258
PARTISAN REVIEW
Baudelaire, serves as an ideal guide for touring, or rather meandering
about, the
Arcades.
As he writes in "Convolute M," dedicated to the
flcmeur:
An intoxication comes over the man who wa lks long and aimlessly
through the streets. With each step, the walk takes on greater
momentum; ever weaker grow the temptations of shops, of bistros,
of smiling women, ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next
streetcorner, of a distant mass of foliage, of a street name. Then
comes hunger. Our man wants nothing to do with the myriad pos–
sibilities offered to sate his appetite. Like an ascetic animal, he flits
through unknown districts-until, utterly exhausted, he stumbles
into his room, which receives him coldly and wears a strange air.
Taking his lead from Baudelaire, whose poetry and prose poems first
introduced him to the joys of urban strolling, and later from Louis
Aragon (especially from
Le Paysan du Paris,
I926),
Benjamin consid–
ered aimless and arbitrary wandering a proper means of viewing the
modern world. This mode of perception (Benjamin states repeatedly
that the
flcmeur's
orientation is "optical"), historical and otherwise, is
operative throughout the work .
In
fact, readers partake of a type of
interpretive
"fliznerie"
as they move about "unknown districts" of Ben–
jamin's passages. Just as the Parisian arcades are built around the prin–
ciple of free-flowing excursions, so too, one might say, is the structure
of Benjamin's magnum opus.
In
her provocative, though occasionally overtheorized study,
The Art
of Taking a Walk
(I999),
Anke Gleber has aptly termed the
flizneur
"a
kind of private eye," a quintessentially urban figure that "investigates
the sensations he experiences and the riddles of modernity he registers."
Benjamin's fascination with visual experience lies at the heart of his
approach. His very descriptions of the project are, in fact, littered with
visual motifs.
These notes devoted to the Paris arcades were begun under an
open sky of cloudless blue that arched above the foliage; and yet–
owing to the millions of leaves that were visited by the fresh breeze
of diligence, the stertorous breath of the researcher, the storm of
youthful zeal, and the idle wind of curiosity-they've been covered
with the dust of centuries. For the painted sky of summer that
looks down from the arcades in the reading room of the Biblio–
theque Nationale in Paris has spread out over them its dreamy,
unlit ceiling.
