I am mildly embarrassed to have let my feathers ruffle so because of a puff piece in the Wall Street Journal called “Why the Expats Left Paris.” For me, it was one puff piece too many, because the more these articles are published, the more a certain idea about Paris is reinforced, and the American reading public deserves better stories of that city than what they’ve been getting. I am not naive enough to think that because one writer voices her discontent, the quality of articles about Paris will improve; still, I must speak up.

I hereby call for a end to clichéd articles about literary Paris, all those which invoke the names of the deities (”Sartre” and “Beauvoir”) in an incantation to raise from the dead the spirit of a Paris that never existed.

Newspaper editors must think these stories are romantic in some way, but the subject has been utterly emptied of its original meaning, and now signals only “here is another article about that place everyone likes with the tower and the bridges.” What is written is incidental to the fact that it is being said, again, and it is in this way that sloppy mistakes and misconceptions creep in. Besides which, aren’t newspaper editors in the business of printing news? It seems to me that any other travel story on any other location would have been researched and fact-checked.  But because it’s Paris, and we’ve heard this story before, touchy-feely clichés based on one person’s very limited experience are apparently acceptable. This is called “reification.”

Do not misunderstand me: this is not a moratorium for all invocations of literary Paris: only those which tell us nothing, add nothing, and flatten out an important moment in literary history. I call for this moratorium in favor of better, truer writing about Paris.  Let us agree no longer to reduce Paris to this tired cliché, and to produce, if not works to rival Being and Nothingness or The Ethics of Ambiguity, at least better travel writing.

What is the difference between a cliché and a myth? Myths are stories we tell ourselves, to explain why we form affinities with certain things, or to help cope with a necessary but unpleasant rite of passage. Myths can be productive; myths can be powerful. But they can also create a false sense of communal agreement—false because the terms are assumed, not specified. Myths can also be untrue.

Literary Paris is a potent myth. An entire cottage industry of books has cropped up around it, some of them quite good, some of them horrid. But how do we tell the difference? Not long ago, I reviewed a book called Paris Cafe: the Select Crowd.  This book treats the myth in a way that both pays homage to the past and makes it relevant to the present. The ineffable quality of the cafe comes through in the gossipy and insightful writing, and the visceral, well-wrought illustrations.

Clichés, on the other hand, are dead thoughts.

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