Hélène Frichot - Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches

Mireille Roddier

The incipit is the literary place par excellence because the outside world, by definition, is continuous, has no visible limits.

ITALO CALVINO

a book is not only a fragment of the world but itself a little world. The book is a miniaturization of the world, which the reader inhabits.

SUSAN SONTAG

A gleam of Borgesian infinitude comes to pass. The sunsets of nineteenth-century Greece, the tin mines of Cornwall, travels to the pyramids, settling in India: all of time and space can be found in this bookshop, which, in the early hours of a winter evening, Virginia

Where will these words find you? What spatial and temporal thresholds separate us? Where did you spend the last chapter? Where will the next one take you? I navigate through the pages as I do through the city, chapters as neighbourhoods, narrative threads as streets that unfold and transform and crisscross. Or maybe is it the opposite? Has my experience of the urban been conditioned by my formative years, travelling deep into the printed text, lingering inside every illustration?

We have just reached the Strand, where Woolf came looking for a pencil to purchase; a thin excuse for a street-haunting adventure. Its getting late and the stores are closing. In another paragraph, she will be home and the story will end, and with its closing words its explicit Parisian daytime will return. I shall go for a walk.

This summarizes the two activities that, figuratively and literally, transport me: reading, and walking the streets of

The risk of dematerialization into passive spectatorship is very real, whether reading or walking the city, especially when fuelled by escapist tendencies. I turn to the two paradigmatic, if contradictory, modes of resistance against such passivity, offered by Bertolt Solnits Wanderlust: A History of Walking. I want to feel the Verfremdungseffekt through my skin.

Where does it start? The voice streams directly into my brain as if it were my own. I sense my muscles tense. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking.

* * *

Among all the cities there is none that is more intimately connected to the book than Paris. Paris is a vast library hall, through which flows the Seine.

WALTER BENJAMIN

The social base of flnerie is journalism. As flneur, the literary man ventures into the marketplace to sell himself.

WALTER BENJAMIN

I read the street like I would a book. They both invite my memories, my projections, my reveries. They simultaneously exist a precursor of sorts to the idea of augmented reality. The material stage of the walls, the faces of the crowd they all trigger my powers of association, and I co-exist within multiple spatial logics. I am neither here nor there, but especially not here, not in the now. I am intoxicated by the speculative, I live in the conditional.

I am a bourgeois archetype and have so much leisure time on my hands that, to show it off, I walk a turtle on a leash.

I cant deny that capitalism preys on my inability to live in the present moment, on my incapacity to perceive signifiers rather than ready-made signs, but I am content to be fooled by illusion. My greatest high? The sensation of the crowd pulsating through my body. The shattering isolation that accompanies the comedown evanesces into the promised thrill of my next fix.

You, on the other hand, are appalled by my passive complicity.

Awake! you say, adjusting your halo. Beware of the spectacle! Whereas I fearlessly lose myself in the city, your suspicion borders on the paranoia. To my flneries you oppose your drive, to my mindlessness your awakened consciousness. Where I read the city as a frivolous work of fiction, you read it as an instruction manual, or worse, as a manifesto, issued as governmental propaganda.

Who are you? Youre the self-proclaimed scientific researcher of the laboratory-city, a situationist. You study the techniques through which the city psychogeographically conditions and produces us. I may be the scout of the market place, but you are scouting for the avant-gardes liberation army. You only read the city in-between its lines, sporting dark-tinted glasses, careful to resist the lure of all that glitters. Like me, you observe its currents. Unlike me, you counter their flow: its the knowledge that drives you knowledge of the know-your-enemy kind. All of space is already occupied by the enemy, you claim as you call urbanism the capitalist education of space.

You read the city to understand its rules, in order to transgress them. Your walks, or drives, are an act of appropriation of the street dtournement is the term you use. It translates as hijacking, but also as peculation, giving the concept of spatial embezzlement a heroic twist.

Your tactic of dtournement is highly imprinted with the traces of previous avant-gardes. They are made strange and de-familiarized, their automatized perception denied. Now you can read them as new and see right through them.

The streets inspire my stories and spawn your revolutions.

* * *

Olivia Howard, Turtle on a Leash. Drawing reproduced courtesy of the artist.

Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

WALTER BENJAMIN

I walk.

I walk in the footsteps of those who walked Paris before me.

I walk in the footsteps of those who walked in the footsteps of those who walked Paris before us.

From the tail-end, I follow a crowd of jostling ghosts: Louis-Sbastien Mercier in the lead, the nineteenth-century Baudelaires and Lautramonts in his tracks, Aragon, Breton and the interwar amblers stalking them, Debord and Chtcheglov rehearsing behind, Eric Hazans posse closing the march, maintaining the vestiges of the peripatetic tradition on life support. Constellations form and transform and a cartography of interconnected clusters emerges the expats, the poets, the revolutionaries coloured by a variety of tones, from melancholia to academic formality, each in a gradient of increased intensity. The front rows walked to write, the last read to walk, inheriting an already signified landscape with ready-traced pilgrimage routes.

Seen from the back, its difficult to discern any women. Some have infiltrated the crowd, hiding behind their androgynous attire or noms de plume, Charles de Launay, Andr Lo, Gent. To avoid being noticed as a man, you must first renounce being noticed as a woman,

Until recently, a woman publicly walking or writing the city could not avoid the mark of specificity that excluded her from the general. If recognized as woman, she could only perform as sign. In the act of walking, as in that of publishing, she would enter the public realm as the marker not of a public figure, but of a public woman: her name would become the subject of conversations, of articles, end up on bedside tables, in the houses of strangers, leaving the domestic sphere in which she was cloistered.

The male voice, on the contrary, eludes specificity and profits from abstraction. The more abstract the voice narrating the urban drift, the more universal its capacity for identification. I, the reader, can either identify with specific accounts akin to my particular experience, or with abstract, general ones. Universal voices enable the messenger to disappear behind the message, which in turn can be fully received by everyone equally. As I read, I subordinate myself to, and internalize, this presumed normative point of view. As I read, I walk through the boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris as a man failing to recall that I am a woman in the twenty-first-century subject to the deafening noise of the street as well as to the seductive sight of the tall slender widow whose path I briefly crossed, and whose glance poured life into my being.