7/27/2019 ;oiph

1/3

il

The Text of the CityPeter Brooks

Oscar Wilde, in one of those epigrams that cut to the heartof the matter, states our subject in broadest outline: "Balzacinvented the nineteenth century." Th e remark is profoundlytrue, in that the identification of an era-its shape, salientcharacteristics, its meaning-depends on its having beenself-consciously conceptualized and articulated. The senseof an era comes to consciousness when it becomes a text.And Balzac's Comedie Humaine is pre-eminently the textin which the nineteenth century take s cognizance of itself,recognizes itself as modernity, a new epoch governed bynew sets of laws, criss-crossed by new codes of significance.Balzac is in fact one of the first writers to be aware of theradically changed situation of literat ure in the new age: anage that for the first time made of literature itself a com-modity, a commercial product which depended on the playof market forces, including advertising, journalism, and theattraction of investment capital, rather than on the oldsystem of royal or aristocratic patronage. This transforma-tion is the theme of Illusions perdues, possibly Balzac'sgreates t novel, which has been described by Georg Lukacsas the epic of "the capitalization of spirit." Along with t hecommercialization of the very medium in which he wasworking, the other inescapable phenomenon facing thewriter of Balzac's era was, not yet so much industrializa-tion-this was only beginning to make its impact in conti-nental Europe in the 1830's-but urbanization. From thetime ofthe French Revolution through the 1830's, the popu-of Paris had nearly doubled, largely because of immi-gration from the provinces-an example of which was Bal-zac himself. The growth of the city was apparent to theobserver principally in two ways: in the building of newresidential areas in what had previously been suburbaccompaniment of considerable land speculation) and, muchmore strikingly, in a g reatly increased density of inhabita-tion in the old quarters of the city, especially in theworking-class districts. The urban crowd became a recog-nizable phenomenon and a felt presence. There was a newsense of the city as a total dynamic entity and way of life, atotal horizon bounding one's perception and one's life, be-yond which was simply the unthinkable darkness of theprovinces. As the fates of so many Balzacian charactersshow, while life in Paris may be a struggle, there are no

viable alternati ve worlds elsewBalzac made the choice of Parurgings to return to the provin its commercial, journalisticreaction to the modern urbannostalgia and loss. The sentimdensity, anonymity, and uncelife, or, in a term I find more sproblems as an artist, its inagain, we find Balzac complaimodern existence: its flatness,and has lost what he believes toof traditional distinguishing chrefrain comes back repeatedly;stated in the preface to one of(1839), where he argues thatthe Old Regime one could telloutward appearance and declothes. Bourgeois, merchantpeasantry: all had their distiNow, however, equality has pnuances." Previously, he wrieach person a physiognomy whthe individual; today, the indifrom himself." This is a lucid ssage from what a sociologist signed identity" to one of "acthis new individual self-definitdifficult to tell who anyone is,entiation infinitely more subtleeclipse of the political andauthority-monarch and churclear and accepted system ohierarchized referents.Balzac, a self-proclaimed politicalls the "disorder" of modern ble and exciting. The profusdefinitions which it offers creatfor the novelist. The writer wportrayal o f modern life, particscape, must encounter and ov

7/27/2019 ;oiph

2/3

8 entiation. He must find the s ystem of nuanced distinctions,contrasts, hierarchies which will allow him to create mean-ing in a social world that appears threatened by a loss ofmeaning. He must discover-or invent-those codes thatwill allow him to make sense of the grayish phenomena(blackish, in fact, since that has become the predominantcolor of male dress) before his eyes. Indeed, since meaninghas in some sense been occulted, he may have to reachbeyond the surface appearances of reality, to uncover thoselatent systems of signification which the surfaces mask.We can witness Balzac attempting to recover meaning inthe urban landscape in such an early and apparently trivialtext as his Petit Dictionnaire critique et anecdotique desEnseignes de Paris (1826)-dictionary of the tradesmen'ssigns hung above shop doors along the streets of Paris.Signed "Par un batteur du pave" ("By a stroller of thestreets") the Dictionary suggests already the Baudelairianfigure of the urbanflaneur: the curious stroller or prowlerof the urban landscape. 1 But here the stroller is concernedto organize a systematic in terpretation of legible meaningsin the .urban landscape. Recording and commenting uponthe shop signs in fact becomes a "semiotic" enterprise, aconsideration of how shops' names and pictorial emblemsrelate to the interior aspects of the shops, their merchan-dise, the character of the establishment and its proprietor.The Dictionary becomes an inquiry into one of the sign-systems which the city has created to organize and conveycertain of its meanings.The Dictionary is an early and relatively crude version ofwhat was to become an almost obsessive concern withfinding the bases of an urban semiotic: a way of discovering,elaborating, the codes which would allow the indiffer-entiated surfaces of modern urban existence to reveal theirsystematic meaning. In the manner that modern linguisticshas discovered that language is fundamentally a system ofdifferences-that a system of differences, beginning withphonological oppositions, subtends the process of selectionand combination which creates the code and makes possiblethe message-Balzac, we find, is concerned to locate differ-ences, distinctions which will allow him to discern basicmeaning, and t heir articulation in networks of sig-

nificance. In a seri es of occasional text s, such as the "NewTheory of the Luncheon," "The Study of Manners by Way ofGloves," the "Physiology of the Toilette," he returns againand again to the problem of distinctive marks or signs.'t F-orinstance, in the first part of "Physiologie de la Toilette,"entitled "On the Cravat, Considered in Itself and in itsRelations with Society and the Individual," he begins: "TheFrench Revolution was for the toilette, as for the civil andpolitical order, a time of crisis and anarchy .... During theOld Regime, each class of society had its costume; onerecognized by his dress the lord, the bourgeois, the arti-san." The cravat held no personal importance. ThenFrenchmen gained a theoretical equality, and differences inthe cut and material of clothing were no longer a suremeasure of social distinction. Threatened with this uni-formity, how could one distinguish the rank of an indi-vidual? From this moment on, the cravat took on a new"for it was called upon to reestablish the lostnuances of the toilette." The cravat, tied by its owner,becomes the sign by which man "reveals and makes himselfmanifest." After Balzac has categorized the different man-ners of cravat-tying, the various possible messages madeavailable by its codes, the cravat has come, at the end of thearticle, to approximate the literary text: an "expression ofthought, as is style." The cravat has thus been establishedas a key signifier in the social text, a sign that tracesdifferences and distinctions.Balzac apparently intended to group such articles as those Ihave mentioned, plus a number of others projected butnever written, in a volume which would bear the title,Pathologie de La vie sociale, a complete "codification" of the"laws of exterior existence" and what it expresses. Thetitle, "The Pathology of Social Life," cannot but recallFreud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which isabout the ways in which people reveal themselves in whatmay at first appear to be the innocent and insignificantgestures of quotidian reality. The most important fragmentof Balzac's projected pathology is no doubt the "Theorie dela demarche," a curious text which registers his discoverythat everything in a person's bearing or gait, each postureand gesture, is somehow revelatory. The whole of humanmovement is meaningful; it bears the imprint of will and

thought. Thus "a simple gesture, an involuntary tremor ofthe lips can become the terrible denouement of a drama longhidden within two hearts." This essay emanates a sense ofBalzac's excitement at his discovery that a whole realm ofhuman existence can become semiotic, a realm of messagesmade available to the writer. These messages are in factlatent within the demeanour and comportment of man insociety; the "Theorie" is a demonstration of how to read thelatent text in and through the manifest text, how to recoverthe significations of the one through the indicators of theother. As in Freud's Psychopathology, in Balzac's fragmen-tary Pathology we have a sense of a new field of meaningrecuperated for human discourse.The discovery of a new way to read meanings in humanbehavior-in the presentation of selves in everyday life-ispeculiarly tied to modern urban existence in that it permitsthe decipherment of those occulted signs of character andmeaning in the urban crowd. It allows the "observer"-a sthe Balzacian narrat or will so often label himself-to makedistinctions in the sea of bodies, faces, attitudes, gesturesbefore his eyes, and to penetrate to the latent signifiedswhich these signifiers both conceal and reveal. Rehearsedmany times in Balzac's fiction is the moment where theobserver's insistent gaze directed at reality begins to or-ganize its signs, then in a moment of penetration passesthrough surface forms to the messages they represent,strikes through to a vision of the networks of social andpsychological meaning which constitute the latent texts ofindividuals or social groups, and which allow them to be-come legible.This kind of observation can be applied to the city as awhole, as in the "Histoire et Physiologie des Boulevards deParis," where Balzac begins by recording his preferenceParis over London, Vienna, St. Petersburg, because,despite the encroaching in differentia tion of mo dern exis-tence, Paris displays a greater capacity for self-representa-tion, for spectacle: it puts itself on show more than othercities. P aris to th e observer who has trained himself in thedistinction of social nuance can be highly dramatic, the placewhere repressed conflict and hidden symbolic action areever on the verge of becoming manifest. T he boulevards of

Paris constitute a free performaproceeds with his sociological article, the spiritual center of Padrama, comes to be, not the TNationale, no r even the Banquedu Temple, place of the princicity. Eight theaters, fifty opencrowd-the world recreated inhere we have a kind of concegeneralized theater of Paris, theitself self-consciously on the staacting out its central concerndrama. Th at the productions oftheaters at this time were priunrelated to Balzac's quest for mform that calls for heightenedexplicit through their overt maBalzac sometimes complains thknown in the Old Regime-basclear social norms and distinctithe modern era. Melodrama hplace, to enact with obviousnesabout people and their relapsychological forces that risk rereality. Melodrama thus presezac's concern with making manithat can be uncovered within ation of surfaces. 3Were there space here for momight consider further some onovels that show the narrator-oing the surfaces of urban life, sorders that will allow him to ding, exercising on contosure of insistence that makes thelegible texts. For instance, in"Scenes de la Vie Parisienne")effort to organize the web of significant network: "There ardishonored as a man accused of street s, then simply honest whose morality the public ha

7/27/2019 ;oiph

3/3

10 then homicidal streets, streets older than old dowagers areold, estimable streets. . . ." But this is not enough; thenarrator goes on to layout the interrelations of differentquarters of the city and their characteristics, then finallyarticulates the whole as the anatomical parts of a monstrousbody. The monster provides an organic metaphor of thecity, whose every detail is a "lobe of cellular tissue" in thewhole; but the image of the monster's articulations alsosuggests how a significant message is put together from theelements of the code. In ano ther instance, at the start ofLaFille aux yeux d'or, Paris becomes a set of circles in imita-tion of Dante's Inferno, through which we spiral up ordown, moved by the universal principle: gold and pleasure.In Illusions perdues, the ambitious young provincial, Lu-cien de Rubempre, goes for his first stroll in the Tuileriesgarden and discovers he is at a performance, where thelittlest things-the "world of necessary superfluities"-areused to create messages concerning vital social discrimina-tions.

Central to the different metaphors and schemes, grids ofperception and rhetorical devices, used to organize,categorize, and, explain the physiognomy of Paris, is thesense of city as theater: not spectacle merely, but thepotentially revelatory enactment of meanings, of the sorttheoretically formulated in the "Theorie de la demarche."The observer is thus never a passive spectator: he mustwork on what is before his eyes, bring to it a pressure ofinsistence that will make the latent text show through themanifest text. Balzac's best-known novel enacts for us in itsfinal scene the ambition of the narrator-observer: at the endof Le Pere Goriot, Eu'gene de Rastignac stands at the top ofthe slope of the Pere Lachaise cemetery, and looks down onParis, stretched along the snakelike Seine, as dusk ga thersand the first lights begin to shine. Paris is spread beforeRastignac like a map to ,be read, and the quarter inhabitedby high society-the world where Rastignac desires tosucceed-ismarked out as by two grandiose drawing pins:the Column of the Place Vendome and the Dome of theInvalides, both of which incidentally evoke the conquerorNapoleon, and which organize the map i nto symbolic legibil-ity. Rastignac, who began the novel in the sordid quarterswhich the narrator called a "valley of plaster," has now

attained an altitude from which he can read Paris, seize it inone possessive glance, interpret its messages, and utter hisfamous line o f challenge: "A no us deux maintenant!" ("Nowit's between the two of us!") which presages what we know,from the sequels, to be a successful campaign of conquest.The conquest of Paris ultimately depends on the reading ofParis: being able to seize the city as a legible andtext.This condition of legibility is one that all the ambitiousyoung Balzacian heroes aspire to, and one that their nar-rator must attain. All that we have said about Balzac'sefforts to work on and work through t he apparen t indiffer-entiation of surfaces, to systems of meaning which make ofthe cityscape and the urban crowd legible texts, could besummarized in the statement that Balzac is everywhereseeking to find, to postulate, to invent the semiotic precon-ditions that make the modern novel possible. The veryexistence of what we think of as "the Balzacian novel" andindeed as "the nineteenth-century novel" depends on thiseffort to make meaning in modern urban life. Starting fromthe anxiety that this new world, deprived of its former clearcodes of meaning, might be threatened by loss ofmeaning-as, socially and politically it is threatened bychaos-Balzac's response is the insistence on meaning. Byclaiming, as he most explicitly does in the "Theorie de lademarche," that nothing is meaningless, that the worldcannot not mean, he makes possible the text of modernity.He invents the nineteenth century by bringing to con-sciousness the very shape of modernity as a set of textssubject to our reading and interpretation.By way of conclusion, I wan t briefly to reach beyond Balzacto the poet who was his great admirer and who best under-stood the importance of he city to the artist of modern life:Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire's celebrated essay on Con-stantin Guys, "The Painter of Modern Life," comes closerthan any text I know of to defining the aesthetic of modernurban art, "tyrannized by the circumstance," concernedwith the transitory and the fugitive, dedicated to wrestingbeauty from the restless crowdedness of the city streets.There is a poem set as epilogue to Le Spleen de Paris(Baudelaire's collection of prose poems) in which the

speaker, imitating Rastignac's position at the end ofLe PereGanot, climbs to the heights of Montmartre to look down onand possess through his gaze Paris stretched below him.But I want to say a word instead about one of the poemsfrom the section of Les Fleurs du mal called "Tableauxparisiens," the sonnet entitled "A une passante" ("To apasser-by")La rue assourdissante autour de moi, hurlait.Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuseSoulevant, balanl;ant Ie feston et l'ourlet;Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.Moi, je buvais, crispe'comme un extravagan t,Dans son oeil, ciellivide ou germe l'ouragan,La douceur qui fascine et Ie plaisir qui tue.Un eclair .. . puis la nuit!-Fugitive beaute'Dont Ie regard m'a fait soudainement renaitre,Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'eternite?Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-etre!Car j'ignore ou tu fuis, tu ne sais ou je vais,o toi que j'eusse aimee, 0 toi qui Ie savais!(The deafening street roared around me. Tall, slender, inheavy mourning, majestic grief, a woman passed, with asumptuous hand raising, swinging the flounces and hem ofher skirt, agile and noble, with legs like a statue. I drank,tense as a madman, from her eye, livid sky where tempestsgerminate, the sweetness that fascinates and the pleasurethat kills. A lightni ng flash .. . hen night! Fleeting beautyby whose glance I was suddenly reborn, shall I see you nomore except in eternity? Elsewhere, far, far from here! toolate! never perhaps! For I know not where you fled, youknow not where I go, 0 you whom I would have loved, 0you who knew it!)5The poem describes an urban encounter, which is not quitea meeting. The anonymous woman suddenly emerges fromthe crowd, from the deafening street, while the speaker ofthe poem watches, fascinated, reading from her costume

and attitUde, precisely from sibility of a new sweet and dmove from the quatrains toencounter is already over; shlike a lightning flash in the mourban beaut y is unstable, flehad is a promise of meetingmeaning-a lightning-like knsage of revelation from theencounter-which is then ohere the dynamics of urban salways menaced with effacemconfers on this sentiment itssion. The excitement depenreading and interpretation, flash of revelation, the fugitivings, but is then immediatelyeffacement. Meaning is indescape. The act of reading iserasure, significance incorpothose nineteenth-century wras context and text, the citsemiotic enterprise. Have wenterprise lose its potency: haHas it been surrendered to lNotes1. On theftaneur, see Walter BLyric Poet in the Era of High(London: New Left Books, 1973indebted to Benjamin's remarkapoet.2. These, and other essays mentionnaire), can most convenientldiverses, 3 vols. (Paris: Conard,zac are my own.3. On melodrama, and Balzac's Melodramatic Imagination (Ne1976).4. lowe this phrase, and the Sennett, The Fall of Public Ma5. I take this prose translation,alness, from the very useful anFrench Poetry from Baudelaire1962).