“The first time that I saw, under the sapwood of Paris, really saw, like a true damned one, Hell [l’Enfer] and Heaven [le Paradis] in mobs of men and old women, the first time that we looked into each other’s eyes, it was, I believe, a night of vague rioting. I was having an aperitif in a genial little bar, not far from the Rue de Lancry, in a sort of cul-de-sac [impasse] as greasy as the bottom of a frying pan, and which snaked with the smirks of a distinguished tributary toward Boulevard Magenta.” (p. 64)
This is the opening sentence of the prose poem “Paris” by Léon-Paul Fargue. I read it as Fargue’s Mundane Comedy – a kind of counterpart to Dante’s Divine Comedy, but abbreviated and transposed to the night streets of a working-class district in 20th century Paris. It runs straight from Inferno to Paradiso and indeed telescopes them into each other. We can’t always tell where one leaves off and the other begins; Fargue leaves no boundary between them.
The people we meet in hell we can find in heaven because the one is the other. These people include a miscellany of types existing at the margins of the city:
Tripe sellers, leather workers in their rooms, girls at the windows, with heavy and cold legs, card shooters, toothpick bureaucrats, hair-scratchers and follow-me-young-man-madams, Czech vendors, Saar emigrants, bank clerks, all the creeping vegetation of the houses of Paris rushed in fragments of bodies toward the sky...(pp. 72-73)
Fargue's
heaven, as he describes it, is likewise filled “with living things of all
kinds, such as have populated Breughel and Bosch.” (p. 75)
Fargue’s people can inhabit both heaven and hell because they all are located in the same neighborhood of the same city. This neighborhood – “this corner of living-dead men” – is the tenth arrondissement, a working-class section on the northern outskirts of Paris with its apartment buildings, train stations (the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est), and cafés. It is there, rather than in a dark wood, that Fargue finds himself. There are no circles there, just the city streets and the bar which provides the center of gravity for the night's events.
The poem begins with the hint of a diffuse but palpable tension. Fargue recalls a taut atmosphere of anticipation which made him
think of the specific fears, of the eternal attitudes of the populations that live in the shadows of volcanoes. The day before an eruption causes short fevers and bursts of granules to run over their skin. Invisible sarabands gallop at the level of kneeling fields. Mustard columns are diluted in the green sky. Then, at the first gasp of the boiling mountain, the earth retracts, man flees bent in two, flowers break, cattle whirl round. (pp. 64-65)
But will the volcano erupt? Fargue reports that in the 10th arrondissement, he and the others “know that a fire will not suddenly spring from the chest of Paris;” rather, it would appear not to be the workers but rather the intellectuals of his acquaintance who, “in the drawing rooms in which we get together,” are concerned with thinking about revolution. It is “part of their snobbism.” (pp. 65-66) We get the impression that the unrest in the streets is rather desultory and short-lived. While it lasts, Paris is “an anthill bungled [bousillée] by the wooden shoe of a cowherd” (p. 73), but then things simply drift back to normal, and for Fargue the evening ends with a vision of paradise “above the roof of the city.” (p. 74)
Fargue can make Paris simultaneously heaven and hell because his Paris was a Paris in which observation, sensation, recollection, and imagination blended together into a world of phenomena uniquely his own. Rather than being guided through his imaginary Inferno by the shade of a deceased poet, Fargue is guided by the ghosts of his own memory and the inventions of his imagination. Fargue’s Paris was an imaginary city, which isn’t to say that it wasn’t real. It was, but it wasn't entirely real either. It was surreal in the original sense of a reality-above-reality made up of the factual and the counterfactual, of the waking perception and the dream vision, of the abolition of the contradiction between the objective and subjective. In effect, Fargue’s Paris was the objective witness of his own subjectivity. It was this at least in part because Paris had been, since the nineteenth century, what Roger Caillois called a modern myth -- the
world of supreme grandeurs and unforgivable crimes, of constant violent deeds and mysteries; the world in which everything, everywhere, is possible at all times, because the imagination has sent there its most extraordinary enticements ahead of time and discovers them at once…(Caillois, p. 178)
If
Fargue could superimpose heaven and hell over the physical reality of the
city’s streets, cafés, and inhabitants, it was because the city’s imaginative
infrastructure had already been put in place by predecessors such as
Baudelaire, Breton, and Aragon. It was a transformation as dramatic as anything
Baron Haussmann had imposed.
In Fargue’s own mythical Paris the tenth arrondissement is a neighborhood of “sooty trenches” with its
stenches [relents], its cats entangled in carapaces, like insects, its large blackish crepes that the man kneads with his foot, mixing under his weight carrots, lettuce, corpses, and dark heels of bread. (p. 64)
Some of this is real, some of it might be, and some of it isn’t. Where to draw the line between them isn’t clear, as Fargue’s imaginative transformation of the facts on the ground introduces a deliberate poetic ambiguity into his record of the night’s events. Take, for example, his description of the moment he sets out for the café in which much of the poem takes place:
I throw myself into the street, into this beneficent water that dozes between banks with windows. Fresh water from a street in Paris where one mingles with reflections, water purer than in any city in the world, comforting water, a miraculous spring, from which emits a mixture of courage and hope. I enter a shady café. (p. 69)
This could be a description of a rain-wet street, or it could be an elaborate metaphor for the street itself as a kind of river whose banks are the windowed buildings that front it on either side. If we take Fargue’s “water” literally, then “reflections” (“reflets”) would refer to the images of buildings and other objects appearing in the water running over the pavement below. But if we take “water” as a metaphor for the street, “reflections” turn out instead to be moments of introspection which, given Fargue’s tendency to weave memory into his prose poems, would take the form of recollections. (In describing the dead-end street on which his bar is located as a “tributary” [“affluent”] of the Boulevard Magenta, he sets a precedent for reading the street as a river.) As an imaginary river in an imaginary Hell, Fargue’s street is like a mirror-reversed Lethe. Rather than being a river of forgetfulness it is a river of remembrance, where the past’s “ghosts had lined up in single file along the steps eaten by tides of feet.” (p. 67)
As for the café he enters, this presumably drab working-class watering hole becomes an exotic place where Fargue
had the feeling that I was in a tent pitched by nomads, a tent that a sort of hereditary approval of poor devils stretched to the limits of a country, and I saw love, usury, loneliness, conspiracy, debauchery and fury in it. But like a showcase of objects. (p. 70)
This last line betrays a certain detachment in Fargue’s imaginings. The lives of the others around him here are so many objects on display, to be seen from the outside. But it is a detachment that will eventually break down.
Inside the bar, Fargue takes a seat next to a young couple. If this is his Inferno, they are his counterparts to Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, banalized as befits the setting:
Two young folks drink from the same glass: one in overalls, one in a bodice, laughter. He, the common man from Larousse, a widespread type, without originality, without value: a good mechanic from the village with hard hands and dog white teeth. But her, the Fleur de Marie... (p. 69; ellipsis in the original)
The man apparently is drunk, as Fargue describes him in a striking set-piece:
And the man, who was barely the master of his impatient hands, rose by arpeggios toward spheres where his dark dreams sparkled. He felt splendor, strength, vertigo. He was walking like a Resurrected Man in a strange ether. He suddenly saw Museum frescoes flit through his ramified & sensitive head. He came face to face with his double [sosie] at the summit of whirling planets. He heard postcard stands tilt toward his immense ears. He was dying on the battlefield, distraught, thin and transparent as in a nightmare, very small & endless, and as he saw himself in the purple stars of drunkenness with his buddies. (pp. 71-72)
Fargue’s description shades over from observation to metaphor to simile to a speculative identification with the man’s internal state. “Rose by arpeggios” is a beautifully turned metaphor for a staggering walk – an arpeggio leaps in asymmetrical intervals, like the unevenly spaced steps of someone who’s had one too many. Fargue captures the physical disorientation, distorted perception, and dreamlike fantasies of intoxication – the vertiginous feeling of moving within a “strange ether;” the alienating experience of coming face to face with one’s reflection in a mirror and seeing it as a doppelganger rather than one’s actual self; the illusion of seeing the café’s lights as “whirling planets;” the experiencing of the strange chain of images that Fargue imagines rush through the man’s head. When he reaches this last point, Fargue abolishes the distance from which he originally observed the couple; he takes this objects out of their showcase. He pulls off the neat dialectical trick of not only experiencing the interpenetration of his own inner states with external reality, but of seeing the inner states of another – of grasping that other as a subject by observing him first as an object, and then subsequently re-subjectivizing him through the empathetic reach of imagination. At this moment Fargue is a subjectivity confronting another subjectivity, recognizing him in his interiority as he would recognize himself in his own interiority. Poetic projection takes Fargue from the visible known to the ordinarily unknown through a kind of inference that bypasses logic in favor of a lived analogy.
In the end the couple provide the occasion for Fargue to see his Paradiso within his Inferno. The unrest in the street has ended – “the derailment was averted” – and in the café Fargue sees that the two hadn’t been affected by it:
The upheavals hadn’t reached them. They were wise and passionate like characters in paintings. They saw everything in white. They climbed unsullied floors, they picked fruit, trampling on ravishing serpents, possessed themselves, twisted in a mirage. They were but cosmic dust: out of space, absent, eternal, and so strange, so comical, so barbaric in that display of glasses, spirits, and mouths...They lived, we were dead. They galloped in the divine, while we were preoccupied with revolutions. (p. 74; ellipsis in the original)
The “stupidities of these two monsters from the Infinite” show him that Paradise, with its “arabesques” and “great landscapes of staggered plains” is “nothing else” than “[l]andings, embankments, medians, half-moons, rotundas, fumivores and carriages loaded with human grapeshot” (p. 75) – the mundane city around him.
References
Roger
Caillois, “Paris, a Modern Myth,” in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger
Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank, tr. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish
(Durham, NC: Duke U Press, 2003). Internal cite to Caillois.
Léon-Paul Fargue, High Solitude, tr. Rainer J. Hanshe (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2024). Internal cites consisting of page numbers only are references to this source.
Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021). Website: danielbarbiero.wordpress.com