Painting Modern Life: A History of the Flaneur from Baudelaire to Bob Dylan
by
Julia Mitchell
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at
Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia December 2008
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Appendices Copyright Releases (if applicable) Table of Contents
Abstract vi
Acknowledgements vii
Chapter One - Introduction 1
The Evolution of Flanerie: From Baudelaire to Dylan 1
Modernism and Postmodernism 6
Historiography 10
Problems and Methodology 15
Chapter Two - The Flaneur and his City: Charles Baudelaire and the Art of Flanerie in Nineteenth-Century Paris 18
Introduction 18
Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century 19
A Tale of Two Flaneurs 22
The Arcades and Walter Benjamin 29
Baudelaire 33
The Flaneur as Symbol of Modern Subjectivity 35
Conclusion 48
Chapter Three - The Flaneur in the Age of Technological Reproducibility:
Mass Culture in Weimar Germany, 1918-1933 50
Introduction 50
Berlin 51
The Development of Mass Culture: The Ur-History of the Arcades Project 54 Flanerie on Film: Photo-Journalism and the Cinema 56
iv Conclusion 72
Chapter Four - "Gates of Eden": Bob Dylan and the Art of Flanerie in the American Sixties 75
Introduction 75
Bob Dylan: Flaneur for a New (Left) Age 77
Songs as Denkbilder. Education Through Experience 78
New York 80
Time Awareness and The Art of Protest 82
Dont Look Back: The Cult of Celebrity, Spectacle, and the Crowd 89
The Artist as Commodity and the
Unreal Reality of the American Sixties 91
Masks and Incognitos 105
John Wesley Harding and the American Voice 108
Conclusion 112
Chapter Five - Conclusion 113
Bibliography 118
v Abstract
The flaneur, the spectator of modern life, has been relatively undervalued as a historical figure. Where the flaneur has been studied, there has been an unwavering emphasis on his role in the emergence of modern, urban culture in nineteenth-century Paris. In the twentieth century, the changing nature of modern society and a variety of technological developments both necessitated and encouraged new forms of flanerie, away from a physical presence on the city streets. The mass mediated culture of the twentieth century facilitated the flaneur's move beyond the limits of the city, broadening his frame of reference, and allowing for the fusion of Charles Baudelaire's painter and Walter Benjamin' commodified flaneur through new art forms - above all photography, film, and the record. Bob Dylan, in the 1960s, demonstrated the possibility of the flaneur's survival through his work, which elucidated the problems of individualism, identity and freedom in post-war American society.
vi Acknowledgments
There are many people to whom I have become greatly indebted in completing this project. Firstly, I would like to thank my family: my parents, for reading drafts and dealing with my panicked phone calls, and for reassuring me when I most needed it;
Colin, Jill, Max and Thomas, for helping to make Halifax home, and for providing me with food, shelter and distraction.
I want to thank my supervisor, Dr. John Bingham, for encouraging an unorthodox project, supporting me through several drafts as it took shape, and for asking me the tough questions. His time and effort are greatly appreciated, and this project could not have been completed without him.
Thank you to the faculty and staff of the Dalhousie history department: Valerie
Peck and Tina Jones, who were always delightfully helpful, and whose patience with my incessant queries will always be deeply appreciated; Dr. Todd McCallum, for taking an interest in this thesis, for lending me many useful books and some great advice; Drs.
Claire Campbell and Chris Elson for agreeing to sit on my defence committee, and for providing insightful commentary and criticisms in the final end.
Lastly, I need to acknowledge my peers who, over the past 16 months, have been incredibly supportive and helpful, providing me equally with encouragement, amusement and reality checks as needed. Thanks Amanda, Brandon, Matt and Saman for being the grooviest of office mates, and dealing with my neuroses on a daily basis; and Laura
Hynes, who not only read early drafts of this thesis, but also tolerates me on the squash court. I hope that I have been able to provide something in return to all of you.
vii Chapter One
Introduction
Every honest man is a prophet, [for] he utters his opinion on private and public matters.1
-- William Blake
The flaneur is a precursor of a particular form of inquiry that seeks to read the history of culture from its public spaces.2
— Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk
The Evolution of Flanerie: From Baudelaire to Dylan
As the archetypal observer of modern life, the flaneur has been remarkably undervalued as an historical figure. The etymology of the term reveals "flaneur" to be a
French word of Germanic origin, meaning primarily to idle about or stroll. This definition should hardly inspire any further study of flanerie, nor does it bare the true scope of the flaneur's cultural participation.3 What the flaneur has contributed to Western culture, and what he might still contribute, has indeed been obscured by the common definition of the word. The flaneur can be alternatively identified as the embodiment of the individual
William Blake, quoted in Mike Marqusee, Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 7. 2 Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4. 3 The history of the term's use in English, from the OED, reveals a lot about its development and the adaptability of the figure: A lounger or saunterer, an idle 'man about town.' Also transf. Hence flane, flane, flane v. intr., to saunter, to laze; 1854 Harper's Mag. Aug. 411/2, 'Did you ever fail to waste at least two hours of every sunshiny day, in the long-ago time when you played the flaneur, in the metropolitan city, with looking at shop-windows?'; 1872 E. Braddon, Life in India vi. 236, 'He will affect a knowledge of London life that only comes to the regular flaneur after years of active experience'; 1896 G.B Shaw, Our Theatres in Nineties (1932) II. 217, 'The boundary which separates the clever flaneur from the dramatist'; 1938 H.G. Wells, Apropos of Dolores i. 13, 'In Paris, in London I have been a happy flaneur, I have flane-d in New York and Washington and most of the great cities of Europe'; 1969 Computers & Humanities IV. 29, 'The electronic age may yet see every man a flaneur.'
1 subject as he responds to the social and cultural conditions presented by modernity and then postmodernity. In times of great cultural change, the flaneur emerges as one who can facilitate an understanding of socio-cultural developments, and ultimately translate what he sees into art. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in France, the flaneur existed as a popular cultural archetype, a distinctly bourgeois figure who produced romanticized visions of the cityscape. However, by the 1860s, the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire redefined the flaneur as the prototypical modern artist - the painter of modern life - and thus solidified the figure's importance not only as an artist, but as a personification of the problems facing modern subjectivity. Broadened this way, the idea of 'painting' modern life applies across a variety of temporal and geographical spaces.
The concept of flanerie emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, inextricably linked with the emergence of the Parisian arcades, the first glass- roofed malls. The writer Louis-Sebastien Mercier was among the first to situate the art of flanerie within a distinctly urban environment, as he recounted the social scene at the
Palais Royal in pre-revolutionary Paris. Mercier's descriptions of the atmosphere around the palace indicated a kind of early flaneuric spirit, in conjunction with the emergence of embryonic arcades within the existing palace structure.4 The arcades were to remain the flaneur's home throughout the nineteenth century. Beneath the translucent roofs of the passages, the flaneur felt chez-soi, and, indeed, the two cultural phenomena developed in tandem. The arcades were also, according to Walter Benjamin, the houses of commodity fetishism, foreshadowing the twentieth century's 'cultural turn,' and offering a
4Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Panorama of Paris, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin (Pennsylvania : Pennsylvania University Press, 1999), 205.
2 "phenomenological hermeneutics of the profane world." Their diminution to mere crosswalks by the fin-de-siecle - hastened by Baron Haussmann's unforgiving reconstruction of Paris - seemingly also brought about the death of the flaneur.
In the streets and passages of Paris, Baudelaire's flaneur became a citizen of the world. He was not only a "lover of universal life," but, more intriguingly, a "mirror as vast as the crowd itself... a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life ...an T with an insatiable appetite for the 'non-I,' at every instant rendering and explaining [life] in pictures more living than life itself."5 The flaneur's empathetic consciousness was and remains crucial to his aesthetic project, a fundamental engagement with subject, evident in both the choice of that subject and the manner of his expression. The flaneur has been above all a seeker of consciousness and an agent for understanding in the modern world.
As the arcades began to wither away at the fin-de-siecle, the fate of the flaneur became less certain. It was arguably not until Benjamin's seminal study of the passages - produced thirty years later as an attempt to understand the profound cultural changes occurring in his own society - that the flaneur experienced a renaissance in cultural studies.
Benjamin's study of nineteenth century Paris, Das Passagen Werk (The Arcades Project) did much to revive a theoretical interest in the flaneur for the twentieth century. The work was monumentally important in its implications for twentieth century notions of modernity and culture, and ultimately laid the groundwork for the beginnings of a postmodernist theory.
The introduction of mass media, coinciding with the immense industrial, political and social development of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, encouraged the flaneur's
5 Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 9.
3 evolution away from a specific temporal space. The interwar period in Germany was a stage of transition for Western culture as well as for the flaneur, as mass media facilitated the flaneur's move beyond the limits of the city, broadening his frame of reference, and allowing for the fusion of the Baudelairean artist, the commodified flaneur theorized by Benjamin and the new art forms introduced in the twentieth century - above all photography, film, and recorded sound.
The art of Weimar Germany (1918-1933) was some of the most innovative and evocative of the twentieth century. A large part of the period's artistic legacy is to be found in its visual art - particularly in the fields of cinema and photography. Karl Grune's film
The Street (1923), Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Fritz
Lang's M (1931) all explore the street and observe the city, evoking a flaneuric gaze through their filmic illustration of the predominantly urban culture that produced them. Cinema became the medium through which flanerie was first translated into mass-produced art in twentieth-century society; the camera lens presented an alternate view, another interpretation of reality. However, the inherent deceit of the camera's vision - its simultaneous interest in exposition and omniscience - meant that cinema was a distrusted medium amongst cultural theorists of the time, who felt that the cult surrounding both the new movie stars and the consuming audience presented a serious threat to artistic integrity.
The anonymity once enjoyed, indeed required, by the flaneur became all but impossible in the wake of new mass technology. Benjamin wrote about the cult of the film star that underlay the lure of the movie screen in Weimar culture as a bi-product of artistic production and commercial success in the twentieth century. Anonymity thus gave way to celebrity, so that a flaneur like Bob Dylan has been unable to shirk the invasive attention focused on him throughout his career. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Dylan's
4 work, as a collector6 and communicator, evoked the art of flanerie as conceptualized by
Baudelaire more than a century previous.
Dylan, particularly in his work during the 1960s, exemplified a socially conscious yet media-literate flaneur for the twentieth century, contributing to what Benjamin called jetztzeit, or a fundamental 'nowness' - illuminating the present as a moment of revelation, of social forces colliding and interacting. His songs and the ways they have been disseminated elucidate a distinct postmodernist aesthetic, one that incorporates both high and popular cultural influences. Dylan's flanerie in the 1960s combined a remarkable self-consciousness, as an "I" reminiscent of Baudelaire's prototype, with a flair for pastiche that allowed him to play with image, sound, and form while still producing compelling work evoking the latent cultural anxieties of his time. Indeed, seeing Dylan as a flaneur - observing, collecting, and translating- encourages new interpretations of one of the most frustratingly complex figures in twentieth-century music history.
Descriptions of the flaneur from the nineteenth century have for decades been echoed in subsequent critical analyses of Dylan as a songwriter and performer. For instance, Mary
Gluck describes the avant-garde nineteenth century flaneur as equating masquerade with
"the life of the imagination," and transforming a "world of categories" into a "world of analogy." She argues that the flaneur was "liberated from the weight of empirical reality" to assume "the function of the original creator," through his art.7 Dylan's creative project was to simultaneously complicate notions of stability and identity; to perceive cultural trends and
6 Walter Benjamin discusses the act of collecting in The Collector, one of the convolutes of the Arcades Project: "Collecting is a primal phenomenon of study: the student collects knowledge" (210). The collector then becomes both a flaneur and an historian. Benjamin recalls Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as a form of (re)collection. In this sense, collection is an innate human quality, an attempt to make sense and impose order on the disordered. Finally, Benjamin writes that "in every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector" (211). 7 Mary Gluck, "The Flaneur and the Aesthetic Appropriation of Urban Culture in Mid-19th Century Paris," Theory Culture Society, Vol. 20, No.53 (2003), 77.
5 translate them into art; and to communicate the unreality, the intrinsic absurdity, of the 'real' world through song, and even through his public image.
Many fans and critics have argued that Dylan was at his best during the 1960s, particularly in the anni mirabili 1965 and 1966, when he released three brilliant albums in quick succession -Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and
Blonde on Blonde (1966) - among the most sustained outbursts of artistic genius ever produced. In a career spanning more than forty years, it is, in fact, impossible to touch on everything Dylan has created,8 and the six years from 1962-1968 arguably remain the most prolific and truly innovative of his career. In that time, Dylan released seven solo albums of remarkable variety and scope, 'tapping in' to what was happening around him and expressing it in a way that resonated deeply with his audience.
Modernism and Postmodernism
The often antithetical tenets of modernist and postmodernist theory can helpfully periodize the development of Western art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the work of Baudelaire, of Weimar filmmakers, and of Dylan can therefore be partially understood through the prism of the concurrent shift from modernism to postmodernism.
Baudelaire's poetry has been widely credited with ushering in an age of modernist art that arguably lasted until the Second World War. Modernist art offered a withering appraisal of the modern world, and thus was often implicitly political. For the most part, it featured a utilitarian emphasis necessarily opposed to the idea of 'art for art's sake' - though
8 For the purposes of this project, the study of Dylan's work has been limited to the 1960s proper. While at other periods throughout his career - particularly with the release of Blood on the Tracks (1975) and Desire (1976), and again with the release of Time out of Mind (1997), Love and Theft (2001) and Modern Times (2006) - Dylan has produced works of remarkable brilliance, these fall beyond the scope of this thesis.
6 notable exceptions were the Dadaists and Surrealists, whose work espoused, if anything, the idea of free-flowing, irreverent expression. These examples aside, modernism, according to Fredric Jameson, "aspires to the sublime as to its very essence which we may call trans-aesthetic, insofar as it lays claim to the Absolute, that is, it believes that in order to be art at all, art must be something beyond art."9
Modernism has been traditionally associated with the auteur, whose distinctive creative footprint defines the work. Conversely, postmodernism asserts the death of the subject and the end of individualism - in essence, the impossibility of the modern auteur.10 Whereas the modernist aesthetic is "in some way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity," the postmodern is concerned with the
"radical" idea that, not only is the "bourgeois individual subject a thing of the past, it is also a myth; it never really existed in the first place."11 Hence, argues Jameson, "in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles of the imaginary museum."12
Postmodernism emerged as a reaction against modernism in the 1960s, in approximate conjunction with the development of 'late capitalism' as well as the formation of a new left movement in politics. According to Jameson, postmodernism
"expresses the inner truth of that newly emergent social order of late capitalism."13 David
Harvey argues that postmodernism is "the total acceptance of the ephemerality,
9 Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 83. 10 Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 115. 11 Jameson, The Cultural Turn, 6. 12 Ibid., 7. 13 Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," 113.
7 fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic that formed the one half of Baudelaire's conception of modernity."14 Historically, what is now considered postmodernism emerged roughly in conjunction with the advent of "the sixties" - that cultural period associated with mods and hippies, rock and roll, psychedelics, and Vietnam - a time of extensive artistic experimentation and political tension. To a certain extent, the Beat poets of the 1950s had already begun dismantling expectations of poetic language and subject matter associated with high modernism and its auteurs. There was, in the work of Allen
Ginsberg and others, an unwillingness to conform to high culture's ideals of linguistic beauty. Ginsberg's Howl - "brilliant at unmasking the demonic nihilism at the heart of our established society"15 - redefined the possibilities for epic poetry, and was an important influence on postmodernist poetry and Dylan's songwriting. Partly as a result, the 'high modernism' of auteurs like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust took negative connotations, as texts such as The Waste Land (1922), Ulysses (1922), and
Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), mainstays of many university English courses, came to be seen as stale, intellectualized, and therefore no longer relevant. Jameson argues that "Those formerly subversive and embattled styles...felt to be scandalous or shocking by our grandparents are, for the generation which arrives at the gate of the
1960s, felt to be the establishment and the enemy - dead, stifling, canonical, the reified monuments one has to destroy to do anything new."16
Media played an important role in making modernist texts seem out of date, and postmodernist art has therefore always been associated with a variety of media, old and
14 Jameson, The Cultural Turn , 44. 15 Marshal Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 314. 16 Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," 111-12.
8 new. Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media (1964), offers insight into the effects of technology and media on human thought and art in the twentieth century. He writes,
"[r]apidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media."17 According to McLuhan, technology has caused the individual man to extend beyond his physical self, as "[i]n the electric age...our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us."18 It becomes impossible, then, to "adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner"19 - an attack, presumably, on high modernism, although the flaneur would certainly fit into this unfriendly categorization as well. McLuhan hints at the implications of these technological developments for the flaneur, although he does not name him as such, when he argues that "[t]he Theater of the Absurd dramatizes this recent dilemma of Western man, the man of action who appears not to be involved in the action."20 A crucial aspect of technology's advancement, for McLuhan, is the inclusiveness it promotes:
As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. It is this implosive factor that alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media.21
17 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964), 19. 18 Ibid., 20. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.
9 Media then becomes a vehicle through which these issues can be understood, and people can be heard. McLuhan's arguments, while at times opaque, nevertheless hint at the positive possibilities for the use of media, for the transfer of knowledge from an individual to a collective through technological means, which ultimately benefits society by making it more inclusive. This has in a sense always been the flaneur's project.
Historiography
Although there is very little scholarly debate surrounding the fate of the flaneur in the twentieth century, several academics and cultural theorists have hinted at the possibilities for flanerie's survival in the transition from modern to postmodern, and it is from these hints and suggestions that a historiography of flanerie has been crafted specifically for this project.
It is easy enough to write about the flaneur in a nineteenth-century Parisian context, or even within the framework of Weimar Berlin, but there is very little to work with in placing the art of flanerie in a late twentieth-century, especially American environment. At his core, the flaneur is an attuned cultural observer, a "botanizer upon the asphalt," according to
Benjamin. However, as asphalt gradually gave way to airwaves and, ultimately, cyberspace, the flaneur became a displaced, overlooked, and nearly forgotten figure in history. A historiography, then, must be constructed from diverse works dealing with the flaneur's erstwhile relevance, his supposed disappearance, and the possibility of his continued importance to the study of culture. Where the flaneur as cultural figure has been studied, there has been an overwhelming emphasis on his role in the emergence of modern, urban culture in the early to mid-nineteenth century, above all in a Parisian context.
Baudelaire's essay, The Painter of Modern Life (1863), remains the most momentous work done on nineteenth century flanerie, as it outlines both a philosophy of
10 the flaneur and of modernity itself. Baudelaire gives one of the most vivid descriptions of the modern flaneur as he describes a scene in Poe's The Man of the Crowd: "In the window of a coffee-house, there sits a convalescent, pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling.. .in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him. Finally, he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in pursuit of an unknown, half-glimpsed
99 countenance that has, on an instant, bewitched him." Indeed, the crowd, that mercurial element of modern city life, becomes essential to the flaneur's raison d'etre, to his very survival.
After Baudelaire's unquestioned importance to theories of flanerie, any historiography must turn to Benjamin and his Arcades Project. Benjamin was the first to recognize the flaneur's historical significance as an attuned observer of the shifting society surrounding him. Without Benjamin's study of the arcades, there would likely not be any discussion of the flaneur outside of a nineteenth-century, Parisian context.
Although Benjamin's focus on Second Empire Paris as offering a phenomenological hermeneutics of his world revived an interest in the flaneur for cultural theorists in the twentieth century, he himself did not embark on a more contemporary study of the figure.
His flaneur is saddled with such political and socio-economic importance that the title cannot be bestowed upon any artist.
Benjamin, responding to Surrealist literature, conceived of the flaneur as a literary device, thus suggesting his continuing usefulness as a means of interpreting culture. Indeed, the flaneuric art of perception and the fictional narrator are very closely linked. The narrator-as-flaneur then becomes at once the protagonist and the reading audience, brought into the imaginative space created through this narration. During the same period as the
22 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 7. 11 Surrealists, British modernist literature often used flaneuric perception as a narrative device.
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf perfected the stream of consciousness technique in their writing, making their protagonists into flaneurs in classic texts such as Ulysses (1922) and
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as modern subjects who struggled to come to terms with the jarring changes wrought by the First World War.
While most studies of the flaneur are rooted in his importance to the nineteenth century, they also inadvertently betray the figure's inherent adaptability - as a cultural interpreter relevant beyond the limits of that century. The works of Benjamin, Siegfried
Kracauer, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer form an important theoretical frame within which to view the development of Western culture in the twentieth century. The negative effects of mass production, together with the implications of the so-called "culture industry," are explored further in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).
Horkheimer and Adorno were among the most influential theorists to realize the nascent political power of mass media. Adorno's bitterly melancholic understanding of art and society takes the fairly cynical view of culture previously espoused by Benjamin and
Kracauer to new heights. As with Benjamin and Kracauer, Adorno's views on mass culture stem primarily and inevitably from his experience as a Jew living under National Socialism.
For Adorno, the production of consumable, "stylized" mass art was "complicit with a disinterested view of society that permits social atrocities such as Nazi concentration camps and genocide to go unchecked."23 Between Benjamin and Kracauer, Horkheimer and
Adorno, the view of the Weimar era as the progenitor of the mass-mediated culture of the twentieth century is overwhelmingly negative. However, the survival of the flaneur through
23 "Introduction to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer," in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2006), 1220.
12 photographic and filmic expression was a crucial side-effect of the development of mass media, one that arguably offers a redemptive quality to the capitalist overhaul of artistic production, and ultimately negates the loss of individual subjectivity in modern society.
In the twentieth century, the changing nature of public space through the advent of mass media both encouraged and necessitated new forms of flanerie, away from a physical presence on the city streets. The profound difference between the physical space of the street and the infinite space created through film and airwaves is important, and this thesis will attempt to unite the notion of the flaneur as observer of the nineteenth century city with the idea of a flaneur as raconteur of more mediated culture in the twentieth through an examination of the changing nature of public space.
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson's essay "The Flaneur and the Production of Culture," casts the flaneur as an "indelibly Parisian" figure who effectively captures the inherent contradictions within his urban environment, and "both interprets and represents new modes of participation in urban culture."24 Her description of him as one who embodies new ways of being in the city ultimately paves the way for more expansive definitions of his role. Mary Gluck argues that the definition of flanerie has always been an interpretive exercise, that it is the mercurial nature of the flaneur that offers the most intriguing analyses for cultural theorists and historians: "mid-19th-Century visions of flanerie were interpretations just as 20 -century images are. They served different purposes, however, and it is these differences that interest [cultural historians]."25 In fact, if the flaneur can, as she argues, be viewed as a metaphor for both the modernist and postmodernist artist, then the advent of mass media early on in the twentieth century offered him freedom from
24 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, "The Flaneur and the Production of Culture," in Cultural Participation: Trends Since the Middle Ages, eds. Ann Rigney and Douwe Fokkema (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1993), 122. 25 Gluck, "The Flaneur," 54.
13 the constraints of geography, social condition and national traditions. He grew into "a truly cosmopolitan figure, gaining the ability to inhabit, not simply the city, but the entire globe through his imagination."26
The variety and scope of the critical essays in Keith Tester's collection, The
Flaneur, offer many new and innovative ways to interpret the many facets of flanerie and the art of the flaneur, proving the figure's versatility. Tester follows the evolution of flanerie, writing that the flaneur "has been allowed, or made, to take a number of walks away from the streets and arcades of nineteenth-century Paris. Not least, the figure and the activity appear regularly in the attempts of social and cultural commentators to get some grip on the nature and implications of the conditions of modernity and post- modernity."27 According to Gluck and Tester, then, the possibilities for flaneuric expression are theoretically limitless; the flaneur is freed from the confines of a specific temporal or spatial relevance.
While I agree that the flaneur need not be relegated to a particular time or space, there are limits to his categorization. A flaneur must be someone who is able to translate latent cultural trends and disseminate more manifest social elements in his attempt to understand the modern world, his contemporary environment. Not everyone who observes his or her cultural surroundings is able to do this, and therefore does not fit the mould of flanerie. The flaneur must be heroic in his desire to know, and in the subjugation of self that underlies this process. Above all, the flaneur must be an artist whose artistry comes from a position of both inclusion and exclusion within his socio-cultural environment.
Ibid., 77. Keith Tester, 'Introduction," in The Flaneur, ed. Tester (London: Routledge, 1994), 1.
14 Problems and Methodology
Because there has not been a significant current of scholarly discussion regarding the position of flanerie in the late twentieth century, a certain degree of licence is necessary here when applying the term to contemporary art and artists. First amongst the problems arising with this project is the inclusion of Bob Dylan as a late twentieth- century flaneur. Some may argue that the choice of Dylan as (post)modern flaneur is a false construct. After all, how is Dylan different from other artists? How can he be considered a flaneur when others are not? Several of Dylan's contemporaries were unquestionably important influences on their generation's consciousness: songwriters
John Lennon and Paul McCartney immediately come to mind, as do Neil Young, Van
Morrison, and folk singers like Phil Ochs. Each produced works that resonated deeply with their audiences, and they have all been lauded by critics, at the time and subsequently, as gifted singers and songwriters. However, none were so universally appealed to as a 'voice of a generation' as Dylan.
Phil Ochs, for instance, was one of the most politically engaged songwriters of the folk movement; his devotion to political and social causes was passionate, and his songs reflected this. In this sense, he was more a disciple of Woody Guthrie than Dylan ever was. His songs were exactly the kind of 'finger-pointing' works that Dylan eventually eschewed. This is perhaps why he never enjoyed the same level of praise as Dylan, nor has his work lasted in the public memory in the same way. His songs are defined but also limited by their uncompromising criticism of such topical issues as Vietnam ("The War is
Over"), Southern racism ("Here's to the State of Mississippi") and self-satisfied liberalism ("Love Me, I'm a Liberal"). And while his work is at times poignant and witty, it also borders on self-righteous. Dylan is unique because he defined his time and
15 changed with it - sometimes ahead of it. He both reflected and directed the tensions, anxieties, triumphs and failures of his generation, and his songs, even those that were considered 'topical,' often resonated well beyond the events they referred to.
Due to constraints of both time and space, the problem of the female flaneur
(flaneuse) will not be discussed in depth in the course of this project. Several feminist critics have covered the topic comprehensively, in my opinion, and further discussion therefore seems superfluous. However, some understanding of their work is called for. Deborah
Parsons, in Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (2000) remakes the flaneur as an essentially androgynous figure who shares a conceptual closeness with prostitution that cannot be ignored. Indeed, because the flaneur exists both as consumer and commodity in the public sphere, this closeness seems inevitable and inescapable. Parsons's work has been important, along with that of Susan Buck-Morss, in exploring this connection between flanerie and prostitution, in its implications for gender studies.
Mica Nava, in "Modernity's Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store"
(1997), explains the importance of the female consumer in the construction of gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because the nineteenth-century flaneur is so intimately connected with the arcades, which were important predecessors of the Grand
Magasins like the Bon Marche and the KDW in Berlin, the figure has been associated with the act of shopping - an activity irrevocably associated with women. Works like Emile
Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise) make the association between women and shopping explicit, connecting the female shopper with the kind of commodity fetishism described by Benjamin and others. The central female character in Zola's novel, Denise, finds herself utterly transfixed by the ostentatious window displays of a great department store, and dreams of one day working in such a place. The activities of the window shopper
16 and the flaneur are indeed similar, inspiring in turn a healthy literature that connects both actions in the figure of a female flaneur - or flaneuse. Much of the contemporary work on flanerie has been preoccupied with the problem of the flaneuse, and the gender issues raised therein, claiming that the flaneuse existed separately and uniquely from the traditional male figure. Arguably, it has been the flaneur's inherent adaptability, the ambivalence of the flaneuric role and project, that has allowed for so many diverse interpretations of the figure's importance to surface in academic discussion, and which will allow for further imaginative studies of the figure in the future.
17 Chapter Two
The Flaneur and his City: Charles Baudelaire and the
Art of Flanerie in Nineteenth-Century Paris
The flaneur begins as a roving empiricist, and ends as little less than a visionary. When pushed to their limit, the visionary powers of the flaneur call into question the principle of identity itself.1
— Richard Burton, The Flaneur and His City
Introduction
Paris, in the nineteenth century, represented the apotheosis of the Modern, embodying a crucial split from the past, from traditional modes of thought that had previously held sway. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, which constituted a decisive break from the preceding social order, Paris developed simultaneously into the uncontested capital of France, as center of industry and commerce; of Europe, as cultural crossroads; and ultimately, of Modernity, as the site of so many of the newest and most original ideas in visual art, architecture, fashion, and literature. The city also inspired pioneering reconceptions of urban life. Indeed, throughout the 'long' nineteenth century
- spanning the Revolution of 1789 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 - Paris consistently attracted the most innovative artists and thinkers from within France and throughout the world, giving the city an air of novelty, originality, and fertility, if only for a relatively brief period. Paris' tenure as "capital of modernity" ended with the
1 Richard Burton, The Flaneur and his City: Patterns of Daily Life in Paris 1815-1851 (Durham: The University of Durham Press, 1994), 5.
18 nineteenth century itself on 2 August 1914. Throughout that time, the flaneur acted as a cultural interpreter, making his society legible through perceptive renderings of the life around him. Post-revolution Paris was the birthplace of the art of flanerie; the city provided aspiring flaneurs with sights and sounds beyond any other, as the locus of so much of what was new in European culture at the time. The seemingly constant threat of revolution, and an unparalleled modernization project, together with warring Parisian inclinations toward joie de vivre and misery in response, all made the city an ideal stage for all forms of participation in modern life throughout this period.
Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century
Paris has become, in both historical and popular memory, the archetype of the nineteenth-century city, and also, therefore, has provided a blueprint for the modern metropolis as conceptualized subsequently by historians. The Revolution necessitated new ways of thinking about the relationship between individual and society, requiring, ultimately, "new modes of participation in public life." The radical period of industrialization occurring throughout Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fostered equally radical social and cultural change in cities like London, Vienna, and especially Paris. The task of modernizing the medieval city, coupled with the emergence of capitalist consumer culture, complicated conceptions of public and private within the metropolitan environment, as the city itself became an interior, its furniture the benches, advertising signposts and statues erected for its beautification.
One of the outcomes of this process was the materialization of a distinctly cosmopolitan culture, which created and nurtured its own unique discourse. Second
2 Parkhurst Ferguson, "The Flaneur and the Production of Culture," 109.
19 Empire Paris became the place where the courses of modern, Western cultures were arguably shaped.3 Walter Benjamin was one of the first to recognize Paris' importance in the modern era, as was demonstrated in his work on the so-called "capital of the nineteenth century," The Arcades Project. The flaneur helped to negotiate that important transition from rural to urban, medieval to modern that characterized the period of industrialization and modernization in Paris.
The idea of modernity has become inextricable from the Industrial Revolution beginning in the eighteenth century and the subsequent rise of capitalist culture in the century following. It is also, conversely, a term referring to the essence of avant-garde art, which would seem to be at odds with the advent of industrial mass production. Matei
Calinescu contends that two diametrically opposed 'modernities,' one historical and one purely aesthetic, developed simultaneously during the nineteenth century:
[A]t some point during the first half of the nineteenth century an irreversible split occurred between modernity as a stage in the history of Western civilization - a product of progress, scientific, and technological progress, of the industrial revolution, of the sweeping economic and social changes brought about by capitalism - and modernity as an aesthetic concept.4
The notion of two divergent modernities offers a constructive way to look at Paris as it developed into the archetypal modern metropolis, with the first idea denoting the bourgeois liberal doctrine of progress, and the second the radical and decidedly anti- bourgeois attitudes governing most of the truly innovative art of the century, which might now be called modernist. Indeed, what traditionally defines "cultural modernity" is its
J Ibid., 111. 4 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 41.
20 outright rejection of "bourgeois modernity."5 Geoff Eley posits that "modernity" fundamentally implies a rejection of liberalism, in its simultaneous critique of the
Western Enlightenment tradition, grand historical narratives, and finally the notion of a
"rationally acting individual subject." The key to connecting these seemingly irreconcilable notions of modernity lies in the work of the poet and art critic Charles
Baudelaire and in the figure of the flaneur, whom he (re)defined both for his own time and for subsequent generations of artists and critics.
Baudelaire's observations regarding the ambivalent beauty of modern life within the urban environment have allowed for expansive interpretations of the purpose of art and, ultimately, of modernity itself. He was acutely aware of his historical moment, and of the relationship between that moment and the past. For him, art fundamentally separated present from past; artistic expression was important in achieving "an awareness of living in a period that is different, a departure from and not a gradual adaptation of the past,"7 precisely because the artist had a unique vantage point as the flaneur. The present as a moment of revelation was a central aspect of Baudelaire's poetics - based on his own notion of modernite - and led to the acceptance of modernism as a distinct artistic style early in the twentieth century. He pioneered the development of a new kind of
Romanticism, one located in the spectacle of city life rather than in more traditional pastoral settings, which was primarily practiced by the painter of modern life, the flaneur.
5 Ibid., 41-2. 6 Geoff Eley, "German History and the Contradictions of Modernity," in Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930, ed. Eley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 69. 7 Malcolm Miles, Cities and Cultures (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007), 54.
21 A Tale of Two Flaneurs
Like 'modernity,' the term 'flaneur' conjures a multiplicity of images and ideas.
Recently, the nature of flanerie has been hotly debated, and the figure himself is in danger of becoming little more than "a generalized symbol of urban experience and cultural
o modernity." He has been variously depicted as nothing more than a bourgeois idler -a mere "wealthy middle-class poser" - who surveys the social spaces of the city, but also as an embodiment of the destabilized (masculine) self. He has been the detective, the journalist, the consumer, the artist. The idea of a classic nineteenth-century flaneur, a singular type, is therefore misleading, if not categorically false. As he was first conceptualized in the popular print culture of the early nineteenth century, the flaneur essentially ceased to exist after mid-century. One can, therefore, speak of two types of nineteenth-century flanerie: the privileged bourgeois flaneur of the Parisian popular culture, and the more rarefied artist-flaneur later introduced by Baudelaire; put another way, the Romantic and the Artist - one who fought for leading roles in the limelight, at the centre of the spectacular city; and one who became an observer of contemporary life on the periphery of that spectacle.10
Paris was, and arguably remains, "a world to be seen by the walker alone."11 As such, the city was the obvious home of flanerie in the nineteenth century. Keith Tester distils the relationship between modernity, Paris, and the flaneur into an easily understood formula: "Modernity is the form; Paris is the content. The flaneur is the figure and the
8 Gluck, "The Flaneur and Aesthetic Appropriation," 53. 9 David Miller, "Could Shopping Ever Really Matter?," in The Shopping Experience, eds. Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 37. 10 Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 166. 11 Edmund White, The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001), 34.
22 point of observation that straddles the two and pulls them together into a unity." As both observer and observed in a world where a spectacular capitalist culture increasingly dominated the urban experience, the flaneur offered a unique and, indeed, unparalleled, way to view the city. The changing city became decipherable through the 'travelogues' of the flaneur, transforming him into a cultural figure who, through his privileged position, could transcend the fragmented world and render the urban landscape legible to his audience. The empirical flaneur brought to life, through his literary depictions of the city, the "fleeting, everyday occurrences that ordinary people failed to notice."13
The first incarnation of the flaneur was the bourgeois empiricist who became a common figure in much of the popular literature of the first half of the nineteenth century.
The bourgeois flaneur, not much more than a socially privileged hobbyist, was first popularized by Louis Sebastien Mercier's Panorama of Paris (1788), in which the author writes of the "anonymous social types" who populated the city in the years before the
Revolution.14 Like many works authored by later flaneurs, the book ultimately depicts
Mercier himself as a "tireless observer of the constantly changing urban scene"15 and offered a blueprint for aspiring flaneurs over the course of the next century. Mercier writes, for instance, about the scene at the Palais Royal: "Everything is to be heard, seen, known there; a young man can get a very fair education just by requesting it.. .the indecent parade is never done."16
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the subject of flanerie was exceedingly popular, and those claiming to be practicing flaneurs appeared commonly in
12 Tester, The Flaneur, 17. 13 Gluck, "The Flaneur and Aesthetic Appropriation," 69. 14 Jeremy D. Popkin, "Introduction," in Mercier, Panorama of Paris, 14. 15 Ibid. 16 Mercier, Panorama of Paris, 205.
23 journals, pamphlets, physiologies, novels and poetic works dealing either implicitly or explicitly with the art of flanerie and discussing everything from the patrons at public libraries to the circus.17 Clearly, to be a flaneur was not only en vogue, but more than that, it was a heroic endeavor, as flaneurs were required to throw themselves into the maelstrom of modern life in order for it to be better understood. The flaneur's "power of vision" was considered by contemporaries to be an "exceptional and potentially heroic achievement that helped humanize the urban landscape."
Most of the writing on flanerie from this early period was composed by self- proclaimed flaneurs, who were, primarily, bourgeois "men of letters." A multi-volume collection of essays entitled Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un, established a trend of flaneuric writing in the early nineteenth century. According to the editor of a truncated
English translation, the volumes were conceived by "distinguished literary men in
France" who offered their "gratuitous aid" to the failed publisher, monsieur Ladvocat, in order to "restore his broken fortune."19 The English essays cover such diverse subjects as
"The Cemetery of Pere Lachaise," "The Public Libraries," and "The History of a Hat."
Omitted, rather remarkably, was the essay on the flaneur. The subject matter of flaneuric study depended on the writer - very little was considered inappropriate or ridiculous; whatever interested the author was acceptable. One man, for instance, devoted himself to providing short biographies of circus-performers as part of a commentary on the state of
This is evident if one delves, even with passing interest, in the archives of nineteenth-century French literature. I found at least forty or fifty works, either about flanerie, or authored by a flaneur, in my initial search. There are many more works that surface with a little more work. 18 Gluck, Popular Bohemia, 75. 19 Anonymous, "Preface to English Edition," Paris; or, the Book of the Hundred and One, Vols. 1-3 (London: Whittaker, Treacher and Company, 1833), v.
24 the circus trade.
The short essays in the book of the hundred-and-one are entertaining, and illustrate well the spirit of flanerie that seems to have suffused Parisian society at the time of their original publication in French, around 1832. The author of the library piece, known only as Jacob, describes with palpable disdain what he sees as the pretention of the patrons of an unidentified but obviously reputable library: "The moment the doors are opened, summer or winter - rain or shine - a host of readers settle round the tables, each in his place of yesterday, each calling for his books of yesterday, and each taking root for at least five hours; many with empty stomachs, and most with empty heads."21 Those who have genuinely come to study, he argues, can be easily counted: "These may be known by their bald forehead, abstracted look, immobility, and perseverance...These men are an honour to literature; and under the shelter of their humble obscurity, they finish the
99 works to which celebrity lays charm." The author's ambivalence regarding libraries and their patrons reveals an essential aspect of the flaneur's ethos - education through experience - to which Mercier referred obliquely, and Louis Huart directly when he wrote that, "Le vrai flaneur a le droit d'ignorer le grec, le latin, les mathematiques et ces autres superfluities scientifiques; mais il doit connaitre toutes les rues, toutes les boutiques de 9^
Paris." Those who wrote about flanerie were very particular about its proper practice and the importance of the figure's cultural role.
In the French flaneur essay an anonymous writer claims that he and others like him are nothing less than the "premier besoin d'un age avance," representing "la plus 20 The title of this work is Biographie des Ecuyers du Cirque-Olympique, Par un Flaneur (Paris: Chez L'editeur du repertoire Dramatique et du theater complet de Victor Hugo, 1846). 21 Jacob, "The Public Libraries," in Paris, or the Book of the Hundred and One, 215. 22 Ibid., 215-16. 23 Louis Huart, Physiologie du Flaneur (Paris: Lavigne, 1841), 120-121.
25 haute expression de la civilisation moderne." The flaneur was without question a uniquely Parisian entity, according to early practitioners. The writer places himself and his art firmly within a nineteenth-century, specifically Parisian, context: "Le flaneur peut naitre partout; il ne sait vivre qu'a Paris... Representer Paris sans le flaneur ce serait peindre une chambre des deputes sans le general, un bal sans la princesse."25 Jules Janin, an American writer who published The American in Paris in 1843, conceived the work as
"a lively sketch of French manners and society, French politics, and French character, in every grade, from the king to the peasant."26 He describes the flaneur as "a word quite
Parisian, to represent a passion which is quite Parisian,"27 although he himself aspires to be one. Auguste de Lacroix, another flaneur, writes, "le flaneur est, sans contredit, originaire et habitant d'une vaste cite, de Paris assurement. II n'y a qu'une grande ville, en effet, qui puisse servir de theatre a ses explorations incessantes." Indeed, Paris cultivated many flaneurs, who in turn expressed their appreciation for the city's intricacies and idiosyncrasies. The flaneur was so common a figure that he comprised a significant portion of many contemporary social studies. Physiologies - pocket-sized illustrated booklets about "social stereotypes" - were popular studies of Parisian manners, and sold for 1 franc each to a mass audience.29
The Physiologie Du Flaneur (1854), authored by Louis Huart, offers a comprehensive study of the bourgeois flaneur. Huart is at pains to define what makes a
24 Anonymous ('Un Flaneur'), « Le Flaneur a Paris, » in Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un (Paris : Chez Ladvocat, 1832), 96. 25 Ibid., 98-99. 26 From the English Translator's Introduction in Jules Janin, The American in Paris (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1843), iii-iv. 27 Janin, American in Paris, 162. 28 Auguste de Lacroix, « Le Flaneur, » in Les Francais Peints Par Eux-Memes : Encyclopedie Morale du Dix-Neuvieme Siecle (Paris : Adolphe Delahays, 1859), 112. 29 Gluck, "The Flaneur and Aesthetic Appropriation," 62.
26 flaneur against imitation, exclaiming, "Rien de plus commun que le nom, rien de plus rare que la chose!" The flaneur should ideally be a solitary figure, Huart argues, because company turns the activity into nothing more than a stroll with friends : "S'il est deraisonnable de flaner en compagnie d'un ami, il est impossible de flaner en compagnie de plusieurs amis : la flanerie n'est plus qu'une rapide promenade." Huart's study provides numerous illustrations of flaneurs in various poses. These images paint the flaneur unequivocally as a bourgeois figure, complete with top hat and frock coat. The flaneur was not only economically comfortable, but apparently unaffected by any instances of real strife. Unlike the more complicated figure later defined by Baudelaire,
Huart's bourgeois flaneur was the happiest man in the world, an affable, good-natured soul: "Le flaneur est le seul homme heureux qui existe sur la terre, on n'a pas encore cite l'exemple d'un seul flaneur qui soit suicide."32 Indeed, the empirical flaneur's existence seemed to be one largely without pain, apart from such occupational hazards as traffic and weather.
Many published journals outlined the daily practices of flaneurs. One dated from
1822 plainly exposes the author's bourgeois outlook, and seeks to justify his position as a flaneur. A passage details his morning routine: "A peine suis-je habille que ma gouvernante s'empresse de m'apporter une tasse de chocolat et un petit pain au lait. Ce leger repas acheve, je prends ma canne et mon chapeau, et je dirige mes pas vers le cafe
Casati." This type of life precluded any philosophical waxing on issues of existential or metaphysical angst. Flanerie in its first incarnation was more concerned with minute
30 Huart, Physiologie du Flaneur, 10. 31 Ibid. ,115. 32 Ibid. ,82. Antoine Pierre Bellot, Les loisirs d'un flaneur, ou le poete par occasion, recueil de poesies provenqales et francaises (Paris, 1822), 31.
27 details and mundane observations, the simple pleasures of living in a great city. Antoine
Bellot describes the aimless nature of flaneuric wandering, writing, "Je me dirige indifferemment, tantot vers le Jardin Bourbon, tantot vers le chemin de la Magdeleine, quelquefois sur le rivage de la mer, plus souvent aux bords de jarret: les variations de l'atmosphere guident seules mon choix; et je ne rentre chez moi qu'apres avoir longtemps chemine."34 In the evenings, he writes, he heads to the theatre, not to take in the show, but rather his fellow spectators : "Le soir, quand le temps le permet, je me rends au spectacle, ou, pour ne pas voir mutiler les oeuvres de nos grands maitres par des acteurs qui se croient infaillibles, je braque ma lunette sur les spectateurs et je choisis mes personnages dans la salle: ma comedie en vaut bien une autre assurement."35 He derives his amusement, and therefore his sustenance, from the crowd.
Jules Noriac, another flaneur, anticipates the transition from the empirical bourgeois to the avant-garde visionary. His cynicism marks a departure from the writings of other, earlier flaneurs: "La vie d'un homme peut quelquefois etre amusante, touchante ou originale, quoique cependant rien ne ressemble plus a un homme qu'un autre homme.
Boire, manger, aimer, dormir, souffrir, regretter et mourir. On a beau se dire que c'est toujours la meme piece, ou se laisse prendre par le vain espoir d'entendre un peu de neuf." Unlike flaneurs like Bellot - who returns home after the evening spectacle -
Noriac prefers to flane at night, beneath the brilliant glow of electric lighting: "la nuit est fraiche l'ete, chaude l'hiver. La nuit les feunes montrent sans crainte bien des choses qui brillent aux feux des lumieres et qui paliraient devant les rayons du soleil."37 The advent
34 Ibid., 35. 35 Ibid., 36. 36 Jules Noriac, Journal d'un Flaneur (Paris: Michel Levy Freres, 1865), 79-80. 37 Ibid., 141-2.
28 of electric lighting was indeed a crucial development in the history of Paris and of flanerie, as the invention allowed night-time strolling without fear of menace, the shadows instead conjuring surrealistic imagery. Most of this night-time wandering was done in the famous Parisian arcades, which provided a haven for the flaneur, as spaces that were both outside and in, both public and private.
The Arcades and Walter Benjamin
Embryonic arcades had been in existence since the days of the Ancien Regime, as
TO part of the structure of the Palais Royal. Bertrand Lemoine asserts that the first arcade was the Galerie de Bois, constructed at the Palais Royal in 1786.39 These early arcades had been ephemeral structures, located within the pre-existing buildings, and as such could not be the "commercial machines" that they would become by the mid- nineteenth century;40 they were, rather, places to gather and observe one's surroundings. The first covered passage to be built "from the ground up," essentially, was the Passage Feydeau, from 1790-91. Lemoine writes, "Le premier vrai passage couvert.. .c'est le passage
Feydeau... Avec son toit perce de jours, ses boutiques, sa fonction traversante a travers un ilot construit, il presentait toutes les caracteristiques des passages a venir."41 The
Passage des Panoramas, perhaps the most famous of all the Parisian arcades, was built between 1799 and 1800, and, from 1822-29, fourteen other of these "shopping malls" were built.
The arcades of Paris were some of the first places in the city to benefit from the
38 Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 2002), 195-6. 39 Bertrand Lemoine, Les Passages Couverts en France (Paris : Delegation a l'Action Artistique de la Ville de Paris, 1989), 13. 40 Higonnet, Capital of the World, 196. 41 Lemoine, Passages Couverts, 15. 42 Higonnet, Capital of the World, 196. 29 invention of electricity. They married industry and art, bringing together the divergent enterprises in their very structure, reconciling antithetical impulses toward aesthetic beauty and the market economy. Above all, they represented an important transition.
They had evolved in the years immediately preceding the French Revolution - during the last tremulous moments of the Ancien Regime - and subsequently came to embody the simultaneous ascendance of industry, technology, and modernist art in the nineteenth century, signifying in effect the arrival of a new world order. The flaneur's primary dwelling throughout the nineteenth century was in the arcades. They were places to see and be seen, where the flaneur existed both as consumer and commodity, and their fate and the flaneur's have often been linked; the two helped to define each other. According to Benjamin, the arcades were the houses of commodity fetishism, their window displays signaling the emergence of consumer capitalism, designed to charm the senses, as crowds of flaneurs, bourgeois dandies and prostitutes - the literal embodiments of consumer fetishism - intermingled with passers-by under the distinct iron and glass roofs.
Christopher Prendergast writes of the arcade as the "perfect emblem of the emergence of the culture of the 'commodity,' a culture of movement and dislocation in which the eye and mind are increasingly solicited, and threatened, by an unprecedented range of stimuli masquerading as the Utopia of the New."43 Beneath the translucent roof of the passage, the flaneur was at home. Huart affirms this relationship when he writes that, "sans les passages, le flaneur serait malheureux; mais sans le flaneur, les passages n'existeraient pas."44 The apparent symbiosis of arcade and flaneur is what caused many to assume that, when the arcades were left to decay, so too was the flaneur.
43 Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 5. Huart, Physiologie du Flaneur, 97.
30 The Arcades Project amounts to a comprehensive yet fragmentary study from which many others on the subject of the Parisian arcades, and, indeed, on nineteenth- century Paris itself, have followed. The work offers an encyclopedic approach, not only to the arcades' physical and cultural importance in their time, but more importantly to their significance as indicators of the trajectory of modern, capitalist culture well beyond the fin-de-siecle. David Harvey writes that the Arcades Project's significance rests on the way in which "[Benjamin] assembled a vast array of information from all sorts of secondary sources and began to lay out the bits and pieces.. .as if they were part of some giant kaleidoscope of how Paris worked and how it became such a central site for the birth of the modern (as both techne and sensibility)."45 Above all, Benjamin was interested in the phenomenon of phantasmagoria - the urban spectacle - which, he argued, was also the primary interest of the flaneur.
A generation after their demolition, Benjamin revived interest in the arcades for a new generation of theorists and historians. Johann Geist argues that he facilitated the arcade's twentieth-century transformation into an "independent literary theme, a metaphor,"46 while Gluck contends that it was Benjamin who "almost single-handedly recovered the figure of the flaneur for 20l -Century criticism, establishing the connection between flanerie and the urban landscape of modernity."47 The Passagen-Werk reveals
Benjamin's own latent flaneur spirit, his simultaneous disgust and delight with the arcades and their inhabitants. As Mica Nava writes, the work is "full of a deeply felt ambivalence about the temptations of the metropolitan world of consumption and
45David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 18. 46 Johann Geist, Arcades: The History of a Building Type (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1983), 115-16. 47 Gluck, "The Flaneur and Aesthetic Appropriation," 54.
31 spectacle - the urban phantasmagoria which both dazzles and deceives the crowd."
Despite his apparent ambivalence, Benjamin's work on these seemingly superficial structures paved the way for ever more nuanced discussions of twentieth and twenty-first century Western culture. A considerable portion of the Arcades Project is dedicated to
Baudelaire, whose cultural importance and genius, Benjamin asserts, is tied to his psychic engagement with the city, and to his seminal redefinition of flanerie. Indeed, Baudelaire's reconception of the possibilities for the flaneur negated the figure's supposed cultural death.
Around mid-century, the flaneur as he was portrayed in popular print underwent a fundamental transformation. That is, the bourgeois flaneur of the popular literature all but disappeared, and was replaced by the avant-garde artist who was, essentially,
Baudelaire's invention. Gluck writes that, "by the late 1850s, a new version of the flaneur and a new definition of flanerie re-emerged in the guise of the avant-garde artist.
'The Painter of Modern Life,' as Baudelaire called this resurrected flaneur, reaffirmed the idea of modernity as epic experience."49 Baudelaire's conception of the flaneur as painter of modern life provided for more impressionistic interpretations of that life. The city became a text in need of translation. The flaneur became a visionary, whose reading of the city in turn became a more creative endeavor, less a journalistic exercise. Reality itself became a matter of interpretation, the city a sea of deception. Baudelaire's work helped to create not only a revitalized flaneur, but the beginnings of a distinctly modern sensibility in art.
Mica Nava, "Modernity's Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store," in The Shopping Experience, eds. Falk and Campbell, 81. 49 Gluck, "The Flaneur and Aesthetic Appropriation," 73-4.
32 Baudelaire
Baudelaire's musings on life in nineteenth century Paris were the beginning of a thoroughly original view of modernity of which he is the unchallenged progenitor. Peter
Gay describes Baudelaire as "modernism's first hero," and places him at the centre of the cultural heresy surrounding its development. He writes, "[n]o single poet, no single painter or composer, can securely claim to have been the 'onlie begetter' of Modernism.
But the most plausible candidate for that role was Charles Baudelaire. For the history of modernism, he is...absolutely indispensable."50 The seminality of Baudelaire's contribution to theories of modernity and what it meant to be modern cannot be overstated.
Marshall Berman contends that Baudelaire did more than anyone in the nineteenth century to "make the men and women of his century aware of themselves as moderns."51
As the issue of modernity's definition becomes more acute with the growing influence of postmodernism, Baudelaire's position as the originator of it all becomes all the more justified. He was, Berman asserts, "the first modernist," and he further contends that "the more seriously Western culture is concerned with the issue of modernity," the more it must appreciate Baudelaire's "originality and courage."52 Baudelaire's striking perceptiveness and at times painful self-consciousness are present not only in his poetry, but also - and no less significantly - in his art criticism. Indeed, his modernite, both as defined theoretically and applied artistically, embodies, according to Calinescu, "the paradoxes of a time awareness so strikingly new... and so rich and refined, that it can be
50 Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (New York: Norton, 2008), 5;34. 51 Berman, All That is Solid, 132. 52 Ibid. ,133.
33 judged a qualitative turning point in the history of modernity as an idea." However, it was not until well after his death that Baudelaire came to accrue such appreciation from artists and critics alike. His elevation to the literary canon was a "strictly posthumous affair" that owed much to Benjamin.54
For Baudelaire, the term "modernity" implied an essential transience, and the ephemeral nature of both time and human existence. The flaneur as a figure embodied this very ephemerality in his person, as a mercurial personage who was sustained through his ability to adopt various masks. In the teeming streets of Paris, the dichotomous relationship between past and present, presence and transience, together with the dialectic imagery of the city, could be keenly perceived by the ambulatory observer, the flaneur. In
The Painter of Modern Life (1863), and also in Les Fleurs du Mai (1857) and Le Spleen de Paris (1869), Baudelaire created a poetics of modernity, of a beauty "both infernal and divine, whose being is the paradoxical place where opposites coincide,"55 inspired by the spectacular city and seen through the eyes of the flaneur.
As Marc Eli Blanchard writes, "[t]o someone like Baudelaire, the city never drops its mask. Even in its most real manifestations, it carries an appearance: the prostitute can be queen, the ragpicker a king, and the bourgeois a caricature, always."56 Baudelaire's incarnation of the flaneur reflected this uneasy relationship with the city, as the figure himself appeared as a series of masks and personae. He was a "unique individual who represented a principle of differentiation and originality. His identity was based, not on
Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 49. 54 Ibid., 38. 55 Ibid., 54. 56 Mark Eli Blanchard, In Search of the City: Engels, Baudelaire, Rimbaud (Saratoga, California: ANMA Libri, 1985), 74.
34 typification, but on masks, disguises, incognitos." The city, too, was a place of contradiction, a space where guise and deception seemed to reign supreme. As a lens through which to see this contradictory space, the nature of the flaneur himself was contested.
The Flaneur as Symbol of Modern Subjectivity
While the earlier bourgeois flaneur's heroism was to be found in his honest, impassioned rendering of the world around him, the heroism of the avant-garde flaneur was related to his "radical creativity, to his god-like ability to refashion himself and the world around him in ever-new forms."58 The city became "a stage," where the individual subject could "attune himself to these happenings."59 In this theatre, the city appeared as an amalgamation of a variety of phenomena, each offering a different image of modern life - snapshots to be taken by a "moving observer in the midst of a moving city."60 The avant-garde flaneur stood in stark opposition to the realism expounded by his bourgeois predecessor,61 embodying instead the profound alienation of an individual lost in the new world of stone created by Napoleon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges
Haussmann.
Haussmann's urban renewal project of the 1850s and 60s left Paris, to many observers, an unrecognizable conglomeration of wide, open boulevards and uniform buildings, causing many writers and artists to paint their beloved city as a cold, impersonal tundra. Harvey credits Haussmann with effectively "bludgeoning the city into
Gluck, Popular Bohemia, 102. 58 Ibid. 59 Blanchard, In Search of the City, 77. 60 Ibid., 82. 61 Gluck, Popular Bohemia, 100.
35 modernity." Haussmann was obsessed with symmetry and perspective, and his boulevards and road extensions reflected this: "The key to the entire reconstruction would be the great new Boulevards: wide, straight, symmetrical, lined with magnificent buildings, terminated by monuments."63 Haussmann never thought of a principal route without considering how it would offer a new point of view, and he was determined to bring those perspectives about, which he proved through his formidable maneuvering of the Boulevard Henri IV, for example. At the time of Haussmann's departure, under the cloud of the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris in 1871, there were 525 miles of roads in the city- as opposed to the 239 that existed when he began in 1852 - and 347 miles of sewer tunnels beneath them.64
Paris was barely recognizable to its own citizens. The flaneur played an important role in these new characterizations of city life, as the personification of the profound alienation experienced by individuals in Second Empire Paris. Gustave Caillebotte's painting, Paris Street: Rainy Weather (1877) depicts Haussmann's Paris as modern and sophisticated, but wanting. The subjects of the painting are both the "wandering strangers," Parisians, and the city itself. Albert Boime writes that "the sight of the pedestrians strolling isolated from the others prompts thoughts on the effects of
Haussmannization on their behaviour and psychology."65 Gustave Flaubert's The
Sentimental Education is largely concerned with the individual negotiating this new, alien
Harvey, Capital of Modernity, 3. 63 Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (London: Phoenix, 1998), 717- 18. 64 Michael Carmona, Haussmann: His Life and Times, and the Making of Modern Paris (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 397; 401. 65 Albert Boime, Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris After War and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 93.
36 city, with his protagonist, Frederic, embodying the "hapless soul of the Second Empire."
In a sense, these artistic representations of Second Empire Paris employed a flaneuric vision of the city, standing "in silent opposition to Haussmann's project."67
Evidently, however, not everyone felt marginalized by the changes. Patrice
Higonnet argues that the alienated flaneur of the Second Empire is only one of many
Parisian myths emanating from impressions of the nineteenth-century city: "[T]his myth of the alienated man had wide import for the history of nineteenth-century Paris: it figures prominently as the last-born of the great Parisian myths."68 One anonymous writer, calling himself a flaneur, welcomed the changes wrought by Haussmann, calling them necessary improvements for an ill city: "L'Empereur, force d'accepter une situation qu'il n'avait pas faite, dut aviser aux moyens de resoudre as problemes, qui se posaient non par la faute de personne, mais en vertu de la marche du temps et du progres."69 The works, writes the flaneur, did away with the seedy underbelly of Paris and facilitated greater mobility within the city: "Nous avons vu disparaitre comme par enchantement ces rues etroites et sales.. .et vu surgir sur leurs ruines de vastes boulevards et de grandes voies de communication."70 Haussmann, for all his ruthless determination to destroy the medieval city, created the Paris of the twentieth century. The city as it is now is very much the city he designed, and from the beginning, Haussmann's Paris provided for a different kind of urban spectacle, one which combined public space with commercial enterprise. Peter
Hall writes that "the great boulevards create a very special spatial structure, which is more than physical, it is also social and psychological.. .All this underlines the fact that -
66 Parkhurst Ferguson, "The Flaneur and the Production of Culture," 113. 67 Gluck, Popular Bohemia, 100. 68 Higonnet, Capital of the World, 208. 69 Anonymous (a flaneur), Paris Nouveau, juge par un flaneur (Paris: E. Dentu, Galerie d'Orleans, 1868), 8. 70 Ibid., 5-6.
37 as Benjamin immediately saw - the boulevards are not everyday streets; they are theatrical spaces, designed for display."71 The transformation of public space had important and far-reaching consequences for ordinary Parisians and flaneurs alike. The commodification of public space, which had its beginnings in the arcades, now imposed itself on a much grander scale. As Harvey writes, "Second Empire spectacle went far beyond imperial pomp.. .it sought directly to celebrate the birth of the Modern.. .In many respects, imperial spectacle dovetailed neatly with commodification and the deepening power of the circulation of capital over daily life."72 With stores open to the street deploying the seduction of the window display, the boulevards actually became stages for
"bourgeois affluence, conspicuous consumption, and feminine fashion" - and the fetish of the commodity reigned supreme.73
Baudelaire's flaneur became a central figure of this world - part of an "urban drama" that also included the prostitute, the ragpicker, the "impoverished and obsolete" old clown, and the "beautiful mysterious woman"74 - as each marginalized individual fought against the threat of obsolescence. Benjamin argues that Baudelaire's genius,
"which feeds on melancholy, is an allegorical genius. Paris becomes for the first time the subject of lyric poetry. This poetry of place is the opposite of all poetry of the soil. The gaze which the allegorical genius turns on the city betrays, instead, a profound alienation." In Spleen de Paris, and more evidently in Les Fleurs du Mai, Baudelaire explores this theme in detail as an ode to the "new city," which, though detested, was an essential component of his art.
Hall, Cities in Civilization, 721. 72 Harvey, Capital of Modernity, 212. 73 Ibid., 216. 74 Ibid., 223. 75 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1999), 21.
38 In Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire uses flanerie as a narrative device. "Le
Crepuscule du Soir" conveys powerful images of the fading day, where the thoughts of lost souls take the form of images at dusk: "Le jour tombe. Un grand apaisement se fait dans les pauvres esprits fatigues du labeur de lajournee; et leurs pensees prennent maintenant les couleurs tendres et indecises du crepuscule."76 The poem's speaker, a keen observer, reflects on all those for whom the night is not a respite, the strange characters inhabiting the streets, suffering from ills he himself cannot fully comprehend.
He remembers two friends: "Je me souviens que j'ai eu deux amis que le crepuscule
77 rendait tout malades." The first friend, he recalls, died a fool (that is, mentally ill),
-TO
"incapable de reconnaitre sa femme et son enfant. The second suffers from perpetual anxiety: "le second porte en lui l'inquietude d'un malaise perpetuel...je crois que le crepuscule allumerait encore en lui la brulante envie de distinctions imaginaires."79
For the speaker, however, the night signals in him "une fete interieure," and the lights of the city become nothing less than "le feu d'artifice de la deesse Liberte."80 He lives for the fantastical images the city lights inspire: "On dirait encore une de ces robes etranges de danseuses, ou une gaze transparente et sombre laisse entrevoir les splendeurs amorties d'une jupe eclatante, comme sous le noir present transperce le delicieux passe; et les etoiles vacillantes d'or et d'argent, dont elle est semee, represented ces feux de la fantaisie qui ne s'allument bien que sous le deuil profond de la Nuit." The ambivalence of the imagery - the unfortunate circumstances of his friends mixed with his own elation at the coming of night - illuminates Baudelaire's dialectic to make a point about the 7 Baudelaire, "Le Crepsucule du Soir," in Le Spleen de Paris (Paris : Garnier-Flammarion, 1967), 93. "Ibid. 78 Ibid., 94. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid.
39 contrasts between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, inspired by the city.
"Les Foules" is a poem about the flaneur. Baudelaire writes of the figure, whom he describes as a jester, that "II n'est pas donne a chacun de prendre un bain de multitude : jouir de la foule est un art."82 That is, not everyone can be a flaneur, who bathes in the multitudinous crowd. In fact, for the flaneur, there exists no difference between multitude and solitude - they are equal terms for one who is, as Baudelaire would later write, at home in the crowd, who rejoices in his privileged position within that crowd: "Multitude, solitude : termes egaux et convertibles pour la poete actif et fecond."83 The poet-flaneur can be "a sa guise," both himself and everyone - "lui- meme et autrui."84 Baudelaire likens him to spirits inhabiting bodies - "ames errantes qui cherchent un corps" - who can enter into "le personnage de chacun."85 The heroism of the flaneur, as Baudelaire sees it, is evident when he writes, "Ce que les hommes nomment amour est bien petit, bien restreint et bien faible, compare a cette ineffable orgie, a cette sainte prostitution de 1'ame qui se donne tout entiere, poesie et charite, a l'imprevu qui se montre, a l'inconnu qui passe."86 Poetry is likened to a prostitution of the heart for the unexpected that presents itself, and the unknown which passes. These entities become known through the poet-flaneur.
Les Fleurs du Mai is generally considered to be one of the well-springs of modernist poetry, with eminent modernist auteurs like T.S. Eliot listing it among their influences.87 Reinhard Thum speaks of the distinctly modernist quality of Baudelaire's poetry, as he writes, "Baudelaire.. .used the city as a stimulus and point of departure for a
82 Baudelaire, "Les Foules," in Ibid., 61 83 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., 62. 87 Raymond Marcel, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (London: Methuen, 1970), 1.
40 purely mental process." Indeed, this collection of poems dealt overwhelmingly with the psychological effects of a rapidly changing society upon the individual, as well as
Baudelaire's perpetual concern with the effects of time. In "L'Horloge," he refers to the clock as a "dieu sinistre, effrayant, impossible," which presses its pains upon the speaker, whose unstable happiness, in turn, disappears toward the horizon: "Les douleurs dans ton coeur plein d'effroi / se planteront bientot comme dans une cible, / Le plaisir vaporeux fuira vers l'horizon."89 Baudelaire's anxiety surrounding Haussmann's changes, and his accompanying feelings of alienation, are evident in "Le Cygne," as he writes, "Paris change! mais rien dans ma melancolie / N'a bouge! Palais neufs, echafaudages, blocs, /
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allegorie, / Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs."90 Here the speaker reveals that, for him, everything has become allegory in the face of overwhelming change, that his cherished memories - of the old city, presumably - have become heavier than rocks, a burden that is too much to bear.
Other poems are lighter in subject and tone. In "A une passante," the speaker is a flaneur musing about a woman he sees passing on the sidewalk in front of his cafe table.
The busy city falls away as the woman walks by, and the speaker is entranced: "La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait / Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse, / Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse / Soulevant, balancant le feston et l'ourlet; / Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue. / Moi, je buvais, crispe comme une extravagant, / Dans son oeil, ciel livide ou germe l'ouragan, / La douceur qui fascine et le
Reinhard Thum, The City: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verhaeren (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 22. 89 Baudelaire, "L'Horloge," in Les Fleurs du Mai et Autres Poemes (Paris : Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), 101. 90 Baudelaire, "Le Cygne," in Ibid., 108.
41 plaisir qui tue."91 Again, the imagery suggests both wonder and fear. Similarly, in
"Hymne a la Beaute," Baudelaire's dialectic imagination comes through in the form of a personified notion of Beauty, as the speaker asks: "Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l'abime / O Beaute! ton regard infernal et divin, / verse confinement le bienfait et le crime, / Et Ton peut pour cela comparer au vin." Unsure whether Beauty is from Satan or God, the speaker asks "qu'importe? Ange ou Sirene, / Qu'importe, si tu rends - fee aux yeux de velours, / Rythme, parfum, lueur, O mon unique reine! - / L'univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?" It does not matter what the source of the beauty is
- it is both infernal and divine - but that it nevertheless makes the universe more inhabitable and time less heavy. Baudelaire writes unabashedly about deep-seated inner struggle, and his poetry reflects a destabilization of personal identity consistent with many later works of modernist fiction. In the person of the flaneur, these latent fears became manifest.
Benjamin writes of Baudelaire that his importance "resides in his being the first and the most unflinching to have taken the measure of the self-estranged human being, in the double sense of acknowledging this being and fortifying it with armor against the reified world."94 Jean-Paul Sartre describes the heroism of Baudelaire's naked honesty in transcribing deeply-felt existential angst to paper:
Baudelaire.. .looked right into the bottom of his heart. He saw that he was incomparable, incommunicable, uncreated, absurd, useless, abandoned in the most complete isolation, bearing his burden alone, condemned to justify his existence all alone, and endlessly eluding himself, slipping through his own fingers, withdrawn in contemplation and, at the same time, dragged out of himself in an unending pursuit, a bottomless gulf without walls and
91 Baudelaire, "A une Passante," in Ibid., 114 92 Baudelaire, "Hymne a la Beaute," in Ibid., 51. 93 Ibid., 52. 94 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 322.
42 without darkness, a mystery in broad daylight, unpredictable yet perfectly known.95
For Baudelaire, the city became the physical manifestation of a psychic process, the
"objectification of mental reality,"96 and the flaneur was the figure who hurled himself heroically into "the maelstrom" of modern life, becoming simultaneously a subject to and
07 object of modernization, thus opening himself up to self-destruction in the pursuit of an artistic expression of life in the modern city. Modernity, writes Berman, "pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said,
'all that is solid melts into air.'"98 The flaneur revealed something of the modernist dilemma between Self and Other. He contained within his person the difficulties arising from interactions within a rapidly changing society, coupled with the ascendant existentialist aesthetic found in modernist art.
Fredric Jameson's discussion of the Sartrean Look - where the experience of being looked at is primary, and the action of looking becomes secondary - is particularly illuminating when it comes to this most basic process of interaction in the modern world.
Sartre's philosophy asks the fundamental question of how identity is constructed - do we exist if we are not seen? Jameson writes that "[the Look] thereby becomes the very medium through which the Hegelian struggle for recognition is concretely waged."99
Being looked at, in short, offers "a state of universal subjection," and likewise, the
"colonizing gaze" of the subject reaffirms that subjectivity.100 Thus, the activity of the
95 Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, trans. Martin Turnell (London : Hamish Hamilton, 1964), 40. 96 Thum, The City, 53-4. 97 Nava, "Modernity's Disavowal," 57. 98 Berman, All That is Solid, 15 99 Jameson, The Cultural Turn, 104. 100 Ibid., 106.
43 flaneur becomes more than just "looking," or even "seeing"; he is, albeit unconsciously, simultaneously constructing his own identity and that of those around him. The city thus became a key ingredient in the shaping of both individual and collective consciousness.
Baudelaire's poetry was acutely concerned with the reconciliation of the finite and the infinite, the fragmented and the whole, which the city revealed to him in reified form.
Prendergast contends that "gathering up the fragments of experience and memory into a harmonious whole situated beyond division and loss is for Baudelaire the raison d'etre for poetry. But, confronted with the discords and dissonances of the modern city, that project comes under serious pressure, and at certain points simply cracks."101 As Parkhurst
Ferguson argues, "It is the paradoxical privilege of being in the city without being of it that makes the flaneur so seductive a figure.. .the flaneur dramatizes the conflicting pressures that beset the individual in a post-revolutionary society."102 Deborah Parsons explicitly connects Baudelaire's flaneur with modernity in the urban setting, as he
"highlights and embodies the problem of distinguishing between private and public, interior and exterior, feminine and masculine, self and other."103 Baudelaire's essay "The
Painter of Modern Life" expresses these concerns, touching on fundamental issues of agency and subjectivity in the modern environment.
"The Painter of Modern Life" has become a definitive statement on the modern artist. The work not only pays particular tribute to a relatively unknown painter,
Constantine Guys, but also anticipates and encourages the emergence of modern notions of art and urban theory. As Bruce Mazlish argues, "To speak of the flaneur.. .is to speak
101 Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century, 27. 102 Parkhurst Ferguson, "The Flaneur and the Production of Culture," 111. 103 Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 91.
44 of Baudelaire. He gave classic expression to the type both in his own life and in his writings. In the process, he singularly created the idea of Modernity."104 Inspired by
Edgar Allen Poe's short story, The Man in the Crowd, Baudelaire constructs a poetics of the modern city. In doing so, he makes a convincing argument for the appreciation of life's particularities, writing, "however much we may love general beauty, as it is expressed by classical poets and artists, we are no less wrong to neglect particular beauty, the beauty of circumstance and the sketch of manners."105 Another important aspect of
Baudelaire's work is its emphasis on the present as inspiration, simply for its "essential quality of being present."106 It is diametrically opposed to the idea of the "painter of eternal, or at least more lasting things, of heroic or religious subjects"107 associated with classically-inspired Salon art. These are the timeless subjects born of myth and legend and history - the flaneur paints a picture of life's simultaneous beauty and fragility, meanness and perseverance.
Baudelaire famously identifies the flaneur with the urban crowd, which becomes an indispensable part of his existence and his art:
For the perfect flaneur, 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, passionate, impartial nature which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a. prince who everywhere rejoices in the 108
incognito.
Benjamin, meanwhile, later contended that the flaneur sought out the crowd because it is 104 Bruce Mazlish, "The Flaneur: from Spectator to Representation," in ed. Tester, The Flaneur, 48. 105 Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," 1. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid., 9.
45 "the veil through which the familiar city is transformed for the flaneur into phantasmagoria,"109 where that city appears as a room. Benjamin saw the interaction of the flaneur with the urban crowd in strictly economic terms. The crowds within the arcades were, for Benjamin, not simply occupying public space; the specifically commercial designation of that space coloured the social relations within it. This distinct relationship so intrigued Benjamin that he furthered Baudelaire's exploration of the relationship between flaneur and crowd, complicating it with the notion of commodification: "In the person of the flaneur, the intelligentsia becomes acquainted with the marketplace.. .He is merchandise."110 The flaneur and the prostitute occupy similar positions within the crowd, both on display, both standing as "archetypal responses to the commodification of social relations."111
The Crowd was a cultural phenomenon brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying mass migration of rural populations to urban centres. According to Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, one result of this migration was an increasing interaction between classes, as neighbourhoods became more diversified: "a handful of
European cities became urban and industrial centers, their inhabitants living in dense concentrations and their social classes so closely juxtaposed that wealthier citizens could not evade the sights, noises, and smells of the populous working classes.'"112 Schnapp and Tiews further assert that this cross-fertilization of the urban population was one of the most prevalent conditions in the "archetypal universe of modernity," the Metropolis, with
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 21. 110 Ibid., 21 ;42. 111 Rob Shields, "Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin's Notes on Flanerie," in ed. Tester, The Flaneur, 66. 112 Eds. Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, Crowds (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 51.
46 1 1 'I its "collisions of events, classes, dialects, professions, and lifestyles" - the world both of Baudelairean flanerie and, not antithetically, Victor Hugo's Miserables.
The flaneur was fascinated by the crowd because of that unknown, slightly dangerous, element within it that piqued his curiosity. Curiosity makes the flaneur more than simply an idler. It is his "fatal, irresistible passion."114 However, the flaneur is also imbued with a sense of consciousness that only comes with age and experience. He is a
"mirror as vast as the crowd itself; a "kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.. .an T with an insatiable appetite for the 'non-
I,' at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself."115
Maria C. Scott argues that the Baudelairean flaneur "subverts the border between inside and outside, self and other,"11 without quite eliminating it. The flaneur returns home at night and translates what he has seen into a work of art: "only when he is alone can he express, on paper, the impressions absorbed during the day. His movement of expansion toward the non-self during the day is thus complemented by a movement of concentration at night."117
Many historians of flanerie have contended that, with the death of the arcades at the turn of the twentieth century - the inevitable result, in many ways, of
Haussmannization - the flaneur, too, met with extinction. Deborah Parsons argues that,
"the fate of the flaneur after the loss of his arcade habitat is a desperate attempt to retain an authoritative urban vision... The moving perspective of the walking urban observer,
113 Ibid. 114 Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," 7. 115 Ibid., 9-10. Maria C. Scott, Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectives, Studies in European Cultural Transition, vol. 29, eds. Martin Stannard and Greg Walker (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2005), 171. 117 Ibid., 174. 47 physically within the city street, is exchanged in this act for the panoramic perspective of a static urban observer."118 As Buck-Morss states, "For the flaneur, it was traffic that did him in. In the relatively tranquil shelter of the arcades, his original habitat, he practiced his trade of not trading, viewing as he loitered.. .The speed-up principles of mass production had spilled over into the streets, waging war on flanerie."119 In this context, cars became "dominant and predatory species" in the streets,120 as the flaneur thus
"yield[ed] to the purposeful march of economic progress." Arguably, however, it was precisely this economic progress, and the mass production it eventually demanded, that allowed for the flaneur's survival in the world that came to be dominated by capital.
Conclusion
Buck-Morss contends that the flaneur found it all but impossible to survive once exiled to the street. Arguably, the advent of traffic actually necessitated new and ever more creative forms of flanerie, less dependent on the "interior" of the street for sustenance or inspiration, allowing the flaneur to "take a number of walks away from the streets and arcades of nineteenth-century Paris." Although Parkhurst Ferguson argues that "isolating the flaneur from the time, the place and the texts in and from which this urban personage emerged turns the figure into an analytical category that, by definition, lies outside history"122 - implying that, beyond the scope of his nineteenth-century cultural ubiquity, the flaneur ceased to exist -1 would argue that the changes in the organization of public space, together with the relentless progression of technology that
118 Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 35. 119 Susan Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, The Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering," in Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, ed. Beatrice Hanssen (London: Continuum, 2006), 35. 120 Ibid. 121 Parkhurst Ferguson, "The Flaneur on and off the Streets of Paris," in ed. Tester, The Flaneur, 33. 122 Ibid., 22.
48 characterized the twentieth century, simply forced the flaneur to be more creative.
Twentieth-century artists explored and embraced a variety of new media and adopted different voices in order to render their societies legible. The flaneur's unique gaze ensured his survival well beyond the confines of nineteenth-century Paris, and anticipated both modernist and postmodernist pre-occupations with identity and perception.
49 Chapter Three
The Flaneur in the Age of Technological Reproducibility:
Mass Culture in Weimar Germany, 1918-1933
Germany of the 1920s offers us a stunning moment in modernity when surface values first ascended to become determinants of taste, activity and occupation - a scene of functioning that shows us there was in fact a time when the new was not yet old, modernity was still modern, and spectacle was still spectacular.1
— Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces
Introduction
In the twentieth century, the centre of the modern movement in Europe shifted from Paris to Berlin. By 1920, the spirit of Belle Epoque Paris, the Paris that fostered the art of the Salon des Refuses and the bohemia of Montmartre, had shifted, and was replaced by the frantic, innovative atmosphere of the Weimar era - an extraordinary, yet fragile period of history lasting only fifteen years, between the fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy in 1918 and the political triumph of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party in
1933. Berlin was its controversial capital. The new cultural environment of Weimar
Berlin, which had been cultivated not only through political strife, economic depression, and post-war malaise, but through the emergence of mass media as a dominant cultural force, was the scene of the flaneur's resurrection in the twentieth century. Flanerie survived by adopting - in many ways becoming - the new media, in what could be described as a pseudo-Darwinian fight against extinction.
1 Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2001), 2.
50 Above all else, the camera lens came to symbolize a new era for the flaneur, and photo-journalism became one of the most popular avenues for flaneuric expression, before the motion picture took over as the dominant form of the flaneur's gaze. Indeed, the German motion picture industry - arguably the best in the world before the Great
Depression, rivalled only by Hollywood - churned out dozens of films that took, as their primary subject, the city, with its simultaneity of seduction and danger. The city was used as symbol of both chaos and real beauty, echoing Baudelaire's visions, as many
Weimar directors worked to create films that illuminated their time. Journalism, film, and eventually the radio contributed to an expansion of the 'public sphere,' and elicited
"passionate controversies" about a new mass culture.2 Throughout the Weimar era, there existed a fertile critical and theoretical intellectual milieu in Germany, which observed the phenomenon of mass culture and its perceived effects with both awe and disgust, and in turn produced some of the most prophetic critiques of twentieth - and twenty-first - century culture.
Berlin
Weimar Berlin provided the western world with one of its great so-called 'golden ages.' Like Paris and Vienna in the nineteenth century, the Weimar years in Berlin were
- despite its being crippled by the First World War, and then subjected to the punitive
Versailles Treaty - a time of great cultural vitality and innovation. Berlin was the center of much of the cathartic art that followed the conclusion of the First World War, and, as
Paris had been only fifty years prior, the city became synonymous with the very notion of
2 Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 86.
51 Modernity; the intricacy and variety of Weimar culture, and the tensions contained within it - whether political, economic, or social - made it an emblem for the age of modernism.3 However, unlike Paris, where modernity had been based primarily in the fine arts, Berlin's particular brand of modernity was located in its reputation as the first
"technopolis." As Lothar Muller writes, "in contrast to Paris, the capital of aesthetic modernity in the nineteenth century, [Berlin] was perceived as a centre of a technological, civilizing modernity."4 The city was at the centre of new technology in the 1920s and
30s, helping to create Germany's reputation as a pioneer in the art of media.
Although Berlin was the political capital of Germany, the case could be made that there were important art movements occurring elsewhere - in places like Frankfurt am
Main, Munich and in Weimar itself. However, overwhelmingly, artists flocked to Berlin
- as they had to Paris or Vienna previously - in search of inspiration.5 Michael Hofmann writes that Berlin was "both a pendant and a totem for Weimar. It was the seat of government, and the place that made the government nervous like no other."6 Once nothing more than a provincial backwater, Berlin became the unlikely capital of a country that had developed relatively late amongst industrializing nations. Modris Eksteins contends that "the social and economic trappings of modernity - urbanization, industrialization, colonies, political unity - all came late to Germany."7 However, if
Detlev J.K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 164. 4 Lothar Muller, ' 'The Beauty of the Metropolis: Towards an Aesthetic Urbanism of Turn-of-the-Century Berlin," in Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, eds. Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 38. 5 The most famous of these innovators is undoubtedly the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, who moved to Berlin in 1924 from Bavaria. 6 Michael Hofmann, "Translator's Introduction," in Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920- 1933 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 12. 7 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 64.
52 Britain lit the path from a rural agrarian to an urban industrial way of life, Germany, argues Eksteins, "took us toward our 'postindustrial' or technological world," and in so doing "has given evidence to the world of the psychic disorientation that rapid and wholesale environmental change may produce."8 The German experience can be looked at, therefore, as a microcosm for the modern experience, with Berlin as its unlikely epicentre.
Berlin developed into the very quintessence of depravity, decadence, and freedom in the few short years of the Weimar Republic's existence, and the whole process, according to Peter Hall, was "caught for posterity as it happened: photojournalism, the documentary cinema, broadcasting, sound recording were some of the arts that were effectively born [in Berlin]."9 The emergence of a mass culture, in tandem with the development of these new technological media, was crucial to Berlin's stature as a pioneering technopolis. Anke Gleber argues that, in Berlin, modernity and cinema took parallel courses in an "age of mechanical invention."10 For the first time, mass media and art intersected, and the new culture they created was of great interest and concern to contemporary writers and theorists. Foremost among them was Walter Benjamin, whose
Arcades Project addressed the development of mass culture from its origins in Belle
Epoque Paris to the consequences of its growing hegemony for twentieth-century
Germany.
8 Ibid., 67-8. 9 Hall, Cities in Civilization, 2A2-'b. 10 Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk, 141.
53 The Development of Mass Culture: The Ur-History of the Arcades Project
By the time Benjamin began working on the Arcades Project, in 1927, the
Parisian arcades as they had been constructed during the Restoration monarchies of Louis
XVIII and Charles X were all but extinct, replaced by luxury department stores like the
Bon Marche in Paris, and the Kaufhaus Des Westens in Berlin. The traditional homes of the flaneur were effectively gone by the 1920s, and the assumption has been, since then, that the flaneur, too, was a bygone entity. However, the arcades' cultural significance - tied inextricably to the flaneur figure - was reintroduced to twentieth century cultural criticism by Benjamin's study, for, although the work focused on nineteenth-century
Paris, it was also a perceptive critique of Benjamin's own cultural-historical moment, a commentary on German society in the 1920s and 30s.
According to Susan Buck-Morss, the Arcades Project effectively acts as "a double text. Ostensibly a social and cultural history of Paris in the nineteenth century, it is in fact intended to provide a political education for Benjamin's own generation. It is an 'ur- history,' a history of the origins of that present historical moment, which, while remaining largely invisible, is the determining motivation for Benjamin's interest in the past."11
That is, Benjamin sought to sketch out the "phenomenological hermeneutics of the profane world," to bridge the gap between everyday experience and "traditional academic
19 concerns." Benjamin's work linked the culture of the shop window, which had seen its height in the arcades, with that of the movie screen. Indeed, the lure of the display
Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 47. 12Ibid.,3.
54 window - Schaufenster - was eventually joined by the luminescent glow of the movie screen in Weimar culture.13
The twentieth century was, first and foremost, the age of the image, with the ascendancy of visual media proving to be a crucial development in the history of human culture, quite literally re-shaping the way people looked at the world. Gail Finney cites
W.J.T. Mitchell's theory of 'the pictorial turn' as being one of the most apt ways to describe the development of Western culture in the twentieth century: where acts of seeing, watching and gazing "assumed the prominence and complexity previously associated with reading."14 During the Weimar era, the commodification of culture was honed to a high art, revealing our own culture's relatively early dependence on mediated information.
The 'invention of mass culture' in the West during the Weimar years has had a lasting though ultimately incalculable effect on both art and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As Hall writes, "During the nineteenth but, above all, in the twentieth century, a remarkable event in human history took place: cultural creativity and technological innovation were massively fused."15 For the first time, individual performances, drawings, and paintings could be distributed to a mass, world-wide consumer-audience - either in 'real time' or via photographs and recordings - and at a relatively low cost. To say that the implications of mass production for artistic enterprise were enormous is a gross understatement. The capitalistic impulse that made such mass distribution possible and eventually highly profitable seemed, for many, an ominous
13 Anne Friedberg, "Les Flaneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition," PMLA, Vol. 106, No.3 (May 1991), 422-3. 14 Gail Finney, "Introduction," in Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle, ed. Finney (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 1. 15 Hall, Cities in Civilization, 503.
55 development that subsumed artistic creativity under a capitalist schema and rendered its audiences inert to their own manipulation. It has been argued that one of the results of this development was the subsumption of cultural vitality to surface sheen. As Ward writes, "in visual terms, the twentieth century...will be remembered as the century in which content yielded to form, text to image, depth to fagade."1
Flanerie on Film: Photo-Journalism and the Cinema
Baudelaire's medium, the medium of the nineteenth-century flaneur, had been print. The advent of photography - and the consequent development of the motion picture - changed the scope of human perception, and therefore the nature of flanerie, irrevocably. Whereas a nineteenth-century flaneur wrote down his observations, his twentieth-century successor had a variety of media at his disposal, with the result that his vision of reality could become manifest in a number of "filmic texts."17 Thus, the street, that erstwhile epicentre of modernist flanerie and symbol of subjective mobility in the nineteenth century, was eventually supplanted by the "fluid mobility" granted through the employment of new technologies like photography and cinema.18
Weimar culture has largely been characterized by its devotion to the screen. By
1919, there were already around 2300 'picture-palaces' in Germany, and more than 3500 by 1930, with over one million tickets sold daily,19 heralding the triumph of the image in mass culture, even before the debut of sound revolutionized the medium once again. Film was easily the most prominent of Weimar's technological and cultural achievements. As
16Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 1. 17 Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk, 3. Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 1. 19 Hall, Cities in Civilization, 255.
56 Ward argues, "The 1920s German film industry excelled more than any other national cinema of any era; nowhere was the fa§adism of modern surface culture so excessively constituted in entertainment form."20 Cinema was the ultimate expression of the supremacy of the image and the power of mass culture. It was also able to convey a sense of contemporary consciousness through the camera's simultaneous intimacy with the reality of its audiences and its ability to breach temporal and spatial barriers in its endeavour to entertain.
Film had the ability to transport audiences beyond the theatres. It was, in many ways, a transformative communication tool. Alison Landsberg contends that, "from its inception, the cinema sought to make visible what for economic or social reasons remained beyond an individual's reach. In part its project was revelation, in both senses of the word, but it was also transportation, the capacity to carry viewers to faraway places and alternative temporalities."21 The new visual media allowed the viewer to transcend, in a sense, his or her own space and time, rendering the world as a whole more accessible and knowable. The implications of the new freedoms afforded by the moving picture for the art of flanerie were absolutely transformative. As Anne Friedberg writes, "[t]he tours in space and time offered by these entertainment devices were apparatical extensions of the spatial flanerie through the arcades."22 As these technologies grew in influence and efficiency, the street as physical, public space began to dissolve as the locus of flanerie.
People found new ways to connect with an ever-shrinking world. The spectator-
Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 142. 21 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 12. 22 Friedberg, "Les Flaneurs du Mal(l)," 423.
57 consumer became a 'time-tourist' through the mediated information made available by way of visual and recording technology.
The seeds of Marshall McLuhan's 'global village' were, arguably, planted in
Weimar Germany as the new technologies of mass media subsumed the market economy, as the "site-specificity of the modern street" evolved into a globalized network of communications. 3 However, 'the street' as critical site of social exhibitionism did not disappear altogether. Rather, there developed new ways of perceiving public space and one's place within it, and the twentieth-century flaneur was able to evoke and translate his environment to new effect in the technological age. Photo-journalism was almost a transitionary occupation, linking the Baudelairean flaneur with the Weimar flaneur, combining both the critical and artistic impulses of the former with the technological savvy of the latter. The symbiosis of text and image resulted in some of the most poignant commentaries on German society during the inter-war period.
Some of the most acute and insightful commentaries on Weimar society could be found in the daily newspapers. Neubauer writes of the flaneur-like photo-journalists who
"took time to 'stroll' through the city with their cameras, where they discovered not just the glamour of the big boulevards but also in the backyards of the working class neighbourhoods." 4 The best photo-journalists of the Weimar era were indeed able to juxtapose eloquent passages on the glamour of the Grossstadt with pieces on the joys and challenges of everyday life.
Joseph Roth, one such journalist, chronicles the sights of Berlin in the 1920s with a distinct flaneur-like vision, making up stories to go with the images he sees, juxtaposing
23 Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 15. 24 Neubauer, "The Back Streets and the Boulevards," in Through the Lens of the Press, 332.
58 tableaux of urban imagery. In one piece, he captures the loneliness of the mannequin in the display window who appears to stand in for the millions of women who aspire to be her,25 a commentary on the ubiquity of advertising culture and its effects: "I see a girl, framed in an open window who is part of the wall and yearns to be freed from its embrace, which is all she knows in the world.. .An advertising kiosk is placed at the head of the street, like its epigram, with a little weathervane on it to proclaim which way the wind is blowing down that particular street."26 Roth expresses his overriding interest in the minute details of life rather than the "monumentality of the whole": "Strolling around on a May morning, what do I care about the vast issues of world history as expressed in newspaper editorials?...Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless."27 The otherwise unnoticed elements of city life are obviously of great interest to Roth, although he also finds pleasure in contemplating the magnetic grandeur of a great street. Roth's remarks on Berlin's grandest street and the locus of the city's cultural vitality, the Kurftirstendamm, illustrate a greater cultural fascination with the cityscape: "I've tried to guess [its] secret, the quality that enables it to remain itself through all the sudden changes in its physiognomy - yes, to become still more
Kurfurstendamm.. .A whimsical piece of whimsy on the part of Creation, you might say, if you could be sure it was intended. But unfortunately it seems more likely that it wasn't."28
The subject of female consumerism and the seduction of department store display windows was not new to Roth. The shopping culture of the nineteenth-century - begun in the arcades of Paris, and culminating in Grand Magasins- was the subject of many a literary work. The most famous of the genre is arguably Emile Zola's AM Bonheur des Dames (1871), in which a young girl is compelled to abandon her family in the hopes of attaining greater social status by working as a shop girl at a great department store. 26 Joseph Roth, "Going for a Walk," from the Berliner Bbrsen-Courier (24 May, 1921), in What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933 (New York: Norton, 1996), 23. 27 Ibid., 24. 28 Roth, "The Kurfurstendamm," from Miinchener Neueste Nachrichten (29 Sept, 1929), in ibid., 150.
59 Just as easily as he writes of the charismatic pull of the Kurfurstendamm, Roth, a
Jew, writes at length about the state of Berlin's poorer neighbourhoods - many of them occupied by Eastern-European Jewish immigrants. The Ostjuden were very different culturally from German Jews, and the relationship between the two groups was not an easy one. As Detlev Peukert writes, "The new migrants differed from the existing
German Jewish community socially, culturally and in their forms of worship, and their presence became a cause of intra-community conflict."29 Roth both laments the state of living conditions in the Jewish quarter, and appreciates the exotic atmosphere, as he writes, "Barely a hundred paces from Alexanderplatz and the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn, it seems strange that the street names are still bland and European. But if you take a right, you find yourself suddenly immersed in a strange and mournful ghetto world, where carts trundle past and an automobile is a rarity."30 The Jews inhabiting the area were mostly of
Eastern -European stock, and Roth sees that they have been reduced to stereotypes by their economic condition: "The people you see here are Eastern grotesques: a poor, shrivelled-up old lady who sells shoelaces for a living - and dabbles in stocks on the side.. .It's suppertime, but no one eats here. They have good bread, fish in various sauces, and sausage from Cracow. But the woman behind the counter is unemployed."31
Roth, through the simultaneous use of both text and image, effectively channels
Baudelaire's flaneur in his bid to render his city, Berlin, legible.
The limitations of still images became apparent soon enough, however, and eventually the motion picture replaced the photograph as the primary mode for capturing scenes of modern life in the city. Film, as Ward states, was "an instantaneous and
29 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 159. 30 Roth, "The Orient on Hirtenstrasse," from Neue Berliner Zeitung (4 May, 1921), in What I Saw, 31. 31 Ibid., 32-33.
60 inflammatory reflector of modernity's engine,"' acting as a gauge for society's anxieties and values, its successes and challenges. The relationship between film and the street - and thereby the flaneur - was established fairly early on in the history of the medium. As the film theorist Siegfried Kracauer contends, "[film's] affinity for the flow of life would be enough to explain the attraction which the street has ever since exerted on the screen." Like the flaneur himself, film has always been interested in capturing the transient and the ephemeral. Kracauer argues that "the motion picture camera seems to be partial to the least permanent components of our environment."34
Film allowed the flaneur to become a personified camera in a renewed, technologically accelerated form of flanerie. Graeme Gilloch asserts that the flaneur's task of "giving voice to the ephemeral and fragmentary character of metropolitan experience is pursued through the formulation of montage and dialectical image,"35 thus making his perceptive abilities akin to those of the moving camera. The twentieth- century flaneur was able to overcome his distinctly 'modern' sense of alienation, which hitherto had threatened to destroy him, through what Gleber terms latently 'filmic' texts, by collecting "scenes and impressions" and translating them, not into written language as his nineteenth-century predecessor would have done, but into cinematic montages.36
Indeed, new forms of reading and writing were created through the image.
The arts of photography - and by extension cinema - and flanerie intersected,
Gleber asserts, as "two of the ways in which modernity receives its exteriors and
32 Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 142. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 72. 34 Ibid., 52. 35 Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 101. 36 Gleber, "Women on the Screens," 55.
61 experiences, in a process of seeing and recording that focuses on the surfaces and structures of their respective realities."37 The flaneur, in Weimar culture, achieved what could be called a 'cinematic gaze,' by creating a "modern perspective that at once performs activities of the spectator with his eyes, those of the camera with his mind as a medium of recording, and those of the director with his writing and reordering of the
•JO collected images into a text of what he - or she - has seen." The possibilities of perception through film were seemingly limitless.
The lure of the cinema - akin to the lure of the Schaufenster - became the inspiration for one of Benjamin's most influential essays, "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility," a work which betrayed his simultaneous fascination with, and trepidation for, the phenomenon of cinema, first amongst the visual media of the early twentieth century. "The Work of Art" has become central to the history of
Weimar Germany and the field of culture studies more generally. In it, Benjamin asserts that cinema is the ultimate expression of mass production, the culmination of a process of industrialization going back to the eighteenth century. He writes, "It has taken more than half a century for the change in the conditions of production to be manifested in all areas of culture. How this process has affected culture can only now be assessed."39 Indeed, the
"industrial modernity" that had transformed Europe in the nineteenth century ultimately transformed the nature of human perception in the twentieth. Benjamin was one of the first to understand the relationship between technology and a society's "structures of understanding and perception," as he suggested that technological advances played a
37 Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk, 133. 38 Gleber, "Women on the Screens," 78. 39 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (2nd Version)," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3 (1935-1938), eds. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans.Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 101.
62 crucial role in "ushering in new forms of vision." A development stemming from these technological advances was that it became possible for works of art to be reproduced en masse, although, "[i]n principle the work of art has always been reproducible." However,
Benjamin states, "the technological reproduction of artworks is something new."41 For instance, graphic art was first reproduced via the woodcut, written language via the printing press and, later, movable type. Photography - and later cinema - were inevitable next steps in this process of information sharing.
Photography was nothing short of a technological revolution that "freed the hand from the most important artistic tasks in the process of image reproduction - tasks that now devolved upon the eye alone."42 The development of photography made possible the
"exact scrutiny of the moment as a sight and a site;"43 - or, the distillation of a passing moment into a work of art: in short, the occupation of the flaneur. Although Benjamin was clearly fascinated by photography and cinema as unique technological and cultural phenomena, he was wary of the impact of mass (re)production on both the work of art and its audience. He argued that reproduction facilitated the disintegration of the original artwork's authenticity, or its "aura." For Benjamin, the act of reproduction took away the here and now of the work of art, its unique existence, and therefore its historical significance.
Film, as the symptomatic outcome and highest achievement of reproductive technology in the early twentieth century, carried a unique social resonance for Benjamin, who writes that "[t]he social significance of film, even - and especially - in its most
40 Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 17. 41 Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 102. 42 Ibid. 43 Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk, 148.
63 positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic side: the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage."44 The business of an artwork's reproduction went well beyond the realm of art; by replicating the work many times over, states Benjamin, "[technological reproduction] substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence."45 To an ever-increasing degree, then, "the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility."4 For Benjamin, and for others of his generation of theorists - the so-called Frankfurt School, including Kracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer - the film industry was not only responsible for the mass production and distribution of the image; it also held a dangerous power over the consuming masses, something he likened to the overwhelming, oppressive and deadening nature of fascism.
Because the technological nature of film was 'invisible' to its audiences, the medium was seen as a deceptive - and latently evil - technology by its detractors.47
Kracauer argues in The Mass Ornament (1927) - a work that deals with the phenomenon of "surface culture" in Weimar Germany - that "films are the mirror of the prevailing society. They are financed by corporations, which must pinpoint the tastes of
AG the audience at all costs in order to make a profit." That the German film industry had been monopolized by the Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA) prior to 1933, was, in itself, suspect enough for a group of Marxists. However, filmmaking was quickly brought under the National Socialist control through Gleichschaltung, making its artistic merits, arguably, a moot point. For Kracauer, film capital used the "revolutionary opportunities" afforded by the medium for "counterrevolutionary purposes," creating not
44 Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 104. 45 Ibid., 103-4. 46 Ibid., 106. Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernit, 89. 48 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 291. 64 only the cult of the Movie Star, but, much more insidiously, the cult of the audience, something that reinforced, for him, the "corruption by which fascism is seeking to supplant the class consciousness of the masses."49 Movies therefore became a significant part of the false consciousness that Marxists believe suffuses modern society, especially after they were used to great effect as a tool in the Nazi propaganda machine.
Several films produced during the Weimar Republic were distinctly flaneuric in their vision of the city, and seemed in part to mirrored at least in part the social conditions surrounding their production. Some early films betrayed a latent fear of 'the street' as centre of depravity and chaos, perhaps reflecting the uncertainties stemming from an economy in freefall and a growing discomfort with changing attitudes regarding sex.
Karl Grune's The Street (1923) illustrates the mysterious seduction of the urban environment, as it celebrates the city, its pleasures and dangers, through the metaphoric space of the street. The overall effect of The Street is one of chaos, echoing the frenetic nature of early Weimar society itself as the republic struggled to assert itself against anarchic forces on both the extreme Left and Right. Peukert writes that "the years 1920-
23 were among the most hectic and eventful of the Weimar Republic. There was a headlong succession of dramatic developments in domestic, economic and foreign policy, either combining in their impact or severally constraining the government's ability to act."50 Kracauer provides a plot synopsis of the film, in which Grune's vision of the city's carnivalesque atmosphere is revealed:
The excited man goes to the window and, looking out, sees - not the street itself, but a 'hallucinated' street. Shots of meshing cars, fireworks, and crowds form, along with shots taken from a speeding roller coaster, a confusing whole, made still more confusing by the multiple exposures and
49 Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 113. 50 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 52.
65 the insertion of transparent close-ups of a circus clown, a woman and an organ-grinder.51
Grune's protagonist is an unnamed man, who represents the everyman in the crushing mundanity of his domestic existence. He looks longingly at the street, through what
Kracauer calls an "ingeniously cut montage sequence [where] the street is defined as a sort of fair, that is, as the region of chaos. The circle usually serving as a symbol of chaos has yielded to the straight line of the city street."52 The man eventually ventures out into the urban crowd, only to be lured into a questionable dance hall-type establishment, where he is horrified at the impropriety he perceives. The issue of modernity and its vices is central to the film, with the protagonist arguably representing the effects of modernization on the everyman as he is confronted with both its temptations and their consequences. Peukert asserts that "the pressure of the changes, and the anxieties which the economic and political crises of the era were also causing, generated a sense of bewilderment. Since crisis and modernization seemed to be going hand in hand, modernity itself became the issue."53 All of these pressures and anxieties are present in the film, with the issue of crime being foremost.
The protagonist removes his wedding ring as the evening progresses, before eventually losing all his money in a card scheme, staged by a couple of desperate criminals who have been - the audience learns - compelled to break the law to feed their child and a blind, elderly parent. He eventually winds up in jail briefly after the card scheme leads to a man's death. After a long night, he returns home to his wife, shaken by
51 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 121. 52 Ibid. 53 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 83.
66 his misadventure. The issue of crime, and its causes, was an important one during the early years of the Republic, before the relative stability of 1924-29. According to Peukert,
A profiteering ethic became common among people who had previously prided themselves on their rectitude. Others turned to crime out of sheer hardship, justifying their action on the grounds that is was the only way they could survive. Both phenomena, profiteering and poverty-induced crime, showed that the rather rigid social and moral code of the age of the monarchy had at last begun to work loose.54
The dire economic situation of 1922-23 caused an "inversion of values. Money and success were now seen as goals that justified breaking the law, while honesty was stigmatized because it flew in the face of the rules of a dog-eat-dog inflationary society."55 Grune's protagonist gets caught up in this environment, and, unschooled as he appears to be in the ways of the world, falls victim to his own inexperience and the desperation of those around him.
The Street deals primarily with the negative aspects of city life, although it also suggests that the man's misfortune is not misfortune at all, but the result of his obvious inexperience and naivete when it comes to living in a modern metropolis. It is clear that he has rarely ventured out, and the romantic notions he has of life outside his apartment lead to his compromised moral status later on in the film. Kracauer describes the street,
"in the extended sense of the word," not only as the arena of fleeting impressions and chance encounters, but a place where "the flow of life is bound to assert itself'56 on the unsuspecting.
The flow of life is nowhere more present in Weimar cinema than in Walter
Ruttmann's documentary, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). Berlin illustrates the
54Ibid., 66. 55 Ibid. 56 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 72.
67 modern preoccupation with the city, and embodies the filmic qualities of the flaneur's gaze. It was one of the first films to explore the relationship between cinema and the city. The film not only exudes an urban romanticism akin to nineteenth-century
Baudelairean flanerie, but also a passion for cinema that would define the Weimar era for subsequent generations of cultural historians. As Gleber writes, "[the film] shows an era passionately engaged in and defined by the cinema and its new discourse,"57 evident in its breathtaking cinematography and its loving attention to detail, which betrays the filmmakers' excitement with both the form and content of their endeavour - in both cases, the city.
Berlin was an experiment in discovering plots in the real world, rather than constructing them as externalizations of inner processes, as was the case earlier with one of the greatest Weimar films, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Carl Meyer, Berlin's cinematographer, came upon the idea of creating a symphony of city life, a montage of pictures and music, while standing amid the traffic near the Palast am Zoo in 1925.58
Traffic, incidentally, appears almost as a character in the film, present in the majority of scenes, a prominent and inescapable fact of city life in the early twentieth century.
Ruttmann, the film's director, wanted to create a film full of dialectical scenes of life in the city, for instance juxtaposing images conveying both hunger and opulence, with the result that it achieves a poignant montage of tableaux vivants of the city experience.
Kracauer asserts that the film was made simply to fill a production quota for Fox
Europe,59 and thus relegates it to mere capitalist enterprise. He also dismisses it as an insignificant effort because, he argues, it offered no criticism or interpretation of the
57 Gleber, "Women on the Screens," 66. 58 Ibid., 182. 59 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 36.
68 images it presented. He writes, "Ruttmann's rhythmic 'montage' is symptomatic of a withdrawal from basic decisions, into ambiguous neutrality," with the result that the film shows much but "reveals nothing."60 Similarly, film historian Sabine Hake criticizes the sense of detachment between the camera and its subjects, writing that "[the movie] has been interpreted as either a celebration of pure imagery outside of all narrative constraints or a falsification of urban reality through the separation of image and meaning."61
However, one can argue that the film's use of juxtaposing images achieves the desired effect of presenting the divergent, and sometimes antithetical, social and economic experiences of Berlin's citizens during the Weimar era. The film's omniscient flaneur- camera demonstrates what Henrik Reeh calls the observer's "abstraction from the city's symbolic and functional hierarchy."62
Walter Laqueur writes that Berlin's producers and cameramen had been
"deliberately modest" in their attempt to "present a more or less realistic picture of big city life, from early morning to late at night. They had realized, perhaps somewhat belatedly, that the cinema alone among all the arts was capable of reflecting certain aspects of city life: 'Let the camera bear witness' was their motto." The film exudes a palpable social consciousness. This consciousness comes through via the dialectical images appearing on the screen. For instance, early on, an image of a beggar transitions to an ornate, horse-drawn hearse, evoking images of a bygone era of imperialist glory. Later on, there are people checking into a five-star hotel, which is quickly followed by the
60 Ibid., 185; 188. 61 Sabine Hake, "Urban Spectacle in Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of the Big City," in Dancing on the Volcano, eds. Stephen Brockmann and Thomas Kniesche (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994), 129. Henrik Reeh, Ornaments of the Metropolis: Siegfried Kracauer and Modern Urban Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 110. 63 Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History 1918-1933 (New York: G.P Putnam's Sons, 1974), 241-2.
69 image of an employee dutifully picking up their discarded cigarette butts of the wealthy patrons.
Perhaps the most obvious example of Ruttmann's consciousness is in the lunch scenes, as he shows the city's various inhabitants on their mid-day breaks. He films a homeless woman and her child pointedly not eating as giant platters of food are prepared in an upscale restaurant kitchen for the well-to-do lunch rush. The commentary on the socio-economic conditions of the post-war city is clear, though there are many "scenes" in the film that seem oblivious to it, focusing instead on the inherent sense of spectacle in city life. Berlin is indeed a largely romanticized vision of the modern city, although it does contain, as noted, some important social commentary.
Where Ruttmann's film is primarily a love letter to Berlin, Fritz Lang's M (1931) tells the story of a city, and a culture, in decline. Made for Nero films - not, remarkably,
UFA or his own company 4 - M was Lang's first sound production, and stood in sharp contrast to the gargantuan Expressionist scale of Metropolis (1927), perhaps his best- known effort. Unlike Metropolis, M was done in a distinctly Realist style as a highly objective, almost documentary-style film, according to Paul Jensen. However, this does not mean that it lacks social commentary; the film still manages to portray a humanitarian consciousness through its treatment of the principal character, Franz Beckert. Beckert, a child-murderer, is the "trapped and menaced" individual within the story; not a traditional hero, but a "fat psychopath." Through him, the film illuminates the cause of mental illness.66 The climactic sequence makes the murderer's own victimization - by way of his illness - explicit to both his prosecutors and to the audience. While his crimes are truly
64 Paul Jensen, The Cinema of Fritz Lang (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1969), 93. 65 Ibid. 94. 66 Ibid., 94-5.
70 horrendous, his culpability is made more ambiguous through Lang's direction. Another key issue raised by the film is that of child neglect. Lang suggests that Beckert is able to prey on children because they have been left unattended. The first scene in the film shows children playing in an apartment courtyard; their parents are inside, and only emerge when the children make too much noise. Very quickly, however, parents realize that there is a predator on the loose, and feel guilt over their erstwhile nonchalance.
Beyond its fairly obvious messages about mental illness and child neglect, M offers far more significant implications for cultural analysis. The consumer culture of
Weimar Germany is a silent character in M; Beckert is a consumer both of the
Schaufenster contents he covets and of the little girls he targets; the film makes this relationship between consumerism and sexual gratification explicit in several instances.
Ward contends that Lang "artfully suggests that Weimar surface culture [had] produced, by the bankruptcy of the Republic's last years, not only dreamlike images for the masses in the Schaufenster, but also an aggressive drive to consume at any cost: here, a murderer is both prey to consumerist fantasy structures and an assailant of unsuspecting consumers." Produced during the severe economic depressions stemming from the stock market crash of October, 1929, the film suggests, according to Ward, "an intimate relationship between the display window and sex crimes - murders that are in fact dependent on visual codes of glass transparency and the consumer gaze." Thus, two of the greatest threats to society - economic depression and moral depravity - are linked through the Schaufenster in Lang's film.
Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 239. Ibid., 234.
71 This is clearly shown when Beckert stands in front of a window displaying knives, transfixed by the sight before him. Suddenly, he notices a young girl through the reflection of the window, who is also "mesmerized by the vast collection of sheer bright surface." The scene moves from being one of "aimless window-shopping" to one of
"fixed excitement and desire" - and Beckert is no longer merely walking in the city; his meandering, claims Ward, has "gained a panoptic directionality toward (childish/sexual) possession."69 Here, the darker aspect of the Sartrean Look becomes manifest in the implicit process of taking ownership within the encounter. Ward's description paints
Beckert as a grotesque version of the flaneur, a figure who makes his home on the street for entirely sinister purposes. And, indeed, there is an element of subversion in the flaneur's innate aloofness, in the inherently voyeuristic aspects of his existence. Ward, then, through Beckert, raises an intriguing issue with regards to the flaneur's place in society. What separates the flaneur from a predator on the street? In some sense, they are both interested in consumption; where they differ, however, is in production - the predator only consumes; the flaneur is a producer as well.
Conclusion
Western culture shifted enormously in the twentieth century with the fusion of new media and mass production, changing perspectives on modernism and art irrevocably. New art forms, made possible through the introduction of new technologies, necessitated different ways of defining modernity as both aesthetic concept and state of industrialized society. The possibilities for artistic creativity, and distribution, became seemingly limitless, so that, eventually, the scope of modernity itself became almost too
69 Ibid., 235-6.
72 diffuse. It encompassed too much. Berman writes that, "In some ways [modernity] has thrived and grown beyond its own wildest hopes...The twentieth century may well be the most brilliantly creative in the history of the world, not least because its creative energies have burst out in every part of the world."70 Weimar Germany was a central moment in the shifting meaning of modernity and art in the twentieth century, the era in which mass production overtook individual enterprise, thus affording unprecedented opportunities and freedoms - as well as some damaging consequences - for both artists and consumers.
The flaneur, of course, was both an artist and a consumer - in the later twentieth century, this relationship became even more acute.
Weimar Germany has come to represent, in Western culture, "the singular era of transition from the modern to the postmodern."71 The advent of so-called 'surface culture' during the Weimar period was of great concern to the theorists of the Frankfurt School, and it is largely because of their judgements that mass culture has been critiqued subsequently as a largely negative influence. However, it should be noted that, without mass media and the innovative forms of 'seeing' that it fostered, the art of flanerie would likely not have survived the nineteenth century. The 1920s witnessed the first film productions that revealed the movie camera's aesthetic attributes to contemporary society.
Indeed, the mobility and artistic possibility afforded by new technologies - and especially the camera - arguably saved the flaneur from obsolescence in the absence of the arcades' relative safety. The flaneur thus continues to play a valuable role in Western culture, as one who perceives latent cultural phenomena and interprets the more manifest elements for an increasingly large and 'tuned-in' audience. In tandem with the growth of mass
70 Berman, All That is Solid, 23-4. Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 3.
73 culture, and through a variety of media, the figure has continued to evolve and stay relevant, despite an increasing distance from the physical space of the city street.
74 Chapter Four
"Gates of Eden": Bob Dylan and the Art of
Flanerie in the American Sixties
The flaneur transcends modern alienation through an epistemological process of intensive perception. He is at once a dreamer, a historian, and an artist of modernity.'
-- Anke Gleber, "Women on the Screens and Streets of Modernity"
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin'.2
-- Bob Dylan, from "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"
Introduction
The proliferation of mass media throughout the first half of the twentieth century allowed for a multitude of possibilities for flanerie. Because the definition of 'public space' had been necessarily altered by the advent of mass-produced and distributed information, the definition of flanerie was certain to change as well. However, if the flaneur barely survived the nineteenth century, it seems even more unlikely that he could survive the Second World War. Europe lay in ruins, although America emerged from the
1 Anke Gleber, "Women on the Screens and Streets of Modernity," 55. 2 Bob Dylan, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," Lyrics, 1962-2001 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 59.
75 conflict as the world's foremost economic and cultural superpower. In the vacuum left by
Paris, London and Berlin, New York developed into a bona fide cultural capital, an incubator for Beat poets and Folk musicians. It was the perfect place from which to observe the rapidly changing American culture in the 1950s and 60s, and although flanerie had to some extent been liberated from the site-specificity of an urban environment, the city nevertheless provided inspiration for an aspiring flaneur. In the unique cultural environment of post-war America, Bob Dylan was able to articulate the series of broken social contracts that beset the country and its citizens, although he did so while continuously eschewing political affiliation, as an independent minstrel, a kind of
"postmodern" flaneur.
Dylan is reminiscent both of the Baudelairean flaneur - as one who answered a need, filled a gap in his society between the collective and the individual - and the commodified flaneur introduced by Benjamin. He was arguably the most successful flaneur of his generation; an artist, both of the crowd and apart from it, picking up its movements and changes, as Baudelaire described. By being perceptive and in tune with the undercurrents of the prevalent youth culture, Dylan was able to create music that touched something deep within an American consciousness, rooted in its history and critical of its present. Michael Gray asserts that Dylan's work offers the "artistic re creation of the individual's struggle in our times - a vision of life within chaos - a very contemporary, and yet universal, vision of the English-speaking world. His work is truly educative, and thereby truly entertaining. Its virtue is not in the immediacy or pace, but in the perceptiveness of what it offers."3
3 Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan (London: Hart-Davis, 1972), 7.
76 Bob Dylan: Flaneur for a New (Left) Age
Dylan has been described as the New Left's "culture hero," an artist who is greater than the sum of his parts - more than a folksinger, more than an entertainer in the 1960s.4
However, his chosen medium, the popular song, has not lent itself to an appreciation from academics. In fact, it could be argued that it was Dylan, almost exclusively, who opened the door for the serious discussion of popular music as poetry in the twentieth century. Ralph
Gleason, in direct rebuttal to the theories of Theodor Adorno, heralds popular music as a more relevant poetic form than traditional verse, and contends that Dylan was its most talented raconteur, writing, "Dylan, by his political, issue-oriented broadsides first and then by his Rimbaudish nightmare visions of the real state of the nation, his bittersweet love songs and his pure imagery, did what jazz and poetry people of the fifties had wanted to do - he took poetry out of the classroom and out of the hands of the professors and put it right out there on the streets for everyone."5
Dylan's perceptiveness translated into instant celebrity and unadulterated adulation from fans, critics, and fellow performers. He became, almost overnight, the voice of the post-war generation, and of the so-called New Left that arose simultaneously, giving that generation a political voice. After seeing Dylan perform at the Newport Folk Festival in
1963, singer Liam Clancy remarked on his uncanny ability to verbalize unspoken tensions:
"He was Charlie Chaplin. He was Dylan Thomas. He talked like Woody Guthrie.. .In old
Irish mythology, they talk about the shape-changers. He changed voices. He changed images.. .He was a receiver. He was possessed. And he articulated what the rest of us
4 Lawrence Goldman, "Bobby Dylan - Folk Rock Hero" in The Age of Rock: The Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, ed. Jonathan Eisen (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 208. 5 Ralph J. Gleason, "Like a Rolling Stone," in ibid., 64.
77 wanted to say but couldn't say."6 Dylan was not only acutely attuned to the anxieties of his time; he was also a diligent student of historical, literary, and musical traditions, immersing himself tirelessly to the point that these influences found their way into his music.
Technology, in the form of recordings, radio broadcasts, and television - the primary agents of transmission in the later twentieth century - enabled new artistic traditions to develop, and
Dylan was the beneficiary of the sort of spatial and temporal tourism that had been made possible by the advent of mass media, in the form of the radio, and through the record.
Songs as Denkbilder: Education Through Experience
One of the most intriguing aspects of flaneuric art is that it often becomes a study of the author himself. The flaneur's observations, then, reveal not only a surrounding social and cultural milieu, but the place of the individual subject within it. This is perhaps
Dylan's greatest contribution to his historical moment - his songs can be read as
Denkbilder, texts of education through experience, something he shared with his country as a whole. A key instrument in Dylan's ongoing education was the transistor radio.
Growing up in rural Minnesota, in a small mining town located on the Iron Range close to the Canadian border, Dylan connected with the outside world through the radio. Like countless others of his generation, he used the air waves to escape the mundanity of growing up middle class in Midwestern America, claiming, "We'd have to listen late at night for other stations to come in from other parts of the country, places that were far away, 50,000 Watt stations coming out through the atmosphere."7 Dylan and other baby
6 Liam Clancy, quoted in Martin Scorsese, dir., No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005). 7 Dylan, quoted in ibid.
78 boomers were "weaned on a transistor radio, involved with songs from the earliest moment of memory."
The radio afforded Dylan, a self-proclaimed "musical expeditionary,"9 a priceless education, which would be nourished by his innate and unquenchable curiosity - akin to that of Baudelaire's painter - in later years. Mike Marqusee argues that it "enabled
Dylan to ransack the American musical heritage."10 Dylan himself writes in Chronicles that "I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was the soundtrack of my life." Among early influences, Little Richard, Hank Williams and
Woody Guthrie loom large. In fact, Dylan's high school yearbook stated that his ambition was to "join Little Richard." Although his later admiration and emulation of
Guthrie meant that he was first identified with folk music, Rock and Roll was in fact
Dylan's first passion, and the radio was his introduction to a previously unknown world, which might otherwise have been out of reach.
Coming of age during the early, tense years of the Cold War, Dylan perceived that
American society was changing, although he argues that he was unsure of what stage in development the country was going through, only that things were about to happen "in an
Olympian type of way":
As for what time it was, it was always just beginning to be daylight and I knew a little about history, too - the history of a few nations and states - and it was always the same pattern. Some early archaic period where society grows and develops and thrives, then some classical period where the society reaches its maturation point, and then a slacking off period where decadence makes things fall apart. I had no
Gleason, "Like a Rolling Stone, 62. 9 Dylan, quoted in Scorsese, No Direction Home. 10 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 159. 11 Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 32.
79 idea which one of these stages America was in. There was nobody to check with.12
American culture in the 1950s was stifling for many baby boomers, who grew weary of the constant threat of nuclear attack that defined their early school days. As a teenager, Dylan was struck by the "surreally inhuman logic of the fallout shelter boom."13 He states that "our reality was fear, that any moment this black cloud would explode and everybody would be dead."14 "Let Me Die in My Footsteps," an unreleased selection from his eponymous first album, was perhaps Dylan's first 'protest' song. It is unequivocal in its rejection of the fallout shelter state of mind, and the fear mongering he felt lay behind it: "There's always been people that have to cause fear / They've been talking of the war now for many long years / I've read all their statements and I've not said a word / But now Lawd God, let my poor voice be heard / Let me die in my footsteps / Before I go down under the ground."15
This statement of refusal is an assertion of individual freedom against dominant social trends, and was one of the first indications of Dylan's engagement with so-called 'topical' material. His humanitarian consciousness, which was plainly evident in much of his earlier work, was cultivated through the relationships he formed in New York at the turn of the decade.16
New York
The experience of living in New York in the early 1960s made Dylan an attuned observer, a flaneur in the Baudelairean tradition. Dylan soaked up life experience and
12 Ibid., 35. 13 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 55. 14 Dylan, quoted in Scorsese, No Direction Home. 15 Dylan, "Let Me Die In My Footsteps," in Lyrics, 20. 16 The most obvious example is Dylan's relationship with Suze Rotolo, who was associated with CORE (Congress for Racial Equality).
80 musical knowledge at an incredible rate. He routinely performed at clubs like the Cafe
Wha? and the Gaslight, where he observed his fellow performers closely, picking out mannerisms and techniques that would find their way into his own stage persona and performance style. Dylan describes New York as the place that would ultimately shape his destiny: "Modern Gommorah. I was at the initiation point of square one but in no sense a neophyte." Indeed, Dylan felt ready for New York, having toiled previously on the coffee shop circuit in Minneapolis. New York offered a privileged vantage point from which to view the rapidly changing country. Dylan arrived in January of 1961, the same month that
John F. Kennedy delivered his inaugural address. In retrospect, he writes, "America was changing. I had a feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes. New York was as good a
18 place to be as any. My consciousness was beginning to change, too, change and stretch."
In Greenwich Village, the crowd, the audience, was largely composed of other musicians and poets, and night after night, Dylan picked out those performers who exuded authenticity, whose artistry and truth were evident equally in the content and the manner of their performance, and determined to emulate them.
The bohemian environment of the Village, the ebb and flow of life on MacDougall
Street - the very eclectic-ness of the congregants in the cafes, clubs, and apartments that lined the sidewalks - provided invaluable education for a self-proclaimed musical expeditionary. The city was also full of literary history, and Dylan was confronted with a rich American literary tradition at every turn: "New York was cold, muffled and mysterious, the capital of the world. On 7th Avenue I passed the building where Walt Whitman had lived and worked. I paused momentarily, imagining him printing away and singing the true song
17 Dylan, Chronicles, 9. 18 Ibid., 73.
81 of his soul. I had stood outside of Poe's house on 3r Street, too, and had done the same thing." In more ways than one, New York was Dylan's proverbial Crossroads. He would soon be unrecognizable to those who knew his previous incarnation, when he was still
Robert Allen Zimmerman from Hibbing. By the time he performed his first professional gig, opening for John Lee Hooker at Gerde's Folk City on April 11, 1961,21 he had created an image for himself as a folk troubadour, styled in the image of Woody Guthrie, and had begun to write his own material, which would very quickly manifest itself as some of the most powerful songs in the Civil Rights and Anti-War political arsenals, as part of the New
Left political agenda. However, Dylan's work often offered a subtlety and ambiguity beyond the typical 'protest' song. The songs were beyond political commentary; they cut to the quick of American history and its reverberations in the present day.
Time Awareness and The Art of Protest
Matei Calinescu's appraisal of Baudelaire, that he exhibited a time awareness so new that his work became a qualitative turning point in the history of modernity as an idea, can be applied to Dylan as well. His 'time awareness' manifested itself again and again in the critical honesty of his work; both contemporary critics and cultural historians refer to his ability to voice the unvoiceable, so that he in fact helped to shape the way his historical moment was perceived at the time and for subsequent generations. Dylan's ambivalent portrayal of the (post)modern in American life recalls Baudelaire's simultaneous fascination with the beauty and meanness of life in nineteenth-century Paris. There are several early
19 Ibid., 103. 20 There is an old myth about blues men, specifically Robert Johnson, heading out to The Crossroads and selling their souls for musical talent. 21 Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 90.
82 Dylan compositions that refer either directly to current events, or to the sentiments they evoked, and as such were (and still are) considered protest songs, of a topical nature. Many of them, like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are A-Changin,"' quickly became anthems for Leftist movements and have retained their relevance to this day. The
Civil Rights struggle was an unmistakable theme in Dylan's early work, as was the issue of war, its causes and perilous consequences.
"With God on Our Side," written late in the winter of 1963, addresses the question of personal and collective social responsibility for America's military history. Dylan weaves the issues of identity and responsibility tightly together in the song, as he goes through the litany of America's military conflicts and questions the religious and moral convictions that accompanied those efforts, from the Revolution through the Cold War. The song says enough to emphasize the irony of not saying enough; it is a subtle criticism of the justifications made for war by governments and individuals alike, offering insight into why wars begin - through the promotion of fear, hatred and the construction of binaries: "Oh the history books tell it / They tell it so well / The cavalries charged / The Indians fell / The cavalries charged / The Indians died / Oh the country was young / With God on its side."22
The song deals with the American past, but it also looks ahead, to a future that remains grim if the same trend is allowed to continue: "So now as I'm leavin' / I'm weary as Hell / the confusion I'm feelin' / Ain't no tongue can tell / The words fill my head / And fall to the floor / If God's on our side / He'll stop the next war."23 There is an implicit challenge here, both earnest and mocking. While songs like "With God On Our Side" are difficult to
Dylan, "With God On Our Side," in Lyrics, 85. Ibid., 86.
83 misinterpret, Dylan also produced songs early in his career that defied easy explanation, that were instead impressionist works whose meanings were more opaque.
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is the first of Dylan's great songs, a work of true visionary scope. The depth of the imagery and symbolism is remarkable, offering a tapestry of experience for the listener. Dylan says of the song that "I wrote it at the time of the Cuban crisis. I was in Bleecker Street in New York. We just hung around at night - people sat around wondering if it was the end, and so did I.. .It was a song of desperation. What could we do? Could we control men on the verge of wiping us out? The words came fast, very fast. It was a song of terror. Line after line after line, trying to capture the feeling of nothingness."24 "Hard Rain" was regarded at the time as an expression of foreboding, a study of current anxieties in the early sixties, which Dylan turns into Biblical prophecy. He evokes a thoroughly bleak future through the eyes and ears of a small child who describes a post-apocalyptic world, with a parental figure asking, "What'11 you do now, my darling young one?"25 Dylan introduces a dichotomous relationship between speakers in the song, which hints at the kind of generational tension that brushes aside the perceptions and opinions of younger people as naive inexperience. The parental questioner uses the same address from beginning to end, which becomes increasingly absurd as the weight of what the young man has seen and experienced becomes clear.
The imagery provided through the younger speaker's tale becomes progressively darker and more ominous. The natural world is no longer a place of refuge - as it is, for example, in "Let Me Die In My Footsteps" - but a place of peril and uncertainty. The
Dylan, quoted in Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades, Take Two (New York: Penguin, 2000), 102. 25 This construction was clearly inspired by the traditional English ballad, Lord Randal: "Oh where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son? And where ha you been, my handsome young man?" (http://www.tnellen.com/cvbereng/poetry/poems/lord randall.html).
84 opening stanza reveals the uncertain terrain of the wandering child: "I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains / I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways /
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests / I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans." And what he's seen and heard evokes a thoroughly bleak future: "I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken /1 saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children / And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard / And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall."27 The final stanza makes it clear that the rain - which is not, as has been speculated, atomic rain, just a hard rain - has not yet arrived, and that something can still be done. The parental figure asks "What'll you do now?" and the child replies:
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin' / I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest / Where the people are many and their hands are all empty / Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters / Where the home in valley meets the damp dirty prison / And the executioner's face is always well hidden / Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten / Where black is the color, where none is the number / And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it / And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it / And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin' / But I'll know my song well before I start singin.'28
Allen Ginsberg, reflecting later on the song, argues that it is poetry, because poetry "is words that are empowered that make your hair stand on end; that you recognize instantly as being some form of subjective truth that has an objective reality to its because somebody's realized it. Then you call it poetry later."29 The bleakness of the imagery is balanced by the heroism of the young speaker - his willingness to go back out, to the depths of despair, into the maelstrom of modern life as it were, provides a glint of hope amidst nearly overwhelming darkness.
26 Dylan, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," in Lyrics, 59. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 60. 29 Allen Ginsberg, quoted in Scorsese, No Direction Home.
85 While "Hard Rain" is built upon a series of oblique and interpretable images, other songs in Dylan's early oeuvre were taken straight from the news - only the words were changed. The artistic and political impact of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" points to the systemic nature of the problems facing America in the early 1960s, especially the
Civil Rights struggle, as well as the internal contradictions of the white, largely middle-class
New Left. It was written eight months after the murder of Hattie Carroll, a Baltimore bar maid, by William Zanzinger, a wealthy tobacco farmer who owned "600 acres." The details of the incident itself are largely well-represented through the song, although Dylan chooses to highlight Carroll's social and cultural isolation in relation to Zanzinger's wealth. The description of her murder is inextricably linked with the casual wealth of her assailant. In the first stanza, justice appears to be done - "the cops were called in and his weapon took from him / As they rode him in custody down to the station / And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder" - but the speaker is adamant that the incident should and can not be rationalized, or explained away, as he sings "you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears / Take the rag away from your face / Now ain't the time for your tears."31
The time for tears does not come until the end of the song, when it becomes apparent that justice will not be done, as Zanzinger receives a six-month suspended sentence. Dylan does not mention that Carroll is black - it is implicit in both the crime and its punishment, and his point is all the stronger for the power of its inference. Songs like "Hattie Carroll" reveal Dylan's latent humanism, his ability to access the core of American cultural and social prejudices. Folk singer Dave Van Ronk comments that Dylan's ability to address these concerns was "almost enough to make you believe in Jung's notion of the collective
30 Barry Shank, "That Wild Mercury Sound': Bob Dylan and the Illusion of American Culture," Boundary 2, vol. 29, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 115. Dylan, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," in Lyrics, 96.
86 unconscious. That if there is an American collective unconscious, if you could believe in something like that, that Bobby had somehow tapped into it." So powerful were many of
Dylan's songs that people began to speak of him as a "moral referee" and a "singing conscience." Dylan's discomfort with these labels was immense - he tells Martin Scorsese that he just "could not relate to it," although he later states that, "In taking all the elements that I'd ever known to make wide sweeping statements which conveyed a feeling which was a general essence of the spirit of the times -I think I managed to do that."34 By late 1963, the pressure of being this "voice of a generation" had become oppressive. As Christopher Ricks explains, "Dylan understood the anger that he might invite by not sounding angry enough.
He was aware of how he might himself be blamed for not blaming,"35 a realization that prompted him to distance himself from the highly politicized folk scene.
Dylan's rejection of his folk-singer image was stinging and complete to those who had known and supported him in the Village. His speech to a stunned audience at an
Emergency Civil Liberties Committee dinner in December 1963 has become legendary. At that event, Dylan openly rejected the Tom Paine award he was presented with and the political imprisonment he felt it represented, saying, "It took me a long time to get young.
And now I consider myself young, and I'm proud of it. I'm proud that I'm young.. .There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore. There's only up and down. And down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up, without thinking about anything trivial, such as politics."36 In the course of his speech, Dylan reportedly likened himself to Lee
Harvey Oswald - a comparison which, less than one month following the assassination of
32 Dave Van Ronk, quoted in Scorsese, No Direction Home. 33 The Steve Allen Show (1963). 34 Dylan, quoted in Scorsese, No Direction Home. 35 Ricks, Dylan's Visions of Sin (London: Penguin, 2003), 171. Dylan, quoted in Scorsese, No Direction Home.
87 the president, would have been especially provocative. It was a powerful statement, an unequivocal rejection of any political stance. As Marqusee writes, "Dylan's impromptu identification with Oswald was a blunt instrument enabling him to register a sense of alienation that had gone way beyond disquiet over racism and nuclear arms." Dylan addresses this nascent outsider status, stating that, "I'd come into town as an outsider...and they were trying to make me an insider to some kind of trip they were on. I don't think so."38
Although signs of his increasing discomfort with the folk scene had been evident for some time, the release of Another Side of Bob Dylan in August 1964 left little doubt that
Dylan's tone, and tune, had changed. "My Back Pages" made Dylan's inner struggle explicit. Indeed, the song "transmutes the rude incoherence of the ECLC rant into the organized density of art. The lilting refrain.. .must be one of the most lyrical expressions of political apostasy ever penned. It is a recantation in every sense of the word." It is one of the most direct, honest, and autobiographical in Dylan's songbook. As Jon Landau writes,
"[the song], with its denouncement of the old myth, shows Dylan's vast capacity at self- analysis and criticism and his ability to be honest with both himself and his audience."4
Dylan addresses what he perceives as his own hypocrisy, singing, "In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand / At the mongrel dogs who teach / Fearing not that I'd become my enemy /
In the instant that I preach / My pathway led by confusion boats / Mutiny from stern to bow /
Ah, but I was so much older then /I'm younger than that now."41 The song could be seen as symbolic of a wider cultural shift, from public to personal, which would later define the
37 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 95. 38 Dylan, quoted in Scorsese, No Direction Home. 39 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 111. 40 Jon Landau, "John Wesley Harding," in The Age of Rock, 219. 41 Dylan, "My Back Pages," in Lyrics, 126.
88 American sixties. "Getting younger" is a Dylanism that gets to the heart of his artistic project - to grow with the country. The political drama being played out around him provided the necessary context for Dylan's expressions of escapism in the period immediately following his protest-singer phase. Marqusee asserts that, throughout the sixties, Dylan wrote both "within the historical tide and against it"42 - often simultaneously.
Another Side was, in retrospect, the beginning of Dylan making the political personal, and vice versa. However, by the time he released the album, the cult of genius that had been built around him was so enormous that to change meant a vast dislocation, a rupture between
Dylan, his fans and their expectations.
Dont Look Back: The Cult of Celebrity, Spectacle, and the Crowd
As with any flaneur (or performer), the crowd was, and remains, a crucial element in Dylan's career. As a performer, Dylan is being watched, but he is also watching. The interaction between himself and his audience has been, throughout his career, at times jubilant (the Halloween concert of 1964), tense (Newport 1965), and acrimonious
(Manchester Free Hall 1966). While Baudelaire's flaneur became a citizen of the world on the streets of Paris, Dylan, it can be said, has become a citizen of the world through his interactions with audience. A crucial aspect of late capitalist culture, for postmodernist theorists, is its subsumption to spectacle, and in many ways, Dylan's public persona and work in the mid-sixties was defined by the pressures created by the spectacle surrounding him and what he appeared to represent. Terry Eagleton refers to capitalist technology as an "immense desiring machine, an enormous circuit of message and exchanges in which
Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 120.
89 pluralistic idioms proliferate and random objects, bodies, surfaces come to glow with libidinal intensity."43
Late capitalism breeds spectacle, which becomes its primary mode of expression.
Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle lays out a theory of the spectacle and its relationship with late twentieth century society: "The Spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."44
Debord argues that social relationships are informed by the spectacular, that the spectacle expresses society's "real unreality" and epitomizes "the prevailing model of social life."
That is, in a world mediated by image, the spectacle is the expression of the social order resulting from late capitalist production and consumption. The spectacle, suggests
Debord, is commodity fetishism taken to its ultimate manifestation: "The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life. It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see - commodities are now all there is to see."46
The Dylan cult, the spectacle surrounding him in the mid-sixties, is caught on film in D.A. Pennebaker's cinema verite exercise, Dont Look Back (1967), which follows
Dylan and his entourage through a 1965 tour of England. The cult surrounding Dylan, and his accompanying discomfort, is at times painfully conveyed. Concert footage is interspersed with interviews, footage of screaming fans, and "intimate," sometimes cringe-worthy scenes of Dylan and his 'people' shot in hotel rooms and backstage lounges. Dylan's encounters with fans, the press, and his groupies show his increasing
43 Terry Eagleton, "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism," New Left Review, no. 52 (1985), 69. 44 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12. 45 Ibid., 13. 46 Ibid., 29.
90 unwillingness or inability to engage in the same discussions about himself or his music.
He repeatedly rebuffs efforts at meaningful communication in scenes with everyone from
"the science student" to a TIME magazine reporter. Even Joan Baez, a person Dylan at one time did care for, is treated like an inconvenient latch-on until she eventually disappears from the film, having quit the tour to go home. It is clear that the press is at great pains to portray Dylan as a man with a 'real message,' and their efforts at interviewing or writing about him repeatedly come up short and end up sounding humorously trite. Famously, Pennebaker films a reporter in a phone booth calling in his report of the concert he has just seen: "Sentence. 'He is not so much singing as sermonizing.' Colon. 'His tragedy, perhaps, is that the audience is preoccupied with song'."47 In Pennebaker's film, it is clear that Dylan had grown tired of his folk identity, and had already begun to move away from the sound and the image that made him famous.
The Artist as Commodity and the Unreal Reality of the American Sixties
An important aspect of the Baudelairean flaneur was that he existed both as consumer and commodity within the arcades. In many ways, this position was even more acute for Dylan, as a popular artist in an era dominated by mediated communication. He relied on the crowd, his audience, for survival as both as a performer and a part of the
'culture industry' described by Adorno. Dylan himself makes reference to this fact in his
60s work. For instance, in "Mr. Tambourine Man," he sings that he has been "branded on my feet." His celebrity rose quickly as part of the post-war folk revival period. He became
D.A. Pennebaker, dir., Dont Look Back (1968).
91 the movement's most celebrated figure, the great hope for the resurgence of American folk music in the post-depression era.
Dylan biographer Howard Sounes writes that those who "followed or considered themselves part of the folk revival placed great importance on an elusive quality in music that might be described as authenticity."48 Authenticity and truth were the pillars of the movement, earlier exemplified in the work of Guthrie and Pete Seeger, among many others.
Marqusee writes that, "unlike the mass counterculture of the late sixties that it helped to breed, the folk revival was characterized by earnestness and restraint. It was self consciously opposed to the glitzy superficiality and addled consumerism it associated with
America's prevalent youth culture."49 The touchstones of the movement were honesty in all aspects of a performer's presentation, and this "jargon of authenticity" was applied to musical performance, artistic purpose, even personal style; it "coursed through the shared understanding of history, tradition, politics, the 'folk' and the 'people' and it levied existential demands."50 Dylan was never really a part of the movement politically, never felt truly comfortable with being associated with any party line. As Marqusee contends, he was
"alert to the perils of authenticity," later producing some of his best work out of its various
"conundrums."51
Baudelaire's flaneur existed in, and helped to create, a world where reality itself became a matter of interpretation. Dylan-as-flaneur inhabited the same theoretical space, often exposing the unreality of the supposed real world. "Chimes of Freedom," from
Another Side, is one of Dylan's most overt attempts at inclusivity, and demonstrates the
4 Sounes, Down The Highway, 45. 49 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 39. 50 Ibid., 40. 51 Ibid., 42.
92 quintessential flaneuric quality of empathy in his work. Marqusee refers to the song as the
"most sweeping vision of solidarity with all those marginalized by a monolithic society" in
Dylan's oeuvre, or any other.52 Written in February, 1964, it evokes the same sentiment as
John Donne's famous statement that "no man is an island." Rather than the usual "I", Dylan employs a more inclusive "we" voice, thus widening the perspective of the song. The narrative describes two people taking shelter from a storm, though clearly it is a storm of a different nature, and Shakespearean in scope, as Dylan sings, "through the wild cathedral evening the rain unravelled tales." There is a wedding in the distance, an event from which the two lovers are absent, either by choice or because they have been excluded. The storm, however, subsumes the wedding bells; the larger bells of lightning include what is not in the wedding bells. There is a metaphysical quality about the imagery in the song - the "mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail," the sky "cracking its poems in naked wonder" - that recalls both Donne's metaphysical poetry and Ginsberg's Howl. The Chimes of
Freedom, throughout the song, strike and toll for all those who have been abandoned, left behind by society: "the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse /
An' for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe."54
The spirit of munificence, so prevalent on "Chimes of Freedom," translated into a more conspiratorial inclusivity on Dylan's next album, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), marking a new era in Dylan's career as he returned to his musical roots in the blues and rock and roll. It was the first album of a brilliant mid-sixties trilogy, produced and released in the span of 18 months, a period of originality and prolifigacy that has seldom, if ever, been equalled in popular music. The variety of elements contained in the albums is stunning.
52 Ibid., 101. 53 Dylan, "Chimes of Freedom," in Lyrics, 116. 54 Ibid., 117.
93 According to Marqusee, Dylan "created a body of work that remains unique in popular music. Drawing on folk, blues, country, R&B, rock 'n' roll, gospel, British beat, symbolist, modernist and Beat poetry, Surrealism and Dada, advertising jargon and social commentary,
Fellini and MAD magazine, he forged a coherent and original artistic voice and vision."55
The aim in these albums was to "make an unreal world sound as if it's real and vice versa";
Dylan's songs effectively recast the experience of history as phantasmagoria, while providing an unflinching account of how "controlled, unspontaneous, and petty life in late capitalist society has become." Critics felt that Dylan had turned away from topical songwriting and from a political consciousness, although, arguably, his work simply shifted what could be defined as "political" by broadening the scope of the landscape to include the social, cultural and historical trends that allowed topical issues to develop.
"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" is a satirical re-telling of America's foundation, and reflects what Marqusee labels Dylan's "sour distrust of that dangerous construct called
America."57 The song has a carnivalesque quality, with Dylan describing America as a circus, both "horror movie and Utopia, phantasmagoric and immediately recognizable...
CO completely realistic and utterly glamorous." The lyrics betray their writer's contempt for
America's self-appointed "vaunted special place in the human family."59 Indeed, it is a rejection of one of America's great founding myths - that of the "city on the hill," the ideal of American triumphalism as expressed in the 1630 sermon given by John Winthrop. Greil
Marcus writes that "the depth of the possible betrayal measures the breadth of the possible achievement [in the sermon]. What Winthrop's speech did do was lay the wish and the need
55 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 139. 56 Tony Fluxman, "Bob Dylan and the Dialectic of Enlightenment: Critical Lyricist in the Era of High Capitalism," Theoria, vol. 77 (1991), 97. 57 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 176. 58 Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 65. 59 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 176. 94 for Utopia in the American story; without it there is no American history." "115 Dream" re-imagines American history as a circus of the absurd. It begins: "I was riding on the
Mayflower I When I thought I spied some land... 'I think I'll call it America' /1 said as we hit land /1 took a deep breath /1 fell down, I could not stand / Captain Arab he started /
Writing up some deeds / He said, 'Let's set up a fort / And start buying the place with beads.'"61
The surrealistic, dizzy progression of the song's narrative, which follows a sailor as he attempts to free his comrades, highlights the hypocrisy of American values that promote humanitarianism, but do not deliver. This is illustrated well throughout the song, as the speaker notices a chariot parked across from a building "advertising brotherhood": "I ran right through the front door / Like a hobo sailor does / But it was just a funeral parlor / And the man asked me who I was /1 repeated that my friends / Were all in jail, with a sigh / He gave me his card / And said, 'Call me if they die'.'"62 The funeral director's apathetic response is just one of many in the song. Repeatedly, the speaker seeks help and understanding, only to be constantly rebuffed. Through these encounters, Dylan criticizes the inequalities that were an unfortunate part of contemporary American society: "I rapped upon a house / With a U.S. flag upon display /1 said, 'Could you help me out /1 got some friends down the way' / The man says, 'Get out of here / I'll tear you limb from limb' /1 said, 'You know they refused Jesus, too' / He said, 'You're not Him." Finally, the sailor decides to make a getaway on the impounded boat, but, "When I was leavin' the bay /1 saw three ships a-sailin' / They were all heading my way /1 asked the captain what his name was
60 Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (London: Picador, 1997), 209. 61 Dylan, "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," in Lyrics, 148. 62 Ibid., 150. 63 Ibid., 149.
95 / And how come he didn't drive a truck / He said his name was Columbus /1 just said,
'Good luck.'"64
Although "115th Dream" jokingly confronts America's foundation mythology, other songs more solemnly convey Dylan's views on his culture. "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only
Bleeding)" owes much to the Beat writings of Ginsberg and others, as a terrifying portrayal of American society in the mid-sixties. Louis Masur argues that there is "nothing funny" about the song, which he calls a ballad about alienation, loneliness, corruption, and emptiness. It offers a "searing indictment" of a consumer society that demands conformity and leaves its citizens "feeling dismembered."65 Dylan places his subject at the centre of a world gone wrong, an individual struggling against an oppressive Establishment. The song is truly frightening in its unflinching critique of contemporary America. Landau writes that
Dylan's anxiety is expressed "with such brilliance and sense of awareness of where both [he] and his country are at."66 It is a "vision of a corrupt and dehumanized society and the fate of the sensitive autonomous individual within it."67 The sense of bleakness is present immediately at the beginning of the song, as Dylan raps, "Darkness at the break of noon /
Shadows even the silver spoon." Throughout the song, Dylan asserts the individual's struggle for freedom and autonomy in an alienating society: "Temptation's page flies out the door / You follow, find yourself at war."
Marqusee argues that commodity fetishism is at the heart of the society Dylan describes again and again in the mid-sixties, along with its "ideological handmaiden," the
64 Ibid., 151. 65 Louis P. Masur, '"Famous Long Ago': Bob Dylan Revisited," American Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 1 (2007), 173. 66 Landau, "John Wesley Harding," 221. 67 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 127.
96 advertising industry. Dylan makes direct reference to the commodification of society as he sings, "Disillusioned words like bullets bark / As human gods aim for their mark / Make everything from toy guns that spark / To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark / It's easy to see without looking too far / That not much is really sacred."69 He goes further, referring to the advertising industry's direct role to both the construction of a superficial sense of identity and the loss of individual freedom:
Advertising signs they con / You into thinking you're the one / That can do what's never been done / That can win what's never been won / Meantime life outside goes on / All around you / You lose yourself, you reappear / You suddenly find you got nothing to fear / Alone you stand with nobody near / When a trembling distant voice, unclear / Startles your sleeping ears to hear / That somebody thinks they really found you."70
Even the office of the President is vulnerable in this world as "even the president of the
United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked."71 However, Dylan asserts, you have to "keep it in your mind and not forget / That it is not he or she or them or it / That you belong to."72 Ultimately, the individual in the song triumphs over oppression in the society of idols and advertisements, which Dylan expresses defiantly: "My eyes collide head-on with stuffed / Graveyards, false gods, I scuff / At pettiness which plays so rough /
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs / Kick my legs to crash it off / Say okay, I have had enough / What else can you show me? / And if my thought-dreams could be seen /
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine / But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life
68 Ibid., 128-29. 69 Dylan, "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," in Lyrics, 156. 70 Ibid., 157. 71 Ibid.
97 only." Once again, the heroic nature of the flaneur comes through in Dylan's fatalistic lyric, in the speakers' willingness to abandon himself to his cause.
Marqusee asserts that "It's Alright Ma" is filled with a "Gramscian conviction," that the "most insidious means of domination are those that secure the 'spontaneous consent' of the dominated"; that Dylan's critique of the "repressive, omni-invasive character of mass culture is here as harrowing and all-inclusive - and nearly as pessimistic - as Adorno's."74
In fact, there is an implicit, although ultimately untested tension between Adorno's intense critique of popular music and Dylan's art, for Dylan is, at his best, "at once the incisive critic of the multiplicity of forms of life in modern capitalist America and at the same time the patron of its most naive forms of consciousness."75 Marqusee writes that, in Dylan's greatest work of the 60s, he "articulates the abiding dilemma of life under consumer capitalism: how you can truly own yourself in a world where everything appears as a commodity for purchase,"76 including, of course, the artist himself. However, Dylan, the producer, "would seem to invalidate" Adorno's claims regarding popular music, as his work "demonstrated the capacity of popular music to crack open the social monolith, to alter individual perceptions, to stimulate resistance. He made the familiar a vehicle for the unfamiliar."77 In using an existing form to convey contemporary concerns, Dylan was the unchallenged poetic leader amongst other artists of his generation.
"Gates of Eden" can be interpreted as an "attempt to focus attention on that continuous consciousness of infinity," an attempt to point through the doors of perception."78
Written in January, 1965, the song combines two of the most resonant images in Judeo-
73 Ibid., 158. 74 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 129. 75 Fluxman, "Bob Dylan and the Dialectic of Enlightenment," 91. 76 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 334. 77 Ibid., 194. 78 Gray, Song and Dance Man, 83.
98 Christian culture - the garden of Eden and the Apocalypse, the beginning and the end. In both mythology and the song, the Gates allow for glimpses of real meaning amid an otherwise hazy, confused or corrupted existence. Dylan's songwriting is simultaneously impressionist, expressionist and surrealist, and as a result, this song is one of the most poetic he has written; it works as well on the page as performed. The stanzas are carefully constructed with highly evocative poetic language, and each one is an emotive vision, a glimpse into another state of being.
Like "It's Alright, Ma," "Gates of Eden" comprises images of a world gone wrong, but unlike the former, the song ultimately offers refuge. Some of its most striking images express the speaker's distrust of authority. The lamppost, standing with folded arms and metal badge in the second stanza arguably represents the failure of those in authority to help the helpless - the same "abandoned and forsaked" referred to in "Chimes of Freedom."
Dylan criticizes organized religion's emphasis on wish fulfillment through reference to
"Utopian monks [sitting] sidesaddle on the golden calf,"79 as well as the hierarchical power structures that exist outside of Eden, in the 'real' world: "Relationships of ownership / They whisper in the wings / To those condemned to act accordingly / And wait for succeeding kings / And I try to harmonize with songs / The lonesome sparrow sings / There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden."80
Along with offering an overt rejection of hierarchical social structures, the song questions notions of objective truth and a rational world, expressing the real unreality of the modern world in its reference to the "kingdoms of Experience" that rot in the "precious wind" while the princess and the prince discuss "what's real and what is not" - but, in the
79 Dylan, "Gates of Eden," in Lyrics, 154.
99 end, it "doesn't matter inside the Gates of Eden." The idea of an objective truth, too, is both denied and affirmed in the final stanza, as Dylan sings: "At dawn my lover comes to me
/ And tells me of her dreams / With no attempts to shovel the glimpse / Into the ditch of what each one means / At times I think there are no words / But these to tell what's true / And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden."82
The space outside and around the mythical Gates is explored in Dylan's next album,
Highway 61 Revisited (1965). Highway 61 is rightly considered a masterpiece - perhaps the masterpiece - of Dylan's career. It does not, according to Mark Polizzotti, seek to "subvert the motifs of Dylan's earlier work," but rather "amplify them in both senses of the word."83
The album is so extraordinary because it seems, even now, to encapsulate America - its weirdness, intricacy, promise- at the cusp, its destiny as a nation seeming to depend on the outcome of that year, 1965. The album contains the country as a whole, both the "factual country, as it was in that noisy, murderous, idyllic summer of 1965," and the imagined, mythical country on vinyl.84 Highway 61 spans America, figuratively, through Dylan's words and voice, and literally, running from Northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, mirroring that other cultural meter stick - the Mississippi river.
Traditionally, Route 66 has been the mythical East-West route across the United
States - the "white escape route"; while Highway 61, the North-South line, was the "black escape route," the path of the underground railroad and the blues migration. Gray asserts that, while Dylan's "literal journey was, with a couple of diversions, east in stages to
1U1U. Ibid. Mark Polizzotti, 33 1/3: Highway 61 Revisited (New York: Continuum, 2006), 11. Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone, 153.
100 Greenwich Village," his "existential journey" was down Highway 61, and so, while his previous album was titled Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited was the true achievement of that goal. Dylan himself describes the importance of Highway 61 on his consciousness: "I always felt like I'd started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere from it, even down into the deep Delta Country...The Mississippi river, the bloodstream of the blues, the woods. I was never too far from any of it. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood."86
Highway 61 is comprehensively inclusive, melding folk and rock, of course, but much more: politicians, myths, legends, ordinary people, heroes and villains, writers, poets and artists are juxtaposed in complex collages of imagery and sound. Marcus writes that "in a country that is settled, a country that like any old and painted whore can still pretend to innocence, Bob Dylan has moved from state to state and decade to decade as if nothing was settled, as if everything remains up for grabs. By doing so he raised the stakes of life all around himself."87 Gray sums up the importance of the album, not only in terms of Dylan's artistic development, but for the world of pop music and American culture in the 1960s:
Revolutionary and stunning, not just for its energy, freshness, and panache, but in its vision: fusing radical electric music - electric music as the embodiment of our whole out-of-control, nervous-energy-fuelled, chaotic civilization - with lyrics that were light years ahead of anyone else's.. .The whole rock culture, the whole post-Beatle, pop-rock world, and so in an important sense the 1960s started here.. .it's the carving out of a new emotional correspondence with a new chaos-reality. There it all was in one bombshell of an album.88
Gray, "Highway 61," in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (New York: Continuum, 2006), 319. Dylan, Chronicles, 240-41. Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone, 29. Gray, "Highway 61 Revisited," The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, 321.
101 Polizzotti concludes that Dylan did not abandon his sense of outrage or protest, but rather the illusion of community that lay behind his earlier albums.89
The first track on Highway 61, "Like a Rolling Stone," is one of Dylan's most complete songs, and certainly one of his most (in)famous. In fact, it is nearly perfect in both its construction and delivery. Marcus contends that the song owes more to Allen Ginsberg's
Howl than to any song - although, obviously, Hank Williams's "Lost Highway" and Muddy
Waters' "Rollin' Stone" were fundamentally inspirational - in its "headlong drive into the street, its insistence on saying everything because tomorrow it will be too late."90 "Rolling
Stone" was an event that transformed its listeners into witnesses in the summer of '65, as
Dylan's voice "steadily screams out" the contradictions of late capitalist America; the song is a simultaneous incorporation and denial of the "impossibility of autonomous authenticity."91 With both the album and the song, Dylan made the choice to depart radically from the sound and the image that had made him famous. Some liked the new sound - Bruce Springsteen said that the opening drum beat '"sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind.'"92 Folk fans, for the most part, were not so receptive.
The song was electric, rock and roll, commercial, and the lyrics certainly did not reflect
"folk values." Paul Nelson explains: '"Like a Rolling Stone' seemed like a direct slap in the face to everything that topical songs represented. 'How does it feel to be on your own?' And
[folk fans] took that to be the most extremely negative, you know, selfish statement, basically. And it was, you know, it was not 'Better World A-Coming'."93 There is indeed something unsettling about someone's personal downfall - echoing perhaps a more profound
89 Polizzotti, Highway 61 Revisited, 12. 90 Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone, 123. 91 Shank, "The Illusion of American Culture," 121. 92 Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone, 94. 93 Paul Nelson, quoted in Scorsese, No Direction Home.
102 cultural stutter - being put to the up-beat tempo of rock and roll, with Al Kooper's
Hammond organ cheerfully underscoring Dylan's gleeful, sneering put-down.
The merit of the song ultimately lies in its implications for America itself. "Rolling
Stone" is really a song dealing with pride, and the proverbial Fall. Ostensibly about an individual's loss of status, it can also stand in for a generation and a political movement, groomed in affluence, whose assumptions and expectations were "bound to fall." Marcus contends that the song was "a rewrite of the world itself. An old world was facing a dare it wasn't ready for; as the song traced its long arc across the radio, a world that was taking shape seemed altogether in flux."94 America was in transition; as Vietnam escalated, and the civil rights and women's movements struggled to succeed, the future of the nation hung in the balance. Things were "coming to a verge, where [America] would have to make good on its promises of liberty and equality or admit, even to itself, that those promises were lies."95
Indeed, the song exposed both the freedom and the emptiness of the youth culture. It had the ability to delve into perhaps the deepest fears of the coming-of-age baby boomers - what would happen if all one's comforts were stripped away? How does it feel, Dylan asked, to be on your own, with no direction home? The song's subject has had all of her comfortable beliefs stripped away, and is adrift in a world she previously shunned.
Ultimately, the subject is expanded to include both the audience and the singer himself: "One upon a time you dressed so fine / You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you? / People'd call, say, 'Beware doll, you're bound to fall' / You thought they were all kiddin' you / You used to laugh about / Everybody that was hangin' out / Now you don't talk so loud / Now you don't seem so proud / About having to be scrounging for your next
94 Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone, 6. 95 Ibid., 16.
103 meal / How does it feel / How does it feel." Indeed, the song works on several levels: as a straight conversation between two people; as an implicit criticism of the singer's audience, the public, America; and as a self-criticism by the singer, sensing his own complicity in the myths and mistakes of his generation. However, there is something liberating about hitting rock bottom - "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose / You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal" - and ultimately, being "Like a Rolling Stone" is to be free.
Freedom, personal and collective, is an important theme on the rest of the album as well, culminating in the heartbreaking scenario of "Desolation Row" - in many ways,
Dylan's "Waste Land" that encompasses all of the Western literary, popular and intellectual tradition, including Shakespeare, Cinderella, Cain and Abel, Einstein and Freud ("Dr.
Filth"), Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. The song closes Highway 61 Revisited, and thus, is the proverbial end of the road for that album, but it also offers a glimpse of the future of the
America described in "It's Alright Ma." The opening line in the song, "they're selling postcards of the hanging," conjures Foucauldian images of the spectacle of the scaffold, as human suffering is translated into commodity. Desolation Row is ultimately a place of both refuge and subversion, not unlike the Eden described in "Gates of Eden."
Dylan's controlled use of language is in tension with the chaos of the world it describes. His voice is slow and deliberate, even as he sings of characters like "Dr. Filth" who "keeps his world / Inside of a leather cup / But all his sexless patients / They're trying to blow it up." As his nurse, "Some local loser / She's in charge of the cyanide hole / And she also keeps the cards that read / 'Have mercy on his soul.'"98 A sense of urgency enters the song in the penultimate stanza, where Dylan addresses the political polarization of the
96 Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone," in Lyrics, 167. 97 Ibid., 168. 98 Dylan, "Desolation Row," in Lyrics, 182.
104 country, singing, "Praise be to Nero's Neptune / The Titanic sails at dawn / And everybody's shouting / 'Which Side Are You On?'99 / And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain's tower / While calypso singers laugh at them / And fishermen hold flowers."100
Finally, the speaker reveals his weariness, which has been evident in his voice from the beginning, as he addresses a second party directly: "Yes, I received your letter yesterday /
(About the time the doorknob broke) / When you asked how I was doing / Was that some kind of joke?"101 Part of the phantasmagoric world Dylan created was echoed in his self- conscious creation and re-creation of his public image throughout the sixties.
Masks and Incognitos
Dylan adopted a kind of theatre about himself, playing with his public image and identity, and raising questions regarding the stability of the subjective self in a world of masks and incognitos, as Baudelaire's flaneur once did. Dylan delivered these messages from behind various masks and personas - his voice changed as often as his outward appearance, providing his audiences with numerous and often competing 'Dylans.' He was very self-conscious in the creation of his image, and has remained so throughout his career.
Goldman writes, "he created himself, name and all, from scratch, and rejected all the elements in his past except those which fit in with his carefully constructed personal mythology." For instance, in early interviews, he claimed that he was an orphan from
Gallup, New Mexico (where he learned a lot of "cowboy songs"). The song "Talking New
York" expresses this fixation on personal myth: "Ramblin' outa the wild West / Leavin' the
99 This is a direct reference to Florence Reece's union anthem, "Which Side Are You On?" recorded in 1941 by the Almanac Singers (Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell and Pete Seeger). The song came to symbolize the polarization of Left and Right in the 1960s. 100 Dylan, "Desolation Row," 183. 101 Ibid. 102 Goldman, "Bobby Dylan," 209.
105 towns I love the best." Goldman aptly describes Dylan's stylistic schizophrenia as he writes,
[N]ow that Dylan is free of politics he is beginning to create another myth, starting to don another mask. His new persona is rather hard to describe while still in its formative stage. At this point it seems to involve motorcycles, the deliberate destruction of all meaning, with Dylan coming on mysteriously as a kind of hip Hell's Angel, a pop art folk-bard, a wild combination of Steve McQueen, John Lennon, Marisol and Bo Diddley...It seems that Dylan, having once lost himself inside a self-made myth, can only function as a performer by creating a new myth. Possibly this mythic persona has become an integral part of Dylan's artistic personality.104
Dylan's pastiche of style and image in creating his persona illustrates in part the death of the modern auteur as described by Fredric Jameson and other postmodernist thinkers. He employed a poetics of voice and, very self-consciously, created a series of personae for and around himself. Christopher Lebold argues that Dylan uses his songs to "write himself," to
"construct a series of numerous and competing personae."105 His personae emerge from his lyrics and interact with his public image, thus constantly either "ratifying or parodying it," allowing the artist to "ceaselessly construct and deconstruct a fictional Bob Dylan."106
On Blonde on Blonde (1966), Dylan "offers a persona awash inside the chaos [of the outside world] and speaking to others."107 The very private landscape of Dylan's mid-sixties work "powerfully reflected," according to Marqusee, "a shared social reality, a reality of insurgency and reaction, and was understood as such at the time, subliminally and by inference."108 The songs on Blonde on Blonde are overwhelmingly about relationships, not just between lovers, but again, between the performer and his audience - which, by the time
10J Dylan, "Talking New York," in Lyrics, 3. 104 Goldman, "Bobby Dylan," 213. 105 Christopher Lebold, "A Face Like a Mask and a Voice That Croaks: An Integrated Poetics of Bob Dylan's Voice, Personae and Lyrics," Oral Tradition, vol. 22, no. 1 (2007), 57. 106 Ibid. 107 Gray, "Blonde on Blonde," The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. 59. 108 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 148-9.
106 the album was released, were quite strained - and the state of social relationships more generally. This is illustrated in songs like "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),"
"Fourth Time Around," and "She's Your Lover Now."
In "One of Us Must Know," there is an attempt to communicate on the part of the singer accompanied by a sense of fatalism regarding his ability to do so and her ability to listen:
I didn't mean to treat you so bad / You shouldn't take it so personal /1 didn't mean to make you so sad / You just happened to be there, that's all / When I saw you say 'goodbye' to your friend and smile /1 thought it was well understood / That you'd be coming back in a little while /1 didn't know that you were sayin' 'goodbye' for good / But, sooner or later, one of us must know / You just did what you're supposed to do.109
The singer goes through a series of situations where his partner was supposed to guide him, but her instructions are unclear: " I couldn't see when it started snowin' / Your voice was all that I heard /1 couldn't see where we were goin' / But you said you knew an' I took your word."110 There is a sense that trust has been misplaced, but that it no longer matters because both parties have resigned from the relationship anyway.
"Fourth Time Around" describes an ending relationship, and begins with the lines,
"When she said / 'Don't waste your words, they're just lies' /1 cried she was deaf."111 Later on, Dylan sings, "I tried to make sense / Out of that picture of you in your wheelchair / That leaned up against.. .Her Jamaican rum / And when she did come, I asked her for some / She said, 'No, dear' /1 said, 'Your words aren't clear / You'd better spit out your gum."112 In
"She's Your Lover Now," a bootleg track, the singer addresses his former girlfriend's new lover, saying, "I see you're still with here, well / That's fine 'cause she's comin' on so
109 Dylan, "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)," in Lyrics, 195. 110 Ibid. 111 Dylan, "Fourth Time Around," in ibid., 207. 112 Ibid.
107 strange, can't you tell? / Somebody had better explain / She's got her iron chain / I'd do it, but I, I just can't remember how / You talk to her / She's your lover now."113 These songs seem to express, if not the impossibility of meaningful communication, at least Dylan's preoccupation with problems of verbal exchange. However, crucially, there is still an attempt at communication, a search for consciousness, however futile. The voice Dylan employs in his next album was wiser and more mature, evoking, at times, the voice of
American history.
John Wesley Harding and the American Voice
John Wesley Harding (1967), Dylan's penultimate sixties album, invokes yet another persona, another voice, and as such is a natural part of Dylan's continuity through growth.114
The album was, in a sense, a return to form, a retrieval of the narrative songwriting of early albums, undoubtedly as a partial result of his work with The Band (formerly The Hawks) in their informal sessions at Big Pink, which yielded both their Music From Big Pink (1968) and, later, The Basement Tapes (1975 officially, earlier via bootleg). Marqusee writes that
"there can be no doubt that in the basement Dylan and his colleagues were trying to re establish a relation to a tradition from which they felt severed," with the result that "the
Basement Tapes are filled with the sound of young men singing like old men." Marcus contends that the sound on the album is what Raymond Chandler described as "the
American Voice," and Stephen Scobie compares the tapes to Benjamin's Arcades
113 Dylan, "She's Your Lover Now," in ibid., 216. 114 Jon Landau, "John Wesley Harding," 214. 115 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 228; 230. 116 Marcus, Invisible Republic, 222.
108 Project, as a "montage of songs": "an apparently miscellaneous collection of utterly diverse material."117
The songs Dylan offered on JWH painted a "timeless landscape saturated in historical suffering."118 The album is, effectively, a religious allegory for the political landscape of contemporary America, circa 1967. Social reality is at once more tangible and less changeable than it was in the kaleidoscopic imagery of Blonde on Blonde. Those looking for political messages in the album were at first disappointed by its seeming disengagement from contemporary events. After all, JWH was released the same year as
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album lauded for being so obviously 'in tune' with its time. The two albums could not be more different in either form or content. In fact,
JWH offers a "stark rebuke to the summer of love," in Gray's opinion, with "All Along the
Watchtower" at its philosophical center. The song, according to Gray, evokes "winter time in the psyche," through its impressionistic, yet apocalyptic imagery.119
"All Along the Watchtower," one of Dylan's shortest songs, is among the most evocative in his oeuvre. It is awash in Biblical allusion, borrowing chiefly from the books of
Kings and Revelation. It is a warning, a vision of an imminent day of reckoning. Dylan sings: '"There must be some way out of here,' said the joker to the thief/ 'There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.'"120 In the song, the Thief acts as prophet and sage, telling the Joker that there is '"No reason to get excited,'" because, he cynically claims, '"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke'.'"121 However, he says, he and the joker have already "been through that, and this is not our fate"; there is no time to talk "falsely"
117 Stephen Scobie, Alias Bob Dylan Revisited (Calgary: Red Deer Press, 2003), 215. 118 Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 243. 119 Gray, "All Along the Watchtower," The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, 7. 120 Dylan, "All Along the Watchtower," Lyrics, 224. 121 Ibid.
109 because "the hour is getting late" - something lurks on the horizon, just out of sight.
Remarkably, the song just trails off; there is no conclusion, only allusion to what will occur:
"Outside in the distance, a wildcat did growl/ Two riders were approaching, the wind began
199 to howl." Obviously, the "two riders" refer to the horsemen of the Apocalypse. The other two could conceivably be the Joker and the Thief. The importance of this song was immediately evident to many who heard it. Jimi Hendrix transformed it into one of the most definitive statements about the End - of innocence, of the sixties dream, of the youth movement, of anything and everything. His electric version seemed to capture the urgency, the sense of impending doom in a way that Dylan's acoustic original could never quite reach.
Dylan claims, in Chronicles, that he had little interest in current events, in the
"madly complicated modern world," as he puts it: "It had no relevancy, no weight. I wasn't seduced by it. What was swinging, topical and up to date for me was stuff like the Titanic sinking, the Galveston flood, John Henry driving steel, John Hardy shooting a man on the
West Virginia Line. All this was current, played out in the open."123 John Wesley Harding reflects this engagement with history as though it were present. Dylan understood innately that his historical moment was not isolated; that it was, in fact, inextricably linked with the collective American past:
The age that I was living in didn't resemble [the age of the Civil War] but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot.. .If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature. Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The
122 Ibid. 123 Dylan, Chronicles, 20.
110 godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.124
The 1960s, like the 1860s, were a time of great cultural upheaval, and the reverberations of the previous hundred years of American history appeared to play themselves out in that one crucial decade. Dylan recognized the importance of the past for the present, and the effects of history on the present day. In this sense, he evokes Benjamin's flaneuric spirit of collection in creating the Arcades Project, for Dylan, history was as topical as the present.
"I Pity the Poor Immigrant" is as powerful an anti-war statement as anything Dylan produced during his topical phase. It focuses on an unidentified immigrant who comes to represent, through Dylan's carefully constructed framework, American foreign policy. As an innately imperialistic nation, America is forever an "immigrant" in the world. The immigrant of the song stands in for both the individual soldier and the collective policy behind him. In this sense, he is comparable to Donovan's Universal Soldier. Of course,
America is a nation of immigrants: having traveled first from Europe and then elsewhere to create a new life in the New World; they brought their values, attitudes, goods. Dylan, then, twists the original ideas of settlement, of American history, to be something far from heroic.
At the height of Vietnam, his argument is difficult to misunderstand as he sings, "I pity the poor immigrant / Who wishes he would've stayed home / Who uses all his power to do evil...Who eats but is not satisfied / Who hears but does not see."125 He continues: "I pity the poor immigrant / Who tramples through the mud / Who fills his mouth with laughing /
And who builds his town with blood / Whose visions in the final end / Must shatter like the
1U1U., UW. Dylan, "I Pity the Poor Immigrant," Lyrics, 231.
Ill glass /1 pity the poor immigrant / When his gladness comes to pass." Although the message is unequivocally critical, the pity Dylan refers to in the song is genuine, the choice of word itself allowing for dialogue and understanding.
Conclusion
Gray asserts that' 'there is a sense in which, more fully than F. Scott Fitzgerald did, Dylan has created a generation. For those of us within that generation, the possibilities of our inner lives have been intrinsically enhanced by the impingement of
Dylan's art - by the impact of his consciousness on ours."127 Marcus, meanwhile, argues that Dylan's is the voice left "after the bomb," the voice - despite his repeated protests - of his times and the conscience of his generation. It is true that no other single individual singer has been so associated with a certain time and place: "The sound of his hammered acoustic guitar and pealing harmonica became a kind of free-floating trademark, like the
1 'JO peace symbol, signifying determination and honesty in a world of corruption and lies."
Dylan articulated the anxieties and issues of his time, sometimes explicitly, and at other times obliquely, but always honestly; the result was that he became a flaneur for a new age. He went to the core of the issues that defined the sixties, and found a way to express them in a meaningful way, which his audience could both understand and appreciate.
Many of his songs, then and now, deal with problems of personal and collective identity in a rapidly changing country; he was not confined to the city, as his cultural predecessors had been. Rather, because of advances in technology, Dylan could take the entire country as his subject, and communicate with the world as his audience.
126 Ibid. 127 Gray, Song and Dance Man, 5. 128 Marcus, Invisible Republic, x.
112 Chapter Five
Conclusion
This thesis began with the premise that the flaneur has been undervalued as a historical figure, and has attempted to prove that the flaneur, as a cultural observer and translator, contributed greatly to a better understanding of Western culture as it has developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In times of great cultural change, the flaneur has continued to play an important role in communicating the reverberations of that change, however faint or minute, to a wider public. The figure has been an effective cultural interpreter because of his position as an artist on the periphery looking in, both within and without the proverbial Crowd. In nineteenth-century Paris, Berlin in the aftermath of the First World War, and America in the 1960s, artist-flaneurs helped to bridge the gap between great cultural and social change and the people most affected by it. The poetry of Charles Baudelaire, the visual art of Weimar Germany, the songs of Bob
Dylan have, across space, time, and medium, helped their various audiences - from the intellectual elite to the mass consuming public - to engage with their historical moment - the "jetztzeit" - and to understand their place within it.
This project has therefore rejected the idea that flanerie is perforce a form of cultural interpretation relevant only to the nineteenth century, into the early part of the twentieth century, or beyond. The city as locus of cultural activity may have ceased to exist as it was once conceived, but that should not mean that one of the most intriguing forms of cultural activity, in flanerie, should also be considered extinct. Because the flaneur has traditionally been inextricable from the urban environment and, to a certain extent, from a specific national context, many scholars have argued that he cannot exist
113 beyond the confines of a particular time and space. I hope that this study has helped to dispel the notion of the flaneur's extinction, and has provided some scenarios in which the figure's continued cultural presence might still be perceived.
The emergence of mass media changed the nature of art and expanded the definitions of public space, ultimately helping to expand the meaning of "flaneur" and allowing the concept to adapt to changes in space, time, and cultural environment. Susan
Buck-Morss has argued that the flaneur "becomes extinct only by exploding into a myriad of forms,'' a statement that simultaneously hints at the figure's potential disappearance and the possibilities for his longevity. I have tried to argue that although the definition of flaneur has evolved over the course of the past two centuries to include many forms of cultural participation, the core characteristics associated with the figure have remained essentially constant: he is both aloof and aware; offers perceptive study of the surrounding culture; has the ability to articulate and communicate those sometimes very faint social and cultural phenomena to the public; and perhaps most importantly, heroically launches himself into the maelstrom of modern life in order to better understand it.
The primary goal for this project was to explore the possibility of the flaneur's continued cultural relevance beyond the traditional boundaries espoused by most scholars. In this sense, the idea of flanerie provided a nuanced way to link three very different historical eras and geographical spaces. I have attempted also to contribute to three existing historiographies, dealing with cultural studies broadly, the flaneur more specifically, and the musicology surrounding Bob Dylan.
1 Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur," 37-8.
114 The flaneur's place in cultural history has been ambiguous since Walter Benjamin expressed his own ambivalence regarding the figure in the Arcades Project. I have here located the flaneur within a theoretical discussion that ranges across a broad spectrum of cultural theorists that includes Benjamin, Adorno and the Frankfurt School, Fredric
Jameson, Guy Debord, and important Dylan scholars like Mike Marqusee. Perhaps the most important claim this project has made with regards to the flaneur's cultural importance is that the figure appears at times to stand in for the individual - predominantly male - subject, as concepts of individuality and personal freedom have shifted in accordance with the tenets of modernism and eventually postmodernism, across historical periods characterized by profound change. The flaneur in many ways embodied these changes, and helped to negotiate the individual's place within the rapidly evolving societies.
All three geographical and temporal spaces discussed here have produced flaneurs whose work, to some extent, was interested in the position of the individual amongst a vast collective and in negotiating the relationship between the two. Baudelaire articulated the discomfiting position besetting an individual whose physical environment has been irrevocably altered; Second Empire Paris saw the greatest urban renewal project ever undertaken, and Baudelaire's flaneur attempts to reconcile his existence within this vastly different urban space. The flaneuric gaze as it was evoked through film projects during the Weimar era in Germany reflects the jarring changes occurring within that society, in the wake of the First World War and in response to the trauma induced by an extreme economic destabilization. The films studied for this project showed city life alternately at its best and worst, and raised important social issues surrounding the marginalization of certain elements of the population in relation to the success of others. Finally, Bob Dylan,
115 as an example of flanerie after the Second World War, demonstrates how flaneuric practice can be adapted across time and space, as he negotiated the cultural changes occurring in America and translated his observations into resonant art. His work expressed acute dissatisfaction with the broken social contracts of late capitalist America, and provided a dissenting voice for many who were not able.
This thesis contributes to the historiography of flanerie by taking the flaneur beyond a discussion of Baudelaire and Benjamin in an attempt to assert the figure's relevance beyond the boundaries of the modern era, and into what might be termed the postmodern era. The terminology used by these theorists to describe the development of culture in the twentieth century has been useful in tracking the flaneur's development since the early nineteenth century until the present. Modernism and postmodernism have worked as periodizing concepts for the development of Western cultures in that time, and thus by linking early flanerie with the development of modernist sensibilities, and attaching more postmodernist sensibilities to flaneuric art after the Second World War, these terms have also worked in terms of understanding the evolution of the flaneur from c. 1850-1970.
Finally, this project also contributes to musicology and the history of popular music through its investigation of Bob Dylan as a flaneur. Studying Dylan as a flaneur offers a new and unique perspective on artistic expression in the late twentieth century, and affords a new angle from which to approach the singer and his work. Most importantly, I think, designating Dylan as a contemporary flaneur is one way to explore the differences between him and other singers and songwriters of the time. Dylan's undeniable uniqueness as an artist can be partially explained by investigating the flaneuric characteristics in his work and in his public personae. Ultimately, by incorporating
116 elements of the existing literature on both Dylan and flanerie, this project attempted to further the theoretical prospects for both.
The theoretical framework provided by Benjamin and his scholastic successors has allowed for the prospect of studying the art of the flaneur across disciplinary lines.
The seminal idea of the critical, heroic, observer works as a descriptor for several great artists who exist beyond the scope of this project, either because they predeceased the modern definition of "flaneur," or because they have not yet established themselves as such. Again, historians must be prudent in the application of the term, but I hope that this study has shown that the flaneur is an adaptable figure who often emerges out of a need for understanding. The flaneur is mercurial in the sense that he will always appear somewhat different from his previous incarnations. Above all, the figure must inhabit some of the archetypal characteristics of the surrounding culture as a familiar figure who is an agent for the unfamiliar.
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