D. W. White
Editorial Meditation
That’s it. There are no adventures—there are no perfect moments…we have lost the same illusions, we have followed the same paths.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
It’s an odd thing, memory. It so very rarely does what we’d like, or expect. One takes a trip, sees the Sights To See, does the Things To Do, and then, back home in the ordinary run of life, it’s the cafe with the gregarious waiter, the interchange with the flashing lights, the subway car and the hotel clerk that are remembered. Of course those big events are there, to be recalled with a bit of effort and the endless albums of clouded photos, but the moments that simply arise in the mind, unaided and uninhabited, are the small ones, the ones that were unexpected and unplanned—the, in a word, ordinary.
‘An ordinary mind on an ordinary day’—this is what Virginia Woolf, in that ruthless disquisition “Modern Fiction”, calls for the novel to encapsulate. What might that mean? What is the ordinary day, the ‘stuff of life’? For Woolf it’s everything—the banality and the memory, the profound and the forgotten. Clarissa Dalloway doesn’t remember some charged sequence of sweeping Victorian resonance, she remembers Sally Seton running through an upstairs hall, a nothing moment on endless loop in her mind—the little things. This seems to be how our minds work in general, and is part of what makes Modernist literature so compelling and fascinating; beyond the innovation in technique and narrative mode, it is the fixture on the quotidian reality, the day-to-day ephemera that earlier (and later) novelists dismiss out of hand. With the right perspective, an understating of how to harness the awesome power of existence, it becomes art. For when one truly looks back on something, tries to recall a stretch of life and how it was, more often than not we find it is the trivialities that are preserved, the nothingness that makes up meaning.
I am writing this from a Parisian window in the sixth arrondissement. Before this trip, I’d last looked out this window eighteen months ago, working at at a section of a manuscript that would become one of my favorite things I’ve done. I am writing this also at a time of change, preparing to return to Chicago after nine winterless years in Southern California—something I would not have predicted, would not have believed. It’s hard to know how things will turn out. It seems the future has very little interest in our dreams.
On that earlier trip I also had the first idea (or at least the first serious one) to start a certain literary journal, in a bar a few blocks from here. There’s something about one’s history in a place that follows you around, that seems to know when you’ll be coming back. We cannot reach through time, cannot go back and start again. But we can leave ourselves messages from the past, we can return to the places we used to walk, read these notes in our new and present future.
Today, there is a Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. From its photogenic doors tourists sprawl out into the adjoining garden, lapped up under the shadows of Notre Dame l’immortalité as it rises like a phoenix among cranes and storyboards. While it is not the mythic shop run by Sylvia Beach and memorialized by Ulysses, those grinning bards on beige canvas are nonetheless ubiquitous. And it says something important, I think, about place, and the power of physical space as a conduit to memory, our own and those of which we dream.
‘Essay’ comes from, essentially, to try—in the French they’re rough synonyms, harkening back to Montaigne’s attempts—and this attempt figures to serve as exemplar of that inherent uncertainty. That (this) aforementioned journal, of course (of course), was founded during the centenary of the publication of Joyce’s masterpiece, itself an anything-but-ordinary examination of a regular day. Joyce and Woolf are the foremost L’Esprit literary ancestors, the heritage we seek to imbue in ourselves and find in the work we publish. This trip, which began the day I moved the last of my things out of my Long Beach apartment (not exactly a recommended approach), takes me—and, by social media extension, L’Esprit—through many of the places that shaped the work the journal admires, from London to Paris to Dublin and back again. I thought I would try and make something of all this, memory and time and place, what it means to leave and what it means to return.
When Odysseus comes home, after twenty years, and lands at last on Ithaca, his dog says hello and promptly dies. Argos seems to have known that there’s something noble in seeing a thing through. If you set out to do something, by god do it. He had set out to wait, and by god he did it. He remembered, and would carry on to the end. His life, as little of it as we actually see, is one of cycles: he sits on his rather barren homeland every day, for two decades (for him, according to my arithmetic, a brisk 140 years)1, waiting for the end of a story he saw began on the day Odysseus was found out as sane and left to burn walls and build horses. From Argos’, um, vantage-point, (this will not be another essay on point-of-view), the whole thing is a bit absurd. But there’s that word again—he has the right perspective, he knows that time is an illusory demon created by man, and that if he stays true, if he channels place and memory, he can elude it, at least for a little while.
There are seagulls in Paris. This seems a bit odd, at first. But up among the rooftops, where only the smallest elevators and tightest budgets can reach, one can see them, sparring with the pigeons, navigating the churches. Over the bells and the farbelow city one can hear them, too, in this place they don’t belong, this place they’ve made their own. Like seemingly all things French, the Parisian seagulls are protected as something of a national landmark, cultivated and maintained and observed. It is very hard, in Paris, to get anyplace at all without the specter of history peering over your shoulder. In a city with so deep and rich a past, documented and preserved to an extent unimaginable in the United States, every square and street has seen something notable, something worth a sign and a marker and a grave.
My favorite, perhaps, are the plaques on buildings that announce this philosopher or that politician lived here.2 That’s usually all they say, leaving to the observer the magnificent details of daily life. One can, if one really tries, see these luminaries, coming in and out through the same door, walking the same streets, existing in an ordinary that transcends the decay of time. These plaques, screwed into apartments very much in current use, are reminders of the overwhelming weight of the quotidian in our lives, all of our lives, no matter how many books or songs or speeches one has written. The vast majority of life, for all who encounter it, is an endless series of nothing, infinitesimal moments cohering, by some strange alchemy, into meaning.
On Rue de l’Odéon, running like an arrow from the theatre to the boulevard, there is such a plaque. At number 12, on an otherwise nondescript apartment, high above the street, it confirms to the shrewd literary investigator that, yes, this is place. The original Shakespeare and Company stood there from 1921-1941, the beating heart of the ghostwhite city. There are photos of Sylvia Beach standing in front of her shop, framed in that poetic maroon, leaning against brick and stone that’re still there today, able to be matched up via drain pipe and window box. Joyce, probably, would’ve enjoyed what the site has become: a curiosity for the perspicacious and the sapient, an essential if little known detail to a colossal story of which he, of course, is at the center. Very few people stop to look up, to notice the ghosts loitering on the sidewalk around them. This all while Ulysses, recently celebrating its 100th birthday (featuring a major, rather solipsistic and self-aggrandizing, celebration by a certain other store over by the river) is probably more popular than ever, with best-selling books written about the story of its own composition.3 But, like Argos, Shakespeare and Company, with its iconic blue binding and fierce resistance to marketability and totalitarianism alike, is no more, having lived long enough to guide something back into the world before taking of us its leave.
When moving, which one should never do, one comes across a stunning amount of stuff, errata of the everyday, accumulated in heretofore unknown corners of the apartment. It is a reminder of that overwhelming weight of the ordinary, the marginalia of the past, reference points to some person we used to be. In the place I left before my flight, my (for now) last California apartment, I’d lasted four years. This is (as a certain, rather solipsistic and self-aggrandizing, erstwhile U.S. President has shown) plenty of time to amass an overwhelming amount of damning evidence about our past selves. Who was that person, who wore that shirt, liked that band, decided to go to law school? What a fool he was! Why, I’d never do such a thing as that. But, oh, I’d better save this… It’s an insight into who we once where, the things that used to have value, the careful plans we laid for the future in sight of laughing Time. It’s the mass of history that can be held by place, location, physical environs. We can glimpse, for just a moment, into the mind of that strange creature, ourselves of long ago, much in the way we might see the writer leave his flat, the bookseller open her shop in the morning sun of 1922. We have only seconds with these beings, moments before the connect snaps and we plunge again into our march ahead. But they are magical ones, the glimpses we have through the windows of the past.
It is the business of Modernism to pry open these apertures, be it with Woolf’s blade or Joyce’s dynamite. To explore so fully the everyday, to deepen into artistry the ordinary—it is a way of seeing that world that perhaps most closely matches true experienced life. This was, of course, the essential idea behind Modernism itself, best reflected in much of Woolf’s criticism—‘Is life like this? Must novels be like this?’. Her comments, instructively, are in many ways just as true of our Modern Fiction as it was a century ago, and makes the audacity, the fierce brilliance, the unshaken mirror held up to our daily selves with which she and Joyce wrote—the type of work we hope to champion at L’Esprit—all the more essential.
A great benefit of running or working on a literary journal is the conversations one has. At both journals where I’m involved, our regular meetings are sophisticated, insightful discussions of the philosophy and aesthetic principles behind fiction.4 At L’Esprit, Jessica and I are routinely asking each other how the journal can best embody the sprit of Modernist fiction, that dissection of the ‘ordinary’ into the illuminating, the versimilar, the provocative. All literary journals look to offer a publication home to work they find compelling and worthy of addition to the broader community, of course, but we also aim to interrogate every story we discuss—and our own perspectives—towards this foundation of risk-adept, fearless work.
And much of our why, our raison d’être, is rooted in that dauntless opening of windows. What makes Modernism so powerful and meaningful to so many people, including Jessica and myself, is that these core elements—exploration and understanding, deepening and reconstituting of the everyday—gives every moment in our real human lives that much more impact and meaning. If art’s utility and necessity is in the ability it possesses to give meaning and richness to existence, then Modernist fiction’s enlivening of an our most typical lived experience makes it high art indeed. Leopold Bloom and Clarissa Dalloway are living, by and large, exceedingly nondescript lives across the single days in which we see them. Sure, there’s a party here or an odd meeting there, but there’s nothing in the fictive world which makes us think this all couldn’t be so deeply rendered and presented on any other day of their lives—or, indeed, our own. The stories typically found in those literary revolutionaries do not follow the murder of the king or culminate in the wedding of our heroine. They are insights into the banalities of life, the nothingmoments that memory chooses to hold, that make up the things we remember without trying. They are works of art depicting those small fragments which connect us with the people we used to be and the lives of those gone on.
The literary theorist Dorrit Cohn, another member of the L’Esprit Pantheon5, finds, in her essay “Signposts of Fictionality”, a distinction between nonfiction history and fictive narration in their essential composition—a difference, as she puts it, between the past events of the world and the ‘ephemera of creation’. Now there’s a phrase. Her point is well-taken: there is, for the professional historian, a series of real-world events and people that make up her research interest, and ultimately her work. While the job is by no means easy, it is explicable, and afterwords one could go back and trace, step by step, how the book came together. This is, surely, not true of the novelist. For her it is those myriad impressions of life, the bombardment of the world upon our senses in each and every moment, that comes together in, as Cohn says, a strange magic to create a fictive world. It is, like the universe itself, the nothing which gives rise to creation.
Walking through Dublin6, or Paris, or London, one can glimpse this ephemera of life in the streets once walked by others. At times, even, once walked by oneself. Returning to Paris this year, I found my memories from earlier trips remarkably bright, as if time had paid them far less mind than others. It was as if I had never left, as if it had not been eighteen months but eighteen minutes since I was there last. This is not true, I have found, of other places I have been. There is of course that Parisian magic many have felt, but I think there is something about the sense of history—literary and otherwise—that pervades the city, makes it a home amenable to memory.
To return, perhaps, that is to know a place; to know those who came before and to know oneself that once was. In another of the Parcae’s endless tricks, I will be going back to Chicago this fall, after those nine bright years, in some ways with little in common with the person who left for the California coast. I will again walk the streets I used to walk, stop by the same places and feel the same wind. But it will not be the same Chicago to which I return, as place like all things is defined by Time, and he is a jealous god. We carry with us the past, kept in the memories of those small moments we would not have thought to remember, were we in control of such things. As Jay Gatsby, that great counterrevolutionary of modern literature, was fated to discover, try as we might we can never go home again. We can only glimpse it in shadows and seconds, peering through the darkened window.
Sitting in her former house (I’ve moved), Woolf’s point seems clear. Across the street is the park in which she discovered, as she puts it, the idea for To The Lighthouse, and it must have looked much as it does today. One can, and might, walk in the same long rectangular pattern as Woolf would’ve done (she doesn’t strike me as one to cut corners), separated only by beastly time. The ordinary, the mundane, the unremarkable—this what our lives are built on, and what gives Modernism its power and significance. Virginia Woolf walking out of this grand stone building every morning and crossing to the square, the sun in her eyes and the wind in her hair. It is the enriching of the everyday, the dissection of what so much of our existence comes down to, that resonates, both in literature and in life. There is moving and evocative writing that builds a large story on the foundation of distinctive events, from the Victorian to the present day. But those characters always seem somehow unlike us, removed across a divide we cannot bridge; for theirs are lives of moments, and ours of memory.
The great events will always stand out, in fiction and in life—there is the day I went to the Louvre, this is the story of Elizabeth Bennet finding her husband—but there’s something artificial there, an inherent anxiety over the need for inflation belied by plot and photo. ‘Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worthwhile,’ Woolf says, to again borrow from “Modern Fiction”. She’s writing in response to the state of popular fiction as it was then, but I think there’s a hint of mortality in those words, as well. Time will always win, and his might is such that even as we know what’s coming we cannot stop the end. History, Stephen’s nightmare, will never let us wake. We can never truly reach behind us, to know the self who sat at this window or that cafe, anymore than we can fully comprehend those who lived before us, leaving only signposts from the grave. But we can draw on the power of place, we can feel the specter of those phantoms in the streets they used to know. We can try and understand our past selves and our ancestors both, telling ourselves the same stories on the same ground. When we walk the places we used to go, when we stand outside a restaurant and realize we drank wine once in that corner, there—this is how we cheat Time, how we deceive Saturn’s demon and commune, for a moment, with the past.
Endnotes
1) The same distance between the births of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and the founding of L’Esprit Literary Review. Now, tell me Athena didn’t have a hand in that one.
2) I also quite like the blue-and-green signs on every street, complete with a succinct biography of whomever for which it was named.
3) Of course not many books have been, literally, put up on trial. Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book is a compelling and well-researched study, for those interested.
4) I’d be remiss not to mention West Trade Review by name, and the always-excellent conversations our twenty-odd-person Fiction Team has twice a month. So edifying these meetings are that I ran the last one from a midnight London hotel room. Thank you to the whole WTR team!
5) Her excellent study Transparent Minds gives us our motto in mediam mentem.
6) Or, indeed, reading sans warning Ulysses in French at Sweny’s Pharmacy…merci to P.J. and everyone!
D. W. White writes consciousness-forward fiction and criticism. Currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he serves as Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review and Fiction Editor for West Trade Review. His writing appears in 3:AM, The Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among several others. Before returning to Chicago, he lived in Long Beach, California, for nine years.
L'Esprit Literary Review 
One response to “12 Rue de l’Odéon”
[…] Continue Reading […]
LikeLike