American writers in Paris: Anaïs Nin - Houseboat - ; James Baldwin – Equal in Paris –

Résumé du document

“Houseboat” is the initial short story in a collection entitled Under a Glass Bell, published in 1944 by Anaïs Nin. It presents us with the complex relationship the artist carries on with Paris – a relationship made of both attraction and repulsion. It also gives us an insight into the realm of fancy and the artist's fantasy.

Extraits

[...] The mere rolling of her houseboat opens the doors of pleasure and gives her the feeling she has cast off the moorings. The artist wishes her dreams could help her to express her unutterable life and to reach fulfilment. To some extent her imaginary travels are like potions able to bewitch the mind; they are the seeds of an enduring wellbeing as opposed to “dust flowers destroyed by a gust of wind”. After a night of reverie she feels emboldened as if she had landed on island of the world is enchanted again: everything seems cleaner, brighter and more wholesome. [...]

[...] Between fiction and reality: so unbelievable that James Baldwin is increasingly disoriented and lost. The situation he is experiencing is in no way similar to anything he has ever seen before; it can only be compared to pieces of fiction: the author steadily refers to movies The cells of the prefecture, which it is almost impossible either to sit or to lie remind us of the notorious prisons built by King Louis XI in the fifteenth century; the “maze of steps and corridors” as well as the shed where very scrapings of the Paris streets” are penned in sound like an allusion to the Balzacian descriptions of the Conciergerie in his famous “Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes”. [...]

[...] This is emphasized by the play of light: coins of light and shadow waltz and the houseboat “bathes in reflections”. The “gusts of wind” and the complex “shivers” that run through the river also fuel the feeling that everything is fluid and changeable. At any moment everything can “slip into anger”. The only clear-cut boundary is the one which separates the Quays from the packed avenues; on the contrary the gaps between misery and wealth, morality and crime, dream and nightmare are frequently bridged. [...]

[...] The old, unstable barge Anaïs Nin uses as a house is like a refuge. It floats where out of the world”: as soon as she is inside of the boat the author longer knows the name of the river or the city”. Only there finds she solace and feels she preserved from the predatory city. It may be a fragile home it is not well tied to the wharf and could be wretched apart at any moment but this fragility is precisely what frees the artist from the city's constraint. [...]

[...] It presents us with a traumatic experience of the author so traumatic that Baldwin is surprised and nearly disappointed that it does not leave tangible marks on his body Paris and the Parisians: a rendez-vous manqué In 1949 Paris has not recaptured its lost prestige yet. Symbolically enough, a citizen of the world” presents us with the dilapidated, gloomy neighbourhoods of the French capital. Traces of former luxury and affluence can still be distinguished - the hotelkeeper, for instance, tries to maintain a façade of refinement: he greets his guests with stately inclination of the head” and wears an old, but elegant suit. Nevertheless the district where Baldwin lives “abounds in hideous establishments” and is teeming with impoverished dropouts. [...]