“Here is my hypothesis,” he announced when I reached him on the phone at his office, at the publishing house of Grasset. “You must go back to the twenties and thirties, when the Flore became identified with the extreme right and the Deux Magots, by default, with the left. Charles Maurras, the founder of Action Francaise, used the Flore as his home base.” Maurras was simultaneously one of the most important stylists in French literature—a member of the French Academy, and a crucial influence on T. S. Eliot, among other modernists—and a right-wing anti-Semite. “Before it was anyone else’s place, it was Maurras’s. His most famous polemic was even named after the café: ‘Au Signe de Flore.’ Maurras was a malevolent force, in that everything he touched was simultaneously disgraced and hallowed.”
Enthoven went on to say, “This meant that by the time of the occupation, when Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir came to Saint-Germain and began their resistance, they had to avoid the Flore like a plague, since it had been contaminated by Maurras. But then the tourists began to crowd into the Deux Magots in order to look at Sartre and de Beauvoir. The place became overcrowded, and eventually the intellectuals noticed the emptiness of the Flore next door. By then Maurras was gone, the occupation had passed, and confronted with a choice between the pollution of Maurras and the pollution of tourism, the intellectuals chose to remake the emptiness rather than abide with the many. So they went across the street and have never returned.” He stopped for a second, as if readying himself for an aphorism, and then said, “The Deux Magots was sacralized by Sartre, desacralized by the tourists, and then left vacant by history.” Eighteen-seventy, 1940, I thought. Like so many lovely things in Paris, the two cafés were given shape by the first German invasion and then in one way or another were deformed by the second.
It was left to another, more dour friend to supply the futility-of-explanation explanation, over coffee at a lesser, more despairing café—neither fashionable nor unfashionable, just a place where you go to talk. “There is nothing to explain here,” he said. “The explanation is a simple, Saussurean one.” He was referring, I realized after a moment, to the father of modern linguistics, who was the first to point out that signs get their meanings not by being like the things they stand for but by being different from other signs: A sign for black means black because it isn’t like the sign for white.
“The fashionable exists only in relation to something that is not that way,” he went on. “The relationship between the modishness of the Flore and the unmodishness of the Deux Magots isn’t just possibly arbitrary. It’s necessarily arbitrary. If you place any two things side by side, one will become fashionable and the other will not. It’s a necessity determined by the entire idea of fashion. A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it’s in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely. That’s the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful—they are goddesses—and yet a man must choose. And what was the chooser’s name? Paris. C’est normal.”
Distant Errors, Christmas Journal 2
My fax machine, which was made by the French state, always blames someone else when things go wrong. It is a Galeo 5000 model, and it is made by France Telecom and is therefore an official, or French government, product; even its name carries with it the nice implication that 4,999 other models were attempted before perfection was at last achieved by the French fax machine ministry.
You even have to go to a government telephone outlet to buy a new ribbon for it. It’s a plain paper fax (you have the same expression in French, papier ordinaire, ordinary paper) with all the usual features. It’s really very nicely designed—much better designed than its American equivalents, with that streamlined, intelligent Philippe Starck look that the French seem magically able to give to everything they make. It’s reasonably efficient too—perhaps a little overtricky in loading in the sheets and unduly inclined to bourrage de papier, paper jams—but still…
It has a little glowing window on its face where it affiches, or posts, the events and troubles of its day, its operating life. The window flashes, for instance, a shocked, offended Pas d’iden-tite!—no identity!—when the fax machine at the other end doesn’t “identify itself,” which for some reason or another most American machines don’t seem to.
But the favorite, all-purpose affiche of my fax machine is erreur distante—distant error—which it affiches all the time, no matter where the error actually originates, far away or right in its own backyard. Whether the error comes from a fax machine in Lille or Los Angeles, it says that it is a distant error. When the machine itself has run out of paper, it is still a distant error. When I have forgotten to clean the ribbon heads, an error has nonetheless taken place, at a distance. Jams and overflows, missed connections, and faulty plugs: all are erreurs distantes. When it really is a distant error, it is still just another distant error. This is the French fax machine’s way of getting through life. The error is distant; the problem lies someplace else; there is always somebody else to blame for your malfunctions.
French intellectuals and public people, I have on certain occasions come to the mordant, exasperated, and gloomy conclusion, share the same belief, affiche the same accusatory message, banding together and flashing erreur distante, whenever they run out of paper or ink or arguments. This morning, for instance, I saw the economist Emmanuel Todd being interviewed about his book on the economic “stagnation” of industrialized economies. He blandly announced that the U.S. economy was just as stagnant as France’s, in fact was worse because its “cultural level” (by which he meant the level of education) was so much more depraved. Also, the United States manufactured less than it once had. Economic stagnation was the problem of all the industrialized economies, France was simply sharing in it, and the United States was really to blame. His debating opponent, an intelligent economist named Cohen—very poorly dressed in a brightly colored blazer and bad tortoiseshell glasses—tried to explain that this wasn’t so, that the fall in manufacturing was in fact a sign of the renovation of the American economy, and that whatever its flaws in equality, the growth in America was real, that the one thing you couldn’t call the American economy was stagnant. Todd, who looked terrific, hardly bothered to argue with him; he just made the same assertions again: The American economy is stagnant. He just affiched, like my fax machine erreur distante, and the host, terrified, nodded.
A while ago I was on a panel broadcast for France-Culture, the radio station, at the Sciences Po, the great political science school, along with Philippe Sollers and other French worthies, and we talked about the influence of American culture on France. Everyone took it for granted that the American dominance in culture was a distant error or, rather, a distant conspiracy organized by the CIA and the Disney corporation. (I was there, the sole American on the panel, to be condescended to as the representative of both Michael Eisner and William Colby, with mouse ears on my head and a listening device presumably implanted inside them.) The cliches get trotted out—that Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists got put over by the CIA, etc.—with a complacent certitude, and it was taken for granted that the relative decline of the prestige of French writing and painting has nothing to do with the actual decline of the quality of French writing and painting. (And yet when we got down to particulars, much of these prejudices vanished: Sellers and I actually had a reasonable debate about Roth and Updike. No American Sellers would have been able to name two French novelists, much less debate their value.)