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The majority of the story is, of course, set in Paris. I thought it might be interesting to analyse what impact the location has on the text as a whole, using Voyant to discover when and how often the word ‘Paris’ is used, and to see what conclusions, if any, I can draw from the information.

This Voyant chart shows us when in the text the word ‘Paris’ appears and how frequent the use is. As we can see, it peaks early on in the story, when Morley Callaghan is still in Canada. This is born out of Callaghan’s longing to visit Paris, to join his contemporaries and to continue his writing in the French capital.

The decline in frequency of the word ‘Paris’ may be an indication that it is not quite so central to the story as one might think – perhaps it is the characters, the company he keeps, Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, McCalmon, Joyce, etc, as opposed to the location, that makes Callaghan’s story worth telling.

The graph shows the frequency of the word ‘Paris’ is at its lowest towards the end of the story but then suddenly increases one last time. This is a result of Callaghan looking back over his time in Paris and fondly remembering his time spent with friends, as opposed to talking about the city itself.

In conclusion, Voyant suggests here that the location isn’t actually as prominent as the title suggests. In actual fact, it seems that Callaghan’s story revolves around who he met and what happened; it just so happened that these writers had adopted Paris as their ‘base’ at that time.

WORKS CITED

Callaghan, Morley. 1963. That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. Available at: http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/bio/callaghan-thatsum.html