Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin (review)

Patrick Greaney's investigation of encounters with poverty in the work of selected French and German creative writers, philosophers and intellectuals pursues an original and productive line of enquiry. The concept, he argues, is not merely one modern theme among many; rather, it occupies a central position in the development of 'the larger traditions' (p. xi) of modernist writing between the 1850s and 1930s. He starts with the nineteenth-century association of the poor with power, deriving from their labour power and their revolutionary potential. Shifted to the plane of representation, this association is 'a focal point for the modernist aesthetic concern with the representation of potential and virtuality' (p. x). The untimely beggar of the title, soon to be replaced, Greaney notes, by the poor worker, appears in Hugo and Baudelaire less as an object of compassion, and more as 'an omen for a possible future'. This figure of impoverishment, pointing to some imminent, unnameable disruption of known order, is also the figure of the new language that must be created to represent that unknown. The opening chapter proposes a theorization of the politics of poverty. The key is Marx's identification of the centrality to capitalism of the 'reserve army of labour'; in the modern economy, incapacity and non-enactment are fundamental to productivity. Baudelaire is the first to confront the destructive difference of urban poverty, in a language that seeks to return the disturbing gaze of the beggar, and domesticate the experience of shock, but also acknowledges an energy which can't be contained, and which paralyses speech. Maurice Blanchot and Paul de Man are the points of reference for a chapter on Mallarmé that moves from the thematics of his poems on beggars to his invention of poetic forms of absence and privation. Nietzsche's critique of the Christian ascetic tradition of voluntary poverty is shown to work towards a new understanding of poverty; not the figure of a state of sacrifice and loss, but a state of estrangement and openness, the condition for a Dionysian entry into new forms of truth. Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Nietzsche are all influences on Rilke's writing on the urban poor, inspired especially by his visits to Paris, from 1902–3 onwards. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge trace the poet's experience of a community of shared estrangement among outcasts, and link that to a transformation of writing, in which meaning and mastery both dissolve, and everything is seen 'differently'. The closing chapter identifies Walter Benjamin's essay on 'Experience and Poverty' as encapsulating the 'poverty of experience' that characterises the world of the 1920s and 1930s, and explores in that context Benjamin's discussions of glass architecture, Brecht's heroes, and James Ensor's urban crowds. This is not an easy book. The movements of the discussion are sometimes disconcerting; sometimes the close readings feel overly dense and detailed. But overall, Greaney's study is a bold initiative, scholarly and informative, and it brings together familiar themes, and familiar writers and theorists, in a constellation that generates significant new light.