Synecdoche and Childlike Wonder

I left for Paris this past October expecting to be disappointed. Surely, I reasoned, the mythology surrounding the city – developed on my part, admittedly, through the near-obsessive reading of the Wikipedia pages for Ernest Hemingway and Mordecai Richler – was rooted precisely in that: myth. Last year at the University of Toronto, before I decided to take time away from school to write and to travel, I was taught a new word (it was not the only one). That word was “synecdoche,” and it is useful in understanding my attitude toward Paris before my departure.

“Synecdoche” is defined as a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to refer to the whole (i.e. “all hands on deck,” with “hands” referring to sailors.) The part in my case was the aforementioned Wikipedia pages, and my underline-riddled copy of Hemingway’s memoir of his time in Paris, A Moveable Feast; the whole was Paris, the actual place, as it existed at the time of my visit.

I had, in my imagination, an image of Paris as derived from the pages of Hemingway’s book, complete with silhouettes of perched fisherman emerging from a dreamlike fog along the banks of the Seine and café terraces that sent out Christmas-light comfort into the night.

And yet I knew that, upon arriving in Paris, my idea of the place would be shattered. The problem with synecdoche as a concept is that there is an inherent gap between the whole and the part that is used to represent it. In that gap there is room for any number of things, all of them capable of distorting the assumptions one has made about the whole. I could only hope that the gap between my idea of Paris and the city itself was not so wide as to be disappointing.

I arrived at Pearson International Airport in Toronto still not entirely sure what the purpose of my journey was (much to the annoyance of my relatives, I’m sure). I had not travelled very much before and, being free for a while at least from the responsibilities of school and employment, I felt compelled to leave home. More than that, I suspect that my trip was, at least in part, an attempt to rekindle that old childlike sense of wonder before adulthood claimed it completely.

I rode into Paris from the airport in a taxi, passing through the not-so-beautiful outskirts and growing increasingly excited as the buildings became taller and older and whiter and the streets became narrower. The plan had been to call the landlord of the studio apartment I would be renting from the airport and arrange a meeting, but I had been unable to figure out the payphones. Feeling foolish, I paid the taxi driver, including a little extra in exchange for the use of his cell phone. Thankfully, I was not far from my destination, and waited only for a few minutes – sitting on my suitcase, observing the excess of adult novelty stores in my new neighbourhood – before the landlord arrived. He took me to my temporary new home and guided me quickly through the signing of some papers before leaving me, surprisingly (oddly enough) and completely alone.

I could not (and still cannot) speak French. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway comes to Paris with a female companion, later coming into contact with a community of expatriate artists and writers that includes F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, and Gertrude Stein (among others.) My hopes of meeting other English-speaking people interested in writing were lofty, and rightfully so: the people I did meet in Paris were mostly fellow tourists, and did not stick around for long. I ended up staying for nearly three months, and though my loneliness was alleviated by the occasional visit from friends and family, it was those times when I was alone that were most fruitful.

My intention had been to work on writing a book while in Paris (much like Hemingway had), and I did precisely that, completing it quickly and just as quickly dismissing it as juvenilia. My writing was not (and still is not) developed enough to be writing a book, and so I spent the majority of my time wandering aimlessly, unable to speak to anyone and growing bored with my own thoughts.

But that first day as I walked I came across a number of landmarks I recognized from A Moveable Feast: the green bookstalls along the quays of the Seine; the Café de Flore, where Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus all reportedly used to write; the Luxembourg Gardens, with its citrus-coloured flowers and white statues; even a fisherman. The beauty of the place was overwhelming, and I found myself experiencing the same sensation I used to get from reading a good adventure story as a young(er) boy. It was all very different from what I imagined, but better too, because it was real.

As it turns out, my worries were unfounded: the synecdoche gap exists, but it is a thing to revel in, not fear. I know now that I am still capable of that childlike sense of wonder, and that I need only to embrace (rather than fear) the unknown to experience it.

There is beauty in the world, and it is best experienced as a surprise. This becomes increasingly more difficult as images of places become more prolific, but I now take reassurance in knowing that beauty exists in the gap between the whole and the part (be it a picture, or a memoir) that refers to it, even if it has to be actively sought out.

The book I wrote will likely (definitely) go unpublished, and there were many times in Paris when I questioned my decision to leave home (especially when counting out bills to pay for a Coke), but I have no regrets. There will always be synecdoche gaps, but it is the experience of exploring these gaps that makes a childlike sense of wonder possible.

Adulthood no longer looms so menacingly on the horizon.