The Flaneur
Edmund White
Edmund White has written two recent novels (The Married Man, The Farewell Symphony), an illustrated memoir (Sketches from Memory), and two biographies (the concise Marcel Proust, the epic Genet) set largely in Paris. It seems inevitable that the amazingly prolific White (Is his drag name Joyce Carol Oates?) has just delivered his own witty version of a guidebook to the city that has so stamped his creative and personal life over the past two decades (White lived in Paris for over 15 years, beginning in 1983).
The Flaneur is a chic, charmant, and surprisingly thought-provoking little volume. It's not the sort of guide book that identifies trendy restaurants or momentary hot spots. The Flaneur (the word means an aimless stroller, directed only by his own curiousity) is more like a philosophical key to the city, ideal for the sort of traveller who wants to attune himself to the local aura, to set enough tidbits of historical and social history afloat in his head that he will have a poetic sense of the place and feel familiar, even upon arrival.
The Flaneur is the first in a new series, The Writer and The City, being commissioned by Bloomsbury USA. If the quality of this first installment is kept up, the series will earn an honored spot on travelers' bookshelves. No others, however, are likely to have the gay-centric perspective of The Flaneur. In his single chapter specifically dedicated to gay-identity (or the lack thereof) in France, White transcends the travel narrative genre altogether to offer a compact, complex nugget of food for thought, an intellectual truffle if you will:
"The French believe that a society is not a federation of special interest groups, but rather an impartial state that treats each citizen—regardless of his or her gender, sexual orientation, religion or colour—as an abstract universal individual. For the French any subgroup of citizens is a diminishment of human equality...as the social commentator Michael Pollak has put it, 'In France specific groups linked together by shared identity are generally perceived as illegitimate.'"
White notes that while, on the one hand, fag-bashing is rare-to-nonexistent and gay couples are socially accepted in generally straight circles, the lack of gay-identification means that France has only one significant gay bookstore, Paris' Les Mots a la bouche, and that, through the 90s, there were no non-pornographic gay periodicals published in the country. There is also no meaningful gay political lobby.
While White argues that the French focus on respect for the individual (and for individual privacy) is defensible, he wisely points out the lack of what is often scorned as 'political correctness' and favorable treatment for 'special interests' has led to poor mobilization against AIDS. From esteemed philosopher Michel Foucault (who died of AIDS) to the largest national AIDS organization in the country, there has been significant resistance—at significant cost—to creating prevention education programs designed to communicate well to gay men.
In his other chapters, chock full of fascinating details on the history of black life in Paris, the tiny—but stalwart—population of Royalists in the city, obscure museums and the art of "flan"-ing itself, White offers a lively, perambulating style, more intimate and less ornately wrought than some of his recent fiction. But for a gay reader, that one chapter will stand out from the rest, challenging one's romantic perceptions of Paris and its freedoms with a paradox that will haunt and vex long after the rest of the book's pleasures have faded.
