Parisian culture
Waiting for something to happen
John Ralston Saul
orris must still be the centre of the world; if not, why would people be coming from everywhere to blow it up? One of the minor results of this is that foreigners are once again cancelling their Paris trips and will miss therefore the best cultural season the city has had in years.
During the Giscard years it seemed here that everyone and his mind had gone to sleep while the tail end of an era crawled away. Mitterrand, despite his intelligence, was unable either to revive the republic or give it direction. And once the Socialists had real power, the need for active thought among intellectuals seemed to disappear.
The slow collapse of this government, the arrival in power of men who don't believe in much except power, the tension between the President and the Prime Minister, uncertainty over the future of the Fifth Republic, terrorism, the gradual realisation that the public place 61 ideas is now empty, open and waiting to be occu- pied; all of these things have, for the first time in a dozen years, put creative tension into the air.
Of course, the cultural machinery of France is so wonderfully organised, inte- grated, oiled and greased that the system goes on pouring out products with such conviction, intelligence and skill, thai even if nothing is being said the message will appear essential. And anyone who man- ages to get hold of the control levers can immediately throw the whole machine into high speed and roar it about, electrifying or terrifying the entire population within seconds. Alain Robbe-Grillet, for exam- ple, used to boast in private: 'Vous allez voir. Je vais leur jouer un tour!'
The practical joke in question — the New Novel — overwhelmed everyone at first, It took the French years to separate the product from the system and discover that air accounted for most of the revolu- tion. By then whole careers had been built out of the New Novel and American universities had burrowed themselves so enthusiastically into its study that entire literature departments have not yet emerged. Just as the New Novelists began running out of steam, the New Philo- sophers appeared and the machinery went back into high gear. Their message — that the Marxist dialectic in France had been dangerous and was now dead — hardly. came as news. It did, however, clear a lot. of dead wood out of the public mind and leave the stage free for whatever promises might be just around the corner; a justified expectation given that a true cultural re- newal has been building up for some time.
Paris had, for example, been a dance desert for years. Now enormous efforts to bring the best of modern dance into the country, either onto the experimental stage of the Centre Pompidou under the lead- ership of the great ballerina, Janine Char- rat, or into the Theatre de Chaillot which runs a permanent dance festival, have provoked the French themselves into creativity. Theatre was equally moribund, until suddenly all the young cinema stars began wanting to go onto the stage. Last year Francis Huster marked this change by reinterpreting Le Cid in a way which made it as much a signature for this generation as Gerard Philippe's Cid had been for the post-war generation. Where Philippe had offered virginal purity to the war-weary, Huster offered a world-weary version of youth old before its time. Even the French cinema industry, despite its enormous pro- duction, seemed to have run out of things to say. Then abruptly, this autumn, it got back on track, with four of the seven box-office successes in the country and a series of surprising films.
That doesn't mean the system has lost its ability to go into overdrive unjustifiably. The cinema world at this very moment is becoming collectively soft and gooey over a pretentious picture about Sainte Therese de Lisieux. Somehow it has uncovered and satisfied a secret French longing to clutch miraculous relics without giving up intel- lectual respectability.
Little Teresa aside, France has found the energy for cultural renewal by opening her doors to the best of the outside world. This has always been true for films and Paris remains the single greatest paradise for film-goers. Everything from everywhere is here to be seen. But what is happening now goes far beyond film and puts into doubt France's old reputation for chauvin- ism. The architectural regeneration of Paris, for example, has been entrusted almost entirely to foreigners. English and Italian architects began the process years ago with the Centre Pompidou. Now a Canadian is building the new state-of-the- art opera house; a Chinese American is redesigning the Louvre; an Italian is just finishing the Musee d'Orsay, a massive and remarkable tribute to the 19th century; and a crowd of architects from everywhere has been working on an enormous science centre, the Parc de la Villette.
The heart of France, however, still expresses itself through language and any real revival must take the form of words and ideas. Now that the ground has been cleared of all the old arguments, the Paris publishing system is ready to spring into action for some new cause. It is a truly remarkable system that has managed to combine the hands-on personal manage- ment of the 19th century with the technolo- gy of the 20th; and that technology has been integrated without the stultifying effects seen in London and New York. French publishers can bang out books in half the time it takes the English or Americans.
FRENCH ISSUE
Even with the translation time included, my own novels manage to appear in Paris before they do in New York. Reviews still claim an enormous amount of space: as much in Le Monde alone as in all the London dailies rolled together. Distribution is fast and flexible and almost free of the deadening effect of the large chains.
The final sign of the power of the word and of its effective delivery is that the most popular television programme in France (6 to 8 million viewers) is the book show. Bernard Pivot's Apostrophe still holds its public for 90 minutes live every Friday night while five authors talk about their own books and each other's and in the process provide one of the three or four topics of conversation around Paris dinner tables for the next six days. The writers attempt to appear perfectly relaxed during this performance although they are aware that a good personal showing can sell 50,000 or more hardbacks. The opposite can kill a book dead, right there and then. The stakes are so high that most authors are extremely wary, despite Pivot's talent for disguising explosive questions within innocent words, about offering anything other than the kindest comments upon each other. They fear that any criticism might unleash an uncontrollable argument, which in turn might be lost. A few weeks ago I found myself on his programme and an hour or so into the broadcast forgot my self-control long enough to say what in fact the other novelists were thinking about one of the author's books. My comments were on the subject of unnecessary perverted sexual masochism. Everyone else lowered their heads automatically as if to avoid being drawn into a dangerous fight.
Despite this sort of care, philosophical, social, even political battles are more likely to be launched from the set of Apostrophe than from a parliamentary podium or a news broadcast. For example, when Alex- andre de Marenche (the retired but still the most famous secret service figure in the country) wanted to settle a lot of old scores, he wrote a careful book. But when he was invited on to Apostrophe he made a series of uncareful accusations on the air in the same week that bombs were exploding around Paris. As a result, the next day a public slanging match began among the spy masters and spread so fast that the minister of defence was obliged to intervene in an attempt to silence everyone. Such a petty and confusing fight, in a country which likes to embrace either great order or massive disorder, is simply a reminder that no new philosophy has been found to provoke one or the other. It is, on the other hand, an amusing way to waste time while waiting for something real to happen.
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