How can you know about literature if all you do is read books? Young academic, Erica Nahum, puts her books aside and sets off to pursue the great literary critic and theorist, Jacques Simon, across Paris.
It is 1991 and Simon is already ten years dead. She takes just one book, Simon par Simon, an autobiography in which most of the subject is missing. She will find the elusive Simon in Paris, she will uncover who he might have been: a writer who lived as daringly as he wrote, a secret lover, a novelist lurking behind the famous critic.
Navigating her way through the Paris of Jacques Simon, she dines with Derrida, she takes a lover, she discovers a Paris that is beyond the romanticised Paris of art and literature.
Her pursuit of Simon leads her everywhere, but nothing is as it seems: not Jacques Simon, not the French lover, not Paris itself. In the end she must reconcile herself to the image of her writer as a tragic figure.
At the heart of Words and Things is the desire to understand the relationship of writing to writing, of ideas to lived experience, of literature to life.
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What Jacques Simon did not know was that during the summer of ’91 I pursued him across Paris. The year had begun with a war in the Persian Gulf and ended with a peace conference in Madrid. In between, the Soviet Union collapsed. Like a great ice pack melting, piece after piece broke off and floated free, until by Christmas, it was all gone. Left, was a sense of expectation and hope. The future would be brighter, people said, as if the new millennium had arrived early.
In Paris the summer was hot. Apartment windows were thrust open to attract a breeze, while the city’s fountains splashed temporary relief. Tourists in their hundreds crowded onto the bateaux-mouche throbbing up and down the river, and tramped in their thousands along the gravel paths of the Jardin des Tuileries to form the queues at the Musée de Louvre. By the end of summer tiihe age-old topiary of the gardens was coated in a layer of fine white dust.
Passionate entries were made in journals, theories were proposed, questions hung thick in the air. Arguments that played out over lunches surfaced again during late night dinners. Glances were exchanged, hints were given, and misunderstandings wafted across café tables like the smoke from those French cigarettes. Somewhere in all this was the elusive figure of Jacques Simon.
It had taken such an effort just to get to Paris that Erica Nahum was able to face the difficulties of that first morning with a certain stoic determination. Two days before Bastille Day and the citoyens were restless. The baggage-handlers, (les bagagistes, her first new French word), had gone on strike and left everyone stranded at the carousels. Erica spent the time devising plans. How to survive the first days without fresh clothing or books, how to see this nuisance as an opportunity. When the luggage finally appeared two hours later, she gave herself a pat on the head for staying calm. Not everyone had.
Now she was seated on the train to Paris, her suitcase occupying too much space between the seats, her legs apologetically tucked up against it. The carriage was a mixture of sullen mid-morning commuters and the new arrivals with their too-large bags. It was strangely silent, as if no-one really belonged, the only sound that relentless clack-clack-clack of the wheels on the tracks. Villepinte, Aulnay-sous-Bois, Drancy, Aubervilliers-la Courneuve…the place names meant nothing, but later she caught a teasing glimpse of the Paris skyline through the overhead wires before the train rocketed into the tunnels under the city, eased to a crawl, and came to a halt at the Gare du Nord. Two stations later at Gare Saint-Michel, Erica stepped off the train and followed the sortie signs into the subway, pulling her suitcase behind her.
The two backpackers ahead of her were disappearing at a brisk pace. Soon she was alone. She could hear footsteps echoing along the passageway and the sound of a distant violin while the posters on the subway walls were introducing her to the city. La Beauté Convulsive, an exhibition of André Breton and Le Surréalisme, was at the Centre Pompidou, an exhibition of Seurat had opened at the Grand Palais, and Prêt à Aimer, a dating agency, beckoned young garçons with pictures of doe-eyed and seductive jeunes filles. There were sales at the department store BHV, the Rolling Stones were coming to Paris, and the United Colours of Benetton astonished her with a full colour photograph of a just-delivered baby, still wet from the womb. Soon the footsteps were no more, the violin was silent, the posters finished. She dragged and bounced her suitcase (too large and too heavy) up the last flight of steps and emerged into the brilliant light and noise of the city.
She was standing on the footpath above the Seine looking directly at Nôtre Dame. This was not the iconic vista of Nôtre Dame on the postcards, (the view that emphasised the flying buttresses and the brow of the île below), but a partially obscured view of the façade. It was beautiful. She repeated that thought aloud. ‘This is beautiful!’ It seemed to call out for a first photograph, but fumbling in her bag for the camera might’ve broken the spell of the moment, so she simply stood there drawing it in – the symmetry of the cathedral façade, the blue-grey of the river, the quais, the ponts, the plane trees just bursting with fresh green. Here was the confirmation Erica Nahum was seeking – she had arrived in Paris.
She stood there for a full ten minutes, luxuriating in the moment, until her tiredness, the noise of the city and the unexpected heat of the morning began to take effect. She joined the throng of pedestrians heading along the Boulevard Saint-Michel and ten minutes later turned into Rue des Écoles. She paused in front of the Sorbonne to pay her respects, then crossed the road and slipped down a side street to her hotel, the Perpignan. Only later did she realise that she had crossed Rue des Écoles at the exact same spot where, late one afternoon in February 1980, Jacques Simon had inexplicably stepped out into the path of an onrushing van. The Salpêtrière hospital described his condition that night as ‘stationnaire’, but Jacques Simon was a dying man.
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linzi murrie 