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City correspondence: Text and photograph in modern Paris and New York
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City correspondence: Text and photograph in modern Paris and New York
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CITY CORRESPONDENCE:
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPH IN MODERN PARIS AND NEW YORK
by
Michael John D’Andrea
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Comparative Literature)
May 1998
© 1998 Michael John D’Andrea
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UMI Number: 9902792
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, written by
................... M id h ^ l, J o ta .D liJ n d re a ............................
under the direction of h .is . Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Dean o f Graduate Studies
Date
3 0, 1998
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
7/
( y c
/ ) v ( / /
....
f S .
1 T «.. L c v-v
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Michael John D’Andrea Advisor: Vincent Farenga
City Correspondence: Text and Photograph in Modern Paris and New York
This dissertation is not a historical study of ways literary texts and photographs document
modem Paris and New York. Instead, it examines how we can interpret texts and photographs as
attempts to recover meaning and reverse the dehumanizing aspects of an urban environment. Part
I compares poems from Baudelaire’s “Tableaux parisiens” ( Les Fleurs du Mai) and prose poems
from Spleen de Paris with the Second Empire city photographs of Charles Marville. Part II
juxtaposes passages from John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer with photographs by Alfred
Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Cobum, and Berenice Abbott. Methodologically, the dissertation
identifies in these texts and photographs “points of loss,” or experiences of alienation,
dehumanization, and the inability to communicate as catalysts for the contemplation of individual
identity in the modem city. Chapter One, after an introduction to the Haussmannian
transformation of Paris, lays a theoretical foundation based on Benjamin’s and Barthes’
discussions of the “aura” and “gaze.” Chapter Two applies theory to readings of poem and
photograph.
A brief interlude associates the Paris chapters with the New York section’s focus on the
skyscraper through the Statue of Liberty and its “Colossal Vision.” Chapter Three briefly
chronicles the cultural dynamics and physical characteristics of the New York skyscraper, symbol
of urban “progress” and human disintegration in Manhattan Transfer. Chapter Four tracks the
artistic development of Dos Passos and examines the ironic suggestiveness of an impotent
language (commercial and interpersonal) within the debilitating Manhattan cityscape; Dos Passos’
distortion of traditional narrative and his joumalist-protagonist’s loss of faith in language serve as
defamiliarizing motifs that focus our critical gaze on the oppressive city and the capacity to
perceive it. The final chapter identifies these ideas as a “figurative aphasia” in the novel and also
in the photographs’ inherent void of narrative, thereby effecting a “negative epiphany” through
the viewer’s instinctive imposition of narrative onto the frozen details of the image. Hence, it is
argued that the response of the reader/viewer to these experiences of loss redeems them
paradoxically by provoking a humanizing perspective on the modem city.
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Dedication
To Martha, my wife, best friend, and gracious benefactor, whose unconditional
support and love pervade every word of this book and all that I do.
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Ill
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the members of my committee for their careful readings of
the various phases of this project. Diane Ghirardo provided much needed guidance in the
daunting challenge of perceiving cities, as well as encouraging words at every step. Her
example confirmed my desire to write about literature and the city. Albert Sonnenfeld
offered his passion for the topic and his varied expertise at the most critical juncture; his
generosity of spirit is indeed contagious. Finally, I owe Vincent Farenga a special debt of
gratitude: his assistance in formulating the project from its earliest conceptions during a
graduate seminar to its final chapter was critical; reading draft after draft, he never failed
to refine my vision, method, or craft through criticism and praise. Thanks for keeping the
faith.
The following not only provided the permission to reproduce photographs for this
work, but did so with a swiftness that belies their busy schedules: Marie de Thezy @ the
Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris (Marville photos); Scott Paden @ Aperture
(Alvin Langdon Cobum and Berenice Abbott photos); Katherine Adzima @ Rizzoli (Paul
Strand photo); Helaine Pardo @ Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc. (Berenice Abbott photos);
and Jean Martin @ Brompton Books Corporation (Alfred Stieglitz photos).
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iv
Table of Contents
Preface .............................................................................................................................. viii
Part One—Paris ....................................................................................................... 1
Introduction: Haussmann and Louis Napoleon........................................................3
Chapter One: Walter Benjamin and the Urban A u r a ...............................................9
Chapter Two: Marville and Baudelaire: Traces of the Practiced Hand................. 47
Interlude: Monumentality and the Colossal V ision.......................................................... 153
Part Two—New Y o rk ...........................................................................................159
Chapter Three: The Rise of the Skyscraper in M anhattan...................................161
Chapter Four: John Dos Passos and the Margin of Interpretation......................175
Chapter Five: Novel: Photograph
Figurative Aphasia and Redemptive Transfer in Manhattan....................190
Photo Credits ....................................................................................................................253
Works Cited ...................................................................................................................... 256
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List of Figures
V
1. Charles Marville, Rue des Saules (18e arrondissement) 43
2. Charles Marville, self-portrait 48
3. Charles Marville, Cul-de-sac de Rohan & Rue Jardinet
(6e arr.) 50
4. Charles Marville, Rue Traversione leading to the
Sainte-Genevieve Hill, ca. 1858 52
5. Charles Marville, Rue du Murier (5e arr.) 54
6. Charles Marville, Impasse des Bourdonnais (ler arr.) 56
7. Charles Marville, Rue Verdelet (ler arr.) 57
8. Charles Marville, Rue Tirechape (ler arr.) 58
9. Charles Marville, The Alley o f the Try-outs, 1865 60
10. Charles Marville, Place et Barriere d ’ Italie 62
11. Charles Marville, Digging on the Avenue de I ’ Opera
at Argenteuil, 1876 72
12. Charles Marville, Digging on the Avenue de I ’ Opera
(Site o f the Butte des Moulins) 14
13. Charles Marville, The First Demolition Works
at the Avenue de I ’ Opera 77
14. Charles Marville, Butte des Moulins (different perspective) 87
15. Charles Marville, Les Carrieres d ’ Amerique 90
16. Charles Marville, Passage de la Petite Boucherie (6e arr.) 98
17. Charles Marville, Rue du Passage Saint-Louis 112
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vi
18. Charles Marville, Rue des Francs-Bourgeois-Saint-Marcel
(5e arr.) 114
19. Charles Marville, Rue Chartieme 115
20. Charles Marville, Rue de I ’ Arbalete 116
21. Charles Marville, Percement de I 'avenue de I ’ Opera 118
22. Charles Marville, Rue Gervais-Laurent 119
23. Charles Marville, Rue de 1 'Ecole-de-Medecine 120
24. Charles Marville, Rue du Platre (5e arr.) 121
25. Charles Marville, Moving the Palmier Fountain,
Place du Chatelet 129
26. Charles Marville, Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire 134
27. Charles Marville, Rue Pirouette 146
28. Charles Marville, Rue des Orties 147
29. Charles Marville, Place Gozlin, Carrefour Buci
(6e arr.) 148
30. Charles Marville, Head o f the Statue o f Liberty,
Universal Exposition 1878 158
31. Paul Strand, Morgan Building 193
32. Alvin Langdon Cobum, The Park Row Building, 1909 208
33. Alfred Stieglitz, Flatiron Building 212
34. Alfred Stieglitz, The Street, Winter 216
35. Alfred Stieglitz, Winter, Fifth Avenue 217
36. Alfred Stieglitz, Two Towers, New York 218
37. Alfred Stieglitz, The Terminal 219
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38. Alfred Stieglitz, Spring Showers, New York
39. Alvin Langdon Cobum, The Flat-Iron Building,
New York, 1912
40. Berenice Abbott, Flatiron Building, Broadway and
Fifth Avenue, c. 1934
41. Berenice Abbott, Exchange Place from Broadway,
circa 1934
42. Berenice Abbott, Canyon: Broadway and Exchange Place,
Manhattan, July 16, 1936
43. Berenice Abbott, Hester Street, c. 1929
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Preface
VUl
Jefferson Hunter writes that some compilations of photo and text, whether
collections of photographs with captions of various lengths and aims, written texts with
accompanying photographs as “illustrations,” or photo essays, “can seem arbitrary or
merely self-aggrandizing, the occasion for a display of dual talents.”1 All such works, no
matter the degree to which a critic believes the union successful, have one striking
difference with this book: the photos and texts were intended by the artists (author or
photographer) to complement or influence one another in some manner. That is not the
case here. The juxtapositions of Baudelaire’s poetry with Charles Marville’s photographs,
and John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer with the photography of Alfred Stieglitz,
Berenice Abbott, and Alvin Langdon Cobum, are my own, and they are predicated on the
belief that they all combine to provide a new perspective on the changing modem city and
a redefinition of its storied alienation and dehumanization. In short, as Hunter states, “the
linking seems functional” (60).
This book establishes a common element of interpretation in reading texts and
photographs of the modem city— that element is recovery through loss. The recovery is
paradoxical because it operates through the invocation of the most human of faculties, the
imagination, but rises from the verbal and visual depictions of the alienating, dehumanizing
modem city. This dialectical movement departs from a point of loss, obstruction, or
1 Jefferson Hunter, Image and Word: The Interaction o f Twentieth-Century
Photographs and Texts (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987) 60.
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ix
distance in the “Tableaux parisiens” of Les Fleurs du Mai or Charles Marville’s
photographs of the changing city under Napoleon III and Haussmann. Points of loss
within the works that stimulate the imagination from an obstructed or distant vantage take
form through the following motifs: death, disorientation, and the mask in LFM; and the
haunting presence of spectral figures in Marville’s photos.
I enlist the support of Walter Benjamin’s ambiguous but suggestive comments on
photography and the aura, as well as Baudelaire’s notion o f “correspondences” to develop
the dialectic and its recovery. Ironically, both men took an adversarial stance against
photography and spoke out against its use as a means of creating art or depicting the soul.
But through a recuperative mode of interpretation that is predicated on points of loss and
mediated through Les Fleurs du Mai and Marville’s photography, Baudelaire and
Benjamin can be reconciled with a subjective, formative, auratic, “human” aesthetic.
More specifically, Benjamin’s neo-Romantic penchant determined both his
condemnation o f photography on the grounds that it robs an object of its cult and
ritualistic value while declining its aura, as well as his subjective human reading of very
early photography. I argue that his notion o f aura actually informs the interpretation of
the photographs produced below, accenting his neo-Romanticism and undermining his
assertions about modem photography. By applying Benjamin’s motifs of distance and the
unretumed gaze, I isolate aspects of Marville’s city photos that permit a recovery of the
aura and interpretation much like that evoked through Baudelaire’s urban poetry. Hence,
Benjamin’s aura and Baudelaire’s “correspondences” are the theoretical means of unifying
an interpretive mode through two forms of perceiving Paris. The argument, although
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complex because it is developed through many variables, is important because it unifies
two art forms, or verbal and visual artistic expression, through the humanizing gaze of
interpretation. At the same time it provides a divergent and humanized perspective on the
storied and singular alienation of the modem metropolis.
The chapters pertaining to New York explore another point of loss, a figurative
aphasia, and its stimulation of a like human response to the rise of the skyscraper in
Manhattan. The theoretical foundation proceeds from Roland Barthes’ suggestion that
the “air” (aura) lies at the end of language, where language somehow M s to tread, and
encompasses Alfred Stieglitz’s concept of “equivalents,” the identification of subjective,
emotive impulses in the physical, objective realm. It is the power of the photographic
image and its invitation to subjective interpretation in the city photos of Stieglitz, Abbott,
and Cobum that underscore the impotence of language, or aphasia, in the text.
But it is a constructive, illuminating impotence: in Manhattan Transfer Dos
Passos’ fragmented impersonal text fuses dazed, desperate, and searching characters with
the towering structures, transferring their stunned emotions and sensibilities onto the built
environment, essentially instilling it with their lost ability to speak. This creates an
equivalent, while the photo’s immediacy echoes and confirms Dos Passos’ conceptual
strategy. Near the novel’s end the protagonist-joumalist’s lost faith in language is
juxtaposed and mirrored in the skyscraper to the extent that he is able to read the structure
as a rare epiphany. Much as in the Paris chapters of Part I, a correspondence between text
and photo forges a paradoxically affirming and humanizing perspective on the oppressive
skyscrapers of Manhattan.
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xi
The comparisons below are governed ultimately by the weight of their persuasion
in regard to the individual’s (both the artist’s and reader/viewer’s) aesthetic and
intellectual response to the city. It is accepted that photographic and textual expressions
are unique forms of perception, but they are essentially united as human responses to an
environment. The photo-text dynamic is succinctly expressed by Ralph Gibson’s
frontispiece photo to his work The Somnambulist: a hand holding a pen is poised to write,
hovering over a photograph of sky, plants, and beach. Having reproduced the photograph
as his own frontispiece, Hunter suggests that “somewhere in the vicinity of every
photograph there is a hand holding a pen.. . . The hand may be at a distance, but it is
there” (6). The same interdependence prompted William Saroyan to say “One picture is
worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the
thousand words.”2 The textual and photographic analyses below aim to open new
avenues, much like Haussmann himself, into the examination of the modem city,
disregarding traditional divisions between disciplines and proceeding synaesthetically, just
as the flaneur perceives the textured progression o f the city around him or her. To
separate the modes artificially is to deny their unique capacities the opportunity to
illuminate common ground. As Hunter puts it:
The basic principle, then, is that combinations of
photography with writing work, when they do work, not by
some impossible feat of mixing incompatible artistic modes
but by discovering similar artistic predilections, using
2 William Saroyan, “The Eye Looks Out,” Look at Us / Let’ s See / Here We Are / Look
Hard, Speak Soft / 1 See, You See, We All See / Stop, Look Listen / Beholder’ s Eye /
Don’ t Look Now, But Isn’ t That You? (Us? U.S.?) (New York: Cowles, 1967) v. Quoted
in Hunter: 6.
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xii
analogous techniques, drawing on the strengths rather than
the weaknesses of each mode, and in general finding
common ground. Collaborations employ discursive and
pictorial means to the same end and sometimes attain that
end most quickly when they do not insist on a perfect
affinity. (36)
The first objective of this study is to identify the aspects of mid-nineteenth-century
Paris that lend themselves to such a comprehensive multi-faceted approach and to
establish this “common ground.”
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1
Part One—Paris
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2
The tim e is not distant when it w ill be understood
that a literature which refuses to make its way in
brotherly concord with science and philosophy is a
murderous and suicidal literature,
—Baudelaire
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Introduction
3
Haussmann and Louis Napoleon
The radical urban transformation of Paris from 1853 to 1870 under Napoleon III
(Louis Napoleon 1808-1873) and his agent, the Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann
(1809-1891), constitutes the setting of this study. It is not, however, a setting in the
traditional sense, a passive environment in which a plot unfolds or a disinterested stage
upon which players ply their trade; it is rather a deterministic element of the urban
dialectic, the very “thing” that promotes an awareness o f loss and a subsequent reaction
and recovery of the “aura” in certain texts and images o f mid nineteenth-century Paris.
Walter Benjamin describes the aura of early photos as a medium that permeates the glance
with depth and certainty (“Short History” 207); this concept of aura presents both a
mysterious and tangible distance. And in his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”
Benjamin designates as aura “the associations which, at home in the memoire
involontaire, tend to cluster around the object of a perception” (Illuminations 186). He
illustrates this through the experience of resting on a summer afternoon and following with
your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you,
“until the moment or hour begins to be part of its appearance” (“Short History” 209).3
Hence, my aim is precisely to explicate how a subjective realm (aura) is evoked through
3 Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” Classic Essays on
Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980) 209.
Benjamin’s writings on the notion of the aura are numerous and complex; they will be
treated in detail below.
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4
the objective, tangible city and the inherent distance created by the texts and photos in
question.
The physical city itself and its poetic and literary representations form a dialectic
that distills the modem city’s dehum anizing phantasmagoria and resurrects a human
perspective. More precisely, the privileging of that perspective through the
recovery of the aura brings into relief the relationship between the citizen/artist and his or
her city. Such meaning rises from an intellectual reaction to an awareness of loss that is
initiated by aspects of the city in change.
I adopt neither a purely Hegelian metaphysical dialectic nor a solely Marxist
materialist one; rather, my synthesis of Benjamin’s notion of the aura, Baudelaire’s
“correspondences,” and Proust’s memoire involontaire invokes the former while its focus
on the physical city points to the latter. It is dialectical by way of its evolution through the
conflict between contraries.
The condition of thought and thing in regard to the city began to evolve in
literature in the Paris of the 1840s, during the era of the feuilleton, when the physiologue
began to examine the characteristics of particular groups of Parisians. Walter Benjamin
writes:
In this literature, the modest-looking, paperbound, pocket-
size volumes called “physiologies” had pride of place. They
investigated types that might be encountered by a person
taking a look at the marketplace. From the itinerant street
vendor of the boulevards to the dandy in the foyer of the
opera-house, there was not a figure of Paris life that was not
sketched by a physiologue. The great period of the genre
came in the early forties. It was the haute ecole of the
feuilleton. . . . In 1841 there were seventy-six new
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5
physiologies. After that year the genre declined.. . . After
the types had been covered, the physiology of the city had
its turn. There appeared Paris la nuit, Paris a table, Paris
dans I ’ eau, Paris a cheval, Paris pittoresque, Paris marie*
The portrayal of Paris itself as a citizen to be described prefigured the “emergence
of the city as a generic source of artistic experience.”5 For Baudelaire the evocations of
his “Tableaux parisiens” rise directly from the synergism of city and inhabitant. Ben
Stoltzfus chronicles “this attempt to describe and evoke the city as a collective
sociological phenomenon,” by which, as in Jules Romains’ unanimism, “a city, or parts of
a city, or Europe are re-created and developed as main protagonists”:
It was not until the 1830s that a physical unit, such as a
church or a locomotive, assumed the role of hero or heroine
in lieu of a Moll Flanders, a Clarissa, or a Manon. Thus, in
Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, the cathedral is the real
protagonist, while in Zola’s novels the street, the store, the
factory, the mine, and the theater live a collective existence
in which individuals are absorbed into the greater entity.
Baudelaire is one of the first poets of the big modem city.
(Stoltzfus 204)
The signifying and deterministic role of the physical city continued through the second half
of the century in works such as Verhaeren’s Les Villes tentaculaires (1895) and Leon-
Paul Fargue’s “Mon Quartier” and “Saint-Germain-des-Pres,” as well as Romains’ works
Le Bourg regenere (1906), Mort de quelqu ’ un (1911) and Puissances de Paris (1911).
Romains’ unanimistic objective was “to express . . . the evolving consciousness of the
4 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era o f High Capitalism,
trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983) 35-36.
5 Ben Stoltzfus, “Dos Passos and the French,” Dos Passos, the Critics, and the
Writer’ s Intention, ed. Allen Belkind (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Up, 1971) 204.
I
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6
collective life of groups and the city . . . sprouting from the very sidewalks of Paris”
(Stoltzfus 205).6
Identifying a Bergsonian entelechy or informing spirit, an aura, through the
objective city and its effects permeates all phases of this project. Throughout this study
the dialectical contrast or opposition is embodied in a human reaction to the city, the
artistic perceptions of the modem era’s most inscrutable physical landscape. The Parisian
cityscape o f the Second Empire and the forces that effected its transformation mark our
point of departure. First, however, it is necessary to sketch briefly the radical political and
social changes in mid-nineteenth-century Paris that were responsible for this new
cityscape.
Napoleon III was elected President of the newly declared Second Republic in
1848, and shortly thereafter began to devise plans to rebuild Paris into the imperial city
that his uncle, Napoleon I, had envisioned. December 2,1851 saw Napoleon Ill’s coup
d’etat and his rise to Emperor. In 1853 Napoleon III summoned the efficient and
resourceful Georges Eugene Haussmann from the Prefecture of the Gironde and
appointed him as the Prefect of the Seine. Napoleon now had a powerful instrument in
what would become the most influential position in the municipal administration;
consequently the plans that Napoleon had started himself, and a multitude of new ones,
were carried out under the Napoleonic Haussmannian collaboration.
6 The same may be said for Rilke’s The Notebooks o f Malte Laurids Brigge (1911) and
for Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) regarding Chicago.
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7
The transformation of Paris from a largely medieval city to “the capital of the
nineteenth century” entailed a myriad of public works, including new boulevards and
extensions of existing ones to provide increased access and mobility to and through
several “diseased” quarters of the city; a complex and extensive system o f sewers to rid
the Paris streets of refuse and stench; a radically increased supply of fresh water to the
city; revitalized and expanded parks; and the construction and renovation of many
buildings such as the Central Markets, the final portions of the Louvre, the new Opera
House, the Hotel Dieu, as well as churches, synagogues, hospitals and barracks.7
Paris’ transformation has created an historical polemic between sympathetic
imperialists and “censorious monarchists and republicans,”8 with the latter citing Louis
Napoleon’s strategic motives in the routing of wide, barricade-proof boulevards through
and around areas of historic insurrection. While evidence clearly indicates that the
suppression o f disorder was indeed one of Napoleon’s purposes, it also shows that he had
too much to gain financially and politically from the rebuilding of Paris to allow strategic
considerations to dictate the larger aims.9 Nathan Kronowski writes:
The public works had an effect on the economy of the
country similar to that of a shot of adrenalin on a lethargic
invalid. In 1851, the French economy was tottering, but as
a result of the Haussmann projects, from 1852 throughout
almost the entirety of the regime, unemployment diminished
considerably and the commercial enterprises associated,
7 See David H. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding o f Paris (Princeton N.J.:
Princeton UP, 1958).
8 Pinkney’s term.
9 Pinkney: 36.
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even indirectly, with the public works prospered. The fact
is that nearly all of the Parisians benefitted from the works
in one way or another.1 0
Nevertheless, induced by radical change and provoked by the exclusionary developments
of an imperial society, it is the dehumanizing effects of the transformation that set the
dialectic in motion. The grandeur of the new Paris and those who embodied it
underscored the wanting aspects of the old city and, at times, eroded its communal, human
side. Through the demolition of traditional quarters and their attendant customs, and in
conjunction with the introduction of a new and majestically built environment and grand
boulevards for unprecedented access to previously unknown areas, Louis Napoleon and
Haussmann opened up Paris and created an awareness of loss in many of its citizen/artists,
thereby comprising the first stage of the urban dialectic.
1 0 See Nathan Kronowski, Paris dans les romans d ’ Emile Zola (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1966) 29.
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9
Chapter One
Walter Benjamin and the Urban Aura
Critics have long maintained that Baudelaire was the first great modem poet of the
city. Likewise, no modem critic has written about both photography and the city,
particularly Paris, as profoundly as Walter Benjamin. So it is not surprising that Benjamin
wrote a great deal about Baudelaire: his Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era o f
High Capitalism (1976) consists of three texts representing different stages of his
uncompleted Paris Arcades project. Harry Zobn explains the origins of that work in a
bibliographical note to the Verso 1983 English edition:
“The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” was
completed in 1938, at a time when Benjamin planned to
make a separate book out of the material for the project
which he had collected on Baudelaire. It was conceived as
the central section of three which were to constitute the
Baudelaire book. The other two sections exist only as
fragments in German — ’’Baudelaire as Allegorist” and “The
Commodity as a Subject of Poetry.” . . .
“Some Motifs in Baudelaire” was completed in 1939,
written as a result of a critique by T. W. Adomo of “The
Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” whose central
part it was intended to replace.. . .
“Paris— Capital of the Nineteenth Century” was completed
in 1935 as an expose or draft of the project as a whole, (vii)
One need only peruse Benjamin’s correspondence (to Scholem, Horkheimer, and Adomo,
among others) from the early thirties through 1940 to understand his dedication to the
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Baudelaire book under ever more pressing and ultimately tragic circumstances.1 1 It is in
the essays “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” and “On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire,” as well as his lesser known “A Short History of Photography” (1931) and the
more celebrated “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), that
Benjamin’s notion of the aura relates most meaningfully to the physical construct of the
city and photography.1 2
Precisely because of its very ethereal nature, the aura lends significance to my
fusing it with the physical city in the vein of Baudelaire’s “correspondences.” Perceiving
the city itself, along with its poetic and photographic depictions, forms a dialectic and
thereby crystallizes the dehumanization of the modem city while setting off a human
perspective. Privileging that perspective by focusing on the aura defines the citizen/artist’s
relationship with the city and magnifies his or her interpretive role; thus an intellectual
response to awareness of loss is comprised equally by aspects of the changing city and its
representations. The dialectical contrast or opposition inherent in identifying an informing
spirit through the objective city is therefore embodied in both the artist’s perceptions and
the viewer’s (patron’s) reaction to the city, the modem era’s most inscrutable landscape.
The slippery notion of the aura in Benjamin’s work is essential to this study
because it provides, in conjunction with Baudelaire’s “correspondences,” the means to
1 1 See The Correspondence o f Walter Benjamin 1910-1940, trans. Manfred R.
Jackson and Evelyn M. Jacobson, eds. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adomo
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994).
1 2 Hereafter these essays will be referred to respectively as “Second Empire,” “Some
Motifs,” “Short History,” and “Work of Art.”
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associate a subjective human realm with the perception of an objective physical one. To
begin, defining the aura is no small undertaking since all such definitions privilege the
“soul” or “emanation” of an object or person; therefore, it is not surprising that this
intangible and ethereal notion engenders ambiguity in efforts to pin it down. Furthermore,
ambiguity and even apparent contradiction are hallmarks of Benjamin’s writings about the
aura. In The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space, Mary Price states that “the way
Benjamin’s mind works is what makes him exciting to read and also what makes him
confusing to interpret, or rather what makes everything written on photography after him
seem to have been inspired by him” (61).'3
Not all critics however are so forgiving of Benjamin’s redemptive style. In her
discerning chapter, “Marxist Creationism: Walter Benjamin and the Authority of the
Critic,”1 4 Dagmar Bamouw speaks of “Benjamin’s general inability to understand
language as a socially developed tool for making sense of a world (154). And she states
the following about the “current intellectual fascination with Walter Benjamin”:
Benjamin’s thought is indeed arrested in images, which
makes access to his critical discourse very difficult and
reading him an often frustrating experience. Anglo-
American critics tend to express their impatience and
frustration with Benjamin’s style but seem content with the
1 3 Price’s text constitutes an ambitious and thorough account of the myriad subtleties
of Benjamin’s notion of the aura and its relation to photography, as well as its dependence
on Proust’s involuntary memory and the metaphor of the mask. I am greatly indebted to
her interpretation of many difficult passages and her approach to the “description” of
photographs in general.
1 4 Dagmar Bamouw, Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat o f Modernity (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1988).
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assumption that there is some higher and valid reason for its
turgidity. (308)
And:
Almost all English speaking critics state their reservations or
dismay regarding Benjamin’s tortuous, obscurantist style,
but do not explicitly relate Benjamin’s contempt for
conceptual accessibility, that is, language as communication,
to his so-called language theory [primacy of the symbolic
character of the word]. It is true that language is a sense-
making tool and communication just one of its aspects, but
the emphatic denial of this very aspect does say something
about Benjamin’s sense-making activity. (309-310)
But as an intellectual historian, Bamouw relates Benjamin’s redemptive metaphor-laden
opaqueness to the larger context of Weimar intellectual culture: “the experience of a
decay, a crisis, the (apocalyptic) end of German (High) culture [that] produced distorted
views of the social construct of reality and . . . was triggered by the trauma of modernity
in postwar Germany” (4). Providing an exhaustive elaboration of Benjamin’s poetics
(extraordinary autonomy of the individual text, critic, and world of things; the promise of
illum ination and the presence of the marvelous; obsession with metaphor and simile; the
magic epiphanic rupture in a continuum of experience and in the perception of the
meaningful object), Bamouw rightfully underscores the conflicted relationship between
these modes of defamiliarization and inaccessibility. In doing so, however, she also
accents his “single-mindedness,” or that insistence on revelation or redemption through
the individual’s interpretation of text or object.
Bamouw divides Benjamin’s readers into two groups: those who “doubt the
functionality of the poetically elliptic semantics and grammar which are the substance of
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Benjamin’s critical style” and those who “accept them as deeply meaningful” (153). My
perspective acknowledges the validity of the former position while embracing the latter.
As such, I am guilty of succumbing to the “seduction of redemption” (151), but not
without purpose. By focusing precisely on Benjamin’s “transcendent” and
“transhistorical” thinking (160), and not on the questionable documentary value of his
unfailing perception of thing and text through the “intrusion of the self’ and as avenue to
the “meaning of selfhood” (170), we are free to trace the very modem motif of subjective
interpretation as provoked through textual and photographic perceptions of loss.
Although Bamouw sees Benjamin’s modus operandi as ultimately one of self-absorbed
appropriation, she acknowledges that:
the question of whether his concept-images, his Denkbilder,
are indeed “dialectic” in a logically accessible sense or
whether Benjamin, mesmerized by antithetical energies, just
intended them to be, and then in what way, may indeed
seem almost petty when one allows oneself to be open to
their provocative power. (153-54)
In “Short History” Benjamin exempts the early years of photography, specifically
the work of Hill, Hugo, Cameron, and Nadar, from the complicity of post “first decade,”
or “industrial” photography in the decline of the aura.1 5 The aura pertaining to such
exalted works emanates from the encounter with “something strange and new . . .
1 5 The translator of “Short History” refers to “first decade” as an “exaggeration,” and
Price elaborates on the incorrect dating of the work of these photographers. It is of
interest to this study because many of the Marville photos examined below postdate some
of the Nadar photos in the Bossert collection Benjamin claims to have consulted in his first
footnote. This naturally invites the speculation about where Benjamin would have placed
the Marville photos and whether he would have included them among his privileged group
of preindustrial photographers.
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something that is not to be silenced . . . a magical value that a painted picture can never
again possess for us” (“Short History” 202), and establishes Benjamin’s first notion of
aura: the associations around the cult object or unique work of art. Price describes
Benjamin’s hum anizing interpretations as “a talent for characterizing a still photograph as
a narrative, implying the beginning and the end of a situation by his dramatic figuration of
the middle.. . . Benjamin invents a story-instantaneous, compressed, elusive, incomplete
. . . ” (40-41). And Bamouw recognizes that while “all critical activity involves some
charting of physical and intellectual phenomena in search of the self, it is . . . particularly
intense and single-minded in Benjamin. . . ” (185). This interpretive license, based in the
aura of the cult object, is, however, the synthesized product of objective detail that is
enhanced by the reportorial medium o f the photograph, but also obscured and mystified
through the primitive equipment used by the early photographers. As Price explains:
Darkness, above all other terms, characterizes the condition
of mystery belonging to the early photographs [And]
the truth, for Benjamin, depends on the mystery, even when
it is mystery intensified by disclosure, as it is in the
reproduction of nature’s details unseen by the eye before
photography’s revelations. (43)
Benjamin embraced the suggestive mystery of darkness in the early photos with the same
fervor he directed against the technological “advances” of later photography:
For that aura is not simply the product of a primitive
camera. At that early stage, object and technique
corresponded to each other as decisively as they diverged
from one another in the immediately subsequent period of
decline. Soon, improved optics commanded instruments
which completely conquered darkness and distinguished
appearances as sharply as a mirror. (“Short History” 207)
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Clearly there is an obstructive element, an essential obscurantism that pervades
Benjamin’s longing for the aura in these early photographs. Because the darkness only
partially veils, Benjamin is stimulated to embrace what the photograph is capable of
suggesting, and not simply what it depicts. The same phenomenon explains his
condemnation of the clarity produced in the subsequent photographic period. Partial
obstruction as a means to invoke the imagination and interpretive license is not an original
notion conceived by Benjamin; the Romantic period provides at least two eminent
predecessors in Wordsworth and Leopardi1 6 And Benjamin’s first aura, the ethereal
associations gathered around the unique and sacred object, is easily associated with
1 6 Because Leopardi posits “questa siepe” before the narrator in his poem “l’infinito,” it
blocks part o f the horizon and thus creates the emptiness or blank slate upon which his
Romantic im agination works. It is in the vacuum created by the obstructed view (“il
guardo esclude”) that his mind constructs the “interminati spazi,” “sovrumani silenzi,” and
the “profondissima quiete.” The imagination is invoked by a void. Likewise, in book
thirteen of The Prelude (1805 edition), the moon allows Wordsworth to discern the sea of
mist that shrouds, confuses, and transforms the reality of the landscape. Like his fellow
Romantic, Leopardi, he seeks the elusive understanding of his place within nature and
recognizes it in a seemingly empty and unenlightening place:
At distance not the third part of a mile
Was a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour,
A deep and gloomy breathing-place, through which
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice.
The universal spectacle throughout
Was shaped for admiration and delight,
Grand in itself alone, but in that breach
Through which the homeless voice of waters rose,
That dark deep thoroughfare, had Nature lodged
The soul, the imagination of the whole. (13.56-66)
Such phenomena of partial obstruction function as synecdochic strategies pursuing the
sublime through the juxtaposition of perceived/known and unperceived/unknown, i.e., the
invocation of the imagination. The exactitude of later photography and its elimination of
this potential are what Benjamin regrets.
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1 6
writings on the sublime as far back as Longinus, who wrote that sublimity is a “distinction
and excellence in expression,” an elevated language that transports rather than
persuades.1 7 The possibility of a revelation enshrouded in mystery described by Benjamin
is further adumbrated by Longinus:
[in the presence of the true sublime] our soul is uplifted. . .
it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting;
[and if the effect of something heard] does not leave in the
mind more food for reflection than the words seem to
convey. . . it cannot rank as true sublimity. (Adams 80)
But it is Benjamin’s relation of the aura’s inherent distance to photography and his
emphasis on Baudelaire’s dedication to psychological and emotional distance in the city
that makes him so crucial to this project.
In the only instance where Benjamin offers a succinct definition of the aura, he
writes: “What is aura? A strange web of time and space: the unique appearance of a
distance, however close at hand” (“Short History” 209). Again, in Benjamin’s thought,
ambiguity invites powerful suggestion. Just as he characterizes the look in David Octavius
Hill’s early photo of a Newhaven fishwife as “something that is not to be silenced,” a
“relaxed and seductive shame,” he writes of Dauthenday’s bride: “She is seen beside him
here, he holds her; her glance, however, goes past him, directed into an unhealthy
distance” (“Short History” 202). Distance is unique and essential to the aura of an object
reverenced as a work of art, but it can also be interpreted in Benjamin’s writing as an
obscuring fog, a mask of reality. It is immediately preceding the above passage in “Short
History” that Benjamin plants the seeds of opposition regarding distance and aura By
1 7 Hazard Adams ed., Critical Theory Since Plato (San Diego: Harcourt, 1971) 77.
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referring to the Parisian photographer Eugene Atget as a “virtuoso” and a “forerunner,”
we know that Benjamin’s description of his photographs are complimentary. Yet his
description of how Atget invokes the aura seems to be at odds with his previously stated
reverent notion:
Atget was an actor who became disgusted with that pursuit,
took off his mask and then went on to strip the makeup
from reality as well Atget’s Paris photographs are the
forerunners of Surrealist photography As the pioneer,
he disinfected the sticky atmosphere spread by conventional
portrait photography in that period of decline. He cleansed
this atmosphere, he cleared it; he began the liberation o f the
object from the aura.. . . He sought the forgotten and the
neglected, so such pictures turn reality against the exotic,
romantic, show-offish resonance o f the city name; they suck
the aura from reality like water from a sinking ship.
(“Short History” 208-209; emphasis mine)
Because Benjamin associates Atget with the Surrealist tradition, a tradition he clearly
endorses in the above passage, he simultaneously links Atget with both a realist and an
irreverent distorting art. Critiquing the city and society in which Atget worked, he claims
that Atget “sought the forgotten and the neglected,” and thereby uncovered a former
reality at odds with the “exotic, romantic, show-offish resonance of the city name”; in
essence, he reverses the associations of “aura” to match this later, undesirable reality
brought about by the specter of reproducibility— here Benjamin’s aura is a negative fog
from which Atget manages to liberate us. The revised notion of aura expresses a
revisionist spirit and shares the Surrealist penchant for distortion of reality and tradition
through the need for a “stripping” or demasking; it subverts the sacrosanct and authentic
associations around the cult object in the former notion. Now a “unique distance” can
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operate as an object or experience to be discovered, or rather something masking a
desirable reality and that must be stripped.1 * The aura’s role in provoking an imaginative
reaction is therefore flexible. Mary Price explains:
It is one thing to strip aura from unique works o f duration,
and another to strip the makeup from reality. Disclosure of
reality by stripping away falsity is good— . Benjamin’s
two uses of aura are (1) reverential attention to the original
work of art, which is unique and lasts through time, thus
traditional, with the atmosphere of the sacred; and (2) the
obfuscation, falsity, and pretense hiding reality. (48)
In both conceptions, however, distance is the catalyst. Of distance and Benjamin’s
intellectual psyche, Bamouw writes:
Benjamin shared with many Weimar intellectuals the view of
the intellectual’s identity as defined by his experience of
disconnection, distance, and exile. But his distance was
more distinctly, allegorically perceived, and it led him to a
more eclectic fragmented vision which is central to his
“thinking in images”: arresting contrasts and conflicts, they
keep the distance alive. His position in his contemporary
culture was therefore more ambiguous. (155-56)
Atget’s photographs postdate Benjamin’s exalted preindustrial photographers, so
one would naturally expect a critical account of how the photos relate to the aura; but his
1 8 Price explains the difference between this second aura and the former “reverence for
tradition,” or “sacred aspect of the unique work of art,” by stating: “The answer seems to
be that the “object” in this context is either natural or man-made, as in Atget’s scenes of
the city, but not an object that was, in the first discussion of aura, the unique work of art.”
I am unconvinced that Benjamin’s reversal in use of the term “aura” implies a perception
of Atget’s photos as less unique works of art. Interestingly, Price herself seems
unconvinced by repeating immediately after quoting Benjamin’s definition of aura from
“Short History,” “Nothing of the original cluster of associations about the unique work of
art is expressed here. [But then] ‘Unique distance,’ like ‘unique work of art,’ is the
unrepeatable, singular experience, in the case of distance; or unrepeatable, singular object,
in the case of art” (46).
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terms of praise confuse the issue. Price suggests that Benjamin’s abrupt change in
approach is the result o f his own ambiguity toward mechanized perception. She writes:
Benjamin’s tone is that of a critic reluctantly coming to
terms with a condition of which he does not approve but
which sweeps him forward.. . . [He] admires Atget’s
photos, [but] finds himself thus in the position of admiring
works that “suck the aura from reality like water from a
sinking ship.” (47)
I emphasize his change in orientation as further evidence underscoring the interpretive
freedom created by the photograph. Perhaps no other section of Benjamin’s writings on
the aura better exemplifies Price’s assertion that his “thoughts were more like pieces of a
mosaic than like causal linear thinking from a to b to c” (48). After describing the aura of
a mountain range on the horizon or twig, he suddenly begins to rue the homogenizing
aspects of reproduction:
Now to bring things themselves closer— and closer to the
masses~is as passionate a contemporary trend as is the
conquest of unique things in every situation by their
reproduction. (209)
One might associate this conquest of “unique” things with the pursuit of knowledge and
the aura’s unique distance, or the bringing of things closer to the masses with the
discovery of the associations around the sacred art object. But Benjamin’s tone intensifies
until it reaches a clearly critical pitch that opposes reproduction and the aura-either aura.
For Benjamin, reproductions of an original are not capable of revealing the associations
around the reverent object, or of disclosing reality by stripping away the falsity of the
obscuring aura. He continues:
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Day by day the need becomes greater to take possession of
the object— from the closest proximity— in an image and the
reproductions of an image. And the reproduction, as it
appears in illustrated newspapers and weeklies, is
perceptibly different from the original Uniqueness and
duration are as closely entwined in the latter as transience
and reproducibility in the former. The removal o f the object
from its shell [aura], the fragmentation o f the aura, is the
signature o f a perception whose sensitivity fo r similarity
has so grown that by means o f reproduction it defeats even
the unique. (209; emphasis mine)
Benjamin makes a distinction here between taking possession of an object with an image,
and the reproduction of that image. The context does not suggest that Benjamin is
equating Atget’s photographs with reproduction as stated here; they are clearly
reproductions of a reality, but as images o f an object, and not reproductions of those
images. My reading of the passage interprets Atget’s photos as “originals,” and therefore
does not support Price’s connection o f the Atget photos’ removal of the aura and the
“increasing sameness in the world.” Even in Benjamin’s fluid mosaic of logic we cannot
conflate an artist who “sought the forgotten and neglected” with a “sensitivity for
similarity.” Benjamin perceives the photos as images (originals), as opposed to the
“perceptibly different” reproductions, and therefore their removal of the obscuring aura
serves positively to disclose reality. As Price herself states: “The implications of aura
depend on Benjamin’s choice of emphasis” (49). I track this difference in interpretation
because I believe my approach places greater emphasis on how Benjamin’s aura, even
through its removal, and notwithstanding his declarations about photography and
reproduction, elicits a return to the unique experience of an object.
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Regarding the “Work of Art” essay, Bamouw notes that “the destruction of the
aura by the mechanical reproducibility of art” is credited with both “the emancipation of
the work of a rt. . . from its ‘parasitical dependence on ritual’. .. and the “removal of the
work of art from its all too firm embeddedness in a cultural tradition. . . ” (187-88). But
she then appropriately identifies Benjamin’s notion of the lost aura as the instrument of his
dedication to recovery and redemption, or “profane illumination”:
Benjamin, if one reads him attentively, is much more
ambivalent about the direct politicization o f art and much
more ambiguous about the inevitable and desirable loss of
aura than his assertive gestures toward materialism may lead
one to expect.. . . The smashing of the aura suggests,
rather, the shock of the profane illumination of
correspondences. The aura is indeed not lost in its
destruction but transformed, transcended. (188-89)
“The unique appearance of a distance” is clearly a defining element in the aura,
even if it masks the “forgotten and neglected” reality that Benjamin privileges; therefore it
stimulates the imagination through an intellectual response as effective as embracing the
associations around the sacred work of art. Furthermore, Benjamin’s second notion of
aura, one that obstructs as a fog, constitutes a dialectical opposition, much like the
phenomenological partial obstructions in Leopardi and Wordsworth, that must be
reconciled through imaginative response. In “Some Motifs,” Benjamin writes that
photography operates within the realm of the memoire volontaire, permanently recording
a captured moment and scene. But it remains distant from the memoire involontaire
because it stops short of the “intangible” and “imaginative”; for Baudelaire this “startling
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and cruel” medium was useful in aiding “the archives of our memory,” but not capable of
supporting “the imprint of [man’s] soul.” Benjamin states:
If the distinctive feature of the images that rise from the
memoire involontaire is seen in their aura, then
photography is decisively implicated in the phenomenon of
the decline of the aura. What was inevitably felt to be
inhuman, one might even say deadly, in daguerrotypy was
the (prolonged)1 9 looking into the camera, since the camera
records our likeness without returning our gaze. (“Some
Motifs” 187-88)
Our present aim being to invert the above statement and effectively link the
involuntary memory with photography through the latter’s reactive recovery of the aura, it
is first necessary to consider how Benjamin interprets this Proustian notion. The
involuntary memory operates on the premise of a distance that cannot be recalled by
conscious acts of memory; on the contrary it is called forth “involuntarily,” prompted by
an unforeseen object or experience such as Proust’s madeleine, and subsequently
stimulates contemplation. It is the foundation of both Benjamin’s aura and the
synaesthesia inherent in Baudelaire’s “correspondences.” I have referred above to various
1 9 Unlike the instantaneous technology of today’s cameras, early photography required
lengthy exposure times. Naomi Rosenblum writes in A World History o f Photography
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1984): “In 1839, sittings would have required about 15
minutes of rigid stillness in blazing sunshine owing to the primitive nature of the lenses
used and the insufficient sensitivity to light of the chemically treated plates and paper”
(40). As new technologies were discovered, exposure times decreased. In 1856 Marville
replaced the calotype technique with a method known as “collodion”; this was the method
used for his Parisian photographs. Rosenblum writes: “An effective alternative
materialized in 1850 when Frederick Scott Archer, an English engraver turned sculptor,
published a method of sensitizing a newly discovered colorless and grainless substance,
collodion, to be used on a glass support. Because exposure time decreased dramatically
when the plate was used in a moist state, the process became known as the wet plate or
wet collodion method” (32-33). The collodion solution was comprised of pyroxylin, ether
and alcohol. Exposure time varied from 3-12 seconds.
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forms of distance and partial obfuscation with the phrase “point of loss,” the void which
sets the dialectic in motion and marks the stimulation of the imagination. As the term
“involuntary memory” suggests, meaning can rise from a hidden place; but it is perhaps of
even greater importance that once stimulated, meaning evolves within a state of arrested
consciousness, much like that which we experience while studying the frozen images of a
photograph. Here a defamiliarized stimulus or point of loss begets a state of loss ripe for
contemplation. The usual stream of consciousness is arrested or diverted into one
characterized by self-consciousness and heightened awareness.
Benjamin introduces the extensive “Some Motifs” by describing the climate in
which Les Fleurs du mal debuted as “increasingly inhospitable” to lyric poetry. The
famous apostrophe in the close o f the opening poem, “Au Lecteur,” identifies those
readers for whom, according to Benjamin, “the reading o f lyric poetry would present
difficulties.” By associating himself with kindred spirits who prefer the sensual pleasures
over willpower and concentration, Baudelaire eschews the traditional gap between poet
and public. The inclusiveness of “Hypocrite lecteur,--mon semblable,— mon ffere” effects
a modem indictment of Baudelaire and his readers as those “familiar with the ‘spleen’
which kills interest and receptiveness” (“Some Motifs” 155). This cleavage between lyric
poetry and the experience of readers prompted Baudelaire’s pioneering approach and the
resultant “inner abyss” that characterizes his lyric poetry. But as Benjamin explains, we
must look to the philosopher Henri Bergson to identify the “change in the structure of [the
readers’] experience” (156). He writes:
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Since the end of the last century, philosophy has made a
series of attempts to lay hold of the “true” experience as
opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized,
denatured life of the civilized masses. (156)
As stated repeatedly above, our association of the involuntary memory with
photography as a means to resurrect the aura from a text or photo is predicated on a
dialectical process of intertwined opposites, one of which is clearly the physical, objective
realm. Bergson’s work, Matiere et memoire, is particularly useful because, as Benjamin
states, “more than the others, it preserves links with empirical research” (157). Bergson’s
empiricism is embodied in the “structure of memory” and its crucial importance regarding
the “pattern of experience.” As Benjamin explains: “It is less the product of facts firmly
anchored in memory than of a convergence in memory o f accumulated andfrequently
unconscious data” (157; emphasis mine). Therefore Bergson’s empiricism is a qualified
one, qualified by, as we shall see, the subjective realm that operates beyond the intellect
and encroaches into the spiritual or metaphysical dimension. But precisely like the partial
obstructions of Wordsworth and Leopardi, as well as Benjamin’s obscuring auratic fog,
Bergson’s concept finds constructive significance in what exists empirically but is eclipsed.
Benjamin concludes by relating the unreceptive environment at the debut of Les Fleurs du
mal with Bergson:
It was the inhospitable, blinding age of big-scale
industrialism. In shutting out this experience the eye
perceives an experience of a complementary nature in the
form of its spontaneous afterimage, as it were. Bergson’s
philosophy represents an attempt to give the details of this
afterimage and to fix it as a permanent record. (157)
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A “spontaneous afterimage” is precisely what Proust experienced while tasting the
madeleine, and it is this same hallmark characteristic of the involuntary memory that
permits the recovery of the aura from Baudelaire’s urban poetry and, I will argue,
Marville’s photos of Paris.
In his multi-volume A la Recherche de temps perdu Marcel Proust adapts
Bergson’s contemplative memoire pure to the memoire involontaire in order to undermine
implications of free choice. Although today’s viewer of a Charles Marville photograph
could not have the personal rapport with objects in the photos such that they might revert
to childhood experiences like the protagonist in Proust’s novel, points of loss in the
photos, most of which constitute an unretumed gaze, construct a subsequent and ironic
contemplation on the human condition within the physical city. Baudelaire’s street poetry
produces the same effect through points of loss created in the text.
Proust’s concept of involuntary memory is so essential to our recovery of the aura
because of what the voluntary memory, not surprisingly, lacks. Benjamin sums up
Proust’s involuntary memory by writing that the information that the voluntary memory
“gives about the past retains no trace of it. . . . [Therefore] the past is somewhere beyond
the reach of the intellect, and unmistakably present in some material object (or in the
sensation which such an object arouses in us), though we have no idea which one it is”
(158; emphasis mine). If, as Benjamin attests, Proust’s novel “restores the figure of the
storyteller to the present generation,” a generation that inherited the “atrophy of
experience” Baudelaire incorporated into Les Fleurs du mal half a century before, then it
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is reasonable to seek the restoration of the aura in photographs that create a like point of
loss.
Benjamin does not, however, suggest that the aura lies beyond the physical world
in a Platonic essence. On the contrary, he joins the “experience of the aura to the fullest
extent” with the “implicit expectation that our look will be returned by the object of our
gaze”; by relating it to “perceptibility” and “attentiveness,” he necessarily calls forth and
underscores the role of an object.2 0 He writes:
the experience of the aura thus rests on the transposition of
a response common in human relationships to the
relationships between the inanimate or natural object and
man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being
looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive that aura of an
object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look
at us in return. This experience corresponds to the data of
the memoire involontaire. These data, incidentally, are
unique: they are lost to the memory that seeks to retain
them. Thus they lend support to a concept of the aura that
comprises the “unique manifestation of a distance.” (188)
Once again we confront what presents itself as another contradiction: if Benjamin asserts
that the associations of the aura lie within the realm of the involuntary memory, a
perceptive capacity that operates beyond conscious intellect, then how can he also relate
the aura to such a proactive term as “attentiveness”? Although Benjamin makes no such
concession, the points of loss embodied in the unretumed gazes of photography create an
imaginative perception in an already intensified attentiveness offered by the captured
moment of the photograph. Benjamin himself demonstrates the means for arriving at this
conclusion in the above citation, but stops short because he remains fixed on the camera’s
2 0 Benjamin is referring to Novalis’ dictum: “Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.”
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inability to return our gaze. As will be shown below, the camera’s product, the
photograph, can stimulate a response that reconstructs the returned gaze. Moreover, in
discussing the expectation of the returned gaze, Benjamin explains that “ in the case of
thought processes, [it] can apply equally to the look of the eye of the mind and to a glance
pure and simple.” The transposed response common in human relationships is therefore
invoked through a photographic object whose point of loss (unretumed gaze) stimulates
the viewer in turn to instil the object with the ability to return that gaze.
It would seem that this reaction on the viewer’s or reader’s part is largely a
conscious, intellectual move produced by photographs or by mental images prompted
through Baudelaire’s poetry. Likewise, this move seems to lie outside the domain of the
involuntary memory. But the generation of meaning from the unretumed gaze or similar
points of loss recalls Benjamin’s own reversion to Freud’s assumption that “consciousness
comes into being at the site of a memory trace” (emphasis mine).2 1 This only makes sense
if we accept the premise that “memory” disintegrates sense impressions, while
“remembrance” seeks to preserve them In other words, consciousness occurs where we
would expect to find an explicit memory trace or sense impression, but find none.
Benjamin continues with Freud’s concept:
Therefore, “it would be the special characteristic of
consciousness that, unlike . . . other psychical systems, the
excitatory process does not leave behind a permanent
change in its elements, but expires, as it were, in the
phenomenon of becoming conscious.” The basic formula of
this hypothesis is that “becoming conscious and leaving
2 1 Benjamin is quoting from Freud’s 1921 work Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Part
III of “Some Motifs.”
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behind a memory trace are processes incompatible with each
other within one and the same system.” (160)
The converse of this castrated memory is of course the impressions that, as Proust says,
have not been consciously or explicitly experienced and have been left behind by an
incident that never entered consciousness as a memory trace or tangible sense impression
(160). The dichotomy of explicit memory traces and consciousness is grounded in Freud’s
privileging of the more important function of consciousness: the protection against stimuli
or the parrying of shocks. According to this interpretation, consciousness is able to
register shocks as a means to “ . . . master the stimuli retroactively, by developing the
anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis” (161). This “training in
coping with stimuli” may take the form of dreams, but more often “devolves upon the
wakeful consciousness, located in a part o f the cortex which is ‘so blown out by the effect
of the stimulus’ that it offers the most favorable situation for the reception of stimuli”
(162).2 2 While consciousness registers shocks, it does not, however, receive memory
2 2 It is interesting to note that Confucianism understands a dreamless state of sleep to
be the haven of inner peace. We know that each of us dreams each night, regardless of
whether or not we have any recollection of those dreams. That dreams are at times very
difficult to remember, seeming to vaporize upon waking, is a sign of the dream’s
grounding in the waking state and our psyche’s desire to subdue the effects of that stimuli.
Huston Smith, in recounting the Confucian belief system, explains that our nightly contact
with the dreamless state is what allows us to carry on with our daily dealings in the
frenetic waking state. The Wisdom o f Faith with Huston Smith (part 2 of 5), prod./narr.
Bill Moyers, PBS, KCET, Los Angeles, 30 June 1996.
The dreamless state can be likened to Benjamin’s aura in its state of arrested
consciousness, while the elusive dream state corresponds to the Proustian voluntary
memory that provides information of the past without any real trace of it. The frozen
moment of still photos mirrors the cushioning or parrying of shock, unlike the constant
bombardment of moving film. And Marville’s spectral figures further arrest consciousness
by not returning the gaze. The reaction per se to the unretumed gaze of Marville’s
spectral figures is not, of course, arrested. But it is stimulated by another point of loss.
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traces. As Benjamin puts it, the cushioning or parrying of shock “lends the incident that
occasions it [the shock] the character of having been lived in the strict sense. If it were
incorporated directly into the conscious memory, it would sterilize this incident for poetic
experience” (162).2 3
I assign this process such weight to show Benjamin’s own acknowledgment of a
process based in recovery through a point of loss. The components of the involuntary
memory are the “most powerful and most enduring,” although outside of tangible
consciousness. Yet, even within this elusive theory of consciousness and memory,
Benjamin identifies a restorative process and unites it with the poetic experience. Jean
Lacoste highlights the notion of recovery from loss by writing that Benjamin:
permit les potentialites emancipatrices de la technique en
meme temps qu’il en souligne le caractere destructeur dans
certaines conditions historiques, et il cherche a definir dans
differants textes. . . un art authentiquement modeme, qui
accepte, jusqu’au bout, la technique comme promesse
d’ emancipation.2 4
the arrested consciousness, clearing a pathway to the aura. Similarly, Baudelaire cushions
the urban shocks of a changing Paris by imbuing his poetry with the metaphysical half of
his correspondences.
2 3 For an extensive and compelling analysis of Benjamin’s conception of memory,
tradition, and experience vis-a-vis the Erfharung/Erlebnis dynamic, see Andrew
Benjamin’s “Tradition and Experience: Walter Benjamin’s ‘On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire,”’ The Problems o f Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin
(London: Routledge, 1991) 122-140.
2 4 Jean Lacoste, “Baudelaire et le Modem Style: Vraie et Fausse Modemite selon
Walter Benjamin,” Les Cahiers du Musee national d ’ art modeme 19-20 (Juin 1987): 149.
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Before developing the notion of a recovered aura through photography and
literature in the next chapter, we should first consider briefly the convergence of
Baudelaire’s philosophy with that of Benjamin. For Baudelaire the poetic experience was
a powerful means to perceive and portray what he called the “inner abyss,” a realm
constituted by “correspondences” and capable of provoking both torment and beauty. In
his capacity as connoisseur of the fine arts and as critic, Baudelaire expressed both
technical versatility and profound artistic conviction, writing extensively about painting
(Guys, Ingres, Delacroix), drawing, engraving, sculpture, and on aesthetic faculties and
notions such as color, the ideal and the model, fantasy, imagination, eclecticism, and
doubt. Much like Benjamin, he denounced the unfettered encroachment of the industrial
modem world into the realm of “art.” Naturally, the role of photography in this regard
was both current and implicated in Baudelaire’s mind.
Baudelaire condemns the art consuming public of 1850s Paris in “The Salon of
1859,” complaining that Truth has displaced Beauty.2 5 This is the very same period that
Benjamin labeled as “inhospitable to lyric poetry.” Underlying this critique of the modem
public’s industrially abetted, single-minded approach to the appreciation of the fine arts is
a passionate call for a lost sensibility based on an immediate synthesis of the objective and
the subjective. Baudelaire writes:
The exclusive taste for the True (so noble a thing when it is
limited to its proper applications) opposes and stifles the
taste for the Beautiful. Where one should see nothing but
Beauty . . . our public looks only for Truth. The people are
2 5 Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror o f Art: Critical Studies by Charles Baudelaire,
trans./ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Phaidon, 1955) 217-300.
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not artists, not naturally artists; philosophers perhaps,
moralists, engineers, connoisseurs of instructive anecdotes,
whatever you like, but never spontaneously artists. They
feel, or rather they judge, in stages analytically. Other more
fortunate peoples feel immediately, all at once, synthetically.
(228)
Baudelaire endorses a response that transcends the exclusivity of Truth by invoking Poe’s
dictum, “It is a happiness to wonder. . . it is a happiness to dream” (228), and establishing
it as a requisite principle for the artist. Opposed is the public “which is singularly
incapable of feeling the happiness of dreaming or of marvelling (a sign of its meanness of
soul) [and] wishes to be made to wonder by means which are alien to a rt. . . ” (228).
In place of a happiness to dream, Baudelaire identifies a deluded obsession with exactitude
and the reproduction of nature; therefore, as Baudelaire writes, photography embodied
precisely what the “idolatrous mob demanded: an ideal worthy of itself and appropriate to
its nature ” It was not that photography had created “this lamentable period.” That
was the result of an extended “discredit of the imagination [and] disdain of th e. . .
exclusive practice. . . of technique. . . ” leading to the painter’s “degradation” (224).
Baudelaire saw photography as an exacerbating “new industry” which “contributed not a
little to confirm stupidity in its faith and to ruin whatever might remain of the divine in the
French mind” (228). Benjamin saw photography as antagonistic to the aura because of its
degradation of the unique tradition within a work of art. Likewise, he saw it as inherently
inhuman due to its inability to return the gaze. Baudelaire depicts photography as an
inhuman proxy to the imagination; in short, it offered an indolent public an excuse to stop
dreaming and deny the imagination. Baudelaire lashes out against a duped public that
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mistakenly associates . an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature [with]
. . . the absolute of art”:
A revengeful God has given ear to the prayers of this
multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah. And now the faithful
says to himself: “Since photography gives us every
guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really
believe that, the mad fools!), then photography and Art are
the same thing.” From that moment our squalid society
rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a
scrap of metal. A madness, an extraordinary fanaticism
took possession o f all these new sun-worshippers. (229)
It is clear, however, in Baudelaire’s essay that he equates the misuse of
photography with the deterioration of the artistic imagination. “The ill-applied
developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress. . . ”
are equally implicated “by invading the territories of art” (230). By calling for
photography’s “return to its true duty,” which he claims to be “the very humble servant of
the sciences and arts,” Baudelaire privileges the materialist nature of photography,
granting it validity in any number of capacities (tourist’s album, naturalist’s library,
astronomer’s hypotheses). As “the secretary and clerk of whoever needs an absolute
factual exactitude in his profession,” he has conceded a utilitarian niche for photography,
but has also married it with the forces behind the “lamentable period” in which he lived.
Baudelaire gives the full measure of his conviction in the sanctity of the imagination as the
determining characteristic of art when he marks the limit of photography’s use:
But if it be allowed to encroach upon the domain of the
impalpable and the imaginary, upon anything whose value
depends solely upon the addition of something of a man’s
soul, then it will be so much the worse for us! (231)
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Given the date of this essay, 1859, which lies exactly midway between the
publication of Les Fleurs du mal and the addition of the section “Tableaux parisiens,” one
wonders about Baudelaire’s description of the dichotomy in such absolute terms. As
Anna Balakian points out:
Baudelaire tantalizes the reader from the very start of Les
Fleurs du mal, for every poem of transcendental inspiration,
there is one that contents itself with “T expansion des choses
infinies,” i.e. the infinite in terms of material things, or the
inner abyss rather than the supraterrestrial elevation.2 6
Furthermore, the sonnet “Correspondances” addresses very precisely synaesthesia and
symbolism, the intuition of concrete things, and the “deep dark unison” between the
sensual and spiritual universes. The objective, sensual realm is clearly a determining
component in the duality of Baudelaire’s aesthetic philosophy two years before he wrote
the “Salon of 1859.” Two years later, that importance is further evidenced by
Baudelaire’s insistence on the physical, concrete detail in “Tableaux parisiens.” Therefore,
the adamance of his separation between reproduction, exactitude, and photography on one
hand, and imagination, soul, and art on the other, is curious. I believe the centrality of
objective detail and its crucial function in the poems of “Tableaux parisiens” and a couple
of his prose poems belie this separation. If we consider the response to the detail of the
photograph and how it invokes the imagination, we move closer to the imagination that
Baudelaire summons through the Parisian detail of his poetry and reifies so passionately in
2 6 Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Approach (New York: New
York UP, 1977) 33.
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the “Salon of 1859.” And much like Benjamin, Baudelaire provides both the underlying
paradox and the tools essential for the discovery o f a resolution. Lacoste explains that:
La modemite de Baudelaire . . . consiste a chercher des
formes litteraires capables de rendre compte indirectement,
obliquement, des transformations de 1 ’experience
quotidienne, de traduire “1 ’experience vecue du choc” qui
s’est substitute aux experiences transmises par la tradition,
a ce que Benjamin appelle les Erfahrungen. En ce sens elle
announce autant Proust— le declin de 1 ’aura, la disparition
des illusions de Penfance. (151-52)
To prioritize the physical urban reality depicted in Les Fleurs du mal by a
poet/critic that states, “each day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing down
before external reality” (“Salon” 231), is to underscore the dialectical significance of
ambivalence itself in the unfolding o f Baudelaire’s thought. At the core o f that thought is
his reference to the imagination as “the most scientific of the faculties” (xiii). In order to
understand such a statement and its relation to photography and the aura, we must look
briefly at the notion and sonnet, “Correspondances,” and why Beryl Schlossman endows it
with a “privileged status in the figures o f art and interpretation for both Benjamin and
Baudelaire.”2 7
CORRESPONDANCES
La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.
2 7 Beryl Schlossman, “Benjamin’s Uber Einige Motive bei Baudelaire'. The Secret
Architecture of Correspondances,” M LN 107 (1992): 548.
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Corrane de longs echos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une tenebreuse et profonde unite,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte,
Les parfiims, les couleurs et les sons se repondent.
II est des parfiims frais comme des chairs d’enfant s,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
Ayant 1 ’expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l’ambre, le muse, le benjoin et l’encens,
Qui chantent les transports de F esprit et des sens.2 8
By focusing on the kind of correspondence extolled in this poem, that is, on the
makeup of its two elements, we discover a dynamic that may extend into a spiritual realm,
but is nevertheless predicated on objective, sensual material. As Anna Balakian points
out, interpreting esprit solely through religious values leads one astray from the
predominant characteristic o f the correspondence. The final lines of the poem, “Le
Voyage,” portray Baudelaire’s willingness to subjugate ideas of Heaven and Hell to the
suggestive power of a point of loss--/ ’ Inconnu:
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?
Au fond de lTnconnu pour trouver du nouveau!2 9
Hurtling toward the distance, the waning echoes intertwine in a deep dark unison where
perfumes, colors and sounds answer each other in a spring of synaesthesia. This plane of
correspondence is as vaste as both the night and the light of day. Baudelaire places the
imagination, that most “scientific” of the faculties, in a dark distance that enlightens
2 8 Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers o f Evil, ed. Marthiel and Jackson Mathews (New
York: New Directions, 1963)241-42. All subsequent LFM citations are from same.
2 9 Quoted in Balakian: 33.
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through the intertwining of opposites, and what can be perceived sensorily; it is here
where les choses may expand infinitely. That expansion is the result of the
correspondence, an involuntary response much like Proust’s involuntary memory and
Benjamin’s aura emanating from the unique object. Or in Schlossman’s words:
correspondence is a principle of an invisible constellation, a
simultaneous gathering and distancing, a harvesting and
disseminating. Benjamin’s understanding of Baudelaire
draws much o f its light from these hidden places. (553)
While the expansion may then be projected toward the Divine, a move that corroborates
Baudelaire’s acceptance of the Romantic allegory between abstract and concrete, and
Heaven and Earth, and can be found in many of the poems in Les Fleurs du mal, the
correspondence operates between the mind and the senses. It is therefore earthly,
dependent on sensual material, and ultimately enables contemplation through synaesthesia.
Anna Balakian explains:
[It is]. . . the projection o f the inner vision upon the world
without, situating the correspondence between the inner
vision and the outer reality, or in the interplay between the
subjective and the objective.. . . The synesthesia that
occurs in the mingling of sense perceptions does not
produce a link between heaven and earth, nor does it
transport us to a divine state; instead, it finds its connections
between sense experiences here on earth: between perfumes
and the flesh of children, linked by an adjective which has an
olfactory as well as a tactical connotation. . . . In the last
line, Baudelaire reveals that the secret of attaining
synesthesia is not through the inner eye and its contact with
the divine, but rather in the connection of the mind (/ ’ esprit)
and the senses (les sens) by means of a natural stimulus,
such as incense or amber. The synesthesia is strictly earthly,
descriptive of the kind of chain association that sensual
stimuli can produce in the mind of man, and from which
Proust was later to derive his notion o f involuntary memory.
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Here the expansion of the sense stimulus does not go so far
as to awaken a whole series of remembrances; what it does
is to unleash metaphors on a double tract of sense
perceptions. (34-35)
Consequently, the perceptions of a man passing through the forest of symbols that
is Nature are shaped by the images of the physical reality behind the symbols and, most
importantly, what his mind and web of experiences forge from those images; let us recall
that the “vivants piliers” of Nature call upon the fruits of involuntary memory and the
infinite expansion of physical things precisely because what lies on the immediate surface
often proves incomplete; i.e. they “laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles.” In that vein
Schlossman discusses Benjamin’s reading of Baudelairean “correspondences” in “Some
Motifs” as based in “hidden figures,” “secret architecture,” and doubtful, irreconcilable
relations; within this complex of loss Benjamin constructs his confrontation between
Nature and the shocks of modernity and the city.
Photography is uniquely suited to exploit the correspondence between physical
reality and the imaginative contemplation of it by way of denotative purity and the
captured moment respectively. Baudelaire and Benjamin acknowledged and lamented the
former; neither, however, identified the latter as a means to recover the aura, invoke the
imagination, or move the soul as a work of art. But if we consider that scientific
deductions and hypotheses rise from physical evidence, in conjuction with the notion of
“correspondences,” Baudelaire’s reference to the imagination as “the most scientific of
faculties” becomes less perplexing. By absorbing the objective world and fusing it with
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the transformative registers of subjective impulse, it becomes the most comprehensive
mode of perception. Jonathan Mayne writes:
By this seemingly paradoxical statement Baudelaire meant
that the Imagination alone is, by its nature, capable of
penetrating beneath the surface of appearances and of
detecting hidden analogies between different material
manifestations, different modes o f perception, and different
levels of existence. The Imagination, in feet, is that capital
faculty of the creative artist whereby he is enabled to see all
in one synoptic glance, and thus to order his work in such a
way that the topical shall co-exist with the eternal, the
natural with the supernatural and the moral with the
metaphysical. It is through the Imagination, in short, that
the universal correspondences are discerned and the “ideal”
brought to light. Baudelaire is nevertheless careful to insist
that the Imagination must have at its service a refined
sensibility and a practised technical equipment. He is,
indeed, scornful of technical ineptitude. . . but he is, if
anything, even more contemptuous o f a purely manual
dexterity, undirected by Imagination or the “Soul.” (xiii)
By pursuing understanding like the fading echoes that mingle in the inner abyss,
that deep dark unison where scent, sight, and sound merge, Baudelaire constructs a
uniquely deterministic distance, very much like the unique phenomenon of a distance in
Benjamin’s notion of the aura— Baudelaire, as well, projects a point of loss as an
originating stage of the human imagination. As Wallace Fowlie writes, it is in the abyss, le
gouffre, where Baudelaire explicates “the dual function” of distance, spirituality, and the
world of things:
The example of Baudelaire has collected around his name
other poetic geniuses— Nerval, Rimbaud and Mallarme, all
of whom are similar in being artists suspended over an
abyss. Le gouffre, which Baudelaire wrote about, is one of
the clues to his spirituality which we are just beginning
today to comprehend in our own terms. This spirituality, in
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its metaphor of abyss, is an ambiguous dimension, a
distance both physical and psychic which separates
Baudelaire from things in the world and from himself. The
ambiguity of this distance lies in the fact that it may be
crossed, that its expanse may be peopled, and hence serve
as that dimension which will ultimately unite Baudelaire
with himself and with all things in the world. Baudelaire felt
this ambiguity as poignantly as he felt the dual function of
any great work of literature which leads us simultaneously
toward a depth of obscurity and a fresh insight into that
very obscurity as it deepens.3 0
The conceptual similarity, combined with the scope of Benjamin’s interest in
Baudelaire, demonstrates that Benjamin found a powerful ally to corroborate his own
philosophy of perception through loss. In his introduction to The Correspondence o f
Walter Benjamin 1910-1940, Theodor Adorno explains Benjamin’s particular capacity for
production through negation, or rather obliteration, as a means to enlightenment. It
becomes clear that letter writing satisfied a similar function in Benjamin’s introspective
psyche as photography does in this thesis. Adomo relates that Benjamin’s “felicity was so
much one of the mind, that anything one might call ‘immediacy of life’ was refracted. . .
[through] the prismatic splendor of reflection” (xvii-xix). The “primacy of the mind” upon
which Benjamin insisted “became for him immediate, in lieu of immediacy,” and
manifested itself in a predilection for ritual, particularly letter writing. Adomo writes:
The letter form suited him because it predisposes to
mediated, objectified immediacy. Letter writing simulates
life in the medium of the frozen word. In a letter one can
disavow isolation and nonetheless remain distant, apart,
isolated, (xviii)
3 0 Wallace Fowlie, introduction, Charles Baudelaire, Flowers o f Evil and Other Works:
A Dual Language Book (1964; Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1992) 11.
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Not surprisingly, Benjamin eschewed the typewriter, feeling that the letter writer was
being superseded just as the storyteller had been by modes of mechanical reproduction.
Adomo explains that “in the age of disintegrating experience [when] people are no longer
disposed to write letters. . . Benjamin brought to them an uninhibited talent for
antiquities; he celebrated the wedding of a vanishing institution to its utopian restoration”
(xix). It is, therefore, simple to associate the isolation and traditionalism of Benjamin’s
letter writing with his regret for the inhospitality toward the storyteller and photography’s
destruction of the aura. Benjamin wrote in “Work of Art” that photography “detaches the
reproduced object from the domain of tradition” by interrupting its “substantive duration,”
and therefore erodes its “authenticity” and “authority.” The “eliminated element,” or
“that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art”
(221). But it is also reasonable to associate photography with his letter writing: the fusion
of the photo’s denotative purity with the imagination stimulated by points of loss mirrors
the “mediated, objectified immediacy”; the captured moment of a photographic image
reflects life in an even more precise exactitude than the frozen word; and the exactitude of
the reproduction simulates, even supersedes, the accessibility of the letter, while still
maintaining an indisputable distance.
Furthermore, the synthesis of human intervention and physical things that Adomo
employs to describe Benjamin’s letter writing passion corresponds to the dynamic of our
discussion’s recovery of the aura in photography, as well as Baudelaire’s notion. He
explains in decidedly photographic terminology:
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His posture as a letter writer inclines to that of the
allegorist: letters were for Benjamin natural-history
illustrations of what survives the ruin of time. His own
letters, by virtue of not at all resembling the ephemeral
utterances of life, develop their objective force: that of
formulation and nuance indeed worthy of a human being.
Here the eye, grieving for the losses about to overtake it,
still lingers over things with a patient intensity that itself
needs to be restored as a possibility. “I am not interested in
people; I am interested only in things”--this private remark
of Benjamin’s broaches the secret of his letters. The energy
of negation that emanates from it is identical with his
productive energy, (xix-xx)
Although the interplay between photograph and poem is developed just below in
Chapter Two, it will be useful to consider here one particular photo of Marville’s that
evinces the crucial duality at the heart o f the correspondences delineated by Baudelaire
and Benjamin. If “in the poetics of the irretrievably lost, the only access to Nature leads
through the secret architecture of refusal or renunciation, the uncanniness of the familiar,
and the destruction of Aura,”3 1 then the interpretation permitted by photos such as the
following confirms that access through recovery.
Fig. 1, Rue des Saules (18e arrondissement), is essentially a photograph of an
intersection in Montmartre, depicting an area that was annexed and became part of the city
in I860.3 2 As photographed, however, the intersection is highly evocative of the
3 1 Schlossman: 557.
3 2 This photograph is on the front cover of the catalogue Charles Marville:
Photographs o f Paris 1852-1878 (New York: French Institute/Alliance Fran9aise, 1981).
The explanatory caption reads:
Old street of the village of Montmartre which became part of Paris in 1860.
Famous for a night spot decorated by Andre Gill, the XIX century satirist
of the newspaper L ’ Eclipse. Gill painted a mural with a rabbit jumping out
of a saucepan, holding a bottle of wine. The place was thus named “Le
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correspondence and fusion of opposites. The street is almost perfectly divided by sunlight
and shadow, with the left wall showing black and the right bathed in white sunlight. But
notice how the one encroaches onto the other: obtruding trees on the ridge of the left wall
cast shadow onto the sunlit side of the street, and the glistening rivulet appears white as it
runs through the central gutter of the cobblestone street. Moreover, the grass on the
upper half o f the right wall, while lying in the area of sunlight, occurs dark like the
shadowed areas; the shadowed trees ford across the light and up the right-hand wall as if
being pulled back into the appropriate lair, or rather they spill down the wall and roll back
into the darkness.
These observations are clearly enabled by the duotone reproduction of mid-
nineteenth-century photography. However, as will be seen in the photos that follow in
Chapter Two, it is Marville’s composition and artful manipulation o f the physical
environment through the peculiarities of the photograph that constitute a correspondence
of its own. The dichotomy of light and darkness is appropriately most pronounced in the
street itself which leads into the intersection, the city’s physical manifestation of
convergence— a correspondence. And as the most prominent trace of human influence
upon the labyrinth of the city, the street denotes human intervention and collaboration
with the physical geography. Therefore, the photograph privileges the correspondence of
light and darkness most as an avenue that progresses toward a place of human creation
and, more importantly, of human mediation— the intersection requires a choice.
Lapin a Gill” (Gill’s rabbit) and later “Le Lapin agile” (The Agile Rabbit).
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Figure 1. Charles Marville, Rue des Saules (18e arrondissement)
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4 4
The photograph could invoke the human response even without the two sentry-like
individuals posted at two comers of the four-way intersection. But the posing figures
stamp an indelible human point o f view on this eternal memorial to an area that was soon
to be subsumed by the tentacles of the expanding metropolis and, by way of its very
existence in the photo, slated to undergo a transformation. Marville has the figures
standing at the junction of Rue Saint-Vincent (straight ahead) and Rue Cortot or Rue de
I ’ Abreuvoir (lateral streets). Interestingly, as if to further underscore the power of
correspondence within the intersection, none o f the four streets continues through the
intersection and maintains the same name, but rather all are changed having passed
through and assume a new name. Both figures are looking up Rue des Saules, at the
viewer. Because the figures are dark and stand out against the sunlit pavement and
background underneath and behind them, they are accentuated in their proximity to the
intersection, but left faceless. That they are faceless creates a human obstruction or point
of loss within the field of human mediation. As a result, they adopt Benjamin’s “unique
manifestation of distance” and become spectral, piquing the imagination of the viewer to
pass through the “forest of symbols” lurking within and around the objects in the
photograph. The destination of that movement is the aura of the spectral figures and the
contemplation of the human condition within the transformation.
Again, this is possible because of the correspondence between the physical
cityscape and a photographically induced imagination, i.e., as a result of Marville’s
composition, and not necessarily his intention. In this photograph, the correspondence
occurs at the end of the line for each of the four streets, in an intersection filled with
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45
sunlight, but nevertheless “dark and profound” by way of the spectral figures’ presence
and distant gazes. The photograph depicts the place of correspondence as indeed “vast
like both the night and light of day” in Baudelaire’s sonnet. As negation begins to work
on the imagination it summons not only a sense of loss, but a loss pervaded with
fam iliarity, as if the loss is hiding something for the unleashed imagination to discover.
Baudelaire’s reader confronts the “living pillars” and “confused words” as he “passes
through the forest of symbols which observe him with familiar glances.” The impulse of
interpretation pervades the sonnet at the point where an uncanny familiarity rises from
open-ended symbolism or awareness of loss. Beryl Schlossman explains:
The forest of symbols is endlessly enigmatic: in addition to
the connections between “foret” and “symboles” that orient
the reading of “La Nature,” the symbols are not attached to
specific meanings in the poem. They are transformed
anthropomorphically into a crowd that looks at “I’homme”
with “regards familiers.” The poetic narrator lends them the
gazes of pointed perception or attention (“Pobservent”) that
converge on the (hu)man. (576)
Likewise, as we study the photo we encounter the figures’ fettered gaze, watching us and
inviting us into the intersection and underscoring the human, interpretive dimension of the
correspondence as it relates to imminent change in this section of Paris.
Regarding the photograph’s capacity to call forth subjective license, indeed to the
extent that it may be associated with elusive notions like Baudelaire’s “correspondences”
and Benjamin’s “aura,” Marie de Thezy describes “les qualites plastiques” of Marville’s
photos:
Pleinement ordonnee a une idee d’ensemble, leur
composition nous parait si parfaite que I’on a peine a croire
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4 6
qu’il s’agisse simplement d’une image saisie dans la realite.
Marville savait choisir un premier plan obscur pour mieux
mettre en valeur la fuite d’une artere, equilibrer les plans, les
lignes, les volumes accentuees par les jeux d’une lumiere
douce.
II aimait faire poser un passant immobile, a la place
necessaire, afin de restituer a 1 ’image tout entiere une
dimension qui compense l’impuissance de la technique
d’alors a saisir la vie dans l’instantane. (22).
De Thezy’s characterization o f the photos as predicated on the idea of an ordered
wholeness concurs with the notion of a correspondence between the intersection and the
sentry-like figures. Also, the difficulty in believing that this photo’s significance is
exclusively ensconced in physical reality, as well as the ability of a posing figure to lend a
human dimension to the cold impotence of photography’s technique, reflects Benjamin’s
concession that the aura “rests on the transposition of a response common in human
relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man.” In
other words, by wedding the sentry-like figures to the intersection via Baudelaire’s sonnet
and photography’s manipulation of the physical site, we have invested the spectral figures
with the ability to look at us in return.
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Chapter Two
Marville and Baudelaire: Traces of the Practiced Hand
The celebrity of the first great modem city poet, Charles Baudelaire, needs no
introduction. But mid-nineteenth century Paris had a photographic chronicler who has
gone nearly unnoticed until quite recently. Charles Marville’s photographs of Paris during
the Second Empire provide a unique documentation of the city before and during its
transformation under Napoleon III and Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann. No other
early photographer chronicled the radical changes of Paris in such a methodical manner.
A large collection o f his photographs is now housed in the Musee Carnavalet and the
Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the later possessing nearly one thousand of
Marville’s collodion glass plate negatives and original prints. Clearly Marville was not
alone in finding the capital a captivating object of photographic study. Other
accomplished and pioneering photographers of nineteenth-century Paris, like Daguerre,
Negre, and LeSecq, produced compelling photos of the city3 3 ; and yet, it was Marville
who was most preoccupied by the aesthetics of the Parisian transformation (fig. 2).
In 1856, having recently switched to the collodion process, Marville began to
photograph the parts of Paris destined for imminent and radical change. The Prefecture of
the Seine directed his work through the early 1860s when Marville became le photographe
3 3 For a general study of Paris photographed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
see Jean-Claude Gautrand’s Photographers’ Paris (Paris: Bookking International, 1989).
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4 8
Figure 2. Charles Marville: self-portrait
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4 9
des musees imperiaux et de la Ville de Paris under the aegis of the Service des Travaux
Historiques, an association of civil servants entrusted with the documentation of the
works. In conjunction with Napoleon III Haussmann officially created the Service in 1865
as part of a bold plan to document systematically the rebuilding of Paris vis-a-vis the
extant city.3 4 Napoleon III and Haussmann felt that the new capital of Europe would be
served well by its citizens’ knowledge of what existed prior to the expansive, uniform, and
“opened up” Paris that resulted from the demolitions and new construction.3 5
Unlike his more famous successor, Eugene Atget, Marville did not feature
Parisians as the central elements of his compositions, but rather presented them as
seemingly complementary entities, apparitions haunting the more central and exalted
Parisian cityscape (fig. 3). The preeminent concern of Marville’s photographs of Paris
from 1858-1870 is the city itself namely the boulevards and structures that were slated to
3 4 Marie de Thezy writes about Marville’s enlistment as the “photographer of the city
of Paris,”: “La premiere commande de la part de celle-ci date, semble-t-il, de l’ete 1858.
Le journal La Lumiere l’annonce en ces termes: ‘M. Marville, dont le nom est bien connu
de nos lecteurs, vient d’etre charge par 1 ’administration municipale de travaux importants
de photographie dans le bois de Boulogne.’” Charles Marville: Reverberes (Paris: Tete
d’Affiche, 1993) 7, 8.
3 5 For a thorough physical, financial, and ideological account of the rebuilding of Paris
under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann, see David Pinkney’s Napoleon III and the
Rebuilding o f Paris. Howard Saalman’s Haussmann: Paris Transformed (New York:
Braziller, 1971) offers a more concise study. And most recently, David P. Jordan’s
Transforming Paris: the Life and Labors o f Baron Haussmann (New York: The Free
Press, 1995) includes many photos by Marville. Among the numerous studies in French,
the following possess notable photographic sections: Louis Cherronet, Paris Tel Ou ’ il Fut
(Paris: Editions Tel, 1943); Michel Cabaud, Paris et les Parisiens sous le Second Empire
(Paris: Editions Belfond, 1982); Yvan Christ, Les Metamorphoses de Paris (Paris: Andre
Balland Editeur, 1967); Rene Coursaget and Guiton Chabance, Dans les Rues de Paris au
Temps des Fiacres (Paris: Editions du Chene, 1950).
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Figure 3. Charles Marville, Cul-de-sac de Rohan & Rue Jardinet (6e arr.)
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51
be demolished or rerouted by the Napoleonic/Haussmannian public works complex (Fig. 4
of Rue Traversione, which disappeared with the construction of Rue Monge, is typical).
Marie de Thezy writes in the catalogue of the 1980 exposition, Charles Marville:
Photographe de Paris 1851 a 1879:3 6
Fidele executant des ambitions de l’empereur, le prefet
commen?ait a demolir la capitale pour en faire une ville
nouvelle. En ce temps ou s’epuisait la creation artistique,
ou le pastiche redondant des chefs-d’oeuvres enfin reconnus
prenait le pas sur l’innovation, le sens de “l’histoire” --
heureuse contrepartie--se developpait tres largement. Or la
photographie “s’etait fait definitivement Fauxiliaire de
l’histoire.” (17-18)3 7
Marville's capacity was of an official and predetermined nature: to photograph
methodically the old city as a means of historically validating its renovation. He was in
fact retained to produce photographic propaganda, and the possibility of an unfavorable
comparison between past and present was apparently not a concern for Paris’ architects of
change. Correspondence between the Emperor and the Prefect in 1865 regarding the
establishment of the Travaux historiques and the elaboration of an Histoire generate de
Paris underscores their faith in the historical justification of the transformation.
Haussmann wrote:
La ville de Paris s’est imposee, sous mon administration, de
ne rester etrangere a aucun des efforts de 1 ’ intelligence
contemporaine. Or Fhistoire de la capitale est encore a
faire.
3 6 Charles Marville: Photographe de Paris de 1851 a 1879 (Paris: Bibliotheque
historique de la Ville de Paris, 1980).
3 7 Thezy quotes from La Lumiere 21 June 1856: 97.
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Figure 4. Charles Marville, Rue Traversione leading to the
Sainte-Genevieve Hill, ca. 1858
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53
Napoleon Ill’s reply:
[l’Histoire generale de Paris] permettra de suivre a travers
les siecles les transformations de la ville qui, grace a votre
infatigable activite, est aujourd’hui la plus splendide et la
plus salubre des capitales de I’Europe.3 8
Napoleon III and Haussmann saw the transformation of the city and its
organizations (i.e. Travaux historiques) as both a means of projecting the capital into the
arena of “contemporary intellectual efforts,” and as a mode of capturing and preserving
the former Paris. Charles Marville was the agent through which that Janus-headed
aspiration was achieved.
Marville’s method was to capture a scene and a moment from a relatively low
point of view. Because he often framed the street with surrounding structures for the
creation of perspective, many of his photographs promote the impression of distance. Fig.
5 of the Rue du Murier, which disappeared when the Rue des Ecoles and Rue Monge were
opened, extends the viewer’s gaze in spite of the terminus created by the prominent well-
lit structure at the street’s end. Coupled with the narrowing and extending effect caused
by the encompassing facades on each side, which is typical for Marville and further
enhanced by his low vantage, distance is highlighted by the slight downgrade of the street
and the intermittent placement of the two low signposts on the street’s right edge,
followed by two carts on the left and right respectively. The objects consecutively
interrupt the eye’s movement to the terminus and underscore the remaining distance. And
yet it is difficult to
3 8 Quoted in Thezy from Histoire generate de Paris, ed. L.-M. Tisserand (Paris: Imp.
imperiale, 1866) 9, 13.
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Figure 5. Charles Marville, Rue du Murier (5e arr.)
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55
determine a central object from which the distance is measured. Let us recall that
according to Benjamin the aura emanates through a “unique phenomenon of a distance.”
Although points of reference can be distinguished in the photographs, it is the foreground
that prevails in many of Marville’s Paris photographs. Impasse des Bourdonnais and Rue
Verdelet seen from the Rue de la Grande Truanderie are typical (figs. 6 and 7). Many
focus most clearly on the cobblestones and central gutters of the streets themselves.3 9
Maria Morris Hambourg writes in Charles Marville: Photographs o f Paris at the time o f
the Second Empire'.
[Marville’s] photographs of small streets present them much
as Haussmann’s philosophy painted them: narrow, uneven
passages choked with noxious waste water. The axial and
relatively low camera position Marville selected makes them
seem so, for it emphasized the damp cobblestones and
rivulets that glimmer in the foreground of the pictures. (10)
(fig- 8)
In Rue Verdelet (fig. 7) the ostensible aim of Marville’s task is highlighted: he has
diligently defined and recorded the street that disappeared with the construction of Rue
Turbigo. In his role as chronicler, capturing the street with the morning light glistening off
the rain soaked stones in no way enhances its historical existence. But if we allow
ourselves to perceive the city both within and beyond the practical realm of Louis
Napoleon and Haussmann, as I believe Marville did, his artistry becomes transcendent.
Our perspective is low and rising, which pulls our gaze, transfixed on shimmering stones,
3 9 Jean-Claude Gautrand writes in Photographers' Paris'. “He loved photographing the
old streets just after the rain, when the light was filtered through a still-gray sky and softly
caressed the pavement. The plainness of those street scenes gave the photographs a
dreamlike quality” (intro, viii).
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Figure 6. Charles Marville, Impasse des Bourdonnais (ler arr.)
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Figure 7. Charles Marville, Rue Verdelet (ler arr.)
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58
I S .11 \ VI Kit ' —*
I DE BEURRE ET 0TJEUF8
i-ISK lU i- S (H I’tH iH \\: . \ T *
Figure 8. Charles Marville, Rue Tirechape (ler arr.)
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59
up the street along the path of light until it verges into a consistent uniform swath at the
street’s end. But, as in all art, our mind’s eye influences our bodily eye, and here we
know that the street does not really end but carries on into the city bathed in light. Our
point of loss results from the contrasting darkness of the structures’ facades, unified
through the frontal proximity across a narrow passage and in their common role as
enclosures of the human element. Most importantly, the windows of those enclosures, the
points of access, are shrouded in utter darkness. As the facade on the right proceeds up
the street, it gathers light, but the windows remain shaded. Marville instills the human
element in the city with an undeniable distance, and yet he offers a way for recovery of the
aura if we are willing to look~it lies just beyond the street and behind the darkness of the
windows.
In The Alley o f the Try-outs (fig. 9)4 0 it is not only the clear focus on the paving
stones themselves that draws our eye to the fore, but also the sharp contrast of reflecting
light between the protruding stones and the receding earth between and around them
This grid produces a pattern of consistent and intermittent stimuli upon the eye, which, as
a result of our low point of view, naturally moves forward and upward. But the gaze soon
runs into a wall— literally. To reach the wall our vision moves from the ordered texture of
the cobblestones to a random contrast of lights and darks, and the fact that we have
traversed a reassuring horizontal and come up against an arresting vertical momentarily
4 0 Gautrand writes of this 1865 photo: “This street owes its name to the fact that
people who had bought horses, donkeys and mules tried them out here. The horse market
disappeared after the Boulevard Saint-Michel was constructed” (intro).
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Figure 9. Charles Marville, The Alley o f the Try-outs, 1865
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61
seizes our perception; this obstruction is the point of loss essential to our dialectic.
Consequently what lies beyond the stone wall is cast in an exalted and mysterious distance.
By developing out of negation the movement adopts Benjamin’s take on Freud’s
derivation of consciousness. The wall affects our perception by stimulating the mind for
contemplation of the scene and preparing the imagination to address the unknown.
Because the wall effectively creates a space in which our imagination probes what is
beyond the wall, how and by whom it is used, or what will become of it, it has digested the
scene through the cushioning or parrying of consciousness and, therefore, has invoked a
very human response. Thus, the process of perceiving Marville’s photograph evolves on
the same premises as Benjamin’s notion of consciousness. It embraces the photograph as
a poetic experience.
In Place et Barriere d ’ ltalie (fig. 10) the cobblestones seem to be directly under
our feet, until we follow their shimmering ascent to “ground level,” effectively raising
them closer to our collective nose. From this perspective, half of the photograph is
“underground,” an effect that invests the three stands of structures with an intimidating
elevation and casts a rising and fading distance on the two streets that divide them. Here
the unique distance of the aura is preserved or recovered through the mystery that our
imagination embraces as a result of the photograph’s capacity to synthesize point of view,
captured moment, and the physical cityscape. Contrary to Benjamin’s assertion, if the
frozen details of this nineteenth century, thirteenth arrondissement scene bring its reality
closer spatially and humanly, they do not overcome its uniqueness, but rather glorify it; the
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Figure 10. Charles Marville. Place et Barriere d ’ ltalie
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63
aura does not wither in this photographic reproduction, it blossoms through the viewer’s
reaction, interpretation, and imagination.
The foregoing analyses indicate that Marville’s photos are capable of punctuating
the human dimension even without the presence of spectral figures and their “unretumed”
gaze. Since the objects comprising the physical landscape in these photos echo the
centrality of terrestrial things within the airy notions of Baudelaire and Benjamin, it will be
useful to move one step further regarding Marville’s objective aesthetic and its relation to
literature through paradox. In Literary Admirers o f AlfredStieglitz, F. Richard Thomas
explains the photographic quality of William Carlos Williams’ poetry:
Like the photograph, the poem, according to Williams, is
concerned with “the lifting of an environment to
expression”. . . . He forces the trivial into the foreground.
Focus becomes important. And finally the detail is used to
carry the meaning or significance of the composition.4 1 (38)
This is an aesthetic transformation stimulated by the captured moment of the photograph
and based on the elevation of the objective, immediate, real object. It is noteworthy that
Benjamin’s conception of the aura and the inanimate object speaks directly to Alfred
Stieglitz’s notion of “equivalents.” For Stieglitz it was possible to produce in a work of
art the objective equivalent of emotional experience through attention to real objects in the
real world. According to Paul Rosenfeld, Stieglitz’s photographs “lie at the point where
the objective and the subjective worlds collide,” much like Benjamin’s aura.4 2 I am
4 1 F. Richard Thomas, Literary Admirers o f Alfred Stieglitz (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois UP, 1983) 83.
4 2 Quoted in Thomas: 45.
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6 4
suggesting that these paradoxical conceptions emphasizing both human and physical
objects inspire an analysis of Marville’s photography o f the Haussmann enterprise, the
suggestive appearance of human figures in those photographs, and the subsequent
associations between the citizens and the transformation. Thomas suggests that Williams
adopted a like strategy for his compositions:
Williams defined this aesthetic in terms of the “radiant gist.”
In other words the power, strength, energy immanent
(emphasis original) in an object is immanent in all objects,
including the viewer of the object.. . . The poem should,
ideally, shock one into that mystic-one might even call it
transcendental— identification of the reader with the
objective world, much as the ancient haiku or tanka
intended. Obviously this is what Stieglitz intended in many
of his Equivalents. Williams said essentially the same thing
when he said, there are “no ideas but in things, and “ the
local is the universal,” and “in the pitch-blend/the radiant
gist.” (46)4 3
Although the photography of Charles Marville and that of Alfred Stieglitz are different in
many ways, chronologically, technologically, and culturally, Marville’s photographs of the
Haussmann works privilege not only the physical city in various stages of transformation
but, moreover, two aspects that are tied conceptually to the paradoxes of Stieglitz and
Benjamin: the particular or “trivial” objects, and the spectral but signifying human figures.
In a more self-consciously theoretical mode, Roland Barthes’ essay, “The
Photographic Message,” considers the unique and representational qualities of
4 3 Such synechochic tropes also pertain to earlier periods of course, such as William
Blake’s lines: “To see a world in in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower,/Hold
infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour.”
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65
photography and what it means to compare a photograph to a text.4 4 Two areas of
Barthes’ essay are particularly suggestive about these relationships. The first is the
“photographic paradox,” which states that the photographic message transmits the literal
reality of the scene itself. Barthes states:
From the object to its image there is of course a reduction—
in proportion, perspective, color— but at no time is this
reduction a transformation. In order to move from the
reality to its photograph it is in no way necessary to divide
up this reality into units and to constitute these units as
signs, substantially different from the object they
communicate; there is no necessity to set up a relay, that is
to say a code, between the object and its image.. . . It is a
message without a code. (196)
While other art forms like painting are messages without a code, according to Barthes,
they all “develop . . . a supplementary message, in addition to the analogical content itself
(scene, object, landscape).” There is a denoted message and a connoted one, society or
culture’s reception of it. But photography seems to resist this duality of messages through
the dominance of its denotation. Barthes writes:
In front of a photograph, the feeling of... analogical
[denotative] plenitude is so great that the description o f a
photograph is literally impossible; to describe consists
precisely in joining to the denoted message a relay or
second-order message derived from a code which is of
language. (198)
4 4 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1982) 194-210. When Barthes discusses the “text” in relation
to the picture, he means, however, the caption, headline, or accompanying article to a
press photo. Marville’s photos of Paris are of course more documentary than popular
press; they were not “intended” to accompany Baudelaire’s texts— that association is my
own.
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But Barthes, perhaps sensing that interpretation goes beyond simple description,
immediately states that, notwithstanding this denotative nature of photography, its
objectivity “has every chance of being mythical.” Perhaps “deception” better describes the
mimetic purity of photography. The photograph is “read” and “connected. . . by the
public that consumes it to a traditional stock of signs.” Barthes concludes:
The photographic paradox can then be seen as the
coexistence of two messages, the one without a code (the
photographic analogue), the other with a code (the “art,” or
treatment, or the “writing,” or the rhetoric, of the
photograph); structurally, the paradox is... that the
connoted (or coded) message develops on the basis of a
message without a code. (198-99)
Barthes’ retreat from the totalizing denotative nature of photography corresponds
to Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s synthesis of the objective and subjective realms, as well as
to the kind o f reading and interpretation that this study makes o f Marville’s photographs.
Adopting that comprehensive aesthetic attenuates the paradox of denotation and
connotation that Barthes relates; that is, the revelatory nature of the perceived immediate
object does not submit to connotation, but rather engages and defines it. “No ideas but in
things.”
Ulrich Baer presents a clear, concise, and original comparison of a selection of
Marville photographs with Baudelaire’s criticism of photography in the Salon o f 1859f
The thesis of his argument claims that these particular photographs engage the involuntary
memory while “encroaching upon the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary,”
4 5 Ulrich Baer, “Photography and History in Baudelaire,” Semiotics 1995 (1996): 313-
320.
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Baudelaire’s greatest fear. They do so by featuring an “immense and dramatically clouded
sky that is anchored. . . by a narrow, dark band of Parisian skyline for which the sun has
almost set.” For Baer, the photos “immobilize the one natural sight everyone knew to be
in constant flux and motion” while “breaking down [representational] categories and
hovering between the literal and the figural, between materiality and transcendence, and
between allegory and the real.” Although Baer privileges the “melancholic knowledge”
generated by the “emblem [sky photos] of an absolutely unique and unrepeatable moment
that is known to have vanished,” he cautions against viewing a photograph “as a symbol
of the passage of time which constitutes human history.” His project is to present these
photographs as historical because they record without memory (Le. without our doing)
and therefore constitute an “allegory of history’s elusiveness.” He does this by
emphasizing an ephemeral yet material object and reminding us that “since a photograph
retains the object’s incontestable, material reality, it falls short of, or exceeds, an
allegorical reading, which depends on extrapolation and tabulation— on something that is
imagined and not real.” This is precisely where our points of view differ.
Baer focuses on an ephemeral, transient object and constructs historical
significance around it through photographic representation. I place Marville’s very real,
urban, and historical depictions of structures, streets, and people at the center of my thesis
and imbue them with allegorical significance through photography and literature. His
photos “record a reality that resists complete integration into the imagination ...”
(emphasis original). My Marville photos record an historical, documentary reality that
invites integration into the imagination.
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I agree with Baer’s association of photographs with the involuntary memory, and
not only the voluntary memory as Baudelaire prescribed. However, Baer curiously depicts
the sky photographs as the exclusive agents of this capacity and specifically exempts the
majority of Marville’s photographs that feature city structures and citizens. The premise
upon which he bases this exclusion, that we must resort to a second image or specialized
knowledge to determine the fete of the city photos while no such knowledge is necessary
for the clouds, remains unclear to me; both sets of photos “bring to mind a sight
involuntarily, against our will,” and show something . . . “of which we have the certainty
that it took place in the past.” Marville’s city photos do indeed require reference to an
outside body of knowledge to confirm their fete, which was precisely the point of his work
for Haussmann and Louis Napoleon: the documentation of what would no longer be; as
such his work provides indisputable evidence of “what has been.” I suggest that the
sensibility Marville exercised in composing the sky photos also determined his subjective,
artistic, and evocative compositions of a transforming Paris. In short, the latter photos
call for an allegorical reading, much like Baudelaire’s poetry, and the necessary
“extrapolation and tabulation” that Baer restricts to fiction is the interpretive work of the
imagination performing the same function as the natural volatility of moving sky.
Such interpretation would very likely, for Baer, fall into a dated category of
historiography where the past was “entirely subject to interpretation and conflicting
viewpoints.” This is based on the fact that “with the invention of photography, there
exists for the first time incontestable proof that reality exceeds human perception.” Baer
asserts that the sky photos are “nothing but fact” and “do not prove the existence or
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reality of anyth in g but themselves.” This “strict confinement to itself’ or “the
photograph’s resistance to be unfolded into a narrative. . . is what constitutes modem
historical consciousness” (emphasis original). But proof that reality exceeds human
perception, something that was surely surmised even before photography, is a strong,
perhaps irresistible, invitation to further interpretation. A Romantic impulse, one wonders
how Baudelaire foiled to see it as such, notwithstanding his obsession with the novelty of
the technology and its exactitude. This imaginative response neither undermines
photography’s fragmentation of reality nor offers access to an encompassing knowledge
that reveals an eternal truth.
As Baer correctly states, photography does indeed “shock into the realization that
history is a desultory succession of disparate events that must be connected by an act of
the will or by creative intervention. . . . ” In other words, photography calls for an
allegorical reading. Baer sees this intervention as creative but not valid, at least not as a
tool for historiography. He concludes the above statement by claiming that the realization
engendered by photography also insists that “any such imposition of form is fictitious or
an allegorization.” Once again, I agree that this response is a conscious one and that its
departure from the denotative purity of the photograph is understood by the viewer. It is,
however, an aesthetic reflex that is stimulated by the photographer’s composition, the
unique physical properties of the photograph (such as captured moment), and the viewer’s
imagination. Unlike Baer, I contend that such a reading can intensify our understanding of
the historical context (here it is Paris transforming under the Second Empire), much like
Baudelaire’s fictions and allegories center on an almost neurotic contemplation of identity
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and psychic disorientation. Indeed most of my interpretations of the photographs focus on
a Barthesian punctum that incites contemplation of an elusive phenomenon. To this end, I
call such readings “auratic.” They offer no epistemological certainty, only a reading bom
o f im agination directed by physical reality. Baer writes that “this act of connecting events
which no longer follow a larger pattern inevitably glosses over the unresolvable nature of
each event.” I see allegorization as a means of gaining deeper insight into such an event.
Interpreting city photographs in this manner rejects the notion that “incontestable
proof that reality exceeds human perception” preempts that perception. I argue that it
hones and directs it. The past can only be subject to interpretation, especially when the
reality that photography presents to us confirms that it had previously escaped our
perception. Allegorical readings of a photograph do not propose a second chance to
relegate photography to “servant of the arts” or to “amplify the voluntary memory,” but
rather they remind us that photography can feed the imagination and engage our
interpretive sensibilities in a unique and powerful way, a way that is different, but equal to
that in literature.
If we designate as aura the associations which, at home in
the memoire involontaire, tend to cluster around the object
of a perception, then its analogue in the case o f a
utilitarian object is the experience which has left traces o f
the practiced hand. (“Some Motifs” 186; emphasis mine)
In the same vein, if we accept Benjamin’s claim and understand the source of the
aura to be an inspiring and determining experience that guides the traces left by the
practiced hand, then reversing the process and starting with the traces can bring about the
aura’s recovery. The premise of this study perceives the traces as results of the practiced
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hands of a poet and a photographer, notwithstanding the objections of Benjamin and
Baudelaire that claim photography to be outside the realm of art and, therefore, excluded
as a source of involuntary memory and imagination. What follows is a close examination
of those traces.
Reading Baudelaire’s texts in light of Benjamin’s concept of the aura and
photography suggests that Baudelaire evokes the aura while “disintegrating” it.
Approaching the photos from a like perspective further suggests that photography is not
restricted to aiding memory but, in disaccord with Benjamin, does return the gaze and
stimulates associations around the object perceived. The grounding of objects (human and
inanimate) in the changing city provides a final common ground in the elevation of the
immediate as a signifying element.
The human figures in many of the Paris photos are spectral, even though many are
posing, fully conscious of the photographic moment (fig. 11). Hambourg writes:
Traces of human beings are everywhere in the photographs,
but most of them seem an accidental or incidental concern,
as indeed they were in the scheme of transformation. (10)
A strong dehumanizing element is at work, even though the human figures lend purpose to
the process of transformation through number, pose, and function. Marville’s spectral
figures ostensibly operate as dehumanizing aspects of “mechanical reproduction” and the
unretumed gaze, two elements implicated by Benjamin in the deterioration of the aura; but
they then stimulate, from a point of loss, an aesthetic and intellectual reaction that
recovers the aura. It is precisely because the gaze is not returned that the viewer is incited
to react. What’s more, as the comparison to poetry indicates, this dynamic mirrors the
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Figure 11. Charles Marville, Digging on the Avenue de I ’ Opera at Argenteuil, 1876
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paradoxical evocation of a human response to exile, unretumed gazes and unrequited love,
death in life, and the progressive dehumanization discovered in the detail of the violated
and sanitized city of Baudelaire’s texts. My application of the theories of Benjamin,
Baudelaire, and Barthes operates in conjunction with the photograph’s unique
characteristic o f captured moment and the viewer’s subsequent ability to observe a
particular detail, object, or thing; it essentially permits the contemplation o f the universal
from the local. “The local is the universal.”
In fig. 12, Digging on the Avenue de I ’ Opera (Site o f the Butte des Moulins), the
scene is one of a city in the throes of a wholesale restructuring. It is therefore on a
threshold: what was has been effectively effaced and what will be has not yet materialized-
-this is its most vulnerable moment, an instant that naturally invites contemplation of
human capacity and status with regard to the urban metamorphosis. At the centermost
point of the photo’s foreground is a cart, as if on display. The workers circle the cart at
various distances, in or around the excavation, but all erect and at attention. The resulting
image pays homage to the excavation and its principle agent, the instrument that most
ostensibly carries away the old Paris and the sense of security that comes with familiarity
of place. The public works of Louis Napoleon and Haussmann proved to be of enormous
benefit to Parisians in many ways, not the least of which was steady employment.
However, we must recall that the grands travaux progressed imperiously as the
touchstone of an empire eager to seal its legacy in the eyes of the world. That such
submission was to some degree imposed is supported by the unchallenged fact that many
Parisians were displaced by the transformation. And yet there is something in the
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Figure 12. Charles Marville, Digging on the Avenue de I ’ Opera
(Site o f the Butte des Moulins)
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photograph itself that subtly, yet defiantly, sets off the human dimension within the scene
more powerfully than historical context. To the upper right of the photo’s center, among
the excavation and violated structures, lies the only vestige of the site’s former life: the
undisturbed sign of a boulangerie. It is a powerful sign of human sustenance and physical
continuity among the bones of a city. And in allegiance to the “correspondences” as
avenues to the aura, the sign evokes the spirituality of broken bread. The sign takes on
greater auratic authority if we recall that the lacerated cityscape represents Benjamin’s
notion of aura as the associations around a sacred object, or work of art. The simple sign,
in conjunction with the men standing solemnly around the symbol of a willing, but false,
Messiah, produces a powerful mass indeed. This photograph has not declined the aura,
but rather presented it to the viewer through the frozen composition of detail and context.
That so much can rise from such a simple detail is a testament to the imagination.
But it is also the result of an accident of sorts, or what Roland Barthes refers to as the
punctum. He explains in Camera Lucida how a detail such as the boulangerie sign can
ignite our subjective faculties of interpretation and association:
It is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it
like an arrow, and pierces me.... This second element
which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call
punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole—
and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that
accident which pricks me.. .. I feel that its mere presence
changes my reading, that I am looking at a new photograph,
marked in my eyes with a higher value. This “detail” is the
punctum.. . . However lightning-like it may be, the
punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of
expansion. This power is often metonymic.. . . (here, the
photograph really transcends itself: is this not the sole proof
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of its art? To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a
sign but the thing itself?).4 6
Fig. 13, The First Demolition Works at the Avenue de VOpera, portrays a blurring of
interiors and exteriors, or rather, an intrusion of exteriors onto the interior realm
traditionally reserved for private, human affairs. The windows of the structure on the left
have been left “open”; there is no glass, the least impermeable of barriers separating the
two spheres, and only one shutter remains, dismantled, crooked, and obtruding into the
structure. Therefore, it is possible to see into the violated interior, where the destruction
and disorder o f the street have taken over. Barthes writes:
Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its
referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to
the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into
the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of
the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly.. . .
(Camera Lucida 98)
The remains of the structure on the far right provide a more radicalized perspective on this
movement. With pillars of an archway standing unadorned, there is an unfettered view
onto the exterior facade of the structures standing behind; here the transgression is
complete. Uniting the structures on each side are the spectral figures standing among the
debris o f the grands travaux. Paradoxically, the workers are the agents of these intrusive
forays, but they appear inconsequential or trivial nonetheless. (Benjamin would most
likely remind us that their participation in the works, or their need for employment, in no
way equates conscious approval or atones for the exploitation of their labor power under
4 6 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 26-7, 42, 45.
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Figure 13. Charles Marville, The First Demolition Works at the Avenue de I ’ Opera
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the commodity driven economy of the empire.) Comingled with the transformation's
waste, they comprise the avenue o f rubble that funnels into the opening between the two
structures and leads up to Charles Gamier’s Paris Opera, finished in 1875, only a year
before this photo was composed. The imposing Opera stands as a monument to the glory
of the arts and also as the quintessence of a public gathering place, a formal place to be
seen for those “of a certain class.”
Thus the changing cityscape of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century constitutes the
aspect of loss through which Baudelaire and Marville produce a paradoxical response and
evocation of individual identity. Privileging disorder and the grotesque as objects of
poetry marked Baudelaire as the first great modem city poet. Such a grotesque,
disordered world is also the place of epiphany where the correspondence of physical and
spiritual realms prompts the recovery of the aura through our reaction. This is exemplified
most poignantly in the fifth poem of the “Tableaux parisiens.”
LES SEPT VIEILLARDS
A Victor Hugo
Fourmillante cite, cite pleine de reves,
Oil le spectre, en plein jour, raccroche le passant!
Les mysteres partout coulent comme des seves
Dans les canaux etroits du colosse puissant.
Un matin, cependant que dans la triste rue
Les maisons, dont la brume allongeait la hauteur,
Simulaient les deux quais d’une riviere accrue,
Et que, decor semblable a fame de facteur,
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Un brouillard sale et jaune inondait tout l'espace,
Je savais, roidissant mes nerfs coirane un heros
Et discutant avec mon ame deja lasse,
Le faubourg secoue par les lourds tombereaux.
Tout a coup, un vieillard dont les guenilles jaunes
Imitaient la couleur de ce ciel pluvieux,
Et dont 1 ’aspect aurait fait pleuvoir les aumones,
Sans la mechancete qui luisait dans ses yeux,
M’apparut. On eut dit sa prunelle trempee
Dans le fiel; son regard aiguisait les frimas,
Et sa barbe a longs poils, roide comme une epee,
Se projetait, pareille a celle de Judas.
II n’etait pas voute, mais casse, son echine
Faisant avec sajambe un parfait angle droit,
Si bien que son baton, parachevant sa mine,
Lui donnait la toumure et le pas maladroit
D’un quadrupede infirme ou d’un juif a trois pattes.
Dans la neige et la boue il allait s’empetrant,
Comme s’il ecrasait des morts sous ses savates,
Hostile a l’univers plutot qu’indifferant.
Son pareil le suivant: barbe, oeil, dos, baton, loques,
Nul trait ne distinguait, du meme enfer venu,
Ce jumeau centenaire, et ces spectres baroques
Marchaient du meme pas vers un but inconnu.
A quel complot infame etais-je done en butte,
Ou quel mechant hasard ainsi m’humiliait ?
Car je comptai sept fois, de minute en minute,
Ce sinistre vieillard qui se multipliait!
Que celui-la qui rit de mon inquietude,
Et qui n’est pas saisi d’un frisson fratemel,
Songe bien que malgre tant de decrepitude
Ces sept monstres hideux avaient fair etem el!
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Aurais-je, sans mourir, contemple le huitieme,
Sosie inexorable, ironique et fatal,
Degoutant Phenix, fils et pere de lui-meme ?
— Mais je toumai le dos au cortege infernal.
Exaspere comme un ivrogne qui voit double,
Je rentrai, je fermai ma porte, epouvante,
Malade et morfondu, l’esprit fievreux et trouble,
Blesse par le mystere et par 1 ’absurdite!
Vainement ma raison voulait prendre la barre;
Latempete enjouant deroutait ses efforts,
Et mon ame dansait, dansait, vieille gabarre
Sans mats, sur une mer monstrueuse et sans bords !
(LFM 331-33)
In this poem Baudelaire constructs a model o f the dialectical power of intertwining
opposites out o f the city. It is a bestial, yet natural city (“Fourmillante cite”), and also a
dream-like, mysterious place (“pleine de reves”). This first line alerts us to the poem’s
grounding in paradox; meaning will not be provided, but rather may be stimulated in the
imagination of the reader as he/she moves through the streets of Paris with the poet-
fldneur. The streets comprise the stage on which the experience of these poems unfolds;
as charted ways through the disorder of the city they are the closest thing to a map that
Baudelaire provides. Indeed, the poem functions through suggestive and multi
dimensional images rather than direct statements of emotion; as a result, a gap is left to be
filled by the imagination. Anna Balakian writes in regard to Baudelaire’s influence on the
Symbolist poets: “There is never the sense of triumph of comprehension; the message
remains as ambiguous as it is succinct, like the visions that come in the dream state or in
the midst of a drug orgy ...” (49). Also, the first line’s fusion of purposeful, seething ants
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with a dream state foreshadows Baudelaire’s hypnotic movement from image to image
and the city as a place o f living death.
Indeed the motif of living death in Baudelaire’s opening is accented by the spectral
human presences in Marville’s photograph (fig. 13) who are nonetheless industriously
engaged. Also, the affiche for the newspaper Le Petit Journal and the signs “Cafe” and
“Biere,” posted on the center and right comer of the left-hand structure, comprise traces
of diversion and vanished human presence.
In obedience to the “correspondences,” the second line’s union of the ghost and a
passer-by, in broad daylight, posits mystery in the narrow streets of Paris as the realm of
revelation. Baudelaire creates that revelation from equal measures of place (city) and
atmosphere (mind), each feeding or feeding off of the other in la triste rue: the fog in the
second stanza distorts the height of the houses so that they resemble the wharves on an
overflowing river; the poet-flaneur likens the effect of an encroaching foul yellow mist, so
similar to the distorting, unreal soul of the actor on his own wearied soul, to that of heavy
wagons shattering the morning calm of the city quarter through which he walks; and
although it is the suddenness of the vieillard’ s hideous debut that strikes the reader most,
his yellow rags link the mind of the poet-flaneur, and of the reader, to the deterministic
atmosphere (“la couleur de ce ciel pluvieux”) that permeates and becomes one with the
city.4 7 Even the construction of the third stanza presents the tormented mind of the poet
4 7 Robert-Benoit Cherix relates the imagery of the poem to the tradition of Poe’s
“Histoire extraordinaire,” but then distinguishes Baudelaire’s work by writing: “il s’agit
plutot d’une parente, si 1 ’on peut dire, d’atmosphere.” Essai d ’ une Critique Integrale:
Commentaire des “ Fleurs du Mai” (Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1962) 329.
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(“Je suivais, roidissant mes nerfs comme un heros / Et discutant avec mon ame deja lasse”)
encompassed by atmosphere (“Un brouillard sale et jaune”) and place (“Le fauborg secoue
par les lourds tombereaux”).
On the convergence of objective and subjective realms in the city of Paris, John E.
Jackson writes:
Paris, dans Les Fleur du Mai, est d’abord cet espace de
representation ou s’objective l’intuition interieure, ou
s’etablit la correspondance du sujet a la realite qui
l’entoure. “Fourmillante cite, cite pleine de reves”— ce vers
liminaire des “Sept Vieillards” indique bien l’echange pour
ainsi dire naturel entre l’exteriorite du site citadin et
l’interiorite du je qui en per?oit la qualite onirique. Le
chiasme ici a valeur de symetrie: au foisonnement de la cite
repond la sensibilite de la conscience du promeneur.4 8
Therefore, the vieillard as determined by both the physical and psychic
environment, and operating according to the notion of “correspondences,” is the
embodiment of the poet’s mind in the city of Paris. The characteristics attributed to the
vieillard betray Baudelaire’s perception of the city’s transforming power. The stanzas
progress according to the mind of the poet -flaneur under assault from the stimuli of urban
shocks after registering them retrospectively— he speaks of a past experience. The
grotesqueness of the vieillard attests to the perversion the city may wreak on the mind.
Benjamin quotes Friedrich Engels in regard to the isolation of city crowds:
And still they crowd by one another as though they had
nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and
their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his
own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing
4 8 La Mort Baudelaire: Essai sur Les Fleurs du Mai (Neuchatel: Editions a la
Baconniere, 1982) 85.
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stream of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour
another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference,
the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest,
becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these
individuals are crowded together, within a limited space.
(“Second Empire” 58)
But it is the vieillard’ s multiplication that infects the grotesqueness with a contagion that
represents the city’s provocation of a psychic disorientation. The multiplying is the
disorder o f the city unleashed upon the mind with a vengeance. Baudelaire depicts this
malady of reason without respite and without escape, for the city’s stimuli are constant
(“Ces septs monstres hideux avaient Fair etemelF’).4 9 That the vieillards may be a
construct of a troubled mind provides no solace for the poet -flaneur, since the trouble
rises from the convergence of the mind and the street (“Exaspere comme un ivrogne qui
voit double, / Je rentrai, je fermai ma porte, epouvante, / Malade et morfondu, 1 ’esprit
fievreux et trouble, / Blesse par le mystere et par l’absurdite!”).
Benjamin couches the flaneur in socioeconomic terms, explaining that the petty
bourgeoisie of Baudelaire’s Paris had not yet become conscious of its proletarianization
under the commodity economy. It therefore could produce flaneurs, passing their time
4 9 Jackson draws attention to perpetuity of the city’s disorienting stimuli by associating
the seemingly endless multiplication of the vieillards with time:
. . . le vieillard des “Sept Vieillards” suscite sans doute une
telle angoisse dans “Fame deja lasse” du poete par le fait
que sa septuple multiplication symbolise une sorte
d’incarnation etemisee d’un Mai qui se confond par ailleurs
avec le temps.... ce huitieme, recommen^ant le cycle des
sept— qui se confond ici avec le chiffre hebdomadaire— eut
signifie, a coup sur, la perpetuation du temps comme
dimension de la decripitude. (90)
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and pursuing enjoyment. But the limitations of class permitted only an enjoyment o f
society, rather than enjoyment in society. He writes:
If it wanted to achieve virtuosity in this kind of enjoyment,
it could not spurn empathizing with commodities.. . .
Finally, it had to approach this destiny with a sensitivity that
perceives charm even in damaged and decaying goods.
Baudelaire. . . possessed this sensitivity. To it he owed his
enjoyment of this society as someone who had already half
withdrawn from it.
In the attitude of someone with this kind of enjoyment he
let the spectacle of the crowd act upon him. The deepest
fascination of this spectacle lay in the fact that as it
intoxicated him it did not blind him to the horrible social
reality. He remained conscious of it, though only in the way
in which intoxicated people are “still” aware of reality. That
is why in Baudelaire the big city almost never finds
expression in the direct presentation of its inhabitants.
(“Second Empire” 59)
The psychic disorientation that “Les Sept Vieillards” inflict upon the poet-flaneur,
the effect of which is very much an intoxication, incorporates the aura through
synaesthesia. Here “F expansion des choses infinies,” or the stimulus for the connection
between the mind and the senses, is not incense, although Baudelaire certainly provides an
atmosphere with smells, colors, and sounds, but rather the multiplication of the old men.
The poet-flaneur is thrown into a “deep, dark unison as vast as night,” but the old men are
far removed from the “sweet sound o f oboes” or the “flesh of children.” The infinite is
embodied in the finite just as intensely through grotesque multiplication, but it is now an
increased sense of awareness that leaves the poet-flaneur reeling. His reason probes both
sensual and spiritual realms, stunned and disoriented, and his soul is set adrift on a
boundless sea (“Vainement ma raison voulait prendre la barre; / La tempete en jouant
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85
deroutait ses efforts, / Et mon ame dansait, dansait, vieille gabarre / Sans mats, sur ime
mer monstrueuse et sans bords!”). Synaesthesia invokes the aura just as it does in
“Correspondances,” but now the paradoxical fauborg and its attendant atmosphere
comprise the equation, and the poet-flaneur ’ s response is decidedly urban, shocking,
mysterious, and absurd. There are, indeed, two responses: with the atmosphere doubling
as the poet-fldneur’ s sensibilities, the first is the appearance and multiplication of the
vieillards, while the second is his own reaction to that response— a quintessentially human
response to a construct of mind operating as a point of loss.
Much like Benjamin’s willingness to interpret the objective city in Atget’s photos
as dramatic narrative, Marville produces a similar embrace of the objective or real object,
the city, and through an ironic twist invokes a human effect. The dynamic o f metropolitan
Paris, multiplied by the radical transformations taking place, provided Marville with a
dizzying display of man and object. Furthermore, the extensive and invasive nature of
certain aspects of the transformation inspired much controversy over not only the
changing aspect of the inanimate city, but more importantly, over the effects of those
changes on the citizenry and its relation to the city.5 0 Given the authority of Marville’s
mandate, surely it would have been possible to photograph the construction sites with no
workers present, had that been the aim. The marginal workers are not only the vehicle
through which the transformation progresses, but they also function in these photos as the
embodiment of the citizenry by which any city reform will be received and judged.
Because the human figures are not emphasized in the photographs, and because in the
5 0 See Georges Pillement, Destruction de Paris (Paris: Editions B. Grasset, 1941).
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8 6
eternal moment of the photograph we may peruse the particular objects and seemingly
trivial details, our eyes are attracted to them and our imagination is stimulated. This is the
unreal privilege of photography, a privilege that allows the viewer to observe an
unchanging scene, constantly focusing on selected (even minute) phenomena that do not
disappear through the movement of daily activity or the passage of time. Gautrand writes
that Marville:
succeeded in capturing in his photographs the soul of the
city. His pictures offer a profound view of Paris and,
ironically, though often devoid of people, possess the
richness of a warm humanity.. . . Other photography
historians have justly written that the Paris of Balzac,
Eugene Sue or Zola is recreated before our eyes in these
pictures, (intro, viii)
At first glance, fig. 14 (another perspective on the Butte des Moulins, fig. 12)
seems to depict no people at all, only an excavation site, a stray dog on the sidewalk,
horses, and carts. But much like the forms of an Impressionist painting, or “Les Sept
Vieillards,” if we persist, figures begin to appear, and then multiply. The eye first catches
the figure to right and directly in front of the small shack. It then perceives a line of
workers spanning the ridge of the excavation, figures that previously blended into the
earth tone behind them and thereby “raised” the ridge slightly higher than reality. This is
very much a place “ou le spectre, en plein jour, raccroche le passant,” as the eye moves
over the captured scene like the poet-_/7aneur through the city. The photo, clearly a
“fauborg secoue par les lourds tombereaux,” now evolves under our gaze and through a
multiplication that indeed approaches “absurdite,” into a “fourmillante cite.” Because our
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87
Figure 14. Charles Marville. Buttes des Moulins (different perspective)
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8 8
gaze moves naturally toward borders and contrast, we find our eyes drifting upward from
the ridge of workers to the highest point under the gray sky. It first occurs to the mind
that the protuberances lined up on the roofs of the structures must be stacks or vents, just
as those in fig. 11. But a closer examination confirms a strange suspicion: while a few are
clearly stacks, most are more o f the indefatigable spectral figures, five storeys up. In this
photo the more the figures are marginalized, the more persistent and seemingly defiant
they become, unwilling to yield control— they have the “air etemel” o f the vieillards. We
arrive at an increased sense of awareness about the figures, or are compelled to think
about their position in the scheme of the transformation as a whole. Their marginalization
works to increase consciousness of distance, and therefore calls forth their aura.
Proceeding from Benjamin’s conception of photography and the aura, it is through
suggestive paradox that Marville’s photography of Paris creates a perspective that allows
the human element to operate prominently in interpretation. Paradox operates as a venue
through which the observer can humanize, read, or interpret the photograph, and thereby
link the visual representation o f the photograph to the literary text. Because the
photograph provides an impossible vision of moment and scene, an historical synthesis of
time and space, it permits a continuous examination of the photographic subjects and,
therefore, constitutes a unique form of seeing and perceiving. For both Benjamin and
Baudelaire, this process does not constitute a genuine art form that invokes as a means of
perception the memoire involontaire, that part of our perceptive and intellectual ability
operating beyond our control; photography is too direct, literal, authoritarian, and
“cruel.” It is, to use another of Benjamin’s terms, “mechanical reproduction.”
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Because Benjamin associates the experience of the aura and response in human
relationships with the inanimate or natural object, it is reasonable to suggest that a human
perspective derived from the aura or soul can be discovered through the immediate or
actual. Most likely Benjamin would not have agreed that photography is capable of
invoking the aura through human figures since the camera does not return our gaze. But
the figures in the photograph return the gaze of the viewer in a manner similar to the
poetic figures that appear in much of Baudelaire’s poetry of Paris.
Marville’s task was considerably more elastic and permissive than one might
assume, given the official mandate from which his role evolved. How and from where
does one photograph a street that is to disappear? Undoubtedly faithful as a
doucumentarian of Haussmann’s transformations, Marville’s photographs produce
nevertheless an elusive image that solicits aesthetic interpretations not wholly compatible
in spirit with the imperious Haussmannian enterprise: namely that the spectral figures’
distant gaze engenders a reaction in the viewer that recuperates or provides access to the
aura, therefore humanizing our interpretation of the city and its transformation. Because
Marville’s technique, i.e., his use of focus, composition, point o f view, and frame,
engenders such interpretations, interpretations that rise from the unique aesthetic qualities
of photography and their collaboration with the physical objects of his compositions, his
intent is not at issue in this study. Moreover, the breadth of his work in documenting the
new public amenities as well as the old Paris, not to mention the exclusivity of his post
under Haussmann and Napoleon III, surely renders any resentment of the transformation
unlikely. However, his technique and the peculiar aesthetic nature of photographs in
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Figure 15. Charles Marville, Les Carrieres d ’ Amerique
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general permit, indeed prompt, new space for interpretation and association. Marville’s
photographs instil not so much a rejection as a hesitancy that mirrors a larger reluctance or
caution to embrace the new city and the burgeoning industrial society that pervaded it.
Les Carrieres d ’ Amerigue (fig. 15) offers an image of nearly complete desolation
on the very outskirts of Paris in the nineteenth arrondissement. The flickering black and
white film highlights the grainy texture of the disturbed earth, the impact of which is only
equalled by the debris strewn about in the foreground. There seems to be no human
element at all, but our eyes soon focus on a figure just to the left of the cart where an “X”
literally marks the spot. The figure appears jet black against a gray and white background,
almost in lively defiance. But the darkness of the spectral figure may also appear funereal
if we perceive him figuratively within the mass excavation (grave) behind him; he seems to
be standing on a precipice, and the back wall of earth encompasses his figure completely.
The team of white horses pulling a train of carts brings to mind angels of death and their
conveyance to “the other side”; the carts are the very same as the single one marked by
the “X,” underscoring the dark figure’s placement directly between them. Furthermore,
the carts constitute the means by which the man’s grave has been dug, physically removing
the earth and altering the city as he and his fellow Parisians have known it. That the
marked cart stands so prominently in the foreground calls attention to the train behind the
horses metonymically, emphasizing the size of each “box” and depicting the conveyance as
predator of both existent landscape and man. The three “mourners” on the horizon invoke
an acknowledgment of loss through death and the essential distance of the aura--there is
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perhaps no stronger embrace of life than when in the presence of death, which gains even
greater poignancy through the inhuman perspective of photography’s captured moment.
The presence of death in a photograph takes form through the imposition of
distance upon the living and, therefore, invites the often invoked metaphor of the mask.
As the embodiment o f an unretumed gaze and distance, the mask functions as a disguise,
or again, a stim ulating obstacle or point of loss that invokes a reaction and, subsequently,
contemplation of the aura. Barthes writes veiy suggestively about how we construe death
in photography: “For the photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning
dissociation o f consciousness from identity” ( < Camera Lucida 12). He then associates this
gap with “that faint uneasiness which seizes me when I look at ‘myself on a piece of
paper” (13). Recalling Baudelaire’s multiplying vieillard as the incarnation of the poet-
fldneur's state of mind within the city assumes a new significance with regard to Barthes’
“dissociation of consciousness from identity” and “uneasiness.” The disorientation and
allusion to a dream state in that poem speak directly to a loss of control, both psychic and
aesthetic, that proceeds through multiplication and evolves into a form of death. This is
echoed in Barthes:
This disturbance is ultimately one of ownership.. . . The
portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-
repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In
front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am,
the one I want others to think I am, the one the
photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to
exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not
stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am
(or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a
sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture
(comparable to certain nightmares). In terms of image-
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repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that
very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither
subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an
object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of
parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter. (13-14;
emphasis original)
Barthes’ reference to a “subject who feels he is becoming an object” adumbrates
the inherent distance in the disguise o f the mask. An inevitable characteristic of such a
reification and slide toward death is a sense of obfuscation, of something that suppresses
control over self-identity; that cloud is the omnipotence of the image in a photograph~it is
the mask. Operating as points of loss that effect the acknowledgment of distance in a
photograph, both death and the mask invoke an aura-pursuing reaction. It is interesting
that Barthes’ description of what the subject of a photograph experiences— ”a micro
version of death” and “becoming a specter”— calls on the participation of the viewer
through the gap that it leaves. Since it is a micro version of death, or as Barthes puts it,
“Total Image, which is to say, Death in person” (14), there is still breathing space,
aesthetically and physically speaking. “Specter” places the same emphasis on image, albeit
on a metaphysical plane, by its very definition: “specter”— 1. “An apparition, a ghost.”
And “apparition”- 1. “The action o f appearing or becoming visible, esp. where this is
unexpected or unusual.” c. “The Epiphany of Christ.” 2. “Semblance, appearance;
aspect.” 3. “A ghost, a phantom.”5 1 Both invite a recovery predicated on shoring up the
distance between life, as usual control of self-image, and death, as “becoming a specter,”
through a focus on visual perception. But the recovery comes from the viewer who,
5 1 The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 1993 ed.
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building on Barthes’ description, perceives according to the objectified subject in the
photo becoming pure subject again. That is to say, the “object” of the photo (its
photographed subject) dictates to the human sensibilities of the viewer. This humanization
is what permits Barthes to recover the aura in the photo of his deceased mother.
Barthes further characterizes the notions of death and the mask as expressions of
and for the living by associating them with the theater:
Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography
touches art, but by Theater.. . . But if Photography seems
to me closer to the Theater, it is by way of a singular
intermediary. . . : by way of Death. We know the original
relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first
actors separated themselves from the community by playing
the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate
oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the
whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the
painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup to
the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask. .. [sic] Now
it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph;
however “lifelike” we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be
lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of
death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of
Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up
face beneath which we see the dead. (31 -32)
In the same vein, Baudelaire relates the inundating and transforming dirty yellow mist that
symbolizes the poet-flaneur's mind to the protean nature of the actor (“decor semblable a
l’ame de l’acteur). Here the mask is the grotesque appearance and multiplication of the
vieillard, and the response they engender in the poet-flaneur is a more radical loss of
control, his psychic disorientation. If we accept the notion of a mask to be an outer image
that covers or disguises a truer self-image, or souL, then the vertiginous multiplication of
the vieillard is a self-conscious mirror image of the mask (“Degoutant Phenix, fils et pere
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du lui-meme”). However, its relation to the actor’s soul and the theater are equally strong
indications that the mask is an indirect but certain pathway to the soul or aura; this point
of loss is ostensibly obstructive, but ultimately constructive through the viewer’s or
reader’s response. Let us recall that the strongest clue to the vieillard’s multiplication as
a product o f the poet-flaneur’s state of mind is that they stop at seven only because he
consciously turns away, unable to bear the sight o f another. Moreover, the eighth is
referred to specifically as if it were a foregone conclusion (“Aurais-je, sans mourir,
contemple le huitieme”). This stanza does continue in the form of a question (“Sosie
inexorable, ironique et fatal, / Degoutant Phenix, fils et pere de lui-meme?”), but
Baudelaire begins the last line with a telling dash, undermining any possibility other than
the appearance of the eighth by identifying the poet’s tormented state of mind so closely
with the multiplication. The dash signifies a strong syntactic break, but retains some
logical connection between two entities. The poet turns his back on the hideous
procession and therefore does not witness the continuing multiplication, but his delirium
continues to fuel it nonetheless. The multiplication continues as sure as the poet-flaneur’ ’s
disoriented soul dances “sur une mer monstueuse et sans bords.”
Roland Barthes and Italo Calvino extend the signifying capacity of the mask in
photography through the viewer’s ability to look beyond the photo’s mimetic purity and
assimilate through relative historical and personal experience— only in this way can the
photograph be more than what it depicts, by way of what it depicts— the recovery of the
aura within the physical object. Barthes writes of the mask:
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Since every photograph is contingent (and thereby outside
of meaning), Photography cannot signify (aim at a
generality) except by assuming a mask.. . . The mask is the
meaning, insofar as it is absolutely pure (as it was in the
ancient theater). (34)
Of course the photograph does not change when it enters “into meaning”; it cannot
become less contingent on what it depicts. But the assumption of a mask is the result of
the viewer bringing the photo into meaning by contextualizing it beyond its frame, by
“aiming at a generality.” While the photo remains unchanged physically, the viewer has
changed his or her perception of it by seeing it as a mask. The distillation of “absolutely
pure” meaning into a single image, the mask, is a process of recovery that embraces the
aura by directing focus on the associations surrounding the object. In this sense, the mask
operates diametrically to the caricature, which stimulates the viewer’s contemplation of
the object by distraction through distortion and exaggeration of its features. The identical
likeness of the mask in a photograph prompts more subtly, through loss or lack of any
other stimulus, ultimately leaving no alternative but a greater significance than that lying
on the surface. Italo Calvino illustrates the paradoxical but volatile elucidation of the
mask by placing it within the confluence o f painting and photography:
He freed himseif from the cloth and straightened up again.
He was going about it all wrong. That expression, that
accent, that secret he seemed on the very point of capturing
in her face, was something that drew him into the
quicksands o f moods, humors, psychology: he, too, was one
of those who pursue life as it flees, a hunter of the
unattainable, like the takers of snapshots.
He had to follow the opposite path: aim at a portrait
completely on the surface, evident, unequivocal, that did not
elude conventional appearance, the stereotype, the mask.
The mask, being first of all a social, historical product,
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contains more truth than any image claiming to be “true”; it
bears a quantity of meanings that will gradually be revealed.
( 115)5 2
As we saw through the above analysis of the vieillards, the poet-flaneur's mind
conspires with the atmosphere of the city, a city full of dreams, mirroring the actor’s soul
and revealing the lurking specter of death among the layers of meaning behind the mask.
The perception of the aura comes from the contemplation of the vieillards or mask, and it
therefore reaches the reader/viewer just as it does the poet -flaneur. This process permits
the gradual revelation of meaning through a response to the immanent distance of the
mask. How that distance is imparted depends on the nature of the mask itself; if the
multiplication of the vieillards is a grotesque disguise that stimulates through distortion,
then the mask in a photograph is a truly brilliant disguise because the distance that
produces meaning and access to the aura is not immediately recognizable.
Fig. 16, Passage de la Petite Boucherie (6e arrondissement), is unique by way of
its inanimate human forms. Unlike the other Marville photographs, these figures on the
left-hand shop fronts are artificial, and not just spectral. No human beings grace this
street. Yet the figures stimulate contemplation of the human relationship with the city
because, while inanimate, they are made by man and in his image. As such, they are twice
removed from the human essence that we can assume is the source of the aura: inanimate
and photographed. But this only enhances the viewer’s self-consciousness regarding
distance. Here the objectification of the human dimension is particularly emphatic because
5 2 Quoted in Hunter
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Figure 16. Charles Marville, Passage de la Petite Boucherie (6e arr.)
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the figures are arrested even before the captured moment of the photograph. Also, the
busts on the store front are ceramic, similar material to that comprising much of the city
itself: bricks, mortar, sand, and stone. Linked organically and as vehicles of stimulating
distance, the masks of the human form mirror the photographic mask of the dehumanizing
city. In other words, the gaze of the masks mimics the photograph’s capacity to capture
and prefigure the present-time and future dehumanized states of the street respectively.
The inherent distance of the mask therefore underlines the destruction of the street and
engages the contemplation of citizen and changing city through the suggestive power of
death. Although less human than the spectral figures in Marville’s photos, the busts are
similarly powerful agents in resurrecting a human aura by their relation to the street and
their closer proximity to death.5 3
That the busts on the store front “refuse” to look toward the viewer further
solidifies the paradoxical illumination within an unretumed gaze. Instead they gaze
blankly onto the street, whose imminent demise further accents their separation from
human form. In fact, death is summoned not only by the destruction of the street, the
certainty of which is confirmed by the photo’s very existence, but also by the street’s
name. The catalogue caption reads:
In 1699, it was called me Abbatiale as it crossed the Abbey
of Saint-Germain and received its present name in 1816
because of a butcher’s shop. Its southern section on place
Sainte-Marguerite was destroyed by the construction of the
boulevard Saint-Germain. (15)
5 3 Vaheed K. Ramazani develops the theme of dehumanization through “expressions of
pain,” the “loss of body,” and “writing as weapon or wound” in “Writing in Pain:
Baudelaire, Benjamin, Haussmann,” boundary 2 23:2 (1996): 199-224.
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Above I stated that death operates in photography through the imposition of
distance on the living realm and its subsequent stimulation of viewer response. We have
also seen that the power of the mask need not lie in distortion and difference, but may be
equally stim ulating as an “evident,” “unequivocal,” and “conventional appearance” whose
layers of meaning are gradually revealed by the induced contemplation of a photograph’s
mimetic purity. Therefore, the specter of death can be invoked from the exponentially
grotesque vieillards as well as Marville’s photograph of the busts made in man’s own
image. Barthes describes this pervasive and aura inducing notion as flat Death:
For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer
(or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps
in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve
life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites,
Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our
modem society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion,
outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death.
Life / Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the
one separating the initial pose from the final print. (92)
In further discussing flat Death and the suggestiveness of what lies behind the mask of the
photo, Barthes addresses the relationship between the response to this point of loss, flat
Death, and its inevitable embodiment in language:
In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell
myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s
psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already
occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every
photograph is this catastrophe.. . .
The horror is this: nothing to say about the death of one
whom I love most, nothing to say about her photograph,
which I contemplate without ever being able to get to the
heart of it, to transform it. The only “thought” I can have is
that at the end of this first death, my own death is inscribed;
between the two, nothing more than waiting; I have no
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other resource than this irony: to speak of the “nothing to
say.” (96, 92-93)
Although Barthes mitigates the efficacy of language to evaluate the aura of a
photograph, he acknowledges that he cannot escape its primacy. The irony here is that
Barthes, having eschewed so many photographs of his mother because they offered only
her “crudest identity,” “legal status,” or “individual expression,” finally happened across
the one that “led [him] to that cry, the end o f all language: ‘There she is!’” (109;
emphasis mine). He has reached the end of language because he has found the aura, once
again lying between the realm of the living and the dead, equally influenced and defined by
both, a synthesis of intertwining opposites, a revealing correspondence. “The end of all
language” is the point of loss where we feel we have strangely transcended the expressive
capacity of language but are nevertheless on the threshold o f a revelation. We might refer
to this obstruction as the partial death of language since its impotence is ultimately
diverted by its inertia; that is, we can only contemplate, ponder, or reflect upon the aura
through language, whether it be written, spoken, or thought. We cannot be lost in
thought outside of language.
Baudelaire, so adept at calling up shades of passion and neurosis through objects,
portrays the volatility of the mask in the following lyric poem:
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LE MASQUE
STATUE ALLEGORIQUE DANS LE GOUT DE LA RENAISSANCE
A Ernest Christophe, statuaire.
Contentions ce tresor de graces florentines;
Dans l’ondulation de ce corps musculeux
L’Elegance et la Force abondent, soeurs divines.
Cette femme, morceau vraiment miraculeux,
Divinement robuste, adorablement mince,
Est faite pour troner sur des lits somptueux,
Et charmer les loisirs d’un pontife ou d’un prince.
— Aussi, vois ce souris fin et voluptueux
Ou la Fatuite promene son extase;
Ce long regard soumois, langoureux et moqueur;
Ce visage mignard, tout encadre de gaze,
Dont chaque trait nous dit avec un air vainqueur:
“La Volupte m’appelle et 1 ’ Amour me couronne!”
A cet etre doue de tant de majeste
Vois quel charme excitant la gentillesse donne!
Approchons, et toumons autour de sa beaute.
O blaspheme de l’art! o surprise fatale!
La femme au corps divin, promettant le bonheur,
Par le haut se termine en monstre bicephale!
-- Mais non! ce n’est qu’un masque, un decor subomeur,
Ce visage eclaire d’une exquise grimace,
Et, regarde, voici, crispee atrocement,
La veritable tete, et la sincere face
Renversee a l’abri de la face qui ment.
Pauvre grande beaute! le magnifique fleuve
De tes pleurs aboutit dans mon coeur soucieux;
Ton mensonge m’enivre, et mon ame s’abreuve
Aux flots que la Douleur fait jaillir de tes yeux!
— Mais pourquoi pleure-t-elle? Elle, beaute parfaite
Qui mettrait a ses pieds le genre humain vaincu,
Quel mal mysterieux ronge son flanc d’athlete?
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Elle pleure, insense, parce qu’elle a vecu!
Et parce qu’elle vit! Mais ce qu’elle deplore
Surtout, ce qui la fait If emir jusqu’aux genoux,
C’est que demain, helas! il faudra vivre encore!
Demain, apres-demain et toujours! — comme nous!
(255-56)
By providing us with a classical notion of beauty (“ce tresor de graces florentines”)
Baudelaire casts the image as “unequivocal,” “evident,” and “conventional,” as a
traditional and indisputable model. But even this “corps musculeux” in which “1 ’elegance
et la force abondent” is a mask capable of “blasphemous and fatal surprise”; the lyric
poetiy unveils the inner abyss behind the mask and illustrates the kind of response elicited
by the busts in Marville’s photograph Baudelaire defines the transformation of the mask
as a viewer response and establishes the reader as a participant with the final lines of the
second stanza: “Approchons, et toumons autour de sa beaute.” The human response to
the statue is further evidenced by the subsequent impression and correction: “O blaspheme
de l’art!. . . / Par la haut se termine en monstre bicephale! / -- Mais non! ce n’est qu’un
masque, un decor subomeur.” The true head with the sincere face is not physically
opposed to the mask, as in a Janus-headed figure, but rather lying behind the shelter of the
exquisitely corrupt features. (“La veritable tete et la sincere face / Renversee a l’abri de la
face qui ment.”) Although antagonistic, the two are presented as one correspondence
from which we respond, along with the poet, to the incitement of weeping beauty. It is
the magnificent river of tears from the “Pauvre grande beaute” that fills the poet’s anxious
heart, and her deceit intoxicates his soul with the torrents that pain wrings from her eyes.
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The poet asks the question: “Mais pourquoi pleure-t-elle?” One answer is that the
poet and viewer of the statue have perceived her in context, that is, not as a monolithic
model o f eternal beauty, but as beauty within and as a part of the society around her. Of
course, the present society is the hallmark sign of what is to come in the fixture, and
Baudelaire sculpts a characteristically debased notion through the statue, mask, and
response. In this way he has affirmed his notion through both the work of art and its
reception. But Baudelaire has fiirther heightened his commentary by so closely associating
the response of the viewer, who is both poet and reader, with the duration of the statue.
As a Renaissance statue, it also exudes the glory and tradition of that period’s artistic past
and fuses it with present-time despair in everlasting stone; the result is a powerful infiision
of modem angst into the classical ideal of beauty. Baudelaire suggests that the real face
behind the mask of the statue weeps because she is acutely aware o f society’s true face
and knows that it, as she, will last eternally, “Demain, apres-demain et toujours! -- comme
nous!”
Although Baudelaire’s poem does not specifically address the city, it does invoke
contemplation through the mask’s reliance on context. The solitary busts in Marville’s
photograph lead us behind the facades of that deserted Paris street and to the ramifications
of its imminent changes— they solicit and embrace the human dimension by underscoring
death and highlighting human desolation. Likewise, the two sides of the statue’s mask
elicit a response that fuses her elegance and power with the dehumanizing context of
Baudelaire’s Paris, and also corresponds to the traumatic urban changes “seen” by the
busts in the Marville photo.
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Because so much of Baudelaire’s poetry evolves from a notion of distance, it is not
surprising that the language in “Le Masque” can recover the aura through the elaborations
of the mask, much like a photograph. Benjamin relates this linguistic tenacity to the poet’s
ability to “invest an object with the ability to return our gaze.” Although he stops short of
my contention, his endowment of this capacity to the poet is a de facto association of the
poet with the viewer of a photograph. He writes:
This endowment is a wellspring of poetry. Wherever a
human being, an animal, or an inanimate object thus
endowed by the poet lifts up its eyes, it draws him into the
distance. The gaze of nature thus awakened dreams and
pulls the poet after its dream. Words, too, can have an aura
of their own. This is how Karl Kraus described it: “The
closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance
from which it looks back.” (200)
Therefore, Baudelaire’s endowment of the mask within the statue is predicated on the
same response as the act of reading into a photograph. In short, the word can be as
evocative a stimulus as the image for the solicitation of a response in the reader.
It is in this liminal, reluctant realm that Marville’s artistry flourishes, where his
techniques induce explorations and comparisons with other depictions of Paris under
Louis Napoleon and Baron Haussmann. Let us further relate his images to Charles
Baudelaire’s poems from “Tableaux parisiens,” a new section introduced in the 1861
edition of Les Fleurs du Mai, and a few of his petits poemes en prose from Le Spleen de
Paris.
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One of the ways that Baudelaire personifies the notion of distance is through the
appearance of exiles in these poems of the French capital, three of which are dedicated to
France's most celebrated poet exile, Victor Hugo.
LE CYGNE
A Victor Hugo
1
Andromaque, je pense a vous! Ce petit fleuve,
Pauvre et triste miroir ou jadis resplendit
L’immense majeste de vos douleurs de veuve,
Ce Simols menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit,
A feconde soudain ma memoire fertile,
Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel.
Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville
Change plus vite, helas! que le coeur d’un mortel);
Je ne vois qu’en esprit tout ce camp de baraques,
Ces tas de chapiteaux ebauches et de futs,
Les herbes, les gros blocs verdis par l’eau des flaques
Et, brillant aux carreaux, le bric-a-brac confus
La s’etalait jadis une menagerie;
La je vis, un matin, a l’heure ou sous les cieux
Froids et clairs le Travail s’eveille, ou la voirie
Pousse un sombre ouragan dans l’air silencieux,
Un cygne qui s’etait evade de sa cage,
Et, de ses pieds palmes ffottant le pave sec,
Sur le sol raboteux trainait son blanc plumage.
Pres d’un ruisseau sans eau la bete ouvrant le bee
Baignait nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre,
Et disait, le coeur plein de son beau lac natal:
“Eau, quand done pleuvras-tu? quand tonneras-tu, foudre?’
Je vois ce malheureux, mythe etrange et fatal,
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Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l’homme d’Ovide,
Vers le ciel ironique et crullement bleu,
Sur son cou convulsif tendant sa tete avide,
Comme s’il adressait des reproches a Dieu!
II
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.
Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m’opprime:
Je pense a mon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous,
Comme les exiles, ridicule et sublime,
Et ronge d’un desir sans treve! et puis a vous,
Andromaque, des bras d’un grand epoux tombee,
Vil betafl, sous la main du superbe Pyrrhus,
Aupres d’un tombeau vide en extase corbee;
Veuve d’Hector, helas! et femme d’Helenus!
Je pense a la negresse, amaigrie et phthisique,
Pietinant dans la boue, et cherchant, l’oeil hagard,
Les cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique
Derriere la muraille immense du brouillard;
A quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve
Jamais, jamais! a ceux qui s’abreuvent de pleurs
Et tettent la Couleur comme une bonne louve!
Aux maigres orphelins sechant comme des fleurs!
Ainsi dans la foret ou mon esprit s’exile
Un vieux Souvenir sonne a plein souffle du cor!
Je pense aux matelots oublies dans une ile,
Aux captifs, aux vaincus!. . . a bien d’autres encor!
(LFM 329-331)
The exiles in “Le Cygne” are consumed by grief and longing for their native soil. Out of
their element, displaced, and yearning, they are all city dwellers. The plight of each is
constructed through the refuse of Paris’ transformation: what must be an inundated ditch
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at the renovation site of Place du Carrousel is perceived as the former river of tears
containing the immense majesty of Andromache’s despair. The poet -flaneur, strolling
near the Louvre, is already conditioned by the changing city to make such an association
in the poem’s first stanza. The “petit fleuve,” now charged with the historic clout of
Greek epic tragedy, invigorates the poet’s memory at the “nouveau Carrousel.”
Baudelaire reminds us that the impetus comes from the juxtaposition of a city that no
longer exists with its specious replacement: “Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville
/ Change plus vite, helas ! que le coeur d’un mortel).” As we saw in “Les Sept
Vieillards,” the pace of urban change ushered in psychic disorientation. Here, it
establishes a distance so formidable and volatile that Baudelaire measures it in terms of the
human capacity to perceive; paradoxically if the city’s physical metamorphosis outpaces
the human heart, it leaves it behind to contemplate through allegory and response. This
development, a vacuum or point of loss created by radical change, occurs on the spiritual
plane, which is precisely how the poet-_/7aneur sees the rubble in the third stanza: “Je ne
vois qu’en esprit tout ce camp de baraques, / Ces tas de chapiteaux ebauches et de futs...
Et, brillant aux carreaux, le bric-a-brac confus.” In spite of Haussmann’s efforts to lend
eternal weight to the city through expansive proportions and monumental landmarks, Paris
can now only signify through allegory, and it is the poet’s memories that become heavier
than rocks, along with his stalwart melancholy: “Paris change ! mais rien dans ma
melancholie / N’a bouge ! palais neufs, echafaudages, blocs, / Vieux faubougs, tout pour
moi devient allegorie, / Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.” Although
the city, now broken down into its constituent elements by the transformation, clearly
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unleashes the poet's regression, it ultimately must be satisfied with a secondary,
supporting role to the grounding cohesion of memory. The city has become unreal.5 4
Again, if Benjamin is correct in identifying the pathway to the aura as a “unique
phenomenon of distance,” then the exiles’ penetrating and exhaustive desire is
Baudelaire’s index to the aura of human existence in a fast-changing city. True to the
makeup of his “correspondences,” it is the physical city and the vestiges o f its former
arrangement that incite the poet-flaneur to recall the swan, its fellow exiles, and the state
of mind they embody at the bequest of their captive urban environment. Immediately after
the above description of the disarray and contrast between new and old near the Louvre
and the Tuilleries, the poet’s mind regresses into a heavy memory of the swan he had seen
in a pathetic menagerie erected for the amusement of city dwellers. Because the ditch has
already jolted the poet’s memory of Andromache, his recollection of the swan is a memory
within a memory: it is in fact one that he is relating to Andromache, the addressee of the
poem The narratological layering results in a profounder distance that mirrors the exiles
who invoke it~a traditional, mythological exile and also one of Paris itself.
As the central exile o f the poem, the swan permits the poet to regress into the past,
condition the present, and brood over the future. With the creation of such a powerful
agent, Baudelaire critiques the dehumanizing and unstable nature of city living. The poet
5 4 The most celebrated reference to the “unreal city” is, of course, T.S. Eliot’s famous
lines from The Waste Land: “Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A
crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / 1 had not thought death had undone so
many.” See also William Chapman Sharpe’s Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in
Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1990).
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first recalls the swan in the passe simple: “La je vis, un matin . . . Un cygne qui s’etait
evade de sa cage.” Being an extension of the first regression to Andromache, which was
stimulated by the debris of urban change, Baudelaire incorporates the swan’s impotence
and despair with that same determining environment: “Et, de ses pieds palmes ffottant le
pave sec, / Sur le sol raboteux traihait son blanc plumage. I Baignait nerveusement ses
ailes dans la poudre.” In the last line of the sixth stanza Baudelaire resumes the present
tense, “ Je vois ce malheureux, mythe etrange et fatal,” uniting the swan with
Andromache’s unjust and surreal fate, and also the spectral old city; the poet perceives
only the spirit of the city in the third stanza, while the outright offense of the swan’s
circumstances depicts a strange and fatal myth. It is as if Baudelaire utilizes the swan to
fall back and usurp the historical force of Andromache’s plight, but then reunites them in
the rhetorical present tense along with the city that summoned them both. Also important
to note is the irony of the swan’s newly found “freedom”: only outside of its cage may it
flounder on the dry sidewalk, cobblestones, and in the city dust. For some Parisians the
glorious expanse of the Haussmann works simply exacerbated their sense of exclusion
from places socially off-limits. For Baudelaire, the only freedom within the city of Paris is
that gained through the mind, through the city as allegory.
The poem’s second part begins with the eighth stanza, quoted above
(“Paris change ! . . . palais neufs, echafaudages . . . tout pour moi devient allegorie”),
further solidifying the city’s submission to memory and melancholy. In the ninth stanza
this movement is completed as the poet stands in front of the Louvre, keeper of the city’s
cultural treasures, and thinks only of the swan: “Aussi devant ce Louvre une image
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m’opprime: / Je pense a mon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous, / Comme des exiles,
ridicule et sublime.” Before the institution housing objects and works created to transcend
prosaic urban existence, Baudelaire begins to expand progressively the scope of his
critique, revisiting Andromache in the tenth stanza and “la negresse, amaigrie et
phthisique, pietinant dans la boue,” in the eleventh. To this point a gradual but cumulative
embrace of the exile’s condition brings us to the brink of perceiving its aura. That final
development comes in the expansive tone of the final two stanzas. The penultimate begins
with a more impersonal and inclusive “A quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve,” and
the poem’s last stanza concludes with the two lines “Je pense aux matelots oublies dans
une lie, / Aux captifs, aux vaincus! .. . a bien d’autres encor !” Baudelaire addresses all
exiles now, what all exiles have in common, the aura of an exile. The most telling line of
the poem’s conclusion is the opening of the last stanza, which reads “Ainsi dans la foret
oil mon esprit s’exile.” The poet now alights upon his own exiled mind in the densest of
all forests— the city. Here among a changing landscape of lost souls he has discovered a
memory that sounds “a plein souffle du cor,” and as such has engaged the aura of fellow
city dwellers, fellow exiles, past, present, and future.
In many of Charles Marville’s photographs a single human figure stands
vanquished and consumed by the city, in perfect accord with the exiles of Baudelaire’s
poem. Marville’s composition of the figures among the rubble of demolition or nearly
camouflaged in an area destined for transformation marks these photographs as artistic
arrangements. The arrangement substitutes for the poem’s textual elaboration on the
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Figure 17. Charles Marville. Rue du Passage Saint-Louis
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exiles’ relationship to the city of Paris and, therefore, is a predominant factor in discerning
the aura in the longing that results from the city’s dehumanization--the aura lies beneath an
acknowledgment of human loss, at the point of loss.
Fig. 17, The Rue du Passage Saint-Louis (later called Rue Champlain), depicts an
area of shanties on the hill Menilmontant in the twentieth arrondissement where migrant
workers from the provinces settled along with Parisians displaced by the demolitions. The
lone figure seated in the foreground strikes a classic pose of the disinherited and
disenfranchised. Unlike the spectral figures in Marville’s photos of demolition sites, this
man, although most likely a worker for the transformation, now sits alone atop a clearing
in the dilapidated shanties. His solitude and position suggest contemplation, not action,
while his gaze looks out across a decomposed and eroding landscape that mirrors the
desolation of the exiles within the changing city. While solitary and centrally placed, the
seated exile insists on the contemplation of his own status. But as his gaze expands across
the sullen refuge of fellow exiles and fellow agents of change, that contemplation evolves
into one of the city itself as it relates to all of its citizens. The dilation from solitary exile
to the state of urban exiles recalls the inclusive movement in the closing stanzas of “Le
Cygne” and is enabled by the artistic, in fact, lyric, arrangement of the lone exile. Like
compositions may be seen in figs. 18, Rue des Francs-Bourgeois-Saint-Marcel (5e arr.),
19, Rue Chartieme, and 20, Rue de I ’ Arbalete. Further, the exiles’ placement within the
sunlight in figs. 19 and 20 intensifies the inducement of contemplation by emphasizing
personal illumination. To repeat, much like the transforming city becomes allegory for the
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Figure 18. Charles Marville, Rue des Francs-Bourgeois-Saint-Marcel (5e arr.)
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Figure 19. Charles Marville. Rue Chartieme
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Figure 20. Charles Marville, Rue de I ’ Arbalete
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poet -flaneur in “Le Cygnethese figures’ contemplation invites an interpretation of the
photograph as allegory, an allegory that strangely rises from the very real, physical aspects
of the city. The figures are therefore discerning the aura through the shanties (fig. 17) and
streets (figs. 18-20) and effectively creating the Benjaminian associations around a sacred
object.
Roland Barthes writes of the aura as an entity pertaining specifically to the human
body and person, and he refers to it as the “air.” However, accepting Benjamin’s
“transposition of a response common in human relationships to . . . the inanimate or
natural object and man,” and having examined the synthesis of city objects and human
contemplation, Barthes’ commentary applies here. He writes of the air’s elusive yet
critical influence and of its accessibility through photography:
Here the photograph’s platitude becomes more painful, for
it can correspond to my fond desire only by something
inexpressible: evident (this is the law of the Photograph) yet
improbable (I cannot prove it).... The air is not schematic,
intellectual datum the way a silhouette is. Nor is the air a
simple analogy— however extended— as is “likeness.” No,
the air is that exorbitant thing which induces from body to
soul— animula, little individual soul... the luminous
shadow which accompanies the body. (107,109,110)
And Barthes approaches the aforementioned expansion and inclusiveness of Baudelaire
and Marville by speculating about its moral aspect and “life value”: “Perhaps the air is
ultimately something moral, mysteriously contributing to the face the reflection of a life
value?” Values lose their significance when taken in a vacuum; they are intended as a
statement in response to extant circumstances or perceptions. Such a reflection would be,
perforce, designated for others to see and, therefore, aided by photography, would invite
contemplation and contextualizing beyond the body and face of the holder.
We may say the solitary gazer in fig. 17 is deeply engaged in contemplation o f the
city and his relation to it, or, figuratively speaking, that he is “consumed” by the city. In
figs. 21-24, however, the consumption is far more literal. The camouflaging of the man
standing at the center of fig. 21 is nearly complete as he stands among heaps of rubble on
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Figure 21. Charles Marville. Percement de I ’ avenue de I ’ Opera
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Figure 22. Charles Marville, Rue Gervais-Laurent
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Figure 23. Charles Marville. Rue de l ’ Ecole-de-Medecine
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Figure 24. Charles Marville, Rue du Platre (5e arr.)
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a demolished site. In a pose that underscores the symbiosis of man and city, and therefore
both human disintegration and resilience, the figure touches and leans on the only
structure left partially upright. What’s more, his torso juts up from the debris like the
column he touches, both enshrouded in the same shadowed hue. His stance, with arm
stretched out at a right angle, mimics the horizontal beam balanced above.
Rue Gervais-Laurent of fig. 22 exhibits the same sepia tones with contrasting
lights and darks as the facades rising on either side. The homogenizing effect of
Marville’s camera makes it fairly easy to miss the lone figure standing on the left side of
the street. Holding a broom, he is the sole caretaker of a dispensable street.
Conversely, the buildings themselves consume the individual in Figs. 23 and 24. A
few paces down from the comer of Rue de I ’ Ecole-de-Medecine, fig. 23, a man stands
partially obstructed in a doorway on the left side o f the street. His white topcoat blends
with the upper part of the doorway behind him, and his dark trousers conform to the line
of foundation blocks under the shop windows. Appropriately, his topcoat fells to the
approximate height of the blocks.
Likewise, the figure sitting at the comer of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue du Platre
effectually becomes the cornerstone. Again, his light trousers mesh with the creeping light
Marville’s camera has captured on the lower wall beneath him, while his dark coat
coincides with the shaded wall. Also, the man’s back is perfectly flush with the beveled
edge of the building’s comer. He appears to be a human continuation of the decorative
etching in the bevel. In each of these cases Marville’s camera and the infrastructure of
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Paris combine to obscure the human figure, highlighting the dehumanization of a city in
change and the individual’s stature as exile.
The presence of eyes and gazes in the “Tableaux Parisiens” section of Les Fleurs
du mal, and Le Spleen de Paris (Petits poemes en prose), is of particular significance
regarding the aura. Recall that for Benjamin perceiving the aura in an object under our
gaze means investing it with “the ability to look at us in return.” This abstract form of
perception corresponds to the memoire imolontaire and, according to Benjamin, because
o f its essential distance and inapproachability, approximates Valeiy’s description of
perception in the dream state: “In dreams, however, there is an equation [between object
and man]. The things I see, see me just as much as I see them” (“Some Motifs” 189). It
is interesting how Benjamin then compares Valery’s characterization to Baudelaire’s lines
in “Correspondances” about “man passing through forests of symbols that watch him with
familiar glances.” Benjamin contends that as Baudelaire’s insight into the aura and its
attendant distance deepened, “the more unmistakably did the disintegration of the aura
make itself felt in his lyrical poetry,” suggesting strongly that for Baudelaire, the city in
LFM is a harsh, determinate reality, completely removed from the manifestations of the
dream state. That is, the unretumed gaze’s inability to recuperate or decrease that
distance, as in dreams, provokes the disintegration of the aura.
My take is that Benjamin is quite right to cite these lines from “Correspondances,”
but not to suggest what Baudelaire disproves through the unretumed gaze and the
disintegrated aura. Those lines, rather, provide an example of the kind of recovery
possible through an unretumed gaze in the desolate cityscape Baudelaire depicts. Human
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disintegration in the city of Paris during these years of upheaval is surely one of the
distinguishing characteristics of Baudelaire’s pioneering modernism, but it also remains
one of the essential characteristics of his “correspondences.” Benjamin continues:
This occurs in the form of a symbol which we encounter in
the Fleurs du mal almost invariably whenever the look of
the human eye is invoked What is involved here is that
the expectation roused by the look of the human eye is not
fulfilled. Baudelaire describes eyes of which one is inclined
to say that they have lost their ability to look. (“Some
Motifs” 189)
However, much like Barthes, Benjamin leaves a fissure in this notion that invites a viewer
or reader response based on the gaze and distance. He states:
The deeper the remoteness which a glance has to overcome,
the stronger will be the spell that is apt to emanate from the
gaze. In eyes that look at us with a mirrorlike blankness the
remoteness remains complete. It is precisely for this reason
that such eyes know nothing o f distance. (190)
Both Baudelaire’s characters and Marville’s figures personify distance. Even if a figure’s
gaze is remote, or mirrorlike, its remoteness can never be complete if we are reading about
(“les Aveugles”) or looking at the gaze (Marville’s spectral figures). Benjamin, believing
photography cannot perceive the aura because it does not gaze actively, provides only the
perspective of the object in the photograph; but we the viewers see that object as a human
subject empowered with the ability to return the gaze. If the spectral figures’ eyes know
nothing of distance, as Benjamin contends, it indeed enhances the revelation of their aura
as our eyes perceive in theirs a distance created by their position in the transforming city.
Thus, the expectations of the poet-flaneur, reader, and viewer are distorted radically, but
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not annulled. The gaze, never completely blank, stimulates imaginative response like the
obscuring wall.
The signifying value of the gaze in “Les Aveugles” and “A une passante” speaks
directly to this inquiry into the photographic aesthetic and the human condition in the city,
proposing that the aura may be perceived through a seemingly unseeing eye or an
unfulfilled expectation roused by the human eye.
LES AVEUGLES
Contemple-les, mon ame; ils sont vraiment affreux!
Pareils aux mannequins; vaguement ridicules;
Terribles, singuliers, comme les somnambules;
Dardant on ne sait ou leurs globes tenebreux.
Leurs yeux, d’ou la divine etincelle est partie,
Comme s’ils regardaient au loin, restent leves
Au ciel; on ne les voit jamais vers les paves
Pencher reveusement leur tete appesantie.
Ils traversent ainsi le noir illimite,
Ce frere du silence etemel. O cite!
Pendant qu’autour de nous tu chantes, ris et beugles,
Eprise du plaisir jusqu’a Patrocite,
Vois! je me traine aussi! mais, plus qu’eux hebete,
Je dis: Que cherchent-ils au Ciel, tous ces avuegles?
(LFM 336-37)
This poem epitomizes the unfulfilling eyes that have “lost their ability to look,” therefore
contributing to Benjamin’s disintegration of the aura. But by applying that concept a step
further, we see “les aveugles” paradoxically casting their “globes tenebreux” into “le noir
illimite.” and it is in this strange and equally paradoxical place of epiphany that the
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narrator uncovers a dark vision: he too is dragging along, struggling, and searching for
meaning in the city. Baudelaire has looked into an unresponsive glance and has
“invest[ed] it with the ability to look at us in return.” The aura of the blind has been
perceived, albeit in a place Benjamin would not have discovered it. The corresponding
distance lies in Baudelaire’s reluctance to offer an answer at the conclusion of the poem -
only suggestive paradox. The poet has gained an insight on perspective: he shares an
alienation with the “terribles, singuliers” blind, but can only ask, “Que cherchent-ils au
Ciel, tous ces aveugles?’ He has discovered his own darkness through their “noir
illimite.”
Barthes fuses the unretumed gaze like that of Baudelaire’s poetry with the
“photographic look,” but ultimately distinguishes his point of view from Benjamin’s by
infusing the dynamic with an intangible human dimension— the air:
The other day, in a cafe, a young boy came in alone, glanced
around the room, and occasionally his eyes rested on me; I
then had the certainty that he was looking at me without
however being sure that he was seeing me: an inconceivable
distortion: how can we look without seeing? One might say
that the Photograph separates attention from perception,
and yields up only the former, even if it is impossible
without the latter; this is that aberrant thing, noesis without
noeme, an action of thought without thought, an aim
without a target. (Ill)
To this point, Barthes seems to be in perfect accord with Benjamin. But it is the Benjamin
before the “transposition” of the human relationship to objects. The three subsequent
sentences clearly place the aura within this paradoxical breach and ally Barthes with the
ambivalent Benjamin that quotes Novalis’ association of “perceptibility” and
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“attentiveness.” Barthes puts forth a notion of the aura in this context that Benjamin
alludes to, but strangely resists.
And yet it is this scandalous movement which produces the
rarest quality of an air. That is the paradox: how can one
have an intelligent air without thinking about anything
intelligent, just by looking into this piece of black plastic? It
is because the look, eliding the vision, seems held back by
something interior. (111-113)
Interestingly, and in support of this study’s objective orientation, Baudelaire binds
the signifying venues of the aura, “le noir illimite” and its “frere,” [le] “silence etemel,” by
the connective “O cite!” It is within the singing, laughing, and bellowing city, a city
infatuated with pleasure to the point of tragic excess, that the poet sees. The changing
city, brilliant to some and dark to others, is thematically and syntactically fused in the
central line of the sonnet’s first tercet (third stanza): it is here where the poet-flaneur
switches from addressing his soul (“mon ame”) to an apostrophe to the city (“O cite!”);
moreover, that apostrophe continues into the next line, where the poet includes himself for
the first time in another instance of intertwining opposites creating meaning in the city. “Ils
traversent ainsi le noir illimite, / Ce frere du silence etemel. O cite! / Pendant qu’autour de
nous tu chantes, ris et beugles.”5 5 Here, therefore, the ostensible inability to recover
5 5 Benjamin quotes Georg Simmel in reference to the “eye of the city dweller”: “The
person who is able to see but unable to hear is much more... troubled than the person
who is able to hear but unable to see. Here is something . . . characteristic of the big city.
The interpersonal relationships of people in big cities are characterized by a markedly
greater emphasis on the use of the eyes than on that of the ears. This can be attributed
chiefly to the institution of public conveyances. Before buses, railroads, and streetcars
became fully established during the nineteenth century, people were never put in a position
of having to stare at one another for minutes or even hours on end without exchanging a
word” (“Some Motifs” 191).
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auratic distance, represented by the final question of the poem, and the perception of the
aura in the limitless dark, are essentially linked to urban living.5 6
Fig. 25, Moving the Palmier Fountain, Place du Chatelet, offers a clear example
of the suggestive human figure in Marville’s work: unlike many other photos of the
transformation, the elevation is relatively high (taken perhaps from a building or platform)
so that the perspective of the entire square may be viewed in light of the twenty-four ton
column being moved twelve meters westward. This is consistent with Haussmann’s
dedication to straight-line vistas and prominent landmarks. However, the premium on
visibility instils an irony into the dichotomy between human figures in the photo: the two
figures standing to the right of the column and directly in front of the for end of the shack
like structure are barely visible, but they are within the barricaded construction zone and
clearly involved with the project’s progress. I similarly characterize the dozen or so
figures standing in a row immediately to the left of the column. The people gathered in
front of the placard-covered wall are reading the information posted on the temporary
wall, or possibly viewing what little might be visible of the construction site above the
wall. Also possible, but unlikely, is that they are waiting to peer through the spaces
between the boards of the fence. For all of these scenarios one element remains constant,
the wall. Regardless of the citizens intent near the wall, it is a barrier or obstruction raised
to maintain the distance between the Parisians and the reality behind it, or a wall to impede
5 6 For an informative study of the city, particularly the street, in the “Tableaux
Parisiens” poems of LFM, see Ross Chambers’ “Baudelaire’s Street Poetry,” 19th
Century French Studies 13 (1985): 244-59. Also note his commentary on the significance
and influence of the “din” in “Les Aveugles.”
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Figure 25. Charles Marville, Moving the Palmier Fountain, Place du Chatelet
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130
perception and participation in the transformation and, therefore, future city. In this
photograph both the physical objects (including humans) and the technique used by
Marville combine to provoke consideration of the transforming city and the complex
relations of the citizens of Paris to that process. The figures inside the boarded zone, the
pair and dozen to the right and left of the column respectively, embody the Parisian
citizenry involved in the transformation process, while the crowd, although blinded,
represents the information gathering citizenry that will utilize, perceive, reject, and or
commend the final result.
Reminiscent of Baudelaire’s sonnet, the wall creates “aveugles” whose vison is
obscured by the wall. The presence of “afiBches” on the wall promotes an interpretation in
which an imperial administration not only blinds the citizens from the city’s changing
reality, but diverts their attention in propagandists fashion. Also, the “monumental”
dimension of the advertisements on the facade in the background attest to the commercial
domination of the new Paris and to the rise of that commercialism to the exalted status of
the classical heroism of the past, represented here by the victory column which is, indeed,
in temporary bondage and in the process of displacement. But notwithstanding the
audacity of the advertisements, the grandeur of the column, and the imperiousness of the
wall, what catches and holds the viewer’s attention in this photo is the crowd of citizens.
Strong in numbers and physically close, they surround the enclosed site with a sense of
purpose. Although we cannot determine precisely what that purpose is, their composition
comprises thepunctum in this photo, predisposes the viewer to perceive the group’s aura,
and overwhelms an imposed status as outsiders. The wall obstructs their access and view
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to the city’s development, and yet their gaze is directed right on to it. We viewers have
their backs. From our point of view their gaze is doubly restricted, blinded by the wall and
directed away from us. Nevertheless, our response is engaged to recover the aura from
the human dimension in Marville’s photograph.
Let us now turn to Baudelaire’s most famous sonnet and the transcendent power
of a gaze returned ever so fleetingly.
A UNE PASSANTE
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse
Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balanpant le feston et l’ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispe comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide ou germe l’ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un eclair...puis la nuit!— Fugitive beaute
Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaitre,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’etemite?
Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-etre!
Car j’ignore ou tu fuis, tu ne sais oil je vais,
O toi que j’eusse aimee, o toi qui le savais! (LFM331)
In the above poem perception of the aura emanates from a very urban phenomenon
and singular characteristic of the crowd, the chance encounter. Once again Baudelaire
incorporates urban volatility with human perception. Although the passion engendered in
the poet-flaneur is totally unrequited, it was indeed the passer-by’s momentary glance that
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affected him so profoundly and stimulated a response. Like photography’s captured
moment, her fleeting “regard” is made eternal through his associations around the object
perceived, and is fused with the debilitating aura of the city:
This is the look-even as late as Proust— of the object of a
love which only a city dweller experiences, which
Baudelaire captured for poetry, and of which one might not
infrequently say that it was spared, rather than denied,
fulfillment. (“Some Motifs” 170)
Again Baudelaire depicts the stimulating object as highly suggestive but equivocal. This is
the “alliance of control and disorder in the one conjoined experience of beauty and death”
(Chambers 257):
Dans son oeil, ciel livide ou genne l’ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
The realization of the aura, and in this sonnet it is the aura of the city stimulated in the
poet’s mind by the “fugitive beaute,” emerges from a sense of loss or inadequacy coupled
with fascination before its distance. Fundamental to that distance and its possible
revelation is the aleatory edge o f city living and the randomness of its encounters;
appropriately, this sonnet points up the role of chance not only in urban encounter, but
also as a factor in perception and communication. In describing the “street poetry” of the
“Tableaux parisiens” Chambers sounds as if he were defining the inherent distance and
abstraction, as well as the paradoxical illumination, of the aura:
The poems describe themselves as places of encounter for
the reader— of encounter with beauty, the bizarre, the
fantastic, the grotesque, the absurd, the enigmatic; of
encounter... with figures of death. They define themselves
. . . as fragments of some chaotic and ungraspable discursive
whole from which they are disconnected but through which
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moments of human communication can occur and the
questions of significance they raise can be posed. (244)
Benjamin writes of “A une passante” that “it is a farewell forever which coincides in the
poem with the moment of enchantment. . . [and] reveals the stigmata which life in a
metropolis inflicts upon love” (169).
Moreover, distance is literally portrayed in “Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici!” The physical
city provides a pervasive consciousness of distance that is intensified and aggravated by
the emotional despair over a love that could have been, but will not. In other words, this
“disconnectedness of experience”5 7 in the sonnet forms a fracture or gap between the
revelation of personal loss and the realization of that loss as an invariable characteristic of
city dwelling, ultimately evolving through contemplation into the recognition of the aura.
In keeping with the influence of chance in the urban encounter and the invocation
of the aura, the photograph by its very nature punctuates contingency through the
serendipitous figure frozen in a composition. Fig. 26 features a multi-faceted depiction of
distance expressed through both composition and the presence of such a passing figure.
Marville sets the composition within two lateral “frames” by composing from a few steps
before the intersection, thus allowing the walls on each side to compress and elongate the
image. The open space, a horse market near the Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, is
underscored by the broad avenue that extends straight away and fades into the white light.
The aligned trees on the right and the horse and lampposts set at intervals on the left affect
the avenue in a like manner, further channeling and extending the viewer’s eye into the
5 7 Chambers’ term.
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Figure 26. Charles Marville, Horse Market, Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire
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distance. Finally, recesses running along each side of the street occur white, contrasting
with the higher, dark avenue, and are thus pulled into the like distance.
Heightened awareness of distance itself does not induce a revelation of aura in this
photograph. It does, however, when taken with the human dimension invoked by the
solitary figure passing from behind the vespasienne. The vespasiennes, alternately
referred to as ediles mmicipaux, chalets de necessite, or more prosaically, pissoirs, were
street urinals placed throughout the city during the Second Empire.5 8 As public facilities
for citizens away from home, any citizen at any time, they substitute for a truly private
space and attest to the need for privacy in public, however mitigated. Whether the passing
figure has just exited from the vespasienne is impossible to tell from the photo, but he has
clearly just stepped into the photograph and into our reading of it. It is reasonable to
associate him with the vespasienne simply because o f his proximity to it. Further, his
position places him just inside the vespasienne and in perfect alignment with the horse and
lampposts, reinforcing the notion of the photograph as a constricting and extending
evocation of distance. Perceived in this context, the passing figure elicits not only an
interpretation o f solitude, but one of the human condition as explicitly imposed by the
physical environment. This photograph promotes viewer identification with a passing
figure that appears as a punctum on the ineluctable, tunnelling trajectory into the
contemplative distance. As such, just as Baudelaire’s sonnet to a passer-by, the photo
5 8 Marie de Thezy explains in Charles Marville: Reverberes that the vespasiennes were
part of the larger group of public works collectively known as the moblier urbain, which
also consisted of improvements in public lighting and decor. It was not until the radical
expansion of boulevards and sidewalks under Haussmann that the needed space for such
projects was afforded. (57-63)
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offers no resolution, but rather draws us into a contemplation of estrangement and
withdrawal that calls upon the aura.
This analysis of fig. 26 in relation to “A une passante” is decidedly unamatory, but
the seemingly disrespectful association (that of Baudelaire’s tall, slender, majestic and
noble widow with a public urinal) emphasizes the centrality and essence o f distance in both
depictions.
The perception and embrace of the aura through the eyes of another being or
object are achieved equally well through literature and photography, the latter providing
not so much a Benjaminian “returned” gaze, but rather an informing glance or gaze that
stimulates association. Literature provokes through a more deliberate form of mediation.
While the captured moment of the photograph induces the aura through arrested
consciousness (thus allowing time for contemplation), Baudelaire’s texts do the same
through a meticulously controlled consciousness.
Le Spleen de Paris, Petits Po'emes en Prose is comprised of fifty fables chronicling
the flaneur’ s impressions and contemplations of modem Parisian society. It is, in the
words of Edward Kaplan, Baudelaire’s “neglected masterpiece.” If the aura is indeed not
one thing, but an essence that may be revealed in many things depending on the
perceptiveness of the perceiver and the evocativeness and volatility of the object, then
Baudelaire’s letter to Arsene Houssaye describing his conception of the prose poem links
the comprehensiveness of the form and the notion of aura through the city:
Quel est celui de nous qui n’a pas, dans ses jours
d’ambition, reve le miracle d’une prose poetique, musicale
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sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtee pour
s’adapter aux soubresauts de la conscience?
C’est surtout de la frequentation des villes enormes, c’est
du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports que nait cet
ideal obsedant.5 9
It is as if Baudelaire saw the versatility and flexibility of the new form as a means to parlay
the impulsiveness of the city and the impermanence of modernity into a telling portrait of
his society— into a snapshot of its aura. We can see in Kaplan’s discussion of the prose
poems that they are in fact an outgrowth of Baudelaire’s determination to understand his
era and city through the idea of “correspondences,” that is, by pursuing their aura through
the synthesizing contemplation induced by both objective milieu and Baudelaire’s acutely
self-conscious mind:
These sometimes incompatible pieces are unified by a figure
of Charles Baudelaire himself— a city writer yearning to
reconcile his vision of the Absolute with the imperfect
reality he can never deny. Paris of the 1850s, soon to be
demolished and “renovated” by Napoleon Ill’s prefect,
Baron Haussmann, is his stage. Each character reflects the
narrator-artist’s struggles to buttress his integrity.. ..
Historically we might locate The Parisian Prowler [the title
of Kaplan’s translation] somewhere between Edgar Allan
Poe’s fantastic tales, which Baudelaire translated, and the
enigmatic parable and paradoxes of Franz Kafka, which
anticipate postmodern subversions of literature’s meaning,
and the “theoretical fables” of Jorge Luis Borges, allegories
of fiction itself.6 0
5 9 Max Milner, introduction, Le Spleen de Paris, Petits Po'emes en Prose, by Charles
Baudelaire (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1979) 15.
6 0 Edward Kaplan, introduction, The Parisian Prowler: Le Spleen de Paris, Petits
Poemes en Prose, by Charles Baudelaire (Athens and London: U o f Georgia P, 1989) viii-
ix.
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“Les Yeux des Pauvres” constructs these aesthetic qualities into a reverie
predicated on the aforementioned motifs of stigmatized love and stimulating gazes.
LES YEUX DES PAUVRES
Ah! vous voulez savoir pourquoi je vous hais
aujourd’hui. II vous sera sans doute moins facile de le
comprendre qu’a moi de vous l’expliquer; car vous etes, je
crois, le plus bel exemple d’impermeabilite feminine qui se
puisse rencontrer.
Nous avions passe ensemble une longue joumee qui
m’avait paru courte. Nous nous etions bien promis que
toutes nos pensees nous seraient communes a 1 ’un et a
l’autre, et que nos deux ames desormais n’en feraient plus
qu’une; — un reve qui n’a rien d’original, apres tout, si ce
n’est que, reve par tous les hommes, il n’a ete realise par
aucun.
Le soir, un peu fatiguee, vous voulutes vous asseoir
devant un cafe neuf qui formait le coin d’un boulevard neuf
encore tout plein de gravois et montrant deja glorieusement
ses splendeurs inachevees. Le cafe etincelait. Le gaz lui-
meme y deployait toute l’ardeur d’un debut, et eclairait de
toutes ses forces les murs aveuglants de blancheur, les
nappes eblouissantes des miroirs, les ors des baguettes et
des comiches, les pages aux joues rebondies traines par les
chiens en laisse, les dames riant au faucon perche sur leur
poing, les nymphes et les deesses portant sur leur tete des
fruits, des pates et du gibier, les Hebes et les Ganymedes
presentant a bras tendu la petite amphore a bavaroises ou
l’obelisque bicolore des glaces panachees; toute l’histoire et
toute la mythologie mises au service de la goinfrerie.
Droit devant nous, sur la chaussee, etait plante un brave
homme d’une quarantaine d’annees, au visage fatigue, a la
barbe gisonnante, tenant d’une main un petit gar9con et
portant sur 1 ’autre bras un petit etre trop faible pour
marcher. II remplissait 1 ’oflBce de bonne et faisait prendre a
ses enfants l’air du soir. Tous en guenilles. Ces trois visages
etaient extraordinairement serieux, et ces six yeux
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contemplaient fixement le cafe nouveau avec une admiration
egale, mais nuancee diversement par 1 ’age.
Les yeux du pere disaient: “Que c’est beau! que c’est
beau! on dirait que tout 1 ’or du pauvre monde est venu se
porter sur ces murs.” — Les yeux du petit garfon disaient:
“Que c’est beau! que c’est beau! mais c’est une maison ou
peuvent seuls entrer les gens qui ne sont pas comme nous.”
-- Quant aux yeux du plus petit, ils etaient trop fascines
pour exprimer autre chose qu’une joie stupide et profonde.
Les chansonniers disent que le plaisir rend Fame bonne et
amollit le coeur. La chanson avait raison ce soir-la,
relativement a moi. Non settlement j’etais attendri par cette
famille d’yeux, mais je me sentais un peu honteux de nos
verres et de nos carafes, plus grands que notre soif. Je
tomais mes regard vers les votres, cher amour, pour y lire
ma pensee; je plongeais dans vos yeux si beaux et si
bizarrement doux, dans vos yeux verts, habites par le
Caprice et inspires par la Lune, quand vous me dites: “Ces
gens-la me sont insupportables avec les yeux ouverts
comme des portes cocheres! Ne pourriez-vous pas prier le
maitre du cafe de les eloigner d’ici?”
Tant il est difficile de s’entendre, mon cher ange, et tant la
pensee est incommunicable, meme entre gens qui s’aiment!6 1
Unlike the blinded or fleeting gazes in “Les Aveugles” and “A une passante,” here
the gazes of the destitute father, son, and infant, are clear and lasting. Therefore, one
might assume the aura to be less encumbered in this prose poem; the effect of the gazes on
the bourgeois couple sitting at the ostentatious new cafe is immediate and essentially
linked to milieu and class. Ironically, however, it is precisely this clarity that produces the
narrator’s keen sense of loss. To the point, as the narrator explains, or rues, at the
conclusion, his enlightenment lies in that elusive distance between language and
understanding, between two lovers in the city, but not beyond the reach of the gaze. Not
6 1 Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poemes en prose, ed. Max Milner
(Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1979) 136-138.
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coincidentally Baudelaire conjoins the closeness of the poor family and the narrator’s
feelings of sympathy with the intensity of their gazes; the narrator confirms this by looking
for that same thought deep in her eyes, and also with an efficient yet powerful turn of
phrase: “Non seulement j ’etais attendri par cette famille d ’ yeux. . (emphasis mine).
Clearly that gaze is fortified by the radical dichotomy evolving in Haussmann’s
transforming city. The cafe forms the comer of a new boulevard and there are still signs
of recent construction nearby. Combined with the sparkling opulence of the physical place
and the resigned eyes of the family, Baudelaire creates what Marshall Berman calls the
“primal scene.”6 2 People who were previously isolated from one another could now view
and contemplate each other. Expansive boulevards permitted lovers and simple observers
to view the spectacle of modem life without the obligation to participate, thus gaining a
certain privacy in public, a modem privacy. Changes in the urban fabric engineered by
Haussmann opened up medieval sections of the city historically sealed off for centuries to
a vast network of connecting thoroughfares and fused the bourgeoisie and the working
class visually and experientially. Marshall Berman writes:
This primal scene reveals some of the deepest ironies and
contradictions in modem city life. The setting that makes all
urban humanity a great extended “family of eyes” also
brings forth the discarded stepchildren of the family. The
physical and social transformations that drove the poor out
of sight now bring them back directly into eveiyone’s line of
vision. Haussmann, in tearing down the old medieval slums,
inadvertently broke down the self-enclosed and hermetically
sealed world of traditional urban poverty. The boulevards,
6 2 For a succinct and penetrating discussion of this prose poem and the social
ramifications of the Haussmann transformation, see Marshall Berman, All That is Solid
Melts into Air (New York: Penguin, 1982) 148-155.
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blasting great holes through the poorest neighborhoods,
enable the poor to walk . . . out of their ravaged
neighborhoods, to discover for the first time what the rest of
the city and the rest of life is like. And as they see, they are
seen: the vision, the epiphany, flows both ways. (153)
But the encounter permits yet another discovery-self-discovery; this one lurks just below
the embellished surface, unseen but objectively invoked just the same. The renovated
boulevard and the opulent objects in the cafe have brought two opposing classes together,
and the weight of that encounter provokes remorse in the mind of the narrator. It
stimulates contemplation and response. The lover chooses to ignore that consciousness:
“Ces gens-la me sont insupportables avec les yeux ouverts comme des portes cocheres!
Ne pourriez-vous pas prier le maitre du cafe de les eloigner d’ici?’ The eyes of the poor
have instilled in the narrator the ability to return the gaze and look back in contemplation.
Although Mary Price does not privilege the contribution of the physical cityscape
as a constituent of the aura revealing correspondence, or for that matter relate the aura of
the photograph to Baudelaire’s poetry, she does abstract very clearly from difficult and
ambiguous passages the role of response in Benjamin’s notion of the aura:
To imagine that an object returns a look is to activate the
memory of what has been forgotten and distant from
consciousness, so that, according to Benjamin, the volitional
memory is not the whole of memory. The reciprocity of the
relation between object and conscious (volitional) or
unconscious memory can be expressed in various ways, but
Benjamin is intensifying the connection between object and
response by insisting that the investment of the object is first
an act by the responder and then by virtue of that
investment, which creates aura, exists as an entity capable of
returning the glance. The metaphor is complex; in this
expression of it, the object invested with aura need have no
intrinsic value, or no reference to systems of value outside
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the intensity and expansive power of personal response.
(142-43)
Clearly, for our purposes the “responder” in Price’s summation is either a reader of
Baudelaire’s poetry (prose) or a viewer of Marville’s photography.
Finally, like a photograph, “Les Yeux des Pauvres” is a visual recollection. In
keeping with Simmel’s notion of perception in the city, all the relations within the prose
poem are determined visually. But that vision serves to establish loss, what is lacking
materially through the family, and emotionally through the narrator. The “Eyes of the
Poor” have frozen in time and memory the narrator’s relationship with his lover and
provide a perspective he had not previously seen. Appropriately, Baudelaire utilizes the
attenuated mediation of the prose poem to depict the sadness and lingering shock o f such
a visually determined memory. Through the writing and vision of memory the narrator
responds to the image the objects of the city and the eyes of the poor have combined to
produce. In this sense the prose poem operates very much like a photograph for the
narrator, arresting the look in the eyes of the poor so the poet may contemplate and create
his response. As George Santayana explains:
Speech and writing helped human memory to retain only
those things which the understanding had already worked
over, recording and transmitting the intelligible and
describable through abstraction and verbal expression: our
humbler art of photography has come to help us in the
weakest part of our endowment, to rescue from oblivion the
most fleeting portion of our experience— the momentary
vision, the irrevocable mental image.6 3
6 3 Photography in Print, ed. Vicki Goldberg (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981)
260-261.
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Obviously Santayana is not suggesting that one does not speak or write about the
photograph afterward. Rather, the photograph rescues the vision or image so that it is not
lost before we manage to digest it— so that we can respond. Undoubtedly a piece of
refined writing that has been “worked over” and “transmitted” through “abstraction,”
Baudelaire’s prose poem nevertheless moves closer to the photograph through its
acknowledgement of the instilling power of eyes and its treatment of the “irrevocable
mental image.”
One of Baudelaire’s prose poems addresses the only physical trace we have of the
aura: the aureole, or halo. Interestingly, the halo is an object made visible only through
artistic depiction. It is a default method for the visual arts of an essence that is elaborated
verbally in literature and traditionally accepted in religious and spiritual circles. In line
with the opposite yet merging forces of the “correspondences,” as well as the “‘horrifying
morality’ of his portraits of contemporary spiritual and social life,”6 4 Baudelaire’s “Perte
d’Aureole” drags the aura into the mud of the frenetic Parisian street.
PERTE D’AUREOLE
“Eh! quoi! vous ici, mon cher? Vous, dans un mauvais
lieu! vous, le buveur de quintessences! vous, le mangeur
d’ambroisie! En verite, il y a la de quoi me surprendre.
— Mon cher, vous connaissez ma terreur des chevaux et
des voitures. Tout a l’heure, comme je traversais le
6 4 Baudelaire’s term as quoted in Kaplan: vii.
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boulevard, en grande hate, et que je sautillais dans la boue, a
travers ce chaos mouvant ou la mort arrive au galop de tous
les cotes a la fois, mon aureole, dans un mouvement
brusque, a glisse de ma tete dans la fange du macadam. Je
n’ai pas eu le courage de la ramasser. J’ai juge moins
desagreable de perdre mes insignes que de me faire rompre
les os. Et puis, me suis-je dit, a quelque chose malheur est
bon. Je puis maintenant me promener incognito, faire des
actions basses, et me livrer a la crapule, comme les simples
mortels. Et me voici, tout semblable a vous, comme vous
voyez!
— Vous devriez au moins faire afficher cette aureole, ou la
faire reclamer par le commissaire.
— Ma foil non. Je me trouve bien ici. Vous seuL, vous
m’avez reconnu. D’ailleurs la dignite m’ennuie. Ensuite je
pense avec joie que quelque mauvais poete la ramassera et
s’en coifFera impudemment. Faire un heureux, quelle
jouissance! et surtout un heureux qui me fera rire! Pensez a
X, ou a Z! Hein! comme ce sera drole!” {Le Spleen de Paris
209-10)
As the visual art most capable of directly reproducing “what is seen,” photography
does not depict the invisible emanation of the aura. The verbal elaboration of literature
may construct a mental image of auratic qualities and also of the halo itself, creating a
powerful proxy through the reader’s imagination. So persuasive is the imagination that it
effortlessly conjures an image of an “invisible emanation.” While painting may stand alone
as the medium that provides a trace of what cannot be seen, literature achieves a more
penetrating depiction by operating through the imagination, an essential state of mind for
perceiving the aura.
And yet Baudelaire utilizes the prose poem to degrade the halo and thus subvert
the aura it represents in order to expose the inner abyss— the more appropriate realm
through its association with both the alienating, disordered city, and emotional and poetic
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failure. Notice that, notwithstanding the title, the halo is not really lost, but abandoned.
This denial in Baudelaire’s literature echoes the photographic inability to portray the halo
and its traditionally imposed aura, allowing him to create a void and leave the imagination
to discern the aura from the urban and human details provided in the prose poem.
Moreover, Baudelaire fills that void with a foil by having the wayward angel embrace
worldly vice, thus reminding us of the halo and of Baudelaire’s redefinition of the aura that
accompanies it. In “Perte d’Aureole” the loss of the halo and aura functions as a means of
redirecting attention to it. Stated another way, Baudelaire recasts the aura in the prose
poem by losing it. In effect, he creates a new identity for the aura through response to the
newly “fallen” angel.6 5 Benjamin refers to a similar process in his discussion of both
Atget’s Paris photographs and the photographic “illustrations” of Andre Breton’s Nadja,
taken, at least in part, by Man Ray and Jacques Boiffard. Of the Atget photos Benjamin
states:
The Porte d’Arcueil fortifications are empty, as are the regal
steps, the courts, the terrace cafes, and as is appropriate, the
Place du Tertre, all empty. They are not lonely but
voiceless; the city in these pictures is swept clean like a
house which has not yet found its new tenant. (“Short
History” 210)
Conversely a group of Marville’s photos, figs. 27-29, surpasses those of Atget by
revealing the aura of the alienating city. These photos, however, punctuate the eclipsed
651 refer here to the angel being addressed in the dialogue, the one who “loses” his
halo. Although this prose poem first strikes us as a meeting of two profligate angels, the
other angel may well be the original “fallen angel”: Satan. After all, the tone and
hyperbole of his greeting are easily interpreted as ironic, as is his shock taken for pleasure.
Wallace Fowlie writes: “Satanism is at the center of his work, not by histrionic black-
magic values, but by the poet’s horror of man’s fate and his obsession over guilt” (6).
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Figure 27. Charles Marville, Rue Pirouette
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Figure 28. Charles Marville, Rue des Orties
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Figure 29. Charles Marville, Place Gozlin, Carrefour Buci (6e arr.)
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149
human dimension through the semi-presence of human figures. Not quite spectral in the
same way as the photos examined above, the figures peer through a strange but
strategically occurring foggy band stretching across the plane of the photo precisely where
the human individuals stand. The band would seem to be caused by the movement of
figures during exposure, but it exists where there are no figures, as in the lane proceeding
straight ahead and jogging to the left in fig. 27. One might also consider the deterioration
of the plates, except for the localized nature of the fog: notice that the three figures closest
to the viewer on the right side of fig. 29 are at the same level as those further back in the
photo, but are in focus, thus rendering a defect running across the plate unlikely. Another
possibility, and one that brings the phenomenon in line with the essence of the aura, is that
the blurring is in fact atmospheric, a lifting fog that in the morning hour Marville preferred
still settles at a distance from the perceiving eye. Whatever the cause or causes, the effect
is that the fog clearly enshrouds and obscures the humans and recalls the nimbus of the
aura. The fog gathers in the far intersection around a barely visible upright individual in
fig. 28. In fig. 29 the obscuring fog enters from the streets leading into the square from
each side and anesthetizes the line of people before the storefronts. And notice how it
emanates from the far lane in fig. 27 and expands and dissipates as it proceeds into the
intersection, just slightly blurring the image of the sitting woman on the right. What
renders the dehumanization so poignant in this photograph is that the structures within it
are nearly all establishments designated for the satisfaction of human desires and needs:
restaurants, wine merchants, tobacconists, parlors, and restrooms. Even an errant barrel
adorns the street and sidewalk. The solitary, mitigated presence of the woman is set off by
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150
the indulgent environment, underlining the dehumanizing aspects of the photo and the
transformation. Unlike the Atget photos that are completely empty, this photo isolates the
estranging aura of the city not simply because there is a figure present, but by the way that
figure is presented.
By now it should not be surprising that Benjamin himself offers a phrase that
crystalizes this process of signification through loss. On the photographs in Breton’s
novel, Benjamin identifies clearly the process of discovering a voice, or aura, through
estrangement in both photo and text:
In such passages in Breton, photography intervenes in a
very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the
city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws o ff the banal
obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the
most pristine intensity toward the event described...
(emphasis mine).6 6
In response to this passage, Mary Price writes:
These photographs, as well as Atget’s, “suck the aura from
reality like water from a sinking ship.” The intervention of
photography, which Benjamin calls strange, is strange
indeed. The photographs are the banality drawn off
whereas the text fills the ancient architecture (and thus the
city) with pristine intensity. The text creates the city of
Breton’s imagination, which is at the same time the real city
of Paris. The city is created anew, and thus seen anew by
the text; photographs are devices to draw off significance
from, by drawing attention to, the banal conventional
nonseeing aspects of the streets and buildings. (49-50)
If the photos function through this “taketh and giveth” process, then one wonders why the
stimulated imagination of the viewers is not sufficient to generate “pristine intensity” and
6 6 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter
Demetz (New York: Harcourt, 1979) 49.
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create “the real city of Paris.” Unlike the dependence between photo and text Price
elaborates from Benjamin, the relationship between “Perte d’Aureole” and these Marville
photographs is one of complementary independence. The figures in the photos fulfill the
same role as the lost identity of the angel in Baudelaire’s prose poem: they generate
significance through loss, triggering a response through imagination and interpretation.
Neither depends on the other for discovery o f the aura. Because the figures in Marville’s
photos humanize a dehumanized site through this process, they effectively create the city
on their own.
But comparing the two art forms clarifies and confirms the interpretive mode
invoked by both. “Drawing off banality” is a manner of defamiliarization, which is an
essential sensibility in perceiving the aura. To perceive what is familiar in a new and
unnatural way is also a crisis of identity, even if not an unsettling one. The angel who
loses his halo has a phobia of the city and its attendant horses, carts, noise, and vertiginous
activity. Yet, it is the forces o f the city that combine with his sensibilities to “lose” the
halo and bring about his revelation-his reaction is to abandon his identity and renounce
his pretension. By ridiculing some bad poet who will don the halo, Baudelaire escalates
the identity crisis, now as societal, asserting the pretension of poets, reader, and church.
No one is spared. Kaplan writes: “A careful reading will reveal his attacks against all sorts
of pretense and self-delusion to be Socratic challenges to his ‘hypocritical readers’” (x).
Baudelaire obscures the traditional notion of aura by abandoning it with the halo
left in the mire of the macadam. The angel’s own response stimulates ours, providing a
liberating and new, even if depraved, perspective. Likewise, the blurred photos punctuate
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the city’s forces of dehumanization, whereby the clouding o f identity invokes
contemplation as means of liberation-restoring the human dimension in our interpretation.
Kaplan concludes expansively the introduction to his translation as follows:
These modem fables undermine any reassuring
interpretations. Dismantling all forms of complacency and
idealism, the Baudelairean “prose poem” amalgamates, in a
dialogically open-ended literary unit, ambiguity and
judgment, kindness and cruelty, anger and generosity,
reverie and analysis. There are no definitive lessons— only
responses. In the end, we must judge for ourselves, (xi)
And in order to judge we must follow the imaginative response through its recognition of
the aura. As we have seen, that process evolves from a contemplation stirred by traces of
the practiced hand.
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Interlude
Monumentality and the Colossal Vision
In June of 1871 France’s Second Empire was in collapse, with its military defeated
by Germany, its people handed a humiliating peace, including the loss of Alsace, and
Napoleon III fleeing the bloody streets wrought by the Commune. At the same time a
Parisian sculptor was sailing to New York with a colossal vision supported by nearly
twenty years of experience executing and promoting his obsession with monumental
statuary and the colossi of long-standing European tradition. Six years earlier Frederic
Auguste Bartholdi sat at the dinner table of Edouard-Rene Lefebvre de Laboulaye, among
other republican-minded guests gathered at the estate at Glatigny, and listened to his host
conceive the Statue of Liberty within a context of power politics and international
relations.6 7 Ultimately the statue would be realized and unveiled in 1886 through both
Laboulaye’s dedication to liberty and Bartholdi’s passion for the colossal, respectively
taking form through insightful political maneuvering and determined promotion of the
project in America.
The centers of western civilization during the middle and late nineteenth century
produced an environment in which, as Trachtenberg states:
6 7 For an account of the statue’s genesis within the volatile and fragile French political
climate and its utility as a unifying entity between conservative republicans and moderate
monarchists, see Marvin Trachtenberg, The Statue o f Liberty (London: Penguin, 1976)
21-40.
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Any public personage, event, memory, aspiration, virtue,
occupation, or preoccupation occasioned at least one
project for a monument that, more often than not, had a
good chance of being erected. (17)
Indeed all of the aspects that Trachtenberg attributes as causes of this phenomenon of
monumentality pertained to the Paris of the Second Empire and Bartholdi’s formative
years: great new wealth, materialism, and pride; nationalism, local patriotism, and the
increasing pomposity of life style; the visual role of monuments in the extensive urban
rebuilding and embellishment of the age (17).6 8 In fig. 25 we saw the contrast between
traditional monumentality and the radical oversized advertisements, signaling both a
strange coexistence of historical and contemporary monuments and the exalted status of
commerce in the reformed city. That same commercialism would evolve most intensely
through the built environment in the American cities of Chicago, New York, and
Cincinnati, where the challenges of the skyscraper were being addressed. Liberty, in her
voyage from old world to new, and as a gift representing the transposition of America’s
hard-fought liberty onto the rest of the world, particularly France and her historic
6 8 Trachtenberg is careful to point out that while Bartholdi “made his name in the glut
of monument building in the prosperous cities of Second Empire France” (21), and was
clearly influenced by the tradition of visionary art in France (Gothic cathedrals, Versailles,
LeCorbusier, Eiffel Tower), the French tradition was “almost exclusively architectural and
abstract, as opposed to figurative and sculptural” (84). Notwithstanding the myriad
carvings on Gothic cathedrals and sculptural enrichment on the Arc de Triomphe de
l’Etoile and the Vendome Column, Trachtenberg maintains that the dominant impression
is still an architectural one. As a result, Bartholdi needed to look outside of France for
models for a colossus, specifically studying those of Graeco-Roman and Egyptian origin,
as well as more contemporary examples in Italy and Germany. Trachtenberg provides a
complete analysis of these influences in chapter four, 84-101.
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movement between monarchy, empire, and republic,6 9 comprises the tensions between
traditional forms of power, grace, and commercialism, and foreshadows the evolution of
the monument into the ultimate symbol of commercial might--the skyscraper.
Erwin Panofsky’s notion of “pseudomorphosis” notes the assumption of new
meaning by old images; by way o f Liberty’ s colossal proportions, as well as her
challenging armature, designed to withstand the winds of New York Harbor by the
pioneering architectural engineer, Gustave Eiffel, a venerable icon dating back to the
Roman republic strides forward into the towering age of commerce.7 0
Bringing a project as ambitious and challenging as Liberty to fruition required a
determined commercial effort on three fronts: in the political persuasion and brokering of
Laboulaye in the early years, the persistent promotion of Bartholdi during trips to
6 9 The Statue of Liberty was originally entitled La Liberte eclair ant le monde (Liberty
Enlightening the World).
7 0 For a history of the robust female icon bearing a symbolic instrument, see
Trachtenberg 63-83; the New Louvre, candelabra-figures on the grand staircase of the
New Opera, and the fa?ade of the Gare du Nord are Second Empire examples (103). It is,
of course, Eiffel’s armature that makes the statue truly modem, albeit “totally unrelated to
the statue’s very traditional appearance” (129). Trachtenberg continues:
Liberty is an archetypal illustration of the aesthetic tension
of its time— when technology had already attained great
advances and power and a hold over the mind, but when the
conscious eye was still dominated by traditional imagery.
Although the closing decades of the century were already
offered the solutions o f let us say, the Chicago and
Viennese schools of architecture, only the last generation
bom in the century would achieve universal solutions that
permeated the aesthetic structure~of most importance
Cubism and the International style, reintegrating structure
and appearance by (to grossly simplify the matter) accepting
the sensibility of science and the machine. (129)
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America, and even the critical 1885 fund-raising campaign for the pedestal run in the New
York World by Joseph Pulitzer. In short, Liberty needed to be “sold” to a diverse public
on both sides of the Atlantic. The willingness to associate monumentality with
commercialism, or rather to deem commerce monumental in a society, extant and thriving
in Second Empire France, evolved through the Statue of Liberty. It is fitting, therefore,
that she graces a city that may reasonably be referred to as the center of western
commerce and corporate prestige.
Furthermore, Liberty’ s right hand and torch were displayed in the 1876
Philadelphia Centennial, where Bartholdi tried to sell them to the city in order to raise
funds, intending to improve on it in a second version. And as a late Marville photograph
documents (fig. 30), the head was exhibited in Paris at the Exposition universelle of 1878.
Trachtenberg attests to the commercial appeal of such exhibitions by explaining that the
torch and head were “chosen not only because they were the most impressive single
components but also because they permitted visitors to enter and climb to a viewing
platform” (125). This fact was not lost on Bartholdi who boasted that “about forty
persons were accommodated in the head at the Universal Exposition of 1878" and that the
torch “will easily hold twelve persons” (Trachtenberg n. 12, 208).
While the historic iconography, radical proportions, and circumstances
surrounding Liberty's rise all contributed significantly to her status as a symbol of political
freedom and commercial opportunity, the iron framework that supports her speaks most
directly to the contemporary and nascent rise of the skyscraper. Because “no part of
Liberty’ s shell rests directly on the parts below, being instead hung on Eiffel’s iron
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157
skeleton and trusswork, she constituted, even if in the form of a statue, one of the first
great curtain wall constructions” (Trachtenberg 140).
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158
Figure 30. Charles Marville, Head o f the Statue o f Liberty, Universal Exposition 1878
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Part Two—New York
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And here is the pile o f stone, brick,
nickel and steel, the shell o f offices,
shafts, windows and steps, that
outmultiplies and outstacks them
all— that, more purposeless and
superfluous than any, is being
advertised as a triumph in the hour
when the planless competitive
society, the dehumanized urban
community, o f which it represents
the culmination, is bankrupt
—Edmund Wilson
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Chapter Three
The Rise of the Skyscraper in Manhattan
The evolution of the modem era’s most compelling and inspiring structure is one
comprised of both pragmatism and symbolism, or rather the drive to capitalize on
escalating property values and the realization of a towering edifice as an instrument of
corporate publicity. As Sarah Bradford Landau puts it:
. . . the invention of the New York skyscraper— a saga of
ingenuity and greed if ever there was one— is one of the
most fascinating and professionally challenging
developments in the annals of architecture, combining as it
does the histories of engineering, architectural style, land
use, and law.7 1
No matter where we begin our exploration of that movement, and regardless of the myriad
architectural styles and technological advancements that graced the early skyscrapers, one
factor remains constant: architects and owners engaged in a gradual “reach for the sky”
from the late nineteenth century to the Great Depression. Although our focus will be on
the buildings erected after World War I, the construction of which John Dos Passos
witnessed and subsequently depicted in Manhattan Transfer, it will be useful to sketch
7 1 Sarah Bradford Landau, Carl W. Condit, Rise o f the New York Skyscraper (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1996) xi. This work chronicles in impressive technical detail the
evolution of the skyscraper from its earliest forms, the dry-goods stores, banks, insurance
company buildings, hotels, and apartment houses of the 1860s, to the Singer and
Metropolitan Life Towers (1908 and 1909), the Bankers Trust Building (1912), McKim,
Mead, and White’s Municipal Building (1914), and the 792 feet, one inch of gothic
splendor referred to as the “Cathedral of Commerce” by Rev. S. Parkes Cadman at the
1913 opening of the Woolworth Building.
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briefly the development of their forebears in the preceding years; by doing so we can
better understand the latter examples as symbols of corporate power and prestige.
Until 1870 New York City was essentially one of six stories, a requirement
mandated by both the limits of masonry construction and those of the average human’s
endurance to climb stairs.7 2 In that same year George B. Post’s First Equitable Life
Assurance Building was erected at 120 Broadway with a passenger elevator, the first in an
office building. Completed in the popular Second Empire, mansard-roofed style, it rose to
eight stories. Landau summarizes the precedence of the building: “All the exceptional
features of the Equitable Building— its elevator-predicated height, “fireproof’ construction,
extensive iron framing, large window area, and rent-free owner quarters— justify the title
‘first skyscraper’” (71).
By the 1880s steel frame construction had evolved as the single most revolutionary
development in the history of the skyscraper, permitting essentially unlimited height.7 3
7 2 Robert A. M. Stem, Gregory Gilmartin, Thomas Mellins, New York 1930:
Architecture and Urbanism between the Two World Wars (New York: Rizzoli, 1987) 507.
7 3 The architect Harvey Wiley Corbett described this exalted moment in engineering in
unalloyed terms:
The transition of steel, from merely strengthening stone to
carrying the masonry load at each floor was the most
momentous step in the history of architecture since the days
of Rome. In a single bound architecture was freed from the
shackles o f stone-weight and made flexible beyond belief.
Suddenly architecture gained a new dimension (quoted in
Stem 507).
However, given the focus of her work on the earliest years of the skyscraper’s
development and on its technical, “hardware” characteristics, Landau asserts the influence
of the previous but less glamorous advances in the iron frame:
. . . iron floor framing was in wide use for commercial
structures by the end of the 1850s; all that remained was to
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The valuable lots in Manhattan’s congested business district could now support twenty
floors of prime rental space instead of the previous five (Stem 507). An urban revolution
had begun. Indeed, as Landau states, “in the space of less than forty-five years, from 1870
to 1913, New York grew from a city o f five- and six-story buildings to a mega-metropolis
with fifty-story skyscrapers” (x).
The foundations of the intense financial and industrial activity dominating
Manhattan in the first quarter of the twentieth century were being laid as early as the
middle 1800s, thus rendering a tall commercial building boom profitable. Landau
identifies the expansion of transatlantic, coastal and canal shipping, along with the laying
of a regional rail network in the 1830s and 1840s, as the catalyst for growth that
“transformed the port city into the leading metropolitan area in the United States” (1).
Moreover, the city’s foreign trade, a full quarter of the country’s total volume at mid
century, quadrupled from 1840 to 1860, reaching $393 million. Assessed property values
followed suit and quadrupled from 1840 to 1875, exceeding one billion dollars (1). The
city’s radical financial growth was furthered by the influx of national cash reserves
stimulated by the National Bank Act o f 1863, as well as the consolidation of the already
nearly dominant New York Stock Exchange with other competing organizations in 1869.
The laying of the Atlantic cable in 1866 confirmed the Exchange’s status as the
eliminate bearing walls. The general public mistakenly
reveres steel as the consummate ingredient; however,
although rolled and built-up steel beams did indeed
completely replace wrought iron for all framing members
after the turn of the twentieth century, the essential forms of
the various structural elements were developed in iron long
before that, beginning in the 1850s (xi).
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preeminent financial center in the nation. New York’s manufacturing sector grew
concurrently with trade and finance (1-2).
Such growth never goes unnoticed. New York city’s population more than tripled
from 1840 to 1875 when over one million inhabitants vied for a share of such fantastic
prosperity (2). Certainly the population of New York swelled from both foreign and
domestic sources: the immigration to the United States peaked at approximately 8 million
in the first decade o f the new centuiy and then dropped, first gradually, and then radically
as a result of the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts, to less than a million in the 1930s;
New York also absorbed new residents from other states and rural areas as the nation’s
urbanization and social change saw city populations begin to gain ground on those of the
rural tradition in the 1860s, pulling even by the late teens and prevailing in the early
twenties, dramatically so in the thirties.
Landau concludes that the “technological, economic, and demographic factors, not
to mention the imperative o f prestige, contributed to a climate that would by the turn of
the century produce the tallest skyscrapers and the heaviest concentration of them in the
world” (2). As the above factors conspired to produce unprecedented density and
development, and thereby raise the value of land in the commercial districts of Manhattan,
the skyscraper became the structure of choice for industrialists and corporations bent on
erecting towers capable of self-promotion and the appropriation of valuable virgin sky.
Putting it bluntly but accurately, Cass Gilbert, the architect of the Woolworth Building,
described the skyscraper as the “machine that made the land pay” (quoted in Landau xiii).
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At the turn of the century the skyscraper faced numerous challenges on different
fronts. The mutually influential relationship of economic and architectural parameters
dictated an environment in which the architect was obligated to address a spiraling density
o f construction in the downtown business district, high construction costs, demands for
office space, and solutions to technical problems through his design (Landau 289). As a
testament to the imperiousness with which the skyscraper was evolving and
notwithstanding the prominence of the obstacles, the tall building was coining of age. “At
the end of 1902,” according to Landau, “sixty-six skyscrapers were under construction in
the city, with heights ranging from nine to twenty-five stories. Forty-three o f these
reached or exceeded twelve stories, compared with fifteen in 1900" (279).7 4 Within a
decade the great skyscrapers of the first boom dominated the Manhattan skyline.
And corporations had outgrown their insistence on locating in the immediate vicinity of
the Stock Exchange:
High-rise construction was spreading into midtown, with
tall buildings going up along Fifth Avenue, along the spine
o f Broadway, near Madison Square, on 34th and 42n d streets,
and a new thatch of office buildings was being planned for
the lower West Street and Hudson and Battery tunnel area
(296).
World War I effectively brought an end to the first age of the skyscraper in
Manhattan, the years when “... architecture was put securely in the service of engineering
and the profit motive, and when the identity of New York City became inextricably linked
7 4 See Landau 281-297 for a discussion of the opposition to the skyscraper and the
criticisms waged by proponents of the Progressive and the City Beautiful Movements.
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with its skyline” (Landau 396). Only the economic surge of the mid 1920s, the period in
which Dos Passos wrote Manhattan Transfer, could resurrect a similar engagement.
Finally, at least two decades of criticism and maneuvering by Progressives, architects,
citizens, and both American and European intellectuals culminated in the New York City
Building Zoning Resolution of 1916, regulating height by district and requiring setbacks.
But the long awaited, contentious stroke of a pen did not succeed in limiting the height of
the next generation of Manhattan skyscrapers; it merely transformed it.
By the time of the 1916 code, however, “the soaring commercial tower had
already become the salient ornament of the cityscape and the inalienable right of realtors”
(Stem 508). There were two flagrant loopholes in the ordinance through which
developers and architects would exercise their determination and ingenuity: “setbacks
could rise above the legislated comice line, following the angle of the “sky exposure”
plane drawn from the center of the street, and towers of unlimited height could rise over
one quarter of each lot” (508). As Stem explains, the drafters of the ordinance failed to
foresee “that the constant rise in land values would force architects and developers to fill
out the zoning envelope, and that developers would assemble larger sites... in order to
make construction in the setback zone more profitable” (508). Of course a tower rising
from one quarter of a base spanning an entire avenue blockfront could effect both
aesthetic and financial returns.
The mandated setbacks also facilitated a pyramidal style that varied considerably
but, nevertheless, defined the post-1916 skyscraper. Designed to limit the height of new
structures and maintain sufficient light and air for neighboring buildings, the law
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engendered terraced designs reminiscent of forms from ancient civilizations, forms that
ironically represented a will to reach up to the gods. Harvey Wiley Corbett wrote that
. . . the set-backs or terraced pyramids so typical of our
skyline . . . have . . . produced a type of silhouette that
immediately suggests the stepped pyramids of Memphis, the
Chaldean architecture of the temples, Tibetan architecture
of the Himalayas, and even the earliest historic examples of
building on this continent, the Mayan ruins of Yucatan
7 5
The terraced effect encouraged by the zoning law also invited the metaphor of “building as
mountain.” Through reference to Meso-American architecture, like the temple at Tikal,
the massive structures were given a Pre-Columbian, exotic pedigree (Stem 533).
Critiquing the aesthetic effects of such structures addresses the transition from pre-war
Modem Classicism to Modem Naturalism, from the “accentuated geometrical clarity and
linear decoration” with its “transformation of the plastic richness o f traditional elements
into planar abstractions incised on, or applied to, the wall surface,” to a “more romantic
movement of sublime and picturesque imagery” (Stem 510). Indeed the skyscraper was
still wrestling with and forging its identity as architecture’s preeminent agent of modem
expression. But we must not lose sight of the skyscraper’s equally defining characteristic,
that which was responsible for its domination of the streets and skyline of Manhattan: real
estate economics. Stem reminds that the “man-made mountain was the direct and at times
ruthless by-product of the desire to take advantage of every inch of space the zoning law
permitted” (533).
7 5 Harvey Wiley Corbett, introduction. Contemporary Babylon, by W.K. Oltar-Jevsky
(New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., 1933). Qtd. in Stem: 510.
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In the following chapters I will argue that the expressive capacity of the skyscraper
cannot be separated from the societal concerns of its patrimony, that is, from the
exigencies of the urban society that created it, just as that milieu molds the expressions of
those perceiving the skyscraper. Let us now examine more closely the social and
economic state of Manhattan in the mid 1920s.
It is the economic speculation lurking below the Manhattan skyscraper and
spurring its vertiginous rise that most directly constitutes the target of Dos Passos’
allegorical depiction in Manhattan Transfer. The notion of “conspicuous consumption,”
exacerbated by the recession of 1921 and 1922, had already tightened its grasp on
American society by 1925, and the rate of commercial building reflected that trend. The
“laissez-faire” policies of the Coolidge administration, combined with the speculation and
materialism now synonymous with the “Golden Twenties,” led to a construction industry
revival where:
expanding companies sought more efficient workspace for
their burgeoning bureaucracies, corporations realized that a
new headquarters could be a spectacular advertising symbol,
inefficient prewar buildings were no longer able to
command prime rents and were therefore tom down and
replaced by new and larger buildings, and spiraling land
values drove up taxes on old, “underdeveloped” properties,
encouraging their owners to replace them with bigger
buildings that would generate more income. (Stem 513)
In the second half of the 1920s there was a 92 percent increase in the city’s office space.
The skyline and land values raced upward, each pushing the other ever higher to recoup
initial investment and maximize profits. “So intense was real estate speculation that in
1925, one-eighth of the national income was spent on building” (514). The most common
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instrument in raising the capital necessary to build a skyscraper was the real estate bond.
Conceived in the 1890s as a means of distributing the risks and benefits of holding a
mortgage, and then popularized in World War I as Liberty Bonds, the market exploded in
the 1920s. Because bond houses’ profits increased with the volume of business, they
offered higher interest rates (514). As a result, the ability of bond houses to sell bonds and
of speculative builders to borrow the cost of production eclipsed actual need
as determinants of the Manhattan cityscape.
Not only did the speculative frenzy determine -which buildings were erected, but
also how. much faster. Stem explains that two telling consequences of “building with
borrowed money, the interest on which accumulated every day,” were to dramatically
increase the speed of construction and to minimize labor costs. This “vertical assembly
line” all but eliminated artisanal work and streamlined the building process “into a series of
simple, repeated tasks” (514). The skyscraper was developing its expressive language and
beginning to “express faithfully its time.”7 6
In addition to the downtown and midtown financial districts, tall industrial
buildings were on the rise in the Garment District, west of Seventh Avenue between
Thirty-fourth and Fortieth streets, as well as in the West Side district of the printing
trades. The most poignant examples of the latter were Raymond Hood’s Daily News and
the McGraw-Hill towers, both featuring an industrial base beneath a tall office tower
(Stem 517, 522-523).
7 6 Harvey Wiley Corbett, “Architecture,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed. 1929, 2:
275. Qtd. in Stem: 513.
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The configuration with a massive base and a small tower became known as the
“latent skyscraper,” a hybrid form that exploited the economics of a low massing but also
capitalized on the advertisement o f a tower, albeit a short one. According to Stem, the
.. additional elevator banks required to serve a [tall] tower absorbed so much rentable
floor space that for most sites it was more profitable to dispense with it.” But many
realized that even “. .. a low, chunky tower was a realistic alternative, providing the
maximum amount of profitable rental space and the potential for a measure of romantic
imagery” (538). Notable examples are the Standard Oil Building (26 Broadway at
Bowling Green; 1926), Ralph Walker’s extraordinary Barclay-Vesey Building (140 West
Street; 1926), and the New York Life Insurance Company Building (Madison to Fourth
Avenue between East Twenty-sixth and East Twenty-seventh streets; 1929).
In an intensely competitive real estate market, however, not all sites offered the
possibility of a sprawling base. Another step in the evolution of the skyscraper during the
1920s was what Stem describes as the “infill tower,” an attempt to address the scourge of
tall neighbors (545-549). Because light and ventilation were critical in “... an era before
air-conditioning and artificial light were devised as acceptable substitutes for fresh air and
daylight,” the rise of a neighbor on either side of a narrow midblock site could radically
reduce the desirability and, therefore, profitability, of a skyscraper (545). Strategies
included setbacks on one side, thus ensuring three sides for light and air; blank,
economically decorated side walls for clients whose buildings were intended for activities
other than rental space, such as display floors, meeting rooms and lounges; and controlling
the air rights of a neighboring structure. The Bush Terminal Building (130 West Forty-
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second street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway; 1918), the forty stories at 10 East
Fortieth Street (1928), the Candler Building (220 West Forty-second Street between
Seventh and Eighth Avenues; 1920); and the fifty-four story, Florentine Gothic Lincoln
Building (60 East Forty-second Street) are examples in midtown Manhattan.7 7
As the skyscraper matured during the 1920s its status as the quintessential
monument to corporate power evolved through the continuing synthesis of pragmatism
and prestige. As such, the structure developed an ever clearer capacity to represent the
materialist imperatives of its creators. Volumes have been written about the social and
psychological implications of capitalist speculation. Further, the intricacies of the
speculative economy during the 1920s and its ultimate return on investment, the Great
Depression, grace the pages of many social histories of the United States. My aim is to
focus on the skyscraper’s symbolic role as register of modernity’s identity crisis. That
crisis may be seen as an ongoing conflict that Lewis Mumford, in his praise of the Barclay-
Vesey Building’s suggestiveness, termed “unresolved. . . between modernity and
tradition, industry and handicraft, anonymity and humanism.7 8
By the mid 1920s the element of prestige in the skyscraper formula had both
prevailed and begun to corrupt its pragmatic counterpart. The very tall tower reached into
the ether and surpassed the point of commercial return on investment; i.e., because of the
ratio of structural necessities, such as elevator and corridor space, to revenue generating
7 7 Stem discusses each of these “infill towers,” among others, underscoring their
significance to the genre and their critical reception.
7 8 Lewis Mumford, “The Barclay-Vesey Building,” New Republic 51 (July 6, 1927):
176. Qtd. in Stem: 567.
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rental space, the highest skyscrapers had encroached upon the law of diminishing returns.
Nevertheless, what Claude Bragdon referred to as a “psychological” need fueled the
growing ascendancy o f symbolism and the inexorable ascent of tall buildings:
The skyscraper arose in answer to the desire of the herd to
become a super-herd; to the ambition of the spot cards to
become face cards. Skyscrapers appear always and only on
those sacred areas which for some reason have become the
blue heaven of the business man. High buildings in
preferred areas owe their existence to the same cause as
high prices for front-row seats at a show.7 9
The skyscraper was not only divorcing from its “utilitarian program” and “venal, prosaic
origins in nineteenth-century mercantilism” (Stem 589), it was also transcending its
allegiance to previous stylistic traditions. Mumford explains that “between 1924 and 1928
it seemed that American architecture had at last emerged from its feeble, romantic,
pseudo-historic posturing, and was creating something that, however harsh and
dehumanized, represented what was vital and effective in our civilization” (emphasis
mine).8 0 Mumford’s analysis crystallizes the relationship of mid 1920s architecture to the
social forces molding its context; the styles represented an expressive independence and
language that embodied the vigor of the economy and the materialist focus of its agents.
Manhattan skyscrapers had become “totems of American capitalist mythology” (Stem
589) and reigned, most importantly, as “a symbol, written large against the sky, of the
7 9 Claude Bragdon, “Skyscrapers,” American Mercury 22 (March 1931): 288-95. Qtd.
in Stem: 589.
8 0 Lewis Mumford, “From a City Notebook,” New Republic 60 (September 18, 1929):
125-26. Qtd. in Stem: 594.
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will-to-power of a man or a group of men— of that ruthless and tireless aggression on the
part of the cunning and the strong so characteristic of the period...
The skyscraper continued to evolve through the end of the decade until the effects
o f the Depression effectively stifled the market for rented office space (Stem 602). In
order to exploit long narrow lots (25-by-100 foot) architects adapted the square tower
typical of most skyscrapers to a slab shape, .. retain[ing] the iconic clarity of the
skyscraper type and provid[ing] more rentable space per square foot of ground area. . . ”
(Stem 597). Examples include the fifty-six story Chanin Building (122 East Forty-second
Street, southwest comer of Lexington Avenue; 1926-29), the thirty-eight story French
Building (551 Fifth Avenue, northeast comer of East Forty-fifth Street; 1927), the forty-
four stories at 444 Madison Avenue (East Forty-ninth to East Fiftieth; 1931), and the
RCA Victor Building (570 Lexington Avenue; 1931).
Lower Manhattan surged toward the sky once again in the years spanning the turn
o f the decade. This generation of towers established a second “range” o f skyscrapers to
rival those stretching across midtown along Forty-second Street. The City Bank Farmers
Trust Building at 22 William Street between Exchange Place, Beaver, and Hanover streets
reached sixty stories, while Ralph Walker’s Irving Trust building placed forty-nine stories
at One Wall Street. Both opened in 1931. A year later the sixty-seven story Cities
Service Building crowned the financial district’s resurgence at 70 Pine Street between
Pearl and Cedar streets.
8 1 Claude Bragdon, “Architecture and Democracy, part I: Before the War,”
Architectural Record 44 (July 1918): 77-84. Qtd. in Stem: 589.
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The ultimate “race for height” and culmination of the skyscraper’s storied rise
occurred in 1930 between the architects of the Bank of the Manhattan Company at 40
Wall Street in the financial district, and the midtown Chrysler Building at 405 Lexington
Avenue between Forty-second and Forty-third streets. After much public one-
upsmanship, William Van Alen prevailed with a 185-foot spire gracing the summit of the
Chrysler Building and just surpassing H. Craig Severence’s seventy-one stories.8 2
The era would come to a close within a year when the stylistic experimentation of
the Chrysler Building was eclipsed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon’s Empire State Building at
350 Fifth Avenue between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth streets, “notable not only for its
height, but also for the superb grace of its massing and the simplicity o f its detailing”
(612).
8 2 Stem chronicles the fevered pitch of this competition, as well as its dramatic finale:
“The spire was erected within the building’s fire shaft and kept secret until Severance had
topped off his design.... Then, in a blaze of publicity, Van Alen’s “vertex” was hoisted
into place” (604-605).
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Chapter Four
John Dos Passos and the Margin of Interpretation
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The rise of the skyscraper in Manhattan converged with the economic speculation
of the 1920s to produce “a maelstrom of seething commercialism.”8 3 This stage of the
city’s evolution inspired a primary motif in John Dos Passos’ modernist novel, Manhattan
Transfer: the anthropomorphic depiction of the skyscraper. I contend that Dos Passos
utilizes the skyscraper not only to complement effectively the creation of character in the
seething city, but also to transcend ultimately the routine notion of the city as a
dehumanizing phenomenon by instilling it with the power of revelation. In doing so, he
engages a more ambitious expression of modem identity, one that exploits urban alienation
and dehumanization, but proceeds to transform those conditions into a state of loss from
which a character may interpret a revealed identity. Such epiphanies are clearly more
Joycean than traditional, with resolutions nowhere in sight. However, the novel’s nearest
protagonist manages the resolve to flee the “destructive city” with his interpretive capacity
in check. He is banished, not vanquished.
Dos Passos constructs this perspective through a cutting focus on language:
journalistic, architectural, sensorial, and contemplative. The oppressive city dehumanizes
existence and thus deflates expressive capacity; but precisely because of its
dehumanization, it is also the strongest stimulant for the recovery of identity through
8 3 W. Parker Chase, New York: The Wonder City (1932; New York: New York Bound,
1983)230. Qtd. in Stem: 595.
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expression. Because Manhattan Transfer is an intensely fragmented, imagistic novel, with
free indirect, poetic, lyrical, meditative, and commercial discourses pulsating through its
intertwined episodes, it comprises a radical break from traditional narratives; while the
breach in form mirrors the dislocated, arbitrary nature of modem urban society and the
elusive identity of those within it, this study focuses on the utility of that state of loss,
what I refer to below as a form of “aphasia.” That Dos Passos builds this apostasy of
language through his own narrative experimentation attests to the ambition of his
enterprise. In case we lose sight of the metalinguistic theme of the project, Dos Passos
provides a Virgilian guide through whom this conflict of language and its usefulness
convulse: the frustrated journalist, Jimmy Herf. My juxtaposition of city photographs (yet
another language) and their inherent subscription to interpretation of the physical world
corroborates Dos Passos’ portrait of identity in the city. The historic enigma of the city
has indeed been its homage to both fantastic creation and tragic destruction.
Appropriately, the architectural critic, Sheldon Cheney, wrote that the skyscrapers along
the Forty-second Street corridor:
tower higher and higher until the mid-city has the aspect of
mighty honey-combed cliffs, deep cleft with canyon streets
.... These terraced crags, these soaring pylons and towers
and piers, overwhelm us with their expression of daring, of
lawlessness, of inspiration. This is at once a new Babel and
a City Divine.8 4
8 4 Sheldon Cheney, The New World Architecture (New York: Longmans, Green, 1930)
18. Qtd. in Stem: 595.
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I l l
Before analyzing Dos Passos’ allegorical depiction of the skyscraper and its
relationship to photography, it will be useful to examine briefly the circumstances
preceding and surrounding his composition of the novel. Although he already knew the
city from previous stays for various periods of time, the writer’s arrival in Brooklyn in
1920 initiated the period o f observation and interpretation that would culminate five years
later in the publication of Manhattan Transfer on November 12. Because of his
inconstant past Dos Passos was able to perceive the city through both knowing eyes and
the defamiliarized view of the outsider~a role he knew very well. Having lived in
Brussels, Washington D.C., London, and Connecticut as a young boy, his was indeed a
“hotel childhood.” His biographer, Townsend Ludington confirms Dos Passos’ lonely
years as an “outsider and a misfit”:
He was small and frail as a child, although later he grew to
be over six feet tall. He was coddled by his adoring mother,
and their travels often kept him apart from other children.
The voyages never stopped; scenes rushed by full of people,
colors, smells, noises, and when he and his mother moved to
England in 1902 after leaving Belgium— but touching down
in America so that the boy was reminded of his homeland—
he felt like “a double foreigner... A Man Without a
Country,” as he described his autobiographical character Jay
Pignatelli in the novel Chosen Country}5
He later traveled throughout Italy, France, and Spain as a young man, spent four years at
Harvard, and then returned to France with the ambulance corps during World War I.
After more literary wandering throughout Europe, Dos Passos arrived in New York as
both a native and a foreigner: familiar enough with the American culture to reflect with
8 5 John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980) 14.
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confidence, but estranged enough to see it plainly. His perspective was precisely that of
the journalist, an occupation he would practice throughout his life and the fictional figure
that he would promote as interpreter of the city and skyscraper.
Dos Passos’ opinion of New York was, like most considered opinions about the
city, ambivalent. “He mocked it,” as he did many of the characteristics of genteel America
and its capitalist customs, “yet it excited him and inspired” much of his work during the
period (Ludington 200). It embodied the fervor and excess of the 1920s discussed above.
Only a writer heeding the warring inclinations of ambivalence, in this case, defiance and
gentility, could portray the following description as “magnificent”:
New York— after all— is magnificent, a city of cavedwellers,
with a frightful, brutal ugliness about it, full of thunderous
voices of metal grinding on metal and of an eternal sound of
wheels which turn, turn on heavy stones. People swarm
meekly like ants along designated routes, crushed by the
disdainful and pitiless things around them.8 6
Further, as I argue below, Dos Passos derives significance from chaos, not in opposition
to it. In the same letter, his analogy of towering, corrupt, Biblical cities speaks to
Manhattan’s whirling, frenetic idolatry of material gods, but it also highlights a tenuous,
secular redemption in the novel:
Nineveh and Babylon, of Ur of the Chaldees, of the
immense cities which loom like basilisks behind the horizon
in ancient Jewish tales. Where the temples rose as high as
mountains and people ran trembling through dirty little
alleys to the constant noise of whips with hilts of gold. O
for the sound of a brazen trumpet which, like the voice of
the Baptist in the desert, will sing again about the immensity
8 6 John Dos Passos, letter to Germaine Lucas-Champonniere, 23 Sept. 1920. Qtd. in
Ludington: 200.
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of man in this nothingness of iron, steel, marble, and rock.
Night time especially is both marvelous and appalling, seen
from the height of a Roof Garden, where women with
raucous voices dance in an amber light, the blue-gray bulk
of the city cut up by the enormous arabesques of electric
billboards, when the streets where automobiles scurry about
like cockroaches are lost in a golden dust, and when a
pathetic little moon, pale and dazzled, looks at you across a
leaden sky. (200-01)
Ludington observes that “a critic could not ask for a better statement of what Dos Passos
intended to portray in Manhattan Transfer” (201). And such a comparison is particularly
revealing when it comes from one so resistant to dogma, religious or other, a true anti
conformist who found the Bible to be a “disagreeable” book, “if devilishly well written,
for the most part.”8 7
Rebelliousness and anti-conformity simmering under a lid of reserve and urbanity
describes Dos Passos’ conflicted personality; his creative impulses and social demeanor
developed respectively through these opposed forces. He found New York alternately
inspiring and disruptive, leaving for locales in Europe and the States to travel and visit
with the coteries of literary and artistic personalities that had become his usual outlet;
these excursions lasted for periods suiting his emotional and creative needs and continued
throughout the time he worked on Manhattan Transfer. His acquaintances included the
Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, E. E. Cummings, Edmund Wilson, Robert Hillyer, Jack and
Adelaide Lawson, Rumsey Marvin, Stewart Mitchell, Dudley Poore, and F. O.
8 7 John Dos Passos, letter to Germaine Lucas-Champonniere, 3 April 1924. Qtd. in
Ludington: 231.
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Mathiessen. According to Ludington, Dos Passos often confided in some of the above
regarding his “rebellion against genteel America,” writing to Marvin that he liked people:
simple, moderately direct in their emotions, moderately
honest in their thoughts, moderately wide-eyed and naive,”
qualities found more often in “uncollegiate” Americans than
in “your goddamned nickel plated rubberized finished
theory-fed socially climbing college grad.8 8
Although he craved the bohemian culture and intellectual stimulation of those in
Greenwich Village and in Europe, he never quite embraced any of them, always pulling
back. Edmund Wilson acknowledged this in the novel I Thought o f Daisy through the
character Hugo Bamman:
He distrusted his family and his early associates, because he
believed that they had sold their souls to capitalist
institutions; but though he chose to live exclusively with
outlaws, in whom he was always discovering qualities
heroic and picturesque to the point of allegory, he never
managed really to be one of them and perhaps never trusted
them, either. (Ludington 218)
It is not surprising that Dos Passos’ conception of language would also be molded
by the same stimuli. Much like James Joyce and Dublin, Dos Passos was translating his
critical perceptions into a modem American vernacular bom from the crucible of
Manhattan. In the spring of 1921 he asked the editors of Rosinante to the Road Again to
“omit italics except in the case of songs and quotations . . . and apostrophes in words like
‘dont,’ and [to] use dashes instead of quotation marks, his point being that he was trying
to create a less formal, perhaps reportorial style” (Ludington 206). Traditional parameters
8 8 John Dos Passos, letter to Rumsey Marvin, 13 March 1922, Collection of the Papers
of John Dos Passos, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Qtd. in
Ludington: 217.
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of prose impeded a direct style that privileged an untrammeled response to the
environment, a style similar to the notes of a journalist. As we shall see in Manhattan
Transfer, even the journalist’s grasp of language will prove insufficient, or perhaps
inappropriate. During an extensive, adventurous journey through the Near East in 1921,
Dos Passos observed plagues o f cholera and typhus, as well as famine. Most
reprehensible to him was the corruption between the fearful but wealthy Russian refugees
and relief agency workers; it was the “pathetic remnants of a shattered world” in an infant
Soviet regime. The idealistic writer despised corruption and “hoped that the Communist
regime foretold a purging of man’s grotesque craving for Things” (Ludingtion 208-09).
In his 1927 novel, Orient Express, a growing delusion with traditional forms of language
surfaces in a diatribe about the incidents six years earlier and the prospects for the Soviets:
Will the result be the same old piling up of miseries again,
or a faith and a lot words like Islam or Christianity, or will
it be something impossible, new, unthought of, a life bare
and vigorous without being savage, a life naked and godless
where goods and institutions will be broken to fit men,
instead of men being ground down fine and sifted in the
service of Things? (emphasis added)8 9
Indeed by the time Dos Passos had made his way into Persia during the same journey he
admitted in a letter to Marvin that “he was not a journalist at heart” (Ludington 210).
Although he continued to contribute articles throughout his life, by 1921 he understood
that only fiction could offer the maleability needed to craft an idiom capable of accessing
experience with the directness he sought.
8 9 John Dos Passos, Orient Express (New York: Harper and Bros., 1927) 45-6. Qtd.
in Ludington: 209.
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1 8 2
His urge to access and represent the intensity of American city culture must be
considered an aesthetic response to “an innate sensitivity, a genteel upbringing as a
mother’s boy, an initial unsureness brought about by the simple fact of extreme
nearsightedness, and a self-consciousness about a stammer and a slight lisp ..
(Ludington 218-19). The work of Dos Passos the writer was always more forceful than
the man. His loss of faith in traditional prose, or a perceived impotence in traditional
Realist fiction, is the same characteristic of the protagonist Jimmy Herf that engages
personal association with the physical cityscape, the skyscraper in particular, and
stimulates a subjective interpretation that both rises from and offsets the city’s
dehumanization. I refer to this stimulus, a point of loss, as a “figurative aphasia.” While
clearly not intended in a clinical sense, but rather in line with Jakobson’s extrapolations,
the “loss of the power to use or understand language” operates on an emotional and
aesthetic level, ironically but poignantly emphasizing Dos Passos’ craft and commentary.9 0
It is in fact reasonable to view his materialist-laden, poetic prose, his heavy use of free-
indirect discourse, and his expressionist, imagined passages as an emotionally charged
linguistic experiment that strives to transcend the limitations of prose by “rendering the
staccato rhythms of the city and. . . conveying the visual images that were part of its
chaotic life” (Ludington 202). Still a year away from his embrace of political activism on
the left, Dos Passos’ experiments with fiction rose from his personal conflict with isolation
and aesthetic expression, as well as “a broad radicalism that extended beyond politics—
9 0 For a theoretical grounding of the term, see Roman Jakobson’s essay, “The
Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (San
Diego: Harcourt, 1971) 1113-1116.
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183
certainly beyond specific political creeds--to independently radical expression of all sorts”
(Ludington 237).
Dos Passos’ practice of and admiration for painting also motivated his willingness
to distort traditional depictions of reality. “He took his painting seriously, [and] his
artwork had a profound effect upon his writing. Influenced by such movements as
Expressionism, Futurism, and Cubism, he tried to reflect these in his own work”
(Ludington 223). Such innovative painting echoed his proclivity to discover aspects of
identity in things themselves; once again we are reminded o f William Carlos Williams’
dictum: “no ideas but in things.” In the spring of 1925 Dos Passos took a break from the
writing of his novel to review an exhibition of paintings by his friend, Adelaide Lawson.
He admired her work, Ludington explains, “because of the color and force with which it
presented people and things. . . and for [its] similarity to what he was attempting to
render in his art” (238). Dos Passos saw a redemption of the individual through the
depiction of objects in her work that, I argue, he was developing through the city and
skyscraper. Ludington elaborates from a manuscript:
Her paintings, he wrote, were “the work of a woman whose
universe is so vigorously individual that she has had no need
to set it down in terms more abstract than things, feces,
clouds, boats, houses.” He admired her “unexpected
combinations of things, moods of color, aspects of human
character,” which became a kind of “painting of the
solitary” that had great appeal to individuals who balked at
letting the “sausagemachine” of American life grind them
up. (23 8)9 1
9 1 John Dos Passos, “Pictures to Look At: A Manhattan Primitive,” Collection of the
Papers of John Dos Passos, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
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184
Because Dos Passos reveals the perception and interpretation o f things, as well as
the association of the individual with those things, through two methods of objectified
language in Manhattan Transfer, he effectively fuses the objective physical environment
and the interpretive capacity of the narrator and reader; blurring the dynamic between
physical and natural properties, he emphasizes in impressionist style the city’s sensorial
and perceptual volatility, transforming objects under the “weight” of urban light and
sound, and alternately materializing and animating abstract qualities like darkness, light
and noise. Both techniques compose the following passages from the novel;
Dusk gently smooths crispangled streets. Dark presses tight
the steaming asphalt city, crushes the fretwork of windows
and lettered signs and chimneys and watertanks and
ventilators and fire-escapes and moldings and patterns and
corrugations and eyes and hands and neckties into blue
chunks, into black enormous blocks. Under the rolling
heavier heavier pressure windows blurt light. Night crushes
bright milk out of arclights, squeezes the sullen blocks until
they drip red, yellow, green into streets resounding with
feet. All the asphalt oozes light. Light spurts from lettering
on roofs, mills dizzily among wheels, stains rolling tons of
sky. (Manhattan Transfer 112)
And:
Sunlight dripped in her face through the little holes in the
brim of her straw hat. She was walking with brisk steps too
short on account of her narrow skirt; through the thin china
silk the sunlight tingled like a hand stroking her back. In the
heavy heat streets, stores, people in Sunday clothes,
strawhats, sunshades, surfacecars, taxis, broke and crinkled
brightly about her grazing her with sharp cutting glints as if
she were walking through piles of metalshavings. She was
groping continually through a tangle of gritty saw-edged
brittle noise. (136)
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The first passage, a prose poem functioning as epigraph before the “Steamroller” chapter,
punctuates the pressure of light in the energy of the urban night and the violent contrast
with the imperious trespassing darkness. As a hybrid form the prose poem employs the
utilitarian and signifying aspects of prose and also the license and freedom of poetry to
defamiliarize words and create Sartrean phrase-objects “outside” language.9 2 The duality
of the form reveals the synthesis of word and image, and here it recalls the simultaneous
energy and alienation present in the modem metropolis: cruel darkness dulls the sharp
edges o f the city into featureless blocks but also generates the erupting gelatinous light.
Involvement with painting and artists not only provided Dos Passos with
corroboration for innovative techniques that grew from his personal conflicts, but also
granted him access to yet another group that saw the city as the decade’s primary
dilemma. As Ludington states:
A glance at paintings from the 1920s by American artists as
different as Georgia O’Keefe, Hugh Ferriss, Joseph Stella,
or Louis Lozowick, for example, reveals that the city
loomed large for artists then. Repeatedly they painted urban
scenes, intrigued as they were by the city’s immensity, its
shapes, its industrial imagery, and its ominous belittlement
of individuals, but also its vitality and multiple frenetic
rhythms. (223)
Dos Passos shared that fascination for the city and developed it in full measure with
Manhattan Transfer. His portrayal is first a chronicle of the city’s power to reduce
individuals to, borrowing a phrase from Eliot, “hollow men.” Here lies the essential loss
9 2 For an insightful discussion of the verbal image and the visual and signifying aspects
of poetry vis-a-vis prose, see Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature?, trans. and ed.
Steven Ungar (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988) 25-47.
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186
behind “figurative aphasia.” Privileging individual alienation in literary depictions of the
city had many adherents before Dos Passos, dating to the early years of the Industrial
Revolution, and has endured as a defining characteristic of city fiction. But in his creation
of Jimmy Herf, a largely autobiographical figure and as close to a protagonist as the
author will allow, Dos Passos suggests a fragile hope for cities through the redemption of
the individual. In his foreword to Jack Lawson’s 1923 expressionist drama, Roger
Bloomer, a play about “the commonest American theme— a boy running away from home
to go to the big city,” Dos Passos alludes to that hope and his own budding activism
through a suggestion for a national theater. Ludington writes:
Dos Passos’ foreword was less about Roger Bloomer in
particular than about the need for a national theater, which
“the continuously increasing pressure in the grinding
machine of industrial life” was going to force into being. A
national theater, he wrote, “is the most direct organ of
group consciousness” and would be “inevitable” as an
expression o f mass sentiment as the cities were welded “into
living organisms out of the junk heaps of boxes and
predatory individuals they are at present.” But, he
wondered, could the cities spring to life? They had to, or
they would “be filled with robots instead of men.” (223)9 3
Dos Passos’ own contemporary play, The Garbage Man, paralleled Lawson’s in theme
and effect and foreshadowed his most trenchant portrayal of the city two years later,
Manhattan Transfer.
In his introduction to the anthology, The American City, Graham Clarke describes
the long standing tradition of anti-urbanism in American literature as one that “invokes
9 3 Ludington quotes from Dos Passos’ foreword to Roger Bloomer (New York: n.p.,
1923) v-viii.
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images of an urban world on the point of apocalypse and breakdown,” the “apotheosis” of
which he sees in the “very meaninglessness” of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (7-8).9 4
While perhaps less celebrated, Manhattan Transfer rivals Eliot’s poem in its portrayal of
urban despair. However, the novel also takes its place in a mitigating tradition that
emphasizes the city’s “vitality and possibility” (9). It is in regard to this tradition that I
examine Dos Passos’ construct of redemption through language and the skyscraper.9 5
Sinclair Lewis spoke to both the innovation and the linguistic redemption of Dos
Passos’ project in his effusive review of the novel in the Saturday Review o f Literature.
He saw “a novel of the very first importance. . . [that] may be the foundation of a whole
new school o f novel-writing.” And more specifically to the importance o f a new type o f
written language, he suggested that Dos Passos had created a “humanized and living
fiction” in a novel that he regarded “as more important in every way than anything by
9 4 For an informative and useful comparison with Eliot’s celebrated poem, see E. D.
Lowry, “Manhattan Transfer. Dos Passos’ Wasteland,” The University Review 30 (1963)
47-52. Rpt. in Andrew Hook, ed., Dos Passos: A Collection o f Critical Essays
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974) 53-60.
9 5 Graham Clarke, ed., The American City (London: Vision Press, 1988). Clarke
comments on anti-urbanism, noting figures like Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne,
Melville, Poe, Henry Adams, Henry James, and William Dean Howells as some of its
proponents. Of course, Baudelaire is only one of their foreign counterparts. Clarke cites
the “seminal” study in this tradition as Lucia and Morton White’s The Intellectual Versus
the City (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962). For the countervailing tradition see Warren
Susman’s Culture as History (1973; New York: Pantheon, 1984), Andrew Lees’ Cities
Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820-1940 (New York:
Columbia UP, 1985), as well as the first and second essays in Clarke’s anthology:
Christine Bolt’s “The American City: Nightmare, Dream, or Irreducible Paradox?” and
Clarke’s own “A ‘Sublime and Atrocious’ Spectacle: New York and the Iconography of
Manhattan Island.”
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Gertrude Stein or Marcel Proust or even the great white boar, Mr. Joyce’s Ulysses.” 9 6
Ludington is equally generous about the success of the novel and acknowledges the
collectivist preeminence of the city as protagonist. He writes that Dos Passos had
“achieved artistic maturity” with expressionist techniques presenting characters “who dash
helter-skelter about a city that looms larger throughout the book than any of the individual
figures” (242). Yet he seems to demur at the linguistic redemption praised by Lewis,
instead perceiving the novel’s depiction of the city and its inhabitants as “caricature.” He
writes: “If he had not achieved the ‘humanized and living fiction’ which Sinclair Lewis
claimed Manhattan Transfer was, he had caricatured New York and members of its
population effectively-had succeeded brilliantly in achieving what he had set out to do”
(242). What Dos Passos had set out to do, as Ludington makes clear elsewhere, was to
create an American idiom capable of representing the intensity of Manhattan’s culture— an
urban vernacular freed from the restraining traditions o f prose narrative and empowered to
provide true access to the city by exploiting precisely what and, most importantly, how its
citizens perceived. Such language must stimulate the reader’s interpretive sensibility, and
this was the aspect of Dos Passos’ realist fiction that Lewis considered “humanized and
living.”
While recounting the punishing review of committed Communist Mike Gold, who
found Dos Passos a “vague aesthete” bent on “pessimism, defeatism, and despair,”
9 6 Sinclair Lewis, rev. of Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos, Saturday Review o f
Literature 5 Dec. 1925: 361. Qtd. in Ludington: 242.
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Ludington concurs about the novel’s famous final passage, understanding it as only one of
escape:
Dos Passos, however, did not understand how to help Herfi
who at the conclusion of the book tries to escape the chaos
of Manhattan only by plodding along a highway out of the
city looking for a lift. “How fur ye goin?’ asks the driver of
a truck. “I dunno,” answers Jimmy, “pretty far”— a
response which, Gold was correct, is an affirmation o f
nothing except the negative effects o f urban life." (245;
emphasis added)
I contend that Dos Passos already had helped Jimmy, which is why he is making his way
out of the city. Yes, it is an affirmation of the city’s dehumanizing pressure, but it also
implicates an America able to reinvent itself and the endurance and pervasiveness of
language. Dos Passos has endowed Jimmy with the same and only refuge he ever found
for himself— language. And like Dos Passos, Jimmy exalts it by questioning its efficacy.
This is Jimmy’s redemption from the city, his capacity (or fete) to be both a talented
journalist and the embodiment of linguistic impotence and irrelevance. Ellen, who is
incapable of participating in Jimmy’s self-conscious exploration of the city, language, and
the self, is left trapped in the city’s machinations, “a wooden Indian, painted, with a hand
raised at the streetcomer.”
I now wish to examine more closely Dos Passos’ language with regard to the
skyscraper and the interpretive mandate of the selected photographs of Manhattan.
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Chapter Five
190
N ovel: Photograph
Figurative Aphasia and Redemptive Transfer in Manhattan
Dos Passos’ elaborate linguistic responses to figurative aphasia are rigorously
cultivated, yet supple and tolerant. As such they insist upon a, to borrow a term from
Barthes, “writerly” analysis and achieve a high degree of self-consciousness that addresses
modernity through a margin of interpretation— a gap that the reader must fill. I contend
that the photographs below exploit the inherent void of narration or text to induce a like
interpretation of the city through visual means. In this case both novel and photographs
stimulate “the prototypically modem revelation: a negative epiphany” that subtly redeems
the harried human presence through the engagement of interpretation and a “transcription
of reality.”9 7
The following passage lies near the beginning of the novel’s final section, “The
Burthen of Nineveh,” and constitutes a brief episode or interlude between more extensive
9 7 Susan Sontag’s book, On Photography (New York: Farrar, 1977), ultimately
underlines the effects of the photograph’s ubiquity on our perception of modem reality,
namely the conflation of reality and the image of reality. Aside from the political
commentary and intimations about social class that her approach permits, the book is
extremely insightful on a formalist and aesthetic level regarding the suggestiveness and
interpretability of photographs, or the volatility of the photograph as language.
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treatments of the Densch’s professional despair and the ongoing emotional entrophy
characterizing the relationship between Ellen Thatcher and George Baldwin:
Mother’s face swoops down and kisses him; his hands
clutch her dress, and she has gone leaving him in the dark,
leaving a frail lingering fragrance in the dark that makes him
cry. Little Martin lies tossing within the iron bars of his
crib. Outside dark, and beyond walls and outside again the
horrible great dark of grownup people, rumbling, jiggling,
creeping in chunks through the windows putting fingers
through the crack in the door. From outside above the roar
of wheels comes a strangling wail clutching his throat.
Pyramids of dark piled above him fell crumpling on top of
him. He yells, gagging between yells. (372)
The isolation of Little Martin comes early, just as it did in the nearly identical passages for
his fether, Jimmy Herf, as a boy. Dos Passos’ childhood undoubtedly inspired the above,
but that association left bare threatens to obscure the significance Dos Passos places on
perception itself. First, the passage is written from the perspective of the infent, taking in
smells, sights and sounds wholesale, per se, hermetically. Although written in third person
narrative, even the syntax mirrors the intensity of infantile, distilled perception and
sensitivity, emphasizing absolutes and encroachments: “Outside dark, and beyond walls
and outside again the horrible great dark of grownup people, rumbling, jiggling, creeping
in chunks through the windows, putting fingers through the crack in the door.” The
oppressive darkness and sounds of Manhattan are passed on to the next generation and
painfully absorbed through its senses. Likewise, the darkness takes on weight, an
objective onerous weight, through the infant’s perception and is transferred to the reader.
Dos Passos molds the darkness into a pyramid, a shape that suggests both weight and
height through a broad base and tapering sides: “Pyramids of dark piled above him fall
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192
crumpling on top of him.” The weight of darkness is further increased by constructing
pyramids strong enough to pile, thus growing exponentially, but maleable enough to
crumple onto the infant, thereby melding into each other and swelling the effect.
Although not one of the featured photographers examined in detail below, the
formalist Paul Strand produced an imposing photograph of the Morgan Building at the
comer of Wall and Broad streets in 1915 that corroborates the heavy darkness of the
passage visually and also connotes the crushing weight through what Victor Burgin calls
“‘literarizations’ made across the image in inner ‘speech.’”9 8 A “stark, formal
composition,” figure 31 reveals Strand’s penchant for “emphasizing strong geometric
patterns” of the city (Stem 65). The photograph produces a striking tonal contrast
between horizontal, or nearly horizontal, lit areas and vertical planes cast in either
shadowed gray or pitch-black. Even the outermost right edges o f the recessed window
bays catch a modicum of the light that penetrates the urban canyons lying between tall
structures, and thereby join the beveled foundation and the sidewalk. The building’s
massive window bays dominate the photograph and wed vertically with darkness: through
their authoritarian position above the pedestrians’ heads, the bays impose the structural
and figurative weight of the city’s skyscrapers and relegate the humans to a subordinate
status: also, the pedestrians themselves, naturally vertical, are appropriately shrouded in
black, completing the association with the building whose black bays assert an inevitable
interior destination.
9 8 The End o f Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press International, 1986) 21.
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Figure 31. Paul Strand, Morgan Building
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There are, however, areas in the image that disobey this tonal contrast: the
shadows cast on the sidewalk. Because of the angle of the sun, they are unusually long
and appear more like traces of the void inside the giant window bays than human forms.
Ominously straight, they encroach onto the horizontal sunlit sidewalk and bind the
individuals to the dark, vertical realm. Each shadow trails the human who cast it and
extends back to meet oncomers, either fusing with another individual and his shadow,
making two seem as one, or creating an aisle to guide those behind. Even in the sunlight
the weight o f darkness is upon them. Or is it that walking toward the sun, the pedestrians
are partially cleansed by its rays, leaving residue shadows, only to return into the
darkness? By composing the photograph at an oblique angle, Strand stretches the
dimensions of the sidewalk shadows and gives us the pedestrians’ backs, exalting their
movement to or from, as well as their inevitable union with, “the horrible great dark of
grownup people.”
Although neither the above passage nor the analysis of Strand’s photograph
extends the notion of redemption through language that is at the heart of this chapter as
directly as those below, I offer them as an introduction to the subsequent close readings of
text and photograph and as a reference for the following theoretical foundation. While
such readings may strike some critics as over-deterministic or fetishistic, I maintain that
they are logical manifestations, indeed repercussions, of the “photographic text” in its
capacity to “break with the notion of an unproblematically coherent image that the term
■photograph’ implies” (Burgin 20; emphasis original). Burgin continues:
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Amongst the intertextual references that a photograph (or
any other image) makes, are references to language itself.
These references may or may not have been intended by the
producer of the text, but they are present in any reading of
an image. (For example, a prominent area of darkness in an
image is never merely an indifferent feet to perception; it
carries all the weight of signification that darkness has been
given in social use, and many of its ‘interpretants’ will be
linguistic— as when we speak metaphorically of an unhappy
person being ‘gloomy’)- (20-21)
The uniqueness of the photograph lies, of course, in its formal and much debated conflict
or paradox: denotative or connotative, documentarist or artistic, signified or signifier.
Susan Sontag, who writes so insightfully about the interpretability of photographs, writes:
Although the natural or naive status of subject matter in
photography is more secure than in any other
representational art, the very plurality of situations in which
photographs are looked at complicates and eventually
weakens the primacy of subject matter. The conflict of
interest between objectivity and subjectivity, between
demonstration and supposition, is unresolvable. While the
authority of the photograph will always depend on the
relation to a subject (that it is a photograph o f something),
all claims on behalf of photography as art must emphasize
the subjectivity of seeing. (135-36)
My focus on the stimulation and process of interpretation of the photograph as a cognate
of literary interpretation not only falls within this conflict, but is fueled, even defined by it.
Sontag sees photographs as loaded with the conflicted significance of “artifacts” in a
society littered with “photographic relics,” and “found objects” or “unpremeditated slices
of the world.” As a result, “they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic
of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information” (69). Because our
perception of any reality through a photograph is predicated on first-order denotation and
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then filtered through our connotative “code,” the photograph incites our creation of a
narrative to fill its void— we reconstruct from the photograph according to the same
exigencies as Dos Passos’ departures from traditional narrative. Put another way, we are
responding to the photograph’s figurative aphasia, or its duality as a “pseudo-presence
and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs— especially those of
people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past— are incitements to
reverie” (Sontag 16). The reveries, allegories, or narrative reconstructions do not,
however, appear from an ethereal realm independent from the photographic object or
signified. The mimetic purity of the photograph, or more precisely the consciousness
stimulated in the viewer’s mind by and of a real slice of time and place, functions as a
catalyst for interpretation. Again, Sontag postulates:
Any photograph has multiple meanings; indeed, to see
something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a
potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom o f the
photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now
think— or rather feel, intuit— what is beyond it, what the
reality must be like if it looks this way.” Photographs,
which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible
invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy. (23)
If photographs cannot explain anything by themselves, or if the “camera’s rendering of
reality must always hide more than it discloses” (23), the depicted object is then critical to
the stimulation of narrative in a photograph because of its unique point of loss— figurative
aphasia. “The very muteness of what is, hypothetically, comprehensible in photographs is
what constitutes their attraction and provocativeness” (24).
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My conception of photographic interpretability rises from theorists such as Barthes
and Sontag, although its strictly aesthetic, formalist focus privileges the representational
registers of the photograph and text in lieu of class consciousness and social commentary.
The same holds true for my notion in regard to the writings of more recent theorists such
as Victor Burgin, John Tagg, and Allan Sekula, “for whom meaning is located in the
‘discursivity’ of the image, in the social use made of the ‘material product’ of the
photographic image.”9 9 The crux of their writing attempts to dispel the idea of an
autonomous visual image, exposing the centrality of language in a photograph and how
the viewer produces meaning from the image and his/her knowledge of a particular
cultural institution; this is not dissimilar to Barthes’ structuralist theory of “codes” as
instruments for the encoding of experience and the formation of meaning. Burgin levels
his criticism at the Modernist conservative aesthetics of those like Clement Greenberg who
espouse a “new criticism” of the visual image and privilege the surface over the sign,
eschewing all reference to anything beyond the boundaries of the art work as object.
Burgin explains that such an approach simply furthers the Romantic and Realist
conception of the image as relay. . . “a communication from a singular founding presence
‘behind’ the picture, either that of the author [Romanticism] or that of the world
[Realism].”1 0 0 According to this philosophy, which for Burgin still falls within the
“gravitational field of nineteenth-century thinking” but constitutes much of recent
9 9 Mark Durden. “Against Aura: Walter Benjamin on Photography,” Camera Culture
Dec/Jan (1993): 37
1 0 0 Victor Burgin, introduction, Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin (London:
Macmillan, 1982) 10.
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photographic criticism, the surface of the photograph “marks the place of entry to
something more profound-- reality’ itself the ‘expression’ of the artist, or both (a reality
refracted through a sensibility)” (Burgin 11).
The analyses made in this study do pose a “reality refracted through a sensibility,”
and the cultural institution encoding that production of meaning is the disconnectedness of
life in Manhattan and the dominating presence of the tall building. They are also
predicated on the paradoxical surface absence generated by the Romantic and Realist
penchant for an authorial or empirical reality “behind” the image (10). What Burgin seems
most adamantly opposed to is the claim for a Kantian noumenal world beneath the image
that reveals a deep knowledge or truth accessible only through the emotions (11). His
criticism of such claims is as strong as his endorsement of the production of meaning by
the viewer, which renders his writing pertinent to the aims of this author. He writes:
“Clearly, the photograph here acts as a catalyst— exciting mental activity which exceeds
that which the photograph itself provides. It follows that photography theory must take
into account the active participation of the mental processes of the viewer. . . ” (9).
However, for Burgin those processes are strictly linked to the use of the photograph
within a cultural institution and cannot be lasting:
The surface of the photograph, however, conceals nothing
but the fact of its own superficiality. Whatever meanings
and attributions we may construct at its instigation can
know no final closure, they cannot be held for long upon
those imaginary points of convergence at which (it may
comfort some to imagine) are situated the experience of an
author or the truth of a reality. (11; emphasis added)
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The readings of photographs in this study make no such claims to “truth” or to the
unveiling o f “reality.” Rather the volatility o f certain texts and photographs to invoke
interpretation from loss, as well as the subsequent redemption in a dehumanized context,
constitutes a new perspective on perceptions of the modem city. Through the analysis of
experimentation with narrative text and readings of the photograph as text, we reveal the
redemptive significance of language across the image/text divide. Burgin sums up the
status of language in an image:
Although photography is a “visual medium,” it is not a
“purely visual” medium. . . . even the uncaptioned “art”
photograph, framed and isolated on the gallery wall, is
invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at: in
memory, in association, snatches of words and images
continually intermingle and exchange one for the other. It
will be objected that this is indistinct and insignificant
background noise to our primary act of seeing. If I may be
excused a physiological analogy, the murmur of the
circulation of the blood is even more indistinct, but no less
important for that. (Art Theory 51)
Given the intensity of life in Manhattan during the 1920s and the drive of Dos
Passos to capture the city’s character through a fitting American vernacular, it is not
surprising that his novel enlists a collectivist technique, a “kaleidoscopic succession of
moments from the lives of a large number of persons chosen to represent the various
classes who may be taken to make up society in the metropolis.”1 0 1 Adherence to the
classic model of continuity in plot and the depiction of society through the plodding
1 0 1 Joseph Warren Beach, “Collectivism and Abstract Composition,” John Dos Passos,
the Critics, and the Writer’ s Intention, ed. Allen Belkind (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois UP, 1971) 55. In the same anthology see Ben Stoltzfus, “Dos Passos
and the French” (197-218), for a grounding o f Manhattan Transfer in the collectivistic
and unanimistic tradition of French novels.
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history of a main character would be anathema to a focus on the varied energies of the city
itself. As Beach puts it, Dos Passos’ characters are “obscure and dreary figures, wisps
and straws on the churning surface of our industrial maelstrom” (56) weaving through a
narrative that “is not of a sort to emphasize ideal objectives at all as a determinant of
action, but rather to suggest that the whole thing is a matter of stimulus and response”
(58). By constructing a narrative technique comprised largely of stimulus and response,
Dos Passos first reveals a truly appropriate expose of life in Manhattan in the first quarter
of the century, “dramatizing the isolation of individual lives and the fragmentation of
individual psyches in the city.”1 0 2 The cohesiveness that incremental emotional evolutions
and cumulative moral positions lend to the progression of a narrative is, with the partial
but critical exception of Jimmy Herfi absent. Rosen writes:
Because Dos Passos shows us only disjointed fragments of a
character’s life, motives are often obscure or attenuated,
feelings seem momentary and trivial. We rarely see thought
preceding action; characters tend to respond to immediate
stimuli. The dehumanizing nature of the city is revealed
through the hollowness of its victims. (43)1 0 3
Here the modernist technique of form replicating theme renders all characters objects
within the city, and beautiful Ellen Thatcher methodically and desperately prevails as the
model of urban isolation. We are, by design, meant to feel that isolation refracted by the
imposing structures of the city and its impressionistic distortions of light and sound, as
1 0 2 Robert C. Rosen, John Dos Passos: Politics and the Writer (Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1981) 42.
1 0 3 Regarding the narrative structure of Manhattan Transfer, see also Blanche Gelfant,
The American City Novel (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1954) 133-174.
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well as our own subsequent inability to identify closely with any character. As Rosen
suggests, however, that inability sets the reader’s mind in motion and engages his/her
interpretation:
With its proliferation of people and disconnected events, its
cubist multiplicity of perspectives, Manhattan Transfer
makes identification with its characters difficult. The
reader’s involvement remains more intellectual than
emotional, the experience a rather Brechtian one of thinking
about the novel’s action, trying to figure out its patterns and
their implications. (42)
Dos Passos creates a uniquely operative character in Jimmy, who perhaps suffers
alienation more than any other because his mutually influential loneliness and obsession
with language empower (or burden) him with the capacity to interpret his place in the city.
Consequently, Jimmy’s tortured relationship with Ellen underscores language as both an
agent of estrangement and refuge. Dos Passos’ technique ultimately serves as the
embodiment of society in Manhattan: for all the other characters language is a volatile
instrument of the city’s influence and exploitation of the individual; and while acutely
perceived as such by Jimmy, language also becomes a medium of personal revelation
regarding the city.
Thus, one of the most intriguing motifs in Dos Passos’ text is the deterministic
quality inscribed on the relationship between characters and the city. Revelations of
personal angst or isolation are often revealed against physical descriptions of Manhattan,
many of which employ the transforming objectifying language discussed above in order to
forge mutations of light, darkness, and sound into an inevitable union between the physical
and emotional fields. The prose poem that introduces the “Metropolis” segment (Chapter
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202
Two) instigates a recurring obsession with the make up of the city as a register of its
reflective capacity:
There were Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick.
Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held upon
broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets
flame like great candles round the Golden H orn. . . Steel,
glass, tile, concrete will be the materials o f the skyscrapers.
Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed
buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the
white cloudhead above a thunderstorm, (sic) (12)
The modem capital will rise above the storm o f history like a white cloudhead and, Dos
Passos now purposely ingenuous, circumvent the fete of its celebrated predecessors. But
the author’s analogies are telling and prefigure what will become of the “City of
Destruction” at the novel’s end by associating it with two Biblical cities renowned for vice
and ultimately destroyed by a punishing God, as well as two great ancient capitals now in
ruins. The prose poems only occasionally correspond directly to the segment that follows
regarding theme and period; rather, “their reference is general and universal; they have a
backward and a forward glance. They build up the physical background of Manhattan.
They are summary and symbolic” (Beach 67).
Accordingly, this prose poem speaks to beginnings in the “Metropolis” section:
those of timid Ed Thatcher fretting in a speculative society and the debilitating Oedipal
childhood that leaves his daughter Ellen almost neurotically emotionless; those of Congo
and Emile in the currents of the entrepreneurial allure; those of Bud Korpenning, new to
the city and in search of an escape from a nightmarish past; and finally the ironic
beginnings of Gus McNiePs near fatal accident that sets him on course for the arena of
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2 0 3
city politics. The historical undercurrent of decline suggested by the ancient cities of vice
and power taints the evolution of both the rising city and the unfolding lives within the
novel while permeating the sensibilities o f the reader. Dos Passos is priming our
perception of the individual and the city, a motif he develops with continuous and
increasing force as the novel progresses. By the final two sections, entitled “Skyscraper”
and “The Burthen [Burden] of Nineveh,” the reader is prepared for the passages most
critical to our purpose: Jimmy’s eternal struggle for peace and a notion of identity comes
to a head in his linguistically-steeped obsession with the skyscraper in the penultimate
section, while the “negative epiphany” bears its full weight and stimulates Jimmy’s nascent
redemption through his flight from the “wastebasket of tom-up daydreams” at the novel’s
conclusion.
Dos Passos develops the theme of loss through two types o f transfer: from
character to character, and from city to character. Correspondingly, I identify a final
transfer in the production of meaning revealed through our interpretive response to both
Dos Passos’ technique, and also the formal qualities and composition of the photograph.
The latter transfer proceeds from the negative epiphany embodied in the figurative aphasia
of the former transfers.
In the same manner that Jimmy Herf s childhood isolation is intensified sensorily
by the city and passed on to his infant son, Martin, only Ellen Thatcher surpasses her
father, Ed, as both creation and victim of the city. After declining to join a friend on a
risky investment, Ed Thatcher pores over figures, alone, in the early evening of his office
building, “dark except for the tent of light. . . at a desk piled with ledgers.” (109) He
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2 0 4
dissects his decision, reliving his conversation with the imperious Viler and ruing his
timidity with the inevitable regret of a cautious man in a speculative society: “Unless the
fellers doin the dirty work change their minds. I know that stuff through and through,
Viler.. . . Sounds like a topnotch proposition.. . . But I’ve examined the books of too
many bankrupts” (109). His disillusion is compounded by his certainty that the funds he is
copying are specious. Dos Passos concludes the episode and the “Tracks” section by
sublimating Ed Thatcher’s brooding, dreaming state of mind into a play of smoke and light
against the towering city:
The three windows at the end were not curtained. Through
them he could see the steep bulk o f buildings scaled with
lights and a plankshaped bit o f inky sky....
He leaned back in his chair and stared out of the window.
The buildings were going dark He could just make out a
star in the patch o f sky. Ought to go out and eat, bum for
the digestion to eat irregularly like I do. Suppose I’d taken
a plunge on Viler’s red hot tip. Ellen, how do you like
these American Beauty roses? They have stems eight feet
long, and I want you to look over the itinerary of the trip
abroad I’ve mapped out to finish your education. Yes it
will be a shame to leave our fine new apartment looking out
over Central Park.. . . And downtown; The Fiduciary
Accounting Institute, Edward C. Thatcher, President.. . .
Blobs o f steam were drifting up across the patch o f sky,
hiding the star. Take a plunge, take plunge . . . they’re all
crooks and gamblers anyway. . . take a plunge and come up
with your hands full, pockets full, bankaccount full, vaults
full of money. If I only dared take the risk. Fool to waste
your time fuming about it. Get back to the FanTan Import.
Steam faintly ruddy with light reflected from the streets
swarmed swiftly up across the patch o f sky, twisting
scattering.
Goods on hand in U. S. bonded warehouses . . .
$325,666.00
Take a plunge and come up with three hundred and
twentyfive thousand, six hundred and sixtysix dollars.
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Dollars swarming up like steam, twisting scattering against
the stars. Millionaire Thatcher leaned out o f the window o f
the bright patchouliscented room to look at the darkjutting
city steaming with laughter, voices, tinkling and lights',
behind him orchestras played among the azaleas, private
wires click click clickclicked dollars from Singapore,
Valparaiso, Mukden, Hongkong, Chicago. Susie leaned
over him in a dress made of orchids, breathed in his ear.
Ed Thatcher got to his feet with clenched fists sniveling;
You poor old fool whats the use now she’s gone. I’d better
go eat or Ellen’1 1 scold me. (sic)(109-10; emphasis added)
The sky and star constitute the human compulsion to look beyond the city for a
permanent wisdom, to look behind the urban image for relief and sanctuary. Midway
through the passage, steam, the byproduct of the city’s encompassing energy, begins to
encroach upon the sky and star to declare its authority over Ed’s fantasy of financial
security and happiness. But the steam does not suffocate the fantasy; rather, it carries it
up to Ed and invigorates it, thus accenting the role of city society in crafting Ed’s
ambition. As Ed’s sensibility reasserts itself: “Fool to waste your time fuming about it.
Get back to the FanTan Import,” the steam is now imbued with the city’s effective light:
“Steam faintly ruddy with light reflected from the streets swarmed swiftly up across the
patch of sky, twisting, scattering.” Finally, Ed’s fantasy comes to the fore, albeit briefly,
and substituting the steam, reveals the underlying web of city, wealth, and ambition:
“Dollars swarming up like steam, twisting, scattering against the stars.” When the
“Millionaire Thatcher” looks into the “darkjutting city steaming with laughter, voices,
tinkling and lights,” it is the city of ambition made his own, complete with music and
money clicking in from the world over; it culminates, however, in what he wants most, but
will never have again— “whats the use now she’s gone.”
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206
Ultimately, Dos Passos has tied the steaming, simmering city to speculation and
Ed’s mental anguish and impotence. The oppressive city (steam, light, and dollars)
constructs Ed’s dream of happiness and then portrays it as pure fantasy, a pipedream that
eludes his grasp. Only the sky and stars remain beyond its influence, but now obscured,
they too are unreachable. By producing Ed Thatcher as both the creation and victim of
the city early in the novel, Dos Passos exposes the reader’s interpretative sensibility to the
deterministic capacity of the city in his creation of character throughout the novel.
Figure 32, The Park Row Building, 1909, projects the rising steam of the Dos
Passos episode as a pivotal element of interpretation through the textured, fabric-like,
gray-brown finish resulting from Alvin Langdon Cobum’s use of a soft-focus lens and
platinum printing.1 0 4 This delicacy of tonal highlights evolved from Cobum’s mystical
sensibility and furthered his project of evoking a reality from behind the image. His
Symbolist period lasted from 1905-1910 and was defined, according to Mike Weaver, by
“four factors necessary to a photographer who wished to advance the art: the
philosophical basis (comparative religion), the aesthetic basis (Japanese art), the technical
basis (the telephoto lens and the soft-focus lens), and the craftsmanly basis
(photogravure).”1 0 5 All combined to produce lyrical images of the city. The Park Row
Building, 1909 exhibits a contrast between dark gray and light gray, a dichotomy that
1 0 4 The soft-focus “Smith lens” was made for Cobum by Henry Smith of Boston. For a
brief explanation of the process and qualities of platinum paper and printing, see Alvin
Langdon Coburn, Photographer: An Autobiography, eds. Helmut & Alison Gemsheim
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966) 16, 18.
1 0 5 Alvin Langdon Coburn: Symbolist Photographer, 1882-1966 (New York:
Aperture, 1986) 9.
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pervades the entire photograph and, therefore, invites contemplation of the steam and its
place in the composition. Aesthetically allied with the light tone of the protruding Park
Row Building, these urban exhalations unite the building with the forging energies lying
within the city and pushing it ever higher. Emanating from buildings in the lower dark half
of the photograph, the steam suggests a city simmering with commercial and speculative
possibility. As it rises, the steam carries our gaze upward along the Park Row Building
and incorporates the light tones. The sky, a putative, natural refuge beyond the reach of
the city’s encroachment, is also fused with the steam; the sky, steam, and building are
tonally indistinguishable.
While the photograph’s contrast is potent, it is also functionally supple. Because
the authority of the city society is unwavering and pertains to the entire image, the
contrast on the building is spatially compromised: the dark tones reside geometrically, and
thus forcefully and consistently, within the windows of the Park Row Building; they also
crown the building. The building dominates the scene and represents the future of the city
in 1909, but the dark tones within it suggest what is begotten by the city’s progress— a
shell. In the captured moment of the photograph the “what has been” is already upon the
tower, and the city can only continue to climb higher. Because the tones encroach upon
one another, aided by Cobum’s soft-focus and platinum delicacy, they emphasize the
unified domination of the city complex over the individual. Hence, the Park Row Building
is the antithesis of the shining city on a hill that rises above the seething dark throngs and
provides a refuge; here the composition extends the building upward as a symbol of a city
that is the hill, erupting skyward but still encompassing the city’s remnants.
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Figure 32. Alvin Langdon Cobum, The Park Row Building, 1909
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In a very real sense, Dos Passos substitutes the traditional continuity in storytelling
with the Manhattan cityscape, particularly its most poignant index of the city’s direction
and the role of its citizens— the skyscraper. The characters must interact with the city, and
it therefore offers a standard upon which to evaluate the various groups. After all, as
Beach reminds us, “it is the social nexus which the collectivist is seeking” (61). And the
skyscraper is a perfect instrument for such determinations because, as mentioned in
Chapter Three, its rise was largely predicated on practicality and prestige, not
consideration of the citizenry. Therefore, Dos Passos has created an appropriate register
of how that social nexus is lacking. Beach continues:
These people live in the same world, the same city. They
are subject to the same natural laws, the same economic
stresses, and to the same legal statutes But for the
social nexus binding man to man— affection, gratitude,
obligation, cooperation— this is nowhere to be seen.. . . It is
an atomistic world, a moral chaos, set in a frame of cosmic
order. (61-62)
One character, indeed the only character in the novel directly involved with the
creation of skyscrapers, is Phil Sandboume, a hard-working architect with a reverence for
the majesty of what the skyscraper could be; he’s a man with a plan to humanize the city
of New York through architecture. Dos Passos presents Sandboume in three episodes
spaced over the first two-thirds of the novel. In the first and last, Sandboume discusses
his passion with his fiiend, George Baldwin, who evolves throughout the novel according
to the opportunistic dictates of the city. Dos Passos, therefore, constructs the only direct
treatment of the skyscraper through the relationship of an idealist and an opportunist:
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210
Phil Sandboume put on his coat, knocked the ashes out of
his pipe on the comer of a draftingtable, and shouted into a
dark inner office, “Goin out to eat, Mr. Specker.”
“All right go ahead,” replied a goaty quavering from the
inner office.
“How’s the old man?’ asked Baldwin as they went out
the door.
“Ole Specker? Bout on his last legs. . . but he’s been
thataway for years poa ole soul Honest George I’d feel
mighty mean if anythin happened to poa ole Specker.. . .
He’s the only honest man in the city o f New York, an he’s
got a head on his shoulders too.”
“He’s never made anything much by it,” said Baldwin.
“He may yet He may yet Man you ought to see
his plans for allsteel buildins. He’s got an idea the
skyscraper of the future’ll be built of steel and glass. We’ve
been experimenting with vitrous tile recently.. . .
cristamighty some of his plans would knock yer eye o u t.. . .
He’s got a great sayin about some Roman emperor who
found Rome of brick and left it of marble. Well he says he’s
found New York of brick and that he’s goin to leave it of
steel. . . steel an glass. I’ll have to show you his project for
a rebuilt city. It’s some pipedream.” (75)
Sandboume is capable of compassion for Specker, and admiration for his project to
rebuild the city. It is reasonable to surmise that such a city would not only be built of steel
and glass, but in the hands of Specker or Sandboume, would also be developed with
consideration for the citizenry. By gauging the influence of the city’s transforming and
eclipsing energy on an idealistic architect according to his evolution in the novel, Dos
Passos establishes the revelatory capacity that permeates his association of individual and
structure.
Of the modem era’s notable photographers, none rivals the accomplishments of
Alfred Stieglitz, or his stature as proponent of photography as art. Perceiving
photography as one among many modem art forms, Stieglitz provided a forum in his 291
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Gallery on Fifth Avenue for artists such as Picasso, Matisse, John Marin, Marsden
Hartley, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Rousseau, Cezanne, Max Weber, Arthur Dove,
Picabia, Brancusi, Paul Strand, and Georgia O’Keefe. Many exhibited at 291 for the first
time in the United States. Stieglitz also founded Camera Work and cofounded with
Edward Steichen the Photo-Secession group which included Alvin Langdon Cobum.
Sontag refers to Stieglitz and Strand as “virtuosi of the noble image, composing mighty,
unforgettable photographs decade after decade” (6)1 0 6
At the intersection of Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and 23rd Street, near Madison
Square, stands the Flatiron Building, probably the most oft and famously photographed
building in M anhattan (fig. 33). Built in 1903, the triangular structure (actually called the
Fuller Building) was among the first skyscrapers of the new century and the tallest north
of the financial district. Stieglitz remarked:
With the trees of Madison Square covered with fresh snow,
the Flat Iron impressed me as never before. It appeared to
be moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean
steamer— a picture of new America still in the making.. . .
The Flat Iron is to the United States what the Parthenon
was to Greece.1 0 7
1 0 6 Volumes have been written about Stieglitz in regard to his photographs, his
patronage o f other modem artists at “291,” his editorship of Camera Work, his views on
modem art, and his relationship and marriage to Georgia O’Keefe. America & Alfred
Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait, eds. Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Norman,
Paul Rosenfeld & Harold Rugg (New York: The Literary Guild, 1934) compiles essays by
writers, poets, and painters who knew and worked with Stieglitz in various capacities. As
such, it provides a comprehensive and intimate account of Stieglitz’s enduring influence.
1 0 7 Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz, An American Seer (New York: Random House,
1973) 454. Qtd. in Landau & Condit 304.
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Figure 33. Alfred Stieglitz, Flatiron Building
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“A picture of new America still in the making” suggests possibilities, a willingness to see
beauty in the city that recalls Whitman’s Mannahatta, his blurring of the distinction
between the work of nature and the work of man, and the discovery of beauty in both. It
is the enthusiasm of Specker and Phil Sandboume dreaming of a rebuilt city. But
Stieglitz’s optimism is qualified by his ambivalence about the new rising city. He had just
returned from a decade in Europe and the comparisons were disheartening. Eva Weber
writes:
The Flatiron, with its aerodynamic prow— epitomizing an
exhilarating rush toward the future, as well as toward the
victory of materialism— was tempered only by trees as
organic reminders of the spiritual, in a typically ambivalent
combination of the optimism and pessimism that marked his
love-hate attitude toward the city.1 0 8
Notwithstanding the haunting beauty of the Flatiron Building standing so stately in the
wintery haze, the Y-shaped tree in the foreground mirrors the triangular shape of the
building and forcefully poses the question of the skyscraper’s coexistence with humanity.
The fresh snow covers the building and trees equably, evoking a Whitmanesque
“democratic vista.” But the expedients prevailing against such a reality, as embodied in
George Baldwin, are present in Stieglitz’s photograph. The park benches situated among
the grandstand of snow-covered trees are empty; as the majestic Flatiron Building makes
its maiden voyage into the future of Manhattan, it does so without a human entourage.
Stieglitz composed two groups of photographs of Manhattan during different
periods: the early impressionistic photographs of tum-of-the-century New York (including
1 0 8 Alfred Stieglitz (AveneL, N.J.: Crescent Books, 1994) 27.
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the Flatiron Building (1903), and the stark skyscraper studies of Manhattan in the early
1930s. The early Manhattan photographs are among his most famous; as in the Flatiron
Building (fig. 33), many combine his affirmation of humanity with, to borrow Weber’s
phrase, a “patina of poetic melancholy.” That is, Stieglitz “did not, like those who have
denied their own humanity, become smaller through his use of the machine.”1 0 9 Rather,
much like Dos Passos’ Phil Sandboume, he aimed to “reconquer the lost provinces that
had been forfeited by the one-sided triumph of the machine” (Mumford 47). Shocked by
modem materialism, he strove for “Whitmanesque affirmation” by “photograph[ing] New
York in an almost quixotic spirit— camera/lance against skyscraper/windmill” (Sontag 47).
And in line with the Impressionists who had influenced him, Stieglitz focused on the
properties of light and the elements, for it was through these that the “lost provinces”
could be redeemed. Because the camera fixed a moment of the ever changing city, just
like Monet had done with haystacks and the Cathedral at Rouen, Stieglitz utilized
ephemeral phenomena like snow, rain, smoke, and light to underscore the perception of
Manhattan. He effectively punctuated the city scenes as volatile receptacles for these
phenomena and thereby defamiliarized the city, accenting the act of seeing and
“question[ing] the physical and psychic costs of the construction under way.” This is
precisely what Dos Passos does with the ubiquitous presence and influence of light in
Manhattan Transfer. The project being to redeem an eroding humanity within the city, it
was not necessary to chronicle or canvas the city in a Balzacian manner; just as Dos
1 0 9 Lewis Mumford, “The Metropolitan Milieu,” America & Alfred Stieglitz, eds.
Waldo Frank et al., 47.
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Passos constructed his novel episodically and without narrative cohesion, Stieglitz touched
only certain aspects by implication. “Instead of merely mining the pitchblende, he extracts
the minute particle of radium, which accounts for the strange behavior of the entire mass”
(Mumford 47).
The technique of defamiliarization operates through a pervasive sense of loss.
Mumford explains the humanizing interpretation from loss that informs Stieglitz’s early
Manhattan photographs:
If one doubts Steiglitz’s awareness of the deeper
transformations of feeling and thinking and acting that took
place in his metropolis one need only examine his
photographs more carefully. The external change in the city
itself was profound. Within the darkened alleyways of the
financial district, people lost their sense o f day and night;
just as they lost the occasional glimpse o f the sky which
makes the worst routine bearable. In the new subways they
lost even the glimpse of the sun over the roof tops of
Manhattan, which had once been theirs from the ramshackle
elevated roads. Nature in its most simple form, the wonder
of the morning and the night, was missing from the
metropolitan routine; and therefore— I say “therefore”
because such reactions are rarely accidents--these elements
establish themselves in Stieglitz’s photographs with a new
force. (48)
Figures 34-36 {The Street, Winter. ; Winter, Fifth Avenue; and Two Towers, New
York) are among Stieglitz’s most famous photographs, and they embody Mumford’s
point. Figure 37, The Terminal, is the photograph about which he prefigured his later
notion of “equivalents” in regard to the city. From 1922 to 1930 Stieglitz moved to
abstraction and began a series of formalist photographs of trees and sky, and ultimately of
clouds alone, that encapsulated his career-long obsession with the union of the
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Figure 34. Alfred Stieglitz, The Street, Winter
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217
Figure 35. Alfred Stieglitz, Winter, Fifth Avenue
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Figure 36. Alfred Stieglitz, Two Towers, New York
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Figure 37. Alfred Stieglitz, The Terminal
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220
photograph’s objective and literal content with its subjective symbolic content— the
association of the body and physical world with the mind and soul. Stieglitz referred to
these studies as “subjective actualities” and entitled them “equivalents.” He claimed: “All
my photos are equivalents of my basic philosophy of life. All art is but a picture of certain
basic relationships; an equivalent of the artist’s most profound experience of life.”1 1 0
Stieglitz had returned to New York in 1890 after a long period in Europe. The changes
brought a depression upon him that determined his interpretation of The Terminal: “What
made me see the watering of the horse as I did was my loneliness” (Thomas 9). Proposing
a visual objective equivalent of a subjective emotional experience of loneliness is
analogous to this study’s reading of the city’s literal content according to our knowledge
and experience of the modem city as cultural institution. As a result, the approach does
not, in spite of Cobum’s mysticism and Stieglitz’s Romantic humanism, claim to unveil
“reality,” but rather it concentrates on the stimulation of interpretation from loss as the
means of evoking a reality according to the expedients of the city.
Appropriately, Stieglitz claimed that “photography brings what is not visible to the
surface” (Thomas 11). Figure 38, Spring Showers, New York, mirrors the use of a tree as
an “organic reminder of the spiritual” discussed in regard to the Flatiron Building.
Mumford writes of Spring Showers that “the promise of life, its perpetual reawakening
and renewal” lie within “a little tree in Madison Square Park, young and vernal in the rain,
with a street sweeper in the foreground and the dim shape of a building in the
1 1 0 Qtd. in F. Richard Thomas, Literary Admirers o f Alfred Stieglitz (Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1983) 9.
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Figure 38. Alfred Stieglitz, Spring Showers, New York
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222
background” (50). Stieglitz offers morsels of redemption in a city erecting monuments
that, while at times beautiful and inspiring, extend beyond the reach of the human touch.
Perhaps this century’s most eloquent and insightful critic of urban culture, Mumford
opposes Stieglitz to city agents such as George Baldwin and, in the process, returns us to
our discussion of the Flatiron Building:
Wherever Stieglitz turns his head in this city, he looks for
the touch o f life, seizes it, emphasizes it; and by this means
he sets himself in opposition to those who would glorify the
negation of life and sanction its subordination to
metropolitan business, material concentration. Meanwhile,
all the forces of urban aggrandizement are on the make:
advertising, insurance, and high finance, the divine trinity
that rules the world of industry and perverts its labors for its
own ends, gather together in the city and out of its egotism
and self-inflation rose higher and higher skyscrapers-----
(50)
In the second episode featuring Phil Sandboume, Dos Passos substitutes the
qualifying presence of George Baldwin with a treatment of architecture and community
that evolves into a morbid response to Baudelaire’s sonnet “A une passante.” In his office
with a colleague, Sandboume heatedly defends Stanford White’s contribution to the city
of New York and bemoans the public’s apathy over the judgment of his killer. Hartly
cannot motivate himself to care about such things in the summer time, thinking only of
vacation. Sandboume chides him, “A fine specimen of a public-spirited citizen you are,”
and continues in the elevator on the way to lunch:
The only other man I ever knew who was really a bom in
the bone architect was ole Specker, the feller I worked for
when I first came north, a fine old Dane he was too. Poor
devil died o cancer two years ago. Man, he was an
architect. I got a set of plans and specifications home for
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what he called a communal building.. . . Seventyfive stories
high stepped back in terraces with a sort of hanging garden
on every floor, hotels, theaters, Turkish baths, swimming
pools, department stores, heating plant, refrigerating and
market space all in the same buildin.. . .
As they crossed Fifth Avenue Phil caught sight of a girl in
a taxicab. From under black brim of a little hat with a red
cockade in it two gray eyes flash green black into his. He
swallowed his breath. The traffic roars dwindled into
distance. She shant take her eyes away. Two steps and
open the door and sit beside her, beside her slenderness
perched like a bird on the seat. Driver drive to beat hell.
Her lips are pouting towards him, her eyes flutter gray
caught birds. “Hay look out ” A pouncing iron rumble
crashes down on him from behind. Fifth Avenue spins in
red blue purple spirals. O Kerist. “That’s all right, let me
be. I’ll get up myself in a minute.” “Move along there. Git
back there.” Braying voices, blue pillars of policemen. His
back, his legs are all warm gummy with blood. Fifth
Avenue throbs with loudening pain. A little bell
jinglejangling nearer. As they lift hi minto the ambulance
Fifth Avenue shrieks to throttling agony and bursts. He
cranes his neck to see her, weakly, like a terrapin on its
back; didnt my eyes snap steel traps on her? He finds
himself whimpering. She might have stayed to see if I was
killed. The jinglejangling bell dwindles fainter, fainter into
the night, (sic) (170)
Sandboume’s concern for public-spiritedness and continuing admiration for Specker and
his communal building dissolve immediately under the pressures of a libidinous instinct and
according to the contingencies of an urban encounter. Baudelaire’s narrator is left to pine
for what might have been, an admittedly painful and deeply meaningful and alienating
moment in the poetry of the modem city, but Sandboume’s attempt to connect with
another human being is violently quashed. Dos Passos suggests with the inhumanity
binding his novel that the city has no place for Specker’s communal building, and that
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those with a mind toward public spirit will not only remain outside the circles of influence,
unable to affect the progress of Manhattan, but may well end badly.
Among the photographs composed for Alvin Langdon Cobum’s book, New York,
1910, was The Flat-Iron Building, 1909. Somewhat nearer and further to the left side,
the photograph is not dissimilar to that of Stieglitz."1 However, three years later Cobum
photographed the Flatiron again, this time producing a radically different perspective that
underlines the subordination of the human presence in the Sandboume episode. The
antirecessive device in figure 39, The Flat-Iron Building, New York, 1912, is not one of
the trees in Madison Square Park, but the street lamp. Cast in the sharpest definition of
the entire photograph, the glowing bulbs draw our gaze in the prevailing darkness. The
definition of the lamppost itself is sharp, felling against the light gray background of the
evening sky, and therefore it is thrown into relief as the dominant structure; but its
preeminence is defined by its relationship to the Flatiron building. From the viewer’s
perspective the lamppost is positioned directly in the path of the oncoming Flatiron’s
prow, to continue Stieglitz’s maritime metaphor. Thus, it functions as a beacon, lighting
the way for the corporate symbol through the darkness of the uncharted. The lamppost
also appears to clear the way, dispersing the natural elements, both floral and human, off
to the left with its angled facade. All living things will be separated from the structures on
the right with the passing of the building. The pedestrians are not fleeing frantically but
moving with a resigned deference to the imperious building. Also, the darkness and point
1 1 1 In an informative, technical relation of Cobum’s photography to Japanese art, Mike
Weaver contrasts the two photographs in light of their “antirecessive devices,” namely the
position of the trees in the foreground: 11-22.
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225
Figure 39. Alvin Langdon Cobum, The Flat-Iron Building, New York, 1912
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of view, when compared to other Flatiron photographs, deliver a protected perspective,
recessed within a natural niche and precisely where the pedestrians are being coerced. We
are therefore safely excluded. Clearly, the photograph is strikingly beautiful, which
renders its duhumanization all the more compelling.
Cobum’s photograph is also suggestive of the Norwegian Expressionist painter
Edvard Munch’s Evening on Karl Johanns Street (1889), which depicts pedestrians
moving toward the viewer and the city as a place of anxiety, nerves, and lost souls. But
Cobum’s depictions of the city cannot be categorized under a determining program of
social criticism anymore than Stieglitz’s could. The idealist penchant in Cobum and his
insistence on the symbolic volatility o f the photograph as a means of inducing
interpretation and personal association are what stimulate my reading of his photograph.
Weaver states that Cobum’s attitude toward the city was “partly Whitmanian, partly
apocalyptic or Futurist” (42), and that his optimism remained unchecked until the early
twenties. But it is reasonable to suggest that his interest in the city evolved not through
his generation’s confidence in the progress of the city, but through the city’s symbolic
potential. The influence of Arthur Symons, “the author of The Symbolist Movement in
Literature (1899), [and] whose Cities (1903) provided the model for Cobum’s own
projected series. The Adventures o f Cities, on London, Birmingham, Liverpool,
Edinburgh, Paris, Pittsburgh, New York, and Boston,” nurtured Cobum’s idealism and
shaped his portrayal of cities (Weaver 33). My reading o f The Flat-Iron Building, New
York, 1912 issues from Cobum’s sensibility instead of his intention to critique Manhattan’s
commercial society. Weaver explains:
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Symons thought that cities had characters like people and
that profound imaginative insight was needed to appreciate
them. The appearance of a city was different from its
essence. To draw confidences out of the stones one had to
put oneself into them, the vision rising up toward one like
the presentment of the print. This was the Symbolist
method~to make sense o f the world by subjective means.
(33-34)
Our experience within the crucible of the modem city and its conditioning of the citizens
governs our perception and reading of symbols. In explicating the symbolist method,
Cobum adumbrates the rise of the skyscraper, our capacity to make sense of it, and Dos
Passos’ distortion of traditional narrative technique:
Symbols are of two kinds, Natural and Artificial. All the
animals, plants, minerals, the orbs in space, day and night,
sunrise and sunset, the very atmosphere itself and the
myriad lives which exist in it are symbolical.. . .
But since man has the power to read and interpret the
stupendous system of symbols which constitutes the
objective Cosmos, he has also the power to rearrange
natural objects, or to mould natural substances into new
forms, and thus give them a new symbolical significance.
This constitutes Artificial Symbolism in the strict sense.1 1 2
In the final episode of Phil Sandboume’s rejection, he is, appropriately, with
George Baldwin again. Both men are older, and after years of legal and social
maneuvering, George has begun to make inroads into the world of politics and influence;
Phil is still laboring at the drafting table, tending to his populism and refining his dream.
Dos Passos places them in a throng of people on the subway, highlighting their divergent
attitudes toward the city as a complex of individual lives:
1 ,2 “A Study in Graphic Symbolism,” The Shrine o f Wisdom, VIII/30 (Winter Solstice,
1926) 177. Qtd. in Weaver 23.
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Faces, hats, hands, newspapers jiggled in the fetid roaring
subway car like com in a popper. The downtown express
passed clattering in yellow light, window telescoping
window till they overlapped like scales.
“Look George, said Sandboume to George Baldwin who
hung on a strap beside him, “you can see Fitzgerald’s
contraction.”
“I’ll be seeing the inside of an undertaking parlor if I dont
get out of this subway soon.”
“It does you plutocrats good now and then to see how the
other half travels.. . . Maybe it’ll make you induce some of
your little playmates down at Tammany Hall to stop
squabbling and give us wageslaves a little transportation
. . . . cristamighty I could tell em a thing or tw o.. . .
My idea’s for a series of endless moving platforms under
Fifth Avenue.”
“Did you cook that up when you were in hospital Phil?”
“I cooked a whole lot of things up while I was in
hospital”
“Look here lets get out at Grand Central and walk. I cant
stand this.. . . I’m not used to it.”
“Sure. . . I’ll phone Elsie I’ll be a little late to dinner-----
Not often I get to see you nowadays George. . . Gee it’s
like the old days.”
In a tangled clot of men and women, arms, legs, hats
aslant on perspiring necks, they were pushed out on the
platform. They walked up Lexington Avenue quiet in the
claretmisted afterglow.
“But Phil how did you come to step out in front of a truck
that way?’
“Honestly George I dunno.. . . The last I remember is
craning my neck to look at a terribly pretty girl went by in a
taxicab and there I was drinking icewater out of a teapot in
the hospital.”
“Shame on you Phil at your age.”
“Cristamighty dont I know it? But I’m not the only one.”
“It is funny the way a thing like that comes over you.. . .
Why what have you heard about me?’
“Gosh George dont get nervous, it’s all right.. . . I’ve
seen her in The Zinnia G irl.. . . She walks away with it.
That other girl who’s the star dont have a show.”
“Look here Phil if you here any rumors about Miss
Oglethorpe for Heaven’s sake shut them up. It’s so damn
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silly you cant go out to tea with a woman without
everybody starting their dirty gabble all over tow n.. . . By
God I will not have a scandal, I dont care what happens.”
“Say hold your horses George.”
“I’m in a very delicate position downtown just at the
moment that’s all And then Cecily and I have at last
reached a modus vivendi.. . . I wont have it disturbed.”
They walked along in silence.
Sandboume walked with his hat in his hand. His hair was
almost white but his eyebrows were still dark and bushy.
Every few steps he changed the length of his stride as if it
hurt him to walk. He cleared his throat. “George you were
asking me if I’d cooked up any schemes when I was in
hospital.. . . Do you remember years ago old man Specker
used to talk about vitreous and superenameled tile? Well
I’ve been working on his formula out at Hollis.. . . A friend
of mine there has a two thousand degree oven he bakes
pottery in. I think it can be put on a commercial basis.. . .
Man it would revolutionize the whole industry. Combined
with concrete it would enormously increase the flexibility of
the materials at the architects’ disposal. We could make tile
any color, size or finish.. . . Imagine this city when all the
buildins instead of bein dirty gray were ornamented with
vivid colors. Imagine bands of scarlet round the
entablatures of skyscrapers. Colored tile would
revolutionize the whole life of the city.. . . Instead of fallin
back on the orders or on gothic or romanesque decorations
we could evolve new designs, new colors, new forms. If
there was little color in the town all this hardshell inhibited
life’d break down.. . . There’d be more love and less
divorce.. . . ”
Baldwin burst out laughing. “You tell em Phil I’ll
talk to you about that sometime. You must come up to
dinner when Cecily’s there and tell us about it.. . . Why
wont Parkhurst do anything?’
“I wouldnt let him in on it. He’d cotton on to the
proposition and leave me out in the cold once he had the
formula. I wouldn’t trust him with a rubber nickel.”
“Why doesnt he take you into partnership Phil?’
“He’s got me where he wants me anyway.. . . He knows
I do all the work in his goddamned office. He knows too
that I’m too cranky to make out with most people. He’s a
slick article.”
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“Still I should think you could put it up to him.”
“He’s got me where he wants me and he knows it, so I
continue doin the work while he amasses the coin.... I
guess it’s logical. If I had more money I’d just spend it.
I’m just shiftless.”
“But look here man you’re not so much older than I am
.... You’ve still got a career ahead of you.”
“Sure nine hours a day draftin Gosh I wish you’d go
into this tile business with me.”
Baldwin stopped at a comer and slapped his hand on the
briefcase he was carrying. “Now Phil you know I’d be very
glad to give you a hand in any way I could.... But just at
the moment my financial situation is terribly involved. I’ve
gotten into some rather rash entanglements and Heaven
knows how I’m going to get out of them.... That’s why I
cant have a scandal or a divorce or anything. You dont
understand how complicatedly things interact.... I couldnt
take up anything new, not for a year at least. This war in
Europe has made things very unsettled downtown.
Anything’s liable to happen.”
“All right. Good night George.”
Sandboume turned abruptly on his heel and walked down
the avenue again. He was tired and his legs ached. It was
almost dark. On the way back to the station the grimy brick
and brownstone blocks dragged past monotonously like the
days of his life. (256-258)
Sandboume and Baldwin espouse antipodal views regarding the people around them. One
is comfortable among the bustling crowd while the other is uneasy. One entreats greater
contribution by the politicians to public transportation and envisions a system of moving
platforms under Fifth Avenue to move large crowds effectively, as a community, while the
other can only think of getting above ground to walk. Sandboume is nearly killed
dreaming about a beautiful woman, while Baldwin is paranoid about his affair becoming
public and undermining his reputation and carefully engineered social ascent. And yet the
two are old friends. Dos Passos punctuates their divergent views through their friendship,
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231
and as Sandboume’s dream is dismissed once again, Dos Passos implies that their
friendship is also slipping away. With Baldwin moving closer to his aspiration of stature
and influence, and Sandboume struggling in vain to be heard by that same circle, there is
little to sustain it. Sandboume, much to his ongoing dismay, has already achieved what his
society will allow. Going into partnership with Parkhurst would be as valuable to his
purpose as is his friendship with Baldwin. He longs to be a power broker of a rebuilt,
communal city, the city of ole Specker, and, as he foresaw in the first episode, a
“pipedream.”
The dream to “revolutionize the whole life o f the city” through “new designs, new
colors, and new forms” proceeds from a belief that the physical city pertains to the
emotional well-being of the citizens, that it is an environment capable of meaningful
interaction and mutual influence with humanity. Baldwin cannot concern himself with
such schemes because the city, like the human presence around him, is there to be
manipulated. Sandboume’s passionate pitch for financial assistance concludes with a
naive, but genuine and appropriate claim that “if there was a little color in this town all this
hardshell inhibited life’d break down.... There’d be more love and less divorce.. ..”
Baldwin has recently negotiated a “modus vivendi” with his wife, that like his position
downtown, is “very delicate just at the moment.” He has infect been slowly designing his
divorce over the length of the novel through infidelities and his consuming passion for the
quintessence of a “hardshell inhibited life”~Ellen Thatcher. Sandboume’s pitch has the
same chance of success as he does in a society of friends like Baldwin. Unable to
persuade his friend to finance his idea, it remains for someone else to make a reality. Here
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Dos Passos fuses the transformation of the skyscraper with the aspirations of an earnest
man constitutionally unable to manipulate individuals and institutions; Baldwin, whose
wealth is based on opportunism and questionable ethics, has that capacity but opts out
almost instinctively. The city’s evolution is the exclusive right of the power brokers, and
the skyscraper, the paramount symbol of commercial prestige and civic influence, faithfully
reflects that alliance.
In 1929 Berenice Abbott returned to New York after nearly a decade in Paris
learning and practicing the art of photography through acquaintances like Man Ray, Andre
Kertesz, Peggy Guggenheim, and Eugene Atget. She soon began to photograph and
chronicle the vertiginous change she noticed in the city. During the next few years she
sought funding for the documentation project that she entitled “Changing New York.” As
Julia Van Haaften writes, “Abbott declared that the camera alone could capture the ‘swift
surfaces’ of the city... .”1 1 3 Although unable to secure funding, she continued the project
and finally received support from the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress
Administration in 1935. Abbott photographed the city over the next two years and
Dutton published Changing New York in 1939. It was reprinted as New York in the
Thirties in 1973.
Although Abbott’s photographs exude a stark accuracy, her realism, as well as her
comments about it, constitute a humanist strain of realism that does not exclude
imagination and interpretation. As I will argue below, her realist photographs of New
York italicize the dehumanizing rapport between skyscraper and individual, thereby
1 1 3 Julia Van Haaften, introduction, Berenice Abbott (New York: Aperture, 1988) 7.
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233
inducing our interpretation and redeeming a human presence. She wrote that the
objectivity of the photographer is “not the objectiveness of a machine, but of a sensible
human being with the mysteiy of personal selection at the heart of it.1 1 4 To .. set down
in the sensitive and delicate photographic emulsion the soul of the city” was her charge,
and the purity of her “realism” in no way precludes interpretive close readings induced by
human dissociation.1 1 5
Flatiron Building, Broadway and Fifth Avenue, c. 1934 (figure 40) depicts a far
more conspicuous representation of citizens than the Flatiron photographs of either
Stieglitz or Cobum; nevertheless, Abbott’s composition intensifies the subordination of
humanity derived from those earlier photographs and parallels the isolation of Phil
Sandboume. Here there is no intent to portray the affirmation of humanity through trees
or atmospheric elements. In feet, there is no antirecessive device; at the elevated, less
human perspective from which the photograph is composed, such a device pointing to an
organic comparison would be unlikely. Abbott presents the Flatiron baldly. It comes
straight at the viewer, instilling an unsettling perspective in relation to the safe niche of
Cobum’s composition. That sense of uneasiness, of wanting to step aside but being
unable to because of the suspended vantage, is heightened by the building’s enormous
scale and sense of movement.
1 1 4 Valerie Lloyd, introduction. New York in the Thirties: The Photographs o f Berenice
Abbott (Newcastle: Side Gallery, 1977) 4. Qtd. in John Tagg, “The Currency of the
Photograph,” Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin.
1 1 5 Berenice Abbott, “Changing New York,” Art for the Millions: Essays from the
1930s by Artists and Administrators o f the WPA Federal Art Project, ed. Francis V.
O’Connor (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975) 161.
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' ■ " S S p w e i l
Figure 40. Berenice Abbott, Flatiron Building, Broadway and Fifth Avenue, c. 1934
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The Flatiron's proportions are intimidating because of the perspective created by
the contiguous but diminutive buildings behind, particularly those angling to the right
down Fifth Avenue, fading and reducing into the sunlit distance. Also, the expanse of the
intersection at Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and 23rd Street, as well as the extended views of
Broadway and Fifth, reflects the sunlight and throws the Flatiron into relief. An elevated
point of view might appear upon first thought to reduce the building’s scale by diminishing
its height as seen from groung level, but Abbott portrays a true scale through perspective
on the contiguous buildings and intersection that is achievable only from an inhuman point
of view. By presenting the building through its true scale in relation to the built
environment around it, Abbott remains loyal to her realist mandate and, most importantly,
subordinates the scale of the human presence. Seen from the ground, we could not
perceive the proportions of the Flatiron Building regarding those behind it or in relation to
the intersection. We would be obliged to refract the building according to a scale
grounded in our association with the pedestrians around us. Abbott’s vantage depicts the
pedestrians out of scale according to human perception and in their true scale to the
building. From the elevated point of view, Abbott shows us how large the building is,
eclipses the human perspective, subordinates the pedestrians in the street, and isolates the
viewer from them physically. The Flatiron’s truest scale corresponds to a subordinated
human presence.
In conjunction with the building’s scale, the creation of its movement also furthers
a sense o f human submission. The diverging angles of the facades running up Broadway
and Fifth Avenue depart from the Flatiron but also combine with and extend the effect of
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its raised, rippled spandrels wrapping around the curved comer and creating the
impression of windmarks. The forward movement is encouraged by the enormous scale of
the building and the sunlit streets and intersection that set the moving mass of buildings off
as if on a surrounding and reflecting sea. In light of the composition’s demotion of
humanity, the pedestrians’ scurrying activity appears no more than flotsam being displaced
by the celebrated prow of the Flatiron.
Tagg writes that Abbott’s is “. . . a conception of realism which is not
incompatible with [her] emphasis on ‘personal expression’ and ‘creative development.’”
Continuing, Tagg extends Abbott’s enlightened realism to the process of perceiving what
is “real,” and thereby broaches my association of her work with the narrative of Dos
Passos:
It also introduces the idea that, far from being a neutral
presentation of pre-existing facts, realism may involve
certain essential formal strategies.. . . It is in this sense that
what she called the “aesthetic factor” in photography was
not at odds with its documentary or realist purpose. This
should be sufficient to convince us of the “internal” features
of Abbott’s “realism.” We must see that here, as generally,
realism is defined at the level o f signification, as the
outcome of an elaborate constitutive process.. . . The
reality of the realist representation does not correspond in
any direct or simple way to anything present to us “before”
representation. It is, rather, the product of a complex
process involving the motivated and selective employment
of determinate means o f representation. (11-112; emphasis
original)
The means of representation in Dos Passos of course lie in his distortion of traditional
narrative technique to mirror Manhattan society and, as will be explicated below, his self-
conscious subversion of language with its ultimate redemptive capacity. For Abbott, the
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means are less ostensibly cultivated and operate through the unadorned, unembellished,
and direct object. She wrote that “the fantastic and unexpected, the ever-changing and
renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself. Once we understand this, it
exercises a dynamic compulsion on us, and a photo-document is bom.”1 1 6 Not
surprisingly, Abbott looked askance at the pictorialist tradition, a “terrible plague,”
initiated by Henry Peach Robinson and furthered by Stieglitz, that “flattered everything”
and “sought to correct what the camera saw.” Accordingly, for Abbott “the inherent
genius and dignity of the human subject was denied” (“Crossroads” 181).
But the “dignity of the human subject” is resurrected in both, rising from an
ambivalence about the city evolved through both affirmation and a partial eclipse of the
human subject in Stieglitz, and a completely, accurately urbanized perspective in Abbott
that magnifies human effacement. Through different techniques, both approaches induce
Tagg’s “elaborate constitutive process” in the viewer, just as Dos Passos’ realism does in
his reader. Put simply, “the originality of a work of art refers to the originality of the thing
expressed and the way it is expressed, whether it be in poetry, photography, or painting...
. the greatest thoughts have been expressed by means o f the simplest technique, writing’
(emphasis added).1 1 7 Indeed Tagg underlines Abbott’s own mention of photography’s
1 1 6 “Photography at the Crossroads,” Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan
Trachtenberg 183-84.
1 1 7 Alfred Stieglitz, “Pictorial Photography,” Classic Essays, Trachtenberg 118.
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“strong affin ity to writing” in the American realist tradition, singling out Jack London’s
novel Martin Eden (110).1 1 8
Ultimately, the intensity of a realist depiction of the city cannot undermine its
subjective interpretation. Dos Passos’ technique is predicated on subjectivity, or the
response to urban stimuli., as realism. And the varied methods of Stieglitz and Abbott
constitute different, but equally effective approaches to the modem city’s inherent catalyst
for interpretation— loss. Sontag writes:
Photography’s commitment to realism can accommodate
any style, any approach to subject matter. Sometimes it will
be defined more narrowly, as the making of images which
resemble, and inform us about, the world. Interpreted more
broadly, echoing the distrust of mere likeness which has
inspired painting for more than a century, photographic
realism can be— is more and more— defined not as what is
“really” there but as what I “really” perceive.. . . Even
Abbott cannot help assuming a change in the very nature of
reality: that it needs the selective, more acute eye of the
camera, there being simply much more of it than ever
before. (120)
Both the novelistic and photographic depictions of the skyscraper are particularly
revelatory given their imperiousness over the individual. That is, they incite through a
focus on a “hidden” reality. Sontag reminds that:
All that photography’s program of realism actually implies
is the belief that reality is hidden. And, being hidden, is
something to be unveiled.. . . Photography’s commitment
to realism does not limit [it] to certain subjects, as more real
than others, but rather illustrates the formalist understanding
of what goes on in every work of art: reality is, in Victor
Shklovsky’s word, de-familiarized.. . . To claim that
1 1 8 Tagg’s reference is to “From a Talk Given at the Aspen Institute, Conference on
Photography, 6 October, 1951", New York in the Thirties 23.
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photography must be realistic is not incompatible with
opening up an even wider gap between image and reality, in
which the mysteriously acquired knowledge (and the
enhancement of reality) supplied by photographs presumes
a prior alienation from or devaluation o f reality. (120-21;
emphasis added)
Through the autobiographical character Jimmy Herf, and as the climax of his
subversion of narrative technique, Dos Passos develops the obsession with the impotence
of language as the novel progresses, finally fusing it with the skyscraper itself, and thereby
making Jimmy’s despair over language and his life in the city inseparable. But the
development starts early and colors many of the episodes featuring Jimmy. Upon finding
his wife (Ellen Thatcher) with Jimmy’s dissolute roommate, Stan Emery, John Oglethorpe,
the stagy articulate actor, lashes out at Jimmy in a drunken tirade, condemning the press
and its sycophantic agents. The accusations are far more telling than Jimmy realizes,
foreshadowing both the synthesis of language and his unfulfilling life, and his painful
empty marriage to another “prostitute,” Ellen:
How do you like being a paid prostitute of the press? How
do you like your yellow ticket?. . . I read and keep silent
. . . . I know that every sentence, every word, every
picayune punctuation that appears in the public press is
perused and revised and deleted in the interests of
advertisers and bondholders. The fountain of national life is
poisoned at the source. (195)
And Oglethorpe touches on the source of Jimmy’s eventual “aphasia,” the keystone of
Dos Passos’ discourse on the manipulation of language as conspirator against the
individual.
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Later Jimmy defends the journalist’s trade in regard to the war, where he later
serves, appropriately, in the Publicity Corps of the Red Cross, with Ellen: “Oh it’s all in a
day’s work.. . . What gives me gooseflesh is the armies mobilizing, Belgrade bombarded,
Belgium invaded. . . all that stuff I just cant imagine it” (222). Unable to imagine it, he
can still produce the copy by rote (“all in a day’s work”). Dos Passos continues to stock
language with deterministic capacity in regard to Jimmy’s empty life. Passionate about the
war, the pinnacle of human desolation, Jimmy sees language as his way into it.
In the “Revolving Doors” section Jimmy starts to perceive the journalist’s life as
existence at a remove, and language as Platonic shadows on the cave wall, leaving him
unsatisfied, ever the spectator. Waiting inside while his friends are involved in a violent
confrontation among contraband smugglers, he struggles with the growing realization of
his own impotence:
Jimmy Herf walked up and down uneasily puffing on a
cigarette. He was making up the story in his mind.. . . In a
lonely abandoned dancehall on Sheepshead Bay. . . lovely
blooming Italian girl. . . shrill whistle in the dark. . . I
ought to get out and see what’s going o a He groped for
the front door. It was locked. He walked over to the piano
and put another nickel ia Then he lit another cigarette and
started walking up and down again. Always the way. . . a
parasite on the drama of life, reporter looks at everything
through a peephole. Never mixes in. The piano was
playing Yes We Have No Bananas. “Oh hell!” he kept
muttering and ground his teeth and walked up and down.
(319-320)
Jimmy’s recounting of the story to a group of liquored-up friends at an all night party
takes a disingenuous turn, transforming his role into a somewhat less pathetic one:
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241
. I finally did drag my bootlegger friend out of the fray
when he got his leg broken. . . his wooden leg.”
Everybody let out a shout. Roy filled Jimmy’s glass up
with gin again.
“Oh Jimmy,” cooed Alice, “you lead the most thrilling
life.” (324)
That only manipulation through language can render Jimmy’s life “thrilling” simply
isolates him fiirther and exacerbates his association of language, impotence, and alienation.
On the night before Ellen cooly suggests a divorce, Dos Passos further blurs the
distinctions between frustration and desire, consciousness and dream state, while
confirming language as the pliant distorting medium through which Jimmy desperately
searches for identity:
He turned out the light, opened a crack of the window and
dropped wooden with sleep into bed. Immediately he was
writing a letter on a linotype. Now I lay me down to sleep
. . . mother of the great white twilight. The arm of the
linotype was a woman’s hand in a long white glove.
Through the clanking from behind amber foots Ellie’s voice
Dont, dont, dont, you’re hurting me so .. . . Mr. Herfr says
a man in overalls, you’re hurting the machine and we wont
be able to get out the bullgod edition thank dog. The
linotype was a gulping mouth with nickelbright rows of
teeth, gulped, crunched. He woke up sitting up in bed. He
was cold, his teeth were chattering. (329)
It is fitting that Dos Passos reserves the most intense association of language and
skyscraper for the novel’s penultimate eponymous section. Here the reader experiences
the sheer hollowness of language in varied contexts and with the same directness as
Jimmy. Therefore, like Jimmy, “we piece things together and make our inferences without
slowing down, as we read traffic signs on a dark night in unfamiliar territory” (Beach 63).
This is the vernacular of the great American megalopolis that Dos Passos sought to
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construct, and it cannot be packaged or compromised into a steady, logical course and
serve his protagonist and reader accordingly. By having us confront the language as
Jimmy does, we are positioned to understand his final embrace of figurative aphasia and,
therefore, his response to seek redemption outside the city. As the only character
compelled to suffer its slings and arrows, Jimmy prevails precisely because of his
obsession with language and the interpretive capacity it has instilled in him.1 1 9
Having parted with Ellen, Jimmy “throws up his job,” which provides the final
measure of defamiliarization and its subsequent revelation of language’s hollowness and
impotence. It is Jimmy’s negative epiphany:
Jobless, Jimmy Herf came out of the Pulitzer Building. He
stood beside a pile of pink newspapers on the curb, taking
deep breaths, looking up the glistening shaft of the
Woolworth. It was a sunny day, the sky was a robin’s egg
blue. He turned north and began to walk uptown. Ashe
got away from it the Woolworth pulled out like a telescope.
He walked north through the city of shiny windows,
through the city of scrambled alphabets, through the city of
gilt letter signs.
Spring rich in gluten.. . . Chockful of golden richness,
delight in every bite, THE DADDY OF THEM ALL, spring
rich in gluten. Nobody can buy better bread than PRINCE
ALBERT. Wrought steel, monel, copper, nickel, wrought
iron. All the world loves natural beauty. LOVE’S
BARGAIN that suit at Gumpel’s best value in town. Keep
that schoolgirl complexion.. . . JOE KISS, starting,
lightning, ignition and generators. (351)
1 1 9 For an insightful discussion of the unique place o f Manhattan Transfer within the
Puritan jeremiad (apocalyptic) tradition and also as a modem American anti-jeremiad, see
Phillip Arrington, “The Sense of an Ending in Manhattan TransferAmerican Literature,
54(1982): 438-443.
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The alliance between skyscraper, language, and human resignation is consummate. Jimmy
terminates his association with the official voice of the city and exits the Pulitzer Building.
But as he stands on the sidewalk a stack of newspapers is on the curb at his side,
“grounded” so to speak. Moreover, he looks “up the glistening shaft o f the Woolworth,”
the cathedral of commerce, which telescopes ever higher as he tries to escape its influence.
A sunny day and a robin egg blue sky, it is business as usual, and “throwing up your job”
does not secure an escape from the play and influence of language. As Jimmy walks north
he moves through a city of signs, assaulted by “scrambled alphabets” and “guilt letter
signs” gorging his senses. But Jimmy’s capacity to absorb and perceive the inexorable
onrush of language is waning; he senses that language is multiplying exponentially around
him, but he is beginning to feel himself outside of it~less vulnerable to its intended
message. This is the defamiliarization of figurative aphasia:
Everything made him bubble with repressed giggles.. . .
Life was upside down, he was a fly walking on the ceiling of
a topsy-turvy city. He’d thrown up his job, he had nothing
to do today, tomorrow, next day, day after. Whatever goes
up comes down, but not for weeks, months, Spring rich in
gluten.. . .
Express service meets the demands o f spring. O God to
meet the demands of spring. No tins, no sir, but there’s rich
quality in every mellow pipeful.. . . SOCONY. One taste
tells more than a million words. The yellow pencil with a
red band. Than a million words, than a million words. “All
right hand over that million.. . . Keep him covered Ben.”
The Yonkers gang left him for dead on a bench in the park.
They stuck him up, but all they got was a million words.. . .
“But Jimps I’m so tired of booktalk and the proletariat, cant
you understand?” (352)
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Dos Passos continues to simmer Jimmy’s struggle with language. Now words pour
through his mind disappearing and reappearing, transformed and encroaching into myriad
contexts. This is word play in Jimmy’s beleaguered mind. Dos Passos presents words as
a medium of exchange, ubiquitous but ultimately undesirable and useless. Moreover,
words and language appear in a context of delinquency and deceit, a further reference to
the commercial apotheosis within the city.
Finally Dos Passos merges Jimmy with the skyscraper, suggesting Jimmy’s
saturation, or consumption by the skyscraper. In order to find an identity, it must first be
unconditionally lost. Dos Passos therefore unites his character’s yearning for redemption
with his reader’s impulse to interpretation: both rise from the construction of aphasia
Jimmy’s personal desolation is chronicled so meticulously because he alone will flee the
“city of destruction”:
With every deep breath Herf breathed in rumble and grind
and painted phrases until he began to swell, felt himself
stumbling big and vague, staggering like a pillar of smoke
above the April streets, looking into the windows of
machineshops, buttonfactories, tenementhouses, felt of the
grime of bedlinen and the smooth whir of lathes, wrote
cusswords on typewriters between the stenographer’s
fingers, mixed up the pricetags in departmentstores. Inside
he fizzled like sodawater into sweet April syrups,
strawberry, sarsaparilla, chocolate, cherry, vanilla dripping
foam through the mild gasolineblue air. He dropped
sickeningly fortyfour stories, crashed. And suppose I
bought a gun and killed Ellie, would I meet the demands of
April sitting in the deathhouse writing a poem about my
mother to be published in the Evening Graphic? (352-53)
Epitomizing the self-consciousness of language in modernism, Jimmy becomes the
skyscraper. Taking in an endless stream of both urban and linguistic pollution (“breathed
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245
in rumble and grind and painted phrases”), he swells forty-four stories into the city’s
emblem of commercial aggrandizement and human subjugation. And now as the society
represented by the skyscraper, Jimmy, “stumbling big and vague,” intrudes upon
individuals laboring in various capacities “above the April streets.” All the superficially
satisfying flavors o f the society ferment inside Jimmy, becoming a stew o f personal and
linguistic consumption with emotions and sensory stimuli overflowing and dropping as
sickeningly sweet foam through the “gasolineblue air.” Dos Passos brings the interlude to
a halt with a free fall back into the dominion of commercial language and Jimmy’s
impotence (“would I meet the demands of April...? ”).
Berenice Abbott’s Exchange Place from Broadway, circa 1934 (figure 41) also
effects a nearly complete dehumanization. From a seemingly impossible point of view, the
extraordinarily narrow passage (barely 25 feet) between opposing skyscrapers permits
light only at the intersections, as if to give fleeting respite to the inconsequential
pedestrians below. A minimum of light may be necessary to navigate through the urban
maze, but such an affirming element cannot penetrate “the architectural bluff and fraud of
the boom period” (Mumford, “Milieu” 50). It simply was not accounted for. The
claustrophobic walls are so imposing from Abbott’s vantage that they appear to be closing
in on the viewer, an effect that would not obtain standing on the horizontal plane of the
street. And the claustrophobic effect is aggravated by an inclination to follow the lighted
intersections: our gaze is pulled to a third intersection that is so distant it registers as
nothing more than a crossing white line. Beyond the white line, where we might anticipate
an affirming vertical strip of daylight, our hopes are deflated by the slight curvature of the
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Figure 41. Berenice Abbott, Exchange Place from Broadway, circa 1934
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passage to the left, thus producing only a slice of the right-hand facade and suggesting that
what lies beyond is more of the same. The proximity and “closing” o f the walls also
invoke an impulse to escape upward, away from crush of humanity below.1 2 0 This effect
is further enhanced by the “ladder” on the near right facade. Indeed it is difficult to gaze
upward without also gazing forward into the corridor, and vice versa. Even Abbott’s
cropping of the photograph into a column carries our gaze upward and/or forward,
accentuating height and eclipsing the human presence. Thus, through both scale and
perspective, Abbott’s composition speaks to Jimmy’s figurative aphasia induced negative
epiphany under the telescoping shaft of the Woolworth.
With the force of such a revelation, figurative aphasia has essentially overwhelmed
Jimmy. His affinity with and confidence in language has brought him to the edge of
complete apostasy. Dos Passos offers a final episode in which Jimmy’s racing mind wages
a desperate, obsessive campaign to resurrect the language of the city as a means of making
sense of his hollow life. Giving the synthesis of alienation and the skyscraper its final
measure here, Dos Passos melds personal and professional angst in a tour de force of
linguistic phantasmagoria. In short, Dos Passos completes his evolution of the skyscraper
as container of Jimmy’s despair, marking the consummation of figurative aphasia and a
subsequent redemptive turn:
Pursuit of happiness, unalienable pursuit. . . right to life
liberty and.. . . A black moonless night; Jimmy Herf is
1 2 0 Interestingly, because of the principles of perspective, moving forward into the
depth of a perfectly and visibly straight corridor would ultimately mean moving upward, as
the ground level would seem to rise up to meet the side walls at the farthest visible point;
here visibility and the curve undermine that possibility.
Reproduced w ith permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
2 4 8
walking alone up South Street. Behind the wharfhouses
ships raise shadowy skeletons against the night. “By Jesus I
admit that I’m stumped,: he says aloud. All these April
nights combing the streets alone a skyscraper has obsessed
him, a grooved building jutting up with uncountable bright
windows falling onto him out of a scudding sky.
Typewriters rain continual nickelplated confetti in his ears.
Faces of Follies girls, glorified by Ziegfeld, smile and
beckon to him from the windows. Ellie in a gold dress, EUie
made of thin gold foil absolutely lifelike beckoning from
every window. And he walks round blocks and blocks
looking for the door of the humming tinselwindowed
skyscraper, round blocks and blocks and still no door.
Every time he closes his eyes the dream has hold of him,
every time he stops arguing audibly with himself in
pompous reasonable phrases the dream has hold of him.
Young man to save your sanity you’ve got to do one of two
things.. . . Please mister where’s the door to this building?
Round the block? Just round the block. . . one of two
unalienable alternatives: go away in a dirty soft shirt or stay
in a clean Arrow collar. But what’s the use of spending
your whole life fleeing the City of Destruction? What about
your unalienable right, Thirteen Provinces? His mind
unreeling phrases, he walks on doggedly. There’s nowhere
in particular he wants to go. If only I still had faith in
words. (365-66)
Dos Passos brings the images and languages of the city together as the pillars of a
comprehensively destructive reality. Jimmy’s “reasonable phrases” represent his waning
attempts to resuscitate the usefulness of language, to stave off the reality of the “dream”
which Dos Passos has meticulously crafted throughout the novel. The skyscraper, pouring
his frustrations down on him mockingly (“typewriters raining nickelplated confetti” and
“Ellie in a gold dress beckoning from every window”), embodies his anguish and, as the
city’s most sacred shrine, still possesses an elusive answer he cannot access; as his
reasonable phrases deflate, the dream becomes his reality. He continues to unreel
Reproduced w ith permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
2 4 9
mechanical hollow phrases, but he has now understood their emptiness and can no longer
believe them. “If only I still had faith in words” exposes the culmination of figurative
aphasia and might well read “If only I were still deluded”~an unsettling and decidedly
modem epiphany.
Berenice Abbott’s Canyon: Broadway and Exchange Place, Manhattan, July 16,
1936 (figure 42) offers the pedestrians’ view o f the same corridor in figure 41. The view
entails such an overwhelming subordination of the human presence and scale that it also
elicits the unmitigated human desolation in Dos Passos’ episode. As a like culmination of
figurative aphasia, another lengthy exposition of its volatility might well seem ironic. In
that spirit, I offer a simple caption that encapsulates both the photograph’s formal content
and its evocation o f human effacement: “ETHER.” “1. The upper regions of space 2. A
volatile, colorless, highly flammable liquid, used as an anesthetic. .. .”1 2 1
The two previous episodes construct a dissolution of Jimmy Herf s faith in
language, the medium through which he had theretofore attempted to evaluate his
existence in the city. That epiphany, what marks Herf as the novel’s preeminent character,
illuminates the collusion of language in his beleaguered search for identity. Hence, he
endeavors to leave the city of destruction. This is Dos Passos’ appropriately simple
redemption. Jimmy doesn’t know where he is headed in the novel’s final and celebrated
lines because the destination is unimportant— receiving a lift on a truck headed into New
Jersey, he is asked, “How fur ye goin?” “I dunno . . . pretty far.” The redemption lies in
1 2 1 Webster’ s New World Dictionary o f the American Language, 1979 ed.
Reproduced w ith permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Figure 42. Berenice Abbott, Canyon: Broadway and Exchange Place,
Manhattan, July 16, 1936
Reproduced w ith permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
251
the revelation he has endured regarding the point of departure. He has indeed obtained
that epiphany through an extended loss, which is precisely the point.
John Dos Passos and the photographers discussed above elicit the inherent
interpretability of their “texts” by exploiting a point of loss. The subsequent interpretation
or reconstruction is, per se, humanizing. Therefore they invoke contemplation of the
human presence, a transference, in our most inspiring and alienating metropolis—
Manhattan. Both writer and photographer lift our numbed familiarity with the expressive
detail of the urban fabric and induce, through the formal structures of their compositions,
a negative epiphany of a subordinate humanity. That is, by stimulating our interpretation
through loss, they reveal the fragile state of the soul— suspended in New York (figure 43).
Reproduced w ith permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Figure 43. Charles Marville, Hester Street, c. 1929
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Photo Credits
253
1. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris
2. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris
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11. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris
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21. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris
22. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris
23. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris
24. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris
25. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris
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28. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris
29. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris
30. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris
31. Paul Strand / Museum of Modem Art
32. © Alvin Langdon Cobum, “Park Row Building, 1909,” from Alvin Langdon Cobum:
Symbolist Photographer, Aperture, New York, 1986
33. Courtesy of Brompton Books Corporation
34. Courtesy of Brompton Books Corporation
35. Courtesy of Brompton Books Corporation
36. Courtesy of Brompton Books Corporation
37. Courtesy of Brompton Books Corporation
38. Courtesy of Brompton Books Corporation
39. © Alvin Langdon Cobum, “The Flat-Iron Building, New York, 1912,” from^/vin
Langdon Coburn, Photographer: An Autobiography, Praeger, New York, 1966
40. © Berenice Abbott, “Flatiron Building, Broadway and Fifth Avenue, c. 1934,” from
Masters Series #9, Aperture, New York, 1988
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41. © Berenice Abbott, “Exchange Place from Broadway, circa 1934.” from Masters
Series #9, Aperture, New York, 1988
42. Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.
43. © Berenice Abbott, “Hester Street, c. 1929,” from Masters Series #9, Aperture, New
York, 1988
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City correspondence: Text and photograph in modern Paris and New York
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