{"id":88718,"date":"2015-08-11T15:25:13","date_gmt":"2015-08-11T19:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=88718"},"modified":"2015-08-11T16:50:29","modified_gmt":"2015-08-11T20:50:29","slug":"the-phantoms-of-the-fifteenth-arrondissement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/08\/11\/the-phantoms-of-the-fifteenth-arrondissement\/","title":{"rendered":"The Phantoms of the Fifteenth Arrondissement"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an unremarkable section of Paris, Roger Caillois saw hiding places for \u201cfloating beings.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"RCailloisRMinnaertca1975\"<\/a>

Caillois ca. 1975. Photo: R. Minnaert<\/p><\/div>\n

Pity the Fifteenth! Paris\u2019s most populous arrondissement is also one of its least celebrated. Stretching from the Front de Seine high-rises in the northwest to the Tour de Montparnasse in the southeast, the Fifteenth is sleepy, residential, and architecturally undistinguished. Home to minor government agencies and the headquarters of various corporations, its streets and thoroughfares are named for military officers, former colonial possessions, inventors, and \u00c9mile Zola, France\u2019s dullest great novelist. Rue des Entrepreneurs intersects Rue de Commerce, where it branches off into Rue de l\u2019\u00c9glise and Rue Mademoiselle, which gives a good indication of what was on the minds of the men who incorporated the small suburban villages of Grenelle, Javel, and Vaugirard into the metropolis in the early years of the Second Empire. To make matters worse, the Fifteenth is tantalizingly adjacent<\/em> to some of Paris\u2019s genuine landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower, located just across the Avenue de Suffren in the Seventh, the Cimeti\u00e8re Montparnasse, on the other side of the neighborhood\u2019s eponymous and much-reviled skyscraper, or the tony apartment buildings on right bank of the Pont de Bir-Hakeim.<\/p>\n

Yet this is Paris, and even the most unremarkable stretches of Zone 1 have their devoted mythographers. Born in 1913 in Reims, the jack-of-all-genres Roger Caillois knew something about being fame-adjacent. If you were to look at the faded group photographs of some of the most important avant-garde literary movements of the twentieth century, you would see him, in the background, with his thick eyebrows and chubby cheeks, manuscript in hand, ready to launch into a lecture about his latest intellectual obsession: mimicry, ludology, the sacred, gemstones, secret societies, science fiction, the City of Light. As a student at the prestigious \u00c9cole pratique des hautes \u00e9tudes, Caillois became acquainted with the works of pioneering philosophers and anthropologists like Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve and Marcel Mauss. He was a member of the surrealists until a disagreement with Andr\u00e9 Breton over the nature of a Mexican jumping bean got him kicked out of the movement. He went on to found a discussion group, the Coll\u00e8ge de Sociologie, with fellow excommunicant George Bataille, contributing articles to Bataille\u2019s journal Ac\u00e9phale<\/em> while skipping the meetings of his secret society, one of which notoriously involved a serious discussion about a ritual sacrifice of one of the members. Walter Benjamin loathed him, but nevertheless included several citations from his writings on Paris in The Arcades Project<\/em>. In Buenos Aires, where Caillois, a militant antifascist, spent the war years, he met Victoria Ocampo, the editor of the journal Sur<\/em>. Ocampo was responsible for publishing some of the leading lights of what would become known as the Latin American Boom. Upon his return to France, Caillois took up a position at UNESCO, using his influence there to introduce the French reading public to his new friends Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, and Silvina Ocampo. <\/p>\n

In the midseventies, shortly after his election to the comfortable immortality of the Acad\u00e9mie Fran\u00e7aise, Caillois was asked by the producers of a French television channel to write and star in a documentary about the slice of Paris he had called home for nearly three decades. The result was A Little Guide to the 15th Arrondissement for the Use of Phantoms<\/em><\/a>, a concise r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of Caillois\u2019s diverse intellectual career and one of the most outlandish contributions to the overstuffed genre of Paris psychogeography ever written. Part memoir and part metafiction, part literary criticism and part architectural monograph, part sociological study and part ghost story, the Little Guide<\/em> is all Caillois, Renaissance Man of the Recherch\u00e9.<\/p>\n

The initial strangeness of the short text derives from Caillois\u2019s longstanding method of \u201cdiagonal science.\u201d In the Little Guide<\/em>, he writes in the afterword, \u201cI attempted to deduce the kind of phantom that would logically correspond to the administrative, bureaucratic, and technological civilization of the metropolis.\u201d Diagonal science, as the name implies, cuts across C. P. Snow\u2019s Two Cultures, applying the discourse of the natural and social sciences to the kinds of literary and mythic phenomena whose existence they refuse to acknowledge, and submitting, in turn, the poetic products of the imagination to the rigors of logic. Like a particle accelerator that smashes together the impossible and the empirical, the Little Guide<\/em> puts itself on the trail of the supernatural beings that hide in the subatomic structures of the ordinary\u2014even infra-ordinary\u2014features of the built environment of the fifteenth arrondissement. \u201cAs always,\u201d Caillois explains, \u201cmy ambition [was] to try to discover a common point between the two distant, somewhat incompatible processes.\u201d Under the paving stones, in other words, the shrieks.<\/p>\n

\"2hrzscl\"<\/a>

A view of the \u201csleepy, residential, and architecturally undistinguished\u201d fifteenth arrondissement in the 1930s.<\/p><\/div>\n

Strolling down the Avenue de Suffren, for example, Caillois notices an odd feature of the building that occupies the corner of the Rue de Laos. The side of the building, which, from one angle, looks perfectly normal, is revealed, upon further inspection, to be little more than a freestanding wall, too narrow for anyone to actually live in. For anyone human, that is. Although the toothing stones on the edge of the wall suggest that this building was once connected to another that has since collapsed\u2014because of age, or structural instability, or perhaps even to one of the bombs errantly dropped into the neighborhood by the RAF during World War Two\u2014Caillois hypothesizes that the building\u2019s design is no accident. Rather, it is the residence of supernatural \u201cbeings of infinite slimness\u201d or \u201cfloating beings from some unknown Limbo\u201d capable of flattening \u201cthemselves against a porous wall that absorbs them like blotting paper,\u201d an image suggested to him by the obscure symbolist poet L\u00e9on-Paul Fargue.<\/p>\n

Caillois is fascinated by these \u201cbeveled buildings,\u201d truly abundant in the Fifteenth, along with an unusually high incidence of blind walls, false fa\u00e7ades, and merely ornamental windows, each beloved of his phantoms. In the parts of the arrondissement developed during the postwar period, Caillois\u2019s attention is drawn instead to the ventilator shafts and drainage grates that dot the streets. These structures, built to clear away rainwater or aerate underground garages, have a secret function, according to him. Noting their uncanny similarity to some of the settings in the Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, he speculates that they may have been constructed to provide the entry points for an extraterrestrial invasion of our planet.<\/p>\n

\"61\"<\/a>It is only when, following the double-movement of diagonal science, you subtract supernatural elements like these from the Little Guide<\/em> that its own secret function is revealed. A book that might read at first like a mini mash-up novel\u2014The Painter of Modern Life and Zombies<\/em>\u2014turns out, upon further inspection, to be an oblique commentary on contemporary affairs. Shortly before Caillois began writing the Little Guide<\/em>, the French government made the monumental decision to discontinue its foreign worker program. For a quarter century, France had been recruiting millions of asylum seekers and economic refugees from Eastern Bloc countries, its poorer neighbors, and its former North African colonies to make up for a shortage of domestic labor. Most of these immigrants remained after the program was canceled; their number steadily increased, mostly through family reunification, sparking a crisis of national identity that France, to this day, has yet to resolve. The fifteenth arrondissement itself was home to many such families, until\u2014as Caillois ominously notes on the very first page\u2014the \u201cdilapidated dwellings\u201d where they lived were cleared to make way for the high-rises of the Front de Seine, and they were forced to relocate to the banlieues<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In this context, it becomes clear why the phantoms who take up residence in the Fifteenth are described as fugitives and refugees in search of \u201chideouts,\u201d \u201csafe havens\u201d and \u201casylum\u201d in the crowded anonymity of the big city; and why the ones who come in through the ventilator shafts on the Villa Croix-Nivert are not just aliens but \u201cforeign beings.\u201d To the members of the \u201curban hive\u201d among whom they have settled, they cause \u201cthe same irrational panic\u201d as vampires, witches, and devils once caused the inhabitants of medieval villages. True, these \u00e9trangers<\/em> are sometimes forced to infiltrate an unsuspecting human body in order to better blend in. But the process, as Caillois describes it, sounds less like demonic possession or alien abduction than assimilation to the way of life of the host.<\/em> In the end, the only thing that distinguishes one of Caillois\u2019s simulacra from a \u201cnative-born\u201d human is the former\u2019s \u201cadministrative nothingness\u201d: his lack of a birth certificate, a rent receipt, a mailing address, a tax number, a residence permit. What kind of phantom logically corresponds to the administrative, bureaucratic, technological civilization of Paris? A sans-papier<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Caillois never tired of observing that myths are generated to respond to the fundamental needs of a collective. His Little Guide<\/em>, however, is not so much an attempt to generate such a myth for modern Paris as it is a parody of the myths that already rule there, all the more effectively for going unrecognized. From the seemingly unpromising vantage point of the fifteenth arrondissement, Caillois managed to deduce something important indeed about the chimerical nature of national identity. The foreigner living in France is nothing but phantasmagorical being who \u201cwould never have emerged if he didn\u2019t correspond to the longings and aspirations of society. He is its fabulous, invulnerable projection; sometimes its mirror image.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ryan Ruby\u2019s translation of <\/em>A Little Guide to the 15th Arrondissement for the Use of Phantoms<\/a> was published earlier this year. H<\/em>is first novel, <\/em>The Zero and the One, is forthcoming. He lives in Berlin.<\/em>
<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an unremarkable section of Paris, Roger Caillois saw hiding places for \u201cfloating beings.\u201d Pity the Fifteenth! Paris\u2019s most populous arrondissement is also one of its least celebrated. Stretching from the Front de Seine high-rises in the northwest to the Tour de Montparnasse in the southeast, the Fifteenth is sleepy, residential, and architecturally undistinguished. Home […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":864,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[184,19112,13175,1657,15942,872,2275,2476,19115,7775,2161,270,19110,7403,2426,19111,19113,19108,17133,19109,8593,19114],"class_list":["post-88718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-1970s","tag-a-little-guide-to-the-fifteenth-arrondissement-for-the-use-of-phantoms","tag-aliens","tag-architecture","tag-french-literature","tag-georges-bataille","tag-immigration","tag-jorge-luis-borges","tag-marcel-mauss","tag-octavio-paz","tag-pablo-neruda","tag-paris","tag-phantoms","tag-philosophy","tag-politics","tag-psychogeography","tag-refugees","tag-roger-caillois","tag-silvina-ocampo","tag-the-fifteenth-arrondissement","tag-the-supernatural","tag-victoria-ocampo"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRoger Caillois\u2019s Fifteenth Arrondissement for Phantoms<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The French writer\u2019s 1970s book blends memoir, metafiction, literary criticism, architectural monograph, sociological studies, and ghost stories...\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/08\/11\/the-phantoms-of-the-fifteenth-arrondissement\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Phantoms of the Fifteenth Arrondissement by Ryan Ruby\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 11, 2015 \u2013 In an unremarkable section of Paris, Roger Caillois saw hiding places for \u201cfloating beings.\u201dPity the Fifteenth! 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