Of course, it is incumbent on Americans to reassure, gently, that it is not really a holiday of the dead at all, that like all American holidays, it is a ritual of materialism, or, to put it another way, of greed, a rite designed to teach our children that everything, even death, ends with candy. It is just fun. Fun is the magic American word (Our motto “Let’s have fun!” is met by the French motto “Let’s be amused.”) Though Halloween arrived and caused parties and sales, the tradition of trick-or-treating has not really caught on here, and so Martha and several other mothers decided to have a Halloween party in her friend Cassie’s apartment, where the mothers hid behind doors, so that the children could knock and get their candy. It was trick-or-treating made into an indoor sport. The French children in the party, she tells me, just didn’t get it. What was the point, the French children, disconsolate as ghosts and skeletons and witches, seemed to wonder, waiting behind their doors, to be all dressed up, with nowhere to go?
Luke has mounted up onto the horses on the carousel this year, although he needs to be tied on, like a parcel. To my delight, though not really to my surprise, I discovered this year that the carousel has been turning in the same manner, offering the same game, and drawing the same bemused, fascinated attention of foreigners for at least seventy-five years. I found a passage in the travel writing of Joseph Roth, the German novelist, who visited the Luxembourg Gardens in 1925 and wrote about the “maneges de chevaux de bois pour enfants.” He describes the rings and sticks, exactly as they are today: “The owner of the merry-go-round holds in his hand, at the end of a stick, little rings lightly hung and easy to detach. All the children on the horses and in the tiny cars are armed with wands. So that when they pass before the rings, they try to unhook them, which is to say slip them onto their wand. Whoever gets the most gets a prize. They learn quick action, the value of the instant, accelerated reflexes, and the trick of adjusting ones eye.” “The value of the instant…” Doubtless Cartier-Bresson and the rest of the decisive moment” photographers rode on such horses, caught their rings, learned there’s only one right moment in which to do it.
Roth admired the game endlessly, because it seemed so un-German, such a free and charming way to educate, without the military brutality of Teutonic schools. The funny thing is that there are now no more prizes—the same game, same carousel, but no more prizes. Nothing left to teach. You get the ring for the pleasure of having taken it. I wonder which child when won the last prize.
The differences are tiny and real. Cultures don’t really encode things. They include things, and leave things out. There is, for instance, the exasperation of lunch. Lunch, as it exists in New York, doesn’t exist here. Either lunch is a three-course meal—i.e., dinner, complete with two bottles of wine—or else it is to be had only at a brasserie, where the same menu—croque monsieur, omelet, salad Nicoise—is presented almost without any variation at all, as though the menu had been decreed by the state. A tuna sandwich, a bran muffin, a bowl of black bean soup—black bean soup! Yankee bean! Chicken vegetable! It is soup, beautiful soup, that I miss more than anything, not French soup, all pureed and homogenized, but American soup, with bits and things, beans and corn and even letters, in it. This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch. So on Sundays I have developed the habit of making soup for the week, from the good things we buy in the marche biologique on the boulevard Raspail. Soup and custard on Sunday nights, our salute to the land of the free.
My favorite bit of evidence of the French habit of pervasive, permanent abstraction lies in the difficulties of telling people about fact checking. (I use the English word usually; there doesn’t seem to be a simple French equivalent.) “Thank you so much for your help,” I will say after interviewing a man of letters or politician. “I’m going to write this up, and you’ll probably be hearing from what we call une fact checker in a couple of weeks.” (I make it feminine since the fact checker usually is.)
“What do you mean, une fact checker?”
“Oh, it’s someone to make sure that I’ve got all the facts right, reported them correctly”
Annoyed: “No, no, I’ve told you everything I know.”
I, soothing: “Oh, I know you have.”
Suspicious: “You mean your editor double-checks?”
“No, no, it’s just a way of making sure that we haven’t made a mistake in facts.”
More wary and curious: “This is a way of maintaining an ideological line?”
“No, no—well, in a sense I suppose…” (For positivism, of which New Yorker fact checking is the last redoubt, is an ideological line; I’ve lived long enough in France to see that move coming….)
“But really,” I go on, “it’s just to make sure that your dates and what we have you quoted as saying are accurate. Just to be sure.”
Dubious look; there is More Here Than Meets the Eye. On occasion I even get a helpful, warning call from the subject after the fact checker has called. “You know, someone, another reporter called me from the magazine. They were checking up on you.” (“No, no, really checking on you,” I want to say, offended, but don’t—and then think he’s right: They are checking up on me too; never thought of it that way, though.) There is a certainty in France that what assumes the guise of transparent positivism, fact checking,” is in fact a complicated plot of one kind or another, a way of enforcing ideological coherence. That there might really be facts worth checking is an obvious and annoying absurdity; it would be naive to think otherwise.
I was baffled and exasperated by this until it occurred to me that you would get exactly the same incomprehension and suspicion if you told American intellectuals and politicians, postinter-view, that a theory checker would be calling them. “It’s been a pleasure speaking to you,” you’d say to Al Gore or Mayor Giuliani. “And I’m going to write this up; probably in a couple of weeks a theory checker will be in touch with you.”
Alarmed, suspicious: “A what?”
“You know, a theory checker. Just someone to make sure that all your premises agree with your conclusions, that there aren’t any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream—that kind of thing.”
“What do you mean?” the American would say, alarmed. “Of course they do, I don’t need to talk to a theory checker.”
“Oh, no, you don’t need to. It’s for your protection, really. They just want to make sure that the theory hangs together….”
The American subject would be exactly as startled and annoyed at the idea of being investigated by a theory checker as the French are by being harassed by a fact checker, since this process would claim some special status, some “privileged” place for theory. A theory checker? What an absurd waste of time, since it’s apparent (to us Americans) that people don’t speak in theories, that the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation, that the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of theoretical constancy is an absurd denial of what conversation is.