Miniature Metropolis

Andreas Huyssen

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674425835
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe's modernizing metropolises offered a sensory experience unlike anything that had come before. Cities became laboratories bubbling with aesthetic experimentation in old and new media, and from this milieu emerged metropolitan miniatures—short prose pieces about the experiences of urban life written for European newspapers. Miniature Metropolis explores the history and theory of this significant but misrecognized achievement of literary modernism.Andreas Huyssen shows how writers from Baudelaire and Kafka to Benjamin, Musil, and Adorno created the miniature to record their reflections of Paris, Brussels, Prague, Vienna, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Contesting photography and film as competing media, the metropolitan miniature sought to capture the visceral feeling of acceleration and compression that defined urban existence. But the form did not merely imitate visual media—it absorbed them, condensing objective and subjective perceptions into the very structure of language and text and asserting the aesthetic specificity of literary language without resort to visual illustration. Huyssen argues that the miniature subverted the expectations of transparency, easy understanding, and entertainment that mass circulation newspapers depended upon. His fine-grained readings open broad vistas into German critical theory and the history of visual arts, revealing the metropolitan miniature to be one of the few genuinely innovative modes of spatialized writing created by modernism.

1

Urban Spleen and the Terror of Paris in Baudelaire and Rilke

ANY DISCUSSION OF THE metropolitan miniature in German and Austrian literature in the early decades of the last century has to take account of the seminal point de départ for this modernist mode of feuilleton writing in the work of Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire had begun to experiment with this new form of urban literature by the mid-1850s, searching for a more liberated form of writing the city than the one of the Tableaux parisiens and other poems in Les Fleurs du mal, first published in 1857. The seminal impact Le Spleen de Paris: Petits poèmes en prose had on the rise of the metropolitan miniature results from the fact that Baudelaire radically transformed the older genre of the impressionistic and discursive urban sketch in the tradition of Mercier’s Tableau de Paris. His new kind of prose writing was equally distinct from the main genre of the nineteenth-century urban narrative à la Balzac or Dickens, and it anticipated new modes of writing the city that emerged only later in the novels of Kafka, Joyce, Aragon, Dos Passos, and Döblin. Its main long-distance aftereffects, however, both direct and indirect, are to be found in the urban miniature written by some of the major German and Austrian modernists in the years leading up to World War I, the war years themselves, and the interwar period. Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1911), with its explicit citations and multiple resonances of Baudelaire, occupies a mediating position between Baudelaire’s short prose texts and the interwar miniature written in the first Austrian Republic and the Weimar Republic. Poetically close to Baudelaire’s imagination, it already highlights the uncanny and surreal dimensions that would become dominant in the later metropolitan miniature.

While Baudelaire and Rilke’s prose works have been extensively discussed in scholarship, we lack any direct comparison. The reason for this lacuna may be simple. Even though Rilke himself used the term “poems in prose” in a comment to his translator, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a novel, a novel in fragments, to be sure, but not a collection of poèmes en prose.¹ And yet the roughly first two dozen prose fragments with which The Notebooks open are unmistakably in the tradition of the urban miniature. Similar to Baudelaire’s Spleen, with its multiple, even serial narrator positions, they feature a narrator whose intense perceptions of Paris ultimately shape his innermost metropolitan consciousness. Despite other significant differences, both texts articulate a sensual and bodily experience of the city without ever drawing on realistic description of concrete urban spaces, as the traditional urban sketch or the nineteenth-century urban novel would do. Both authors shared a visceral dislike of photography, a medium they believed threatened the integrity of the imagination and disabled poetic creativity itself. Of course, they experienced photography at a technically less developed stage than the later miniaturists, but despite their rejection of the new medium, traces of its presence abound in their work.

A selection of twenty Baudelairean miniatures was first published by Arsène Houssaye in 1862 in the feuilleton of the Parisian paper La Presse. They condense, displace, and juxtapose, to use the formulation from the dedication to his publisher, “the soul’s lyrical movements, the undulations of reverie, the jolts of consciousness.”² While these characterizations by no means exhaust the anonymous narrators’ moods, attitudes, and strategies, the format of the miniature, with its experimental mix of genres, intense subjectivities, and roaming reflections, was picked up, appropriated, and transformed by Rilke, Benjamin, Kafka, Kracauer, Benn, Jünger, and Musil. As in Baudelaire himself, the soul’s lyrical movements are juxtaposed to outright cynicism, if not male hysteria (Benn); the undulations of reverie turn into nightmare or the emptiness of ennui (Rilke, Kracauer); the jolts of consciousness escalate into terror (Rilke, Kafka, Jünger). New imaginaries of time and space are created by the short prose texts themselves, just as they provide new transitory reading experiences for the overstimulated and distracted urban reader of the feuilleton.

However, Baudelaire’s miniatures did not meet with much success among the reading public. The first publication in La Presse was cut short after three installments, and another publication in Le Figaro two years later was also not completed, since, as the editor let Baudelaire know, they bored readers. While in length and reflective mode they attempted to satisfy the needs of their medium, they also remained something like a foreign body in the feuilleton, which at that time tended more toward entertainment, celebrity anecdotes, and society gossip. And yet it was in Baudelaire’s feuilleton texts that Paris first became legible as a modern metropolis.³ They responded in novel ways to the disorienting urban condition as analyzed by Georg Simmel four decades later in his seminal Berlin essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life.”⁴ But whereas Simmel analyzed only one typical reaction to the proliferation of stimuli in metropolitan life, the self-protective blasé attitude, Baudelaire displayed a whole gamut of reactions among which the blasé self-protection from urban stimuli would be only one, and not even the dominant one.

Baudelaire recognized that a new kind of writing the city was called forth by the city itself. Thus, in the dedication of 1862, published in an Appendix and entitled Preface in the recent English translation, he stated:

This obsessive ideal [of writing a poetic prose that was musical, subtle, and choppy, as he put it] came to life above all by frequenting enormous cities, in the intersection of their countless relationships. (129)

The choppiness of his little work is exacerbated by the fact that it has “neither head nor tail.” Addressing his editor, he continued with cutting irony:

Consider, I beg you, what admirable convenience that combination offers us all, you, me, and the reader. We can cut wherever we want, I my reverie, you the manuscript, the reader his reading. (129)

As he offered the “entire serpent” (129) to his editor and the public, his hope must have been that the act of seduction would be successful. Despite the sarcastic authorial irony in this metaphoric description, it also holds a Baudelairean belief. It matches Baudelaire’s concept of aesthetic creation as inevitably transitory and ephemeral, as he laid it out in his seminal essay “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” which focused on the transitoriness of life, art, and fashion in the modern metropolis, from which a new kind of eternal beauty was to spring.⁵ With that text about Constantin Guys, the Monsieur G of the essay, a minor figure in the visual arts of the time rather than one of its giants, Baudelaire was also the first influential theoretician of the metamorphoses of aesthetic creation and reception in an increasingly commercialized and technologized metropolitan culture. Constantin Guys published his sketches in the Illustrated London News, a leading European paper at the time that also had begun to publish photographs. Indeed, photography is the great unspoken dimension of the essay on Guys. We know how Baudelaire hated photography not only as mere copy but also as a sign of hateful progress and mass culture, a technological contraption that could not possibly compete with art. Thus, in “The Salon of 1859,” we read:

As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce.⁶

Baudelaire of course came to be the key figure in Benjamin—theorist par excellence of modern visual media of technical reproducibility and reader of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century. In typical avant-gardist fashion of the interwar period, Benjamin also emphasized the link between urban writing and the feuilleton: “Literature submits to montage in the feuilleton.”⁷ And montage—always associated with photography and film at the time—it is. Baudelaire’s miniature as form—creatively appropriated by Benjamin himself in One-Way Street and Berlin Childhood around 1900—embodies paradigmatically what David Harvey has described as the compression of time and space in the social world of modernity.⁸ Montage is the principle that shapes the collection of the miniatures into an open-ended whole that can be said to represent a model of seriality before film. The claim is not that somehow literature prophesies film; instead, the seriality of miniatures formally reflects and constructs the very nature of urban experience. Both the theory and the practice of Baudelaire’s writing the capitalist city in transition to the modern metropolis at the time of the Baron Haussmann’s radical interventions into the older city fabric provide the perfect entry point into that body of literature I call the metropolitan miniature.

Baudelaire’s transformation of the older genre of journalistic urban prose since Mercier, a tradition that was well and alive in many Paris books of his time, did for Paris in the mid-nineteenth century what the later German and Austrian writers did for metropolitan life, not only of Paris but of Vienna and Berlin as well. Reading all these short urban texts together allows us to focus on shared cross-national aspects of the experience of metropolitan space in major European cities during an earlier phase of what now is called globalization. What emerges in the modernist miniature is not some kind of literary city guide but a reflection on the changing perceptions of city life and the city’s effects on structures of subjectivity at a time of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and the evolution of bohemian subcultures. At stake was the creation of a modernist urban imaginary that would account for historical changes in the mode of attentiveness and reading.

Baudelaire is so crucial for this development of new city writing since he stripped the older genre of le tableau de Paris of much of its impressionistic urban description of recognizable Parisian sites, offering instead philosophical reflections and narrative or dialogic fragments mixed with extreme mood swings and contrarian states of mind. The multiplicity of clashing perspectives, which modern metropolitan life generated in that key phase of urban and social transformation after the bloodbath of 1848 and the Napoleonic putsch, recurs in his miniatures in a variety of moods from euphoria to lament and melancholy, from the epiphanies of reverie to the decrepitude and paralysis of the spleen, all the way to aggressiveness, sarcasm, and cynicism, with the latter becoming increasingly prevalent in the late miniatures written in the 1860s, during the twilight of Napoleon III’s dictatorship.

Baudelaire’s Spleen is also fundamentally different from a precursor he mentions explicitly in the Preface: the minor romantic poet Aloysius Bertrand, whose 1842 collection of prose fragments Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot presumably inspired him

to try something similar, and to apply to the description of modern life, or rather of one modern and more abstract life, the procedure he [Bertrand] had applied to the depiction of ancient life, so strangely picturesque. (129)

Bertrand’s Gaspard was indeed picturesque and descriptive, whereas Baudelaire aimed at abstraction from the picturesque. More important, Bertrand’s writing was deeply visual in its execution and in its dedication to visual artists, and thus its posthumous editions always included visual representations with the prose fragments.⁹ Baudelaire, however, despite his own highly visual imagination, did not include any visuals with his texts, which, given modern times, could only have been photographs of the city. The verbal and the visual had merged emblemlike in the editions of Bertrand’s work, but like Benjamin later on, Baudelaire insisted on the Eigensinn of the literary in his miniatures. At stake, after all, was the power of language to conjure up urban scenes and create an urban imaginary.

In all of his multifaceted and heterogeneous miniatures, Baudelaire’s relationship to the social and the political remains oscillating, amorphous, anarchic. Central are the intellectual’s, the poet’s radical mood swings. Thus, in “The Double Room,” an intérieur is described lyrically as an aesthetic hothouse of voluptuous sensations of timelessness. Suddenly, clock time and the spleen of a banal everyday reenter the narrator’s world with a vengeance, transforming what appeared as a “truly spiritual room” into “the abode of eternal ennui” (7). In a way, this fateful doubling is given an analogy in displaced form in the structure of the social world. Here the carefree world of the hated bourgeoisie is opposed to the world of poverty, deprivation, and vice with which the narrator identifies time and again, sometimes via empathy (“The Old Woman’s Despair”; “Widows”; “The Old Acrobat”; “Eyes of the Poor”), other times via an aloof and disillusioning understanding (“The Cake”; “The Rope”). The collection opens with a soliloquy that establishes the narrator as perfect stranger and loner, prone to Rousseauean reverie. But it concludes with an allegory of social life, an elegy on the city’s muse in which the social “double room,” as it were, is allegorized in the opposition between the “good dogs, pitiful dogs, muddied dogs, those everyone shuns,” just as everyone shuns paupers, poets, and prostitutes, and the

foppish dogs, those conceited quadrupeds, Great Dane, King Charles spaniel, pug or lap dog, so enchanted with themsel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Urban Spleen and the Terror of Paris in Baudelaire and Rilke
• 2. Kafka’s Betrachtung in the Force Field of Photography and Film
• 3. Benn in Occupied Brussels: The Rönne Novellas
• 4. Photography and Emblem in Kracauer and Benjamin’s Street Texts
• 5. Double Exposure Berlin: Photomontage and Narrative in Höch and Keun
• 6. Benjamin and Aragon: Le Paysan de Berlin
• 7. War and Metropolis in Jünger
• 8. Musil’s Posthumous Modernism
• Coda. Diving into the Wreck: Adorno’s Minima Moralia
• Notes
• Index