Romance Studies, Vol. 22 (I), March 2004

THE ARCADE AS HAUNT AND HABITAT:ARAGON, BENJAMIN, CELINE

DOUGLAS SMITH

University College Dublin

Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris (1926) established the moribund Parisian passage, or nineteenth-century shopping arcade, as the privileged site of a Surrealist mythology, where the casualpasser-by issolicited by strikingly incongruous objectsfrom another era. Aragon's work elicited a critical responsefrom both Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project (1927-1940)) and Louis-Ferdinand Celine(Mort a credit (1936)). Mile Benjamin insists on the economic context of the obsolescenceofcommodities that for him produces the Surrealist sense of the marvellous, Celine presents the arcadeasa miserable habitat dominated by thefear of bankruptcy experienced by its petit bourgeoisshopkeepers.For all their differences, the materialist views of the arcadepresented by Benjamin and Celine share acommon origin in the nineteenth-century traditions of autodidact socialist and esoteric thought. ButBenjamin ultimately shares Aragon's fascination with the emancipatory potential of the obsolete ratherthan Celine's reactionary anxiety over obsolescence.The dominant early-twentieth-century view of thearcadeis, then, that of a haunt rather than a habitat, a placefrequented by transients and ghosts ratherthan residents, a place of transition that anticipates contemporary definitions of urban space even as itexceeds them in its emancipatory resonances.

Habitat has been a constant preoccupation of French literature since at least the nineteenthcentury. From Balzac to Zola and beyond, the role of the environment in the shapingor expression of human behaviour has been explored through a variety of representationaltechniques. Particular environments have of course been the object of sustained interest.This is the case of the Paris passage or arcade, which was exploited as a location bynineteenth-century fiction (Zola) and poetry (Lautreamont), then retrieved from oblivionin the twentieth century by the Surrealist Louis Aragon in Le Paysan de Paris, before receiv-ing theoretical consecration in the last unfinished work of the German critic WalterBenjamin, The Arcades Project.1 Concurrent with Benjamin's work, and pursuing what arein certain respects similar aims, albeit in very different ways, is Celine's second novel Morta credit, an autobiographical fiction based partly on Celine's experience of growing up in thePassage Choiseu1.2 While Benjamin's arcade, like Aragon's, is a thoroughfare for shoppersand contemplative passers-by, Celine's passage is instead a habitat, a place of residence andwork rather than of leisurely consumption. The purpose of this article is to explore thesignificance of the arcade as an emblematic space of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

Address correspondence to Dr Douglas Smith, Department of French, University College Dublin, Belfield,Dublin 4, Ireland

© 2004 University of Wales Swansea

18 DOUGLAS SMITH

centuries through an examination of the critiques of Aragon advanced by Benjamin andCeline. If Aragon mythologizes the arcade, Benjamin seeks to demystify the Surrealist mythin Marxist terms, while CHine subjects it to nihilistic desublimation. In the process, Celineimplicitly challenges the extent to which Benjamin successfully dispels the illusions associ-ated with the arcade, a question posed also in explicit terms by Theodor Adorno. In theirdifferent ways, Benjamin and Celine work through the intellectual and political legacy ofnineteenth-century autodidact socialism, with its idiosyncratic combination of materialistand esoteric elements, an ambiguous tradition that for both is embodied in the arcade itself

A Brief History of the Passage

The passage, or arcade, is essentially a covered walkway lined with shops and represents themajor retail and leisure innovation of the early nineteenth century. Typically a convertedalley between two existing buildings, its enclosed space, protected from the elements by aglass roof, allowed a different kind of shopping and social experience in a changeablenorthern climate at a time when pedestrian negotiation of streets could be an unpleasantand even risky business. The earliest surviving Parisian arcade is generally agreed to be thePassage du Caire of 1799, built in the first flush of Egyptomania following Napoleon'scolonial and scientific expedition to North Mrica, complete with pseudo-hieroglyphics.Beyond the orientalist decor, which led many commentators to compare the passage to aMiddle Eastern souk or bazaar, the structure and architecture of the arcade anticipates manymodem building techniques, most notably the use of glass and iron in the roof, and theserial or modular structure of the retail outlets. Like Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace of 185I,the arcade represents one of the prototypes of the International Modem Style of architectssuch as Le Corbusier. The popularity of the design reached its high-point in France underthe Restoration and the early July Monarchy, before entering a slow decline consolidatedby the improvement of the external urban environment and the development of the depart-ment store from the I860s on. By the early twentieth century, the Paris arcades weremoribund, home only to ailing small businesses and shopkeepers trading in the goods of abygone era. Such is the context for the treatment of the arcade in the work of Aragon,Benjamin and Celine.3

Aragon's I.e Paysan de Paris (1926) opens with an elegiac evocation of the about-to-bedemolished Passage de l'Opera, and establishes the arcade as the privileged site of a modemmythology, an inexhaustible source of evocatively obsolescent objects. Benjamin's ArcadesProject, his last, unfinished work pursued through the I930S but only published posthu-mously in 1982, takes the passage as the starting point for a wide-ranging archaeology ofnineteenth-century French urban culture. Celine's Mort a credit (1936) recounts the story ofthe son of petit-bourgeois shopkeepers who grows up in an arcade whose atmosphere isdefined by claustrophobia and paranoia, and who embarks on a series of unsuccessful careersas delivery boy, salesman, and private secretary to an eccentric inventor. Each of these threetexts offers a different but related perspective on the arcade.

From A to Z to ABC: Writing the Arcade

Benjamin's Arcades Project is an A to Z of the Paris passage, a retrospective encyclopaedicenquiry, whose starting point is A for Aragon and destination Z for Zola. For Benjamin,

ARCADE AS HAUNT AND HABITAT 19

Aragon's Surrealism represents a rehabilitation of the arcade whose decline had beenmapped decades earlier in the Naturalist novel, most particularly in Zola's Therese Raquin(1867), where an arcade that has seen better days supplies the fateful decor for a menage atrois ending in murder, guilt and recrimination (AP, pp. 203-04). But a reading of Celine'sMort a credit suggests that Zola's work does not in fact represent the definitive endpoint ofthe decline of the arcade, and that the Surrealist recuperation does not pass unchallenged.The guide to the arcade offered by the A to Z of Aragon to Zola finds an alternative, then,in the ABC of Aragon, Benjamin and CeIine.4

As Benjamin notes, the twentieth-century rediscovery of the arcade is in the first place aSurrealist achievement. Fascinated by the surviving remnants of nineteenth-century Paristhat served their cult of the merveilleux, defined as a psychic shock produced through theincongruous juxtaposition of objects or a mysterious personal encounter, the Surrealistshaunted flea markets, pawnshops and secondhand stores in rundown areas of Paris and itssuburbs. The semi-derelict arcades with their faded and eccentric shops full of unlikelygoods from another age and customers of dubious morality offered a privileged terrainfor Surrealist investigation, one strewn with quirky antiques and inhabited by intriguingcharacters.5 Surrealism could even be said to have been conceived in an arcade: in hismemoirs, the Spanish film director Luis Bufmel recounts how his parents spent theirhoneymoon in a hotel in the Passage jouffroy, a honeymoon from which his motherreturned pregnant with her Surrealist son-to-be.6 But the most famous Surrealist account ofthe arcades remains Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris, from which the following quotationis drawn:

[La lumiere modeme de l'insolite] regne bizarrement dans ces sortes de galeries couvertes quisont nombreuses a Paris aux alentours des grands boulevards et que l'on nomme d'une fa<;ontroublante des passages, comme si dans ces couloirs derobes au jour, il n'etait permis a personnede s'arreter plus d'un instant. Lueur glauque, en quelque maniere abyssale, qui tient de la dartesoudaine sous une jupe qu'on re1eve d'une jambe qui se decouvre. Le grand instinct americain,importe dans la capitale par un prefet du Second Empire, qui tend a recouper au cordeau Ie plande Paris, va bientot rendre impossible Ie maintien de ces aquariums humains deja morts a leur vieprimitive, et qui meritent pourtant d'etre regardes comme les receIeurs de plusieurs mythesmodemes, car c'est aujourd'hui seulement que la pioche les menace, qu'ils sont effectivementdevenus les sanctuaires d'un culte de l'ephemere, qu'ils sont devenus Ie paysage fantomatique desplaisirs et des professions maudites, incomprehensibles mer et que demain ne connaltra jamais.(PP, p. 19)

Aragon details several important features of the Surrealist passage: the erotic frisson it elicits,its abandonment by fashion, its relation to the ephemeral. For the Surrealists, the arcadeis an obsolete retail model threatened by modem urban development, and its obsoleteform is mirrored by the obsolescence of the shops and businesses housed within it. As itsname suggests, the passage is a space of transition, made for passing through, a spacecontaining transitory commodities, which are also in a psychoanalytic sense transitionalobjects, carrying an erotic charge displaced from previous owners. As such, the arcade is theperfect pilgrimage site for the Surrealist cult of the ephemeral, whose principal inspirationis precisely the lapsed expiry date.

A further important aspect of Aragon's reading of the arcade, and one that providesthe starting point for the counter-readings of Celine and Benjamin, is its mythologicaldimension. For Aragon, the arcade is an important element of a modem mythology, part

20 DOUGLAS SMITH

of a Surrealist attempt to re-enchant the disenchanted, rationalized world of bourgeoisindustrial capitalism. It is a place of the revelation of the marvellous, a quite literally magicspace conceived in terms inherited from the esoteric and occult traditions of the nineteenthcentury.

As Michel Beaujour has observed, Celine's response to Aragon's marvellous mythologyof the arcade is to subject it to radical desublimation? In fact, Celine's description of thepassage concurs with Aragon's in only one respect, namely the lack of light:

II faut avouer que Ie Passage, c'est pas croyable comme croupissure. C'est fait pour qu'on creve,lentement mais a coup sur, entre l'urine des petits debs, la crotte, les glaviots, Ie gaz qui fuit.C'est plus infecte qu'un dedans de prison. Sous Ie vitrail, en bas, Ie soleil arrive si moche qu'onl'edipse avec une bougie. (MC, p. 572)

The Surrealist sanctuary of the ephemeral is thereby desecrated, transformed into a dark andputrid sewer, an unsanitary prison, unfit for human habitation.

This last element - unfitness for habitation - implies the fundamental differenceof perspective that separates Mort a credit from I.e Paysan de Paris. While Aragon givesthe passer-by's view of the passage, Celine gives the resident's; the casual Surrealist window-shopper is confronted by the desperate retailer, for whom the outwardly marvellousspectacle of eclectic objects represents instead the imminent bankruptcy of unsold andunsaleable stock. One consequence of this is the radically different phenomenology ofthe object to be found in Surrealism and in Celine. However incongruous in itself or inconjunction with its surroundings, the Surrealist object arguably retains its contours, thestrangeness of its new identity depending on the secure borders that mark it off from otherobjects and enable it to move freely between different contexts:

Bizarre attrait de ces dispositions arbitraires: voila quelqu'un qui traverse la rue, et l'espaceautour de lui est solide, et il y a un piano sur Ie trottoir, et des voitures assises sous les cochers.Inegalite des tailles des passants, inegalite d'humeur de la matiere, tout change suivant les lois dedivergence. (PP, p. 59)

For Aragon's aesthetic of collage, the Surreal shock of the meweilleux results not from theintrinsic oddness of an isolated element but from the unlikely collision of two realitieswithin the context of a wider reality that serves to defamiliarize them: 'Mais Ie drame est Ieconflit des elements disparates quand ils sont reums dans un cadre reel ou leur propre realitese depayse'.8 In contrast to the object as an element of Surrealist collage, the Celiman objectrapidly loses its specific contours; an alternately jagged or viscous concentration of matter,it stubbornly refuses to circulate smoothly as a commodity, preferring to snag on or stick toany available surface and to accrete with other like objects in precariously teetering piles ofundifferentiated junk:

Jamais je n'avais vu si moche et tant d'horreurs ala fois '" Une gageure ... Un enfer de poche... Tout ce qu'on ouvrait, c'etait infect ... Rien que des grimaces et des ludions ... en plombstarabiscotes, tortures, rafistoles degoutamment ... Toute la crise des symboliques ... Des bouts decauchemars ... [... J Tout rra devait se passer dans les doigts, ala ceinture, dans la cravate. <;adevait se suspendre aux oreilles? '" C'etait pas croyablel ... Et puis il fallait que rras'achete? (MC,p. 671)

ARCADE AS HAUNT AND HABITAT 21

To the enchanted object-world of Surrealism, CHine opposes the nightmarish vision ofrefractory and formless matter, forever on the point of dissolution and collapse, andabsolutely devoid of market value.9

Benjamin's view of the obsolete objects that wash up in the arcades is different againand indicates the divergence between his critical approach to Aragon and CHine's. ForBenjamin, the object is primarily a commodity, and his aim in Marxist terms is to demystifyits fetishized image, to re-situate it within its wider social and economic context that hasbeen concealed by the operations of capitalist production. Ultimately, the decipheringof the social meanings of individual commodities will dispel the greater mystificationof consumer society itself, understood as a vast phantasmagoria or optical illusion. ForBenjamin, Surrealism intuits certain characteristics of the commodity form that help todemystify the social relations around it, even as in other respects the movement privilegescertain mystical or mythological meanings. In other words, Surrealism combines elementsof quasi-religious experience with moments of secular insight in what Benjamin terms'profane illumination' .10 Benjamin's self-appointed task is then to secure the profanecharacter of the illumination, to re-historicize the Surrealist myth and retrieve its socialcore:

Delimitation of the tendency of this project with respect to Aragon: whereas Aragon persistswithin the realm of dream, here the concern is to find the constellation of awakening. Whilein Aragon there remains an impressionistic element, namely the 'mythology' [... ], here it is aquestion of the dissolution of 'mythology' in the space of history. (AP, p. 458)11

Benjamin's critical reading of Surrealism is premised upon his interpretation of the obsole-scence of commodities in a capitalist economy. For Benjamin, modern capitalism producescommodities in rapid cycles of fashionableness and obsolescence, in accordance with afebrile rhythm that discards objects almost as soon as they are produced. Capitalist moder-nity is a place where alienation has not only saturated all aspects of human life but evendeath itself, whose reified form stares back at us from the discarded consumer disposablesand depreciating consumer durables that surround us. Abandoned commodities thenbecome emblems of human fragility and finitude and the built-in obsolescence of thecommodity confronts us with our mortality as alienated labour-power. This is where theSurrealist treatment of the object comes into play. From Benjamin's materialist perspective,the Surrealists realized that the alienation of human mortality in the form of the obsolescentcommodity contained an explosive revolutionary potential. In the first place, the discoveryof the intrinsic obsolescence of all commodities under capitalism relativizes the social life ofthe present as nothing more than an ephemeral style already dismissed by future fashion.But this negative insight contains the potential to unleash a revolutionary will to change asocial and economic order based on obsolescence. As Benjamin writes:

Surrealism can boast an extraordinary discovery. It was the first to perceive the revolutionaryenergies that appear in the 'outmoded', in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings,the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of fiveyears ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them [... ] No-onebefore these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution - not only social but architec-tonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects - can suddenly be transformedinto revolutionary nihilism. (8, pp. r8r-82, translation modified)

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The revolutionary nihilism of Surrealism as identified by Benjamin contrasts dramaticallywith the very different nihilism evident in CHine's response to the problem of obsole-scence. For CHine as for Benjamin, capitalist modernity is an economic system marked bydeath and obsolescence. The very title of Mort a credit indicates that even death does notcome free; once taken possession of in advance at birth, it must be paid off retrospectivelyin instalments, in a kind of Heideggerian hire-purchase arrangement where being towardsdeath is refigured as a long-term loan, and where we simultaneously pay and decay aswe earn. If life for CHine is then biologically marked by death from the beginning, itsmoribund character is exacerbated by the social and economic conditions of modernity,which reduce life itself to the status of an obsolescent commodity. Obsolescence is in factin many respects the central theme of Mort a credit, as the novel recounts the slow agony ofthe Parisian petite bourgeoisie of small shopkeepers and artisans in their struggle to competeagainst department stores and factory mass production in the years leading up to the FirstWorld War.12

In their respective responses to Surrealism, then, Benjamin seeks to retain the revolution-ary potential of the movement's emphasis on myth and the marvellous, understood asthe oblique expression of a valid materialist insight, while CHine opts rather for a nihilistinsistence on the abject, non-transcendent elements of arcade life. Surrealism's revolution-ary nihilism is met with reactionary nihilism, and Benjamin's optimistic dialectical materi-alism with the fatalistic materialism of a world in terminal decay. But in proposing hisown versions of nihilism and materialism, Celine implicitly poses the question of whetherBenjamin's ostensibly revolutionary materialist reading of Surrealist mythology actuallysucceeds in moving beyond the mythical. To use the critic's own terms, how profane isBenjamin's own illumination?

The Architecture of Utopia

The question of Benjamin's relation to esoteric thought recurs in relation to a furthertheme of the Arcades Project that is relevant here, namely that of utopia and its architecture.In an intriguing fragment, Benjamin identifies Andre Breton and Le Corbusier as thetwin poles of early-twentieth-century French culture: 'To encompass both Breton andLe Corbusier - that would mean drawing the spirit of contemporary France like a bow,with which knowledge shoots the moment in the heart' (AP, p. 459). For Benjamin, thedialectical tension of twentieth-century Modernism is embodied in this juxtaposition ofpoet and architect, Surrealism and Purism, primitivism and technology, the unconsciousand social engineering, the occult and an aesthetic of transparency. While Benjamincertainly saw the arcade as the privileged site of Surrealism and its cult of the marvellous, healso viewed the passage as the template for the utopian architecture of the communitiesimagined by nineteenth-century French Socialism. The use of glass and iron, the collapse ofthe distinction between outside and inside, the modular structure of infinitely extendibleunits, all these features of the arcade echo the phalanstere of Charles Fourier or thecombined social and mechanical engineering of the Saint-Simonists, while, as mentionedearlier, they anticipate also the light and hygiene of the International Style housing projectsenvisaged by later figures such as Le Corbusier.

ARCADE AS HAUNT AND HABITAT 23

But if Benjamin's arcade offers the open possibility of utopian community, albeit nostal-gically, CeIine's passage embodies the CEdipal claustrophobia of the single child living incramped conditions above his parents' shop, in perpetual fear and loathing of competingand gossiping neighbours. The anxious downstairs daily grind of shop keeping on the vergeof bankruptcy is matched upstairs by the crushing weight of parental expectation and thethreat of domestic violence. In contrast to Benjamin, CeIine's arcade is a dystopia, so hisputative utopia is located elsewhere, first in the exiguous but exotic offices of Ferdinand'sultimate employer, the inventor Courtial des Pereires, located in the Palais-Royal, and thenin the rural community founded by Des Pereires at Bleme-Ie-Petit.

Bleme-Ie-Petit is the last stage in Des Pereires's attempts to envisage a different kindof human habitat and social organization. Appalled by the urban development of the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Des Pereires first attempted to devise an alter-native to the imposed slum housing of the Paris suburbs in the form of a 'chalet polyvalent',a prefabricated, multipurpose housing unit that could be constructed and customized by itsusers (Me, 869-']1). The venture failed, largely due to the fact that, on first being presentedto the public, its prototype was destroyed by the curiosity and acquisitiveness of crowds ofcannibalizing do-it-yourself enthusiasts. In a sense, this episode represents the failure of theModernist ideal of architecture within the novel, as a technologically sophisticated responseto the problems of modem urban living is thwarted by the destructiveness of the people itis intended to serve. Des Pereires's ultimate response is to flee the city altogether and toattempt to resurrect the ideal of the nineteenth-century utopia in the countryside.

Bleme-Ie-Petit is explicitly described as a Fourierist experiment, a phalanstere wherechildren from urban backgrounds are to be educated and improved through healthyoutdoor work and exercise (Me, 100S-II). Its educational mission is accompanied by atechnological one, as Des Pereires attempts to improve crop yields through exposingvegetables and cereals to pulses of electricity. But the utopia gradually breaks down, sincethe policy of allowing children to follow their impulses leads to their stealing fromneighbouring farms and having sex with the postman, while Des Pereires's agriculturalinnovations result only in acres of rotting potatoes. In a sense, the fate of the community isindicated from the outset in the form of the derelict farm in which it takes up residence;the ramshackle and flimsy buildings, forever on the point of collapse, are never adequatelyrepaired or renovated, and their physical dilapidation anticipates the ultimate economic andsocial disintegration of Des Pereires's utopia.

The Bleme-Ie-Petit episode is Celine's satirical critique of utopianism, in both its back-to-nature and technologically advanced forms. If anything, the children are corrupted bytheir exposure to nature, while the attempt to industrialize agriculture fails miserably. Inmany respects, this section of the novel echoes Bouvard et Pecuchet, Flaubert's last comicnarrative about two Parisian autodidacts who retire to the country in order to embark ona number of hilarious social and agricultural experiments, much to the bemusement andamusement of the locals. Flaubert's novel is essentially a critique of the received ideas andideological stupidity that in his view characterized the civil society of Second EmpireFrance. Celine radicalizes Flaubert's critique of utopianism, in terms of a thoroughgoingmaterialist nihilism. So the character of Des Pereires represents a nineteenth-centurytradition of self-education and popularization of science that has degenerated into patho-logical obsession and confidence trickery.13 The positivism of Auguste Comte (on whomthe character of Des Pereires is partly based) that inspired this autodidact tradition has itselfquite literally turned into religion and superstition, and is all the more readily manipulated

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for unscrupulous ends (MG, 924-27). For CHine, then, the radical utopian tradition of thenineteenth century falls ultimately into the hands of cranks and crooks. Its positivist basisturns into a blank cult of science that is in itself a form of superstition related to esotericthought, where the technology of electricity is all too easily aligned with the invisible occultpowers invoked by Theosophists and mediums. Des Pereires's personal fate underscores thebankruptcy of this tradition as Celine sees it. Committed to the life of the mind and thesupremacy of intelligence over mere matter, he none the less reduces himself to an inani-mate parcel of meat by committing suicide when confronted with the failure of his ruralutopia. For CHine's nihilistic materialism, as opposed to Des Pereires's mystical positivism,matter, beyond which there is nothing, wins out over mind.

Notwithstanding its very different character, Benjamin's work is equally engaged withthe utopian tradition of the nineteenth century. His interest in the possibility of profaneillumination through Surrealism opens up the perspective of relations between the utopianFrench socialist tradition and contemporary occult beliefs and practices. His attempt toretain the radical charge contained within the esoteric dimension of art and politics helps toexplain the complex and hybrid nature of his Marxism, aptly described by Margaret Cohenas 'Gothic Marxism' .14This emphasis on the mystical accounts also for the reservations thatBenjamin's work elicited among fellow Marxists such as Theodor Adorno.

Between Magic and Materialism

The correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin constitutes an extended methodo-logical argument. Essentially, Adorno disliked what he viewed as the lack of adequatemediation in Benjamin's work, in other words, the latter's tendency to move directly froma detailed inventory or examination of cultural artefacts and practices to a general invo-cation of economic context, with little or no discussion of the complex and differentiatedrelations between the two dimensions. Such a leap from superstructure to base representedfor Adorno the worst kind of vulgar Marxism, combining a positivist fascination with brutefacts with a quasi-mystical belief in capitalism as the Ultimate Cause and Prime Mover ofthe universe. As Adorno wrote to Benjamin in a letter of 10 November 1938, 'if onewished to put it very drastically, one could say that your study is located at the crossroadsof magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched' .15 And of course, the subsequent devel-opment of Celine's work, which is also located between the magic and positivism of thetradition represented by Des Pereires in Mort a credit, demonstrates just how bewitchedthis spot is: disillusionment with magical positivism can easily lead to nihilist materialismand then fascism. But in another sense, of course, Adorno is missing the very point ofBenjamin's work, whose aim is precisely the exploration of the bewitched spot betweenmagic and positivism that is none other than the passage itself as site of profane illumination.Benjamin, as a student of Surrealism, is interested primarily in the cognitive shock value ofabrupt transitions and juxtapositions between concrete and abstract, material and magical.The Arcades Project as a whole is dedicated to the possibility of opening up new horizons ofthought through such a method, horizons closed off by more rigid Marxist models such asAdorno's.16 As Benjamin states in relation to his own approach to his materials: 'Methodof this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show' (AP, p. 460). Therigorous but narrow intellectual work of mediation advocated by Adorno is here replacedby the suggestive compositional play of juxtaposition.

Habitat and Haunt

ARCADE AS HAUNT AND HABITAT 25

In conclusion, I want to consider briefly how the passage relates to more recent conceptu-alizations of space. It could be said that the arcade begins as a kind of 'non-lieu' or non-place, in Marc Auge's sense - an anonymous infrastructural shopping thoroughfaredesigned primarily for people to pass through in large numbers.17 As obsolescence sets in,the arcade gradually becomes a 'heterotopie', or heterotopia, to use the term coined byMichel Foucault - a marginal space for the activities of excluded or deviant groups (suchas Celine's petite bourgeoisie or Aragon's Surrealists).18 Finally, in recent years, the passagehas become a 'lieu de memoire', as defined by Pierre Nora, a symbolic object of culturalmemory whose integration into the national heritage has been ratified through programmesof renovation and gentrification.19 But equally it might be said that the Parisian arcade in itspresent form embodies these three types of space not in historical sequence but all at once.For if some passages currently retain a viable and lively commercial function, others havefallen into a shabby and seedy neglect from which they have not emerged, while yet othershave been rehabilitated as sites of heritage and tourism. In this respect, the arcade at thebeginning of the twenty-first century is simultaneously 'non-lieu', 'heterotopie' and 'lieu dememoire', a multiple identity made possible in theoretical terms by the fact that neither thearcade nor any of these subsequent models conceives of space as habitat. None addressesCeline's fictional critique of the viability of certain spaces, including the arcade, as placesto live and work. What the comparison with contemporary spatial models ultimatelyreveals is that, in spite of Celine's counter-reading, the general cultural significance of thearcade throughout the twentieth century resides less in its status as a habitat than as a haunt.For the passage is a haunt in at least two senses: first, as a place frequented in passing bytwentieth-century j1lmeurs such as Aragon and Benjamin; and secondly as a paradoxicalhome to the absent ghosts of nineteenth-century socialist and esoteric thought. Notwith-standing its affinities with subsequent models of space, then, the arcade retains its ownidentity, partly because of the strength and interest of the literary and theoretical texts it hasgenerated, but also because of the specific character of the place itself, with its idiosyncraticcombination of the obsolescent and the modem, the magical and the material, the utopianand the quotidian. To paraphrase Adorno while reversing his value judgement, the arcadeis a bewitched spot whose spell continues to fascinate.

I would like to acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and SocialSciences, whose funding of a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship enabled me to completethe work presented in this article.

1 See Louis Aragon, I.e Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris: Gallimard, 1995), and Walter Benjamin, The ArcadesProject, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999). Furtherreferences to these editions are given in parentheses in the text, using the abbreviations PP and APrespectively.2 See Louis-Ferdinand CHine, Mort a credit (1936), in Romans, ed. by Henri Godard, 4 vols (paris:

Gallimard, 1981-93), I, 507-1104. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text,using the abbreviation MG.3 For a comprehensive history of the arcade in Paris and elsewhere, see Johannes Friedrich Geist,

I.e Passage: un type architectural du XIXe siecle, trans. from the German by Marianne Brauch (1969; Brussels:P. Mardaga, 1989).

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4 For a reading that stresses the arcade as a predominandy Naturalist topos, briefly appropriated by Surre-alism, but more broadly characterized by the line that stretches from Zola to CHine, see Michel Meyer,Le Paysan de Paris d'Aragon (paris: Gallimard, 2001), pp. 85-86.5 On the importance of the passages for the Surrealists, see Marie-Claire Bancquart, Paris des sum?alistes

(Paris: Seguers, 1972), p. 14 and pp. 85-86, and Kiyoko Ishikawa, Paris dans quatre textes narratifs dusurrealisme: Aragon, Breton, Desnos, Soupault (paris: L'Harmattan, 1998), pp. 128-29.

6 See Luis Bunuel, Mon dernier soupir (paris: Robert Laffont, 1982), p. 94.7 See Michel Beaujour, 'La Quete du deIire', Cahiers de I'Herne 'L.-F. Celine', 3 & 5 (1972), 285-302

(pp. 286-87).8 See Louis Aragon, 'La Peinture au defi' (1930), in Les Collages (Paris: Hermann, 1965), pp. 31-61 (p. 54).

On the essentially realist nature of collage in Aragon, see Nathalie Piegay-Gros, L'Esthetique d'Aragon (Paris:SEDES, 1997), p. 121. For wider surveys of the theory and practice of collage in Aragon's work, seeWolfgang Babilas, 'Le Collage dans l'reuvre critique et litteraire d'Aragon', in Revue des Sciences Humaines,151 (1973), 329-54, and Marc Chassal, Aragon/Peinture/Ecriture: la peinture dans l'&riture des Cloches de Balea la Semaine Sainte (Paris: Editions Kime, 1999), pp. 42-49.9 On the phenomenology of the object in Celine, see Jean-Pierre Richard, Nausee de Celine (paris: Fata

Morgana, 1973), and Marie-Christine Bellosta, Le Capharnaum celinien, ou, la place des objets dans Mort acredit, Archives des Lettres Modemes, 164 (Paris: Minard, 1976).10 See Walter Benjamin, 'Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia' (1929), in Reflec-tions: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, ed. by Peter Demetz (NewYork: Schocken Books, 1978), pp. 177-f)2 (pp. 179-80). Further references to this edition are given inparentheses in the text, using the abbreviation S. For a reading of Benjamin focused on the notion ofprofane illumination, see Margaret Cohen, Profane fllumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of SurrealistRevolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).11 For a discussion of the relations between Aragon's and Benjamin's views of the arcade, see JacquesLeenhardt, 'Le Passage comme forme d'experience: Benjamin face a Aragon', in Walter Benjamin et Paris:coUoque international, 27-29 juin 1983, ed. by Heinz Wismann (paris: CerE, 1986), pp. 163-'72, and JosefFiirnkas, 'Das Ephemere der Geschichte: Louis Aragon und Benjamin', in Bucklicht Mannlein und Engel derGeschichte: Walter Benjamin, Theoretiker der Moderne, ed. by Margarethe Gerber et al. (Berlin: Heenemann/Werkbund-Archiv, 1991), pp. II6-23.12 For contrasting views of CHine's representation of the crisis of the petite bourgeoisie, see NicholasHewitt, 'Mort a credit et la crise de la petite bourgeoisie', in Australian Journal of French Studies, XIII, nos1-2, pp. II 0-1 7, and Pascal lfri, 'Une reconsideration de 1a crise de la petite bourgeoisie dans Mort a credit',in Actes du coUoque international L.-F. Celine de Paris (1er-5 juillet 1994) (paris: Du Lerot & Societe d'EtudesCHiniennes, 1996), pp. 105-12. Hewitt endorses CHine's vision of tum-of-the-century lower-middle-classlife as overshadowed by the threat of imminent bankruptcy, while Ifri contests it as historically, if notpsychologically, inaccurate.13 On this tradition and CHine's relationship to it, see Philippe Muray, Le XIXeme Siecle a travers les ages(paris: Gallimard, 1984), 'Mort a credo: CHine, Ie positivisme et l'occultisme', in Actes du colloque inter-national L.-F. Celine de La Haye (25-28 juillet 1983) (Utrecht: CHine Genootschap, 1983), pp. 95-II6, and'Le Siecle de CHine', in L'Infini, 8 (1984), 31-40; and Yves Pages, Les Fictions du politique chez L.-F. Celine(paris: Seuil, 1994).14 See Margaret Cohen, Profane fllumination, pp. 1-15.15 See Adorno to Benjamin, 10 November 1938, in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. by Ronald Taylor (London:Verso, 1980), p. 129.16 For a useful summary and explication of the methodological divergence between Benjamin and Adorno,see Giorgio Agamben, 'Le Prince et Ie crapaud: Ie probleme de la methode chez Adorno et Benjamin', inEnfance et histoire: destruction de l'experience et origine de l'histoire, trans. from the Italian by Yves Hersant (1978;Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2002), pp. 187-215.17 See Marc Auge, Non-lieux: introduction a une anthropologie de la surmodernite (paris: Seuil, 1992).18 See Michel Foucault, 'Des espaces autres' (19671r984), in Dits et &rits 1954-1988, ed. by Daniel Defertand FranlYoisEwald, 4 vols (paris: Gallimard, 1994), IV, 752-62.19 See Pierre Nora, 'Entre memo ire et histoire: la problematique des lieux', in Les Lieux de memoire, ed. byPierre Nora, 3 vols (paris: Gallimard/Quarto, 1997), I, 23-43.