Zazie in the Metro

4 ideas

1. The Métro ride she sleeps through

   Zazie, a provincial girl of about twelve, is left with her uncle Gabriel in Paris for a weekend while her mother spends time with a lover. The one thing Zazie wants is to ride the Métro, but it is shut by a strike, so she spends two days in chaotic misadventures above ground. When the strike ends she is carried through the Métro asleep and misses it entirely. Back with her mother, asked what she did, she answers only "J'ai vieilli" ("I got older"), which makes the longed-for goal irrelevant beside what happened on the way to it.

2. Writing speech as it sounds

   The novel spells spoken French phonetically, as in its opening word "Doukipudonktan" ("D'où qu'il pue donc tant?", roughly "where's that stink coming from?"). This exposes how far formal written French has drifted from the language people actually speak. Making readers decode everyday speech as though it were a foreign script turns orthography into a question of class and authority, not correctness.

3. The city as an unreliable text

   Gabriel and the taxi driver Charles confidently name Paris monuments and keep getting them wrong, confusing one landmark for another. Tourists trust them anyway. Characters also shift identity, as when the policeman-satyr Trouscaillon keeps changing names and roles. Read this way, knowing a place is a shared performance of naming rather than accurate reference, and the famous city is mostly the talk that surrounds it.

4. The deflating refrain that punctures talk

   Zazie tacks "mon cul" (roughly "my arse") onto adults' grand statements, and the parrot Laverdure answers every speech with "Tu causes, tu causes, c'est tout ce que tu sais faire" ("You talk, you talk, that's all you can do"). Repeating one rude or mechanical phrase empties rhetoric of authority by treating every claim, however grand or earnest, as the same noise. The comedy comes from the gap between the characters' pretensions and a single blunt reply.

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