unexpected climax of the novel: Alex tells Neva that he’ll leave the following day. He’ll be moving to London: Paris was always meant to be a place in between places; a stepping stone in whatever Alex’s journey is about. This occurs down in the Lamarck-Caulaincourt Métro station, just as Neva is about to board her train and after they’ve arranged to call each other the next day. [WHY DOES HE WAIT UNTIL THEN TO TELL HER? MAKES NO SENSE]. What we do know, however, is that Neva’s response is quelle merde. And with these words she kisses him. The train arrives. She gets on the train. She leaves without looking back. And Alex is left there [INSERT MOTIVATION FOR EXISTENTIAL CRISIS] and the next thing we know Alex removes his shoes, throws them in a bin in [NAME OF THAT SQUARE ON RUE LAMARCK], and walks all the way back to the hotel barefoot [EXISTENTIAL CRISIS SHOULD EXPLAIN THIS].
Siren Orgasms ends with Alex in his room, getting his bags ready. There’s another police car rushing past: the sirens— circularity. And then it starts raining. Alex approaches the window and he can’t see anything but some trees and a fragment of sky. The next morning he’ll move to London and I’ll shelve the novel with other literary failures.
And the rest is all fiction.
The Arraignment of Paris
Stuart Walton
The nervous energy of disappointment is a constitutive factor in the Anglophone experience of Paris. It is at least as important to the British, for example, that Paris should fall short of what they expect of it as it is to the Parisians that les Anglais have never really understood it. If Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century for Walter Benjamin, and then the frenetic vanguard of the cultural world in the 1920s — when Britain was reverting to insipid realism in the visual arts and turning to American musicals and Noël Coward on the London stage — the Paris that has since emerged is of the white baguette and the insolent waiter variety: the atrocious pop, the substanceless cinema and a culture that swallows its own pretensions, from couture to an insularly defined gastronomy, whole. The British are never disappointed in their disappointment with the City of Light. The disappointment is tout compris. In itself, however, it speaks of a cultural ideal to which the concept of the foreign ought to live up, even though Paris has always offered itself as home to every romantic and untethered soul, as well as those broken by alienated experience. Jean Rhys’s heroine, Sasha Jansen, in Good Morning, Midnight (1939) has returned to a Paris that once nurtured her freedom and that now dramatises her rootlessness, an environment attuned to both liberty and desperation as occasion commands. Its shabby hotel rooms, the gloom of an empty cinema in the afternoon, cognac-and-sodas in dispiriting cafés where the bathroom mirrors are for sobbing in as much as fixing one’s make-up: the whole city forms a stage-set on which the reality of crashed hopes can become as intermittently unreal as the speech and behaviour of its actors.
Every pilgrim to Paris from the citadels of Nordic asceticism has longed to find in it the libertinage with which, in the late eighteenth century, France scandalised Europe, by investing it simultaneously in sexual affairs and politics. The same destructive energies unleashed in the orgies of de Sade motivate th
e continual lopping of heads on the Place de la Révolution. Even the July Days of 1830, which did little more than see off the last of the Bourbon kings, are imaged by Delacroix in the figure of Liberty, her breasts exposed, trampling forward over the corpses of the fallen. If beauty, as André Breton insisted, should be convulsive or not be at all, the desire it provokes should be hotly rapacious to be worthy of the name. Thus does Monsieur Swann whip himself into a squall of jealous misery at Odette’s absence in the capital, for “as he told himself, now and then, to allow so pretty a woman to go out by herself in Paris was just as rash as to leave a case filled with jewels in the middle of the street”. And yet gap-year students alighting from the Eurostar are doomed to find only an arid politesse where they yearn for initiatory carnal adventures, not least because Paris obstinately does not these days give herself to those who are not already acquainted with her.
The curious air of lifeless desertion that descends over the city in the August canicule is interpreted by foreign tourists to themselves in accordance with the myth that the provincial French all dislike Paris too. Its harsh froideur is an affront to the hospitable Gallic instinct, they assure each other, even if what provokes it is more likely the brash assumptions that the tourist makes. Sprawling in crowds around the pavement café tables, chattering at an abrasive volume, displaying their enjoyment of their own drunkenness, demanding changes to the menu items when they do decide to eat, and assuming that nobody in Paris can understand the English imprecations they utter when the menu items cannot be changed, are all guaranteed to elicit the superior mien of neighbouring patrons and staff alike. Cultured shuddering at the uncultured is as uncultured as lack of culture itself in all cultures, but it is this demeanour that is seen as having been raised to an exquisite proficiency by the Parisian, who looks with mingled pity and scorn on the braying hordes. If the perduring English cultural temperament is a rumbustious pleasure in living, its French counterpart is seen as glacial contempt, the aridity of an over-bureaucratised polity, notwithstanding the fact that Victorian England invented the chilly reserve in social manners for which the British have been noted ever since, while pleasure in living went by its proper name, joie de vivre, across the Channel.
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