IV

Le regard que le génie allégorique plonge dans la ville trahit . . . le sentiment d'une profonde aliénation. C'est là le regard d'un flâneur.
Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capitale du XIXe siècle"

The look that allegory plunges in the city . . . betrays a profound alienation. It's the look of a flâneur.

Reading Flaubert through Durkheim and Marx suggests a type of interpretation that might fuse the imaginative mode of literature and the analytical method of social science—precisely the kind of history it was Walter Benjamin's ambition to write. Benjamin's work on nineteenth-century Paris is a mine of information, of literary and historical analysis, and of meditations on just what it is that ties the nineteenth century to the present. Benjamin sought the congruence of the apparently incongruent, the immaterial embedded in the material. Behind "the facts fixed in the form of things" he looked to the illusions around which those facts and those things cohered.^[11] Not accidentally, the subject demanding this integration was, once again, Paris. In "Paris, Capitale du XIXe siècle," the second of the two introductions that he wrote for his unfinished project on nineteenth-century civilization, he circles around the Marxist notion of fetishism. But Benjamin sees Paris as much through the lenses of Baudelaire's poetics as through the lenses supplied by Marxian theory. He parts company with orthodox Marxism when he singles out the illusions produced by a materialistic civilization. In this short summary of his intended great work on Paris, Benjamin points to a universe of illusions that brings us back to Flaubert's Paris and its flâneurs.

Benjamin seized upon the flâneur as an exemplary character type produced by the nineteenth-century city. Working largely from Baudelaire's conceptions of the modern artist and the flâneur, Benjamin elaborated a vision of a city of revolution, but a revolution that somewhere, somehow went wrong. So remarkable are the correlations with L'Éducation sentimentale that the novel seems almost a blueprint for the Benjaminian vision of history. For before Benjamin and contemporaneously with Baudelaire, Flaubert uses flânerie to represent the modern city and the illusions that it sustains. But the differences are instructive and suggest why Benjamin paid little attention to Flau-

bert's flâneurs and their world of dislocation. The flâneur that Baudelaire allegorizes, Flaubert represents. The archetypical modern urban landscape of Le Spleen de Paris contrasts with the scrupulously delineated topographical and historical Paris of L'Éducation sentimentale. The fascination with the allegories of modern life that drew Benjamin to Baudelaire suggests that his inattention to Flaubert may be explained by the very different, realistic mode in which the novelist necessarily operated. Flaubert's flâneurs are Parisian in ways that Baudelaire's, and Benjamin's, are not.

Yet despite the evident difference in mode, Flaubert very clearly renders the kind of spectacle for which Benjamin appropriated the term phantasmagoria. (The term, which originated in popular entertainments that used optical illusions to produce shadows or fantômes, was appropriated by Marx to designate the illusory, reified nature of personal relationships under capitalism.) Benjamin outlines the phantasmagoria in tantalizing brevity. Against the public illusions of the market place, which find their privileged expression first in the arcades and subsequently in the World's Fairs and the department store, he sets the private illusions of the collector who endeavors to abstract objects from the market by idealizing them. In the Paris reconstructed by Haussmann, Benjamin uncovers the mask that society has composed for itself. The new Paris is "phantasmagoria turned into stone." All of these elements together disguise the primary transformation of nineteenth-century society in the reduction of objects to their exchange value, that is, their commercialization. There remains only the illusion of freedom and security, which coexists in the anxiety of those living the illusion. Modernity, as Benjamin concludes citing Baudelaire, is the world dominated by its phantasmagoria.

Benjamin traces these phantasmagoria through their material manifestations—a logical enough approach given the weight that fetishism bears in the Marxist model and his own vision of a material history, a "thing-oriented representation of civilization." But Benjamin's notion of materialism is singular. It is not dialectical, and if it is passionately historical, the history in question remains a quirky one. Still, if we can talk about Flaubert's materialism, it is through just this sort of twist. Flaubertian materialism does not issue solely from the oppressive presence of objects in these novels or the innumerable lists of almost every sort. Were that the case, almost any realist novel would do (and the naturalist Zola would presumably provide an even

more telling model). Flaubert's "historical materialism," like Benjamin's, takes a specific turn. It resides in his insistence that desired objects are illusory, and it places its stress upon the fact and importance of illusion as such. Frédéric illustrates to perfection Benjamin's notion of the collector who accumulates possessions in order to make a place in a world in which, in truth, he has no place.

In this world of phantasmagoria, Frédéric and everyone else in the novel exchange roles, ideologies, politics, lovers, and governments as easily as objects change hands. The exchange-value of objects and people everywhere supersedes their use-value. L'Éducation sentimentale portrays a reified world, where Benjamin's arcades have been elaborated into a metonymy for the city and the society beyond, where the market solicits through the illusions it sustains. Frédéric meanders about Paris like the flâneur passing through an arcade, giving himself over to the illusions of the material. The bumbling protagonists in the unfinished, posthumously published Bouvard et Pécuchet (1880) similarly pass from one illusion to another as they meander through the facts and fads of the nineteenth century, unable to find a place or a text that fits. More radically than L'Éducation sentimentale, Bouvard et Pécuchet stages the drama of intellectual and social dispossession. Displacement has been redefined from a matter of individual disposition (and election) to a question of social (dis)organization. In sum, the flâneur's temporary suspension from society has become the urban condition. No longer one of many social roles that the urban dweller may adopt from time to time, the flâneur occupies a fullfledged social status that defines and confines existence itself—a negative construct of truly modernist proportions.

Between the vibrant city of Balzac and Hugo and the haunting, strangely empty metropolis of Flaubert and Baudelaire loom the Paris of Haussmann and the France of Napoléon III. This city and this society furnish the sociological intertext for L'Éducation sentimentale, one that intervenes between the action of the novel (1840-51) and the presumed narration (1867). The text of Paris (re)written by Haussmann, like the rules of government redrafted by Napoléon III, does not efface the past so much as it inexorably marks off the present. Frédéric's consternation at seeing Mme Arnoux's white hair renders the shock provoked by the confrontation with the new Paris and the consequent realization that the old is irretrievable. The "adorations" that Frédéric directs to "the woman she was no longer" (503)

echo the laments for le vieux Paris that grew louder and louder as le Paris nouveau took shape. Flaubert does not even specify where this last meeting takes place, surely a significant absence in a novel notable for topographical specificity. The rue Rumford where Frédéric has his hôtel particulier in the late July Monarchy disappeared into the new boulevard Malesherbes between 1855 and 1860, so it cannot be there that Mme Arnoux comes in 1869. Frédéric's last apartment exists in something of a non-place, just like his great love affair that does not so much end as dissolve into the city lights reflected on the shiny, wet streets of their last walk together. Once again the urban topography supplies a basic figure for the narrative at large. Haussmannized Paris is not merely the setting for Frédéric's nonexistence from 1852 to 1869, summarized in two paragraphs, it is the necessary figure for that nonexistence.

Unlike Balzac and unlike Baudelaire, Flaubert offers no artist-flâneur to make sense of this universe, to retrieve the past by refashioning it Flaubert in the Second Empire can only come up with idlers whose constitutional dés-oeuvrement (idleness) must be understood as dés-oeuvrement, as "un-working." Of the eight instances of "désoeuvrement" and the five that concern Frédéric, four are explicitly related to the absence of work (69, 72, 116, 500), once in direct reference to the novel that Frédéric never finishes (72). Flaubert achieved the paradox cal construction of a work (oeuvre ) out of idleness (désoeuvrement ) in a latter-day equivalent of creation from the void. Accordingly, L 'Éducation sentimentale is an oxymoron. The very existence of the work refutes the conclusions reached by the text. As Georg Lukács noted in The Theory of the Novel, the achievement of L'Éducation sentimentale contests the default of the artist and the degradation of art that the novel performs so vividly.

Frédéric "sustained the idleness [désoeuvrement ] of his intellect" (500) during the decade and a half that followed Louis-Napoléon's coup d'état of 1851. But those were the years of the Second Empire during which Flaubert became a writer, the years of Madame Bovary, of Salammbô, of L'Éducation sentimentale itself. He took to heart the advice he gave Louise Colet in 1852. From the top of his ivory tower, Flaubert could see the Second Empire and the transformed Paris, but he rendered them by their absence. The "blank" space of the novel—from  1851, when the sentimental and political drama ends, to 1867, when the novel ends—was filled by Flaubert's hard work. His-

tory is dislodged but also filled by art. The discourse of displacement becomes, in a final paradox, the means of creation.

The infinite emptiness with which L'Éducation sentimentale has so often been taxed derives not from the loss of illusions but, quite the contrary, from their persistence. Like Bouvard and Pécuchet, Frédéric and Deslauriers end up exactly where they started out, older to be sure, sadder certainly, but scarcely wiser. The final scene reveals the illusion in which the novel originated—that is, the time before either came to Paris—which Frédéric and Deslauriers agree was "the best that we have had"(510). But the novel begins after this time, and it begins, as it ends, in Paris, though once again in a non-place. At the very heart of flânerie, as Benjamin understands, lies an "anguished phantasmagoria," the anguish of the citizen reduced to one of many in a crowd. Such is also the artist's anxiety as he faces the "crowd" of competitors in the expanding literary market of the nineteenth century and the resulting degradation of both art and society.

The social space of failure analyzed by Durkheim and Marx is imagined, peopled, and narrated by Flaubert. The Paris of L'Éducation sentimentale, then, is a dystopia. Only by removing himself from the city, at his home near Rouen, could Flaubert write about the flâneur and the phantasmagorical city. "Let the Empire go its own way," he exhorted his mistress Louise Colet (she was also a writer) in November 1852 barely two weeks before Louis-Bonaparte officially became Napoléon III, "let's close our door and climb to the top of our ivory tower."^[12] For Flaubert, the flâneur's disengagement from society defines at once the dilemma of the artist and the solution that is art.

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In its overwhelming complexity, the modern city defies description. The metaphors by which it is conveyed engage through simplification. Whether of a woman to be known or of a woman who cannot be known, whether of a panorama to be dominated or of a scene lost in the reflections of the viewer—these tropes all work through simplification. But they do work, and the consequence is that observers of the city hold onto them for explanations. The problem of knowledge becomes an insuperable one, and yet every urban dweller must create a city that can be known and with which it is possible to cope. Hence the flâneur epitomizes a general predicament, and the discourse of

disruption that surrounds the figure concerns every reader. For this reason, the links between Balzac, Flaubert, Durkheim, and Marx are neither fortuitous nor superfluous. Each observer constructs a narrative to control proliferating meaning, and each succeeds through personal creativity but also through the knowledge and authority of linkages perceived and accepted. The flâneur is one of those links, a vital mechanism in the course of understanding. No wonder understanding the understander is as much a matter of sociological analysis as of literary creativity.

It was not by chance that the flâneur appeared on the streets and in the narratives of early nineteenth-century Paris. The postrevolutionary city both invited and required new urban practices. The disarray engendered by continually shifting political and social bases, like the incertitude fostered by a constantly fluctuating population, undermined the sense of the city as a whole. The narratives of a ubiquitous flâneur joined otherwise separate parts.

The intrinsic surety of this relationship to the city, the authority confidently assumed by the flâneur-writer to define the city, is one manifestation of the myth of Paris as the paradigmatic modern city, Benjamin's capital of the nineteenth century. Like the namings of one and another part of the city itself and along with the directions to the altered social and cultural urban landscape offered by guidebooks, the urban narratives of the flâneur produced what I have called a "discourse of placement." These mappings of revolutionary Paris controlled, and thereby produced, the city. Yet, because the modern city in particular necessarily escapes any narrative, the discourse of placement turned into a discourse of displacement. The conspicuously unproductive flâneur at midcentury pointed to the plight of the individual now overwhelmed by those very processes of change that had once seemed so exhilarating. Revolution exemplified not opportunity but loss.

Flânerie lost its authorial connections. With flânerie disconnected from narration, the flâneur once again became the ordinary stroller, temporarily disengaged from urban woes, with no thoughts of turning flânerie to productive account. A democratized flânerie opened the city to anyone with a bit of leisure time at his (and now also her) disposal. Flânerie returned to its original sense of "insufferable idleness," inactivity unredeemed by creativity of any sort. The 1879 edition of the dictionary of the Académie française puts flânerie beyond

the pale of bourgeois society, in the realm of "dawdling," "wasting one's time on trifles." The final blow to the flâneur-writer received what must have been a final confirmation in the term flâneuse. The feminine substantive appeared in 1877—to designate a type of chaise lounge! Sturdy legs were no longer needed to take one about the city! For that matter, scarcely more than daydreaming, flânerie lost its connection with the city. In the twentieth century, anyone can be a flâneur almost anywhere and anytime that nothing is happening. Passive, solipsistic, the ordinary flâneur turned into the ultimate consumer. Not surprisingly, this paradigmatic urban personage moved inside, away from the now disquieting city toward the comforting interior, the enclosed structure of social control.

By the last third of the nineteenth century the semipublic, semiprivate space of the arcades had been taken over by the department store. Women entered the public sphere as consumers, in the selfsufficient social microcosm of the department store that kept the city outside, at safe remove. "Window shopping" was not random flânerie but directed toward consumption. Feminine flânerie became another mode of shopping, thus realizing the fears expressed by the artist-flâneur early in the century.^[13] This final twist, the metamorphosis of the flâneur into the flâneuse and the consequent banalization of flânerie, effectively ended the flâneur's special relationship with the city. There will be flâneurs in the twentieth century, many of a literary inclination. Apollinaire will call one of his works Le Flâneur des deux rives. But the connection has become incidental to the conception of the city and to urban discourse.

In bringing about the urban revolution that would produce modern Paris, the failure of 1848 cuts across the philosophical and sociological value of the flâneur as definitive subject and controlling perceiver. The new landscape of power and the new practices of Paris at midcentury required another kind of character, another kind of perception, and, above all, another kind of movement within movement. For a vision of that complex revolution in the making, no work offers a clearer vision of the new ties between the sociological work of modernization and the aesthetic vision of modernity than Émile Zola's novel La Curée. No work is further from the universe of flânerie. Zola's characters are frenetically and absolutely engaged in the city. His Paris is no place for the idle or detached observer, and something

more murderous also has entered the urban dynamic. Whichever translation of La Curée one decides to use—The Hunt, The Kill, The Quarry —the world of Paris is now divided between the hunter and the hunted. Movement is much more than movement. Midcentury transmutes movement into direct conflict. The writer must devise a new strategy to deal with the city of revolution.