[In the following excerpt, Kennedy analyzes how Paris became for such writers as e.e. cummings, Ernest Hemingway, and Anaïs Nin a place that “inescapably reflects the creation of an exilic self.”]

Shortly after returning from a prison camp in France, E. E. Cummings composed The Enormous Room (1922), an experimental novel recounting his ordeal as a Norton Harjes ambulance driver arrested (with his friend Slater Brown) on suspicion of German sympathy and incarcerated by French authorities. From his confinement with a motley assortment of men, Cummings created an exuberant, heterogeneous narrative mixing French with English, traditional allegory with naturalistic detail, and verbal portraiture with stream-of-consciousness impressionism. As implied by the title, the broad subject of this autobiographical account is the experience of place; the camp at La Ferté Macé and the “enormous room”—a dark, oblong enclosure “unmistakably ecclesiastical in feeling”—comprise Cummings' minimal world.¹ In this dismal compound, as he vents his scorn for French officialdom, the writer forms memorable friendships with fellow prisoners and thus recovers a faith in human goodness. His experience transforms the enormous room from a chamber of horror echoing with “weird cries, oaths, laughter” (42) into a scene of community filled with “a new and beautiful darkness” (233).

Oddly enough, however, the place which most clearly reflects the inner change in Cummings is Paris. He passes through the city twice: once on his way to the prison, when the idea of his arrest still seems preposterous, and then again after his discharge, en route to America. The earlier scene indeed depicts an ecstatic return to the city where Cummings and Brown had enjoyed a five-week revel before going to the Western Front. As the crowded night train approaches a station, the idea of Paris explodes into consciousness; the city's very name becomes a magical incantation: “Some permissionaires cried ‘Paris.’ The woman across from me said ‘Paris, Paris.’ A great shout came up from every insane drowsy brain that had travelled with us—a fierce and beautiful cry, which went the length of the train. … Paris where one forgets, Paris which is Pleasure, Paris in whom our souls live, Paris the beautiful, Paris enfin” (30). In a chapter significantly titled “A Pilgrim's Progress,” Cummings enters a Celestial City which promises to satisfy all human longings. Richard S. Kennedy observes that “when the train reaches Paris, it is a holy place: the people on the streets are ‘divine,’ a motherly woman sells [Cummings] coffee, a ‘sacredly delicious’ brew.”² Yet we know that Cummings is merely in transit; unlike Bunyan's pilgrim, his ultimate destination is “La Misere,” the place of misery.

When the dazed Cummings finally obtains his release from prison, he can barely comprehend an order to report to the American Embassy in Paris. After four months in a dark pen, he feels disoriented: “Where in Hell am I? What is Paris—a place, a somewhere, a city, life, to live: infinitive. … Paris. Life. Liberté. La Liberté. ‘La Liberté’—I almost shouted in agony” (237). From the mud and filth of La Ferté Macé, Paris is simply an idea of survival and freedom. By the time Cummings reaches the city, however, he finds quite a different place:

The streets. Les rues de Paris. I walked past Notre Dame. I bought tobacco. Jews are peddling things with American trademarks on them, because in a day or two it's Christmas I suppose. Jesus it is cold. Dirty snow. Huddling people. La guerre. Always la guerre. And chill. Goes through these big mittens. Tomorrow I shall be on the ocean. … Les rues sont tristes. Perhaps there's no Christmas, perhaps the French government has forbidden Christmas. Clerk at Norton Harjes seemed astonished to see me. O God it is cold in Paris. Everyone looks hard under lamplight, because it's winter I suppose. Everyone hurried. Everyone hard. Everyone cold. Everyone huddling. Everyone alive; alive: alive.

(240-41)

After his stint in prison (where he has heard about the horrors of war from other inmates), Cummings sees the city as a site not of beauty or pleasure but of suffering. The air is cold, the snow dirty, the streets sad, the faces hard; even Cummings' style seems austere. The city has been transformed by winter and “la guerre.” The authorities who threw him into prison may even cancel Christmas, but thanks to the brotherhood he has discovered at La Misère, Cummings now experiences place as a focus of community; in winter Paris is bearable because everyone is “alive.” That perspective, so different from his earlier, effusive vision of “Paris the beautiful,” marks a crucial change in Cummings himself, whose experience of hardship now enables him to set aside his illusions of Paris, to recognize its wartime sadness and to value its defiant vitality.

Three decades later, in I: Six Nonlectures (1953), Cummings looked back upon Paris (to which he had returned in the twenties as a painter-poet) not as an aggregate of buildings and monuments but as a place manifesting “the humanness of humanity”: “Everywhere I sensed a miraculous presence, not of mere children and women and men, but of living beings; and the fact that I could scarcely understand their language seemed irrelevant, since the truth of our momentarily mutual aliveness created an imperishable communion.” From the perspective of his sixtieth year he sees Paris as the meeting place of two realms, the sacred and the secular. He recalls an image from his “Post Impressions” of the twenties:

Paris; this April sunset completely utters
utters serenely silently a cathedral
before whose upward lean magnificent face
the streets turn young with rain.(3)

These lines, he asserts, demonstrate the happy coexistence of the material and the ethereal; he claims to have celebrated in Paris “an immediate reconciling of spirit and flesh, now and forever, heaven and earth.” In retrospect, Cummings translates the city of exile into a symbol of his own contradictory desires: “Paris was for me precisely and complexly this homogeneous duality: this accepting transcendence; this living and dying more than death or life.”⁴

What do these separate representations of la ville lumière suggest about the nature of place? What do they imply about the way human beings conceptualize places and form attachments to them? In the progression of responses sketched above—from the novel to the poem to the late philosophical “nonlecture”—we see that Paris changes: not the actual city (although the novel implies a change of seasons) but the city of words constructed by Cummings. Through these brief passages, we witness the evolution of an imaginary city while regarding its transformation as a sign of the changes which Cummings (or his persona) has undergone. The phrases which constitute this imaginary city are mimetic, but what they “represent” are the psychic and emotional conditions under which he has contemplated Paris or his own mental image of Paris. These fugitive references, supposedly to a real city, thus mirror certain changes in the writer's own consciousness and sensibility. In this respect they suggest the potential function of place in every textual representation of self; more broadly, they imply that identity itself inheres in the relation which the self assumes to its surroundings (material and human). We see in Cummings' novel that he makes sense of his wartime ordeal through a contemplation of two sites: the “enormous room” at La Misère—which becomes a microcosm of Europe and an emblem of the human community—and the city of Paris, which in its contrasting aspects discloses his own growth. Recounting his transformative experiences, Cummings reveals the orienting function of place; he can tell his story only through the reconstruction of those sites. For him, as for other American writers, Paris was a scene of metamorphosis; the city's image, inscribed in the expatriate text, inescapably reflects the creation of an exilic self.

To pose the question of place is to revive an issue which criticism apparently disposed of decades ago with the concept of “setting.” Yet as Leonard Lutwack has recently remarked, we still lack “a theory of the formal use of place in literature.” Though all narrative action unfolds in space and time, criticism has concerned itself almost exclusively with temporality; we have barely begun to consider the textual implications of place. Lutwack proposes that all literary projections of locale express “symbolic purposes even though in their descriptiveness they may be rooted in fact.”⁵ This figurality derives from both archetypal associations (mountains connote vision, spirituality, and so on) and particular implications of place generated by a given work (the vulgarity of Yonville, for example, in Madame Bovary). Lutwack asserts that “the most elemental orientation of a reader to a narrative text is through its evocation of places” (37). Here he refers to “those aspects of the actual environment” forming the world inhabited by fictive characters; he claims that correlations between real and fictional topography determine the reader's preliminary assumptions about narrative form and mode.

If Lutwack establishes the importance of place in literature and the diversity of its treatment, however, his distinction between the “actual environment” and an imaginative landscape bears reexamination. A real environment becomes intelligible—and comparable—only after it enters into language as an instance of place; yet as geographical theorists have suggested, all conceptions of place are inherently and inescapably subjective. According to Yi-Fu Tuan, “place” is a “concretion of value,” space endowed with value; Edward Relph speaks of places as “focuses of intention.”⁶ For both, the notion of place implies the projection of human sensibility upon the natural or built environment. Hence one cannot compare an “actual” place with its literary representation, since there is literally no “place” apart from an interpreting consciousness. The only possible comparison for the critic is thus between a personal, readerly concept of place (perhaps informed by knowledge of an existent site) and a textual, writerly image. This distinction forces a rethinking of the status of literary topography, for the salient difference lies not in the relation between real and fictive environments but between textual scenes and the symbolic experiences of place which they inscribe. In the case of Cummings' novel, Paris is first synonymous with beauty and pleasure, then with life and liberty, and finally with the persistence of humanity in the face of war. What matters is not the discrepancy between his version of the city and that of the Baedeker guide but rather the connection between his city of words and the internalized place to which it refers. Perhaps every textual construction of place implies just such a mapping or symbolic re-presentation of an interior terrain.

In everyday conversation, the word place designates a portion of the physical world, detaches it from its surroundings, and tacitly attributes a distinctiveness: “Vienna is a place I want to visit.” The uniqueness or difference assumed by such a statement resides not in the material configuration of streets, buildings, trees, or rivers but in an idea of place already embedded in consciousness and shaped by cultural forces (art, literature, advertising, journalism), as well as personal fantasy. The same place may, as we know, hold radically different meanings for different persons: on a visit to London, the traveler who loses her passport and gets food poisoning will have a significantly different sense of the city than someone who falls in love in Hyde Park. Relph shows how the identity of a place derives from three intertwined yet irreducible elements—“physical features or appearance, observable activities and functions, and meanings or symbols.” Some of these components seem fixed, objective, and independent of subjective judgment; yet even so empirical a criterion as the “appearance” of a place implies its contemplation from a certain vantage point or through a particular representation. We can distinguish between a popularly held image (Rome, the eternal city) and an individual perception of place, but both are ultimately human constructions; the supposed “identity” of a place may be little more than the dominant popular image. A person's sense of place emerges from a fusion of perceptions occurring on several levels—a process which inevitably remains conditional and arbitrary. Such an operation hinges, according to Relph, on one's existential relation to place, which may be characterized by some form of “insideness” or “outsideness.”⁷ The extent of one's psychic involvement in or identification with a given place affects—and is affected by—the symbolic meanings associated with that site. “Outsideness” connotes the persistent sense of exclusion from or disregard for one's material surroundings. From the converse perspective of “insideness,” place becomes (as Tuan says) a “calm center of established values,” a symbolic constant amid change and movement; he thus ascribes a groundedness, a sense of orientation and identity to the root concept of meaningful space. Here place connotes security and belonging, as in the expression “my place,” a synonym for home.⁸

Feelings of “insideness” and “outsideness” occur as more or less conscious responses to milieu; but we can also experience place as space which has penetrated to the level of the unconscious. Pierre Sansot appositely remarks: “To the rather embarrassing question ‘What is the essence of a place?’ one must often substitute another question: ‘What can one dream about it?’” To dream of place is to experience the intrusion of landscape into the deepest recesses of the psyche and to recognize the inevitably symbolic structure which our perceptions of the environment assume. But dreams typically manifest a topography quite different from conscious perceptions. Our residual, waking remembrance of dreamscapes may, for example, call to mind a place in childhood, a scene of trauma or pleasure, without providing any specific visual correlation; we recognize through pure intuition the site of an essential though repressed episode. This phenomenon of intuitive recognition suggests that one's sense of place is determined less by specific geographical features than by experiential associations. It also implies, however, that the assimilation of experience in the unconscious—the processing of everyday life—depends in some way upon these spatial and topical attachments. Beyond their conscious symbolic or functional importance, places thus invade the unconscious and acquire oneiric potency. According to Gaston Bachelard, the most powerful psychospatial image is the house in which we were raised, which is “physically inscribed in us” and “imbued with dream values which remain after the house is gone.”⁹ The house of childhood recurs in the unconscious as a phantasmic repository of early impressions and sensations, ordinarily as the embodiment of at-homeness.

Summing up the multiple implications of place for what Heidegger might call our being-in-the-world, Relph argues that

the essence of place lies in the largely unselfconscious intentionality that defines places as profound centers of human existence. There is for virtually everyone a deep association with and consciousness of the places where we were born and grew up, where we live now, or where we have had particularly moving experiences. This association seems to constitute a vital source of both individual and cultural identity and security, a point of departure from which we orient ourselves in the world.¹⁰

This process of orientation, of situating ourselves in space and coming to know the surrounding environment, seems indispensable to the recognition of the self as a self. The elements of place to which we are most responsive (consciously or unconsciously) comprise the physical signs of our deepest intentions and desires. Gabriel Marcel once observed that “an individual is not distinct from his place; he is that place.” His contention is not that geography determines personality (otherwise all natives of a region would be indistinguishable) but that we find or know ourselves principally through the attachments we form to a place.

Similarly, we organize our experiences with other people through associations with place; to recall an acquaintance is to visualize scenes and contexts in which we have known that individual. This is precisely the psychic connection between identity and setting evoked when we try to “place” someone who looks vaguely familiar: we recollect a college lecture hall and instantly recognize an old classmate. The identification occurs not through a rational calculation of time or chronology but by recalling some physical scene which condenses past experience as a nexus of associations. Roger M. Downs and David Stea make the intriguing suggestion that we can have no awareness of past events in our lives “without a sense of the place in which they happened.”¹¹ They contend that we reconstruct the past largely through the imagery of place and imply that memory is less the retrieval of bygone time than a recovery of symbolic space.

Despite its title (which underscores the passage of time), Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu demonstrates this point: in the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann, the narrator recovers an earlier self by evoking the village of Combray, a place associated with childhood visits to his aunt's house. Through the lapse of time, his image of the town had become dim and unreal: “These Combray streets exist in so remote a corner of my memory, painted in colors so different from those in which the world is decked for me today, that in fact one and all of them, and the church which towered above them on the Square, seem to me now more unsubstantial than the projections of my magic-lantern.”¹² Conjured up by the taste of lime tea and petites madeleines, however, the memory of that lost world returns: the church of Sainte-Hilaire, Tante Léonie's house, the streets and lanes of the village, the “two ways” (the Méséglise and Guermantes), the ruined castle, and all of the other images of Combray which compose its particularity. For Proust the village is that network of associations within which he locates himself as a subject. Yet he also knows that the place of memory bears little relation to contemporary Combray, where even the landscape has changed; he recalls promenades along the rue des Perchamps, “a street for which one might search in vain through the Combray of today, for the public school [which in the actual village of Illiers has been renamed the Lycée Marcel Proust] now rises upon its site” (213).

The remembered sites which hold the key to our being thus have a shadowy, precarious existence:

The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

(551)

Despite their evanescent nature, however, places known in the past remain with us like certain tastes and smells, ready to be summoned into consciousness and to unfold a profusion of meaning; according to Proust these places form part of the “vast structure of recollection” (58) through which we order and interpret our past lives. He uses the metaphor of Japanese cutouts that expand in a bowl of water from tiny crumbs to recognizable shapes of “flowers or houses or people” to suggest how a single image or impression may evoke a detailed recollection of place. Throughout his later experiences in Balbec and Paris, Proust's narrator draws upon memories of Combray as a point of reference and a source of coherence. The quintessential episode associated with Combray—his mother's refusal to bestow the goodnight kiss—indeed holds the key to Marcel's subsequent preoccupation with the paradoxes of desire.

A shorter modernist text, Hemingway's “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” enables us to examine with perhaps greater efficiency this complicated relation between place and memory. Here, a dying writer on safari in Africa visualizes a series of mental scenes—the rail station at Karagatch, the Alpine village of Schruns, a trout stream in the Black Forest—each of which evokes certain moments or phases of consciousness. Set against the immediate environment of the African plain, these flashbacks imply a process of re-collection, a psychic review in extremis of experiences which have shaped a life. In effect, the narrative enacts the gesture of autobiography, the effort to locate in past experience those episodes in which the self has defined itself through its responses to the world. As the writer, Harry, recalls these sites of being, he acknowledges the function of place in remembrance; each separate locale, evoked by sensory images, epitomizes an entire episode. More poignantly, these scenes signify stories which will go untold, for Harry recognizes that “he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.”¹³ Hemingway here manifests more than self-pity: Harry's remorse betrays a profound attachment to places where he has glimpsed basic truths. These sites mark moments in which he has been fully alive to the world, and in the chagrin of lost opportunity, the writer virtually equates place with writing. The “things that he had saved to write” all reside within recollections of physical scenes: the ranch out West, his grandfather's log house on a hill above the lake, the streets of Constantinople, the working-class neighborhood in Paris.

In the italicized passages which comprise Harry's reveries, Hemingway implies that in some fundamental way, we do not inhabit places so much as they inhabit us. Each of the physical scenes, linked (in Relph's phrase) with “particularly moving experiences,” persists in memory and dream as a psychic landmark. The writer's life is obviously more than the sum of those places in which he has lived, but the difference between one place and another makes possible the recollection of that life and in effect determines the very structure of remembrance. Wyoming, Paris, and Constantinople constitute more than settings in which meaningful events have unfolded; they designate separate spheres of being, each marked by specific impressions, desires, and contingencies. As Harry recalls these scenes, he implicitly takes the measure of his existence, trying to discern in memory some scheme or pattern which will account for the cruel irony of his death in Africa by gangrenous infection. But in depicting this “recherche du temps perdu,” Hemingway reflects less on time than on the primacy of place in the writer's conception of self. If memory is the crux of identity, images of place determine the act of remembrance. Late in his career Hemingway wrote: “We live by accidents of terrain, you know. And terrain is what remains in the dreaming part of your mind.”¹⁴ In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” the dying writer surveys that inner terrain, the symbolic landscape of his life, to understand who he is and what he has been; like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych, Harry confronts the enigma of self in the imminence of annihilation. Each of the places in which he has lived holds a clue to the essential identity threatened by the absolute displacement of death.

As if to preserve these memories of place (and hence the remembering self) from oblivion, the writer at one point considers dictating his recollections to Helen, the wife at his bedside. He recalls one site so integral to his self-conception, however, that it cannot be thus transcribed:

You could dictate ^[the fishing trip to the Black Forest^], but you could not dictate the Place Contrescarpe where the flower sellers dyed their flowers in the street and the dye ran over the paving where the autobus started and the old men and the women, always drunk on wine and bad marc; and the children with their noses running in the cold; the smell of dirty sweat and poverty and drunkenness at the Café des Amateurs and the whores at the Bal Musette they lived above.

(69)

The significance of the Left Bank setting is not immediately clear. The flashback follows two previous allusions to Paris in dialogue with Helen; Paris also figures in a recollection of the writer's encounter with the Dadaists of Montparnasse, evoked by the image of an “American poet with … a stupid look on his potato face” (identified in manuscript as Malcolm Cowley) talking in a café “with a Roumanian who said his name was Tristan Tzara” (66). Through these references Hemingway draws an implicit contrast between the elegant Parisian haunts Harry has known with his wealthy second wife and the more modest environs associated with a previous marriage and the beginnings of his career.

But why is the author unable to dictate a description of the quarter around the place de la Contrescarpe? Why does that sketch seem possible only if he writes it himself? In two sentences Hemingway discloses the psychic importance of this place for Harry's conception of himself:

In that poverty, and in that quarter across the street from a Boucherie Chevaline and a wine co-operative he had written the start of all he was to do. There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of the autobus in the round square, the purple flower dye upon the paving, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the River, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard.

(70)

This section of Paris—the very milieu where Hemingway served his apprenticeship in 1922-23—thus becomes associated with the life of writing and with a period of ambition and hard work prior to the dissipation of Harry's middle years. Throughout the passage, he recalls with disdain the drunken locals, contrasting their ivresse with his own industry and recollecting the room he rented in the hotel where Verlaine died: “He had a room on the top floor of that hotel that cost him sixty francs a month where he did his writing, and from it he could see the roofs and chimney pots and all the hills of Paris.” While the view from his apartment is restricted (“you could only see the wood and coal man's place”), the writing room significantly affords a panorama; by this vertical ascent, a secular, urban mode of transcendence, the writer claims a position of symbolic dominion. Seen in its totality, the confusing maze of Paris reveals its ultimate form and organization. From this loft, in a hotel which once housed a famous poet, Harry knows where he is and who he is. The old neighborhood, recollected in vivid colors, becomes associated with the formation of this writing self; it is appropriately only through an act of writing that he can recover the immediacy of that place which, in its remembered details, yields his original identity as an author.

But that task remains uncompleted, and Harry's lingering regret is that “he had never written about Paris. Not the Paris that he cared about” (71). Hemingway here discloses a nostalgia for the lost world of his own youth. By the mid-1930s he had realized the importance to his development of those lucky years on the Left Bank; yet not until the late fifties, as he struggled against infirmity and despair, did he compose (in A Moveable Feast) his memoirs of “the Paris that he cared about.” The dying protagonist of “Snows” receives no second chance to preserve the story of a life lived in and shaped by memorable places. Instead, like the doomed hero of Borges' “Secret Miracle,” he must content himself with the cerebral projection of never-to-be-completed writing. In the end, his memories reveal the psychic fusion of topography and experience, as desire resolves into the forms and features of place. Hemingway's story culminates in a vision of Kilimanjaro, which in the spatial dynamic of the narrative marks an apotheosis of place, the geographical concretion of the longing for artistic transcendence figured in Harry's climb to the top-floor room. In this final fantasy, the dying writer reinscribes the dream of a younger self, confirming again the symbolic status of landscape in the conceptualizing of a life story.

Although Hemingway's story enables us to consider the role of place in the structure of remembrance, we must look elsewhere for insight into the daily process by which one internalizes surroundings and thus orients and defines the self. Downs and Stea call this phenomenon “cognitive mapping” and define it as “a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, codes, stores, recalls, and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in his everyday spatial environment.”¹⁵ That is, cognitive mapping describes the assimilation of sensory information about the places we inhabit or traverse not as raw impressions but as a “code” of meaningful signs which collectively produce a mental map. This cartography enables us to function by providing a sense of distance and relation and by schematizing our experiential world in terms of valued or significant sites. Social scientists have examined spatial behavior dependent on cognitive mapping: giving directions, taking shortcuts, determining shopping routes, or even choosing one's place of residence. They have acknowledged, moreover, that beyond the conduct of daily business, this topographical orientation seems vital to personal survival in a complex environment; without this internalized map we would literally be unable to find our way home.¹⁶

But cognitive mapping surely affects more than spatial behavior. We have already seen in Proust and Hemingway how encoded landscape figures in the operation of memory; other literary texts suggest that place enters importantly into the day-to-day construction of the self. Of particular relevance here is the autobiographical form most attentive to everyday life: the journal or diary. In her Early Diary, the French-born American writer Anaïs Nin records her agonizing return to Paris in late 1924. Before leaving the United States she had mused: “The New Yorker dreams of Paris while the Parisian wonders about New York. And we go through life without definitely realizing any place. They all remain unreal for us.”¹⁷ Yet her experience proved otherwise; after moving to Paris with her husband, Hugh Guiler, Nin became obsessed with the reality of the city, which for nearly three years seemed to determine the course of her existence. Her profound ambivalence toward Paris forms a key to her diary during this period and mirrors an ongoing psychological conflict.

Perhaps because she recalled the Paris of her childhood, Nin returned full of illusions. Her first weeks there established a pattern of sharply vacillating emotion: one day the air was sweet, and Nin felt “the pleasure of being in Paris” (81); a few days later “Paris was gloomy,” and she wished that she had never come back (84). But she nevertheless began to reorient herself, walking with Hugh through the Tuileries …, beside the river, and along the grand boulevards. Recurrent references in the diary indicate sites of personal significance: the place des Vosges, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Luxembourg Gardens, and the bookstalls along the Seine. For a few months in 1925 Nin lived on the Right Bank near the Etoile and enjoyed promenades along the fashionable boulevard Haussmann; the couple subsequently took a Left Bank apartment on the rue Schoelcher in Montparnasse. Nin took a skeptical view of this quarter (then teeming with expatriate artists) and preferred little side streets—like the rue Vavin—to the broad boulevard du Montparnasse. When urban crowds aroused her disgust, Nin alternately sought out quiet parks or remained ensconced in the apartment. But despite a reclusive tendency, she also loved walking and became familiar with the streets of the city's central arrondissements. Her perambulations reflect a seemingly deliberate effort to absorb the geography of the city—as if absolute spatial orientation might somehow reconcile her to the invisible Paris which oppressed her.

Much as she tried to understand the city, though, Nin felt a revulsion toward it and confided in her diary: “This Parisian life, I am convinced now, is a constant source of irritation to me” (142). We can identify three separate sources of dis-ease which undermined “the pleasure of being in Paris.” The first was the “intolerable pain” inflicted upon the modest young wife by the spectacle of “impurities”—public displays of sensuality or vulgarity. Prior to the awakening which plunged her into sexual adventures as well as the composition of erotica, Nin discovered in Parisian culture a bawdiness which tainted her perception of the physical city:

Paris is like a giant park, riotous in coloring, festive in its fountains and flowers, glorious in its monuments. When I stand at the top of the Champs-Elysées, with its chestnut trees in flower, its undulations of shining cars, its white spaciousness, I feel as if I were biting into a utopian fruit, something velvety and lustrous and rich and vivid.

But the worms are gnawing it. A repugnant phrase in a book, a coarse breath of the theatre, a look from sacrilegious eyes, the smell of something foul and abysmal, … and the fruit turns bitter in my mouth. I stand in the same place, but shivering, nauseated.

My reaction to sensuality causes me infinite pain.

(142-43)

Nin's reaction was complicated by her relationship to her philandering father—who personified “intelligent, insidious, cultured Paris”—and to her husband Hugh, the “humorous banker” whose character would be corrupted, she worried, by the “poisoned life” of the city. Reading between the lines, we see that Nin also feared the transformation of her own nature—specifically, the loss of those constraints which protected her from the seductive influence of Paris. Like Lambert Strether in James's Ambassadors (a novel she greatly admired), Nin felt strangely intrigued and repelled by the complicated amours of the French.

A second source of unhappiness was the climate of Paris. Weather seems to have determined both her mood and her perception of the city; with keen self-awareness she observed: “I react with the exactitude of a barometer to the atmosphere” (95). On 2 January 1925 she confessed: “Tonight I hate Paris. The wind is blowing heavy rain-drops about; the streets are wet and muddy; the automobile horns, more discordant and insistent than ever” (82). Nin's attentiveness to climate illustrates the influence of weather on the experience of place. Rain and gloomy skies triggered her most despairing characterizations of Paris:

Hateful gray days—short and dark and oppressing, wrapped in mists, with a pale, powerless sun appearing occasionally through them like a mockery. You see the copper circle, but its rays cannot reach you—the fog swallows them and cuts up the warmth halfway. And to me it is even sadder to see the sun and not to feel it, to be reminded that on other worlds it shines so deliciously. … I want to go anywhere, but away from loathsome Paris.

(243)

Yet pleasant weather could transform the city: “Paris on a sunny day is such a different thing!” (84). Sometimes atmospheric conditions enabled her to recover a romantic perspective: “Today, in the dense fog, I saw Paris like a magic city. The shadowy people, the muffled sounds, the fantastic air that hung over the most common voitures à bras, over the vague and featureless heads of the vendors. The Seine has completely disappeared. I walked over a bridge that spanned two clouds” (89). But such moments came infrequently. Throughout the diary, Nin traced a curious relationship to Paris in which she had seemingly surrendered her will: the city in its various seasonal and meteorological aspects controlled her emotional life.

Finally, Nin felt oppressed by the weight of French literary tradition. Unlike most Americans in Paris, she enjoyed fluency in French; she read the literary journals, attended lectures at the Sorbonne, and retained from childhood a reverence for the grands hommes of French letters. Nin registered the ordeal of finding her literary identity in the shadow of such brilliance; she conceived herself as the victim of “a Monster, … the perpetual presence of Letters” in Paris which “swallows your individuality.” Sensing that she had become paralyzed, she wrote in the dramatic entry of 11 April 1926: “Paris kills my writing. I have been oppressed and belittled and silenced in Paris. As soon as I leave it, I feel free again, vivid, enthusiastic, fervent, creative. … I have been spiritually crucified in Paris” (189). Nin here acknowledges the intimidating—and patently masculine—authority of French tradition as enshrined at the Sorbonne, the Panthéon, and the Académie Française. She felt that her survival depended upon relocating, finding a milieu in which writing would be possible: “All I need now,” she wrote, “is a chance to develop in a place where I am allowed to breathe” (191).

For a time Nin imagined that a room above the rooftops might enable her to come to terms with the city she described as “hell on earth” (198). After seeing a movie with aerial views of the capital, she felt a need to “get a sweeping sight of the whole” for she had seen “only parts of Paris at a time” (99-100). She thought that a panoramic view would disclose “the beauty of the whole” which—in her experience—was often “lost in the sourness of the details.” Nin couched in aesthetic terms her own desire for an elevated perspective: to scan the horizon, note landmarks, and absorb the spatial configuration is to conduct an essential remapping, to place oneself above a landscape thus rendered coherent, picturesque, and benign. By surmounting Paris literally she hoped to conquer the effects of the oppressive, internalized city. This desire for “a sweeping sight of the whole” led to the discovery in May 1926 of a top-floor servant's room on the rue Schoelcher, which the couple rented as “a Secret Refuge, a workroom.” Nin called it “the High Place” and recognized its psychic importance: “On this little terrace, seeing Paris from such a high plane, nothing can affect us” (205). Although not quite a room of her own, the loft offered “peace and books and sunshine” (224) as well as superb views of Montmartre and Sacré Coeur. But Nin found the loneliness “intolerable”; four months after renting the top-floor room, she acknowledged a “fear of the High Place, where I am alone with my ideas, alone with my hate of Paris” (233).

Unable to relieve her anguish by positioning herself above the city, Nin tried yet another strategy of adjustment. In December 1926 she vowed: “I shall try to turn my hate of Paris into writing and make it harmless” (248). Hugh had suggested that she consolidate her journal entries under the title “Two Years in Paris,” and she initially undertook an analysis of Montparnasse: “I am going to study my quarter, my neighbors, and their life.” She examined the bohemianism of the Rotonde and the Dôme …, concluding that the great cafés were “fake in spirit,” crowded with “men and women who make sport of art” (252). But Nin wanted to take a wider view of Paris; in a passage framed as the opening of her book, she offered a striking parallel:

Night and day the gargoyles of Notre Dame look down upon Paris with a sinister expression, with derision, mockery, amusement, with hate, fear, disgust. For two years I looked down into Paris, and tried to understand why the gargoyles had such expressions.

It seemed strange that they should be able to look in such a manner at the lovely river, the graceful bridges, the ancient palaces, the gardens, the majestic avenues, the flowers, the quays and the old books, the bird market, the lovers, the students. What do they see beneath these attractive surfaces? Why do they frown perpetually and mock eternally? What monstrous secrets made their eyes bulge out, twisted their mouths, filled their heads with wrinkles and grimaces?

I know now.

(253)

Observing a disparity between the city's “attractive surfaces” and its “monstrous secrets,” Nin conducts a further remapping of the visible Paris in order to disclose an invisible world. The avenues, bridges, and palaces merely point toward an unspeakable abyss. But while this passage seems initially to reinscribe Nin's misery, we should note that by bringing Paris into her own discourse she has achieved a conceptual breakthrough implied by the final claim “I know now.” Precisely what she knows remains unspectified, but the comparison of her vantage point with that of the gargoyles seems revealing. For Nin has found at the geographical and symbolic center of Paris, literally amid the stones of its most fabled monument, a figure for her own relation to the city. She has in effect metaphorized her alienation from Paris in the gargoyle's sardonic gaze; she has articulated her displacement through a recognizable sign of place. …

Nin's “Two Years in Paris” apparently never reached completion. But the project seems to have marked a turning point in her relation to the city. In early 1927, she listed an achievement of the preceding year: “I faced and accepted Paris as a test of my courage” (258). A visit to America that summer placed her life in France in a new perspective; recounting for a friend her experiences in Paris, Nin confessed: “I found myself drawing an intensely interesting picture, full of color, movement, rhythm, meaning and beauty. And unexpectedly, I was struck by the conviction that the life in New York could not hold me, that I longed to return to Paris” (283). Into the quarrel with Paris she had of course projected other struggles: with loneliness and depression, with the burden of household duties, with doubt about her talent, with worries about her “perfect” marriage, with suppressed desires and disturbing temptations. But her relentless contemplation of the city—“the lovely river, the graceful bridges, the ancient palaces, the gardens, the majestic avenues, the flowers, and the quays and the old books”—finally culminated in a reconciliation to place, renewed purpose in her writing, and a growing acceptance of her sensuality.

Nin's diary displays, to be sure, many other facets of her emotional and intellectual life. But her encounter with the city reflects with remarkable precision the course of that life and illuminates its essential unfolding. Because the diary provides only a selective condensation of daily thoughts and activities, however, we cannot reconstruct Nin's response to Paris in its full complexity; what remains is at best a partial, residual image of the city she had internalized, suggesting certain reference points in a private, symbolic cartography. But the diary nevertheless testifies to the function of such mapping in realizing a sense of self; if Nin's vision of the Champs-Elysées in 1925 exposes an initial uncertainty and vulnerability, her identification with the gargoyles of Notre Dame in late 1926 manifests a perspective that is at once more cynical and more secure. As she absorbed the topographical subtleties of Paris and demystified its monstrous presence, she gained a more confident sense of her literary identity. By August 1927 Nin had returned to the High Place to work, and at year's end she reported in her diary: “Every day I feel surer of myself, my desires soar higher, I feel power in myself, conviction.”¹⁸

Beyond their autobiographical interest, Nin's many allusions to Paris raise the question of how cognitive mapping affects textual versions of place. Downs and Stea have noted that mapping consists of two basic stages, encoding and decoding. That is, the mind converts perceptions of place into images that are symbolic, schematic, and functional.¹⁹ Theoretically this mental grid helps us resolve spatial questions—which route is most direct? which is most scenic?—and implicitly directs our movement toward centers of value or interest. But does writing about place entail the same encoding and decoding? Or does the textual representation of place reverse the process of mapping by depositing reformulated signs of spatial experience? Insofar as Nin's diary sheds light on this problem, allusions to her apartment, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Louvre, the Seine, and other locales may describe important nodes of an internal map; but her attention to these sites also forms part of a deliberate strategy of self-presentation. Despite its apparent status as a truthful, uncensored record, Nin's diary (like all diaries) betrays a self-conscious selection and manipulation of details to produce an ultimately fictive image.²⁰ It yields a portrait of the writing self constructed from the diverse signs by which personality inscribes itself—especially from those reencoded signs of place which encompass and epitomize the struggle for identity. In Nin's diary, the gargoyles of Notre Dame figure crucially in her fabulation and illustrate the textual encoding of the city by which the self discovers and defines itself.

Not all prose forms, of course, entail the representation of place. Nor does place invariably indicate a writer's effort to articulate an image of self. Certain genres, such as travel narratives or landscape sketches, emphasize topography to assert the charm or distinctiveness of particular sites. The writer's attachment to place may color the account but remains incidental to the task of delineation. Other types of prose (the reflective essay, for example) incorporate physical scenes chiefly when locus figures as an explicit object of contemplation. In short stories and novels, however, place often plays an integral role in narrative conception as the matrix of action. Indeed, we speak of plot as what “takes place,” what assumes localized form, in fiction. The French expression avoir lieu captures this same sense of an action or incident which literally must “have a place” in order to happen at all.

Localization is, however, scarcely a uniform principle of fiction; some writers, curiously indifferent to geography, have seemed content to embed plot in obscure or generalized settings. Lutwack notes that after Fielding locates the story of Tom Jones in Somersetshire and depicts the house of Squire Allworthy in pastoral terms, “place ceases to function in the novel.”²¹ For the most part, Poe's tales of effect employ vague, unlocatable European settings to lend remoteness to events and underscore their ambiguity. In Kafka's fiction, the physical scene also remains ambiguous, a dreamscape which metaphorizes the protagonist's anxieties but which in its surreal figurality resists facile biographical association. Recently the more realistic stories of Raymond Carver have inscribed a postmodern placelessness—a flat, undifferentiated suburban scene marked by anomie and emptiness.

But fiction more often embodies a purposive image of place, as we see in evocations of locale by Hawthorne, Flaubert, and Hardy.²² In this century, both Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! have appeared with maps tracing the configuration of imaginary towns and thus called attention to spatial relations within these fictive worlds. Faulkner's representation of Yoknapatawpha County indeed remains an unparalleled instance of the literary concretion of place. Modern fiction presents other notable instances of what Bachelard has called “topophilia”: Joyce's obsessive attention to the geography of his native city in Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses; Virginia Woolf's material evocation of place (her parents' summer house in Cornwall) in the brilliant “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse; Thomas Wolfe's meticulous rendering of his mother's boarding house and the streets of Asheville in Look Homeward, Angel.

These last three examples suggest a possible correlation in fiction between an elaboration of place and an autobiographical project. I do not mean to suggest that all novels which emphasize locale should be read as autobiography; it seems more plausible to assume that a writer's fixation with place may signal the desire of autobiography: the longing to reconstruct—albeit in fictive terms—the relation between an authorial self and a world of located experience. As we have seen, this is precisely the gap bridged in Hemingway's “Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Autobiographies like Nabokov's Speak, Memory and Soyinka's Aké: The Years of Childhood reinforce the impression that place may be crucial to autobiography; both writers reconstruct their early years through evocations of specific, almost magical sites associated with indelible, formative experiences. Indeed, in theoretical terms it is difficult to imagine the recounting of a life story apart from the tangible, physical scenes where important episodes have occurred. As Plato observed in the Timaeus, place is a veritable matrix of energies, the “nurturing container” of experience. Summing up Plato's ideas on chora (place), E. V. Walter writes: “People and things in a place participate in one another's natures. Place is a location of mutual immanence, a unity of effective presences abiding together.” Chora is more than mere position, more than a constellation of material forms or structures: it is “the active receptacle of shapes, powers, feelings, and meanings, organizing the qualities within it, energizing experience.”²³ It would thus seem imperative for a writer constructing a narrative of lived experience to acknowledge the receptacle which gives that experience definition and sustenance.

Yet autobiography as a form exhibits as much variety in treatment of place as fiction; although numerous critical discussions examine time in autobiography, place remains an apparently incidental issue.²⁴ Whether the autobiographer acknowledges the influence of certain locations or, conversely, ignores locale seems finally to hinge upon the life itself, upon the degree of the writer's attachment to indigenous or customary scenes. Milton's Satan insisted that “the mind is its own place,” and for writers ensconced in their own mental worlds, the physical environment may indeed remain an irrelevant background. But for writers attentive to lived, sensory experience, place proves (as Plato insisted) a nurturing medium, a source of both thought and identity.

Insofar as all writers of fiction and autobiography display differing attachments to place and different patterns of habitation and movement, one might conceive a range of possible spatial attachments. There are, at one end of the scale, writers whose work is rooted in the life and landscape of a specific region and whose projections of place imply a groundedness, a sense of belonging. Eudora Welty serves here as the representative figure; her Place in Fiction acknowledges the determinative role of locale in narrative:

Place in fiction is the named, identifiable, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering-spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced, in the novel's progress. Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place. Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else.²⁵

Then there are those diverse writers for whom place is a matter of happenstance or preference, simply the present locus of activity. Their fiction tends to register the commonalities of contemporary culture rather than regional peculiarities. Some attachment to roots may remain, but these writers inhabit a changing, megalopolitan scene which has little meaning as place in their writing, however realistic its portrayal. Among current American writers, John Updike and Anne Tyler may perhaps be said to possess such an orientation. Perceptibly more dislocated are those writers of internal exile whose attachments to place have been complicated by feelings of alienation, marginalization, or exclusion. Their identification with a given locale may be as intense as that of the regionalist but is accompanied by a complex, ironic detachment. In quite different ways, Flannery O'Connor and Ralph Ellison may be seen as figures of domestic exile, projecting into their fiction a contradictory, often hostile relation to place. Finally, at the other end of the spectrum, we locate those writers whose careers have been marked by prolonged absence or even permanent exile from homeland. Their passage from familiar, native grounds to an alien scene poses in the sharpest terms the difference between one place and another and produces the perspective of displacement. Conrad, Joyce, and Mann all drew upon that perspective to reconstruct the geography of their own experience.²⁶

Reductive as this scheme may be, it helps to explain the singular importance of expatriate writings for a study of place. It might be argued that, among all forms of prose discourse, narratives of exile (including novels, short stories, autobiographies, and diaries) seem most likely to incorporate reflections on the problem of place and the relation of place to writing. Near the end of a career marked by his own relentless search for what his protagonist Nick Adams called “the good place,” Hemingway speculated in A Moveable Feast that “transplanting” might be as necessary for the writer as for other growing things, insofar as relocation produced a new perspective from which a previous haunt might be written about. His theory is revealing: like many a modernist, Hemingway regarded displacement as an elective strategy of replenishment, a way of shifting one's angle of vision. Unlike such precursors as Ovid or Dante, who were banished for political reasons, the modern literary expatriate has (with certain exceptions) often experienced exile as a quest for a more productive milieu. In his determination to “fly the nets” of language, religion, and country, Joyce's Stephen Dedalus may be seen as the exemplary exiled modernist, though of course Joyce himself made a career of self-exile in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. Gertrude Stein observed pointedly that in the twentieth century writers needed two countries because the creative life depended upon that detachment or ungrounding only available in a foreign place.²⁷ Stein's claim resonates with Henry Miller's declaration in Tropic of Cancer: “I'm not an American any more, nor a New Yorker, and even less a European, or a Parisian. … I'm a neutral.”²⁸ What Stein and Miller identify is the expatriate's oddly indeterminate status of being imaginatively neither here nor there. Moving from the place where one “belongs” to an unreal second country implies a deliberate renunciation of origins and the assumption of an ambiguous position between “outsideness” and “insideness.”

Yet as Hemingway realized, this deliberate dislocation can become a mode of vision. Lloyd S. Kramer has observed that the situation of exile produces a heightened consciousness of the physical and social environment; more significantly, Kramer adds, “the experience of living among alien people, languages, and institutions can alter the individual's sense of self … [provoking] important changes in self-perception and consciousness.”²⁹ The writing which emerges from this experience tends to reflect both an intensified awareness of place and an instinctive preoccupation with the identity of the alienated self. In an essay on the expatriate “avant-garde autobiography,” William Boelhower claims that this type of narrative embodies “the larger crisis of habitare that characterizes the modernist condition.” In this form of discourse, “the avant-garde autobiographer, in his attempt to create a coherent grammar of the self out of the spatial vocabulary of the metropolis, ends up with a loosely bound inventory of fragmented forms.”³⁰ That is, the city of exile offers a source of signs from which the author constructs a provisional expatriate identity.

In this sense the modern expatriate writer also reenacts an ancient human predicament, the dilemma of the ungrounded self. Reconsidering Freud's reading of Sophocles' Oedipus cycle, E. V. Walter shows how the psychoanalyst abstracted the mythic hero from his environment to underscore the “universal drives of infantile mental life.” But Freud thus overlooked (and quite literally displaced) an important dimension of the tragic myth, the relation of sacred or portentous sites to the mystery of identity: “Taken together, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus go beyond psychological insight to grounded insight. They present the drama of place and the crisis of the placeless self. Together, they probe the riddle of alienation and explore the relation between the self and its place.”³¹ This dilemma continues to inscribe itself in Western cultural attitudes. Whatever differences may be seen in the experiences of the aforementioned expatriates, each to some extent participated in and wrote about the crisis of the displaced self—a crisis which, to be sure, has certain modernist aspects but which in the search for identity and grounding traces an archetypal struggle.

Although expatriation remains a problematic concept, often loosely invoked to claim dubious commonalities, we can nevertheless recognize that a lengthy stay in an alien place must produce certain changes in the way one feels, thinks, sees, and writes. In the difference between the immediate scene of exile, the “unreal” site of expatriation (as Stein would have it), and those real, remembered scenes of homeland, one confronts the anxiety of the ungrounded self. No mere homesickness, this condition exposes a radical uncertainty about one's relation to “home” and to the self one has been. In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino depicts the situation of the wandering expatriate in paradoxical terms: “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”³² The experience of exile reveals a different, foreign self while disclosing the stranger whom one no longer resembles. As it calls identity into question, expatriation forces a rethinking of the relation between place and self.

To dwell in another country also opens the expatriate to awareness of another kind of exile, the homelessness that may be traced in Western, Judeo-Christian culture to the loss of Eden. Perhaps our longing for and attachment to earthly places derives from an ineradicable collective memory of that forfeited paradise. Heidegger suggests that a consciousness of this plight may ironically provide the basis for dwelling: “As soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling.”³³ If a sense of homelessness indeed leads to dwelling, then exile must be seen as an enabling exercise, an ironic means of inserting the self into the world so as to “bring dwelling to the fullness of its nature.” In effect, expatriation creates a space for being, thinking, and writing by rupturing those relations to place which obscure the nature of our homelessness. In exile, the longing of the self for place reveals itself as pure nostalgia—as a futile yearning for nostos (home), for a ground of being. This is the desire identified by Plato and later expressed by Hemingway and Nin, the desire to discover the “good place” or the “high place” wherein the ungrounded self might at last escape homelessness and find bliss. But exile also makes literal one's existential displacement, and it is this consciousness which impels the writer's effort to construct a city of words which may be inhabited by a textual self.

Just as exile foregrounds the problem of place by posing an implicit contrast between new surroundings and old, it also produces a fresh perspective on cultural differences. Kramer points out that “extended contact with a foreign mentalité helps [exiles] to recognize the unconscious social or ideological hierarchies that create order and meaning in their native culture but pass unnoticed by people who never leave home. The ‘normal’ (or normative) values of the home country become more relative: simply one way of explaining reality or social experience rather than the way.”³⁴ This vantage point “on the margin of two cultures” also works the other way, enabling the emigré to see revealing features of daily life in a foreign country which might escape the notice of the native. For the writer, exile thus provides an immediate spectacle that yields material for reflection and composition as it supplies a new perspective from which to contemplate the distant homeland.

While the tradition of literary exile extends back to the classical period, the condition of expatriation has become so pervasive in the twentieth century that, according to Andrew Gurr, we should regard exile itself as “the essential characteristic of the modern writer.”³⁵ By definition a separation from a familiar and significant native landscape, exile presupposes no particular destination. Yet displaced writers of the modern age have in fact converged mainly upon a half-dozen great cities, presumably finding in them the cosmopolitan density of experience and urban energy conducive to the production of modern literature.³⁶ Among these centers of emigré activity, Paris has since the mid-nineteenth century claimed preeminence as a city of exile. We may summarize those key cultural factors which made it a haven for expatriates, taking note of a few earlier writers who sojourned in Paris and began to explore the vantage point of modern literary exile.

As Kramer and others have demonstrated, the conditions of Parisian life during the nineteenth century made the city powerfully attractive to a large population of exiled artists, writers, and intellectuals. Under the relaxed regime of Louis-Philippe (1830-48), France enjoyed “more freedom for publishing and political activity” than any country in “southern or central Europe”; Paris consequently became a “refuge for displaced radicals” escaping repressive conditions in Italy, Germany, Poland, and Russia.³⁷ The so-called “bourgeois monarchy” of Louis-Philippe also produced material prosperity and cultural dynamism; the rise of bourgeois capitalism inspired a lively counter-culture known as Bohemia, an underworld populated by students, artists, and intellectuals linked mainly by their desire to scandalize the bourgeoisie and to repudiate its materialism.³⁸ Though caricatured in Murger's Scènes de la Vie Bohème (1851), Bohemia developed a romantic allure as a site of rebellious creativity; it defined a climate hospitable to the marginalized artist-exile by rejecting social distinctions and setting itself in opposition to elitist (and xenophobic) high culture. Paris also attracted exiles as the “capital of the nineteenth century,” placing on display the most advanced forms and styles of what Walter Benjamin has called “commodity fetishism.” Through such projects as the construction of the arcades in the 1830s, the staging of world exhibitions, and the modernization of Parisian streets under Baron Haussmann, “Paris was confirmed in its position as the capital of luxury and fashion” and presented a “dreamworld” of progress which fascinated even the politically disaffected.³⁹

The figure whose career most fully embodies the tensions of nineteenth-century French culture and who serves ironically as a prototype of the exiled writer is the Parisian Charles Baudelaire. His brooding sense of isolation, his cultivation of the contradictory roles of dandy and bohemian, his identification with the poète maudit Edgar Allan Poe, his obsession with the crowd and the city streets, his diabolism, and his participation in “the cult of multiplied sensation” all defined aspects of Baudelaire's estrangement from middle-class life. In the poems grouped as Tableaux parisiens and in the prose-poems titled Le Spleen de Paris (now available in English as The Parisian Prowler), he uncovered the grim, fantastic world of the streets, using his sense of self-exile from the Paris of bourgeois splendor as a lens through which to observe the grotesque low-life types—beggars, degenerates, freaks—whose misery appalled and fascinated him. An inveterate flâneur (stroller), Baudelaire metaphorized Paris now as an “ant-like city, full of dreams,” now as a “terrifying landscape,” now as a “gloomy old man doomed to toil.” Benjamin contends that “the Paris of his poems is a sunken city, and more submarine than subterranean,” a city upon which Baudelaire cast “the allegorist's gaze” while accentuating “the modern” in his poetry.⁴⁰ Contemplating a Parisian underclass of victims, misfits, and outcasts, he constructed a model of metropolitan exploration which would influence not only later French symbolistes (especially Jules LaForgue) but also such international exiles as Rilke and Eliot, who came to Paris and briefly adopted what Benjamin calls “the gaze of the flâneur.”

So many notable exiles lived and worked in Paris during the century preceding the expatriate invasion of the 1920s that a separate book would be necessary to do justice to the topic. Kramer's fine study treats three exemplary figures—Heine, Marx, and Mickiewicz—who experienced self-discovery and developed new perspectives on modernity while living in France under the “bourgeois monarchy.” Yet he does not mention another important literary expatriate, Turgenev, who during the revolutionary epoch of 1847-50 composed in Paris the majority of the pieces included in A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), the collection of stories about Russian peasant life which helped to bring about the abolition of serfdom in 1861.⁴¹ Exile apparently enabled Turgenev to see more clearly the distinctive features of the rural subculture he sought to represent. After returning to Russia and suffering internal exile—banishment to a remote provincial town—Turgenev resumed a pattern of periodic visits to France in the late 1850s, primarily to be close to his love, Pauline Viardot. From 1871-83 he lived more or less continuously in Paris, establishing literary connections with Flaubert, Zola, Sand, Daudet, and the brothers Goncourt; during this prolonged exile he wrote The Torrents of Spring, a novel which a half century later provided an American expatriate, Ernest Hemingway, with the title for a parody.

Through his participation in Flaubert's salon, Turgenev made the acquaintance of another international exile, Henry James, who spent a crucial year in Paris (1875-76) before establishing residence in England. As a correspondent for the New York Tribune, James reported on developments in Parisian culture, with emphasis on literary and theatrical fashions. In his first dispatch, he reflected on the American obsession with Paris, the inevitability of recurrent visits, and the effect of leaving and returning upon the perception of place: “No American, certainly, since Americans were, has come to Paris but once, and it is when he returns, hungrily, inevitably, fatally, that his sense of Parisian things becomes supremely acute.”⁴² James found his own “sense of Parisian things” so intense that he shortly began to write a novel dramatizing an American encounter with the city and its vast social complexity. In The American (1876) he analyzed the dazzling effect of culture, tradition, and manners upon a crass but good-hearted entrepreneur from the West who falls in love with a French noblewoman in the waning years of the Second Empire. The famous opening scene, set in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, epitomizes that craving for cultural refinement which in the case of Christopher Newman nearly becomes a destructive obsession. Perhaps fearing his own susceptibility to the charms of Paris, James retreated to England but retained throughout his career (as Edwin Sill Fussell has shown) a veritable preoccupation with France and its capital, as well as with French language and literature.⁴³

With the suppression of the Commune of 1871 and the rise of the Third Republic, the buoyant Parisian cultural scene produced, as Roger Shattuck has shown, a lively avant-garde movement which, like the earlier Bohemian movement, flaunted the sort of creative freedom enticing to international exiles of art.⁴⁴ During the “banquet years” celebrated by Shattuck, August Strindberg returned to France, determined to win fame. The Swedish playwright had visited Paris twice before, but in August 1894 he returned for a longer stay. Already celebrated as the author of such naturalistic dramas as The Father and Miss Julie, Strindberg considered Paris as his “intellectual Mecca” and hoped to promote the French translation and production of his works. But he also feared a loss of identity in the great, indifferent city; and the sudden departure of his wife Frida in October 1894 effectively signalled the failure of his second marriage. Beyond these anxieties he also suffered increasingly from bizarre hallucinations and delusions, including recurrent paranoia. As if to insulate himself from neglect as an expatriate dramatist, he pursued a fugitive career as a scientist, conducting experiments to determine the chemical composition of iodine and to extract gold from sulphur.

The record of Strindberg's strange two years in Paris appears in Inferno, the somewhat exaggerated memoir he composed in Sweden in 1897. The account traces the development of his mania partly through adventures in the streets of Paris; his chance discoveries, clairvoyant experiences, and occult intuitions curiously anticipate the narratives of French surrealists like Breton, Aragon, and Soupault three decades later. One evening, for example, Strindberg takes a walk in a gloomy quartier on the Right Bank:

I crossed the Canal St. Martin, black as a grave, a most suitable place for drowning oneself in. I stopped at the corner of the rue Alibert. Why Alibert? Who was he? Wasn't the graphite that the analytical chemist had found in my sample of sulphur called Alibert graphite? What did that imply? It was odd, but I could not rid my mind of the impression that there was something inexplicable about this.⁴⁵

His stroll becomes progressively nightmarish: “Suspicious-looking persons brushed past me,” he reports, “shouting out coarse words as they did so.” He stumbles into a blind alley “that seemed to be the abode of human trash, vice, and crime” before finding his way to the Porte Saint-Martin. On another occasion, he notices in the Montparnasse cemetery a monument to “Orfila, Chemist and Toxicologist”; a week later on the rue d'Assas, he comes upon the Hôtel Orfila. Assuming this to be a mystical sign, Strindberg takes a room there in February 1896, but the place becomes his “purgatory” as weird, unnerving experiences recur. In the hotel vestibule he notices a letter addressed to a person with the surname of his estranged wife; the letter has come, coincidentally, from the very Austrian village where his wife and child are living. Later he hears someone playing a familiar song on the piano and suspects that a former disciple has followed him from Berlin to Paris to kill him. Finally, in July, he interprets odd noises in adjacent rooms as evidence of a plot by one or more strangers to pass an electric current through him. Horrified, Strindberg flees the Orfila and shortly thereafter leaves France to seek treatment for his delusions.

Unlike Turgenev, who during his first long stay in Paris wrote about the Russian countryside, Strindberg exploited the estrangement of exile to describe uncanny aspects of Parisian life. Both perspectives, however, figure in Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a work which begins (like Strindberg's Inferno) with a slightly fictionalized memoir of the writer's first sojourn in Paris but ends with haunting childhood memories of family and homeland. As Naomi Segal points out, the Notebooks thus involve a subtle fusion of past and present, remembrance and perception: “We must ask ourselves whether this strange, often grim childhood produced an adult destined to receive Paris in precisely this way, or whether the stimuli of Paris induced him to remember certain things in a certain way.”⁴⁶ Rilke arrived in Paris in late August 1902 and stayed for six months, principally to write a book about his hero, the sculptor Auguste Rodin. But the young poet from Prague also felt the influence of Baudelaire and composed a number of poems about the city generally reminiscent of the Tableaux parisiens.

His most complex response to the city came in the Notebooks, however, where he registered what Segal calls “the ubiquity and anonymity of urban death.” His persona and alter-ego Brigge defines his principal task as “learning to see” and quickly begins to notice the horrors of the metropolis. In a key paragraph he reflects on his progress as a writer and considers the effects of his exile:

I am in Paris; those who learn this are glad, most of them envy me. They are right. It is a great city; great and full of strange temptations. As concerns myself, I must admit that I have in certain respects succumbed to them. I believe there is no other way of saying it. I have succumbed to these temptations, and this has brought about certain changes, if not in my character, at least in my outlook on the world, and, in any case, in my life. An entirely different conception of all things has developed in me under these influences; certain differences have appeared that separate me from other men, more than anything heretofore. A world transformed. A new life filled with new meanings. For the moment I find it a little hard because everything is too new. I am a beginner in my own circumstances.⁴⁷

Brigge realizes that his experiences in the city have produced a “new life” and a different understanding of the world; his stay has also clarified what it is that separates him from others. This sense of alienation appears to motivate the reflections on his childhood which fill the last half of the Notebooks. Though he visited Paris many times, Rilke discovered during his first sojourn there the peculiarly stimulating effect of solitude in the city of exile.

These few figures—Turgenev, James, Strindberg, and Rilke—represent a much larger contingent of expatriate writers who established at least temporary residence in Paris during the period stretching from about 1850 until the outbreak of the Great War. Discussions of such diverse figures as Knut Hamson, Oscar Wilde, and Edith Wharton might enlarge or modify the emerging model of exilic experience. But the cases briefly outlined above at least indicate certain potential consequences of displacement and identify a basic tension between the new, different, and perhaps disorienting conditions of an unfamiliar foreign scene and the remembered features of an abandoned native scene, now made strange by the perspective of exile. Kramer writes of the three subjects of his study: “All felt themselves to be alienated from the French culture in which they lived, alienated from their native countries, and also alienated from the general development of nineteenth-century European capitalist society.”⁴⁸ Although later exiles seem to have been generally less troubled by capitalism, the experience of living in an alien culture did (as I will suggest later) complicate some responses to the changes associated with modernity.

Reduced to elemental terms, the situation of exile produces a revealing contrast between one place and another, a contrast which implicitly poses the question of which qualities or features determine the distinctive identity of a place. But this question leads us back to an earlier, more basic question: what is a place? Does place exist “out there” in a purely objective form susceptible to empirical analysis, or does it lie within the human mind, as a set of internalized images always already contained and determined by language? In a recent discussion of this problem, J. Nicholas Entrikin describes the “betweenness of place,” arguing for a concept of liminality which sees place as a shifting function of reciprocal but contradictory realities.⁴⁹ He thus sees place as a construct caught between the subjective and the objective. This formulation recalls an idea advanced by Henri Bergson, who in Time and Free Will commented on the interpenetration of subject and object while analyzing the relation between time and memory:

Every day I perceive the same houses, and as I know that they are the same objects, I always call them by the same name and I fancy that they always look the same to me. But if I recur, at the end of a sufficiently long period, to the impression which I experienced during the first few years, I am surprised at the remarkable, inexplicable, and indeed inexpressible change which has taken place. It seems that these objects, continually perceived by me and constantly impressing themselves on my mind, have ended by borrowing from me something of my own conscious existence; like myself they have lived, and like myself they have grown old.⁵⁰

Bergson's sense that these houses have been “impressing themselves” on his consciousness and “borrowing” from it at the same time provides a revealing gloss on many of the representations of Paris to be examined in subsequent chapters. It also suggests that the problem of place is caught up in the phenomenology of subject-object relations and perhaps belongs to that intermediate reality which Bergson calls the “image”—that construction half-way between an idea and a thing, determined by objective reality but registered only through perception—or additionally through inscription. For the writing of place, the textual construction of a perceived environment, gives at least a tentative account of the interplay between the inner and outer realities which merge to produce our sense of where we are.

This notion of place remains crucial, for as Entrikin reminds us, “place serves as an important component of our sense of identity as subjects.”⁵¹ No experience intensifies our consciousness of this fact more than immersion in a foreign environment, which exposes not only our complex dependence upon knowledge of topography, climate, language, and culture (among the most obvious determinants of place) but also reveals the considerable extent to which we are creatures of place, deriving our most basic sense of self from the relation which we have formed with the place or chora in which we have our being. The experience of expatriation often discloses an alternate self, responsive to the differences which constitute the foreignness of another place.

Precisely this dilemma of identity accounts for the dramatic power of James's late novel The Ambassadors. His American protagonist, Lambert Strether, comes to Paris with the delicate mission of retrieving the errant son of wealthy Mrs. Newsome. But Strether recognizes first in the prodigal behavior of Chad Newsome and then in his own fascination with Chad's lover, Madame de Vionnet, the potential transformation of perspective and sensibility which the expatriate may undergo in Paris. To his astonishment, Strether finds his notions of New England propriety undermined by what Chad calls “the charm of life over here”; the struggle between Strether's sense of duty to Mrs. Newsome and his attraction to the European sophistication of Madame de Vionnet persists to the final page in his quandary about remaining abroad and marrying Maria Gostrey.⁵² James's novel also poses the special problem of American expatriation in Europe, a return to the Old World from which the New has obtained much of its cultural identity. Strether's conflict of values is inherently a crisis of self-conception, and in the following chapters we shall explore other versions of this predicament. Exile affords the opportunity for change, growth, and insight as well as the possibility of alienation, confusion, and corruption. The terms of this crisis are different for Stein, Hemingway, Miller, Fitzgerald, and Barnes, but their representations of Paris enable us to trace the implications of each writer's attachment to the city of exile.

Notes

1. E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room, ed. George James Firmage (1922; reprint, New York: Liveright, 1978), 50. Subsequent parenthetical page references to the novel correspond to this edition.

2. Cummings, The Enormous Room, xiv.

3. E. E. Cummings, Complete Poems, 1913-1962 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 93.

4. E. E. Cummings, I: Six Nonlectures (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 53.

5. Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 12, 31. Subsequent page references to this work will be noted parenthetically.

6. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6, 12; Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Plon, 1976), 43.

7. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 50-56, 61.

8. Tuan, Space and Place, 54. The expression “knowing one's place” appeals to just this sense of being where one belongs, though it also figures in the discourse of repression to exclude individuals or groups from a guarded, symbolically important place.

9. Pierre Sansot, Poétique de la ville (Paris: Editions Klinksieck, 1969), 23; Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 14, 17.

10. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 43.

11. Roger M. Downs and David Stea, Maps in Minds: Reflections on Cognitive Mapping (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 27.

12. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Modern Library, 1956), 59. Subsequent references to this edition will be noted parenthetically.

13. Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner's, 1939), 54. Subsequent parenthetical page references to the story correspond to this edition.

14. Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into the Trees (New York: Scribner's, 1950), 123.

15. Downs and Stea, “Cognitive Maps and Spatial Behavior: Process and Products,” in Roger M. Downs and David Stea, eds., Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior (Chicago: Aldine, 1973), 9.

16. Kevin Lynch describes victims of brain injury who “cannot find their own rooms again after leaving them, and must wander helplessly until conducted home, or until by chance they stumble upon some familiar detail.” See Lynch, “Some References to Orientation,” in Downs and Stea, eds., Image and Environment, 301.

17. The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 3 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 40. Subsequent citations from the Early Diary refer to this edition. The question of Nin's national identity is complicated by the fact that her father was of Spanish and her mother of French-Danish descent; both parents were born in Cuba. Nin moved to New York with her mother in 1914 at the outbreak of the Great War.

18. The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 4 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 42.

19. Downs and Stea, Maps in Minds, 78. Kevin Lynch also develops a theory of “imageability”—the “quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer.” See his Image of the City (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1960), 9.

20. Those volumes of the diary (from 1934 on) which Nin herself prepared for publication reflect careful revision and purging of indiscreet entries. So, for instance, the published diary deletes references to her sexual liaisons with Henry Miller and others. The recent appearance of Henry and June (1987), eidted by Rupert Pole, makes available some of this previously suppressed material.

21. Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature, 21.

22. A fine recent study of British and French fiction reinforces the importance of place as a repository of meaning and demonstrates new interest in this aspect of narrative. See Gillian Tindall, Countries of the Mind: The Meaning of Place to Writers (London: Hogarth, 1991).

23. E. V. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 121, 205.

24. See, e.g., the bibliography appended to Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 343-52. Six of the fifteen contributors to this important collection address the problem of time in autobiographical narrative; none, however, deal substantively with the problem of place.

25. Eudora Welty, Place in Fiction (New York: House of Books, 1957), 11.

26. See Harry Levin, “Literature and Exile,” The Listener (15 October 1959): 613-17. My thanks to Lewis P. Simpson for bringing this essay to my attention and for sharing his work-in-progress on Robert Penn Warren as a figure of internal exile.

27. Gertrude Stein, Paris, France (New York: Scribner's, 1940), 2.

28. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934; reprint New York: Grove Press, 1961), 153.

29. Lloyd S. Kramer, Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830-1848 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 9.

30. William Boelhower, “Avant-Garde Autobiography: Deconstructing the Modernist Habitat,” in Literary Anthropology, ed. Fernando Poyatos (Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 1988), 274, 276. Thanks to Paul Smith for bringing this essay to my attention.

31. Walter, Placeways, 98, 99.

32. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 28-29.

33. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 161.

34. Kramer, Threshold of a New World, 10.

35. Andrew Gurr, Writers in Exile (Sussex: Harvester, 1981), 14.

36. See Malcolm Bradbury's suggestive essay “The Cities of Modernism,” in Modernism 1890-1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin, 1976), 96-104.

37. Kramer, Threshold of a New World, 18, 20-21.

38. Jerrold Siegel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930 (New York: Viking, 1986), 7-13. The Bohemians were, as Siegel suggests (51), often products of middle-class culture who harbored contradictory attitudes toward wealth and comfort.

39. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), 166, 176.

40. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 171.

41. Leonard Shapiro remarks that it is “quite certain that the future Emperor Alexander II was influenced by the Sketches in his final decision to put through the emancipation of the serfs, and Turgenev regarded this as his main achievement in life.” See Shapiro, Turgenev: His Life and Times (New York: Random House, 1978), 66.

42. Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune 1875-76, ed. Leon Edel and Ilse Dusoir Lind (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958), 3.

43. See Edwin Sill Fussell, The French Side of Henry James (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

44. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage, 1968).

45. August Strindberg, Inferno and From an Occult Diary, trans. Mary Sandbach (New York: Penguin, 1979), 111.

46. Naomi Segal, “Rilke's Paris—‘cité pleine de rêves,’” in Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art, eds. Edward Timms and David Kelley (New York: St. Martin's, 1985), 103.

47. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. M. D. Herder Norton (New York: Norton, 1964), 67.

48. Kramer, Threshold of a New World, 230.

49. J. Nicholas Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1991).

50. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (1910; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 129.

51. Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place, 13.

52. See especially Fussell's French Side of Henry James, 177-214, and Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 131-63, for discussions which foreground the problem of place and the displacement of exile.