We'll Never Have Paris

by Andrew Gallix

  So, let me go back to being a writer. Let me say at the top of my voice. Paris is still Paris. Triumphantly so. A city that has endured worse and better. I didn’t know what stubborn meant until I came here. Read some Balzac, it hasn’t changed that much. It’s still the place that invented sex and the afternoon. The city where a choccy bun can be so disgracefully sublime that it can make you dance in the street. The city of the most beautiful children I have ever seen. The city where this Irishman learned to drink. Where you can have communist councillors and binmen with PhDs. The city where knowledge is your friend and pleasure is your pal. Paris is still and will always be the city where the streets flow like rivers and the sky is still sometimes full of stars.

  Missing Paris

  Rob Doyle

  Recently I flew back to Dublin for a few days from Berlin, where I am living now. When I moved here at the start of the summer, I sublet my room in the Dublin suburb of Kimmage to the boyfriend of one of my housemates. I stored my belongings — mostly books — in plastic crates in the attic. I intended to return at the end of the summer: my rent was quite low and, that being rare in Dublin, I didn’t want to give up the room. As the summer ended, however, I decided I was better off in Berlin, and contacted the subletting tenant to tell him he could take over the rental.

  After I landed in Dublin, I drove to Kimmage with my father, and he helped me transport the crates back to our small family home in Crumlin. (Crumlin and Kimmage, incidentally, are the two cheapest tiles on the Dublin edition of the Monopoly board — the ones marked with brown strips.) In Berlin I rent a room in Friedrichshain, with a balcony on which my flatmate, an artist in her fifties, cultivates an explosion of plants that I water whenever she’s away. At the weekends, I can hear the boom of the Funktion One soundsystem at the nearby Berghain nightclub (which is also a day club; my preferred time for going there is after breakfast on Sundays, when the queue is short and the garden area opens).

  Unloading the crates in my childhood bedroom (repurposed by my retired father as a room for listening to Bob Dylan while reading about Bob Dylan) made me acutely aware that I’m thirty-five years old and don’t really have a home of my own — a place to put my stuff — and that maybe I should think about settling down.

  One of the books I unpacked was Paris, a collection of some five-hundred photographs by Eugène Atget published by Taschen. I bought Paris after I left Paris, where I lived, on and off, between the spring of 2015 and the winter of 2017. I bought the book after I started missing Paris, so that I could miss it more. Atget’s photographs would be an aid to missing. From the 1890s until his death at the age of seventy in 1927, Atget obsessively photographed a Paris that was vanishing before his eyes, overlaid by modernity. His main motive was to sell his photographs to the painters he observed at work in Montparnasse, for use as memory aids. When the Surrealist photographer Man Ray became enthused after Atget showed him his work, the latter insisted that his photographs were “just documents” (the sign he hung on the door of a studio in the fifth arrondissement around 1890 said as much: “Documents pour Artistes”). When four of his photographs were published in La Révolution surréaliste magazine in 1926, Atget stuck to his self-effacing guns and insisted that he not be credited for his contribution.

  As Paris was transformed by “Haussmannization” at the end of the nineteenth century — grand boulevards and gridded streets replacing disorderly neighbourhoods — Atget began to consciously regard himself as an artisan documentarian of le vieux Paris. In his most evocative photographs of the old Paris he was already missing, there is something else missing too: people. Streets are deserted; quays and canal banks are desolate; the interiors of homes and small businesses are empty, as if the city has been evacuated. Walter Benjamin noted that Atget photographed Paris as if it were the scene of a crime: the witnesses have fled, though here and there a prostitute stands her ground in a doorway, peering brazenly into Atget’s lens. For Benjamin, the nature of the crime for which Atget gathered evidence was historical, but perhaps it was also metaphysical (the killing of time?). Whatever dark deed went down, some of the photographs appear to be haunted by its victims. For instance, a ghostly little girl crossing the Boulevard Sérurier in the nineteenth arrondissement: she is transparent, flickering between our shadowy world and some other dimension. Two more children peer furtively from behind a gate, likewise neither here nor there. Near them, an old woman in a dark shawl sits on a bench with her face turned towards the camera. Unlike the children, she is wholly substantial, as if age has solidified her. I have no great understanding of the techniques photographers apply to their craft,1 so I can’t say what kind of overlay effect has been used here, but it’s easy to believe that Atget wanted to depict the city as a (missing) place that haunted him as it haunted itself.

  Many of the human figures who have stuck around Atget’s crime-scene city, like the hookers, stand in clusters and gawp at Atget’s lens as if he were an extraterrestrial flâneur. Although photography was no longer a new technology in Atget’s time and more compact cameras were available, he took his pictures on a cumbersome, twenty-kilo, tripod-supported contraption that he lugged all over the city. It probably did look a bit like an alien spacecraft, or like the metallic capsule from which Arnie emerges in The Terminator, having hurtled back from the future — back from our future, perhaps, where unseen cameras document not a crime that has already happened, but one we are all presumed guilty of longing to commit.

  These gawking figures on Atget’s streets likewise seem to have been transported from elsewhere: namely, from India, where it is a common experience for foreign travellers to arrive in some village or town and find that men on the street stop and stare at them, without the slightest self-consciousness. One of Atget’s photographs shows a blind man sitting by the side of a street at Bastille. Staring at him, we wonder if he knows he is being photographed, and if he doesn’t, whether this constitutes a more serious violation than the unnerving stare of a stranger in the street, which at least alerts us to the fact that we are being scrutinized. We feel we are appraising the blind man for his vulnerability to robbery or assault — or perhaps the crime we are contemplating is more subtle. As the twentieth century passed in a time-lapse blur and everything on Earth got snapped in the camera’s insatiable gaze, postmodern theorists warned of a threat to reality itself, which, crushed beneath mass media, seemed to be disappearing into its representations. No longer was the camera a witness to metaphysical crime; it now perpetrated the crime. Jean Baudrillard suggested that the unnatural smiles of people who pose for photographs are like the behaviour of an animal who plays dead to avoid detection by a predator. Relentless and ubiquitous, the camera had become not only predator but Terminator, carrying out the total extermination of the real — The Perfect Crime, in Baudrillard’s reckoning.

  When I bought Atget’s Paris, the sections I perused most keenly were those devoted to the arrondissements where I lived and spent my time: the nineteenth, tenth, twentieth, eleventh, fifth. Disappointingly, Atget did not take many photos of the nineteenth, where I lived when I first moved to Paris. I had hoped especially to find photographs of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, where I used to jog in the mornings and, in the evenings, watch the sun set on the Paris skyline from its steep grassy vantage. While I was living next to the Buttes Chaumont (having moved there following a break-up), the French-Argentine director Gaspar Noé’s film Love was released in cinemas. On its opening night I arrived early at a quayside cinema by the Bassin de la Villette, expecting a long queue of French cinema lovers as keen as I was to see the latest work by this maverick filmmaker. There was no queue at all: I was handed a pair of 3D glasses by the usherette, then I sat in a near-empty theatre, the lone loner amidst two or three couples viewing this film that was inelegantly marketed as a “3D porno”. I may as well have been Bruno, the hapless sex-addict in Michel Houellebecq’s novel The Elementary Particles, who ashamedly jerks off in the porn cinemas that once operated around the Latin
Quarter. Despite its lacklustre reception among Parisians, I found Love magnificent — especially the scene in which the young American protagonist flashes back to the moment he met his lover, on the viewing point at the top of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. In a trance of infatuation, the pair walk down the pathway that winds from the summit to the gates of the park, as Paris lights up the swirling dusk behind them — I could see my house from here! Love may be a 3D porno, but that scene is exquisitely wistful.

  The next time I lived in Paris (in the tenth arrondissement), like the protagonist in Noé’s film, I was very much in love — with a woman who flew over to stay a few times in my studio loft opposite the Gare de l’Est train station. One of the things I loved about her was her wistful attraction to the quality of wistfulness — in art, people, places. To her, wistfulness was almost a moral category. “She’s not wistful,” she would declare by way of dismissing somebody. Geoff Dyer’s 1998 novel Paris Trance, which I had read several times before I ever lived in Paris, must be the most wistful novel ever written about the city, and perhaps about any other city too. It really couldn’t be any more wistful. Reading it imparts an exquisite ache that lingers like the memory of someone you missed even while they were there. One way to define wistfulness: the sadness of finding a beautiful experience tainted by the awareness of its passing, even while knowing that beauty is predicated on evanescence. Much of Paris Trance, a love story, is set in the eleventh arrondissement — in bars and clubs on Oberkampf and Parmentier — but its final pages unfold on the French coast, where four friends are entranced by a happiness that we know is destined to be shattered. As an evocation of transience, the novel’s closing image

  A military jet pulled through the sky, very high. Beyond that was the uncertain region where sky turned into space, where everything began to peter out, where distance ceased to be measured as space, only as light. The plane itself was no more than a dot, would probably have been invisible but for the vapour trail easing out behind it.

  resonates across the millennia with the final stanza of a classic text of Mahayana Buddhism, the Diamond Sutra:

  As stars, a fault of vision, as a lamp

  A mock show, as dew drops, or a bubble,

  A dream, a lightning flash, or cloud,

  So one should view what is conditioned.

  Despite all talk of crime scenes, Eugène Atget’s Paris, like Geoff Dyer’s, is inevitably a zone of intense wistfulness, a remembrance of things in their passing. An archivist of nostalgia, Atget photographed chunks of the present that were crumbling into the past, his mission impelled by the erasures of a looming future. Some of his most suggestive work depicts the poorer arrondissements away from the splendour and opulence of the centre, pushed up against the Périphérique that encloses Paris from the now-notorious banlieues beyond. In shots of the city’s down-at-heel southeast that have the cosy-seedy atmosphere of Georges Simenon’s crime novels, narrow canals run through vacant laneways, past sullen houses. Out past Bercy, a towpath on the Seine leads away from the city to the drab eastern outskirts. It is a bleak, wet day. Once again the view is deserted — or seems to be, until I spot two huddled figures in the middle-distance. It is my friend Liam and I, heads downturned against the rain. We took walks out there on winter Sundays, keen to look beyond the enclave of Paris proper, which we suspected of being a dream, an ether of lost past sustained by a film of nostalgia. On Sunday mornings, we would separately take public transport and meet where we had left off last time, and there resume our march into the banlieues. Along the way we would stop to drink in garishly fluorescent working-class bars whose total lack of charm generated its own kind of self-assurance. We eventually made it out to the eccentric postmodern high-rise blocks at Noisy-le-Grand, whose looming geometries of cube and cylinder saw them used as locations for dystopian sci-fi films. I took a few photos on those walks, most of them destined to be archived on the cloud and never seen by anyone else, like old photograph albums buried in a closet.

  As I scan through the cloud at these and other photos I took in Paris, some of the memories they evoke are unexpectedly painful, or prompt me to consider elements of my time there in a new and starker light. In this sense, photographs can be evidence not of a crime but of an unhappiness one would rather forget, preferring to cover it up with nostalgic, wistful images like those of Eugène Atget as we can only see them now. Nevertheless, I still miss Paris, the way I remember missing it even while I wandered its photogenic streets. That is why I keep moving, I think: to find new places to miss. In the shimmer of nostalgia cast by the refraction of memory, perception and desire, I make a kind of home.

  1 I take photos on my phone with sporadic enthusiasm and no sense of what I am doing beyond pointing and clicking. Recently, on my girlfriend’s request, I photographed my erect penis, then sent her the image via WhatsApp. It was my first dick-pic. Surprisingly, whenever I see the photo as I scroll though my collection, I find myself aroused by the cock’s firmness, its heft, its strutting obscenity. I wonder what that most confusing of Parisian authors, Jacques Lacan, would have made of the jouissance of a heterosexual man who, holding a sleek mobile device in his palm, is excited by the image of his own erect cock filling its bright screen. I wonder too if in some future age, more intrepid dick-pic snappers than I will be praised for generating unintended art, as Atget was for his “documents” of the old Paris.

  Contributors

  Jeremy Allen is a music, film and culture journalist who has written for the BBC, Guardian, Independent, Quietus, Stool Pigeon, NME, Record Collector, Prog, Huck and more. His flawed heroes include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nina Simone and Serge Gainsbourg, the latter of whom he has written sleeve notes for (posthumously, of course). Allen lived and worked in Paris until recently and now resides in an obscure Surrey village with his partner Claire and son Jean Genie.@jeres

  Anna Aslanyan is a freelance journalist and translator. She writes, mainly about books and the arts, for the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement and other publications. Her first book, a popular history of translation, will be published by Profile Books. @anna_aslanyan

  Will Ashon is the author of a series of occasionally-read books including Strange Labyrinth (2017) and Chamber Music (2018), both from Granta. @willashon

  Nicholas Blincoe is the author of six novels, including the CWA award-winning Manchester Slingback (Picador, 1998), and two histories: Bethlehem (Nation Books, 2017) and More Noble Than War (Nation Books, 2019) a history of football in Palestine and Israel. He also writes for theatre and film, and his scripts have won the Beckett Award (Cue Deadly, 2003) and iFeatures Award (Eight Minutes Idle, 2012). His PhD is on Jacques Derrida’s use of economics. @NicholasBlincoe

  Owen Booth is the author of What We’re Teaching Our Sons (4th Estate, 2018). His short stories have been published in The White Review,Gorse,The Moth,Hotel,3:AM Magazine and Best British Short Stories, among others. He won the 2015 White Review Short Story Prize. https://owen-booth.com/ @owenbooth

  Gavin James Bower was born in Burnley, Lancashire and graduated from the University of Sheffield. The author of two novels — Dazed & Aroused (Quartet Books, 2009), Made in Britain (Quartet Books, 2011) — and one non-fiction work — Claude Cahun: The Soldier With No Name (Zero Books, 2013). As a journalist, he has contributed to the Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday and Sunday Telegraph. He joined the writing team for EastEnders in 2014. @gavin-jamesbower

  Tom Bradley has published twenty-seven volumes of poetry, fiction, essays and screenplays with houses in the USA, England, Canada and Japan. His latest blank verse epics are Energeticum/Phantasticum: a Profane Epyllion and Useful Despair as Taught to the Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch, both published by MadHat Press in 2017 and 2018, respectively. http://tombradley.org/

  Donari Braxton is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker and photographer. He has received support and awards from Sundance, TriBeCa, NPR, IFP, Film Independent and Berlinale Talents, amongst other institutions. Ou
t of My Hand, the narrative feature that he wrote and produced, premiered at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival. He was later nominated for the John Cassavetes Independent Spirit Award for his work on the project. Most recently, he was awarded the San Francisco Film Society’s KRF Grant & Fellowship for his new feature in development, Above. Outside of his feature endeavours, his images, editorials and shorts have frequently been featured in such publications as GQ, Details and Playboy magazines. http://donaribraxton.com/

  Daniela Cascella (Italy/UK) writes through sound, literature and art. She has published three books that articulate various tensions and points of contact between creative and critical writing across disciplines: Singed: Muted Voice-Transmissions, After the Fire (Equus Press, 2017), F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound (Zero Books, 2015) and En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing. An Archival Fiction (Zero Books, 2012). http://www.danielacascella.com/

  David Collard writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review and other journals. He is the author of About a Girl (CB editions, 2016). He lives and works in London, where he divides his time. @David-Collard1

  Emily S. Cooper is a poet from the north west of Ireland who studied at Goldsmiths, London and Queen’s, Belfast. She has been published in a number of journals and anthologies. Two of her poems were awarded the Hennessy New Irish Writing Prize in the Irish Times. @Emily_S_Cooper

  Susanna Crossman is an Anglo-French writer. Co-author of the French novel, L’Hôpital, le dessous des cartes (LEH, 2015), her work has appeared in Versopolis, ZenoPress, The Creative Review, 3:AM Magazine, Litro and elsewhere. Nominated for Best of The Net (2018) for her non-fiction, her fiction has been shortlisted for the Bristol Prize and Glimmertrain. She regularly collaborates on international hybrid projects with academics, artists, filmmakers and musicians. https://susan-na-crossman.squarespace.com/ @crossmansusanna