How Fiction Works

Flaubert and the Rise of the Flaneur

Flaubert can drive together his time signatures because French verb forms allow him to use the imperfect past tense to convey both discrete occurrences (“he was sweeping the road”) and recurrent occurrences (“every week he swept the road”). English is clumsier, and we have to resort to “he was doing something” or “he would do something” or “he used to do something”—“every week he would sweep the road”—to translate recurrent verbs accurately. But as soon as we do that in English, we have given the game away, and are admitting the existence of different temporalities. In Contre Sainte-Beuve , Proust rightly saw that this use of the imperfect tense was Flaubert’s great innovation. And Flaubert founds this new style of realism on his use of the eye—the authorial eye, and the character’s eye. I said that Updike’s Ahmad, just walking along the street noticing things and thinking thoughts, was engaged in the classic post-Flaubertian novelistic activity. Flaubert’s Fré dé ric is a forerunner of what would later be called the flaneur—the loafer, usually a young man, who walks the streets with no great urgency, seeing, looking, reflecting. We know this type from Baudelaire, 1 from the all-seeing narrator of Rilke’s autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge , and from Walter Benjamin’s writings about Baudelaire.

This figure is essentially a stand-in for the author, is the author’s porous scout, helplessly inundated with impressions. He goes out into the world like Noah’s dove, to bring a report back. The rise of this authorial scout is intimately connected to the rise of urbanism, to the fact that huge conglomerations of mankind throw at the writer—or the designated perceiver—large, bewilderingly various amounts of detail. Jane Austen is, essentially, a rural novelist, and London, as figured in Emma , is really just the village of Highgate. Her heroines never idly walk along, just thinking and looking: all their thought is intensely directed to the moral problem at hand. But when Wordsworth, at around the time the young Austen was writing, visits London in The Prelude , he immediately begins to sound like a flaneur—like a modern novelist:

Here files of ballads dangle from dead walls,

Advertisements of giant-size, from high

Press forward in all colour on the sight …

A travelling Cripple, by the trunk cut short.

And stumping with his arms …

The Bachelor that loves to sun himself,

The military Idler, and the Dame …

The Italian, with his Frame of Images

Upon his head; with basket at his waist

The Jew; the stately and slow-moving Turk

With freight of slippers piled beneath his arm.

Wordsworth goes on to write that if we tire of “random sights,” we can find in the crowd “all specimens of man”:

Through all the colours which the sun bestows,

And every character of form and face,

The Swede, the Russian; from the genial South,

The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote

America, the Hunter-Indian; Moors,

Malays, Lascars, the Tartar and Chinese,

And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.

Notice how Wordsworth, like Flaubert, adjusts the lens of his optic as he pleases: we have several lines of generalized cataloging (the Swede, the Russian, the American, etc.), but we end with a sudden plucking of a single color contrast: “And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.” The writer zooms in and out at will, but these details, despite their differences in focus and intensity, are pushed at us, as if by the croupier’s stick, in one single heap.

Wordsworth is looking himself at these aspects of London. He is being a poet, writing about himself. The novelist wants to record details like this, too, but it is harder to act like a lyric poet in the novel, because you have to write through other people, and then we are returned to our basic novelistic tension: Is it the novelist who is noticing these things or the fictional character? In that first passage from Sentimental Education , is Flaubert doing a bit of nice Parisian scene-setting, with the reader assuming that Fré dé ric is seeing perhaps a few of the details in the paragraph while Flaubert sees all of them in his mind’s eye; or is the entire passage essentially written in loose free indirect style, with the assumption that Fré dé ric notices everything Flaubert draws our attention to—the unopened newspapers, the women yawning, and so on? Flaubert tries hard to make this question unnecessary, to so confuse author and flaneur that the reader unconsciously raises Fré dé ric up to the stylistic level of Flaubert: both must be pretty good, we decide, at noticing things, and we are content to leave it there.

Flaubert needs to do this because he is at once a realist and a stylist, a reporter and a poet manqué . The realist wants to record a great deal, to do a Balzacian number on Paris. But the stylist is not content with Balzacian jumble and verve; he wants to discipline this welter of detail, to turn it into immaculate sentences and images: Flaubert’s letters speak of the effort of trying to turn prose into poetry. 2 We nowadays more or less assume, so strong is the post-Flaubertian inflection of our era, that a fancy stylist must sometimes write over his or her characters (as in the example from Updike and the one from Wallace); or that they may appoint a surrogate: Humbert Humbert famously announces that he has a fancy prose style, as a way, surely, of explaining his creator’s overdeveloped prose; Bellow likes to inform us that his characters are “first-class noticers.”

By the time the Flaubertian innovations have reached a novelist like Christopher Isherwood, writing in the 1930s, they have been polished to high technical shine. Goodbye to Berlin , published in 1939, has a famous early statement: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” Isherwood makes good on his claim in a scene-setting passage like this, from the opening of the chapter entitled “The Nowaks”:

The entrance to the Wassertorstrasse was a big stone archway, a bit of old Berlin, daubed with hammers and sickles and Nazi crosses and plastered with tattered bills which advertised auctions or crimes. It was a deep shabby cobbled street, littered with sprawling children in tears. Youths in woollen sweaters circled waveringly across it on racing bikes and whooped at girls passing with milk-jugs. The pavement was chalk-marked for the hopping game called Heaven and Earth. At the end of it, like a tall, dangerously sharp, red instrument, stood a church.

Isherwood asserts even more flagrantly than Flaubert a randomness of detail, while trying even harder than Flaubert to disguise that randomness: this is exactly the formalization you would expect of a literary style, once radical seventy years ago, that is now decomposing a bit into a familiar way of ordering reality on the page—a set of handy rules, in effect. Posing as a camera who simply records, Isherwood seems merely to turn a wide bland gaze to the Wassertorstrasse: there, he says, is an archway, a street littered with children, some youths on bikes and girls with milk-jugs. Just a quick look. But, like Flaubert, only much more assertively, Isherwood insists on slowing down dynamic activity, and freezing habitual occurrence. The street may well be littered with children, but they cannot all be “in tears” all the time. Likewise the cycling youths and the walking milk girls, who are presented as part of the habitual furniture of the place. On the other hand, the tattered bills and the ground marked with the children’s game are plucked by the author from their quiescence, and made temporally noisy: they flash at us, suddenly, but they belong to a different time signature than the children and youths.

The more one looks at this rather wonderful piece of writing, the less it seems “a slice of life,” or a camera’s easy swipe, than a very careful ballet. The passage begins with an entrance: the entrance of the chapter. The reference to hammers and sickles and Nazi crosses introduces a note of menace, which is completed by the sardonic reference to commercial bills advertising “auctions or crimes”: this may be commerce, but it is uncomfortably close to the political graffiti—after all, isn’t auction and crime what politicians, especially the kind involved in communist or fascist activities, do? They sell us things and commit crimes. The Nazi “crosses” nicely link us to the children’s game called Heaven and Earth, and to the church, except that, threateningly enough, everything is inverted: the church no longer looks like a church but like a red instrument (a pen, a knife, an instrument of torture, the “red” the color of both blood and radical politics), while the “cross” has been taken over by the Nazis. Given this inversion, we understand why Isherwood wants to top and tail this paragraph with the Nazi crosses at the start and the church at the end: each changes place in the course of a few lines.

So the narrator who promised that he was a mere camera, quite passive, recording, not thinking, is selling us a falsehood? Only in the sense that Robinson Crusoe’s claim to be telling a true story is a falsehood: the reader is happy enough to efface the labor of the writer in order to believe two further fictions: that the narrator was somehow “really there” (and in fact Isherwood was living in Berlin in the 1930s), and that the narrator is not really a writer. Or rather, what Flaubert’s flaneur tradition tries to establish is that the narrator (or designated authorial scout) is at once a kind of writer and not really a writer. A writer by temperament but not by trade. A writer because he notices so much, so well; not really a writer because he is not expending any labor to put it down on the page, and after all is really noticing no more than you and I would see.

This solution to the tension between the style of the author and the style of the character presents a paradox. It announces, in effect: “We moderns have all become writers, and all have highly sophisticated eyes for detail; but life is not actually as ‘literary’ as this implies, because we don’t have to worry too much about how such detail gets onto the page.” The tension between the style of the author and the style of the character disappears because literary style itself is made to disappear: and literary style is made to disappear through literary means.

Flaubertian realism, like most fiction, is both lifelike and artificial. It is lifelike because detail really does hit us, especially in big cities, in a tattoo of randomness. And we do exist in different time signatures. Suppose I am walking down a street. I am aware of many noises, much activity, a police siren, a building being demolished, the scrape of a shop door. Different faces and bodies stream past me. And as I pass a café , I catch the eye of a woman, who is sitting alone. She looks at me, I at her. A moment of pointless, vaguely erotic urban connection, but the face reminds me of someone I once knew, a girl with just the same kind of dark hair, and sets a train of thought going. I walk on, but that particular face in the café glows in my memory, is held there, and is being temporally preserved, while around me noise and activities are not being similarly preserved—are entering and leaving my consciousness. The face, you could say, is playing at 4/4, while the rest of the city is humming along more quickly at 6/8.

The artifice lies in the selection of detail. In life, we can swivel our heads and eyes, but in fact we are like helpless cameras. We have a wide lens, and must take in whatever comes before us. Our memory selects for us, but not much like the way literary narrative selects. Our memories are aesthetically untalented.

So realism is at once true and artificial, pulled between life and art, the capacious and the selective, the camera and the painting. And see how vital these tensions still are, and what an alert contemporary writer can do with them, in Teju Cole’s novel Open City . Cole’s narrator, Julius, a young American intellectual, half-German and half-Nigerian by birth, wanders around New York City gathering impressions, hearing stories, and floating his ideas. Julius is a twenty-first-century flaneur, who has read Roland Barthes and Edward Said and Kwame Anthony Appiah—a good noticer and reader, an exceptional listener. Alert to his own mixed origins, he seeks out people and stories that are neglected or politically occluded: he talks to a Liberian refugee, a Haitian shoeshiner, an angry Moroccan intellectual. He is compassionate, empathetic, learned, liberal; almost our ideal sense of ourselves. But he also narrates his own story, and the novel gradually reveals him to be an unreliable narrator. We begin to see that he isn’t as empathetic as he thinks he is; he congratulates himself on the achievement of his liberalism, on the fineness of his noticing eye, while neglecting inconvenient or even grievous actions in his own life. Julius listens well to the story of a Liberian refugee, but he’s rude to his African American cab driver; he seeks out a Moroccan intellectual in Belgium, but is complacently unaware that his neighbor’s wife in New York died a few months ago.

Cole activates the tension in flaneurial realism between saturation and selection, and transfers it to the moral and political sphere. In the aesthetic or literary realm, the flaneurial tension is between what you helplessly record and what you choose to represent (between the cinematic and the painterly). In the moral or political realm, that tension manifests itself thus: what should we notice, and how much do we actually forget or neglect? And what do we then do about what we notice? It’s all very well to listen to the Liberian refugee, but if I do nothing to help him or change his political circumstances, I am perhaps just a well-read flaneur, a morally idle Flaubertian. Maybe life, morally speaking, is just such a process of hapless noticing and neglect? And as readers of Cole’s book, will we truly notice Julius’s moral and political lapses, or will we neglect to see them? Will we read Open City , close it, and then do nothing about our own careless habits of witness? Will we become mere flaneurs of the text itself ?