New Directions in Flânerie

Global Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century

Kelly Comfort, Marylaura Papalas, Kelly Comfort, Marylaura Papalas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000482348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book distinguishes itself from previous scholarship by offering an inclusive and comprehensive treatment of urban walking from 1800 to the present. Divided into three sections—geography, genius, and gender—the introduction establishes the origins of the flâneur and flâneuse in early foundational texts and explores later works that reimagine flânerie in terms of these same three themes.

The volume's contributors provide new and global perspectives on urban walking practices through their treatment of a variety of genres (literature, film, journalism, autobiography, epistolary correspondence, photography, fashion, music, digital media) and regions (Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East).

This volume theorizes well-known urban characters like the idler, lounger, dandy, badaud, promeneuse, shopper, collector, and detective and also proposes new iterations of the flâneur/flâneuse as fashion model, gaucho, cruiser, musician, vampire, postcolonial activist, video game avatar and gamer.

1Necrophilic FlânerieCollecting and Urban Walking in Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte

Tessa Ashlin Nunn

DOI: 10.4324/9781003164791-2

The similarities between the flâneur and the collector demonstrate how the desire to possess and accumulate shaped nineteenth-century masculinity and commodity culture. The flâneur walks through the city collecting sights much like a collector wanders through his collection looking at things. Seeking pleasure in the infinite and ephemeral movement of the crowd, the ideal flâneur, as described in Charles Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), desires to see the world and be at its center while remaining unseen. He transforms his surroundings into images that are more alive to him than life itself, participating in modernity’s attempt to render the ephemeral eternal. Similarly, the collector fashions a world in which he reigns over seemingly eternal representations of transitory lives captured in material objects.

In the Belgian symbolist Georges Rodenbach’s novel Bruges-la-Morte—first published as a feuilleton in Le Figaro in January 1892, then a few months later in Le Journal de Bruges, and finally as a single volume by Flammarion—the protagonist Hugues Viane exemplifies these parallels between the collector and the flâneur. He creates a crowd out of collected commodities and art objects as well as images of deserted streets by observing Bruges as if he were a photographer. By collecting, he manages to eternalize ephemeral moments. Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, Hugues reveals the modern man’s capacity to control time and give himself a position of power in a crowd lacking subjectivity. Also like the flâneur, Hugues attempts to collect images of women as eternal objects.

Collecting Death and Desire

Collecting in Bruges-la-Morte allows the protagonist to recreate and remember death. After the death of his wife, Hugues moves to the Belgium city of Bruges, a once prosperous maritime city, known for its craft guilds, that fell into decline after its access to the North Sea silted up in the sixteenth century and the population rapidly shrunk. There, he creates a world of mourning. He spends his days cherishing a collection of objects—namely mirrors, portraits, his deceased wife’s toiletries, and a lock of her hair—as if they were religious relics. This habit rhythms his existence as his devotion to these objects becomes a religion. As Paul Edwards notes, the novel presents both the protagonist and Catholicism exclusively in relation to material objects and buildings (84).

Hugues worships these inanimate things not to remember his wife’s life but rather to remember her death. Through his collection, he attempts to avoid forgetting her death out of fear that she will die a second time if it fades in his memory: “la figure des morts, que la mémoire nous conserve un temps, s’y altère peu à peu, y dépérit … dans nous, nos morts meurent une seconde fois!” (“the faces of the deceased, that our memory allows us to preserve for a while, gradually changes, perishes … in us, our deceased die a second time”) (74).¹ This type of obsession with deceased women was widespread in the nineteenth century. Elisabeth Bronfen, in her study of dead women in nineteenth-century art, argues that “representations of death are so pleasing” because they allow the living to “experience death by proxy” (x). As a substitution for the absent person, the art object “represents something which it both is and is not, while at the same time the beautiful form both is and isn’t eternal” (Bronfen 65). Attempting to overcome time, Hugues’s house in Bruges functions as a materialization of his mourning in which his wife’s death persists in the relics that confirm his control over death.

The domestic space turned into a sanctuary protecting the memory of the dead woman creates an ideal situation for a collector. Like a morgue (a popular place to visit and observe death during the nineteenth century, according to Bronfen), the house preserves the material things that the dead woman left behind. In “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Walter Benjamin qualifies interior space as “the asylum of art,” where the collector concerned with “the transfiguration of things” is “the true resident” (39). In lieu of mourning the physical and social absence of his wife, Hugues worships the traces that, he imagines, she left through her contact with the material world, thereby creating a memory of her image out of her relation to her possessions. His house becomes what Benjamin calls “the étui of the private individual” preserving the traces of the deceased (39).

The commodification of the dead woman puts into question if she already existed as an object in life and therefore existed as death before dying. For Benjamin, the collector divests objects of their commodity character and use value, thereby creating a dream world in which things are not required to be practical. In this fashion, Hugues dissociates the purpose of his wife’s former objects from their function. Attaching a fantasy to them, he treasures them for satisfying and reflecting his desires, not for representing his wife. Rodenbach’s novel echoes a subject addressed in works by Champfleury, Armand-Ambroise Rochoux, and Edmond de Goncourt: collecting as “a substitute for sexual activity” (Bielecki 113). The substitution of objects for women draws on the recurrent motif in nineteenth-century French literature of women as automatons, dolls, or machines.² In short, women and things in nineteenth-century novels are frequently interchangeable.

A collection, as Krzystof Pomian explains, is comprised of relationships with the invisible (the collector’s taste, nostalgia, dreams, or fantasies) and what is beyond the physical objects collected. The furniture and commodities agglomerated in the house, which Hugues’s wife never inhabited, become representations of his fantasy of her static body: “Il semblait que ses doigts fussent partout dans ce mobilier intact et toujours pareil, sophas, divans, fauteuils où elle s’était assise, et qui conservaient pour ainsi dire la forme de son corps” (“It seemed like her fingers were everywhere on this furniture, still intact and the same, sofas, divans, chairs where she had sat, which, as it were, conserved the shape of her body”) (58). Neither the narrator nor Hugues describes her actions or discourse. The reader only knows her through the things that Hugues transforms into images of her death.

In the novel, both objects with no apparent connection to the deceased and objects recreating the deceased wife’s image become fetish objects, blurring the difference between fetishizing a thing, a person, and an “atmosphere” (Chambers 2). Hugues contemplates portraits of his deceased wife daily. They allow him to see her at different ages during her life and transform the passage of her time on earth into materialized, collected, framed, and displayed artwork. According to Benjamin, a painting is only a set of marks, unless it is named after “what transcends the marks,” that is to say the model who sits for the portrait (“Painting” 85–86). Hugues never names the paintings as anything other than material objects marked with references to his unnamed wife. Accentuating the memory of her death rather than her life, the painted and photographed portraits vaguely reveal either her nearness to or distance from death, based on her age or physical state of suffering, since there are “des portraits à ses différents âges” (“portraits of her at different ages”) (60–61) as well as “une photographie, à l’âge où elle était une jeune fille” (“a photograph, from when she was a young girl”) (138). More noticeably, the third-person narrator underscores the materiality of the portraits (the light on the object, the enamel frame) and their connection to space (the piece of furniture on which the photograph stands, the objects in the image, its relation to lighting in the room). Nothing specific to the wife’s life transcends the images. As fetish objects, these portraits hypostatize a visual aspect of the deceased wife’s existence but neglect the other aspects of her lived experience.³

As Robert Zeigler suggests, Hugues appreciates his deceased wife in the same way he appreciated her when she was alive, “as a work of art” (“From Flower” 41). Zeigler argues that by never naming the wife, the novel constructs a protagonist who remains attached to “the atmosphere of death and the serenity of her absence” and supersedes her with “the idealization he creates in his own imagination” (“Resurrected Time” 97). Her lack of name allows her to haunt the novel as la morte (the dead woman) unmarred by traces of life. The omission of her name also positions her as a replaceable thing. Consequently, the novel equates young women to objects to be acquired, much like bibelots, serving no purpose other than fulfilling the protagonist’s desire to look and to have.⁴ By never naming the deceased wife, the novel never hints at her former existence as a thinking, desiring subject. She is only an inanimate thing existing through a collection of things.

In Bruges-la-Morte, both material items and women are treated as fungible fetish objects. Freud’s theory of the fetish, published several decades after this novel, highlights how the protagonist’s relationship to his collection functions to objectify his deceased spouse. According to Freud, the fetish replaces the penis that the child once believed his mother possessed and endows women with “the characteristic which makes them acceptable as sexual objects” (Freud 200). Because the meaning of the fetish remains unknown to other people, no one can withhold it from the fetishist or prevent him from obtaining the attached sexual satisfaction. Moreover, the fetish, like the collection, at times replaces sexual relations. As Freud states, “[w]‌hat other men have to woo and make exertions for can be had by the fetishist with no trouble at all” (201). With the rise of commodity culture, fetishism became ostensible in nineteenth-century literature. For Benjamin, nineteenth-century fetishism is a “dream image” or “dialectical image” born out of the ambiguity between the commodity and desired object (“Paris” 40). Since both seek pleasure in material objects, the boundary between the collector and the fetishist is incredibly hazy.

Key events in Rodenbach’s novel involve one of the most common fetishes in the nineteenth century: women’s hair. Hugues’s most beloved object is a lock of his deceased wife’s hair that he cut a few days before her death. Despite the five years that have passed, the lock of hair, safeguarded in a glass case, remains unchanged. By taking the hair before death took his wife, Hugues overcomes the decisive power of death. At the same time, he guards and worships a spiritless, unnecessary aspect of her body as if it preserved her existence. Claiming that hair is the only part of a person that escapes death, he concludes that we survive through our hair: “Les yeux, les lèvres, tout se brouille et s’effondre. Les cheveux ne se décolorent même pas. C’est en eux seuls qu’on se survit!” (“Eyes, lips, everything becomes blurred and falls apart. Hair does not even discolor. In it alone, we survive!”) (54).⁵ The immortal lock of hair not only becomes a testament of his enduring love—“la portion d’immortalité de son amour” (“his love’s share of immortality”)—but also ensures his perceived ability to outsmart death (61). The hair creates the morbid essence defining his home, collection, and identity: “Pour lui, comme pour les choses silencieuses qui vivaient autour, il apparaissait que cette chevelure était liée à leur existence et qu’elle était l’âme de la maison” (“For him, and for the silent things that existed around him, it seemed that this hair was linked to their existence and that it was the soul of the house”) (62). The nineteenth century saw the rise of fetishists whom Freud identifies as coupeurs de nattes (braid cutters) because they would cut off women or young girls’ hair by surprise. For Freud, the behavior of the coupeur de nattes demonstrates a parallel between treating a fetish with affection as well as hostility and a simultaneous disavowal and acknowledgment of castration (204). Festish objects in general combine qualities thought to be incompatible (Chambers 19). In the novel, the hair, as a fetish object, bolsters Hugues’s simultaneous denial of and anxiety about his mortality.

Hugues’s devotion to the lock of hair echoes Baudelaire’s poem “La chevelure” (“The Head of Hair”), in which the poet travels through his memories and aspirations thanks to an intoxicating contact with a woman’s hair. Considered to be inspired by his mistress, the actress Jeanne Duval, the poem transforms the woman’s hair, in this case seemingly still part of her living body, into an alcove full of memories and an aromatic forest evoking faraway lands to which the narrator escapes on the waves of her hair. Hugues’s worship of the lock of hair likewise allows for evasion; yet, instead of drifting into exotic dreams, he admires the hair to conjure up memories of death and his control over death. As Carol de Dobay Rifelj explains in Coiffures: Hair in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, cut hair, particularly after the bloody events of the Terror, evokes images of death and possesses the “power to recall the past and the dead individual” (236). Through women’s hair, Baudelaire’s poetic voice and Hugues escape to very different illusions created out of their desires.

The unchanging nature of cut hair attests not only to escaping death but also to avoiding the effects of aging. In Guy de Maupassant’s short story also entitled “La chevelure,” a man, described as both a flâneur and a collector, worships a lock of hair. Maupassant’s collector, who greatly values sight, floats through boutiques full of objects in the same way that the flâneur drifts through a crowd. While choosing objects for his collection, the protagonist, whose journal the frame-story narrator reads, reflects on the traces that others have left on objects: “je pensais aux mains inconnues qui avaient palpé ces choses, aux yeux qui les avaient admirées, aux cœurs qui les avaient aimées, car on aime les choses!” (“I would think about the unknown hands that touched these things, the eyes that admired them, the hearts that loved them, because we love things!”) (112). He is particularly obsessed with a watch that belonged to a woman, whom he assumes is dead. Like Hugues, the collector in “La chevelure” worships objects as a way of loving dead women: “Je suis possédé par le désir des femmes d’autrefois” (“I am possessed by a desire for women from the past”) (113). Both men guard the youth and beauty of women who died young. Since these women have no future, their beauty, like encased objects, remains safe from the inevitable disfigurement of old age.

The reduction of women to their hair and the collection of women’s hair was a fashionable practice throughout the nineteenth century. In Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture, Galia Ofek shows how scientific writings, fashion, paintings, and literature all took part in fetishizing women’s hair. As Michelle Perrot explains, their hair symbolized femininity, sensuality, and desire. Offering their hair to other people, women gave a part of their body that could resist time (Perrot, Mon histoire 63). Yet, it is important to distinguish the significance...