Stephen Dedalus and His Latin-Quater Hat

In the opening section of Ulysses, James Joyce introduces the desire to distance one’s self from both social institutions and technology that perpetuate a feeling of alienation. Despite Steven Dedalus dwelling in the outskirts of Dublin as opposed to its urban center, the reader still notices themes and concepts identified by both Benjamin and Baudelaire influencing the actions and opinions of Joyce’s characters. Clearly, the fact that motifs identified in 19^th-century Paris resurface in 20^th-century Dublin serves as stalwart confirmation to their validity. Even before Joyce takes us into the heart of Dublin, we become behold an environment that is running on a structured timetable to maximize its efficiency and solely focused on the creation of wealth. The effects of capitalism identified by both Marx and Benjamin transform Dedalus’ surroundings into a mosaic of trivial and intangible achievements from which he elects to distance himself.

                At the turn of the century, Dublin was a confluence of British imperialism and Irish nationalism. Joyce allows the 300-year-old conflict to haunt his characters’ thoughts and further complicate their surroundings. On 16 June 1904, Sinn Fein was becoming quite popular while past movements such as Parnalism still lingered in the city’s collective consciousness. Dublin was furiously trying to define a course of action that both enacted a modern and fresh approach to shedding the British yoke while at the same time maintaining traditions sacred to the Irish independence movement. In other words, how does a nation defeat a technologically advanced hegemony while still clinging to archaic belief structures?

                Furthermore, Dublin was subconsciously becoming more efficient. As Benjamin stated in the Arcades Project, an economy will subordinate all individual timelines to that of the most efficient form. Actions operating independent of any external influence suddenly become amalgamated into one collective mechanism solely dedicated to maximizing production. Such is the case in 1906 Dublin. While Dedalus and his friends stand on the beach looking out to sea, Haines, an Englishman, states that authorities searching for a man who drowned nine days ago should find the corpse today based on the local superstition that a drowned corpse takes nine days to resurface. How does a seemingly independent event such as the recovery of a dead body submit to the predictability of a timetable? Both Benjamin and Marx would reply by stating that in capitalism, even the dead must be efficient.

                Joyce embodies another form of Marxist alienation with respect to the conversion of labor into capital. Stephen Dedalus, rumored to be to Joyce’s alter-ego, is a teacher at lavish private school. Being an educator, one would expect that educated and enlightened pupils would serve as a tangible product of one’s labor. However, Dedalus’ attempts fails to yield said result. His students’ demand for an early release to play field hockey truncates his lesson on Pyrrhus. After dismissing his unruly students, a boy by the name of Cyril Sergeant approaches Dedalus with a problem set of arithmetic and requests his help. As soon as he touches the boy’s notebook, a single sensation jolts through Dedalus: futility. Despite Dedalus’ patient instruction and multiple repetitions, Cyril is unable to grasp the concepts. “Waiting always for a word of help,” Dedalus narrates, “his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of shame flickering behind his dull skin”[1]. Instead of the rewarding feeling of helping a student grow intellectually, Dedalus only receives a reminder of how awkward and frail he was during his youth. Since his labor is unable to manifest in the form of successful instruction, Dedalus shamefully makes his way to Mr. Deasy’s office to receive his bi-weekly salary.

While waiting for Mr. Deasy to dispense his salary, Dedalus takes note of the seas shells displayed on the massive desk. Jeri Johnson’s notes to Ulysses explain that these shells are souvenirs from the shrine of St. James in Spain. Pilgrims who make the arduous journey proudly display them as a testament to their endeavor. Dedalus’ “embarrassed hand moved over the shells heaped in the cold stone mortar”[2]  as he beholds a tangible product of labor, in this case the sea shells, in conversation with his pending monetary payment for his services.

Further confirming the alienation from the products of labor, Mr. Deasy uses a machine to dispense Dedalus’ salary. “You must buy one of these machines,” he remarks, “You’ll find them very useful”[3]. Not only is Dedalus receiving a payment that will barely cover his expenses; he receives his coins from a machine as opposed to a human. Caught off guard by the mechanical intrusion into his environment, Dedalus jokes that there is little need to buy such a machine because it would always be empty. While Dedalus further reflects upon the sea shells, Mr. Deasy lectures, “Because you don’t save. You don’t know what money is. Money is power, when you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew”[4]. He goes even further by explaining to Dedalus that the proudest thing an Englishman can say is, “I paid my way”[5]. He demands Dedalus feel his aura of never having borrowed a schilling. As proud of Mr. Deasy is of his life-long labor, Dedalus is unable to feel anything. Mr. Deasy’s aura is an intangible, if not imaginary, accomplishment to everyone but himself.

Strangely enough, Mr. Deasy goes on to criticize the Jews as moneychangers and financial swindlers. While it is admirable for him to base his existence on capital, it become abhorrent when a race thought to be inferior espouses the same values. “Do you know why Ireland has the honor of being the only country not to persecute the Jews?” inquires Mr. Deasy to which he answers, “Because she never let them in!”[6]. As his laughs bubble through a phlegm-packed esophagus, the sun bathes Mr. Deasy in what Dedalus describes as a glimmering coat of “dancing coins”[7]. Differently put, Joyce transforms Mr. Deasy into an obscene laughing pile of money. The irony of his hypocrisy is evident for both Dedalus and the reader.

Following his awkward conversation with Mr. Deasy, Dedalus goes walking alone on the beach and meditates on Mr. Deasy’s asinine worldview. While smelling the sea and feeling the salt wind blow, Dedalus remembers a time in Dublin full of “Famine, plague, and slaughters”[8]. Whether it is the Bruce invasion of the 14^th-century massacring Dublin’s population or its starving masses feasting on dead beached whales, Dedalus cannot help but note the absurdity of Mr. Deasy’s success in a seemingly arbitrary and intangible system. How does a machine that dispenses coin trump defeating the Viking invasion? Is borrowing money worse than feeding your family with rotten whale blubber? Clearly, Dedalus’ dismisses the ideas espoused by the imbecilic Mr. Deasy.

In response to the alienation rendered by the mechanized industrialization dominating Dublin, Dedalus elects to distance himself from what he feels is an obfuscated system that grows more confusing with each passing day. While have morning tea, Dedalus’ friend Buck Mulligan states, “I’m a hyperborean as much as you,”[9]. In this context, hyperborean refers to a term Nietzsche uses to describe one who’s “above the crowd and not enslaved by conformity to the dictates of traditional Christian morality, whereas the moral man who lives for others is a weakling, a degenerate”[10]. Dedalus refuses to embrace the dominating Catholic Church in lieu of a liberating atheist moral code. “Either you believe or you don’t, isn’t it?” states Dedalus, “I could never stomach that idea of a God”[11]. In addition to religion, Dedalus even rejects the contemporary fashion that allows him to blend into a crowd. Instead of wearing the ever-popular derby, he dons what he refers to as a Latin-quarter hat (i.e. a soft, floppy hat popular with the Bohemian movement in Paris). While pondering why he has selected such an abnormal piece of headgear, Dedalus states, “God, we must dress the character”[12]. While a derby would allow him to appear the same as everyone else, he elects to stand out in a mass of people. Dadalus even avoids a connection with his family. Evidently, his aunt perpetuated the notion that he is responsible for his mother’s recent death. His voluntary withdrawal from normal social structures allows him to “not be the master of others or their slave”[13]. In other words, Stephen Dedalus exists for no one but Stephen Dedalus.

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[1] James Joyce, Ulysses, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 28.

[2] Ibid., 30.

[3] Ibid., 30.

[4] Ibid.,30.

[5] Ibid.,31.

[6] Ibid.,36.

[7] Ibid.,36.

[8] Ibid.,45.

[9] Ibid., 5.

[10] Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated, (University of California Press: Los Angles, 1988), 15.

[11] James Joyce, Ulysses, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 20.

[12] Ibid., 41.

[13] Ibid., 45.

Idle Hands Make the Flânuer's Workshop

            In the closing portion of The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin both defines the cause of the dominating feelings of alienation and isolation suffocating Paris in the latter half of the 19^th-century and provides a remedy for both abating said discomforts and finding hope in a dreary and decrepit environment. Whereas in the first portion of the Arcades Project he introduces the endemic afflictions without providing either a Patient Zero or root cause, Benjamin uses the second half of his work to declare this origin as a sense of idleness created by the increased industrial and technological capacities indicative of a commercial epicenter. Heavily influenced by Marx, Benjamin explains that the modern city’s technology and industry perpetually simplifies our daily routine until we are mechanical automatons desperately searching for purpose in the scant hours not devoted to production.           

Benjamin indentifies a crucial form of Marxist isolation: the conversion of labor into capital. Coupled with the aforementioned isolationist motif of the division of labor in the earlier portion of The Arcades Project, Marx explains the conversion of our labor into capital further removes us from our humanity and slowly changes us into automatons. Summarizing one of Marx’s observations of capitalism, Benjamin states, “With the purchasing power given to him in the form of a salary, the worker can purchase only a certain amount of goods, whose production required just a fraction of the labor he himself provided”[1]. Marx’s worker will never “break even” with his investment of labor. No matter how much labor he invests into the system, he will never receive the appropriate retribution. Sadly, he has no choice but to continue to disproportionately exchange his labor for capital if he hopes to sustain himself in a capitalist economy. Marx further explains, “The existence of capital is his existence…since it determines the tenor of his life in a manner indifferent to him. Production…produces man as a…dehumanized being”[2].

            Benjamin’s believes this dehumanization is an evitable consequence of progress. In his opinion, the industrial revolution forced Paris’ economy to grow so rapidly, its attention was focused on production and not the individual. For example, the construction of the railroads increased production capability exponentially. Prior to the proliferation of rapid, affordable mass-transportation, factory owners could manage their capital and labor force by themselves thus providing a slight degree for a possession of labor; however, the railroads soon “had the need of such massive amounts of capital that it could no longer be concentrated in the hands of only a few individuals. And so a great many bourgeois were forced to entrust their funds, which had never before been allowed out of their sight, to people whose names they hardly knew”[3]. With a large populous forced to seek employment in the factories, massive access to natural resources, and a newly established transportation network, Paris’ economy grew at a velocity that obliterated man’s every option save to accommodate its expansion. The inexhaustible supply of labor yielded unimaginable profits for the bourgeois factory owners who in turn enslaved their labor force through the means of providing goods costing a disproportionate price to the demanded labor investment in order to ensure subservience.

            Soon, the city itself began to reflect the disregard for humanity in exchange for more efficient means of production. For example, stores began to employ the use of mannequins to increase the sales of clothing. Out of fear for directing attention to anything but the merchandise, shop owners elected to use “female busts without heads or legs, with curtain hooks in the place of arms and a percaline skin of arbitrary hue- bean brown, glaring pink, hard black- [that were] lined up like a row of onions, impaled on rods, or set out on tables”[4] as opposed to a more realistic model. Not only did the shop owners elect to focus on the consumption of goods as opposed to the accurate depiction of the interaction between their product and humanity, the crowd itself approved of the removal of the human form in exchange for showcasing the industrial product in order to facilitate the refinement of the efficiency of the capitalist system.

            While the aforementioned example is one of an infinite multitude, Marx identifies the greatest contributor to idleness and alienation: synchronization. If a capitalist system is to be efficient, it forces all other schedules to evolve into their most efficient form all the while ignoring both the second-order effects of their conversions and the agendas of those affected by the schedule. In fact, Marx informs us that, “The clock was the first automatic device applied to practical purposes; the whole theory of production of regular motion was deployed through it”[5]. Our itineraries are subordinate to that of the collective whole. For example, you might be out of luck if you want to take a train at three in the morning from Topeka, Kansas to Ontario, Canada. It is not efficient to construct the necessary track and provide a train specifically intended to accommodate your travel plans. In stead, you must travel to several locations at times contrary to your choosing if you one-day hope to travel from Topeka to Ontario.

Benjamin using an unlikely example to demonstrate the forced synchronization in a city: prostitution. As Paris continued to develop its economy, even vice began to maximize its efficiency. For example, a clinic on Rue de Jerusalem would set aside one day a month to treat prostitutes’ venereal diseases for free. Oddly enough, one always found “the approaches to the station overrun by a large number of men awaiting the appearance of these unhappy creatures knowing, as they do, that those who leave by the dispensary have been deemed healthy”[6]. Furthermore, Benjamin states that the Parisian police of the 19^th-century continued to notice an increase in debauchery prior to the following holidays: New Year’s Day, the Feast of Kings and festivals of the Virgin. Why? “Because girls,” explains F.F.A. Beraud, “like to give and receive presents or to offer beautiful bouquets; they also want a new dress for themselves, or a hat in the newest faction, and, lacking the appropriate means…turn to prostitution”[7]. Clearly, Benjamin identifies human behavior, in this case soliciting prostitutes, independently adjusting its timeline to coincide with the established, efficient approved by capitalism.

When a system maximizes its efficiency, components not required for a specific purpose at a specific time are ignored while the system directs its attention to the appropriate resources and apparatuses. Accordingly, that which is not required by the system has nothing to do. Benjamin identifies that once urban denizen completed his labor for the day, one found that he had very little to do. Every aspect of life was becoming more efficient and thus required less and less attention and labor. Naturally, Benjamin states that people eventually became very bored and idle. Differently put, he states, “When all lines of are broken and no sail appears on the blank horizon, when no wave of immediate experience surges and crests, then there remains to the isolated subject in the grip of taedium vitae one last thing- and that is empathy”[8]. The empathy eventually perpetuates the notion of solitude. In other words, after working 10-12 hours at a job requiring only the most elementary, efficient movements repeated thousands of times, one comes home to an environment so efficient and advanced, he has very little to do outside of sleeping and eating to maintain his existence. His whole life revolves around sustaining himself to work in the factory. Nothing else matters. Thus, when one is not at the factory, he feels agitated while he impatiently awaits for the hour during which he will once again become useful to the city.

The idle components of the city’s machine soon begin to look for ways to make the vacant hours pleasurable before they are called to resume their labor. Corresponding to a previously identified yearning to break the perpetual monotony, Benjamin believes people search for a reliable source of shock effect: gambling. Eduard Gourdon claims, “I submit that the passion for gambling is the noblest of all passions because it comprehends all others. A series of lucky rolls gives me more pleasure than a man who does not gamble can have over the period of several years”[9]. Why is gambling so exciting? How are we able to glean such pleasure from gains of chance? Benjamin explains that it is one of the few mechanical processes that allows destiny to control one’s schedule as opposed to means of production dictating what we do at a certain time. Anatole France states that gambling produces in a single second the same changes “that Destiny ordinarily effects only in the course of many hours or even many years”[10]. Each hand is, as Alain explains, “independent of the one preceding…Gambling strenuously denies all acquired conditions, all antecedents…pointing to previous actions; and that is what distinguishes  it from work”[11]. While the green felt still demands mechanical repetitions such as the rolling of dice or placing a bet, we are unaware of what Fate has in store for us in the hand to come. This excitement sharply contrasts with a factory worker who knows exactly what is moving down the conveyor belt to his workstation. Instead, the gambler waits for Fate to shock him from omnipresent senses of malaise and route with either outrageous fortune or crushing failure. Differently stated, gambling offers the opportunity to perceive one’s surroundings as an environment governed by random chance as opposed to a structured production schedule. Albeit it being temporary, gambling liberates us from the monotonous pattern of life mandated by the city.

Gambling, however, has one distinct drawback: it requires some form of capital if one wishes to partake. And, mathematically speaking, one will eventually run out of money while playing games in which the odds favor “The House”. Accordingly, Benjamin identifies another approach to filling idle hours: flânerie. By strolling the city streets and observing both the crowd and one’s surroundings, Benjamin feels that one is able to gain an acute level of clarity that enables him to break the obfuscation of reality mandated by a system demanding its workers focus only on facilitating a maximum level of production. Instead of a Gordian Knot of streets, filth, and an unending stream of humanity flowing along the sidewalks, Benjamin feels that flânerie allows one to “transform Paris into one great interior- a house whose rooms are the quarters, no less clearly demarcated by thresholds than are real rooms”[12]. Where gambling temporarily alleviates us from boredom, flânerie permanently dissipates the feeling of isolation and universally connects one with his surroundings. As Baudelaire states, flânerie empowers one to “be at home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be the center of the world”[13]. While one may have difficulty correlating aimless wandering to the defeat of isolation, Benjamin quickly dissuades any doubt in flânerie’s ability to remedy our discomfort. “Flânerie,” he explains, “is the demonstration against the division of labor”[14]. The city is an unexplored labyrinth and offers a person a unique opportunity: to apply labor of his choosing solely dedicated to help him understand his surroundings. No one can help the flânuer understand a city; he is unable to delegate portions of his task to another and must do everything himself. For once, our understanding of our surroundings is our own. By separating ourselves from the crowd and viewing the city a whole entity as opposed to an infinite number of separate components, we are able to rebuke the city’s demand that we must accept alienation and confusion as terms of our existence within its urban limits.

While the city never allows us the opportunity to truly liberate ourselves from monotony, we are afforded the luxury for minor rebellions. Benjamin feels the best way to confront the city’s imposition of its will upon ourselves is to view it as a singular, collective entity instead of a billion different pieces. This holistic approach allows us to achieve a higher understanding compared to what we would gain by examining each component. For example, we can identify a car as exactly what it is and understand its purpose. However, if you remove its rear differential or a single piston rod and try to gain a total understanding of their purposes and how they relate to the entire car, you would more than likely become confused. As you continued to dissemble the car piece by piece, you would eventually become frustrated. When you are frustrated for an extended period of time, you become apathetic and stop caring about the cost of resembling the car as long as it retains a form once familiar to you. Once the mountain of separate pieces once again become a car, you can’t help but feel a sense of relief knowing that you are able to understand what you are looking at. For when you fully understand something, it is very difficult for that object to maintain absolute control over you.

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[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 651.

[2] 652

[3] 577

[4] Ibid., 694.

[5] Ibid., 695.

[6] Ibid., 501.

[7] Ibid., 501.

[8] Ibid., 805.

[9] Ibid., 495.

[10] Ibid., 498.

[11] Ibid., 512.

[12] Ibid., 422.

[13] Ibid., 443.

[14] Ibid.,427.

The Arcades: The City in a Single Glance

Louis Aragon describes Paris’ Arcades as “sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral, the ghostly landscape of damnable pleasures and professions. Places that yesterday were in comprehensible, that tomorrow will never know”[1]. His comments describe a phenomenon that illuminated the dreary, rainy Parisian streets with bright lights, vibrant colors, and an alluring cacophony that began in the 19th-century and lasted until the early portion of the 20th. Walter Benjamin investigates these fascinating components of urban space. His massive opus of research, The Arcades Project (1932), describes the effects of the arcades on both the city and the crowd. By accumulating an incredible amount of contemporary criticism regarding both the arcades and their secondary effects, Benjamin is able to define the arcades as a sensual oasis amidst a bleak and dreary urban landscape that ultimately fails to abate the prevailing feelings of isolation and malaise.

                Benjamin further embellishes upon his motif of the urban environment isolating the individual and eventually assimilating him into a faceless mass of automatons. If urban spaces were dynamic confluences of new technologies and humanity’s daily life, one would initially think that a large city is incapable of putting us to sleep with a lullaby of boredom and banality. However, Benjamin rejects the notion of a buzzing urban metropolis tantalizing its citizens with miraculous advancements of technology and comfort. As adults, we are desensitized to the “new”. He envies the child because “he can do what the grownup absolutely cannot: recognize the new once again. For us, locomotives already have symbolic character because we met with them in childhood”[2]. In other words, we are so used to interacting with technology, all the comforts and wonders it provides fail to affect our mundane perspective on the world.

                Furthermore, Benjamin saturates the city with ennui by applying Marx’s alienation though mechanical reproduction. Marx feels the mechanization of humanity is a consequence of the increased production of technology. As both the commercial and technological tempo of an economy increase, so does the rate of production yielded by a “collective machine”. Marx defines this entity as “an organized system of various kinds of single machines, and of groups of single machines, [that] becomes more and more perfect … in other words, the more [raw materials] passage from one phase to another is effected not by the hand of man, but by machinery itself”[3]. As machines replace people, a system becomes more efficient. Eventually, man becomes so isolated from his labor, he is relegated to repetitiously performing an inane action such as pushing a single button or pulling a lever for hours in a factory. Benjamin believes that the city’s appetite for technology and luxury goods warrants a feverish rate of production. Accordingly, people are replaced by machines and thus denied a familiar, independent connection to their environment by applying their specific trade.

                As we slowly feel less like people and more like machines, Benjamin feels that we are slowly lulled to sleep. In exchange for our contribution to the city’s appetite for goods and commerce, we are rewarded with trivial gifts of trite technological comforts. Paris’ natural climate does nothing to abate the palpable feelings of malaise. Benjamin states the rainy climate, “Makes days not only gray but uniform. For morning until evening, one can do the same thing- play chess, [and] read, engage in argument”[4]. Building upon the modern sense of boredom discussed by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents, Benjamin states, “We are bored and we don’t know what we are waiting for”[5]. Should we not be ecstatically frolicking in a wonderland of technologies and the comfort both provided a modern economy dumping its cornucopia of production on a single, focal point? In his article in Paris bei Sonnenschein und Lampenlicht, Julius Rosenberg describes a second-hand encounter with a stock mogul. As told through the experience of a friend, the mogul meets his visitor at the doors of his baroque residence decked in opulence and splendor. As his host led him into a “large glass-roofed gallery whose walls were decorated entirely with camellias and hothouse plates, “ he noticed a prevailing sense of “a suppressed boredom in that lay in the air; at the very first step, you breath a vapor as of opium”[6]. Rosenberg goes on to describe the hosts and his family stumbling about their house like somnambulists. Benjamin includes several examples such as this in order to create the paradoxical texture of malaise in one of the most modern and advanced cities in the world. Through themes previously identified by Baudelaire and Marx’s division of labor, Benjamin clearly establishes what would appear to be an unavoidable conundrum.

            Enter Paris attempt to abate the everyday melancholy and boredom of urban life: the arcade. Benjamin describes these commercial hubs as clean places of refuge from the rain, mud, and dangerous traffic of the Parisian street. Ultimately, the arcades provided one the opportunity to behold Paris’ entire commercial potential in a single glance. Individuals could leisurely stroll under glass roofs protecting them from ran and atop marble floors capping the mud and filth of the streets. In the anthology Fourier (1932), Poisson describes the arcades as a place to spend “a winter’s day in a Phalanstery, to visit all parts of it without exposure to the elements, to go the theater and the opera in light clothes and colored shoes without worrying about the mud and the cold”[7]. Benjamin claimed the arcades continue to develop until they became an entity capable of enabling the reconstruction of the past 1500 years of French history should a catastrophic event level the city to the ground.

            However, the novelty of the arcades quickly dissipated. While initially serving as an oasis from the city’s gloom, they quickly became just as overcrowded as the streets outside. “As soon as the Parisians had got a taste of the new galleries,” explains Tony Moilin in Paris en l’an 2000 (1869), “ they lost all desire to set foot in the streets of old- which they often said, were fit only for dogs”[8]. Soon, the arcades’ novel shops and boutiques became just as commonplace as the traditional storefronts lining the muddy streets of Paris. Once again, the chance to enjoy a unique and individual experience faded as the arcades became swirling eddies of the crowd.

            In other words, the arcade experience was no longer subservient to the individual’s will. This massive proliferation of commerce soon began to affect those strolling amongst its clean porticos and take control of their experience in the arcade through an invisible but palpable force: fashion. Commercialism’s gaze is reflected upon itself in the form of fashion. It controls what people wear and to what stores they go to purchase their contemporary uniforms of subservience. In the arcades, people who frequent certain stores considered fashionable while abstaining from patronizing others. Benjamin describes this experience yet another form of isolation of the self in an urban environment. Frantically, people searched for a final foothold of individuality. If the city dictated how they acted, worked and dress, to what could they turn?

            Benjamin moves his project to focus on perhaps the last bastion of maintaining a familiar connection with one’s physical environment: the interior space of the home. Since pristine temples of commerce failed to provide an experience subservient to the will of the individual, people naturally focused on making their home their own. Benjamin states the dwelling served as a receptacle of the person for “it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of inside a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet”[9]. By barricading ourselves from the outside world, we are able to exercise a total sense of control over our environment. Benjamin jokes about creating monuments of dead relatives by filling entire walls with their pictures. However, even this haven is still not a hermetic bunker- the city still attempts to violate our inner sanctum through the infiltration of what Benjamin calls “outside things”. The objects range from a telephone to a piece of furniture. In other words, we are unable to create an unadulterated sense of isolation from the outside world; however, we are able to exercise control of its influence in our home.

            Contrasting Baudelaire’s hopeless plummet into debauchery, Benjamin continues to allude of the possibility of enjoying an experience subservient to individual will while living in the city. While the city’s economy mechanizes its workforce, one can still control the city’s influence in his own home. He has the option of ignoring the external world’s established behavioral norm or embracing. For Baudelaire, there is no escape from the will and designs of the city. This is a notion to which Benjamin would respond, “Shut the front door.”

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[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 87.

[2] Ibid., 390.

[3] Ibid., 394.

[4] Ibid., 104.

[5] Ibid., 105.

[6] Ibid., 104.

[7] Ibid., 44.

[8] Ibid., 53.

[9] Ibid., 220.

The Lost Halo

            The urban crowd is a phenomenon that continues to fascinate us even today. The notion of individuals coalescing into a singular, pulsating entity defies the human sacrosanct of individualism. Large populations crammed into small areas build massive buildings that canalize pedestrian traffic into a perpetual flow of humanity. Naturally, this tempest sweeps away individuals and assimilates them into an urban collective. Baudelaire took note of this menacing spectacle in The Flowers of Evil. His portrayal of this urban entity was so adroit; it would later attract the attention of Walter Benjamin. In his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), Benjamin defines the connection between Baudelaire and the crowd as the catalyst for man “losing his halo” in the grime of the urban streets.

            Benjamin begins his essay with the introduction of Freud’s theory of shock. For Freud, the purpose of our consciousness is to serve as protection against stimuli or “shocks”. He feels that the “more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely are they to have a traumatic effect”[1]. Shock effect is not just important to Baudelaire; rather it is “the very center of his work”[2]. Benjamin believes Baudelaire constantly strives to defend himself from the shocks of the city in an effort to separate himself from his surroundings and still maintain an unadulterated sense of individuality and clear perception of the world. While Baudelaire successfully parries most of the city’s onslaught, he fails to defend himself against one particular aspect: the urban crowd. Benjamin identifies that the haunting of the crowd’s menace within Baudelaire’s work is his attempt to defend against its massive traumatic shock.

            Oddly enough, Baudelaire never directly addresses the subject of the crowd in The Flowers of Evil.  “The masses had become so much a part of Baudelaire that it is rare to find a description of them in his works,” Benjamin explains, “[Baudelaire’s] most important subjects are hardly ever encountered in descriptive form”[3]. By refusing to directly describe Parisians and the city, Baudelaire maintains the freedom to “invoke the ones in the form of the other”[4].  In the sonnet “A Une Passante”, Benjamin identifies a flawlessly example between the crowd and the city:

The deafening street was screaming all around me.

Tall, slender, in deep mourning—majestic grief—

A woman made her way; with fastidious hand Raising and swaying festoon and hem;

Agile and noble, with her statue's limbs.

And there was I, who drank, contorted like a madman,

Within her eyes—that livid sky where hurricane is born—

Gentleness that fascinates, pleasure that kills.

 A lightning-flash ... then night! —O fleeting beauty

Whose glance all of a sudden gave me new birth,

Shall I see you again only in eternity?

Far, far from here! Too late! or maybe, never?

For I know not where you flee, you know not where I go,

 O you I would have loved (o you who knew it too![5]

While Baudelaire does not overtly address the dangerous allure of the crowd, one can identify a palpable texture within the verse describing an inexorable force attempting to consume the viewer in a whirling cacophony.

            Benjamin moves to further define the crowd’s shock effect that tantalizes Baudelaire as a feeling of crushing isolation. True, one would cannot help note the paradox of feeling lonely while surrounded by people. However, Benjamin identifies a theme of exactly that consistency running rampant throughout The Flowers of Evil. Specifically, this theme focuses on the crowd overwhelming an individual’s senses via a gauntlet of bright lights, collisions with strangers, shouting merchants, and dangerous streets full of speeding carriages. Baudelaire refers to this individual as a “kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness”[6]. The city quickly overwhelms our sense of equilibrium and disconnects us from a once familiar reality. The constant flow of humanity almost becomes surreal in Baudelaire’s work. Often, they fight a losing battle and infuse descriptions of the macabre or profane in their descriptions of the world. This is exactly what Baudelaire is telling his reader: the crowd is the city’s apparatus for jostling you away from a comfortable sense of individuality and transplanting into a faceless collective.

             Once the city isolates us from our individuality, Benjamin identifies the next step in Baudelaire’s degeneration of humanity: mechanization. Naturally, man has relatively high level of access to technology in the city. Machines do a great number of tasks previously executed by humans. As Benjamin states, “The feeling of being dependent on others, which used to be kept alive by need, is gradually blunted in the smooth functioning of the social mechanism”[7]. Baudelaire’s notion of mechanization physically manifests in the form of gambling.

            Benjamin explains that the “shock experience which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to what the worker ‘experiences’ at his machine”[8]. Initially, a gambler and a machinist appear two different and incomparable occupations; however, Benjamin states mechanization forces both of them share a sense of “futility, the emptiness, and the inability to complete something”[9]. “Gambling,” Benjamin further explains, “contains the workman’s gesture that is produced by the automatic operation, for there can be no game without the quick movement of the hand by which the stake is put down or the card is picked up… the drudgery of the laborer is, in its own way, a counterpart to the drudgery of the gambler. The work of both is equally devoid of substance.[10]” Benjamin identifies that Baudelaire selected the gambler as his physical manifestation of the notion of mechanization produced by an urban environment for one important reason: the gambler serves as a conduit for vice and enables its proliferation to all those sharing a feeling of becoming more machine than human.

            Baudelaire’s gamblers embody the notion of abandoning morality when one no longer feels human. His work proposes the rhetorical question, “Why should we act like a human we no longer feel like one?” These gamblers consume narcotics that “submerge the consciousness that has delivered them to march of the second-hand”[11], ravage prostitutes, and dwell in a realm of filth and slime all the while mechanically playing games of chance. In “Gaming”, Baudelaire assumes the roll of an observer in a decrepit gambling hall. He describes the scene as one of:

“My heart takes fright to envy this poor lot

Who rush so fervently to the abyss,

And who, drunk on their blood, prefer in sum,

Suffering to death, and Hell to nothingness.”[12]

The gamblers are now machines that can no longer distinguish between the filthy squalor of their immediate surroundings and aspects of their former lives. Gambling dens are now their homes and whores, thieves, and perverts are their new neighbors. While games of chance reduced these men to machine, Baudelaire feels the city and the crowd reduces every other soul’s humanity. To him, we are no longer independent thinkers capable of mastering our own destiny; rather, we are brainwashed cattle mindlessly navigating the city streets.

            Benjamin compares Baudelaire’s struggle against the city and the crowd to a man “fighting the rain or the wind”. For Benjamin, the shocks created by the crowd overwhelm us and, as in the case of his lyrical poet, cause us to lose our halos in the rancid mud of the streets. He closes with an unpublished conversation written by Baudelaire. In it, one man asks his friend, a once stalwart, moral individual, why he is dwelling amongst places of ill repute. His friend responds that the “moving chaos in which death comes galloping at you from all sides at once” jostled him and knocked the halo off his head. Oddly enough, he rejoices, “ I said to myself, every cloud has a silver lining. Now I can go about incognito, do bad things, and indulge in vulgar behavior like ordinary mortals. So here I am, just like you!”[13]Regardless of our own desires, the crowd carries us all to the same location: a place populated by mindless denizens mechanically going about daily life and desperately clinging to vice as their only source of happiness. Clearly, Benjamin could not have better described the dominating texture of The Flowers of Evil.

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[1] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Random House, Inc., 1968), 186.

[2] Ibid.,189.

[3] Ibid.,195.

[4] Ibid.,195.

[5] Ibid.,196.

[6] Ibid.,203.

[7] Ibid.,203.

[8] Ibid.,205.

[9] Ibid.,205.

[10] Ibid.,205.

[11] Ibid.,208.

[12]Charles Baudelaire, “Gaming” in The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 197.

[13]Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Random House, Inc., 1968), 221-222.