Sin City
Miller expresses a sense of “lost” in Walking Up and Down in China. The title for a narrative set in Paris already suggests the displacement of the writer because he no longer identifies where he is psychologically with the physical location he is in. To Miller, “Paris is France and France is China. All that which is incomprehensible to me runs like a great wall over the hills and valleys through which I wander.” He suggests that in a foreign land with a foreign language, geographic specifics do not matter to the individual because they cannot alleviate the foreignness anyway.
This is easily relatable to anyone who has traveled to completely foreign lands. The sense of alienness due to the language and cultural barriers is almost universal regardless of the place and time. In Paris, my minimal knowledge of French hinders my assimilation into Parisian life. Unlike the Lost Generation, I desire to integrate into Paris instead of being sheltered in the comforts of an expatriate community. At the same time, I am aware that the expatriate life is part of Parisian culture, it is a fragment of it. The Lost Generation embraced the divide. They did not attempt, nor did they want, to fuse with the locals. Instead they chose to coexist in separate worlds on the same land. The French reciprocated this. They did not reject the Americans, but they did not engulf them into their own sphere either. In French propriety, they interact with the expatriates at a social distance they deemed appropriate.
Perhaps this is why I consider myself wishful when I personally would like to be adopted and acknowledged as a Parisian for a period of my life. To me, it is how one can taste French life in the most flavorful manner. This is my vision of the Parisian fantasy — to find and experience authenticity — and this is where I differ from Miller’s nonchalant attitude towards his environment. I am not at ease with not knowing the situation around me and I do not find comfort in permanent residence in a comfort zone like the Lost Generation.
Nonetheless, it is Miller’s mentality that accounts for the underlying ambiguous amorality in his behavior. “I see the whore alongside me reading over my shoulder; I feel her breath on my neck.” Miller is able to casually use the derogatory term ‘whore’ while not imposing any value judgment onto his companion’s profession or character is quite distinctive. He comes across as blunt in Pizer’s reiteration of “the fucking business” in Tropic of Cancer. It appears that when the environment is unspecific, so are the moral grounds.
However, the landscape of Paris encouraged his libertinism. He is in Paris, where the “map of Europe is changing before our eyes; nobody knows where the new continent begins or ends.” The uncertainty that accompanies the geopolitics of Europe furthers his incurable sense of moral and identity ambiguity. He almost laments, “I have lost in the new world and which I would never have recovered had I not fallen like a twig into the ocean of time.”
Yet this background nourished creativity. In an illusionary world like the expatiate bubble of Paris, one is free from social norms back home and did not need to adhere to the rules of the locals. This not only allowed a liberated lifestyle, as observed from the likes of Hemingway, Miller and Fitzgerald, but also more literary autonomy. Miller for instance, was noted for his fusion of reality and concepts. In China, Miller displays the otherworldliness of Paris through his craft. He employs metaphoric language to generate a distance from reality in his seemingly autobiographical narrative.
“Night is coming on, the night of the boulevards, with the sky red as hell-fire, and from Clichy to Barbès a fretwork of open tombs. The soft Paris night, like a ladder of toothless gums, and the ghouls grinning between the rungs. All along the foot of the hill the urinals are gurgling, their mouths chocked with soft bread. It’s in the night that Sacré Cœur stands out in all its stinking loveliness.”
Miller creates a mythical Sacré Cœur, an utterly realistic location, with “hell-fire” red skys. As if it is the Underworld in Greek mythology. Paris is further mystified through personification. She is an alluring woman whose “heavy whiteness of her skin and her humid stone breath clamps down on the blood like a valve”. This enigmatic description creates a sense of being out-of-touch with the pragmatics of the environment in the protagonist and the reader.
Similarly, as Pizer observes, Miller’s use of allusions, metaphors and images proliferated in his writings in Paris. “If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one; I go forth to fatten myself” “with “ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pic when the carcass is ripped open.” The use of anthropomorphism heightens the surrealism and sensuality of the text. Pizer claims that this is “the essence of [Miller’s] creative rebirth in Paris” for he “understands at the, the search for meaning in life by the faithful has produced merde.”
In the same vein, the sexual liberty that Paris affords has also been accounted as a factor for the creative fecundity of the city. Pizer contemplates this in Geography. His examination evaluates both the positive and negative influences of Parisian sexuality.
“Paris encourage not so much the expression of new and radical faiths as the restatement of traditional beliefs in the new and radical forms of an open sexuality and an evocative Paris locale.” (Pizer, 1990. 178)
He acknowledges the intellectual fertility of Paris in his paper and evidently, Paris is portrayed as “flourishing and fecund garden found in many autobiographical accounts” of the Lost Generation.
Doubtless, the Lost Generation’s literary talent thrived in the photogenic sunlight and subtle moonlight by the Seine.
However, their personal lives ultimately dissolved in a self-destructive manner. According to Pizer, Miller himself was aware of “his own growth in the Paris milieu and the destructive effect of the city on his fellow expatriates.” His peers perhaps served as a warning to him, and he left in 1939.
Indeed, the fates of Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds proved the profound hazardousness of Paris. Hemingway, whom we are familiar with, made what he considered the most devastating decision of his life — abandoning Hadley. Paris fueled F. Scott Fitzgerald’s alcoholism, arguably propelled Zelda into her mental breakdowns and was the backdrop of some of the most catastrophic turbulences in their marriage. For instance, Zelda accused Fitzgerald of homosexual relations to Hemingway out of jealousy of their friendship and Fitzgerald apparently wanted to patronized a prostitute to prove his heterosexuality. These creative writers might not have acknowledged the dangers of Paris in biographical accounts, many times beautifying it for nostalgia’s sake. However, they were aware of it as illustrated in the depiction of Paris as a “wasteland of much fictional representation”.
Perhaps Paris is truly like a drug — offering the highs in the mind while eating away the body simultaneously. In my opinion, it is difficult to have self-discipline with company when your social circle is the Lost Generation in the Wonderland that is Paris. When one is lost in a surrealistic environment, excused from the weight of its native society by living in an expatriate bubble and free from that of back home, it is not difficult be be consumed by the indulgence one takes. Subconscious self-destruction was the price for hedonistic libertinism. Whether the exchange was worth it would be an interesting question to raise. Although, given the immortal literary products of this equation, I suspect the answer would be in the affirmative.
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