- Title
- Paris as rewrite: getting away with it in Léo Malet's XVᴱ arrondissement
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- Rewriting Wrongs: French Crime Fiction and the Palimpsest p. 81-94
- Relation
- http://www.cambridgescholars.com/rewriting-wrongs
- Publisher
- Cambridge Scholars Publishing
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2014
- Description
- In his "Work-inProgress" study of the Bastille, Keith Reader notes Walter Benjamin's "fragmentary and citational mode of writing" in The Arcades Project, which he explains is "often compared to a collage or palimpest" (2010, 56). If Reader stops short of declaring Paris itself a palimpest ("Paris abides and changes," he writes on page 63), the inference is nonetheless there. Indeed, for a scholar like Ross Chambers (1999), writing the city and walking the city are one and the same act, performed in a double space: steps taken on the city streets as they unfold before us in real, present time recall steps (re-)inscribed (remembered, represented) in historical, or mythological, time. To this extent, Paris is a double city - both itself and exemplary of its (own) otherness, but also both particularly modern while at the same time paradigmatic of the great cities of modernity - and as such it recalls the Paris of Charles Baudelaire's prose poetry. Indeed, like the prose poem, Paris "n'a ni queue, alternativement et réciproquement". We should note the irony of the concluding prose poem, or "Épilogue", in which the Satanic pull of poetry into the Parisian streets is complete - with Paris described as a brothel, jail or hell on earth, the victory of prose over poetry is total - but which is the only poem to present itself, and its Satanic prose, in verse form, and thus as pure poetry.
- Subject
- detective and mystery stories; French fiction; literary analysis; crime in literature; French literature
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1067529
- Identifier
- uon:18424
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781443861335
- Language
- eng
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