I ended my last blog with a question:
What personal insights can I draw from the bookpacking experience when I consider the authors’ and characters’ experiences, hopes, disappointments, and especially fears when seeing the sites?
I tried to keep this question in mind the last couple days as we bookpacked Paris for A Tale of Two Cities. In the last few days, we found La Force, the prison where Charles Darnay was held, and walked the route Sydney Carton took in the tumbril towards his execution. We also visited the Conciergerie where Darnay was held and tried. Each of these routes and buildings are now repurposed. La Force is now sort of hidden in a shopping street, only marked by a plaque. The route Sydney was taken on is a wide shopping road; we walked from the Louvre to the Tuileries and passed numerous souvenir shops and nearly got run over a few times by busy Parisians. The only place that really commemorated the Revolution of 1789 and the Terror was the Conciergerie which is now a museum.
As I was walking through these areas, I tried to imagine how Darnay would have felt. It was harder for me to empathize with him when we were standing in front of La Force than when we were in the Conciergerie. The efforts made by the museum to preserve a sense of the events that occurred there went a long way towards helping me get a feel for the significance of the complex. I did visit the Conciergerie about six weeks ago and when I say I breezed through it, I mean I played the Rick Steve audio guide, read most of the informational blurbs, and got literally nothing from it. I glanced into the room with the list of names of people killed from the Conciergerie but nothing stuck with me. This time around, I was much more intentional about my visit. I really tried to think about how Darnay and Dickens might have experienced the space. I felt a sense of injustice and confinement in the overwhelmingly thick walls, even all these years later. Using the museum guide really helped me visualize how crammed the cells were and increased my feelings of unfairness that Darnay had to pay for his meals in prison. I really tried to use my attachment to Darnay to better understand the space, and I got a much deeper experience of it than the first time I went. So for me, my connection to the humans who occupied the space made the history more accessible to me.
The museum technology made it easier to envision the prisoners’ situation.
Similarly, when we were walking the path Sydney Carton took to his execution, I tried to imagine the fear he must have felt, traveling such a long distance, knowing the fate that awaited him. The Terror was aptly named; I imagine he must have been terribly afraid despite his resolve.
My experience of being in the Conciergerie and tumbril path made me reflect on the relationship between remembrance of history and empathy. The more I thought about it, I realized that I was empathizing with fictional characters. And even though Darnay wasn’t a real person, my attachment to him still piqued my interest in the place he was held and the events he survived. My sympathy for Carton led me to a more personal connection to the Terror, an individual-level view rather than an impersonal statistical overview. Standing in the room of names in the Conciergerie this time around, I was struck by the realization that all of these people are real, with narratives every bit as compelling as Darnay’s. Yet to hear their stories I would have had to specifically look them up in the database.
This reminded me of our class discussion about how novels make history more accessible, even if it’s less accurate. Because it’s interesting! So my reflections on history and empathy within and outside of the novel really cemented for me that the novelist has an important role to inspire people to look into the real lives of people. Even if they aren’t super accurate, they still make sure that the people in history aren’t forgotten and act as footholds for an exploration into the past.