Rat Man of Paris by Paul West

First published: 1986

Type of work: Psychological romance

Time of work: 1983, immediately preceding and following the arrival of Klaus Barbie in France

Locale: Paris and Nice

Principal Characters:

• Etienne Poulsifer (The “Rat Man of Paris”), an outcast of the streets with some local fame
• Sharli Bandol, a high school teacher, Poulsifer’s lover and the mother of his child
• Charles de Gaulle Poulsifer, the protagonist’s infant son
• Boche, a Nazi SS officer, who is guilty of exterminating most of the inhabitants of Poulsifer’s childhood village

The Novel

While there are indeed various events and activities in the novel, most of the action takes place in the protagonist’s wandering mind. Etienne Poulsifer is known to most as the “Rat Man of Paris” for his habit of accosting strangers on the street and revealing a live rat (later rubber, wooden, or dead ones and finally a fox fur) hidden under his coat. Almost invariably, the startled or appalled passersby proffer money to dismiss Rat Man, who regards his actions as rituals for “tweaking the race. Helping it evolve.”

On one of his excursions, he meets Sharli Bandol, who is not frightened by his gesture and who invites him to her apartment for a meal. The two are immediately attracted to each other (though Rat Man, now in his sixties, disheveled and stoop-shouldered, is anything but physically attractive) out of their mutual desire to give and receive affection. Their favorite pastime is to park on the runway approach at a nearby airport as the planes roar overhead and discuss anything and everything.

In his mental wanderings, Rat Man takes the reader back to the central events of his life—the Nazi occupation and near-total extermination of his village. While his parents are burned alive, the young Poulsifer hides under floorboards and is later reluctantly adopted by a fellow survivor, Madame R. On the surface, Rat Man appears to be a zombie as a result of these experiences, and often he feels only barely alive, yet he strives continually in his eccentric way to live a life of meaning, a life that matters if for no other reason than to glorify existence itself.

When he learns that a former SS officer has been expelled from Peru and will arrive in France, he convinces himself that this is one of the officers (Boche) responsible for the extermination of his villagers. Rat Man now has a purpose and compulsively sets out to make an impact on the situation. Burning holes in photocopies of the Nazi’s face and then pushing a pram with his fox fur wrapped in a blanket, wearing a swastika armband, dressing in a faded gray suit and trailing balloons painted with a skull, Rat Man ambles day and night through the Paris streets acting as the nation’s conscience, until, one night, he is shot.

Immediately, he is elevated to the position of media celebrity, and Sharli understands that through his desperate gestures Rat Man has regained his dignity and made an impression on the world. During his convalescence, Sharli becomes pregnant and Rat Man turns into a recluse and ponders the course of his life. Initially exuberant, he becomes depressed, believing that he is no longer affecting anyone or anything, though his earlier hatred of Boche turns into sympathy.

Worried about his condition, Sharli moves them for a year to Nice, where Rat Man becomes engrossed in slipping out at night and collecting coins from one of the city’s fountains. For his part, Rat Man worries about his ineffectuality and purposelessness until the baby, Charles De Gaulle Poulsifer, is born. As Sharli fears, Rat Man’s reaction is initially one of jealousy and competition, but these emotions are eventually transformed into paternal care for the child. The novel ends with Rat Man remembering his parents’ death; now, however, he takes their place and hides baby Charles under imaginary floorboards.

The Characters

The character of Etienne Poulsifer is based upon an actual figure who roamed the Paris streets collecting money after exposing and then removing his offending rats from beneath his overcoat. As Paul West has commented in an interview, he learned of this man from friends and then “dreamed on him” for the purposes of his novel. Poulsifer is an original creation, someone whose life seems utterly blasted and hopeless yet one who insists on making some contribution. His dilemma is what that contribution might be.

Poulsifer indulges in bizarre, comically absurd theories and actions (a good example is his method of taking a shower fully clothed in order to do his laundry), and even his crusade against Boche amounts to a doomed commitment when he learns that this is not his Nazi but Klaus Barbie instead. Nevertheless, despite all of his strangeness and confusion, Poulsifer is a profoundly compelling figure and in his way a kind of twentieth century Everyman. Alienated and bruised by history and his personal experience, Poulsifer insists that life must have meaning, that individuals do matter, that one must be committed to something. Sharli characterizes him as “a warning of what a man becomes who lives without tradition, a code, a home,” while Poulsifer describes himself as representing “active meaning, passive form.”

Sharli is also a thoroughly sympathetic creation. Her acceptance of Poulsifer is initially confusing, even improbable; as her character develops, however, the logic of their relationship emerges. She constantly questions the wisdom of tying her life to that of Poulsifer and often despairs of his obsession with death and her seeming inability to civilize him. Yet her determination to love Rat Man, almost in spite of himself, reveals how similar to him she is in various ways. She, too, wants life, a life with meaning and dignity, and with Poulsifer, for the first time, she believes that she has achieved that.

While these are the central characters, West does add a few minor figures who are fascinating in other respects. One of these characters is an obscure Spanish novelist (“Jose-Juan-Jorge Madero-Madeiras-Menendez,” as Sharli calls him), who Poulsifer believes is following him and taking notes on his activities. Sharli follows Rat Man in an attempt to view this novelist, but one never sees him in Rat Man’s company. Like Sharli, the reader concludes that he is one of Rat Man’s apparitions, a projection of his desired notoriety. At one point, however, during Rat Man’s sojourn in Nice, the narrator shifts the scene to present an actual Spanish novelist beginning and then abandoning a work about Rat Man.

Boche is another significant figure, though the reader learns very little about him except through Poulsifer’s tortured, obsessive ruminations. For Poulsifer, he is a vicious criminal who must atone for the suffering he has inflicted on so many, but as the novel progresses, Poulsifer’s view of Boche changes to one of “a certain sympathy. . . [for] the man’s pain speaks to the pain in Rat Man....” When he inadvertently thinks of the man as Klaus Barbie, Rat Man is freed of his burden: “It doesn’t hurt, it can’t, it won’t.”

Critical Context

Rat Man of Paris is West’s tenth novel in an impressively large and diverse canon. Critical reaction to the novel was largely favorable, though nearly every critic had some reservations. Unlike so many other writers, however, West continues to surprise and stimulate after having written for many years, and this novel stands as testament to the powers of his enduring and fertile imagination.

West has gained a reputation as a writer of experimental fiction, and while Rat Man of Paris lacks the dramatically experimental structures of Caliban’s Filibuster (1971), which relies on the color spectrum and the world of cinema, and of Gala (1976), which employs astronomy and genetic code patterns, it is anything but a conventional fiction. Perhaps its most significant feature is the narrator, an anonymous, omniscient figure who can slip into the minds of both Poulsifer and Sharli and reveal their most private selves. The emphasis in the novel is clearly upon interior space, and this particular narrator, who glides so effortlessly between the two characters and throughout their world, manages to transform abrupt shifts in thought, time, and space into a seamless, coherent narrative.

In so many of his works—novels, autobiography, and essays—West has emphasized how living is discovery, and certainly Rat Man of Paris is no exception to this belief. The unconventional Rat Man, crazed as he may appear, stands as still another of West’s protagonists who rage against the forces of stultification and ultimately achieve a selfhood of their own.

Bibliography

The Atlantic. Review. CCLVII (March, 1986), p. 111.

The New Yorker. Review. LXII (March 24, 1986), p. 124.

Newsweek. Review. CVII (March 10, 1986), p. 76.

Quill and Quire. Review. LII (April, 1986), p. 41.

Sinkler, Rebecca Pepper. “Writing in the Afterglow of World War II,” in The New York Times Book Review. XCI (February 16, 1986), p. 3.