Places remember events
Paris across the decades
Lauren Elkin’s novel Scaffolding, is the story of desire and infidelity, dreams and reality, and a search for intimate connections, set in Paris; a city that so intrigues and enthralls me.
I loved how much emotion Lauren Elkin allowed herself in her (mainly) Paris-focussed 2016 book Flâneuse. It’s one of my favourite non-fiction works, which, in the midst of its insightful pages contains a claim which I’ve told so many people about, seeing as it’s quite spectacularly brilliant – she writes that there’s a rumour of a ward in the Hôpital Sante-Anne open to disoriented Japanese tourists seeking counselling after finding that actual Paris is rude and dirty when they were expecting a city of cute Amelies and streets smelling of Chanel No.5.
Scaffolding is Elkin’s newest work of fiction, although Anna is drawn at least a little from Elkin’s own life, and, secondly, the intellectual curiosity that drives her non-fiction is never far away in the novel. Elkin’s non-fiction has intellectual rigour but is also full of emotion and self-revelation; her fiction is full of ideas. This melding really works for me.
Set in Belleville, Paris, Scaffolding concerns itself with two young couples living in the same apartment in 1972 and 2019. Despite the gap between their respective times in the apartment, there are numerous echoes and connections. Both women are involved with thoughts of pregnancy. Modern-day Anna, in 2019, is a psychoanalyst taking a break to recover after a late miscarriage; Florence, in 1972, is finishing her degree in psychology, and hoping to conceive with her husband, Henry.
Henry arrives into the novel as a bit of a dolt, and a reminder that the progressive ideals of the 1960s didn’t seem to have made much of inroads into misogyny. The politics of the évènements of Mai 1968 are still seen as worthy of debate in French society.
Of immediate concern to Florence and Henry in 1972 is the wave of demolitions and redevelopment that changed the neighbourhoods of Belleville and Menilmontant forever. It was a huge upheaval of not just the landscape but the demographic. The old working class streets disappeared, the world of the 1956 film Le Ballon Rouge, was bulldozed into oblivion, replaced with new build towers and a large Parc de Belleville. "What about the people who were perfectly happy living there, who didn't ask for Modernity?" Henry asks in Scaffolding.
In Flâneuse, Elkin talks of “the ghosts on the boulevards”; the sense of previous inhabitants leaving a residue, a form, a footprint. The notion in that book is played out in Scaffolding, but in an apartment. Aside from any social, political or psychological issues looping down the years, there are always revolutions in decor - Florence wallpapers the apartment in the early Seventies in a style Anna, arriving in the modern age, is extremely keen to replace. Anna has other plans for the apartment, but not much progress is happening.
In the last pages of my short format book about Picasso’s Paris nightlife, I go searching for traces of old nightlife spaces in modern day Montmartre, in the air, the street, a sudden view round a corner, a tile, a brick. In Flâneuse, Elkin points out something James Joyce noted in the margins of Ulysses; “Places remember events”.
For all its artistic vibe and vistas of inspiring beauty, Paris has a past full of trauma. In my own wanderings in Paris, my breath still falters when I pass the Bataclan, or the site of the massacre of thousands of Algerians at the Pont Saint-Michel, or Charonne where police killed demonstrators at the foot of the Metro steps. One era of shame becomes a part of the story in Scaffolding - the ethnic cleansing of the prewar Jewish community in Belleville and Menilmontant in collaboration with the Nazis.
Anna is French-American, hoping to live out a more golden, romantic Parisian dream, having secured an apartment in the 11th arrondissement with a view of rooftops and beyond across the city. For anyone familiar with Paris, and wanting a clearer pointer to her neighbourhood; Anna’s favourite café is Combat, halfway up the hill between Metros Belleville and Pyrénées. Well known for its fancy cocktails and hipster staff.
Builders have erected scaffolding around Anna and David’s apartment block in order to scrape off the outside surface of the building and re-render it (an experience Elkin had herself when she lived on the left bank, near Metro Duroc, finding the noise and the dust so much of a torture she fled to a hotel).
Distressed after the miscarriage and at the mercy of the exterior and interior building works in Scaffolding, there’s no sign of a dream Parisian life for Anna. She shrinks back into a small world consisting of staring at the walls of the apartment or taking walks to the boulangerie, sad sometimes if she doesn’t see another regular customer, an elderly gentleman she slowly becomes on speaking terms with.
Mostly, she’s living in her head. And not as in love as she wonders whether she ought to be; her husband, David is away - he has a job in London - but she’s not pining for him. She extends the break from her job and slides into ennui and solitude, and a frustration that the alterations to her dated kitchen are dragging on. A home can feel like a prison; our personal renovation projects – physical or psychological – seem never-ending.
What are the changes over decades, via the experiences of different generations in the same space? Are the experiences of the generations deeply different, or are they merely a painful, but cosmetic, re-rendering?
A newly-arrived neighbour, Clémentine, plays an important part in Anna’s story. She’s a dozen years or so younger than Anna, and also seems adrift - she describes her activities on an average day as “writing poetry and masturbating”. Clémentine’s boyfriend remains in the shadows in the early pages, but is revealed to be part of the tangle of connections between the characters.
Anna and Clémentine become friends, enjoying each other’s company and discussing the ways of the world and the heart, including the men in their life. In Anna’s case, too, the presence of exes that somehow still inhabit her thoughts. Anna and Clémentine’s conversations underline many themes of the book as a whole – questions dealing with sex, desire and fidelity, particularly.
Clémentine is a version of womanhood that Anna is attracted to on several levels, but also worried by. Clémentine is something of a representative of the next generation; politically active, for one thing. She’s part of radical feminist collective called les colleuses, which seems to give some purpose and animation to her life. The collective are campaigning to spotlight the horrifying rates of femicide in France, taking to the streets at night to flyposter statistics, messages, and calls to arms. There’s something of a return to the strategy of the students in ’68 about this, of course.
Clémentine is eager to learn from Anna, particularly about the work of Lacan - there’s a lot about Lacanian psychoanalysis in Scaffolding. The sifting and discussing of ideas that would be central in a work of non-fiction might seem a slight encumbrance in a novel, but it speaks of Elkin’s welcome attitude of treating her readers as grown-ups happy to pursue some intellectual curiosity.
The narrative shifts hazily between the characters and their eras, their inner thoughts. There are no narrative explosions. People are trying to make sense of stuff; people needing some joy.
Elkin’s writing is often poetic, and sensual, even in a book that swerves towards the cerebral. Late on, Anna leaves her under-siege apartment, and breaks away out of her head onto the streets. It’s a passage in Scaffolding that relates to Flâneuse, for sure; particularly a phrase in that book; “Walking makes me feel at home”. At this point, with Anna on the streets, walking just walking, Elkin’s language takes a left at the metro, crosses a square, recognises a bar, takes off towards Notre Dame and the Seine, flying free, dispensing with paragraphs, logic, scaffolding.
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Further reading; my post about Sylvia Plath in Paris https://davehaslam.substack.com/p/sylvia-plath-walking-the-sunny-side
If you’re looking to buy Scaffolding, it’s currently in stock at one of my favourite independent bookshops; https://www.forumbooksshop.com/product/scaffolding-lauren-elkin-9781784742942/12111
Great read that Dave, my Dad used to visit Paris regularly, it was where he got inspiration for clothes when he was doing Crazyface. He'd check what the young people were wearing and emulate it back in Manchester, usually a few seasons ahead of the trends as Paris is always avant garde. He took me there a few times too, it's a city of layers of stories. I'll grab the book, thanks for the tip.