‘An anti-flâneuse kind of existence’: In conversation with Lauren Elkin
.
You began writing Scaffolding in 2007. How did it develop?
There were just a lot of different aspects of my life coming together at the same time to make a kind of novelistic stew. There was what we were reading in my graduate seminar, which was a lot of Jacques Lacan. Specifically, his mirror stage essay where he talks about that originary moment when the baby sees itself in the mirror and understands itself as separate to its mother. For Lacan, this is the moment when the child comes into language and subjectivity, and into their individuality, through the loss of that previous, almost infinite feeling of continuity, care and safety. I was reading that, and then reading Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, The House in Paris, which was really inspiring in terms of its construction. It’s also a novel in three parts, with parts one and three set in the present day, the mid-1930s, and part two reaching back ten years, to look at the events that created that situation. It’s also a book about adultery and forbidden love across the English Channel, between London and Paris.
There’s this amazing moment when the young woman at the centre of the novel says something to her aunt that really stayed with me: ‘People must hope so much when they tear streets up and fight at barricades. But, whoever wins, the streets are laid again and the trams start running again.’ That struck me as such an interesting way to think about May 1968 in Paris: These big events that almost brought the county to a halt over a period of about a month, but then afterward it felt like not a lot had changed. I was really curious about what it might have felt like to live in the aftermath of that revolution – which was possibly a complete failure.
I was also living in this tiny apartment in the fifth arrondissement. It was already very cramped, claustrophobic, and then one day the scaffolding went up, because they had to reface the building. My life became, on a phenomenological level, really small and difficult. I had the idea to write a novel about a woman who had just had a miscarriage. I had not at this point in my life been pregnant, but I had a friend who had a miscarriage and something just took root in my mind. So, it all came together – this weird blend of my reading and my life and other people’s lives.
You were writing this novel over a long period of time, alongside publishing works of criticism and translation. What was it like having it in the background of more public projects like Art Monsters (2023) and Flâneuse (2016)? Did they affect each other?
Actually, the first book I ever published was a novel set in Venice [Une année à Venise], which came out in France in 2012. I wrote it in English, and was shopping it in 2008, just as the world economy collapsed and no one wanted to take a chance on a debut novelist, writing about Venice of all things. So, I put it in a drawer and then through this really weird, circuitous route a friend of mine gave it to her editor in France, and it was translated and came out there. So, I had this sense of myself as a novelist from the get-go. Everything else I was doing was just to make money to support myself. I trained as an academic, then once I had my PhD I couldn’t find an academic job, because, you know, there aren’t any! I had to try then and do something else. I decided to write a public-facing non-fiction book because they give you the money upfront, as opposed to fiction where you have to write the thing first. It ended up taking 16 years to be able to authorise myself to write fiction, to feel like it was something I could devote any time to.
The novel begins during a period of serious paralysis for the narrator, Anna, a psychoanalyst on leave after suffering a miscarriage. She and her husband’s new apartment in Belleville needs renovating, while the building itself is about to go through a disruptive restoration called ‘the ravalement’. I wonder if you could speak about your choice to begin writing from within paralysis?
I think I probably felt paralysed at that point in my own life, when I was a young graduate student and didn’t know what the future was going to be. I felt trapped in this apartment, that I couldn’t afford to leave and I could barely afford to pay, because it was something like 800 euros a month, which was insanely high at that time, but for various reasons I felt I needed my own space and couldn’t be cohabitating. I had roommates for a few years when I first moved to Paris, and they would always be really flighty and go after a few months. I was like, ‘is it me driving them away?!’ I did have a small dog, so maybe the dog was annoying. Anyway, I needed to be on my own, with my dog, and this felt like the best I could do, I had to just keep putting one foot in front of the other: finish my PhD and then see what was on the other side of that. I hadn’t experienced the particular kind of paralysis that Anna feels in the book, but an analogical kind, of not knowing what I was doing with my life and just sort of floundering.
I don’t know if it’s very interesting to read fiction where you can feel that the author is judging the character.
Different forms of sexual encounters thread the novel. There is Clémentine’s belief in non-monogamy, extramarital affairs, relationships between university professors and their students, relationships with age-gaps, even abuse. You handle these dynamics with seriousness but without judgment. What was the process of toeing that line?
I think I probably just have an overly earnest and serious viewpoint on the world! On the judgment question, I don’t know if it’s very interesting to read fiction where you can feel that the author is judging the character. It’s so important that the novel be a space of non-judgment, for the readers to take from it what they will. My training before I was an academic was in theatre, so I read a lot of Aristotle – he has this idea of theatre as playing a cathartic, social role; it’s a space where you can go as a viewer to see things enacted you wouldn’t necessarily do in your own life. That stayed with me in terms of my approach to fiction.
It was also important to me to be thinking of these approaches to sexual relationships not as the characters’ firmly-held convictions but as something they were working through. Clémentine, for instance, isn’t totally sure what she thinks about monogamy. She’s trying out this idea of non-monogamy, but she’s struggling with it. There’s this moment in the book when she sleeps with another woman and then can’t go home to her boyfriend and so comes to stay with Anna, and she says something like ‘it’s all fine; the relationship can absorb it.’ But she’s still unsure. By the end of the novel, she’s having some kind of nervous breakdown. She seems to have been tolerating what is happening between Anna and Jonathan, but then by the end of the book, in a way, it’s clear she really hasn’t been metabolising it, and she reclaims her boyfriend. It’s not always clear what Clémentine’s ethics are, but what is clear is that she’s trying to figure them out, and possibly biting off more than she can chew in terms of what she claims to be comfortable with.
Paris has such a central place in the English-speaking imagination, particularly in the imagination of writers. But Scaffolding takes this sense into a more rooted social history: the gentrification of Belleville, feminist movements in both the 1970s and the present day, questions of Jewish assimilation and identity. Were you conscious of Paris’ aesthetic appeal, and did this factor into your portrayal of it as something quite different?
I was and I wasn’t, in the sense that it’s just where I was living, so I was writing about where I was. But obviously I know it has that appeal, I know what Paris means to people. It was important to me, though, to also be writing about a real lived experience of Paris, which is very different from the ‘macaron and Marie Antoinette’ fantasy, which is a very surface level experience of Paris. It is a real experience – it’s not like people are hallucinating, that’s their idea of Paris, but it’s not the way people who live there experience daily life. Sometimes it can be very difficult. Sometimes it felt I was in an abusive relationship with Paris. The number of times I cried after a meeting at the visa office… I would be like, ‘I can’t take it, okay, alright, I’ll take some more.’
This is the central question the book is asking: how do people live together?
Belleville struck me as a really good place to set the novel, partly because it’s a part of Paris that I don’t think a lot of people know very well. It’s located at the intersection of four different arrondissements – you can walk for two minutes and be in the nineteenth, twentieth, tenth or eleventh arrondissements. There’s just something about the psychogeography of that particular place, where you have people from all different cultures coming together: Belleville played a large role over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in terms of welcoming Eastern European immigrants, Jews mostly, who were fleeing antisemitism, and then more recently people from North Africa, West Africa, China. It has such an interesting history, in terms of all these different layers of people coming together and cohabitating, and this is, in the end, the central question the book is asking: how do people live together?
It’s been about a year since Scaffolding was published. A few of the reviews I’ve seen have characterised it as a ‘critic’s novel’, or as ‘cerebral’. I wonder how you feel about this. Is there such a thing as ‘the critic’s novel’, and, did you write one?
[Laughs] I love the idea of that. I think the reception was influenced by the fact that I’ve been writing nonfiction and ‘cerebral’ nonfiction prior to that. And the book is shaped very much by the fact that in researching it I spent a lot of time with Lacan, and people like Gisèle Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir, and just all of these different elements of French intellectual culture which made it into the book. So, yes, it probably is a critic’s novel just in the sense that I am a critic, and so the stuff I think about and encounter is what ended up in the book. I’m trying to think of whether people would say the same thing about writers like Deborah Levy or Marguerite Duras. Maybe we read Deborah Levy’s novels with theatre in mind because we know she trained in theatre. Or Duras we read with cinema because we know she’s a filmmaker as well. Maybe you will always be read in the context of what people know about you.
Did Scaffolding find its way into those critical works, then? I feel like people always talk about nonfiction permeating into fiction and not the other way around.
Oh, that’s really interesting. I don’t think it did. It’s so funny, I remember years ago when I was writing Art Monsters feeling really envious of novelists, and longing to be writing Scaffolding instead. With Art Monsters, or any kind of seriously researched works of nonfiction, you have to read like ten books to write one sentence, and with fiction you can just write. Then, when I was writing Scaffolding, I was feeling nostalgic for writing nonfiction, for the clarity of making an argument and drawing on sources and constructing from that. Even if it’s something formally experimental, it’s concrete, you’re talking about something real in the world, whereas with fiction you’re inventing a world. I had a hard time ending Scaffolding because I felt like as a work of fiction it needed to be making some kind of pronouncement on what it means to be human, and having it all mean something very profound. I found that really challenging. So, I don’t know if writing the fiction influenced the nonfiction insofar as that whenever I’m writing one, I’m sort of wishing that I was writing the other.
Along this line, you need only to look to the school of postcritique to see how Freud, and psychoanalytic forms of enquiry more widely, have been rejected in literary criticism. For someone like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, it’s ‘paranoid reading’, for Rita Felski it’s ‘suspicious’. Susan Sontag called Freud ‘aggressive’ in his method of interpretations. Scaffolding, though, brings psychoanalysis into the matter of fiction itself. What makes it a compelling frame for you?
That’s a great question. I think I read Lacan as a critique of Freud, and that is probably vulgarised, because Lacan saw himself as making a return to Freud. But I think of Freud’s mode of operation as trying to uncover some kind of originary moment which embedded itself in the person’s psyche. This gives Freud the opportunity to construct a narrative about what happened to this person, and why they are acting the way they’re acting. Like, ‘oh, that time when I saw my father’s best friend put his hand on my mother’s ass is the thing, now I understand I can move forward with my life.’ I think Sontag was taking issue with that: the idea that there’s something behind the story that can be pointed at and isolated.
In my understanding of Lacan, there’s nothing ‘behind’ the story; the story is all you have, which is language. You’re never going to get to the thing which makes you feel the way you feel, because that’s just what being a person is about. Even if the mirror stage doesn’t apply to the specific details of your upbringing, we do have to accept our fundamental aloneness as a kind of prerequisite for being a person. Nobody else can be in your consciousness, and you can’t be in anyone else’s. All that we have to make sense of our condition is language, and Lacan, as I understand him, is trying to be attuned to the ways in which we narrativise our experience. To think about psychoanalysis in the frame of the novel was interesting to me for the same reason, because novels are also made of narratives. When the novel begins Anna is having a professional crisis, thinking ‘how can I go to work if work is just listening for the way people repeat themselves?’ But I think it’s still important to listen for people to repeat themselves. Not to project a reading onto it, but just observe that it happens.
Seeing as this is for The London Magazine, I feel the need to be competitive: How does London compare to Paris as a city to walk in? To write in?
London can’t compete. Let’s be real. But seriously – I think that is partly just to do with the fact that I became who I am in Paris. Had I come of age here, it might be different. I lived in Paris from my early twenties to my early forties, and it’s still home. I go back as often as I can, and one day we’ll live there again. That said, I’ve settled into London; I have a house here, with a back garden and a child. I have a very, you know, suburban middle-aged kind of existence here. I think it’s been good for me. I don’t know what middle age would be like in Paris. I wouldn’t have as much space, that’s for sure. And I can’t really be out exploring the city, because I have a six-year-old and parenting is so exhausting. I’m in bed by ten every night. I don’t have the time or energy to go wandering, so, it’s like an anti-flâneuse kind of existence. It’s sad on the one hand, but for this period of my life, when my child is very young, I’ve accepted that my life revolves around the house, and for that London is really lovely. I’m very grateful to be here and to have this kind of life. It’s an extreme privilege. But, yes, my heart is in Paris.
What are you reading at the moment?
I’m reading a lot at the moment, so I will give one nonfiction and one fiction recommendation. One amazing book is Adam Moss’s The Work of Art. He used to be the editor of New York Magazine and then left to be a painter. The book came out a couple of years ago, and he interviews different artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians about a work of theirs and the process by which it came into being. I’ve just started it: The first chapter is an interview with Kara Walker about her work, A Subtlety, which I talk about in Art Monsters, this massive sugar sculpture of a Black woman as a sphinx she did for the Domino factory in Brooklyn, before they tore it down. He has Walker talk him through the process from the initial commission, to how she got to the final point of the installation. She shows him a PowerPoint she used to sort through her ideas. It’s an amazing peek into other people’s creative processes.
The other thing I’m reading is The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, which I have actually never read before, and I realised I needed to plug that gap in my education. There’s so much dystopian fiction right now, I felt I needed to plug this hole in my education, and see where so much of it is stemming from. A while back when I was teaching creative writing, I had a lot of students who wrote dystopian stuff, and I asked them once, ‘why don’t you just write about the real world?’ They were like, ‘this is the real world!’ It made me wonder, is this something I should be thinking about more in my own work? Is the dystopian novel the appropriate form for this moment – when what is described in that novel feels shockingly ever more possible in the US, and actually not out of the question elsewhere? I’m not ready yet to write about projected worlds, but the gap is feeling really narrow – the kids were right.
.
.
Image credits: Sophie Davidson.
Lauren Elkin is a novelist, critic and translator, working both in and between English and French. She is the author of Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (2023) and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City (2016). Her most recent novel, Scaffolding, follows the relationships of two couples living in the same apartment in Paris, one in the present day and one in 1972.
Rosa Appignanesi writes essays and criticism. She is beginning a DPhil at Oxford, looking at the influence of clinical psychology on reading practices at the turn of the twentieth-century.
To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.