Threshold

by Rob Doyle

  I emerged from Pigalle station on to the Boulevard de Clichy, one of Paris’s seedier zones, with its sex shops, strip joints and the Moulin Rouge. The first time I’d come to Paris, a decade earlier, I’d had a nasty experience around here. After spending the day at the Musée d’Orsay, my girlfriend and I had decided to see a strip show. We entered, took our seats at a table in the darkness, and awkwardly watched women with ravaged faces and surgically remade bodies gyrate indifferently around a pole, one after the other. I remember being appalled and fascinated by one of the strippers in particular, a blonde with narrow, shaded eyes. Her face was harsh and run through with lines of age, but her breasts were immense, upright and gleaming. She seemed to me a kind of Minotaur. An enormous black man in a tuxedo appeared at our table and grinningly asked us what we would have to drink, pointing to a laminated menu he briefly held before us. We ordered 7Up and vodkas. A while later, just as we were deciding it was time to leave, the waiter returned and placed our bill on the table in a little black plastic dish. What it said was this: four hundred and forty euro. We rose to our feet in protest; the waiter’s arm thrust out to block our exit. Two other men materialised and circled us, shouting in our faces. I said I wanted to call the police and their roars got louder. One of them poked his finger in my chest. Eventually we managed to convince them that all we had on us was twenty-five euro. I handed over the bills and we walked out of there with what dignity we still had, which was none. In hindsight, it seems unlikely that they would have assaulted us – I later learned that this is a common scam at strip clubs – but at the time I found it prudent to hide behind my girlfriend and suggest she sort this out because she ‘knew French’ (she could say ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘where can we find the Métro?’).

  Now the streets around Clichy were Sunday-quiet. Men sat outside cafes, nursing glasses of beer or coffees. Some drank pastis. One or two of them even wore berets. It is commonly said that the old Paris is dead and gone – the literary Paris of splenetic flâneurs, warring avant-garde factions and promiscuous philosophers. The real Paris, this narrative insists, is now to be found outside the Périphérique, in the sprawl of the banlieues, which are addled with poverty and hate. In this reading, Paris’s twenty arrondissements bounded by the Périphérique comprise a bourgeois enclave, obsolete and fated to be overrun by the scorned, the excluded, the enraged – all the post-colonial hens come home to roost. Sure enough, a week after I left Paris, an Islamist suicide commando would wreak carnage on some of the city’s trendiest quarters, intensifying an era of fear and vulnerability. Glancing around Pigalle on this grey morning, though, it was clear that one could still live out the Parisian dream, or the cliché, with ample cultural props to flesh out the illusion.

  For instance, this young, stylish, Doisneau-ish couple kissing and smoking over their thimblefuls of coffee on the Place … André Breton. So I was on the right track, and sure enough, a minute later I was standing outside 42 Rue Pierre Fontaine, the address that Breton had commandeered as the headquarters of the surrealist movement for forty-odd years. The word ‘headquarters’, with its martial overtones, is apt. Like many of the avant-garde movements of the period, surrealism was run on near-military lines, with Breton as its ruthless general, calling the shots on who was to be purged and excommunicated, and allying his forces with the global struggles against capitalism and fascism. Reading about the spats and fissures, I wondered if they weren’t all just playing around a little bit. It did look like fun, the art-militancy and bitchy factionalism. More likely, though, they were in deadly earnest, sandwiched as they were between two near-apocalyptic wars, and it was me and my video-game culture that lacked seriousness. As if in oblique sympathy with my thinking, the one-time headquarters of surrealism had since been transformed into the Comédie de Paris, a stand-up venue. On either side of the road there were sex shops and Vietnamese pho restaurants; a few doors down was the dilapidated shell of a Monoprix supermarket. A plaque on the wall commemorating Breton and the surrealists included a quote: Je cherche l’or du temps. As I stood there, a woman who I fancifully imagined was a prostitute walked past, smoking a cigarette and holding open a hefty paperback, reading as she strode. A thin, dark man began to roar into his phone in Arabic, gesticulating furiously. He turned the corner and the street fell quiet again. I watched a cute girl in tight blue jeans cross the road at the traffic lights. Idly, I thought about getting a prostitute. It would have been nice, just then. I found myself regretting that I didn’t come from a culture in which paying for sex was easy and natural, a norm, like in South American novels.

  My next stop was Rue de Rennes, south of the Seine, near Montparnasse. It did not take long to find the building where Bataille had lived, with his mother and brother, from the age of nineteen to thirty-one. This was the address where Bataille stripped naked in the darkness and, for reasons best known to himself, jerked off over his mother’s freshly deceased corpse. There was no plaque on this house, even though masturbating over the corpse appears to have been a crucial, not to say seminal, event in Bataille’s life, one that he wrote about recurrently. Christophe Honoré’s loose film adaptation of Bataille’s novel My Mother ends with a startlingly abrupt version of this incident: the adolescent protagonist bursts into the room where his mother is lying in wake, starts jerking off, and roars that he does not want to die. Fin. When I saw the film at the IFI in Dublin, the audience burst into laughter at this necrophilic money shot.

  The years that Bataille spent living in Rue de Rennes were not ones of great literary productivity. The only real book he had written by his early thirties was Story of the Eye. Bataille’s psychoanalyst, Adrien Borel, served as his editor, reading the novel chapter by chapter, helping his client refine it down from the unreadable pile of obsessive crap it would otherwise undoubtedly have been. Bataille claimed that it was his psychoanalysis that allowed him to write. Moreover, it allowed him to live: ‘It changed me from being as absolutely obsessive as I was into someone relatively viable.’ It was also Borel who gave Bataille the photographs he would fixate on for forty years, of a young Chinese man suffering the ‘Torture of a Hundred Pieces’. (In Chris Kraus’s annoyingly trendy novel I Love Dick, Kraus complains about the ‘Bataille Boys’ who imitatively gaze at these photographs, ‘young white men drawn to the more “transgressive” elements of modernism, heroic sciences of human sacrifice and torture as legitimised by Georges Bataille’.)

  My intention had been to walk from Rue de Rennes to the house on Rue Blomet in the fourteenth arrondissement, where the surrealist movement’s second garrison had been based. Instead, with the afternoon sun breaking through, I found myself walking in the opposite direction, towards the Latin Quarter and the Shakespeare and Company bookshop.

  Shakespeare and Company is perhaps unique in the world in being a bookshop that is at the same time a tourist attraction. People come to see it: they stand around outside and take photographs. Then they go inside and take photographs. Some of them stand inside and take photographs of their friends who are outside, or vice versa. Still others stand in the doorway, either to take photographs of friends who are inside or outside, or to be photographed themselves, standing in the doorway like dicks, blocking my way. Almost all of these snappers buy a book or two during their visit, many of which bear the names of such usual suspects as Kerouac, Bukowski, Hemingway and Salinger. Hanging out at Shakespeare and Company seemed to be a long-established tradition among young anglophone literary types in Paris – to the point of cliché, in the way that everything about young anglophone literary types in Paris was cliché. (It has to be said, however, that the selection of books in the shop was impeccable, and by this I mean that they kept my work in stock, which fact I knew because I checked every time I was in there.) A few weeks earlier, at the peak of the heatwave that had ignited Paris for an infernal, beer-swilling fortnight, I had come along one evening to hear the English writer Geoff Dyer read from his work on the courtyard out front. ‘I moved to Paris when I
was thirty to live the life of the writer – which is all but indistinguishable from the life of a total loser,’ he quipped, drawing somewhat deranged laughter from me and the other total losers who had gathered in the tormenting heat.

  Poky and dim, Shakespeare and Company was always crowded, but I had never seen it more crowded than it was today. Seeking refuge upstairs, where members of a writing group were reading their work while young musicians took turns on the piano in an adjacent room, I became trapped on the stairs. A line of people was coming down, and another was coming up, but there was only space for a single file. Neither side seemed willing to give way, and I was caught in the squeeze. I began to suffer an attack of claustrophobia, which I wouldn’t have thought likely in a bookstore; I considered kicking the man below me in the solar plexus. When I eventually made it back down the stairs, I ascertained that they did not have in stock the books by Bataille’s theory-buddies Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski I’d hoped to pick up. Still, I was pleased to discover that the well-dressed German staffer who confirmed this for me had himself written a PhD on Bataille. He shared tips and suggestions, and for a few minutes we bonded over talk of sacrificial mutilation, the eroticism of violence and the ecstasy of war. I bade adieu to my fellow Bataille Boy, then spent a few minutes repositioning copies of my own novel around the shop so that they hid the books of rival authors. The door hinges groaned with another incoming surge of tourists: I decided I’d better split before a tragedy unfolded.

  A week later, I woke up early – too early – on a Tuesday morning to catch a train to Burgundy. I’d drunk just a few bottles of beer the night before, but because only four hours had passed since I’d finished the last one, it felt like more. I shouldn’t have gone to bed so late (or drunk beer), but then, had I gone any earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep. For a month I had been trying and failing to realign my quotidian rhythms so that I wasn’t so unprofitably out of sync with French culture. All across Paris, bistros and restaurants offered excellent-value lunch menus – formules du midi – which began at noon and ended around two o’clock. After that, not only could you not order a lunch menu (starter and main or main and dessert), you couldn’t order anything at all until dinnertime. They had their hours of convention, the French, and they weren’t about to change for the likes of me, whose day only got slouching to a start as the waiters cleared up after the lunchtime crowds.

  A few coffees got me back in the game. I boarded a train from Paris-Bercy towards the commune of Sermizelles in the department of Yonne in the region of Burgundy (all these administrative subdivisions meant nothing to me, but I enjoyed writing them in my notebook, the lexical trail connoting an odd mixture of bureaucratic staidness and the romance of foreign journeys). From Sermizelles it was a two-hour walk to the hill town of Vézelay, my destination. As we pulled out of Paris through the banlieues in the grey, misty morning, I alternated between reading Georges Bataille while feeling I should be looking out the window, and looking out the window while feeling I ought to get back to Bataille. I love being on trains and tend to get a lot of reading done on them, even if this reading is inevitably spoiled by a nagging sense of missing out on the landscape. Often visiting places is merely a pretext for a nice long train journey, the longer the better, with books, newspapers and my phone to keep me amused. I had been one of the last people I knew to buy a smartphone, but now that I had one, I was wholly reliant on it. I didn’t really have any friends in Paris (Zoé had moved to Avignon at the start of the summer for her theatre career) but that was okay because I had my phone. There was little, perhaps nothing, it couldn’t do, and I anticipated a long, rich, tender relationship with it, one lacking the myriad kinds of messiness that made human affairs, which on the whole had not gone so well for me, notoriously tricky. The key to getting the most out of your train journey was to resist tweeting or posting anything to social media en route, because if you did you would become distracted by checking what sort of response it was getting, and thus unable to read The Accursed Share or anything else.

  When Georges Bataille founded the secret society of Acéphale in the tweetless years leading up to the Second World War, one of the rites its members undertook was to journey alone on a train from Paris to the tiny, remote station at Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, where they would walk into the woods and congregate by the stump of a tree that had been struck by lightning. The members of Acéphale were sworn to secrecy and so we do not know exactly what they got up to out there, if there were orgiastic rituals (their highest aspiration was to carry out a human sacrifice), or whether they all just hung around in companionable silence, reflecting on what a spectacular nutjob Bataille had shown himself to be.

  There were a couple of changeovers and I had an hour to kill at a station called Auxerre Saint-Gervais. It was pleasant enough, with its church perched on a hilltop and its houseboats and barges docked along the river. I didn’t really know what part of France we were in, which department or region or commune or whatever: the feeling of being in a dreamy, interzonal nowhere-place was quite agreeable. There wasn’t a single person on earth who knew where I was. I imagined staying on there indefinitely, checking in to a hotel or renting a small room by the river, blending in with local life, living out my days and never contacting anyone back home. Perhaps I would meet a local girl, marry, and remake myself as a provincial Frenchman, with his own Instagram page and Twitter handle.

  An hour later, none of those things having happened, a coach carried me the rest of the way to Sermizelles. I disembarked by the small pale-yellow building of the train station, which was closed. There was no one around and, along with a few houses across the road, it appeared that the train station was Sermizelles. Forested hills rose up on either side of a river that meandered behind the houses. There were no signposts. Seeing a man packing things into the boot of a car, I asked him in French for directions to Vézelay. He replied in lilting, hesitant English:

  ‘You turn right. Then go that way forever.’

  He considered for a moment, then revised his estimation downwards: ‘For ten kilometres.’

  It had turned into a magnificent late morning. The Burgundy countryside I marched across was resplendently green, with the gurgle of the river – la Cure – the soft breeze, and the birdsong marred only by the noise of cars that zoomed past now and then along the road I was following. My tiredness had dispersed and I felt supremely cheerful in the sunshine and the country air. As I walked, my thoughts began to drift towards a realisation that had been dawning slowly on me these past few days: namely that Georges Bataille, whose grave and former home I was on my way to visit, was of dwindling interest to me. I had read him at a certain period of my life with great fascination, but now, in the Burgundy sun, I started to feel I wanted nothing more to do with him. His capacity for getting me high – blazed out in a trance of wilful irrationalism – had diminished. Everything about Bataille was starting to seem cadaverous, putrefactive, pitch-black, violent and obscene – I just wasn’t on that trip any more. My thirty-third birthday was bearing down on me, an age that I had long associated, apprehensively, with Thomas Kinsella’s poem ‘Mirror in February’:

  I read that I have looked my last on youth.

  Not to mention:

  … they are not made whole

  That reach the age of Christ.

  I had imagined that it would be alarming to hit the milestone of thirty-three, yet as the date approached I had never felt more whole, less gloomy, further from death. I was getting older, but the truth of it was that in my youth I had been infinitely older, infinitely gloomier, more haunted by the death in everything. Bataille had helped to validate and clarify the lust for chaos, destruction and ecstasy that had governed my younger years, but now I sensed he was a writer I would have no further dealings with. If philosophers were musical subgenres, then Georges Bataille was death metal – and death metal was insufferable, its devotees a gang of dreary bastards. You liked to know it was out there, so extreme and absolute,
but you were damned if you were going to spend your summer days listening to it.

  It was lunchtime when I reached Vézelay. I had eaten nothing all day except a croissant that weirdly smelled of garlic back at Auxerre Saint-Gervais, so I decided to restore myself with a long, lavish meal. Vézelay was known for its wines, and I drank quite a bit over the course of the lunch, which, with the customary languor of French waiters very much in evidence, went on for so long that, by the time my dessert arrived (pear in red-wine sauce, which I washed down with red wine), I felt as if it was time for dinner, or at least for an aperitif, which I ordered, though it overlapped with the post-lunch grappa that had just arrived. I was a bit drunk. Some people claimed that alcohol was bad, but the truth of the matter was that it was actually very good, I reflected drunkenly. Yes, it was really, really good. As I noted this I also noted that, its other benefits notwithstanding, alcohol did not exactly lead to profundity or subtlety of insight. But who cared, when drinking it made you feel this good – so at home in the universe, so tolerant and benign. I would have recommended it to anyone. I took out my notebook and wrote: ‘Alcohol is good. It makes you feel … like an emperor.’ As I drank an espresso to try to clear my head, knowing I had work to do, it struck me how baffling it was that the French had produced such a formidable literature despite this custom they had of drinking wine with every meal. I loved wine, drank it copiously, but I did not see it as being compatible with writing. One glass of wine and my writing day was shot. Drowsy and lethargic, I would have to wait till the next day to even think about stringing some words together. The only thing I felt up to doing after drinking a glass of wine was drinking another – like the one I was now ordering to wash down my digestif, or aperitif, or whatever it was. Yet France had produced one of the world’s richest literatures, whose practitioners were skulling wine the whole time. And you never even really heard of properly alcoholic French authors, the way you did with the Americans and the English, not to mention the Irish. The French got on with their drinking and their writing without making a fuss about either.