In the early days, Zanzibar had tried his hand at creatio ex nihilo. Did not work. He then had a go at recreating the world within a whopping great Gesammtkuntswerk. This proved equally unfruitful. The words he used to conjure things up simply recorded their absence, instead of preserving them for all eternity: Evanescence, ou la naissance d’Eva (1992) expressed nothing but itself — if that. Writing something, as opposed to writing about something, seemed to be the way forward — or rather backward, as it implied rediscovering some prelapsarian language that merged with the reality of things. Chemin faisant, as he strived to bridge the gap between signifier and signified, Zanzibar also hoped to recapture some of that old magic which had inspired Bigorneau back in the day: a soupçon of oomph; un peu de welly. In the event, he did neither. Every single volume he ever published had thus been an approximate translation — and ultimately a failed instantiation — of the ideal book in his head. Were his novels, then, simply intimations or imitations of his other self’s works: dim echoes, pale copies? Were they inferior versions of the masterpieces his doppelgänger could come up with given half the chance? Zanzibar thought long and hard about all this, finally electing to stop writing in order to let his more talented likeness — whom he pictured as slightly better-endowed and -looking than himself — get on with it.
Flammarion ruthlessly exploited Zanzibar’s disappearance by encouraging the hypothesis of a suicide. Meuniaire claimed on television that this, après tout, would only be in keeping with his “fundamentally nihilistic outlook”. Arthur Cravan and Jacques Rigaut were frequently invoked by literary journalists in support of this argument. As a result, Zanzibar’s back catalogue flew off the shelves, with Bigorneau topping the bestseller lists once again. Of course, the second stage of this cunning marketing strategy — i.e. cashing in on Zanzibar’s miraculous reappearance by bringing out a new book asap — was jeopardised by the author’s decision to down penceuls. Meuniaire was promptly dispatched to resolve this delicate problem. As expected, Zanzibar adopted a hardline position (“C’est une question de principe, un-point-c’est-tout!”) but proved far more amenable as soon as Flammarion threatened to sue. A compromise was finally thrashed out between the two parties, down at Les Deux Magots, where many a bottle of Perrier-Jouët was downed, almost cul sec.
Zanzibar, who had always tried and failed to convey the inadequacy of words with words, came up with the concept of a novel printed in disappearing ink. Once read, each word would vanish forever, the full text living on in people’s minds — retold, reinterpreted, reinvented… “There’s no such thing as original fiction,” he said, a little worse for wear, “Novels can’t be set in stone.” He climbed on the table and, punching the air, began chanting, “Li-bé-rez le texte! Li-bé-rez le texte!” After a few phone calls, Meuniaire put a damper on proceedings: the project was too complex to pull off from a technical point of view, and would be far too expensive anyway. So it was back to the drawing board: “Une autre bouteille, s’il vous plaît!” They finally decided that Zanzibar would write an entire novel in longhand, using disappearing ink, and that Flammarion would publish a facsimile of the manuscript — blank page after blank page: “Garçon, une autre bouteille!” What better way to say something without saying it? “Allez hop, on fête ça, une autre bouteille!” What better way to express the idea that the writer has nothing to express? “Vous nous remettrez la même chose.” In between hiccups, Zanzibar explained that his blank book would somehow retain traces of the novel that had once graced them. He then spoke confusedly of palimpsests and the tradition of erasure in contemporary poetry; the word biffure was used thrice. When he started claiming that the absent text would be a kind of manifestation, en creux, of the great novel his other self was composing in a parallel universe, Meuniaire decided to call it a day.
It was probably that night, as he was walking home to clear his head, that he resolved to publish Le Roman invisible under his own name. Two grown men — intellectuals! French ones at that! — claiming rights to a blank book was bound to make the front pages. It also made Meuniaire shitloads of money as Le Roman invisible became the must-have accessory of that rentrée littéraire. Suddenly, it was not only subversif and jubilatoire (two adjectives which, by law, must feature in all French book reviews) but also incontournable and, paradoxically, everywhere to be seen. The fact that it doubled up as a handy memo pad turned it into a top seller in the run-up to Christmas too. With the royalties, Meuniaire treated himself to a luxury yacht worthy of a Russian oligarch. He called it Authorship (en anglais dans le texte).
*
A laundry van stopped outside the Michelet Odéon hotel. The words Maison Binger were painted on the side in quaint curlicue letters. A young man in a crisp beige uniform jumped out, leaving the door wide open. Zanzibar made a wild dash for it. The keys were in the ignition; the driver was talking to a pretty receptionist: the race was on.
The van picked up speed, crushing the asphalt beneath its burning wheels, like a shirt-collar under a Morphy Richards. Meuniaire’s grey Porsche was still only a dot in the distance, but it was growing bigger by the second. It contained more atoms than all the penceuls in the world. Soon, those atoms would be spilled all over the leather dashboard and horn-rimmed glasses like chicken-scratch squiggles. Zanzibar was already living in the future. He could see it all, now, with blinding clarity. The shattered glass. The chromium twisted into the shape of Byzantine rings. The gory action painting on the tarmac. The charred corpses in their chariot of fire. He was hunched over the steering wheel, headbutting the windshield, laughing manically, whooping and hollering, with the wind in his combover and imaginary music blaring away in his ears. Four cars now separated him from his prey. He was closing in.
Just as he was about to go for the kill, the grey Porsche lurched into the outside lane. A sudden but steady — and, indeed, uninterrupted — flow of traffic prevented Zanzibar from giving chase. This being Paris, no one saw fit to let him go: steaming ahead was a woman’s prerogative and a man’s virility test. To make matters worse, the cars in his lane had now ground to a halt in what seemed like the mother of all tailbacks. Those on the left-hand side, however, continued to race past as if taking part in a dry run for Le Mans. Watching them whizz by made him a little drowsy after a while. Feeling his eyes glaze over, he stretched, and noticed two large white eggs with black dots inside. The eyes belonged to the Michelin Man who was towering above him benignly from a billboard.
Zanzibar fell asleep and was transported back to the tiny village in Burgundy where he spent his summer holidays as a child. His grandparents’ house with the dark-green shutters and, across the road, the plot of land where his grandfather grew tomatoes and carrots and beans. Halfway up the hill, there was a water pump that looked like an obscene squat robot with a chunky, phallic-looking spout. It said POMPES LEMAIRE and TOURNEZ LENTEMENT (although there was no water in it) and it was green, but a lighter shade than the shutters. On the same side, further up, when you had almost reached the top, there was a little convenience store — the only one for miles. People used to go there to give and receive telephone calls. At the other end of the village there was a big barn, and on the door of this barn there was an advertisement with the Michelin Man. It was already old and faded by the early Seventies. Going back there, he thought, now waking up and rubbing his eyes, would be a little like visiting the setting of his past following the detonation of a neutron bomb. Zanzibar looked up at the billboard again, and it was at this juncture that he realised that there was no driver in the car in front. And none in the one in front of that. And so on.
Putain!
Night was beginning to fall. He wondered how long it would take to drive back to the past, and if the Michelin Man would still be waiting for him there.
1 This is an abridged version of story published on The White Review’s website in September 2011.
The Map Rather Than the Territory
Jeffrey Zuckerman
I had the directions figured out:
land at Orly, take the light rail to the RER, then the RER to Saint-Michel, then Line 4 and after a few stops I would get out and lug my suitcase to the Airbnb.
Since I didn’t have a European SIM card yet, I would have to go off a Google Map of Paris downloaded to my phone. With no data and only sporadic access to Wi-Fi to geolocate myself, I navigated the city by the gleaming five-point stars Google let me pin on the map. One star for my apartment in Oberkampf; one for the apartment of the author I’d meet a few hours after that. One star for the restaurant where I ate lunch with a different author the next day. Another for the bookstore that this author had told me to visit.
I never did bother with getting a SIM card on that trip. Or the one after. I kept the phone’s data turned off, kept the Wi-Fi on, and kept checking where I was every so often. I starred practically all the McDonald’s locations because they had free Wi-Fi. Some of the Métro stations did, too. Every museum was good for that. One time, utterly lost, I stepped into a café and asked the server if the place had Wi-Fi. He grinned and took my phone and logged me in. (I was so grateful I ordered four pastries, all of them to go.)
Now, sitting in front of my laptop in New York City, with a new book to translate into English, I pull out my phone, open the map of Paris, and constellations fill the screen. The city’s a bit ovoid, lying on its side, and I can’t see the city for the stars.
I put my two fingers on the screen, spread them apart, and the city zooms into focus. From the southernmost star of Marie Darrieussecq’s apartment to the northernmost one by the Parc de la Villette, where the first novel I translated (a murder mystery) was set, this pixel city is more familiar to me than the real-life one. And why not? What I hold in my hands is my own condensation, my own interpretation of the reality I have seen again and again.
The Paris I walk through is complicated, dense, constantly swerving between filmic cliché and unending surprise. The names — the Opéra Bastille, Rue du Cherche-Midi, Montmartre — are so laden with meaning that they, and the history they encapsulate, threaten to turn the city into an unending mille-feuille of signifiers surrounding a nearly-forgotten signified. The streets blur together, one Haussmannian façade after another. I only ever feel properly oriented when I’m standing in an inner courtyard, or with a friend inside a restaurant I recognize, or in one of the many apartments I rent and return to again and again. In places that are contained, places that I have thoroughly mapped in my mind.
And as I think on the city in its full grandeur, I find myself falling in love with the map rather than the territory.
The stars I plant on the screen are memories, specific memories, ones that I replay again and again in my head long after returning to the United States.
The star I worked hardest to find is the one for Thomas Clerc’s apartment. He spends four hundred pages describing everything inside it, and all he mentions of its outside is that it’s on the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin. I had to watch a documentary about the apartment and catch an accidental glimpse of a storefront through a window to get something I could look for in Google’s Street View. And now the star is nothing but a memorial: the author has moved his life and his possessions to the eighteenth arrondissement. If I walk past the doorway to the courtyard to Thomas Clerc’s apartment, I won’t be able to go in — so I have to keep on walking toward the hulking arch of the Porte Saint-Martin. The only memento I have is the star on my map.
I look up from my phone with its map and focus my eyes on my laptop in New York City. I stare at the last paragraph I translated. Reread the English, reread the original French. The French is a welter of meanings, and every time I try to preserve the language’s ambiguity I find my translations pinning down specific interpretations, specific perspectives. Any other translator would have done this paragraph differently.
And rightly so: translating my way through this book is every bit like tracing my own particular itinerary through the convoluted streets and hidden corners of this city. Any other translator would inevitably walk through Paris under a constellation of wholly idiosyncratic stars.
Still Paris
Sam Jordison
The Paris I love is probably an unreal city. But then, this is the twenty-first century. Nothing else is genuine either. And at least the Paris I love is fun. If it’s a dream, at least it’s a good one.
I’ll try to share it with you. But before I do, a bit of throat-clearing self-justification. I know that what follows is fantasy. I also know (if you’ll allow an apparent paradox) that it’s largely a cliché. You’ll have seen a very similar version of Paris in guidebooks, late-period Woody Allen films and soppy love songs. You might even have seen some of my favourite visions flickering around the edges of the real Paris. Or set down on other pages in this very book. I don’t try to claim originality. But that shouldn’t be an issue. One of the best things about this reverie is the fact that we can all share it. Anyway. Here are some of the stand-out details:
Serge Gainsbourg. Naturally.
Notre-Dame and hearing a stupid voice in my head shouting “The bells!”
Bridges. The river surging below, lovers kissing, all that stuff. (In my dream I also have very powerful bolt cutters to remove all the locks. When I snap them, it feels like I’m breaking bits of stupid. This is important.)
Buildings. So many of them so extraordinary that they blur and blend into one lovely, golden stone vision. And sure, plenty of them are as overdone as wedding cakes, but they’re still beautiful. After all, if you can’t have crenellations, flying buttresses, or gargoyles in Paris, where can you have them?
The sewery smells you get on a street café on summer mornings when they’ve just sprayed the pavements. I enjoy these with coffee and a brief cheering interaction with a waiter in my appalling French.
1968 and sticking it to The Man. The revolution, the barricades, the Commune. Or at least, the idea that some people had that things could be better.
Coleman Hawkins and Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk and all the other jazz musicians finding refuge and respect away from home.
The Lost Generation, Ford Madox Ford, The Transatlantic Review and Hemingway starting out, and people doing real work.
Proust. Zola. All of them. All the things that have happened here. And all the other books. The books. The writers. The dreams about books. The idea that books might make things better. The bad books. The good books. The words in the books. The potential.
I’m a journalist and publisher myself, so of course the printed page dominates my dreams of Paris. I’m also anglophone. And as I say, my French is pretty bad. So, as you might expect, these dreams centre around the English bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Around Allen Ginsberg, more than half a century ago, stripped naked, reading Howl, destroyed by madness. Don DeLillo talking more cogently to a rapt audience just a few years back. And all the hundreds of writers in between. The ones we’ve forgotten. The ones who will become immortal. The ones who never published anything but dreamed that they might. The ones who did finish a book, and couldn’t believe that it was on those shelves, in that city. And all the readers. The casual browsers. The intent listeners. The Tumbleweeds. Those are my favourite. The people who come in and give up some of their time in exchange for a place to sleep in the shop and the promise that they will write something about who they are and what they have experienced before they leave…
I’ve been lucky enough to sneak a peak at a few of these testimonies. They are gathered in a flat above the shop in green binders, a neat orderly row of them. These look like perfectly ordinary office ledgers, if maybe a little old-fashioned. In another place, they might contain accounts, or order books, or maybe lists of phone numbers. Here, they contain magic.
They contain brief snatches of hundreds of lives. And lives caught at their brightest moments. The writing is generally accompanied by ever so slightly blurred passport photos, attached to the page with rusting staples. Most of them coming from the age before digital selfie technology, taken by machines
whose shutter-falls were unpredictable and which gave no second chances. By modern standards, they look off guard, and all the more revealing. The writing is similar: snatched, grabbed, youthful and unpolished and fantastic.
Some of the accounts are brief and only sketch the bare facts. Most are long and adjectival, the prose in thrall to Jack Kerouac, full of bounce and excitement and — oh boy! — sudden exclamations. Because: why not? Most of these people are on the road. They are excited, exhilarated, joyful. They speak of escape and adventure.
Most of the pages I’ve read were written by people in their early twenties, in between university and the rest of life. Briefly jumping off the track that was taking them to mortgage and marriage and Midwestern comfort. Or to law school. Or to more uncertainty. Some were escaping Vietnam. Some were fleeing brown and beige lives in 1970s Britain. Some just wanted a cheap place to stay. One I saw came all the way from Pakistan. They nearly all share dreams about art, immortality and the things that count. They’ve helped create a legend. They’ve helped serve literature up fresh. They’ve worked towards something that might just last.
The flip side of that is that many of the accounts are freighted with sadness. The writers know they’re enjoying a fleeting experience. Time is about to start grinding into them — and they’ll maybe never have as much fun again. Soon they will have to turn and face the not-so-strange. The everyday world is waiting. They will fade out of that world faster than those beautiful, youthful pictures preserved upstairs at Shakespeare and Company.
We'll Never Have Paris Page 38