Teaching the Aesthetics of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: Perspectives on the Dynamics of Life, Art, and Representation

Thinking of aesthetics with reference to the Greek term aisthesis as both sense perception and the theory of the nature and perception of art and beauty, I read and teach Hope Mirrlees’s Paris as a particularly aesthetically-minded and meta-reflexive modernist poem that addresses questions about the dynamics of life, art, and representation. While Paris textualizes and aestheticizes Parisian reality, some of the poem’s formal modernist techniques make it particularly open and responsive to other modes of (visual, aural) representation. Paris features a thematic and aesthetic breadth that invites both diverse approaches to the poem and creative engagement with its multiple aesthetic dimensions.

Thus, when teaching a Master of Education class on “Modernist Poetry” in fall of 2018 at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, I combined traditional literary studies methods with creative projects.[1] In the section on Mirrlees’s poem, I asked student teams either to visualize or perform parts of Paris, or to write their own Berlin city poem.[2] My motivation to have the students work with the poem creatively was based firstly on Paris’s own status as a meta-reflexive, aesthetically broad poem that experiments with forms of representation, and secondly on my conviction that creative engagement with literary texts opens up new intellectual and affective experiences of and perspectives on their aesthetic qualities and thematic objectives. This project thus had a similar aim as Melanie Micir and Anna Preus’s digitizing project: to bring Paris to life in the classroom with the help of other media.[3] These transmedial projects made it possible to draw conclusions as to why the majority of student teams opted for a visualization of Paris but chose instead to perform Edith Sitwell’s Façade poems based on experiential insights into the different aesthetic qualities and ambitions of these modernist texts that might otherwise have been missed. They also proved to be a powerful reminder of why I enjoy experiencing modernist poetry.

In the following, I will elaborate on the poem’s characteristic combination of topical realism, aesthetization of Parisian reality, openness to other modes of representation, and self-reflexivity. I will read closely two passages from Paris that foreground its spatial-visual aspects and present two student teams’ visualizations. There will follow a section focusing on the poem’s auditive/sonic aspects – in my reading and a student’s audio version of the poem. I take the students’ creative interventions as answers to one of Paris’ central questions: What happens when modernists/we conceptualize, represent, and create reality in (terms of) art?

Topical realism, aesthetic openness, and meta-reflexivity: Some characteristics of Paris

Paris is very specific in its references and allusions to Parisian post-war reality in spring 1919. As Nina Enemark puts it, it is an “antiquarian act that Paris performs in recording a moment in history.”[4] Similarly, Sean Pryor reads Paris as an “occasional poem,” showing, as Julia Briggs has done as well, that many of the events referenced in the poem can be dated: the Peace Conference began on 18th January 1919, the eight-hour-working day was granted by the Chambre des Députés on 17th April, and Easter Sunday fell on the 20th April.[5] Likewise, many of the streets, places, and buildings can be clearly located. It is the poem’s historical and “topical realism” that invites us as readers to get out a map of Paris and trace (at least the beginning of) the journey the poem’s speaker undertakes.[6] Paris, too, encourages us to look (online) for the images referenced, such as the historical advertising posters, the paintings, and the city views.[7]

Paris not only refers to the material reality of 1919 Paris; it also aestheticizes this reality in a number of remarkable ways. Firstly, Paris aims at textualizing the aesthetic-sensory experience of the city—its layout, the speed by which it is traversed, and its sounds and images. As Megan Beech writes of Paris’s sensory density, “(t)here is a kind of visual and oral onslaught of impressions of city life.”[8] Paris can be termed what Mirrlees would later call an “aural kaleidoscope”: the “graphic iconicity” and painterly visions combine with its ontological and material dimensions as a poem printed on paper and a text read (aloud).[9] These aesthetic experiments become possible because of what we consider to be recognizable modernist formal features: in its use of free verse and shifts to prose lines, Paris abandons conventional generic elements such as metre, rhyme, or stanzas.[10] The poem makes use of a cut-and-paste technique that gives up syntax and instead assembles phrases the reader has to identify as snippets of conversations, fragments of thoughts, or glimpses of printed text on signs and posters, which the reader must then re-organise in a meaningful way. Paris is “an outward facing poem” whose “form becomes peculiarly open, agile, and responsive” to non-poetic forms.[11]

The second way in which Paris aestheticizes Parisian reality is by conceptualizing it in terms of art; it refers to artistic means and practices, features institutions of high and popular art and culture, names various artists, and references a multitude of art works and their materials. For example, the battlefield is presented as a dramatic performance of a Grand Guignol overthrowing the generic rules of tragedy, budding leaves perform a butterfly ballet, and agricultural furrows are turned into sculptured folds (lines 181–182, 128–130, 86–87). As Julia Briggs has pointed out, “Paris itself is also recreated as a series of pictures”: the Tour Eiffel is flattened into an etching and the demobbed soldiers’ uniforms are the signature colour of an eighteenth century fine English china manufacturer.[12] Parisian reality is conceptualized, created, and framed in terms and products of art. A highly self-reflexive poem, Paris thus performs its own status as a work of art and makes a strong claim that all forms of representation are creative acts of aesthetization. Though clearly partaking of its contemporaries’ concern with representation, Mirrlees’s poem does not read like a text exemplifying a “crisis of representation”; rather, Paris reads (and looks) like a celebration of a poetic text’s aesthetic potential.[13]

Aesthetic experience and experiment: space, speed, and silhouettes

One of the most obvious aesthetic features of Paris is its use of typography and spacing. The capitalized words on the first page (NORD-SUD / ZIG-ZAG, for example) are the text a traveler on the metro would see and read when riding in 1919 on the Nord-Sud line from Ru du Bac to Concorde.[14] Words in capital letters represent printed text on public display: the words, firm and static, indicate the authority of print and the strong presence of advertising.

What the text does not present are the images that go with the brand names on the posters—the Zouave advertising Zig-Zag cigarette paper, the people on the adverts producing or consuming Cacao Blooker.[15] This opening moment makes you want to take out the metro plan to check where the poem is travelling and to look online for images of the historical advertising posters, thus inviting you to engage with the visuals of Paris’s “topical realism” (as did the student teams in their visualizations of Paris—more on this below).

Furthermore, Paris aims at presenting metropolitan space on page space. With regard to the poem’s reflection on aesthetic conceptualizations of reality, the spatial-visual representation of the Tuileries is particularly interesting:

In this experiment with page space, when the “layout of [the] description mimics the gaps in the layout of the gardens themselves,” the poem approaches the “graphic iconicity” of concrete poetry and visual forms of representation.[17] Accordingly, the voice of the poem’s speaker holds “the painters” responsible for the spaced-out status of the Tuileries. The passage has a doubly tranquilizing effect on its readers, then: we might be staring at the text’s layout just as the painters stare at the Tuileries, and when reading the text we do it at a slow, almost trance-like pace (as the student’s audio version of Paris included below renders audible). The description of the effects of the painters’ long gaze, the simultaneous focus on the spatial layout of the text, and the effect that the layout has on the poem’s oral dimension build up to a meta-reflexive comment on the poem’s status as art and on art’s potential to change our perception of reality.

The prose paragraph that follows, by contrast, is all about fast movement:

The alliteration of “boys”/“black,” the reoccurrence of the consonant “l,” and the reduplication in “round and round” mimic the carrousel’s repetitive circuit and the dizziness the boys experience. The word “horse” connects the tree and the boys while the phonetically intricate phrase “newly furled leaves” suggests their curved shape and closed folds. In these moments, the poem exhibits its potential to visually represent space and to textualize speed and movement, highlighting its status as a creative product that performs and effects different perceptions of reality.

While the Tuileries passages spotlight a poetic text’s potential to represent space on the page and to influence its temporal-aural/oral dimension, there is, towards the end of the poem, a city scene carefully crafted to emulate a picture-like quality:

The carriages and people seen from a distance against the setting sun are metaphorized as flies taking small bites from an apricot. The distant perspective reduces the central heavenly body to the size of a fruit and human beings to the size of insects. This metaphor presents the Parisians on Pont Solférino as harmless yet potentially annoying insects that have no productive purpose; rather, they function as what is called in art history a “vanitas-image.”[18] Alongside this natural metaphor with its notions of transience, vanity, and the everyday is placed the artistic practice of silhouettes: “Fiacres and little people” are “black and two-dimensional.” Seen against the setting sun, the Parisians lose their colours and three-dimensionality. They are flattened into an image on paper and “look like / silhouettes of Louis-Philippe citizens.” An artistic technique that reduces an image to a mostly black solid shape with clear contours displayed against a lighter background, silhouettes could be life- or pocket size, framed, and sent to friends—like souvenirs. Silhouette portraits were finely cut, showing details of physiognomy and of dress in its contours.[19]

Mirrlees employs carefully crafted verbal means to create this evening scene in the form of a silhouette.[20] The two colors are named by simple adjectives—apricot and black—marking the clear contrast between the dark silhouettes and their lighter background. “Against” and “Across” mark a contrast and a transverse position, structuring the scene. The diminutive size is simply stated—“little people”—and presented in a witty metaphor. An acoustic-verbal semblance of the priest’s large hat and the finely cut contours of the silhouette—“a broad-brimmed hat and a tippeted pelisse”—is created through the alliteration, the long vowel, and the two stressed syllables in the first and the many plosives with high, short vowels in the second adjectival phrase. The text again plays with its reader by emphasizing that what we are reading is an artefact conceiving of reality in terms of art.

Student Interventions: Visualising Paris

The visual interpretations of Paris by two student teams in my class, too, are carefully crafted artefacts, both aiming at the multitude of themes and images the poem references. Both visualizations present the profusion of places, posters, paintings, objects, buildings, and people that turn up in Paris. The teams use cut-and-paste techniques—digitally and manual-materially—to arrange the images. This technique is a result of the collective (i.e. teamwork) aspect built into the assignment as well as Paris’s own fragmented make-up, which suggests a collage rather than a uniform painting. The visualizations thus emulate one of the poem’s most prominent techniques.

The first visualization works with digital images, arranging them so closely that they overlap, suggesting the density of Parisian experience and the layering of past and present that informs Paris’ aesthetic. The digital collage exemplifies, to recall Beech’s words, the “visual . . . onslaught of impressions of city life” (72). The images used are a combination of actual images referenced in the poem—the advertising posters of Cacao Blooker, Zig-Zag cigarette paper, and Dubonnet—and images that supply the visuals to the textual mentions of objects, people, and places (such as tobacco, chocolate, lilies-of-the-valley and dog roses, flies, memorial plaques, and religious artefacts). There are a number of photographs—historical and contemporary—showing street life, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, metro stations and trains, the Seine, which capture the “topical realism” of Paris. The black and white photographs, the prints, paintings, and etchings aim at a historical perspective, yet there are a few images that indicate that this is a twenty-first century Paris-intervention (the glass pyramid added to the courtyard of the Louvre in the 1980s, for example, or the 2012 film Anna Karenina starring Keira Knightly), thus creating an effect of simultaneity of past and present. In the poem, the images are referenced and evoked in temporal succession, in the digital collage, the images are present instantaneously: the different temporal and spatial dimensions of text and image become immediately clear.

The second visualization has a slightly different focus and uses different techniques:

This intervention acknowledges an unidentified human presence as central to the poem, for there is the abstract shape of a human body—head and torso—drawn with a blue felt pen on a white poster. The inside of the body is left almost blank, but the poem’s lines in first person (and others) have been inscribed in the same color, marked as direct speech. Furthermore, there are lines from Paris handwritten on white paper, cut out in the form of speech bubbles and glued in between cut-and-paste images at the edge of the body, referencing a comic convention and highlighting the oral dimension of the poem. Some of the speech bubbles are placed as if figures on the pictures had voiced them but many are not, thus showcasing the difficulty of clearly identifying individual speakers to the poem’s free-floating voices.

The pictures in this intervention are grouped so as to retain some of the poem’s narrative logic: a photograph of President Wilson is accompanied by a “grinning” dog, photographs of flowers are grouped around a photo of “gypsies,” a statuesque head of Hesiod is placed next to the photograph of a cock (1.126, fig. 4, 1. 109, fig. 3). So, while attempting to retain part of the poem’s content and structure, the students’ arrangement of images connects disconnected fragments and creates new combinations: the images of Hesiod and the cock, for example, are coupled with the image of a male classical statue with a pigeon on its head (lines 28–27). These choices foreground some of the poem’s central tensions: between the classical tradition and Paris’s present, and between art and the natural world. Like the poem, this visualization focuses on a central human presence which is surrounded by, merges with, and processes a multitude of objects, places, paintings, people, and voices.

Sounds, voices, music: Paris’ acoustic dimension

These voices are central to Paris’ project of textualizing the sonic dimension of the metropolis.[21] The poem registers phrases of direct speech that you would have heard on the streets of Paris, verbal utterances marked by the use of italics, such as “Vous descendez Madame?” (line 14). Mirrlees uses typographic means to represent this form of sense impression and communication, the italic type suggesting the more flexible and volatile form of oral communication. The poem thus registers the laments of war widows, the shouts of the newspaper boys, and the voices of American soldiers (lines 188–189, 392–393, 396, 428–429). These voices recorded “verbatim” encourage our reading the poem out loud, activating its sonic dimension and performative potential. These effects are enhanced by the multitude of acoustic phenomena that reverberate throughout the poem: “the small dry voice / As of an old nun chanting Masses,” the Muslim evening prayer in Algeria, the hooting of taxis, and the sexually charged cries of “tom-cats in a rut”(lines 350–351, 395, 412, 419–420). The rattling of the metro is onomatopoetically represented in the “Brekekekek coax coax” of Aristophanes’ frogs, while the majestic sound of the bells of Nôtre-Dame-des-Champs is rendered in three present participles capturing their booming sound: “droning . . . droning . . . droning” (lines 10, 378).

In this soundscape, “One often hears a cock,” so the poet tells us. The cock’s crow, its rhythm mimicked in the short and long syllables, is presented as solmization, as a Major third: “Do do do miii” (lines 77, 78). It is turned into a musical practice that is at the same time the ancient poet Hesiod’s lament for his lost artistic occupation (lines 79–82). At this point, the narrative voice asks for attention—“hark!”—inviting the readership-audience to listen for the poem’s culturally laden sounds (line 82). This gesture reaches beyond the poem’s textual boundary, stressing its nature as a sensory-aesthetic experience. A similar gesture, a shushing sound “Husssh” (line 342), introduces another instance of musical representation and performance. There are eight bars of music from the aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Georg Friedrich Händel’s opera Rinaldo (1711). This non-poetic text represents yet another acoustic-artistic phenomenon and at the same time invites the poem’s reader to hum or sing the music (the aria’s words are not printed). The poem thus incorporates another art form’s textual materiality and highlights its own “musical” nature as a literary text to be experienced acoustically.

This is what one of my students, Victoria Michaelis, aims at: her sound file offers a sonic experience of Paris. The piece opens with the soundscape of a metro-platform which is interrupted by a siren and the fast, blasting automatic sound of machineguns reminiscent of World War II. These sounds turn into the rattling of metro carriages and the hooting of cars, before changing into a slow jazz music piece with piano and saxophone that introduces the lines of Mirrlees’s text: “Rain / The Louvre is melting into mist . . . / The Seine, old-egotist, meanders imperturbably towards the sea” (lines 264–269). The jazz music highlights the personification of the Seine as a character with a swaying, meandering, leisurely gait.

Student X uses a number of techniques to create this soundscape of Paris: she integrates music and sounds referenced in the poem, such as jazz, Handel’s aria, and the noise of traffic and rain; she adds sound effects at certain textual cues—for example, while reading the poem’s words “dreams / They are the blue ghosts of king-fishers,” a bird song sets in; she cues a choral recording of The Marseillaise at the line, “dream / Of a gigantic sinister mujik…”; and she amplifies an echo effect at the first person line, “The Bois bores me” (lines 272, 284–85,  61).

In this reimagined soundscape, the word “dream” often comes up, and Student X’s particular choices of sounds and music highlight the dream-like quality of Paris. After the aggressively noisy passage of traffic and war, the meandering and melancholic as well as the swinging and leisurely aspects of the poem are made audible. The soundscape, too, offers a meta-reflexive comment: just after a reading of the line “Whatever happens someday it will look beautiful,” a passage from a recording of Handel’s aria sets in. This combination of text and music points exactly at the beautifying effect that the poem ascribes—either approvingly or critically—to (historical) paintings.[22] The sound file shows how this principle is applied to music: Almira’s lament for her lost liberty is aestheticized—and beautified—in a slow, grave piece of vocal music.

Paris and these student projects highlight the fact that artistic representation of life—of “whatever happens”—is always an aesthetization. While each art form has their intrinsic limits, potentials, and specific conventions, Paris shows how a poem can gesture visually and acoustically beyond its own borders to invite creative engagement. The student teams’ interpretations show how conceptualizing Parisian collages and a soundtrack entailed not only making creative choices about specific means and techniques in order to generate certain aesthetic effects, but also analytical and contextual choices that would realize their specific vision of Paris. All three creative products performed and celebrated their potential to go beyond the textual and historical reality of Paris, allowing the students to experience and reflect on the dynamics of life, art, and representation in their own historical moment.