Remembering Paris in Text and Film

Alistair Rolls, Marguerite Johnson

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789384208
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

This new book explores aspects of Paris from the time of Baudelaire within the context of nostalgia and modernity. It seeks to see Paris, through written texts and movies, from the outside, and as both concrete reality and a collection of myths associated with it.

This collection of essays contains original research on the intersections of several disciplinary approaches to Paris and modernity. It is designed to make these complex concepts speak to an academic audience, but also to an undergraduate readership. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines.

The book springs from two interdisciplinary courses on Paris and modernity – Paris at Dawn, which looks at modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Paris at Midnight, which looks at left-bank culture following the Second World War – coordinated by Associate Professor Alistair Rolls (French studies) and Professor Marguerite Johnson (classics and classical reception) at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

While it is driven by original research, notably by examining the intersections of any number of disciplinary lenses and positions on Paris and modernity, it is also designed to make these complex concepts understandable for a wider readership, including undergraduates. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines (with their monoliths and taxonomies); at the same time, it will also provide clarity and, importantly, make logical links between, for example, the past and present, myth and reality, poetry and history, and various schools and movements, including psychology, poetics, poststructuralism and critical theory, classical reception, feminism and existentialism. All contributors are academics working in the School of Humanities and Social Science, who have contributed to the development and delivery of these twinned courses.

Remembering Paris investigates Paris as an urban and poetic site of remembrance. For Charles Baudelaire, the streets of Paris conjured visions of the past even as he contemplated the present. This book investigates this and other cases of double vision, tracing back from Baudelaire into antiquity, but also following Baudelaire forwards as his poetry is translated, received and referenced in texts and films in the twentieth century and beyond.

Primary readership will be academics, educators, scholars and students – both undergraduate and postgraduate. The chapter structure and the relatively classic choice of authors and filmmakers is well suited to course use.

Many universities are now turning to interdisciplinary courses, which combine historical, cultural, literary and artistic approaches to thematic studies. This book, therefore, will also be of interest to academics teaching courses on French language, literature and culture; literary studies; film studies; cultural studies; women studies, gender studies; LGBTQ+ studies; even human geography.

1

Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen: Re-presenting Paris

Alistair Rolls

When Jean-Michel Gouvard (2015: 140) opens his article on Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris and its relationship to Paris by stating that ‘contrary to what the title of the collection might lead you to believe, all the “little prose poems” are not set in Paris’, it is difficult to know whether he is being ironic or not. In the framework of the present volume, which has Paris firmly centre stage and, crucially, present even when it is ostensibly absent, this appears a surprisingly literal comment to make about Baudelaire’s final work. Certainly, Gouvard immediately goes some way to softening his opening gambit. He refers to other readers, for whom the prose poems are by turns ‘exotic in character’ (set on far-flung desert islands or in fairy-tale fantasy lands) or positioned non-specifically but recognizably ‘beyond the city walls’, in the faubourgs, areas that have since been integrated into Paris intra-muros and whose present-day equivalents are the suburban spaces of la banlieue. And yet, other references throughout the prose poems are undeniably to Paris itself. Gouvard sums up his careful, even cautious, position as follows: ‘[Thus,] several texts in the collection are “Parisian” not insofar as their action takes place “in Paris”, which is one meaning of the adjective, but by virtue of references that are made to, and the relationship that is thereby established with, Paris’ (2015: 140). One is led to wonder what motivates such a granular exploration of Paris as toponym or of the appearance of its famous landmarks in this work. Why, indeed, do any of us strive in our own ways to prove that the collection can be defined as ‘Parisian’?¹ One aspect of Gouvard’s summation is of particular importance for our present purposes, and it is this suggestion that ‘taking place in Paris’ is only one, and perhaps not the most important, meaning of ‘Parisian’. In this chapter, it will be argued that this adjective pertains to a particular type of poetics, a mode of being present to, and presenting, a precise urban locale while simultaneously representing it, overlaying it with myths, memories and other varieties of absence.

In the prose poems therefore, Baudelaire establishes a framework for reading both poetry and urban space that is recognizably modern (even if, as is so often the case, it is almost impossible to find clear and commonly accepted definitions of this and other such terms) and, further, one that is exemplary of a critical form of modernity. This critical stance, this mode of reading, I shall suggest, is metonymic of modernity just as Paris is so often considered to be. One might think of David Harvey’s work in the field, which argues against what he considers the common misapprehension about the modern of modernity, which is to say, that it somehow ‘constitutes a radical break with the past’ (2003: 1); instead, critical modernity offers a lens for remembering the past, for repatriating it, continuously and reflexively, into the present. For Harvey, there is something particularly Parisian about this. Another reason for considering the prose poems to be Parisian is rather more prosaic: it has to do with the final editing of the collection. The prose poems were first gathered together and published in 1869, that is, after the poet’s death in 1867. The full title, the title by which people have since come to know them, Les Petits Poèmes en prose: Le Spleen de Paris (literally, The Little Prose Poems: Paris Spleen²), was chosen as part of a collaborative process. This process appears to have taken into account various titles that Baudelaire himself had had in mind.

My argument here follows Michel Covin’s interpretation of the title chosen for the collection. Irrespective of the complexities of the process, and that Baudelaire himself was not alive to oversee its final stages, Covin considers the title to reflect all the complexities of the poems’ relationship to the city. For him, the prose poems quite simply are Paris, and vice versa (2000: 51). Covin’s belief is predicated on the nature of what he considers the ‘full title’ (or the conflation of various titles that have been given to the prose poems), which specifically mentions Paris. Further, the structure of the title lends itself to a chiastic analysis that brings Paris into the text paratextually, with the result that the poems are always locatable and readable as Parisian even when they make no mention of the city.³ Structurally, the two halves of the title, which are opposed by a central colon, reflect the individual prose poems, which generally comprise two halves (one of which may often appear more ‘poetic’, the other more ‘prosaic’) separated and joined by some kind of central pivot (often an adverb of concession, say, ‘however’). In this way, the two sides of the title and the two halves of the prose poems echo or cross-reference each other. In the case of the title, the first part lays out the binary opposition of the prose poems (prose versus poetry) as a mission statement for this new poetics. The second part, or subtitle, on the other hand, if we follow the cross-currents of Covin’s chiasmus, sees Paris opposed to Spleen, which seems to confer on the city an objective signification, such as the Capital of Poetry, or poetic Ideal, while spleen takes on the role of the visceral, grounded Other.

It is important to understand here that the prose poems are very much not examples of ‘poetic prose’ or ‘prosaic poetry’; instead, they stand as a non-synthetic conjoining (under considerable poetic tension) of poetry and its textual opposite, prose. Prose poetry, in other words, is an oxymoron.⁴ To see Paris as an overarching frame of signification against which urban experiences happen, or from whose heights they fall, makes sense. And yet, it does not explain why this representational force itself sometimes appears, as Gouvard has shown, inside the prose poems. To understand this, we need to consider the possibility that Paris’s role in the subtitle is to embody the oxymoronic tension of poetry versus prose and thus to operate both as poetry and prose throughout the collection. Covin’s chiastic analysis leads him in the same direction. My aim here is to extend the logics of this reading by considering spleen also to function as an auto-antonym, or Janus word, which means one thing and the exact opposite at the same time (we might think of the verb ‘to cleave’, which means both to split one thing into two and to join two things together as one). I shall therefore consider the splenetic to extend to the modern urban experience that is ‘reading the prose poems’, for this is an experience that indiscriminately juxtaposes the stuff of everyday life (the obviously prosaic, and thus the obviously splenetic) with the motifs typical of Romantic verse poetry (Goddesses, for example).

If spleen can be seen to overarch the things and the Ideals, the stuff of existence and the Essences, of the prose poems, then we must understand Paris’s role in the collection as something more than simple signifier or locale. Indeed, such an either/or understanding would lead to the kind of ‘prosaic poetry’ or ‘poetic prose’ reading of the texts noted above. Instead, Paris sits alongside spleen, matching it, locating it; it too is an oxymoron, both itself (Paris ville lumière, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, Capital of Modernity and all the terms by which it is recognized) and its own Other (Paris the urban experience, the places and events that we encounter in the real world of the texts). It is simultaneously the sign beneath which the prose poems sit and the setting in which they take place. This type of auto-differentiation, of failing to coincide with oneself, and its attendant auto-antonym are crucial to Baudelairean modernity. Such a Parisian space is also, for Barbara Johnson (2000), that of the ‘critical difference’ when it comes to reading text (or Text, to give it the capital that came when the poststructuralists wanted to differentiate the meanings created – liberated and re-fixed – by the reader from the words fixed on the page). Text’s difference from itself, for Johnson, Roland Barthes and other poststructuralist and deconstructionist readers, is more important than the way in which a given text differs from other examples of text. This is equally true of Paris, which for Baudelaire in the period from the mid-1850s to the mid-1860s was being radically transformed by Baron Haussmann’s urbanization project. As such, Paris was quickly becoming unrecognizable (it was not what Baudelaire remembered; it could not be Paris) while clearly still being the same place (it must be Paris, for what else could it be?). Thus, when Covin writes that Paris is a prose poem and that the prose poems are Paris, he means that both are auto-antonymic.

What is insufficiently addressed in Gouvard’s commentary is precisely this balancing act. For the prose poems operate a poetics of double motion. It is not sufficient therefore to seek to privilege the poetic in them at the expense of their prosaic elements, since such a privileging of the one term over the other, which appears based on a sort of reverence for Baudelaire the ‘Poet’, the author of the infamous verses of Les Fleurs du mal rather misses the point. Certainly, it fails to take into account Baudelaire’s famous letter to Arsène Houssaye, which typically stands as a preface to the prose poems:

Mon cher ami, je vous envoie un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire, sans injustice, qu’il n’a ni queue ni tête, puisque tout, au contraire, y est à la fois tête et queue, alternativement et réciproquement [My dear friend, I send you a little work of which no one can say, without doing it an injustice, that it has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail, alternately and reciprocally.]

(Baudelaire 1973: 21 [1970: ix])

It is easy to see in this statement a clue to reading and making sense of the prose poems: the head can be placed in opposition to the tail, as a transparent meaning to a textual body, a cerebral understanding to a physical experience. While there may be different degrees of each at various points throughout the work, the one depends on the other. And crucially, it will not be enough to seek to understand the events; it will remain equally as important to experience the signifiers.

Furthermore, not only does the apparent need to excuse or compensate for the prose in the little prose poems in some way mask the fundamental paradox on which they are predicated, insofar as it appears designed to emphasize the head at the expense of an embarrassing tail,⁵ but it also, and importantly here, causes their Parisianness to be viewed as incidental, as a mere location among other potential (and real) locations. To understand that Paris equals the prose poems, and vice versa, on the other hand, is to realize that everything about them is Parisian, even when there are no references to the city and the prose poem is set on a far-flung desert island. (This is, of course, part of the challenge of the present volume, for it could well be argued that, given that Paris is not mentioned explicitly and that other great cities – London, to name but one – underwent considerable change in the course of the nineteenth century, the events of the prose poems might well not be set in Paris. The short answer to this argument lies in Baudelaire’s facticity; the longer one – what it is about Paris that causes remembrance and what it is about various types of remembrance that speaks to Parisianness – will hopefully emerge over the course of this book.) If a prose poem about a desert island is as Parisian as one featuring, for example, the Paris Opera House, it is precisely because Paris fails to coincide with itself to the same degree that it can never escape that same self-coincidence. It is arguably for this very reason that the invitation to travel ‘Anywhere out of the world’, which is made to the reader in English in the original (1973: 146, 1970: 99), is necessarily an invitation that extends from, returns to and, allegorically, metonymically, never really leaves Paris.⁶ The point of having Paris as not only an ever-present, but also equally ever-absent, subtitle is that the prose poems are always already Parisian, irrespective of their content.⁷

That this metonymic Parisianness, this other Paris as absence-presence and thus as metonym, should get somewhat obscured, while not being entirely erased, by Gouvard stems from his quite legitimate interest in representation.⁸ Paris is indeed represented throughout the prose poems, although surprisingly infrequently (hence Gouvard’s interest); it is also, by virtue of the metonym under which the texts are couched, continuously presented. This could, one might argue, be any urban environment (when it is not a desert island instead) because the reader cannot tell; the reader cannot tell in which city the events of any given prose poem are occurring because it is too close, too immediate. In the same way, it would be difficult for us to tell in which city we happened to be if we were teleported into its midst and had no significant landmar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Remembering in Paris and Paris as Remembering
• 1. Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen: Re-presenting Paris
• 2. Baudelaire and the Classical Tradition: Virgil, Ovid and Sappho in Paris
• 3. Sappho in the Salons
• 4. Memory, Modernity and the City in Agnès Varda’s Paris Films
• 5. Looking (Back) at the Moon in Parisian Cinema
• 6. Breathless in Paris
• 7. As Sedate as Swans: The Parisian Side of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée
• 8. ‘La forme d'une ville/Change plus vite, hélas! […]’: Translation and the Changing Modes of Urban Cognition
• 9. Paris, Capital of the Australian Poetic Avant-Garde: Christopher Brennan’s ‘Musicopoematographoscope', John Tranter’s ‘Desmond’s Coupé' and Chris Edwards' ‘A Fluke' and After Naptime
• 10. Forms of Remembrance in the Sculpted Verse of Louise Colet, Anaïs Ségalas and Some of their Male Contemporaries
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover