New York-Paris: Whitman, Baudelaire, and the Hybrid City

Conclusion

Conclusion In Search of Lost Time the modern city, for Whitman and for Baudelaire, was not simply a place to live in, to look at, and to record. In a deeper and more essential sense, each city was a mechanism for living time in a certain way. Even as he was composing his obsessively detailed catalogs of city life, Whitman was not trying to paint a cityscape of New York; Baudelaire’s prose poems show little interest either in the topography of Paris or in the minutiae of Parisian life. Very few concrete images of the city emerge against these receding backgrounds. Writing in Paris in the 1940s, the critic Georges Blin spoke of the all too familiar grayish chiaroscuro in which Baudelaire ’s prose poems seem to be bathed. Whitman’s poems, too, are mostly colorless. What Paris or New York looked like, for Baudelaire and Whitman, was not important. What really mattered to them was how the modern city transformed the experience of time. Both Baudelaire and Whitman attempted, desperately and repeatedly, to capture the lineaments of that transformation. In late-nineteenth-century New York and Paris, the leisurely pace of the ›aneur was progressively becoming a thing of the past as time rushed headlong into its own future. As Georges Blin was meditating on Baudelaire ’s gray skies from the Paris of the Occupation, the architectural critic Siegfried Giedion was enthusiastically making a case for Haussmann ’s prescience. In his classic study Space, Time, and Architecture, Giedion noted that Haussmann took extraordinary steps, far in advance of his era, toward the solution of the traf‹c problem that would later be created by automobiles. “His critics, taking the scale of the promeneur as ‹nal, could not have been expected to understand such arrangements, 99 intended as they were for generations yet unborn,” Giedion explains. “They could not have foreseen that these roads, carried clear over the horizon, would be the most ‘productive’ of the Prefect’s ‘expenditures,’ and would constitute the future living space of Paris.”1 One of Haussmann ’s ‹ercest opponents, Adolphe Thiers, once remarked that people out walking from the Madeleine to the Place de l’Étoile will take several turns up and down the street to make their walks more enjoyable.2 The idea that ›ânerie should shape the design of a city made no sense to Haussmann, who viewed urban planning as a way of ‹nding the shortest route from one point to another. Having been pitched to the accelerated pace of urban transformation, expansion, and metamorphosis, urban time (or so it seemed) could no longer reclaim its original pace or its immemorial nature. In Baudelaire’s prose poems, the time is never right. The repudiation of the past in Haussmann’s forward-looking city has thrown everything—Baudelaire, Paris, and poetry—off-balance. The city is losing its memory, and Baudelaire is losing his capacity to memorialize the past as he is nearing his own end. Both Baudelaire and Paris seem to be reaching the end of the line. The poems in prose, the last he ever wrote, should have been his testament . Had everything not been thrown off-balance, they should have been the legacy of a life—the past carrying over, seamlessly, poetically, and musically, into the present and the future. The prose poems, then, would have been a gift to future generations. Instead, the poems are trapped in a present moment that never seems to move either forward or backward. The “spleen of Paris” is the melancholy of a present that has been stripped of anticipation, of hope, and of memory. Neither the decrepit acrobat at the funfair, the old woman behind her window, or the “innocent monster” called Miss Scalpel has any right either to a past or to a future. What happened to them before, and what the future now holds in store for them, is beside the point. There is nothing left for them on either side of time. They are bereft of any kind of temporality except for a present moment that never ends, and that will never lead to any other time. At the end of “Miss Scalpel,” Baudelaire asks God why such bizarre creatures as Miss Scalpel exist: “Oh Creator! Can there be monsters in the eyes of God, who alone knows why they exist, how they made themselves , and how they could have not made themselves?”3 Miss Scalpel could have never been born; she could have never “made herself.” As...