Flâneurs in the Night
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The city does not inspire like it used to. Urban alienation has become routine, a subject more fit for nostalgia than for alarm. Woody Allen’s Manhattan, a city confidently inhabited by very human people, suits us better. The dark energy of Jack the Ripper and Edgar Allen Poe has been relegated to graphic novels and floridly imagined efforts like “American Psycho” or “The Matrix.”
A consummate theorist of urban matters, Walter Benjamin put his finger on this disillusionment, on what he calls “a reservation about the big city,” as early as 1938. He quotes the French poet Émile Verhaeren:
And of what consequence are the evils and the lunatic hours
And the vats of vice in which the city ferments,
If someday a new Christ, sculpted of light,
Arises from the fog and the veils,
Lifts humanity toward himself,
And baptizes it by the fire of new stars?
Yet vats of vice are what concern Benjamin, through three essays, in “The Writer of Modern Life” (Harvard University Press, 306 pages, $15.95), a new volume spun-off from the multi-volume edition of Benjamin’s “Selected Writings.” The title alludes to Charles Baudelaire’s famous essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” a celebration of the draftsman Constantin Guys. In that essay, Baudelaire used Guys to think about “the poetry within history,” just as in this volume Benjamin uses Baudelaire to think about modernity.
Baudelaire never looked up from the ferment of the city for the fire of any new stars. Gaslight drowned out the constellations. This was an age, Benjamin writes, in which “the moon and the stars are no longer worth mentioning.” In a poem “Twilight: Evening,” Baudelaire wrote that in the evening “the sky, like curtains round a bed, draws close.” The streets become an inner room, an interior space in which the flâneur operates, treating public space as a private sphere.
Interpretations like this abound in Benjamin’s writing.
He takes Baudelaire’s metaphor somewhat literally, finding in the Paris of the Second Empire suggestions of literal interiority: the covered arcades, the cozy displays in shop windows, the warm gaslights. No one, possibly, verbalized the idea of “interiority” at the time. Of course, Benjamin owed the metaphor to Baudelaire, but in his poem the drawn curtain surrounds a bed, which is a little too specific to suit Benjamin’s notion of an interior.
To read Benjamin, one must be able to believe that a metaphor such as interiority could define a society without being explicitly described by anyone. Can such things work themselves out in the backs of our minds?
They can and do, if we are to agree that a modern taste, for vats of vice and lunatic hours, has come and gone, without our quite knowing what to say about it. Benjamin knew. He sees how changes in the modern way of life become manifest, if not explicit, in Baudelaire’s macabre style.
A rift had opened between city and country. The city, so far as poets knew, was a perverse place, far from the idylls poets had known. The poet could no longer be a straightforward “minstrel.” Already, he represented a genre that was self-consciously endangered: Baudelaire sympathized with the boredom that made reading poetry a chore for his “hypocrite lecteur.”
Meanwhile, a bourgeois mainstream became, in a way now familiar, inimical to poetry. Benjamin writes of “the fundamental incompatibility of sensual pleasure with what is called Gemütlichkeit,” (cordiality) noting that “Baudelaire’s snobbism is the eccentric formula for this steadfast repudiation of complacency, and his ‘satanism’ is nothing other than the constant readiness to subvert this habit of mind wherever and whenever it should appear.”
Baudelaire wrote blasphemous poems, but his image as an agent of transvaluation, turning evil into virtue, comes from the overall stance of his poems. Baudelaire wrote about suicide as no one had, and he gave criminals a place in literature, but Benjamin asserts that “Baudelaire’s satanism must not be taken too seriously.”
Rather, Satan was for Baudelaire an attitude through which to be nonconformist; Satan was “the patron saint of the stubborn and unyielding.” Moreover, the position of “satanism” gave Baudelaire the best of two worlds: He is an elite fiend, a vampire, but he also represents rebellion from below.
Benjamin, a Marxist, is alive to the fact that in the Second Empire both the upper and lower classes felt left out: “Among the upper classes, cynicism was part of the accepted style; in the lower classes, a rebellious argumentativeness was the norm.” Both had become the devil. Here again, Benjamin’s metaphor seems both wholly original and convincingly apt.
All this — the devilish glint in the countercultural eye — has become standard fare. How much Baudelaire originated, and how much Benjamin merely associates with Baudelaire does not really matter. Benjamin writes that “Baudelaire was a bad philosopher, a good theoretician; but only as a brooder was he incomparable.” Brooders collect images and wait for them to hatch. They move by metaphor. Benjamin may have been an even better brooder than Baudelaire.