Paris and Madame Bovary

I’m sitting in a cafe in Paris at the moment, staring at a wall of graffiti. The cafe is super hipster, and I have high hopes for my cafe filtre. The area is quite interesting. It’s the part of the 18th arrondissement up the back, closer to the Boulevard Periphique. There’s lots of stores selling wigs and African fabrics, and it’s more run down than a lot of the other parts of Paris.

This post is part travel blog, part reflection on fantasy and the world, via Flaubert. Paris makes me think about the things we dream, and how they affect how we live. Because Paris is very much an idea, and then there is the city. Sometimes you feel like Paris is heavy with the past, with everyone’s ideas of Paris.

Yesterday, we were in the 16th, which is super wealthy, and ridiculously parisian. We were doing our own personal modernist walking tour, and had three separate conversations with people who were super excited about art nouveau buildings. All the buildings were really pristine, even the ugly ones, and we only encountered one Starbucks, in a mall, hidden away.

Paris has been great. Lots of walking the streets, exploring different areas. I have been particularly charmed by the 10th, and the area around the Canal St Martin. At night on the weekends it packs out with people drinking and hanging out. We walked all the way up the Canal to Parc due la Villette the other week, and it was an excellent walk. We went to a market and successfully purchased cherries, tomatoes and avocados. There are cool bridges that go across the canal, and also a great cafe close by – Ten Belles. This whole area is less clean and well maintained than the 16th, but I like it better.

I read Madame Bovary in the first week in Paris. It’s about rural France rather than Paris, but was kind of on theme. The aspect of the novel that most affected me was the discrepancy between the dreams sold to us by art, and there reality of our lives, and how longing for a fantasy is a source of unhappiness. And yet, in the novel there is no attempt to portray ‘real’ life as particularly beautiful either. So I felt quite a lot of sympathy for Emma Bovary. Yes she is foolish, and indulges herself in pursuit of romance, but her husband, her lovers, her neighbours, her life are all mediocre.

So passion starts as something which can invigorate her:

But an infinity of passions can be contained within a minute, like a crowd of people in a small space.

But her cynical lover is unable to appreciate the freshness of her passion:

The eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language. He could not perceive – this man of such broad experience – the difference in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression.

I love this idea – that language and expression which are not novel might still be used to express novel feelings. It accords with my view that poetry sometimes seeks novelty of expression at the price of genuine communication.

But then Emma Bovary, too, finds the passion of love not all she dreamed it would be:

She knew, now, how paltry were the passions exaggerated by art.

This to me is more a condemnation of art, and the fantasies sold by the romantic novel. What you never get much of a sense of in Madame Bovary is what other life is possible. It is a subtle book, and I have only touched on a few points here. I read the Lydia Davis translation, which I really enjoyed. I have been reading her collected stories as well.

I think the tragedy of Emma Bovary is that when the fantasy is found lacking, she still pursues it, as simple sensation, because she cannot find another way to change the world. At least Emma Bovary felt that something was inadequate.

Paris is something of a fantasy city – Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the pont neuf in the evening at sunset. But it is also dirty, with lots of cars, lots of people going about their lives. How often do we go places with an idea of the time we will have there, what it will mean? File through Notre Dame to say we did it, march through the Louvre. I have really appreciated these weeks taking it slowly, thinking about the city, the world.

Paris is also its tourists, who are everywhere, just some places more than others. Though it’s funny how on one side of the Sacre Coeur there are hundreds of tourists, and on the other side hardly any, and a very local neighbourhood.

We had one amazing evening dancing on the banks of the Seine to a brass band, which was playing an impromptu show while the tourist barges passed by down the Seine. Paris as I never expected.

Raymond Chandler in transit

So, I’m in Paris right now. I am infamously terrible at travel writing, so I won’t attempt a blow by blow account of my last week. In fact, for this post there will be no attempts at Paris writing. Right at the moment I’m in the tiny apartment I am sharing with my amour in the 2nd arrondissement (fortunately spell check knows how to spell that). My feet are tired from walking around today. So I’m going to do my first overseas post on the book I read in transit. Part two will be Madame Bovary in Paris, and may involve some actual travel tales.

On my way from Canberra to Paris I read a Raymond Chandler novel – The Long Goodbye. Many years ago I saw an excellent film version of this book with Elliot Gould as Phillip Marlowe, Chandler’s classic noir detective anti-hero, most famously played by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. Usually I try to read the book first, but in this case it didn’t seem to matter.

Chandler is one of the greatest of the American hardboiled crime writers. In hardboiled crime, the detective typically has a cynical attitude towards crime, criminals and the system. Often the protagonists are private detectives, often dealing with corruption and incompetence in the police force. Usually there are one or two women of doubtful moral fibre.

Reading Chandler in the strange cavernous departure hall of Shanghai Pudong airport, I am transported to the strange, sprawling streets of LA – doctor’s dispensing illicit drugs, drunken authors, trips to border towns. In the end, though, what makes Chandler great are three things: his stripped back, occasionally poetic style; his frequent witticisms; and his random references to works of ‘high’ literature. The latter are always obvious, not subtle, and often seem to say more about Chandler than operating as character development.

As for great lines, how about:

He was a man who always talked with commas.

The stores were already beginning to fill up with overpriced Christmas junk, and the daily papers were beginning to scream about how terrible it would be if you didn’t get your Christmas shopping done early. It would be terrible anyway; it always is.

I really hate flying, but I feel that the desperate, stretched out state it puts you in is perfect for reading hardboiled crime, where most of the characters are desperate and stretched out. Usually in these novels no one comes out a winner, America is never beautiful (though the women sometimes are), but the detective continues on his quest for the truth and some sort of justice.

I read somewhere once that it’s about maintaining faith that one good man will always stand up against a corrupt system and an immoral world. But I’m not sure that’s totally true in Chandler. Marlowe is almost fatalistic. He has a code which requires him to act in a certain way, and he just does. He reflects on the people around him, their characters, but the reasons why he holds out when a cop beats him, pursues a case no one wants solved, remain under-explained. Particularly given that he rarely gets paid, and turns a fair bit of money down.

To bring it back to travels, sometimes he seems to inhabit that strange state you do after long haul flights, moving through the world without it quite touching you. Unreal. I think this style suits crime novels. A lot of contemporary crime novels are just too horribly graphic; full of disgusting serial killer crimes, psychological analyses. I’ll leave Chandler with the last word.

A murderer is always unreal once you know he is a murderer.