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  • Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth-Century Novel?
  • John Attridge
Henry James Goes to Paris. Peter Brooks. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. 255. $24.95 (cloth).
Quand Paris était un roman: du mythe de Babylone au culte de la vitesse. Brigitte Munier. Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2007. Pp. 478. €35.00 (paper).

Paris is not only a great cultural capital: it is great cultural capital. To grasp this truism, you need only imagine the deadpan itineraries of The Sun Also Rises, at once fussy and nonchalant, transposed to the streets of your hometown (unless, of course, your hometown is Paris or somewhere like it). The ascetic regime of proper nouns that Hemingway recommended in A Farewell to Arms has no effect on a city that has been described so many times before: Paris is always already read, and hence always already converted into a symbolic commodity. Flaubert's Paris, for example, was mediated by Balzac ("But it occurs to me that what I'm saying is classic," says a character in L'Education sentimentale: "Remember Rastignac in The Human Comedy!"), while for Balzac himself Paris was already the "city of a hundred thousand novels."1 Paris's figural existence as a city of literature has been further boosted by the exceptional centralization and cohesiveness of the French cultural elite. As Henry James tartly observed in 1876, "everything in France proceeds by 'schools'"; it is no accident that the twentieth-century notion of an intellectual class was largely defined in Paris, by Zola's J'accuse (1898) and the ensuing Manifeste des intellectuels. Overarching the city's geography is the endogamous family tree of côteries and cénacles, of intellectual friendship, patronage, collaboration, and, above all, "movements": the avants gardes and nouvelles vagues that Lambert Strether tentatively regrets not having kept up with in The Ambassadors. These institutions are Paris too.

It is primarily this city of cultural institutions that Henry James goes to in Peter Brooks's critical narrative, in spite of indications to the [End Page 167] contrary contained in the whimsical title and fetching jacket design. He goes to the physical city too, of course, and a strength of the book is its fine account of Third Republic Paris and the relationships James formed there, but the "Paris" of the title mostly stands for French protomodernism, and in particular the circle of novelists gathered around Flaubert and associated with realism. This is not necessarily a synecdoche: as Brigitte Munier particularly insists, French realism was synonymous with Paris in important ways.

James only lived in "the modern Babylon," as his brother William called it, for just over a year, from November 1875 to December 1876, although he would return there at regular intervals for the rest of his life. He took a flat between the Tuileries and the Grands Boulevards, not far from the newly completed Opéra and the ultra-fashionable boulevards des Capucines and Italiens, and set to work on The American and a series of travel letters for Whitelaw Reid's Tribune. This last, mutually trying relationship was dissolved in July of the following year, James asserting a constitutional inability to dumb his sketches down any further than he had already, but not before he had had a chance to register opinions about the second impressionist exhibition that are important for Brooks's argument. In a word, James didn't get the impressionists, lamenting their slavish mimesis and sloppy finishes, and this "misestimation" (31) reveals a deeper unwillingness to overhaul his own bearings on representation. "How one understands representation," Brooks says, "will turn out to be a deep source of misunderstanding not only between James and the impressionists, but as well between James and Flaubert" (32).

After a lonely couple of months, James made contact with the American colony in Paris and also with a mondain circle of Orléanist monarchists, but his most important encounter from a literary point of view was with Flaubert and his circle, to which he was introduced by Ivan Turgenev. James liked Flaubert, "a great, stout, handsome, simple, kindly, elderly fellow," and exulted to have gained access to his Sunday afternoon salons, a "Mount...

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