Seven Wafer-Thin Slices of Life (French)

Est-ce que vous souhaitez visiter la France mais vous n’avez pas le temps? Voilà! Try one of these wafer-thin slices of French life, each of which offers a lesson in the importance of close observation.

• An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec (55 pages). Translated by Marc Lowenthal. Wakefield Press, 2010.

On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, October 18-20, 1974, Georges Perec went to the place Saint Sulpice in Paris and set himself the task of describing “that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other the the weather, people, cars, and clouds.”

An Attempt is, on one level, utterly mundane, just lists of things observed:

It is five after two.
An 87 [bus] passes by.
People, in waves, still, continually.
A priest returning from a trip (there is an airline label hanging from his satchel).
A child slides a toy car along the windowpane of the café (slight noise).
A man stops for a moment to say hello to the big dog of the café, peacefully stretched out in front of the door.

As translator Marc Lowenthal notes in his afterword, although An Attempt seems cursory, nothing more than the sort of assignment a creative writing teacher might give a student to develop their powers of observation and expression, it is actually a cornerstone to Perec’s oeuvre, much of which was a response to a tradition in French literature that reaches back at least as far as Choses vues Victor Hugo’s great collection of reports on events great and small in Paris. It’s reflected in the epigraph to Perec’s magnum opus, Life: A User’s Manual, which comes from Jules Verne’s novel Michael Strogoff: “Look with all your eyes, look.”

• District by Tony Duvert (40 pages). Translated by S. C. Delaney and Agnés Potier. Wakefield Press, 2017.

District is one of Duvert’s last books, a set of ten vignettes of an area in an unnamed French city (though the presence of a metro station narrows the list of candidates). It could easily be a few hundred meters from Perec’s place, but it’s a world away in mood. If An Attempt, like much of Perec’s (and Queneau’s) work, is suffused with a certain amusement and delight in humanity, Duvert’s district is grim, soiled, worn, tired:

You get out of bed, chilled to the bone by the morning; naked and hunched, you approach the piece of furniture on which, every day, you deposit the clothes you’re to wear. You don’t look at them, in too much of a rush to be inside, closed in and warmed, a prisoner….

You examine the walls, ceiling, furniture, feeling the inanity of it all and knowing that you, in fact, are the same. You are no longer made of flesh, are just a heavy, aching mass crushing down on a loose and feeble scaffold of bones.

Where Perec sees people he knows (Paul Virilio, the actress Geneviève Serreau), Duvert sees society’s cast-offs: “Girls and old women, bitches and sows… Drum-bearers, swindlers, blowhards, suck-off artists, devils from the bad part of town.” But no matter how bleak, there is always some chance of catching a glimpse of something hopeful if you walk far enough, get away from abandoned factories and unused railway tracks sprouting with weeds: “a sky that’s pale blue, almost gray, like the color of provincial eyes.”

• Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux (96 pages). Translated by Alison L. Strayer. Published by Yale University Press, 2023.

Look at the Lights applies Perecian powers of observation to one of the least chic phenomena in French life today: l’hypermarché. The usual English translation — supermarket — fails to capture the character of l’hypermarché. Imagine a Walmart: vast, with a full supermarket plus a department store full of cheap goods, but with a café where pensioners sit and sip coffee or nurse a beer, a florist, perhaps, a Mister Minute where you can get keys cut or shoes resoled, perhaps a handful of small shops. l’Hypermarché is now as much or more the center of community life as the charming old squares were in Perec’s time.

Between November 2012 and October 2013, Ernaux kept notes on her visits to the Auchan l’hypermarché in Cergy where she normally shopped. For anyone who has frequented one of these places, Look at the Lights is both a pleasant memory (a supermarket that routinely features crates full of fresh whole cod on ice!) and a depressing reminder of how uniform French towns are becoming. It’s a sample of how people adopt/adapt conventions to new situations:

An island of loose Italia grapes in bulk. Many people pick out one or two and eat them, more or less discreetly, with a sort of collective sense of permission whereby individuals limit themselves to a few grapes and are further kept in check by others’ eyes upon them. To do the same with apples or pears would overstep the boundaries of this unspoken right.

Ernaux also records the Auchan social hierarchy, at the summit of which is the cashier. French cashiers are, in general, oblivious to any Anglophone notions of customer service. They do not exist to serve customers: customers represent the varying levels of irritation to which the cashiers’s shift will force them to endure. And they see — and judge — deeply into customers’ lives:

Here, as nowhere else, our way of life and bank account are exposed. Your eating habits, most private interests, even your family structure. The goods deposited on the conveyor belt reveal whether a person lives alone, or with a partner, with a baby, young children, animals.

If Perec were alive today, I’m sure he would be seated at whatever café is opposite the Auchan in Cergy and relishing the show.

• No. 91/92 by Lauren Elkin (127 pages). Published by Semiotext(e), 2021.

Consciously inspired by Perec’s Attempt, this is a collection of journal entries that Elkin thumbed in on her iPhone while traveling to and from her classes near the École Militaire between September 2014 and May 2015, usually on the 91 or 92 buses. “I will carry out a public transport vigil, and use my phone to take in the world around me, to notice all the things I would miss if I were using it the way I have been, the way they all are.” While many of her fellow passengers are staring at their phone screens, she watches and records.

Perec is a largely invisible observer of his place. This is impossible for Elkin, especially when the bus is crowded and more especially when she becomes pregnant. She notes the lack of accepted etiquette regarding the simple problems of bus travel — “Really annoyed by people who sit on the outside seat leaving the inside one empty.” On the other hand, there is an official policy on windows: “Priority given to those who wish to close the windows, it says on the bus wall. Who decides these things?” She invents a new measure for the trips when the bus is stuck in traffic: “two Haussmanns in five minutes.”

In the course of the year, however, the quotidien nature of these trips is shaken by catastrophes: one public (the shootings at the offices of Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015), one personal (Elkin’s pregnancy is ectopic and has to be ended). And then, though after her journalkeeping, the November 2015 massacre at the Bataclan nightclub. “It’s the everydayness of the attacks that gets me, that puts up the block I can’t think though, or around.” But it causes her to remember Perec’s manifesto: “Question your teaspoons.” Notice the unnoticed. As Elkin reminds us, Perec lost both his parents in the Second World War, yet never lost his passion for the ordinary — “This si parisienne elevation of the ordinary into something compelling” as an act of defiance to the evil always hovering on the margins.

• Why Can’t They Be More Like Us? Essays from a Parisian Life by Shelby Ocana (88 pages). Published by Shelby Ocana, 2023.

Let’s call this An Attempt at Preventing Ex-Pats from Becoming Exhausted by the French. Shelby is an old college acquaintance who’s lived in Paris for decades and who assembled this collection of essays from a journal she kept between 2001 and 2021. Raised in California, she is proof that the bi-cameral mind didn’t die millenia ago, as she fluently navigates daily life in Paris, always picking up the latest manners and argot while never losing her sense of astonishment at the capacity of the French to be French. Anyone planning a long-term stay in Paris should pick up a copy of her book to learn such valuable tips as (a) avoid the Monoprix at all costs and (b) understand that the French say positive things as double negatives (e.g., pas mal means “everything is going swimmingly).

• Soap by Francis Ponge (114 pages). Translated by Lane Dunlop. Published by Stanford University Press, 1998.

Francis Ponge was the high priest of the church of careful observation. He took almost a quarter of a century to write a book about soap. Not what it’s made of or how it’s evolved over the years or about the different types of soap. Just about three aspects of soap: soap as it sits in the soap dish; the bubbles soap makes in water; and the fact that it’s slippery in water. He started in 1942 when his family were refugees from the German invasion and finished in early 1965. But there was so much to say about soap:

There is much to say about soap. Precisely everything that it tells about itself, when one chafes it with water in a certain way. It also looks as if it had much to say. May it say it, then. With volubility, with enthusiasm. Until the disappearance by exhaustion of its own theme. When it has finished saying it, it no longer is. The longer it is in saying it, the more it can say it at length, the more slowly it melts, the better quality it is.

What Ponge was really doing through this painstaking exercise was to plumb the very essence of what it meant to be a poet. What distinguishes a poet from other people, he argued, is the poet’s ability to see the true value of an object — “any object: bread, a candle, a piece of meat, a piece of soap.” A poet is equipped with a special set of tools. They look as if they were good for nothing, but are actually “inconceivably useful … a sort of universal key or cipher.”

You might call Ponge an extreme materialist. He maintained that the secret of happiness was not in rejecting all objects but in appreciating them. Appreciating them and communicating their essence and worth was what poetry was all about. “One should be able to give to all poems the title: Reasons For Living Happily,” he once wrote. You might say that taking 22 years to write about soap was a waste of time. Ponge would probably say there were few better ways to spend one’s time. (For the record, he also served with the Resistance and served in several professorial posts during that time, so it wasn’t all soap. But compared to Ponge and soap, Perec’s three days in place Saint Sulpice are a sprint.

• Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau (197 pages). Translated by Barbara Wright. Published by New Directions, 1981.

Slightly outside wafer-thin range, Exercises in Style must be mentioned alongside Soap as the other ur-text and inspiration for the above. In this book, Queneau on reports two trivial incidents: a man on a bus accuses another of jostling him, then takes a seat; later, the same man is told by an acquaintance to sew a button on his overcoat.

That’s it.

Except that Queneau proceeds to relate these incidents in ninety-nine different ways. In exclamations (“Goodness! Twelve o’clock! Time for the bus! What a lot of people!”). In compounds (“I was plat-bus-forming co-massitudinarily in a lutetio-meridional space-time and I was neighboring a longisthmusical plaitroundthehatted greenhorn”). With a French accent (“Wurn dayee abaout meeddayee Ahee got eentoo a büss ouich ouoz goeeng een ze deerekssion of ze Porte Champerret”). In free verse (“the bus/full/the heart/empty/the neck/long”).

As you can imagine, this sort of thing is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to translate. Even a native speaker would struggle with the most abstruse versions, which are as dense with wordplay and jokes as Finnegans Wake. Barbara Wright, who translated many of Queneau’s books, doesn’t so much translate as recreate Queneau’s prose. Her English version isn’t perhaps literally correct but it will give you the sense and spirit better than anything short of years of immersion in French language, literature, and culture high and low. And it will also demonstrate the very serious lesson behind Queneau’s tricks: namely, that any attempt to exhaust a place or even a momentary incident, can only approximate the richness of reality. But as all these writers would argue, it’s always worth the effort