We'll Never Have Paris

by Andrew Gallix

  Above all, what the Anglo-Saxon temperament hopes to find in Paris is the apotheosis of high culture, of a culture it is sportingly willing to admit he lacks, for a weekend at least, in the encounter with its essence. It was the genius of Paris that it provided a home for both the deification of culture and its overthrow in the century just gone, when the iconoclasms of the avant-gardes after 1918 provoked concert audiences and gallery habitués to foaming dyspepsia, in the self-same locale where the classical ballet and the tragedies of Racine still set the benchmark. In the present day, what iconoclasm there is has nothing to say to society at large, but is enacted purely internally, against itself. The manifest absurdities of the fashion industry, one of capitalism’s shameless oxymorons, and the over-conceptualized somersaults of contemporary cuisine, which have resorted to the language of the inorganic and the inedible in order, as they say in the glossies, to “push the boundaries”, even while tourists on the Boulevard Saint-Michel are served the same raggy bavettes and clotted sauces with which they have always been sated, speak an unintelligible language. Only in the Salle des États, where Napoleon III once presided over the legislative sessions of the Second Empire, and where La Gioconda now skulks behind her protective wooden barriers and screens of bulletproof glass, does culture still feel like culture, an inert object of the transfixed gazing of the masses, to whom she remains as immune as when Marcel Duchamp drew a waxed moustache on her.

  If they are lucky, a moment of transcendence on a drizzly day out in the city from the ruthlessly administered magic at Disneyland Paris may break upon the visitors. The cheap glass of Bordeaux rouge that turns out to be unexpectedly delicious; a coupe of praline ice-cream at Berthillon; the frankly returned glance from somebody beautiful on the cobbles of Montmartre; sunlight washing through the stained windows of the Sainte-Chapelle; the dazzle of the evening scene from the open deck of a bateau-mouches gliding sedately along the Seine: such moments arrive like tokens of dreams half-remembered on waking, already fading under the impress of rationality, but bearing witness to what one hoped the surprising world would be before it surrendered to the principle of order. If Paris is otherwise disappointing, it is because it already bears the image of what the entire first world is turning into — a mausoleum of disordered hopes.

  Stalingrad

  Will Wiles

  It was dawn. We had just stepped off a sleeper train at Nord, and were walking the tree-lined nineteenth-century avenues, searching for our hotel. I had never visited before, but it all seemed so familiar, so like my mental picture of Paris: the radial streets, the cobbles underfoot, the plane trees, the tall stone-faced mansion blocks with their mansard attics. Yes, this was the place. This was Bucharest.

  Paris is a uniquely memetic city. The City of Light might be unmistakably distinctive, but its distinctiveness has been paradoxically easy for other cities to emulate. It is an idea that can be reproduced, and indeed has been across France, and across the world. Paris — specifically the Paris of Georges-Eugène Haussmann, prefect of the Seine Department under Napoleon III — accidentally created for itself a kind of off-the-shelf urban-design operating system. It is the Microsoft Windows of cities, and any up-and-coming nineteenth-century city that wanted to appear grand, established and modern could install and run it. And they did, from Bucharest to Buenos Aires.

  The Paris system had two main features: the 1859 building code, which standardised the appearance of the city’s physical fabric and streetscape, and the carving of new, straight boulevards through the irregular mesh of the medieval city. (It’s significant that Haussmanization does not only reject the organic layout — it also comprehensively rejects the grid, which in urban planning terms is at least as ancient.) Neither of these principles was at all new; they are familiar precepts of baroque city planning, with antecedents that are even more ancient. In fact, the wide, tree-lined boulevards aren’t even originally urban: they began as the shady allées and avenues of formal parkland, and were a routine feature of European suburban improvement long before Haussmann started grinding them through the city centre, and he was hardly the first to lay out a new street or two. The accidental genius of Haussmannization in Paris was that it did not reside in a single scheme. Other cities had laid out their Regent Streets and Unter den Lindens. What Paris created was a system, a method, which reproduced itself across the existing fabric of the city.

  Today, when cities in the Far East lay out neighbourhoods designed in conscious emulation of Paris or English towns, English broadsheets like to portray them as helplessly gauche and tacky. But cities are fundamentally imitative enterprises, forever copy–pasting parts of each other into their own composition. Urban distinctiveness is a kaleidoscopic, mirrored image, and its every fragment reflects somewhere else.

  The Sunday-supplement snark is cranked out in a city that has its own generous slices of Parisian pastiche. Kingsway in Holborn was laid out at the turn of the century as a deliberate ape of the Champs Elysées, with a dash of Beaux-Arts New York thrown in — one of its proposed names was Connecticut Avenue. Just off Kingsway is the even more bizarre Sicilian Avenue, RJ Worley’s stab at Naples on a postcard scale, with an oneiric inattention to the source. Is it the two-thirds-scale Eiffel Towers in Shanghai and Shenzhen that makes their Parisian districts just a little too on-the-nose? We almost had one of those as well, at Wembley, but the developers ran out of money with only the first stage complete. (London even has a pissoir, on Horseferry Road.)

  There is another kind of direct reference that cities make to each other, and Paris is home to perhaps the most vivid example of it: Stalingrad. I can’t remember the first time I saw Stalingrad. The important thing to note is that I didn’t see-see it at all; I wasn’t there. I saw the name, on a map, either one of the little ticket-sized folding maps RATP gives out, or mounted on a wall. And I think I might have laughed, because it caused what could only be called a surge of non-association. If psychogeography is the exploration of a place through the literature and memories it brings to mind, this was something like the opposite, and all the purer for it: a rush of meaningless half-learned fragments, ignorance nested in ignorance. Sebald inverted. What to do, as a callow teen, but laugh?

  To recap: I was in an unfamiliar city looking at a place on a map with a jarringly un-Parisian name. Stalingrad the Paris Métro station was a place I had never been, and I knew for certain I would not be going to; it was named after a place that I had never been, and would not be going to. Furthermore, it was named after a place I would never be able to visit, because it no longer existed: the Russian city of Stalingrad became Volgograd in 1961. Strictly speaking, it is not named after the place but the 1942–43 siege and battle, during which the Soviets withstood, and then encircled and destroyed, a vast concentration of Nazi armies. Even more strictly speaking, the Métro station was not named after the place or the battle but after the place named after the battle, Place de Stalingrad. Just to clarify the distinction between city and battle, the square was renamed Place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad a couple of decades ago. However the Métro remains plain old Stalingrad.

  This was all very satisfying. There was a pleasingly blunt Gallic courtesy in recognising one of the principal scenes of the Allies’ victory in the Second World War, even if France had not directly participated in the battle. Despite our recent mania for new war memorials, this recognition is comprehensively lacking in the UK, where remembrance remains a selective, provincial and amnesiac business. But what I remember about encountering the name is how unevocative I found it. I didn’t know what Stalingrad (the Soviet City) looked like. I’m afraid my assumptions were crass, based in (not uncommon) prejudices about Soviet cities and, indeed, French suburbs. Grim, right? Tower blocks and that.

  My ignorance wasn’t total: I had seen, at school, The World at War, but of course that mostly shows the city in ruins and, like skeletons, ruined cities are rarely distinctive. In their own era, anyway: the ruined cities of the Second World War are generally unli
ke the ruined cities of today because of the preponderance of the concrete frame over brick. Pre-1960, urban ruinscapes had a rained-on, melted look, like the stubs of candles, and subsequently they have a more layered appearance, like pastry.

  In any case, it was not the urban landscape that the name brought to mind. It was something else, something almost visceral: the distinct human reflex of peripeteia, the appreciation of a reversal of fortune. Stalingrad wasn’t the first time the Nazis had been stopped — they had already failed in their efforts to capture Leningrad and Moscow — but at Stalingrad they were not just stopped, they were crushed. Operation Uranus, a devastating pincer movement by the Red Army, turned the Wehrmacht column besieging Stalingrad into a besieged pocket, and doomed it. That was what was so satisfying about the word: the image of it, the gesture, the pincer closing, hacking off the outstretched tentacle.

  Beneath the strategic abstractions the human horror involved was vast, so it is best not to succumb to outright pleasure, but we can allow ourselves a restrained degree of gratification from reflecting on Stalingrad as the place where Nazism began to get what it deserved. A name worth remembering for that, even if the city name honoured a monster and even though the memory comes cut with a shudder at the cost.

  When I first saw the name, in the early 1990s, Stalingrad was necessarily mysterious — we were just passing through Nord. It was a blob on the map, the intersection of three lines. Today, that kind of mystery is permanently diminished by the digital panopticon. Google Street View — so helpful to research, so ruinous to the dream cities of the imagination — reveals a pleasant pedestrian square and boulevard with an elevated railway running down its middle, a bit of Robida-esque Third Republic heavy technology. It’s all distinctly normal, although it could only really be Paris, or somewhere like it.

  Paris Perdu

  Tom McCarthy

  They all do it: highbrow, lowbrow, avant-garde, retrograde, all of them. What do they do? Create a Paris, a “Paris”, a glorious Paris, city for the ages, that’s been utterly and irrevocably lost. For Marker in La Jetée it’s been nuked; for Humph and Ingrid in Casablanca it’s been mothballed inside memory; for Debord in In Girum Imus Nocte it’s been buried beneath capitalism; for Burroughs (“Paris Please Stay the Same”: the essay’s title is rhetorical, functioning negatively, i.e. to signal that is hasn’t stayed the same) it disappeared with open pick-up urinals and over-the-counter codeine. The “real” Paris, the authentic one, the one before all this alienation, all this fakeness, all this shit.

  But what if this were structural? What if the nostalgia were constitutive, built into the experience of being (that is, of failing to “be” authentically) in Paris in the first place? One of the city’s greatest twentieth-century exports, Claude Lévi-Strauss, pacing the streets of Lahore in the Fifties, all festooned with electric cables, senses that he’s come fifty years too late to see the real Lahore; then, with a sense of déja-vu, recognises the same feeling when he’s staying among the Amazonian Nambikwara — although, having read the account of the anthropologist who was here fifty years ago, before the rubber-traders and the telegraph, and knowing that this man expressed the exact same feeling, and knowing that the anthropologist who’ll come in fifty years from now will wish he’d come when he, Lévi-Strauss, was here, that is, now, then, whenever… leads him to a revelation: that the “purity” we crave is nothing more than a condition in which the frames requisite for analysis and interpretation are missing; once these are in place — and putting them in place is, after all, the anthropologist’s (and writer’s) task, their raison d’être — then pouf! The mystique that drew him to his subject in the first place vaporises.

  He gets it. Lahore, the Amazon, the Arctic — it’s Paris. Paris is whatever is lost, and whatever is lost is Paris. That makes Georges Perec’s 1974 account of the Paris experience the only accurate one. It’s accurate precisely because it understands its own irremediable inauthenticity; understands that inauthenticity can be the only proper mode of being/not being in Paris. In Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien Perec sits for three days in a café, looking at the city passing by his window, noting down what he sees. And what he sees, this being Paris, is largely made up of other people looking. There are even hordes of Japanese tourists snapping photos out of special Kodak coaches that themselves are built like cameras, giant lenses. On Day Two, Perec is overwhelmed by a sense of nostalgia — not for “Paris”, but for his time in the same café yesterday: Curiosité inassouvie (ce que je suis venu chercher, le souvenir qui flotte dans ce café)… He gets it too: there’s no ur-madeleine; it’s memory of madeleine all the way down.

  The square he sits in is Place Saint-Sulpice. Beneath it there is (was then and still is now) an underground car park. Sous les pavés, le parking. I, too, recall (Je me souviens…) a parking in Paris. I think it was underneath the Boulevard Saint-Germain or Saint-Michel, near a café where famous writers, Sartre and de Beauvoir or some people like that, once used to meet. It had a luminescent poured-tar floor; its yellow bay-lines glistened wetly, even though they were quite dry. Arriving there, stepping out of the car at level -2 or -3, I’m not sure how long I spent standing there admiring it. In real time it can’t have been more than a few minutes, while my friend went and got a display-ticket, locked the car, whatever. Real time was up above, though. Down here, artificial birdsong, playing out on a loop, created its own temporality, a duration that, freed from all clocks, oozed and accreted like the tar. The whole ambience was perfectly synthetic, synthesised; in fact, it brought about a synthesis in the Hegelian sense — an absolute suspension of the city, its simultaneous abstraction and solidification in the gorgeous geometry of lots, arrows and tar, of singing without origin or end. It was without question the most beautiful place I have ever known in Paris, or perhaps anywhere. I’m not sure if I could find it again, though. I’m not sure it even still exists. They’ve probably turned it into a fucking library or something.

  a mnemopolis, a necropole !

  Andrew Robert Hodgson

  On the terrasse of the Café de la Mairie there Sulpice adjacent I sat and watched the 87, the 96, the 63 pass, and stop, and pass and wondered if he’d taken a taxi. The waiter came, and stopped, and went and I wondered if I’d ordered anything. Watched the chuff of buses offloading. Through four ply of glass panes and intervening space a small boy chasing an older woman chasing a grey dog chasing greyer pigeons, I suppose blue, almost. In contrast, the pigeons. Who ensemble rounded the fountain in the middle there once or twice. Dispersing, somewhat, knocked the photographer’s cue over on the church steps where two ranks of friends and family had stood suited, booted, white dressed (faux pas, y’know), and themselves now missed the “Fromage!” moment, and dispersed to do a lap or two of the fountain along the photographer, the dog, the older lady, the small boy and the pigeons there themselves. Before, “You are late, Monsieur !” and Jean Mimi (dit Jean-Martin Philippe, and presented with the further elongated shortening of Jean Mimi Fifi had resolved himself to the briefer hypocoristicon. Saw that as something of a win, I think. He did) and Jean Mimi closed whatever he was failing to read, folded into his lap reveals it to be a bound book or other, and squinted up at myself as I crossed the road towards him there on the terrasse of the Café de la Mairie, the quarrel of mammals and birds and photographers all off over my shoulder, through a bus or two, and I realised I was misremembering.

  Or projecting as I sort of fell up the stairs of Saint-Sulpice sortie, the Métro, as opposed to the church there. And, operating on “And so, I’ll meet you at the Perec café” had, that morning woken a little late, a little, and flicked through Tentative (1975), and found three such cafés from which Georges had voyeured the buses, and the church, and the old ladies, and so opted for the first, the Saint-Sulpice (tabac). Which I deduced to be in my near corner, furthest from the group there throwing plastic rose petals at a couple on the steps, and found non-existent. And so, well, I thought Mimi will have cigarettes
, and I suppose he won’t be much interested in a pair of leather chaps what with the heat of early summer (the season in which we here are), thus further deducing that he was not in this maroquinerie bygone tabac. I left to wait to cross the road there where the 87, the 96, the 63 stopped and passed, the latter of which parked across the zebra crossing. And so I had to round the back, and dodge through the taxis jostling to line up underneath a large white P painted onto a blue square. Breeching at a pole topped by a weathered plastic diamond that once was orange, still reading “TAXI”. Sort of, clambered between the shifting bumpers and onto the place itself where a ring of benches round a fountain that’s off when I’ve been here before, but on today, and I wonder if they chemical the water. As it’s a sort of aquamarine, like, a pool, or the sea in Greece “As seen on Instagram”. When someone’s high key trying to sell me a holiday, or dietary supplements, or yoga classes or whatever. And I wonder this, not all that keyed, but low, to myself, as a small boy keepy-upping by the bike racks misses a knee, a foot, the last-ditch elbow, and the ball comes bouncing over to the blue pool and well. Well, this water is pristine. Or, perhaps, so chemicalled the ball itself would just fizz and melt away. I prefer not to take any chances, and for the greater good, kind of half lunge out a foot, though not removing my hands from my coat pockets (where, NB, they have been all this time), so as not to show too much effort endured if I miss the thing, y’know? And, in all my glory, manage a half shin into a pile of brooding pigeons on the other side of the place and sort of. Well, how are you supposed to come back from that. Shout, “fetch!” Like a joke, that’s a terrible joke. Are the pigeons the dog in this scenario? The boy? Various shrieks and jeering erupt from far behind my shoulder as I quickly turn to find the second café, La Fontaine Saint-Sulpice (café), and resolve to never ever think about it ever again.