"Some other kind of subject, less bounded": Gail Scott in conversation with Corey Frost

CF: Let's start with B: Walter Benjamin. Tell me about his influence on My Paris.

GS: Both [Gertrude] Stein and Benjamin stroll through My Paris as literary ghosts. Benjamin is there in a particularly intimate way, almost a friend or lover whom she calls B and whose Arcades Project [Paris: Capitale du XIXe siècle] she reads in bed every morning. It becomes a site map for her exploration of Paris, but more than that, the work starts to infuse her way of thinking. The Arcades Project is actually a huge pile of detritus, 19th-century quotes and anecdotes, put together in a series of montages. Benjamin was looking for a way to write a history based on found objects, juxtaposed in unexpected or contradictory ways, in order to continually challenge the biases of both the historian and the reader. The point was to make the historian, as a writing subject, not disappear but become a construction of the whole. My Paris isn't exactly a montage, but in a way the diary form is a montage, like it or not. It's discontinuous. Sometimes things are juxtaposed in a shocking manner. For example the action in the men's clothing shop window across from her studio on boulevard Raspail, always changing. There's almost more action in shop windows than in real life.

CF: Those juxtapositions really struck me, like Bambi going by on the bus. They're brilliant: very disruptive of the expected trajectory of narrative. Which came first, the idea for the novel, or your interest in the Arcades Project?

GS: Well, to answer sort of anecdotally, somebody gave me the book as a present and I went to Paris with it. And I wrote a diary, but all the time I was reading Walter Benjamin. At first I thought the diary would be a straightforward travel diary. But a so-called straightforward travel diary–there are tons of them around these days–features an essentially 19th century traveller: the One sucking up the exoticism of the Other. The old Imperialist model. Certainly that long careful reading I did of Benjamin in Paris showed me other narrative options. As reading Stein suggests other syntactical options. But whatever is learned from Benjamin or Stein gets subsumed into the artistic needs of the late 90s diary and character. The dead authors become traces in the work, clashing with new technologies and life in the streets now, which is both the same as and very different from life in the streets when they wrote.

CF: Had you been interested in Benjamin before?

GS: Oh yeah. I've been reading Benjamin for a long long time, ever since I was in the Left in the 70s. He's somebody who really understood that place between Marxism and what they call the superstructure or means of production of culture, which I don't think many Marxists really understood. He understood it without having to reject Marxism altogether. Or some kind of leftist thinking, not necessarily orthodox Marxism. Benjamin's also in Main Brides, there are references to him. As a left person and later a feminist, I learned from writers like Benjamin and the Surrealists how to remain fluid in my thinking, to learn from these crucial movements without conceding, artistically, to the dogmatism that political movements, with their particular tasks, run the eternal risk of projecting.

CF: What about the flâneur. According to Benjamin, the flâneur as a historical persona vanished with the advent of modernism, but continued to be a rich allegorical figure. The narrator in My Paris is a flâneuse of sorts, but doesn't feel comfortable in that role either. Do you see the flâneur as a useful figure for interpreting the contemporary city, or is it too problematic today?

GS: One interesting thing in the Arcades Project is that the flâneur has to find a means of economic survival at some point... The first flâneurs in 19th-century Paris were the sons of rich men protesting Daddy's money–made on the backs of factory workers in the industrial revolution–by leaning against walls, wearing cloaks lined with scarlet. One incarnation of the flâneur was the dandy, who was picking up boys, mostly. The Oscar Wilde figure is a classic flâneur. But Benjamin points out that at a certain point the flâneur has to start surviving so he becomes a journalist and sells his observations; thus the flâneur becomes a complete mockery of what he represented in the beginning: resistance/flaunting representation of the increasing monotony of capitalism.

CF: You can't escape economics.

GS: Right. But I still hear people talking about flânerie in Paris and it just strikes me as being completely ludicrous. A professor on sabbatical, or a person on their junior year abroad, or a writer, like myself, who gets a grant to a very comfortable studio, does not represent, unless she finds some very original way to live, the spirit of resistance and enforced marginality that the early flâneur aimed for. The flâneur flaunted his sloth in an insulting manner. Another point that Benjamin makes, that then gets juxtaposed on my own text, is who are the real flâneurs today? In Paris they're the homeless people looking for cobblestones that aren't too bumpy to sleep on. Or the sans papiers, refugees. Those are the flâneurs today.

CF: There are certain words from Benjamin that you fix on and use repeatedly, like physiognomy. What does that mean for you in the text?

GS: That's a hard question, partly because the face in the crowd is one of the things I go back to again and again in my work, without getting to the bottom. Main Brides might be considered, on some level, an obsession with the face of the stranger. Anyway, there is the notion that the flâneur collects physiognomies. And inasmuch as [the narrator] has residues of this desire to be a flâneur I guess physiognomies are one of the things that she tries to collect, except it's always so fleeting. I think some of her most successful attempts to do that are with faces she sees on TV. She certainly has a romantic idea when she gets to Paris that she's going to be this flâneur, but she just doesn't know where to go. She doesn't know how to do it. She's too timid, whimsical. Spends hours getting dressed to get lost in the crowd. Goes into cafés and looks at herself in the mirror, or looks at other people looking at themselves in the mirror, instead of actually walking around looking into faces and saying, I can tell a whole story from that face.

CF: Whimsical is another resonant word. The flâneur is whimsical, and the narrator seems modelled on that.

GS: Was the flâneur whimsical? I don't think so. I think the flâneur took himself very seriously. And that's precisely what she can't do.

CF: There are references in the novel, for example, to the flâneur walking a tortoise in the arcades, and Benjamin has a quote about Nerval with a lobster on a leash. That's the kind of whimsy I'm talking about.

GS: But I think the difference, and this is the difference between the 19th century and now, is that the flâneur had a kind of ironic stance, the flâneur's flaunting of himself in his outfit was very ironic, and I think that's very 19th-century and it requires someone who considers themselves a fairly well-constituted subject. Whereas this character is not ironic, she's parodic. She's in a different space–and we never know whether she doesn't make it as a full subject because she doesn't know how, or if, as she implies, she's making herself minuscule, inconsequential, the better to not over-influence her story with her own subjectivity. In fact, the flâneur is lost in the crowd but is also in full control of his own individuality, Benjamin says. And that's different from her clownish, Chaplinesque posture. Which is far more deconstructed in a way.

CF: More of an object than a subject?

GS: I think she marks a place where, in interesting prose today, which is not much prose [laughing], the subject has gotten displaced–between the subject and the object as opposed to being here, with the object over there. The whimsy has to do with that.

CF: Alright. Now GS: the review in The Globe and Mail calls you a Québecoise Gertrude Stein. What do you think?

GS: Well, I think that the person writing that review of the book didn't get it. She didn't get the fact that the narrator of the book has in fact a love-hate relationship with everything Stein and the expatriates represented. On one hand she totally admires Stein's work. And I do think Stein is one of the greatest 20th-century writers. But at the same time she doesn't want to have the kind of relationship to the world around her that these people had–they seemed to be defined to some extent by what was happening in the expatriate milieu, or bounded by it. The problems of others, the economic situation of ordinary Parisians, for example, rarely comes up as an issue. [James] Baldwin, not surprisingly, was an exception. The Globe and Mail reviewer didn't see the parody.

CF: What is it about Gertrude Stein's relationship to the world around her that you find problematic?

GS: There is Stein the persona and there is the writing. We can reframe with hindsight the limitations of her vision, her republican enthusiasm. Basically, Stein noticed that the Americans, in inventing the automobile, were inventing the 20th century, but she didn't notice the Imperialist payback. I mean, the automobile is a very fraught sign for everything that was to come after. It's true: it changed our world. It changed our lives, provided us with tremendous mobility. But, will the planet be around a century from now, given the automobile? So that's not a useful trope anymore. At the same time, the way the automobile moves, and even the way it is produced, were picked up in Stein's sentences. Her ability to see how extraordinary that invention was as a defining element of her epoch helped her revolutionize narration.

CF: Another intertext is from Balzac: the narrator's favourite Balzac heroine is The Girl with the Golden Eyes. Why is that character important to her?

GS: Well, she's like that person in a way. I mean, she would love to live this cloistered life where someone else takes care of her. At the same time, the Balzac heroine has a kind of split desire: she's sequestered by the Marquise and likes that a lot but at the same time she desires the Tom who's prowling around the tuileries and running after her.

CF: She's between hetero- and homo-sexuality.

GS: Right. And I think the character in this book, she's not bisexual by any means, but she's (a) trying to avoid categories all the time, and (b) phenomenally interested in the question of exotic beauty which for her the Balzac heroine represents.

CF: There's a really Orientalist portrayal of her in the Balzac story. By identifying with the girl with the golden eyes, is the narrator trying to turn herself into an exotic, Orientalized object, a figure from "the South?"

GS: She might desire to make herself an Orientalized figure. I certainly don't think she succeeds. I think she probably does have some desire to do that.

CF: It's interesting that there's a slippage for the Western subject from desiring that Orientalized figure to desiring to become that figure.

GS: Right. But without any of the inconveniences of being that figure. Because she doesn't want to be deported, she doesn't want to live like the Algerians in Paris, or First Nations people here, or young Africans, whom the police see as perpetual culprits. She wants to live in her nice surroundings. I mean that's one of her contradictions–in some ways she's a very typical Western traveller.

CF: Mmm. What about Canadians in Paris? While writing this novel, or in general, do you feel a connection to Canadian expats such as Mavis Gallant or John Glassco? That tradition?

GS: Certainly not Mavis Gallant. I think she's an important writer, but I don't think she belongs to the same current in writing as I do. Wherever I go and whatever I do, I'm always looking for this thing that I think of as being about subversion, contradiction. The writer through her story-telling proposes new ways of seeing. Every writer does this in some way. But some choose the more direct, witnessing end of the scale, in terms of intention. I love John Glassco's book about Paris [Memoirs of Montparnasse] but I don't really identify with it either. Partly because he comes from the "other Montreal" I suppose.

CF: A colleague, Justin Edwards, pointed out to me that John Glassco constructs and perpetuates the "Lost Generation" myth without ever talking about being gay. Mavis Gallant also mythologizes Paris, and while she's never come out as a lesbian, that seems to be a submerged theme in some of her stories. My Paris is somehow similar to but the opposite of their writing in that it "outs" that experience of Paris.

GS: Right. I would agree with that. But I also think that My Paris is a quest for something else that comes from a whole political tradition that I don't think either of those writers are interested in, from what I can see.

CF: I found the way the intertexts are introduced really interesting. You refer to Walter Benjamin early on, then you start to call him B. Just as all the friends are named P, S, C, etc. That really integrates him into the social sphere. So I was wondering, while you were writing this book, how did you experience that relationship to these other texts?

GS: The narrator, as she becomes more and more intimate with Benjamin, reduces him to B. She also provides him with a double, her friend R from Winnipeg who looks like B. But her almost porous, inconsequential persona makes her incapable of real relationships–until the coda when she redoes the whole city in a fast take as a lover.

CF: So there's a kind of confusion between the experience of the text you're reading, the Benjamin text, and the experience of the "real" people.

GS: Oh absolutely. In that respect I think the Paris she experiences is very much a text. But then I think probably everything is text. Except sex maybe.

CF: I was thinking that all of your novels are some kind of travel writing.

GS: Nobody's ever said that to me before! They're always saying, oh the narrator's so stationary, she's either lying in a tub or sitting in a bar...

CF: No, but it's true. Take the protagonist in Heroine: She arrives in Montréal from elsewhere, in search of a new experience of self. And although it becomes her home, it's very much a site of exploration for her, and a means of escape. She lives in the Waikiki Tourist Rooms, after all. In Main Brides, there's a lot of travel: at least in the portraits she continually imagines herself elsewhere.

GS: That's true. I never thought of that before.

CF: Your new novel, though, is the most specifically a travel story. Why did you choose Paris as a destination?

GS: Well, first of all it was the luck of the draw because I won this studio. The leisure-lottery studio, her friends called it. But Paris for many many reasons. First of all, I think Paris belongs to the Western world. I mean you can't look at Western 20th-century literature–until the advent of post-colonialism and the rise of minority culture writing–and not trace it directly or indirectly, to something that happened in France–the Surrealists, New Wave film, post-structuralism etc., May '68 was phenomenally important, Kurt Schwitters, all that stuff. So Paris in Western culture is huge. To me it makes a lot of sense to go there. London doesn't do that for me personally. I just don't see another single city like Paris in terms of being able to look back at the century and see what's happened in the "tradition" of white avant-garde writing.

CF: So you feel a part of the Western tradition that is centred in Paris...

GS: I feel a part of the, for want of a better word, avant-garde tradition (that's an oxymoron), which has roots in Paris. I don't think it's centred in Paris anymore. Paris is too expensive to produce the kind of easy-going excitement that the great exchange rates produced for writers in the 30s and 40s. That's why you're in Montréal now, right?

CF: Right. It's cheap. That's one reason. In the book, though, the narrator doesn't really come in contact with those roots that she's ostensibly looking for.

GS: No, she doesn't. Well, she does between the covers of books and in occasional conversations. I mean, she can walk through the neighbourhood. She lives in one of the neighbourhoods that Proust lived in. Right around the corner from Gertrude Stein. Joyce lived half a block down. So she's kind of surrounded. At the same time, contemporary Paris, with its huge minority communities, and the endless influx of refugees, upsets the romantic notions of Paris completely, including the notion implicit in the word "roots." That's the weird thing about Paris. It's completely packed with history, beauty, memories, references, all the time. And yet, as in all major metropolises, survival is really the outstanding issue.

CF: According to the mayor quoted in the novel you need at least $4,000 a month to live there.

GS: Yeah. Even then. I mean, part of her thing about going to Paris, because she's gay, is that she wants to find her "women of the left bank." And who were they in the 20s or the 30s? They were people who had tons of money or had friends who had tons of money. None of the women she meets on the left bank have two cents to rub together. They're all, virtually, blue-collar workers. Most of them have been through various struggles, various left-wing struggles–in Paris some women still walk around in peaked caps! It's just not the Paris of expatriate writing any more at all.

CF: One aspect of the travel experience in the novel is constant paranoia. The imperative of passing as a native, as a Parisian. Do you think that's a universal feature of travel, or is it a part of the post-colonial, centre-periphery dynamic? Does going to Paris from Canada involve searching for colonial roots?

GS: I think, for one thing, she makes it very clear in the book that she's not authentic Québecoise. So she's not searching for roots in the way a total francophone would be searching for roots and for whom that's no joke because it's the one place on Earth that nourishes the language of the francophonie–nourishes and at the same time mocks writing/language from the so-called margins. But that culture is necessary for the survival of this Québécois culture. She's presented as a kind of half-and-half person who is looking more for a literary tradition than she is for a language. The post-colonial thing–I wanted to play a little bit with the whole business of being Canadian and travelling. I remember when I was a student and travelling in Eastern Europe, I naively thought people would be nice to me when they learned I was from Canada. But they just said, oh, like America! And I protested. No! No! But the Canadian thing is so contradictory. First of all it's this business of being a non-nation that can't seem to coalesce into what a republic represents. What is a republic? The French Revolution, for example, was in theory about equalizing subjects, protecting them so that each person could stand as an individual in Liberty, Fraternity, whatever.

CF: The preservation of our Western concept of individuality, essentially.

GS: Exactly. In Canada we buy into that and at the same time we pretend we don't. On the one hand we're the vertical mosaic and on the other there's this constant struggle for the dominance of one culture over another. Canadian history just crawls with appalling incidents of that. So how does an anglo-Québécoise situate herself in travel? I saw this person as having a literary mission, a writing mission. So the place she could situate herself was in sentences. Not anywhere else.

CF: Not in a nationality certainly.

GS: No. So then the question is what kind of sentences. Which is why there's this constant examination of Stein's sentences with their big subject sucking up all the action generated by predicates. Again, Gertrude Stein said that the sentences were kind of like automobiles going across a landscape. So here's this other person who comes not only from Canada but from Québec. You know: the whole question of nation-state, complete disaster. And in Québec even more than in the rest of Canada there is a strong republican desire. On one hand she's appalled that it takes so much military hardware to prop up this notion of the individual–which we don't see in Canada, everyone knows that our military is a joke–and on the other hand she's very wary of creating, in her writing, the strongly bounded subject which in a sense is the literary equivalent of republicanism. So she's looking for something else. And that's why her sentences get smaller and smaller. With present participles which are kind of a way of looking backwards and forwards at the same time but not necessarily going anywhere. Maybe it's in answer to that Globe and Mail review [by Stan Persky, of Main Brides] which said, you know, there's no action in this novel. So here I invented a sentence where, really, nothing happens. I think that the desire to make herself small enough to take in the world in a way that she considers acceptable as a traveller–to get back to the post-colonial thing–acknowledges her own failures and her country's failures to be non-racist. She somehow thinks if she can make herself small and porous enough she'll be able to empathize with everything, every aspect of life in contemporary Paris. Maybe find a different way to narrate this. At the same time, she's aware of the impossibility and hypocrisy of her own situation. Because while she tries to become smaller and more absorbant, eventually she ceases to exist as a person. And the less bounded she tries to be, the more paranoid she gets. She never gets laid in Paris, not the first trip. And when she returns with a lover, she doesn't see the city. It's all fogged in. As if she can't find her place as a subject. And in this book, the difficulty of achieving subject status has little to do with feminism. I mean I've learned things from feminism that I've applied, but here the focus is not feminism at all.

CF: Hm. It surprises me to hear you say that. But we'll get to that in a few minutes. I want to ask you more about republicanism. At first I thought the observations about republicans were incidental, but then I realized that in fact republicanism is fundamental to neo-Imperialism. Could the drive to assert one's individuality–one's sovereignty–ultimately lead to Imperialism?

GS: Well that seems to be the contemporary version but don't forget that some of the greatest Imperialists of all were the Brits. Contemporaneously, there is no doubt that America rules the world. Small-r republicanism, which she refers to in the novel when she talks about Benjamin talking about Poe's "Man of the Crowd"–the dangers of a notion of Equality where everyone is the same–is a metaphor for the endless thrust of the Imperial power towards hegemony of ideas and culture. But then, since there's always a contradiction, if you look at the United States, it's remarkably multi-cultural, increasingly so. Developments that perhaps point to the new millennium.

CF: If America or France as republics have this government-sanctioned sense of individuality, a unified self, does that make Canada, as a non-national country without the same unified identity, a more suitable place for writing a de-centered, post-modern subject? Or is that just an excuse for finding our own sort of agency in post-modernism?

GS: Or the whatever-comes-after-post-modern. Well, one would like to think it might. So far, there is not a lot of evidence for that in the Canadian novel. I think Canadians have a very fraught relationship with this stuff. I mean the narrator talks sometimes about how she likes the present participle because she can look backwards and look forwards at the same time. But she has problems staying in the present. She's always got one foot in the 19th century. And hopefully one in the 21st. In Canada, we haven't had a bourgeois revolution. We missed that stage somehow. Unfortunately, instead of looking forward to new possibilities, we are hopelessly nostalgic for some kind of dominance of a "national dream" that only suits part of the population: not Québec; not First Nations people, among others.

CF: That's why you say Canada has a 19th-century mentality.

GS: Yes. But in a way what I'm trying to say in the book is: all you can do is put little things together. You can't come up with big answers. So as soon as she puts something together she finds another element that contradicts that, and that changes what came before and what comes after. A huge puzzle...