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Having made repeated announcements about my intentions to hie myself Parisward, I am pleased to declare that I have finally fracking done it. Naturally, I was disgusted to return to Perfidious Albion, who’s nevertheless doing his level best to charm me back to the fleeting anglophilia I once harbored. Yet something has changed, between me and Paris, or perhaps between me and France. This weekend, for the first time in five years, I was in France as someone who did not live there. I felt foreign in Paris for the first time, like a tourist-tourist, rather than an expat-tourist.
I want to find ways to bring France, the French language, the Francophone world, back into my life — if it means becoming a comparativist, so be it. I didn’t realize the extent to which my world here had gone entirely Anglophone — this year has been the first sustained period since childhood during which I do not speak, read, or write French on a regular, if not daily, basis. I started learning in the fourth grade, and took French language and literature courses every academic year until I graduated college; I taught high school French in the States for a year; I majored in French literature and culture in undergrad; I studied in Paris for a semester; I lived and taught in Toulouse for eight months. Before I fell unpredictably in love with the English Renaissance, I wanted to pursue Francophone post-colonial literature as an academic career. It seems strange, given that biography, that I am only now realizing how important the language(s), the cultures, the literatures and histories of the Francophone world are to me, how much of myself is bound up in them.
Here I am, in England, in a rigorously anglophone – despite its own best efforts – program. Here I am, headed off to an English department next year. Not a guttural “r” to be heard anywhere. Of course, one of the wonderful things about the Renaissance is that, at least in terms of cultural and intellectual history, national boundaries break down almost of themselves, resist the disciplinary boundaries of the modern academy naturally. It is perfectly natural, for example, to read Montaigne in a course on Shakespeare; to read Erasmus in a course on the English Reformation; to read Aretino or Machiavelli in a course on English drama. The period is not particularly kind to xenophobes, nationalists, or the monolingual (though it produced many such of its own). One needn’t define oneself as a comparativist, in this period, in order to be a Europeanist.
I want to be a Europeanist. I think. (This feels like coming out.) I need to learn Latin, like, yesterday. And I want Italian. At least. My fledgling Spanish will come back to me swiftly — it will take some muddling, but the Romance languages will come swiftly, I think. I have an ear for language, though perhaps not the one I had ten years ago. Latin will be like a puzzle, I think — the pieces will look as though they fit together one way, but surprise and delight me by going exactly the other way. I will re-learn my own languages through learning my way around that puzzle. I envision my future apartment* covered with index cards mapping declensions, post-it notes exhibiting in bold capitals those stubborn words that won’t get themselves learned, then scraps of Virgil and Cicero, lists of medieval neologisms, humanist diatribes on the status of Latinity, and so on.** I will begin this next fall. There will be a summer in Italy there, somewhere. Someday, there will be Dante and Boccaccio and Aretino. A Europeanist, yes. Why not?
All this, for Paris. For money and an excuse to take me to the Bibliothèque Nationale, for leisurely picnics of Camembert and cheap wine, for that language, that language, ever in my throat. For those r’s. For Montaigne. All this, really, for Paris. Reader, I know you: you, just like me, think this is perfectly sane and good and right. Paris. Yes.
*My apartment, ahem, in the City of Abundant Fraternal Devotion, whither I am officially bound. Cheers, please.
** This is why I can’t live with other people. My madnesses take up physical space.
Reader, I talk to myself.
Today in the car on the way to the Food Emporium, I continued a conversation I’d started with myself (well, myself and my imaginary interlocutor[s]) in the bathroom about my conference paper, which evolved, with the rapidity of most conversastions with good company, into musings on Theory.
I’d taken an opportunity in my paper to bite a really shoddy Lacanian reading in the ass. This is partially because the critic who crafted the reading is, pour aller vite, an idiot. It is mostly because I have a visceral and immediate, almost allergic, reaction to anything that remotely smacks of psychoanalytic criticism. This is Not Fair for several reasons. One, I haven’t really read any psychoanalytic theory — precisely zero Lacan, only a handful of pages of Kristeva, etc. Two, most of the psychoanalytic criticism I’ve read is really quite bad. Three, because I haven’t engaged with psychoanalysis At All, I haven’t a leg to stand on in my claim in point Two. Since I don’t know how it’s supposed to work, I can’t say it’s bad, right? Right.
So I just added Lacan’s Écrits (in English, because I am a wimp) to my Amazon wishlist. A (weensy) point of departure. Next step, read the bugger.
In the meantime, my musings ran as follows: I find theory — err, Theory — useful to the extent that it opens. The more critical or, better, interpretive freedom a theory or theorist creates or allows, the stronger the theory. This is why I have found Foucault and Derrida and (many of) their derivatives so seductive — for the multiplicity of readings they’ve allowed me, for the terrain they’ve opened, for the liberating complexity I’ve found in those readings and that terrain. It is also why I’ve had so much trouble with the psychoanalytic criticism I’ve read — it seeks to diagnose, to solve, to close.
Posing problems, putting a question mark after “complexity” (?), is why reading and re-reading and continuing to read is worthwhile for me. Solve the problem, diagnose the text, and your work is done. We need never read that one again. That’s both misguided and tragic.
I’m prepared to be proved wrong about psychoanalysis. And about anything else.
Suggestions?
A friend was recently expressing homesickness for the States through periodic outbursts of Bernstein-whistling. I thought she was cracked until my ears began to pop somewhere over Long Island two nights ago. And I almost bloody started weeping when, eight hours and not a few Heffeweizens out of Frankfurt, the two hippie boys seated behind me started to sing “The Only Living Boy in New York.”
I stepped off the plane and the first thing I heard was a Port Authority officer’s gruff voice as he spat into his cellphone, “That mothafucka! I… well, I’ll be god-damned! The mothafucka!”
Which translates, of course, to “Welcome home, mouse, welcome home.”
I didn’t anticipate the culture shock (WHERE IS MY FRESH-BAKED BREAD?!). I didn’t anticipate the cloying, nauseating closeness of my parents’ house and of Small Town New England. I didn’t anticipate missing France desperately. I didn’t anticipate the wrenchingness of the linguistic dysphoria induced by having a whole language abruptly snapped out of my spoken life.
But I feel whole, somehow; somehow new. I’ve read and written more (substantive) material in the past three days than I had in a month. I feel capable of regeneration and progress. I don’t have a five-euro bottle of St Emilion and I don’t have my cheesemonger and I don’t have my beautiful, beloved French language, true. But projects are forming — I have cover letters to write, a paper to rework and present, an application to polish. Examinations to study for, Ph.D. programs to research, books and articles to read. Friends to reconnect with, films to catch up on, old haunts to revisit.
In short, I am home. Home, home, home. There will be time (there will be time) to cipher out what, exactly, that means.
These things will perhaps be chronicled here. I’ve grown attached to this little blog and would like to keep it. It will need a new name for its new life (one cannot be Amélie Poulain forever). Suggestions — for blog titles, for my new life — welcome.
The joy of France is that a leisurely afternoon stroll on any given sunny Saturday afternoon frequently turns into a loud, joyous lefty street-party.
I don’t know enough about nuclear energy to take a position on it, but gee, the French actually think about nuclear energy enough to stage a relatively-massive protest in a relatively-miniscule city. Isn’t that nice?
And Toulouse is beautiful today, and has been for a week straight. I fell back in love, unadulterated by snark (okay, complemented by snark), with la douce France the moment my train from London emerged from the tunnel into the Norman countryside. I spun through Paris with my arms wide open, and today for the first time since fall Toulouse made me smile and dance all alone in the middle of that crowd and make friends with strangers. Sure, those strangers were all high as kites and la manifestation is nothing if not an elation-vehicle, but nevertheless. A little elation goes a long way to making me feel like a whole person again.
I watched this live with Madame on Sunday. She did not understand why, in between coughing fits, cigarettes, and her intermittent nonsensical exclamations, I was laughing fit to strangle myself. I was laughing, mes chers compatriotes, because this is what an American would produce, if told to produce a caricature of the Président de la République Française, and if he were truly a gifted devotee of the art of political satire.
Ladies and gentlemen, c’est avec beaucoup d’émotion que je vous donne: Jacques Chirac’s address to the nation, March 11, 2007.
It must be said that:
1. If I heard this voice in a dark alley late at night, I would run like hell.
2. In spite of (1), the man can deliver a speech. And, you know, sound like he means it. For that matter, that he knows what it means in the first place.
3. It would be nice to have a national leader who can produce the effect of (2). On a le droit de rêver, non?
Vive la République, et vive la France.
Qui serait assez insensé pour mourir sans avoir fait au moins le tour de sa prison? Vous le voyez, frère Henri, je suis vraiment un pélerin. La route est longue, mais je suis jeune.
– M. Yourcenar, L’Œuvre au Noir
“Inchoate” is one of my favorite words, and here I have an opportunity for it. I record the following here only because telling it all to my hard drive alone is depressing. So, some notes from the past few weeks.
As I slowly prepare to leave France, to return to the States, perhaps to leave again, I begin to accept the in-betweenness of my current life. There is here, there will be there, and third and fourth places that now merely glimmer dimly in the distance. I have said before that these feelings of disorientation, confusion, moderated chaos, are what I sought, after all, in coming to France in the first place, and I am at last learning to be grateful for them.
I cracked and bought a book. I told myself before I left for London that I was to make no more purchases — I haven’t room in my suitcases. But Tschann Libraire has mystic powers. When I am in Paris I make a point of spending at least an hour amid its splendid selection, its disheveled middle-aged white male clientele, its sour-faced, supremely knowledgable staff. And there in the corner on the bottom shelf in littérature française, my hands fell on an item I couldn’t resist. The superb smoothness, the fine, clean design of a volume from Gallimard’s Biblos imprint. The brittle, sweet crispness of a thousand pages well bound. Yourcenar’s memoirs. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I had to. I simply had to.
It is lovely to think that I may soon have this problem again. How, for example, am I to get my mammoth Longman Milton and Spenser across the ocean? Yes — what a lovely problem to have. We cross our fingers, we scribble our lines, and we wait.
I carry a warmth with me from this recent trip that somehow doesn’t wane. I am grateful for this travel, and I am grateful for friends and fine food and for tea and music and long walks and for sunlight and for the kind old bouquiniste in the rue St Jacques who indulged me though she knew I couldn’t afford her wares.
I am worried about Madame, about her pride and her age and her upcoming potential surgery. For the first time, the other day, she said “tu” to me. Sure, it was to berate me for berating her, but it brought tears anyhow.
I wrote in an e-mail three years ago, “Paris, c’est un conte de fée.” Remains true. I love it anyway and always will, but this city will never be wholly mine nor I wholly this city’s. I cannot stay here — there is something oppressive in this joy — I cannot stay here, it flees from me and I am forever fleeing from it, and for that I love it all the more.
And then, and then — surprise, shock, wonder, heart-pounding éclats que je ne saurais décrire — in a stairwell, this encounter. Two women, or a girl and a woman, or who knows, all but knock each other over — “oh, pardon!” and “excusez-moi!” — and then the sudden recognition — “you!” The heart-pounding, the sudden smile, the awkward bises, suddenly I am, yes, just a girl again and she touches my arm and she smiles “mais ça fait longtemps!” And oui, ça fait longtemps and qu’est-ce que tu fais là? And je vis en France maintenant, ou bien… Sérieux?! Sérieux. And she smiles again, and that awkwardness, et toi tu fais quoi? And let’s-get-together-sometime and oh, mais je n’ai plus tes coordonnés… [As I say it I can't help hearing "corps donné, je n'ai plus, je n'ai pas ton corps donné..."] And she writes me her coordonnés, corps donné, and I see her name written there in her hand and I stumble over the words trying to form, “Ça fait plaisir de te voir…” plaisir, plaisir, plaisir… I stumble on the “plaisir” and stare dumbly at her name, written there, in her hand. Bon, beh, à bientôt, j’espère! Oui, j’espère… bon, au revoir! Au revoir and goodbye and I stumble down the stairs and into the sunshine, my hand on my heart, clutching my beautiful Gallimard volume, goodbye and oui, ça m’a fait grand plaisir.
And so, flight to the closest possible refuge — the cimetière du Montparnasse. These dead have rescued me more than once, and they do again. They don’t talk, thank god, they don’t stumble over their words and they don’t give a damn about me or my girlishness or the fluttering of my little heart. Simone, salut, je me mets là un instant, si ça te dérange pas, juste le temps de respirer un peu. Reading in the sunshine in a cemetery, smoking though I oughtn’t, smiling suddenly in the sunshine in a cemetery. A young woman approaches, nods to me, salutes the tombstone, rolls a cigarette and leaves it as an offering. If only these dead could smirk — and perhaps, after all, they do.
Have I mentioned music?
Alchemical combination of book, cigarette, gin, music gives a sudden immediacy to the wonder and the simple joy of being young and free and with the means to do as I please. It is for the best, suddenly say the book and the cigarette and the gin and the music, this itinerant life. You are young and free and you are beautiful; you have language and space and time on your side; you are beautiful and young and the world you want is there and you will have it. And what’s more, you, slight and hardly apprehensible thing, transparent and fleeting and frequently fleeing though you are, you are loved.
It is good, however, that these moments do not last or they would crush us. And so I return and fall into a long and dreamless sleep and rise into a dreamless waking and that is that.
(This is from last night. Tomorrow, if I have the energy for it, there will be recounting of the – frustratingly hilarious – bureaucratic morass of getting my papers in order, containing vivid descriptions of my totally rad papercut scars.)
Today, I was asked how to get to the tourist office by an English-speaking non-American. I gave her efficient, accurate directions. She was delighted with my English. I passed her again on my way back into town, and she smiled and said hello and thanked me and told me my directions were perfect. I grinned like an idiot as I congratulated myself on that little rite of passage.
I was on my way to sign a lease. I did so. Then I moved into my apartment.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to have my own space. For the first time in a very long week-and-a-half, I:
– am no longer living out of my suitcases (I almost threw them out the window, before I realized how anticlimactic it would be that they should then land in the parking garage that serves as our courtyard, and that I will after all need them someday)
– did laundry (there’s no dryer, and I am now happily smelling my clean, clean clothes drying on the rack in the kitchen)
– went to the grocery store! And cooked my own dinner! No more bad ham sandwiches! No more ham, period.
– spread out my things knowing that they would stay put as long as I want them to
– snuggled into my very own linens (magenta, to go with the orange walls and pink curtains and to compensate for the lack of sunlight in my bedroom)
– curled up on a couch – a real couch, in a real living room, half of both of which belong to me for the next ten months
– listened to very loud music (nothing like Nerissa Nields to lift a girl’s spirits)
– made a phone call from a landline, half of which belongs to me for the next ten months
– threw away (with no small amount of glee) the plastic bags and miscellaneous found containers that have been vaguely organizing my life in suitcases for the past howeverlong
– washed dishes – I can’t tell you how much this delighted me
– stopped worrying at every moment about where my money, my passport, my various documents are located, whether I might lose them, and who might steal them
– rediscovered the photos and miscellany that I packed to put on my walls, blissfully sighed over them and sorted out where they’ll go once I’ve got gummy stuff to stick them up with
– knew my own (semi)permanent address by heart
– and felt (almost) at home in Toulouse for the first time.
My thus-far extremely fabulous roomie and I had a lovely conversation, before she left to spend the week with her boyfriend, in which she told me that she wanted to have “une étrangère” as a roommate because “it’s more interesting with two cultures.” I told her that while I agreed, I also don’t feel all that out of my element in Toulouse – of course, it’s France, I said, and France is not the United States (yikes), mais avant, je ne connaissais que Paris, et enfin je me sens beaucoup plus chez moi à Toulouse qu’à Paris.
Chez moi à Toulouse. It’s an overwhelming and wonderful, comfortable and warm sort of feeling to have. Part of it is the Petri Dish Effect – I feel I know the white hippies with dreadlocks at the tapas bar on the corner, and the (Frenchified) bike punks with their patches and stickers, and the vegan activist screaming at the crowd and brandishing gruesome slaughterhouse photos at the market around St Sernin (though I think I was the only one who took his leaflet, and that only out of mild curiosity regarding how, precisely, logistically, financially, and culturally, one can survive as a vegan in France)… But it is also that the city is so profoundly not alienating in the way that Paris or New York or Bordeaux or even London or Boston can be. I can’t put my finger on it – part of it is the niceness of your average Toulousain (had a fabulous conversation with a cabbie today, who loved the United States for its open spaces, has a daughter my age, and approves of national education, all in five minutes), and part of it is the sun and the pink brick. Part of it is the obvious lack of American and Continental tourists – what French and British tourism I’ve seen is apparently not enough to turn the entire city into a giant postcard. Part of it is feeling at the same time perfectly legible, transparent (my accent, something not-quite-European in my clothes and my shoes, my blatant youth) and comfortably inscrutable (the accent not easily identified – “et vous venez d’où, en fait? … mais de quelle origine?”, the nationality of the visible identity ambiguous, my youth clearly not that of a student). Part of it is that nobody speaks broken English to me and then expresses astonishment when I don’t understand a word. The caissières, the waiters, the people I meet in the street, the landlady, all accept me, more or less, as part of the landscape, nothing troublesome, and if out of the ordinary, then pleasantly and expectedly so.
The most accurate and astonishing thing I can say about all this: honestly, right now, I can’t see myself anywhere else.
