The Flâneur

T The Flâneur Ben Moore University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands The fl^aneur is an urban type who first emerges in early nineteenth-century Paris. As classically understood, he is a wanderer in and voyeur of the modern city, who observes the spectacle of urban life while strolling the streets at his leisure. The earliest representation of this figure in writing is probably in an anonymous pamphlet of 1806, Le Fl^ a neur au Salon, ou M. Bonhomme, Examen Joyeux des Tableaux, Mêlé de Vaude- villes. As Elizabeth Wilson (1992: 94) observes, M. Bonhomme “spends most of his day simply looking at the urban spectacle,” his interests being “predominantly aesthetic.” He is interested by new plays, the art world, and the appearance of those around him, especially the lower classes. These are characteristics that would continue to define the fl^aneur through the nineteenth century and beyond. As a result, he has frequently been aligned with the figures of the writer, the artist, and the detective, most famously in the writing of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin (who are both discussed below). At the same time, the fl^aneur is not necessarily active nor productive; he is defined as much by a contemplative disengagement from the city in which he wanders as by his movement through it. He is on the streets not to buy or sell but for the pleasure of looking. He is from the beginning depicted as a gentleman, at least in income and appearance if not necessarily behavior, giving him the freedom and financial capacity to appropriate the city as a pleasurable spectacle. In this sense he represents an urban reimagining of the attitude taken toward nature by many Romantic poets, hence the intended subtitle of Benjamin’s unfinished book on Baudelaire (whom he took as an archetypal fl^aneur): A Lyric Poet in an Age of High Capitalism. Women are typically seen by early fl^aneurs as part of the city’s visual spectacle, objects to be observed rather than observing subjects in their own right. The High Age of the Parisian Flâneur Before Baudelaire’s epoch-defining appropriation of the fl^aneur persona around mid-century, French journalists, artists, and writers had already solidified the key features of the type. D’Hautel’s Dictionnaire du bas-language of 1808, a dictionary of common or “base” language, included entries for Flaner as a verb and Un grand flaneur as a noun, with the latter defined as a “man of insufferable idleness, who doesn’t know where to carry his trouble and his boredom” (Ferguson 1994: 24). Even more significant in the development of the fl^aneur as a literary type were the “physiologies” that began to appear in Paris in the 1820s and 30s, peaking in the 1840s. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Tambling (ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_23-1 2 These pocket-sized, relatively inexpensive books “investigated the types that a person taking a look at the marketplace might encounter” (Benjamin 2006: 67). As Benjamin (2006: 67) observes, in 1841 there were 76 new physiologies published. These included Louis Huart’s (1813–1865) Physiologie du Fl^ a neur (1841), which featured illustrations by the painter and caricaturist Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) among others. 1841 was also the year of Auguste de Lacroix’s (1805–1891) often-cited article “Le Fl^aneur,” which appeared in volume 3 of the nine-volume Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: Encyclopédie morale du dix-neuvième siècle (1840–1843). This social encyclopedia offered a panoramic typography of the inhabitants of France, covering such figures as Le Sportsman parisien and La Femme adultère. A Parisian journal with the name Le Fl^ a neur ran from 1834 to 1837, its wide remit reflecting the amateurism of the fl^aneur: Renseignements utiles, littérature, sciences, art, commerce et industrie, annonces et avis divers [Useful information, literature, science, art, trade and industry, announcements, and miscellaneous notices]. As Walter Benjamin (1999: 448) observes, another newspaper named Le Fl^ a neur was launched in May 1848, inviting its readers in that highly charged year of revolutions to “be fl^aneurs, but patriotic fl^aneurs.” This journal seems to have lasted only for a single issue. Perhaps the most important contributor to the Encyclopédie morale in which de Lacroix’s article on the fl^aneur appeared was Honoré de Balzac, and it is in Balzac’s literary writings that we find some of the most important early depictions of the fl^aneur. These are among the first accounts of the fl^aneur which can properly be called literary, rather than journalistic. In the Third Meditation of Balzac’s Physiologie du mariage (1826), he reflects on the pleasure of wandering across Paris, comparing it to taking flights of fancy or enjoying a delicious meal. This aesthetic mode of engaging the city is developed in texts such as La Fille aux yeux d’or [The Girl with the Golden Eyes] (1834–1835), which begins with a reflection on “Parisian physiognomies” that adopts the perspective of a fl^aneur wandering the streets of The Flâneur the capital. Balzac’s (1974: 310) description of the city provides a clue to the blasé attitude commonly associated with the fl^aneur: “In Paris no sentiment can stand against the swirling torrent of events; their onrush and the effort to swim against the current lessens the intensity of passion. Love is reduced to desire, hate to a whimsy. The only family link is with the thousand-franc note, one’s only friend is the pawnbroker.” For Balzac, the modern city degrades commitment, authenticity, and stability. The fl^aneur comes into being, almost inevitably, as the symptom of this condition. Beyond the atmosphere Balzac describes, the specific material conditions of the modern, capitalist city – and above all Paris – provide the basis for fl^anerie in the nineteenth century. Walter Benjamin (2006: 68) emphasizes this in his seminal work on Baudelaire’s Paris, noting that “Fl^anerie could hardly have assumed the importance it did without the arcades. [. . .] It is in this world that the fl^aneur is at home; he provides the arcade [. . .] with its chronicler and philosopher.” The arcades were covered shopping streets that for the first time allowed comfortable window shopping to those who could afford it, regardless of the weather. Paris’s first arcades, the Passage du Caire and the Passage des Panoramas, were completed in 1798 and 1800 respectively, with several more built in the 1820s, including the Galerie Colbert, Passage du Ponceau, and Passage Vendôme. For Benjamin, as for the critic Priscilla Ferguson (1994), the arcades are the site of the “true” fl^aneur, whose existence becomes compromised as the passages are superseded by department stores (such as the Bon Marché, Printemps, and La Samaritaine) in the latter half of the century. Whereas the arcades are ambiguous places, simultaneously public and private, interior and exterior, symptomatic of a period of developing consumer capitalism, the department store represents the total dominance of the commodity: “The space of commodification created by the department store radically modifies the individual’s relationship to the city and to society, a space that abolishes the lines of demarcation distinguishing observer from observed and allowing the fl^ a neur his distinctive status” (Ferguson The Flâneur 1994: 35). For Benjamin (1999: 448), however, the fl^aneur had always had a connection with the commodity from which he supposedly stood aloof: “Empathy with the commodity is fundamentally empathy with exchange value itself. The fl^aneur is the virtuoso of this empathy. He takes the concept of marketability itself for a stroll.” Nonetheless, there is little possibility of the disengagement which marks the fl^aneur within the new department stores. There are no fl^aneurs, for instance, in the greatest French department store novel: Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883). Even in Zola’s first major novel, Thérèse Raquin (1867), the arcades are shown to be dying. The Passage du Pont-Neuf is “not a place where people go for a stroll. It is a short cut, a way of saving a few minutes” (Zola 1992: 7). The life of Charles Baudelaire, who was born in 1821, the beginning of the great arcadesbuilding decade, and died in 1867, the same year as Thérèse Raquin was published, can be taken as representative of the first great flourishing of the fl^aneur as a literary figure. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (first edition 1857) captures the modernity and decadence of Paris from the point of view of the fl^aneur-as-poet. His essay “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), which is nominally about the artist Constantin Guys (1802–1892), is also a manifesto for artistic modernity and for the fl^aneur. Baudelaire emphasizes the development of the fl^aneur out of the dandy, the quintessential Romantic-era man of fashion, and one whom he himself embodies. Benjamin (1999: 244) quotes an 1844 description of him as “Byron attired like Beau Brummell.” In a much-quoted section of Baudelaire’s essay, including by Benjamin, Baudelaire (1995: 9) reflects on the homology between the fl^aneur and the crowd: For the perfect fl^ a neur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, impartial natures which the tongue 3 can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The contradiction evident in Baudelaire’s essay between the fl^aneur as dandy – and hence on show – and the fl^aneur as “hidden from the world” can be read as indicative of the fl^aneur’s alignment with the commodity, which is also both on display and “withdrawn” among a crowd of other commodities. Only among the newly realized spaces of display generated by consumer capitalism could the dandy become anonymous, and only through this anonymity could he become a fl^aneur. For Benjamin (2006: 72) the fl^aneur is a “prince who rejoices in his incognito,” which reveals him to be an “unwilling detective,” whose gaze catches the criminal traces that other urban inhabitants are too busy to notice. For this reason, Benjamin lays great emphasis on Baudelaire’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), the creator of the modern detective story, and especially Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), said to be “something like an X-ray of a detective story” (Benjamin 2006: 79), in which the greatest horror of the fl^aneur-like figure whom the narrator follows is to be deprived of the crowd. In this story, the figure of the fl^aneur is in effect split into the dual figures of detective and criminal, and the city space of their missed encounter becomes simultaneously the scene of an internal psychodrama. By 1854, according to the OED, the word flaneur was in use in English (sometimes with and sometimes without the circumflex accent, as in French). Earlier in the century, texts such as Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821) had included fl^aneur-like characters and sequences, but without using the word itself or the blasé detachment of the Parisian model. Charles Dickens has sometimes been read as a fl^aneur, thanks to his combination of an intensely observational literary gaze with a compulsive need to walk through the city. Michael Hollington’s 1981 article “Dickens the Fl^aneur” begins this tradition, which is continued by critical studies such as Matthew Beaumont’s Nightwalking (2015). 4 By the late nineteenth century, though, in Britain as in France, the fl^aneur seems to have lost his earlier distinctness, with his characteristics absorbed by the texts associated with decadence or by detective fiction. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) follows a dandyish urbanite, but one who lacks the critical reflection of the fl^aneur, which is instead split off and attenuated in the figure of Lord Henry. Sherlock Holmes, who first appeared in the 1890s, exemplifies the observational gaze of the fl^aneur but lacks the pleasure the fl^aneur takes in aimlessness. For Holmes, crime is a kind of drug, a necessary stimulant to action. While his amateurism preserves something of the fl^aneur’s gentlemanly status, his role is not primarily to observe the city but to explain and preserve it. The Modernist Flâneur Modernism brings new life to the fl^aneur. It also sees the first important literary examples of its female mode, the fl^aneuse. Georg Simmel’s essay The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) is something of a turning point, thanks to its detailed analysis of the psychology of the city dweller, whose need to protect him/herself from the overwhelming stimuli of urban life leads to the defensive cultivation of a blasé attitude and to a reliance on monetary rather than interpersonal relationships. This diagnosis is similar to Balzac’s in the 1830s, but reconceptualized in psychological and sociological terms. Freud’s analysis of the tension between the desires of individuals and the repressive pressures exerted by modern civilization, most fully developed in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), is also significant for reframing the relationship between the subject and the city as a psychological contest. Modernist literature’s interest in both the alienation described by Simmel and Freud and new narrative experiments such as stream of consciousness (a term first used of literature in 1918 by May Sinclair (1863–1946), referring to Dorothy Richardson (1873–1957)), made the perspective of the fl^aneur an appealing one. Hope Mirrlees’s (1887–1978) little-read poem Paris, The Flâneur published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1920, is written from the perspective of a female wanderer in the French capital, whose internal and external impressions, presented in a mix of English and French, blend together as she moves through the city. This is a significant departure from the nineteenth century, where critics have questioned whether it was even possible for women to adopt the position of the fl^aneur, as opposed to roles tied to production and consumption. Such roles include the shopper (a literary word, coined by Frances Burney in Evelina (1778)) and the prostitute. Elizabeth Wilson (1992) gives a useful summary of this debate as it had emerged in the 1980s and also argues that “the fl^ a neur represents not the triumph of masculine power but its attenuation” (109). Her essay takes its title from Janet Wolff’s important “The Invisible Fl^aneuse” (1985), whose title is also reused in a 2006 essay collection edited by Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonagh, The Invisible Fl^ a neuse? Virginia Woolf’s writing often features fl^aneuse figures, as in Mrs Dalloway (1925), but her most explicit reflection on walking the city streets is Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1930), which opens with the lines “No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, a purpose, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner” (1). Notably, unlike the male fl^aneur, Woolf’s narrator fabricates an excuse for her presence on the streets: the need to purchase a pencil. She is keenly observant of both the city streets and the nature of her own perceptions, as in this passage: “The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps, perhaps, as it looks” (Woolf 1930: 6). Another important female writer of the modernist fl^aneuse in London and Paris is Jean Rhys, often writing in a bleak and bitter mode in novels such as After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). The Flâneur Walter Benjamin’s work in the Arcades Project (1927–1940) and his other city writings show him to be a modernist fl^aneur himself, as well as a critic. One important inspiration for Benjamin was Franz Hessel’s (1880–1941) Walking in Berlin: A Fl^ a neur in the Capital (1929), a series of essays in which Hessel describes wandering though Weimar Berlin. The book was translated into English for the first time in 2017. Among the other modernist writers Benjamin praises is Louis Aragon (1897–1982), whose Le Paysan de Paris [Paris Peasant] (1926) takes Paris, including the Passage de l’Opera, as the background for surrealist experimentation. Aragon’s combination of the modern and the mythic echoes the even more ambitious structure of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), whose hero Leopold Bloom has often been read as the archetypal modernist reinvention of the fl^aneur. Beyond Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, who was also associated with the Frankfurt School, is perhaps the most important modernist critic of the fl^aneur. His Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his Time (1937) takes the composer as a route into revisiting Second Empire Paris, as Benjamin did with Baudelaire. For Kracauer, the fl^aneur arose in the 1830s as a replacement for the bohemian, a type that was in decline. Together, Benjamin and Kracauer’s analyses provided a new critical energy to the figure of the fl^aneur, just as the fl^aneur and fl^aneuse were attracting new attention from literary writers. This new literary attention extended beyond Europe. In Korea, Park Taewon (1909–1986) wrote Sosŏlga Kubossi ŭi ilil [“One Day in the Live of the Writer Kubo”] (1934), in which the fl^aneur-like Kubo records the street-life of colonial Seoul, including the young women whose public presence in the city was still seen as unnatural. In Shanghai, Shao Xunmei wrote a poetry collection influenced by Baudelaire after a trip to Europe in the 1920s, and cultivated the image of a dandy, though according to Leo Ou-fan Lee in Shanghai Modern (1999), he and his contemporaries did not directly import the fl^aneur into their writing. In the USA, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925) includes many scenes of walking the streets, but the characters are never able to maintain a distance 5 from the city of New York or to wander in a state of casual contemplation. The accelerated speed of New York, driven by what Rem Koolhaas (1994: 10) calls a “Culture of Congestion” (10), overwhelms their ability to shape their own lives. In Soviet Russia, Dziga Vertov’s experimental masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera (1929) decisively set the mold for the cinematic fl^aneur. The cinema audience are invited to share the perspective of an anonymous fl^aneur who is not only a member of the crowd but a witness to a newly modernizing and collectivizing society. In this film, the fl^aneur is not so much the “Man” of the title as the movie camera itself. The Contemporary Flâneur and Flâneuse In the 1960s, the French Situationists experimented with the concept of the dérive, a concept outlined in a 1958 essay by Guy Debord (1931–1994). Though not precisely fl^anerie, the dérive draws on several of its key features. Individuals or, ideally, small groups would wander through the city, seeking to counter the automation of everyday life with the chance of creating unexpected “situations.” More broadly, the Situationists generated the concept of psychogeography, lying at the intersection of psychology and geography. Their ideas have influenced new generations of literary writers and critics, who continue to work in the tradition of the fl^aneur. Michel de Certeau’s landmark chapter “Walking the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), argues for a homology between walking and writing. The view from above, by contrast, imagined as the perspective of Icarus or an urban planner, becomes a form of reading. The book itself is dedicated to “the ordinary man. To a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets” (De Certeau 1984: v). De Certeau’s focus is New York, one of the most walkable of American cities, but critics and writers in recent decades have also reflected on the distinctness of walking in other cities, such as Amsterdam (Edward Soja, “The Stimulus of a Little Confusion: On Spuistraat, Amsterdam,” in Strangely Familiar, ed. Borden 6 et al., 1996), Venice (Giorgio Agamben, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Living among Specters,” in Nudities, trans. Kishik and Pedatella, 2010), and San Francisco (Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust, 2000). Of the novelists who have reinvented the fl^aneur since de Certeau, W.G. Sebald is among the most influential, with books such as The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001) turning the techniques of fl^anerie into both a narrative technique and a way of examining memory and trauma. Strongly influenced by Sebald is Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), whose simultaneously observant and reserved firstperson narrator walks the streets of New York and Brussels but has a heritage that goes back to Nigeria and to Germany. Another modern New York fl^aneur is the 20-something billionaire fund manager Eric Packer in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), whose apparently aimless journey through Manhattan, purportedly with the goal of getting a haircut, takes place in a customized limousine. As his financial empire collapses around him, Eric is isolated both from it and from the streets of the city by his bulletproof vehicle, a material metaphor for the blasé attitude that marks both the fl^aneur and the new ultrarich tech elite. David Cronenberg adapted the novel for a 2011 film version starring Robert Pattinson. Another book which reimagines the fl^aneur for the age of the automobile is Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital (2002), a nonfictional record of Sinclair’s project to walk London’s M25 motorway. This book takes the fl^aneur from the center of the city and relocates him among its suburbs and apparently dead spaces. More recently, Amit Chaudhuri’s Odysseus Abroad (2016) invokes James Joyce in both its title and timespan, covering 1 day in the life of two Indian men who explore London. Both Sinclair and Chaudhuri, in different ways, innovate with the figure of the fl^aneur in London, while keeping one foot within that tradition. In Turkey, Orhan Pamuk’s work draws on the tradition of the fl^aneur but combines it with a distinctively Islamic context. This combination reflects, as many of his novels explicitly do, on the position of Istanbul between Europe and Asia. The Flâneur Memory is important for Pamuk, as for Sebald, Benjamin, and Baudelaire, forming a prominent theme in books such as Istanbul: Memories of a City (2002) and The Museum of Innocence (2008). For the latter book, Pamuk created a physical Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, a ticket for which can be found in the pages of the novel. In recent decades there have also been cinematic innovations on the theme of fl^anerie. Patrick Keiller’s London (1994) allows the camera to dwell on scenes from across UK’s capital city, while a narrative voiceover describes encounters with the esoteric Robinson. Keiller’s London is a barely postindustrial and postThatcherite one, but is also filled with the fragments of a radical literary and political tradition. Two sequels, Robinson in Space (1997) and Robinson in Ruins (2010) record the further changes in the city and beyond, reflecting on the economic inequalities that have been thrown up by neoliberal development. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) stars Scarlett Johansson as an alien who takes the form of a beautiful woman driving around the streets of Glasgow in a van, picking up men whom she then proceeds to consume. Similarly to Cosmopolis, this film makes the fl^aneuse a driver rather than a walker, but it also plays with the traditional association between women on the city streets and prostitution. Its main character is both a woman and not a woman, and struggles to comprehend her own status as an object of desire. While novelistic explorations of the fl^aneuse continue to be less common than those of the fl^aneur, Lauren Elkin’s recent book, Fl^ a neuses (2016), has brought renewed attention to the fl^aneur’s female counterpart. Elkin interweaves her own experiences in New York, Paris, London, Venice, and Tokyo with a cultural history of women who walk, from the nineteenth century onward. The Flâneur References Baudelaire, Charles. 1995. The painter of modern life. In The painter of modern life and other essays, ed. Jonathan Mayne, 2nd ed., 1–41. London: Phaidon. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire. In The writer of modern life, ed. Michael Jennings, 46–133. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Balzac, Honoré de. 1974. History of the thirteen. Translated by Herbert Hunt. London: Penguin. 7 De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. 1994. The fl^ a neur on and off the streets of Paris. In The Fl^ a neur, ed. Keith Tester, 22–42. London: Routledge. Koolhaas, Rem. 1994. Delirious New York: A retroactive manifesto for Manhattan. New York: The Monacelli Press. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1992. The invisible Fl^aneur. New Left Review 191: 90–110. Woolf, Virginia. 1930. Street haunting. San Francisco: The Westgate Press. Zola, Émile. 1992. Thérèse Raquin. Translated by Andrew Rothwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.