TWELVE WALKING

Les Morts qui Marchent

Comme le mort, les temps sont sombres. C’est dimanche et tout le Paris est endormi. 

ELEVEN HEMINGWAY

Daybreak

In Book One of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway keeps to the first person narrative as we have encountered in this class earlier in A Moveable Feast. Such a style, together with the circumstances and the personality of Jake, cannot help but reminds us of the author himself. The perspective of Jake brings us into his American Paris and introduces the American expatriates within it. We are reacquainted with memory, the intricacies of human relationships, the status of women and the idea of a better land elsewhere (the very essence of expatriation in this context). In terms of craftsmanship, Hemingway balances the emotions of his story with a literary austerity that delivers a realism that we now consider a Hemingway signature. 

ELEVEN WALKING

Walk; Ponder

I think, therefore I am.

One never stops thinking. Even in a blank state of mind, there is still thought.

TEN HEMINGWAY

The Other American Expatriates 

Baldwin and Hughes provide us with a new dimension of the expatriate life in Paris through the lens of African-Americans. They too, believe in a myth of Paris “as a crucially non-racist city”. Baldwin presents a rather unfortunate encounter in Paris and expresses his negative feelings over his fate. Yet he chooses to remain in the city of lights. On the other hand, Hughes delivers his story with a frankness with exclamations of humor despite it having his fair share of misfortunes.It is through Kramer that we learn about the reason behind Baldwin’s fondness of Paris — its cultural hybridity. Both the writers reflect this hybridity through their tales while replicating the insular nature of the expatriate community in the French capital. In this process, their expectations of Paris are also confronted with her realities.

As African-Americans, Baldwin and Hughes arrive in Paris about two decades later than the first Lost Generation to escape the racial discrimination in America. Parallel to the idle, romantic notion of Paris that the Lost Generation had in the 1920s, a racially-tolerant, liberating idea of Paris was held by the African-American hopefuls. However, both writers soon learn that Paris was difficult in her own ways to survive in. 

TEN WALKING

Le Sentiment

I.

In 1965, the 16th arrondissement reaffirmed itself in cinema as the district of affluence and power when a traffic warden retracts his order to Emilio Largo’s illegal parking when the Bond villain steps out of the car in Thunderball. The notion that the atmosphere of a neighborhood varies with its average household income is compelling. However, I made an conscious effort to not hold any expectations of the neighborhood before my walk in it. It was out of my past experience of reality falling short, or being simply different, from my imagination. 

NINE WALKING

The Grains of Wood

In 1965, the 16th arrondissement reaffirmed itself in cinema as the district of affluence and power when a traffic warden retracts his order to Emilio Largo’s illegal parking when the Bond villain steps out of the car in Thunderball. The notion that the atmosphere of a neighborhood varies with its average household income is compelling. However, I made an conscious effort to not hold any expectations of the neighborhood before my walk in it. It was out of my past experience of reality falling short, or being simply different, from my imagination. 

NINE HEMINGWAY

An American Returns

F. Scott Fitzgerald is introduced as one who “understood loss better perhaps than any American writer”. Babylon Revisited acutely relates to this theme as it speaks of a man trying to reclaim what he had lost. Paris becomes the setting for this quest and its fiction resonates with many of the realities that Fitzgerald faced during the 1920s. We continue to learn about Paris through an expatriate lens and are reacquainted with that lifestyle in retrospect. Furthermore, this story might offer some insight into Fitzgerald’s psyche as a successful writer, husband and father. At the same time, the series of events, observations and characters continuously serve to convey the inescapability of the past.