Taking you line by line through the last three verses of Baudelaire’s « Les Phares », Dean Kyte explains the paradoxical relationship that damnation has to praise in Baudelaire’s thought.
And in today’s video on The Melbourne Flâneur, I take you inside the softcover version of the book as I explain—with due reference to Baudelaire—the rationale behind my choice of such a bitter and pitiless title.
As I say in the video, what appears on its face to be a title utterly alienating in its satanic vituperation is in fact the highest possible homage that Baudelaire can render to God’s majesty, and the proof of his most fervent belief, as a heretical Catholic, in the Supreme Being.
Thus, at a plutonic hour of human history where faith in God and human goodness could not be more ridiculous, I too assert, in taking this title, my quixotic faith in what is highest in man by ‘praising with sharp damnation’ what is lowest in our species, we irredeemable children of the tribe of Cain.
For there must no longer be any doubt in our present year, even to the somnambulistic billions who would make ‘the Woman Question’ and ‘the Jewish Question’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suddenly ‘the Human Question’ of the twenty-first, that Baudelaire’s apocalyptic prophecy of modernity—a veritable ‘Age of Iron’—has now properly revealed itself in our day.
The time could not be more right for the apparition of this book.
One hundred twenty-one years to the very day of my birth, Baudelaire writes in his journal that ‘today … I suffered a singular alarm: I felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.’
Charles Baudelaire is the Alpha of the dandy-flâneur, the man, in modernity, who still seeks to be a ‘man’—to live heroically in the strength of all our human frailties and the humility of our profound limits—and I am the Omega, the decadent result of two centuries of societal degeneracy in the West, the last quixotic figure, in the armour of my hat and suit, to intransigently ‘hold the faith’ in that utterly discredited, unconscionable project of embodying ‘Homo Occidentalis’ in all his risible nobility.
So, as a mad Aquarian, an avatar of the New, destiny has elected me for a task, chers lecteurs;—to be the ‘postrunner’ of this great fallen angel of modernity, this great albatross of a luciferic intellect who found his wingspan so vast he couldn’t walk easily among us, and interpret to the Anglosphere, as an evangelist after the fact, the poetry and prose poetry of Charles Baudelaire.
And I’m pleased as punch to advise you that Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments is on the verge of seeing the light of day.
I explain the origins of the book’s title in the video above, but here below, I am posting for the first time the line-up of fifty pieces I have selected from Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris to take the field as the Baudelairean ‘dream team’ and represent our poet.
So, here we go…
From Toxic Blossoms (Les Fleurs du mal):
“To the Reader” (« Au Lecteur »)
From “Spleen and Ideal” (« Spleen et Idéal »):
“Blessing” (« Bénédiction »)
“The Albatross” (« L’Albatros »)
“Elevation” (« Élévation »)
“Correspondences” (« Correspondances »)
“The Venal Muse” (« La Muse vénale »)
“The Faithless Monk” (« Le Mauvais moine »)
“Illfated” (« Le Guignon »)
“Past Life” (« La Vie antérieure »)
“Beauty” (« La Beauté »)
“The Ideal” (« L’Idéal »)
“The Giantess” (« La Géante »)
“The Jewels” (« Les Bijoux »)
“Hymn to Beauty” (« Hymne àla Beauté »)
“You’d let all mankind dally in your alley…” (« Tu mettrais l’univers entier dans ta ruelle… »)
“With her raiment, sinuous and nacreous…” (« Avec ses vêtements ondoyants et nacrés… »)
“The Possessed” (« Le Possédé »)
“An Apparition” (« Un Fantôme »)
“I make a gift of these verses to you so that if my name…” (« Je te donnes ces vers afin qui si mon nom… »)
“Vespers” (« Chanson d’après-midi »)
“Spleen” (« Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle… »)
“Warning” (« L’Avertissement »)
From “Parisian scenes” (« Tableaux parisiens »):
“The Sun” (« Le Soleil »)
“The Swan” (« Le Cygne »)
“To a Passerby” (« À une passante »)
“Evening Twilight” (« Le Crépuscule du soir »)
From “Wine” (« Le Vin »):
“The Soul of Wine” (« L’Âme du vin »)
From “Toxic Blossoms” (« Les Fleurs du mal »):
“Epigraph for a Condemned Book” (« Épigraphe pour un livre condamné »)
“The Two Wellbred Girls” (« Les Deux bonnes sœurs »)
From “Rebellion” (« Révolte »):
“Litanies of Satan” (« Les Litanies de Satan »)
From “Death” (« La Mort »):
“A Connoisseur’s Dream” (« Le Rêve d’un curieux »)
“The Journey” (« Le Voyage »)
I have selected fully one-fifth of the total number of poems published in the three editions of Les Fleurs du mal which Baudelaire, and then his mother, saw through the press.
At least twenty per cent of every section of Les Fleurs du mal is represented in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, and because Baudelaire’s poetry collection is a psychological novel with a narrative order, in selecting at least a fifth of the poems from every section, I have taken care to choose those works which I think best highlight the themes of that section and carry the overarching drama forward.
The figure of one-fifth includes the six pieces that were struck from the first edition as obscene, banned in France, and were only subsequently available in Belgium among Les Épaves (1866).
One of the censored poems, « Les Bijoux », is included, and as you can see, that piece, which I published in my first collection of Baudelaire translations, Flowers Red and Black (2013), is listed in orange.
With the exception of « Spleen », the titles in orange are works from the earlier book which are still in the buffer awaiting revision.
As this post goes to press, I am about to start revising « Spleen », which I also translated in the years preceding the publication of Flowers Red and Black but declined to include in that book, so this poem will see the light of day for the first time in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments.
And the word ‘revise’ in this instance basically means ‘completely rewrite’.
So it’s going to be interesting when I look at “The Jewels” again in a couple of weeks, because this is by far my most well-known translation of a work by Baudelaire, the piece that often cliched sales of Flowers Red and Black. Is this poem going to run true to form with the rest of the book and am I going to see the text in a whole new light?
What I can tell you for certain is that a revised version of “The Jewels” will include a translation of the newly revealed ninth verse that was discovered in 1928, written in Baudelaire’s hand, in a first edition of Les Fleurs du mal which he gave to a friend but only made public when that copy came up for auction in 2019.
These are the last outstanding selections from Les Fleurs du mal that I am yet to translate. They’re Baudelaire’s most famous poems; they’re among my longest selections, and they’re going to be the greatest tests of my interpretative abilities.
So that’s Les Fleurs du mal. Now let’s look at what you can expect to read from Le Spleen de Paris.
From Parisian Spleen (Le Spleen de Paris):
“To Arsène Houssaye” ( « À Arsène Houssaye »)
“The Stranger” (« L’Étranger »)
“The Artist’s Confiteor” (« Le Confiteor de l’artiste »)
“A Troll” (« Un plaisant »)
“Twin Suite” (« La Chambre double »)
“The Buffoon and the Venus” (« Le Fou et la Vénus »)
“At an Hour after Midnight” ( « À une heure de matin »)
“Crowds” (« Les Foules »)
“Invitation to the Journey” (« L’Invitation au voyage »)
“Hungry Eyes” (« Les Yeux des pauvres »)
“The Magnanimous Gambler” (« Le Joueur généreux »)
“Sozzle Yourself” (« Enivrez-vous »)
“Windows” (« Les Fenêtres »)
“The Port” (« Le Port »)
“Lost Halo” (« Perte d’auréole »)
“Anywhere Out of the World ” (« N’importe où hors du monde »)
“Epilogue” (« Épilogue »)
One-third of the total number of pieces from Le Spleen de Paris will be featured in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, including Baudelaire’s prefatory letter to Arsène Houssaye—which ought to be considered a prose poem in its own right—and the poem that Baudelaire appends as epilogue to the collection.
And you’ll notice we have one text in red: « Le Port ». After I complete the revision of « Spleen », that short, pretty little prose poem is next on my list.
So, if you’ve been keeping count, chers lecteurs, you’ve clocked 49 pieces and I promised you fifty. What’s the big 5-0?
“Fanfarlo” (« La Fanfarlo »)
The translation of Charles Baudelaire’s only known original short story is now complete.
The longest, most ambitious translating project I’ve undertaken in any language was completed to my satisfaction at the end of last month after 134 hours and seven drafts of work.
A task I approached with trepidation and misgivings, thinking I would be merely giving the reader a ‘bonus’ text that was still going to cost me time and sweat, I now believe to be one of the major selling points of Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments.
One of the reasons I think this version of « La Fanfarlo » will last for quite a long time as an introduction to what is, for English readers, an overlooked part of Baudelaire’s œuvre is my decision to include footnotes to the text.
I found that there were three types of instance where a footnote would aid the reader’s understanding, the most important being the occasional footnote that takes you inside my process as a translator, shows you clearly what the French is and how it can be variously interpreted, and what ultimately informed the choice I’ve gone with in the text based on my intimacy with Baudelaire’s typical modes of thinking and expression.
So, 86 per cent of the poems, prose poems—and fiction—of Charles Baudelaire that you will shortly be reading in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments is now locked in.
And this week, apace with my final revisions and translations, I pulled out my trusty essay plan and began plugging in points and sources for the last remaining major task before this book goes to print:—my contribution, an 8,000-word critical monograph on Baudelaire that I hope will serve to honourably introduce the man, the myth, the œuvre to the English-speaking world.
But what I write in the critical monograph introducing Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, I intend to be my definitive statement on Baudelaire—at least for the next ten years, when I will have doubtless more translations of his work to offer the English-speaking world.
When I published Flowers Red and Black in 2013, I had no idea that people would see such a close connection between Baudelaire and myself, as parallel lives across centuries, souls who cannot take quiet desperation.
I am truly the ‘mon semblable, mon frère’ (‘my double, my brother’) whom he salutes in the last line of the very first poem of Les Fleurs du mal, « Au Lecteur »—a fraternal spirit of revolt.
What I say about Baudelaire in the critical monograph will be the fruit of some seventeen years of working intimately with the thoughts of a literary mind that is as much a black mirror to my own as Edgar Allan Poe’s was to Baudelaire’s.
And I intend it to stand the test of future times and tastes as Baudelaire’s critical essays on Poe have proven their lasting value as perspicacious insights into that poor unfortunate’s life and work from a fraternal spirit who knew the horror he was experiencing only too well.
I am now taking pre-orders for Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, and I invite you to get onboard now.
The price point I am looking at for the softcover version advertised in the video above is $A32.00, exclusive of shipping.
(For my American readers, that’s approximately $20.50 in your yanquí dinero.)
For that price, you’re going to receive:
A 180-page illustrated softcover edition with pages printed in full colour
Autographed and wax-sealed by me as a guarantee of authenticity
Handwritten, personalised inscription from me to you
Complementary custom bookmark
My proposal to you is to purchase now to guarantee your copy at that price point in the initial print run, and after I go to print, I will invoice you for shipping.
And by pre-ordering, you will also join the community of consumers who have already committed to purchase Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments. I’m sending emails on a monthly basis to my readers, staying accountable by keeping them up to date with my progress towards publication—and taking them inside my Artisanal Desktop Publishing process, the joys and vagaries of writing, designing and publishing this book with exclusive content not posted here on The Melbourne Flâneur.
So, avail yourself of the order form below and book your ticket to Cythera on the Baudelaire boat.
“Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments” [softcover]
Personally signed, sealed and inscribed by author. Comes with custom bookmark. Pre-order your copy and join an exclusive community of readers anticipating the release of Dean Kyte’s new book!
In this prose-poetic video essay, the Melbourne Flâneur returns to the city where his love of flânerie was born.
Brisbane, David Malouf exclaims exasperatedly in Johnno, is a city that ‘would have defeated even Baudelaire!’ ‘People suffered here without significance,’ he writes. Where hell is Sartre’s bourgeois autre, Brisbane is too middling, too mediocre even to be a suburb de l’Enfer, ‘[a] place,’ in Malouf’s avis, ‘where poetry could never occur.’
For Johnno, for Malouf, – for his Brisbanian Dante without even the dignity of Ravenna to suffer in, – it’s a city whose very soul is soullessness, characterized by the ramshackle, makeshift nature of the place. Exiled from the empire of Western Europe, no classicism could possibly take root in this muddy colony of the maddog English.
And yet all my spleen with la vie de l’ennui en Australie was born in the ideal of this sultry river city, swampy Venise of vaporous, féerific CityCats plying gauche rives of odiferous mangroves. And all mes désirs de Paris were born of mes flâneries to the Dendy, the Valley, to Indooroopilly or Rosalie in search of movies and thumbedthrough bouquins de seconde main.
City of ferries like Venice, city of bridges like Paris, like our national epic, the story of Brisbane is yet to be chanted. The civic classic sinking its piliers et poutres into Brisbane’s shores will sing l’esprit of contingency, of ersatz imperfection, and even of mouldy ugliness, of baudelairean putrefaction!
— Dean Kyte, “O Brisbane! O Baudelaire!”
Welcome back, chers lecteurs, to another year of investigating the æsthetic philosophy of flânerie here on The Melbourne Flâneur.
The Christmas/New Year period found Your Humble Servant sweltering in higher latitudes than the name of this vlog implies as I returned to my home city of Brisbane for the first time in over five years.
I spent seven weeks in the River City over December and January, and after what was probably the longest period of absence from it in my forty-year intimacy with Briz Vegas, when I stepped out of the chantier that has been dug from the defunct Roma Street Station, I felt like I was finally seeing the city in which my first flâneurial balbutiements were babyishly burbled and trébuchements were trippingly taken in its true, very reduced dimensions.
Sensation curieuse!
Even when Brisbane was the hellish destination that lay at the other end of a homeward journey that began at the gare du Nord, not even then did I feel, with all my desolate weeping at the sight of our Venetian-style City Hall—the most beautiful in Australia—that Brisbane is a very strait and provincial place.
It is not that my experience of the world has grown that very much larger in five years of absence from Brisbane, but that I became thrillingly aware that, in an exile from Paris I expect to be a permanent removal from the most vivifying spectacle I have ever beheld, ‘down under’, in the infernal antipodes of culture and civilization, what might be called ‘the lessons of Paris’ have at last been absorbed into my vision of the local scene during the last sixteen years of my literary life.
In fine, it is my eyes—the scope of my vision and the cognitive lens of the French language that I apply over everything—that has grown that much larger in the absence when Melbourne, as the local analogue for la vie parisienne, has been the concrete structure mediating the theoretical construct of applied flânerie on Australian soil, and has primarily occupied my vision, both physical and mental.
It is not a slight to Brisbane to say that I found the first city of my experience ‘smaller’, less abounding in absorbing, diverting novelty than in the days when I used to live on the Gold Coast and some of my first expeditions in flânerie involved weekends in Brisbane searching for the altered states of experience that movies, books and art—the ‘culture’ I was in thirst of—represented for me.
I still have affection for it. But I’ve travelled so far in my thinking now from those days in my twenties when, like the ‘hero’ (?) of David Malouf’s great Brisbane novel Johnno (1975), I was so desperate for a better life than South East Queensland could offer, that I just had to chuck the whole place up for a jaunt to the Mecca of flânerie itself.
Among the kilo or so of books I decided to bring with me on my expedition back to Brisbane was Johnno. I wanted to read it again ‘in situ’, to have the actual locations Malouf describes—and which are so familiar to me, despite the very different Brisbane of his day—before my enwidened eyes.
For it’s the case that the Brisbane of Malouf’s wartime childhood and post-war youth was just hanging on in my own, in the Bjelke-Petersen eighties and Wayne Goss nineties. Even then, it was ‘so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely!’
Johnno is so sensual a book that you might say that Malouf manages to poetically capture and convey something impalpable yet inhering about Brisbane—its ‘aroma’, perhaps—the way a fragrance lingers—for an ‘old Queenslander’ like myself—in an old Queenslander like the one in which I was staying in Aspley, throwing me back into childhood memories of my great-aunt’s home in Red Hill.
That’s perhaps not a surprise because this short novel, which has become a ‘classic’ of Australian literature, was published less than a decade before my birth. The city of the sixties Malouf describes in the later pages is definitely the ‘beautiful one day, perfect the next’ Bjelke-Petersen bog of glass, steel, bitumen and bad paving I remember from my enfance in the eighties and nineties.
It was the same all over. The sprawling weatherboard city we had grown up in was being torn down at last to make way for something grander and more solid. Old pubs like the Treasury, with their wooden verandahs hung with ferns, were unrecognisable now behind glazed brick facades. Whole blocks in the inner city had been excavated to make carparks, and there would eventually be open concrete squares filled with potted palms, where people could sit about in Brisbane’s blazing sun. Even Victoria Bridge was doomed. There were plans for a new bridge fifty yards upstream, and the old blue-grey metal structure was closed to heavy traffic, publicly unsafe. There would eventually be freeways along both banks of the river that would remove forever the sweetish stench of the mangroves that festered there, putting their roots down in the mud….
It is a sobering thing, at just thirty, to have outlived the landmarks of your youth. And to have them go, not in some violent cataclysm, an act of God, or under the fury of bombardment, but in the quiet way of our generation: by council ordinance and by-law; through shady land deals; in the name or order, and progress, and in contempt (or is it small-town embarrassment?) of all that is untidy and shabbily individual. Brisbane was on the way to becoming a minor metropolis. In ten years it would look impressively like everywhere else. The thought must have depressed Johnno even more than it did me. There wasn’t enough of the old Brisbane for him to hate even, let alone destroy.
— David Malouf, Johnno (1998, pp. 206-8)
I have a friend who reminds me of Johnno, but I ought to be careful what I say, for I’m sure that return fire could be made and that several of my friends probably think that I am Johnno—the discontented dilettante spewing spleen about the cultural desert de l’Australie, constitutionally incapable of getting on with life or along with people.
‘Johnno’ is Edward Athol Johnson, but for my readers abroad, he’s Harry Haller or Holden Caulfield; he’s the type of stifled rebel who doesn’t march to the beat of a different drum because he cannot even get in step with himself.
All that differentiates Johnno from those more famous examples is that he’s an Aussie—given to larrikin pranks with a long fuse, and feeling, from the distance of the infernal antipodes, the unreachability of the ‘culture’ he associates with Europe even more profoundly than an American might do.
An utterly characteristic gesture is that, when he departs Brisbane for darkest Africa to have his Heart of Darkness experience in the Congo, at his last meeting with the novel’s sensible, cissy narrator, it is Johnno who gives Dante the going-away present of a volume of Rimbaud.
He fancies himself a voyant whose vision is narrowed, unfairly hobbled by the unspeakable blahness of Brisbane, but even when he gets to Paris, improbably impersonating a Scottish English teacher since the French won’t entrust their sous to someone with an Aussie accent, Johnno finds himself trapped in the same ennui as in Brizzy.
Johnno’s whole life is the abject and undigested lesson that I learnt on my first unhappy day in Paris:—the realization that you port your troubles as a fardeau with you; that putting a fresh landscape before your eyes doesn’t fundamentally change you or your destiny; and that if you are miserable in Brisbane gazing at the Skyneedle, you will be just as miserable in Paris looking balefully at Notre-Dame.
… [U]nless the police were making one of their periodical raids (which they did every time there was a bomb blast or a murder under the trains at Châtelet, [the rue Monsieur-le-Prince] was as quiet and suburban as the Parc Monceau.
I got used to the raids. Like everyone else I would tumble out of bed at the first sound of the armoured car swinging in over the cobbles, and by the time the first hammering came on the door downstairs would be out on the landing with my passport, while Johnno shouted from the landing below: ‘Twice in a week, this is! It’s driving me crazy. You can see now why I wanted to get out.’ But when the uniformed officers arrived with their tommy-guns at the ready he was desperately eager not to give trouble. His student permit had expired several months ago, and if they had wanted to the police might have arrested him on the spot. But they were after terrorists, not petty violators of the civil code. They returned Johnno his papers with yet another warning, turned over the bedclothes while one of them covered him with a tommy-gun and the other went through the motions of a quick frisking, and it was over. Then my turn. And the others further up. Generally after a ‘visitation’ Johnno’s nerves were too shaken to go back to bed, and after three or four minutes of futile argument I would agree to go out with him and walk until dawn. We would stroll along the silver-grey quays where the tramps slept, stop and have coffee at one of the all-night bars, play the pinball machines whose terrible crash and rattle, in those early hours, had a more violent effect on my nerves than any flic with his toylike tommy-gun.
— Malouf (1998, pp. 166-7)
That’s the other thing about Johnno. Although he wants to put a bomb under Brisbane and claims to hate Paris, he’s a coward without the Rimbaudian convictions of the true æsthetic terrorist—which is what the dandy-flâneur essentially is in his explosively, kaleidoscopically light-filled heart of darkness.
Where Johnno boasts to Dante, in Brisbane, of consorting with a spy and assassin who ‘look[s] and act[s] like a bank clerk’, he hasn’t that true saboteurial spirit that Flaubert counselled—that one should be bourgeois in one’s habits so as to be radical in one’s art.
Johnno hasn’t any art, apart from the lie and the prank. His poetry and performance art is acting out a fantasy of rebellion against the very staid existence that he is just as pathologically adjusted to as Dante.
Both have what might be called a ‘free-floating discontent’ that manifests itself in a way that is superficially divergent but is actually, in terms of the deep structure of the novel, regrettably convergent.
It’s one of the weaknesses of Malouf’s book—which comes out in the overdetermined yet dribblingly vague and unresolved third act—that it’s ultimately not clear what moral he intends for us to draw from the mémoire of unlikely comradeship between this odd couple, who do not really contrast with one another, nor undergo any complementary inversion of rôles.
Rather, I think Malouf fumbles intuitively and yet artlessly into some clumsy irresolution about the character of Australian life, its vacancy, its makeshift nature, which is particularly potent in the psychogeographic character of Brisbane itself.
It’s hard to put one’s verbal finger quite on it, but there’s a certain abortive character to Australian life, a kind of unconscious will to failure or a dread of success that manifests in the irresolute half-lives of vacancy that both Johnno and Dante are more or less resigned to—and which mars even the best books of our literature, as it mars this one.
Perhaps more than any city on this continent, Brisbane sunnily manifests this blankness of temperate sameness which inspires Malouf/Dante to say that it is a city so deprived of the light and shade of spleen and the ideal—the blanc et noir possibilities of flânerie—that ‘[i]t would have defeated even Baudelaire!’
I don’t dispute this; I utterly repudiate it.
The whole intellectual history of my life disproves Malouf’s contention: As bitter and sinister an orchid as Baudelaire can spring up in these climes to stalk its streets and milk it of its healing poison.
Johnno may kick senselessly against the pricks of Brisbane and Dante may resist them with quiet desperation, but neither of these characters have that largeness of vision, that structural scope I indicated at the beginning of this article, to see Brisbane in its just proportions and its proper place in the broader context of modernity.
The vision and experience of Paris can fundamentally impress itself upon neither of these characters—eminently Australian in their unformed, ersatz natures—and it cannot fundamentally remold and refine them for the ironic æsthetic appreciation of the local scene en Australie because neither Johnno nor Dante, despite their hungry reading, have even a tentative hypothesis for an æsthetic lifestyle such as the one I formed in my splenetic traipsings through Brisbane and took with me to Paris, intending to prove or disprove my æsthetic theory there.
In fine, neither of these characters are really flâneurs—and yet Johnno is a flâneurial novel, and not just because Johnno and Dante spend most of the book ambling through its pages.
I liked the city in the early morning. The streets would be wet where one of the big, slow, cleaning-machines had been through. In the alleyways between shops florists would be setting out pails of fresh-cut flowers, dahlias and sweet william, or unpacking boxes of gladioli. After Johnno’s sullen rage I felt light and free. It was so fresh, so sparkling, the early morning air before the traffic started up; and the sun when it appeared was immediately warm enough to make you sweat. Between the tall city office blocks Queen Street was empty, its tramlines aglow. Despite Johnno’s assertion that Brisbane was absolutely the ugliest place in the world, I had the feeling as I walked across deserted intersections, past empty parks with their tropical trees all spiked and sharp-edged in the early sunlight, that it might even be beautiful. But that, no doubt, was light-headedness from lack of sleep or a trick of the dawn.
‘What a place!’ Johnno would snarl, exasperated by the dust and packed heat of an afternoon when even the glossy black mynah birds, picking about between the roots of the Moreton Bay figs, were too dispirited to dart out of the way of his boot. ‘This must be the bloody arsehole of the universe!’
— Malouf (1998, pp. 116-7)
Johnno is, for one thing, a great novel of place, which is why I wanted to read it again ‘in situ’ when I was up in Brisbane last month.
What Walker Percy, in his equally flâneurial novel The Moviegoer (1961), called ‘certification’—the ‘making real’ for a reader of a place he already intimately knows—is one of the deepest pleasures of regional literature.
Malouf paints with a looser brush than I generally prefer. It’s one that he handles adroitly when it comes to Brisbane and sloppily when it comes to Paris, which he limns in a curiously dull palette by comparison, and not, I think, by deliberate design, since the whole novel falls very badly away into busy incoherence when the action relocates to the Continent.
But the first two-thirds set in Brisbane are sketched with a colourful impressionism that is, as I said above, ‘aromatic’ of the city’s vibe even today, and Malouf treats a place that both Dante and Johnno regard as irrecuperably ugly as though it had the poetic dignity of Paris.
He certifies the city with les détails justes—with the names of streets and suburbs, with the presence of pubs that are still trading and where yours truly has sat and written, and even set some of his own scenes, drawn from his flâneurial vie in Briz Vegas, in their beery bosoms.
As a flâneurpur sang, the proper names of places, of streets and suburbs, of correct geography that allow for certification, carry an incantatory quality for me, and I sense that, for anyone unfamiliar with Brisbane, Malouf’s petites touches of impressionistic precision would enable a similar kind of ‘certification by proxy’.
Arran Avenue, Hamilton, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the World. That is the address that appears in my schoolbooks. But what does it mean? Where do I really stand?
The house at Arran Avenue is the grim, three-storeyed brick house my father built for us in one of the best suburbs in Brisbane. Arran Avenue is a narrow dead-end street that runs straight into the hillside, with houses piled steeply one above the other on either side and bush beginning where the bitumen peters out into a track. The traffic of Kingsford Smith Drive is less than fifty yards away but cannot be heard. The river, visible from the terrace outside my parents’ bedroom, widens here to a broad stream, low mudflats on one bank, with a colony of pelicans, and on the other steep hills covered with native pine, across which the switchback streets climb between gullies of morning glory and high creeper-covered walls.
— Malouf (1998, pp. 68-9)
The afternoon before I was due to book out of Brizzy, I took a flânerie, first by ferry, then by foot, to see this mythical Arran Avenue in Hamilton, wondering if I could find a house that geographically matched Malouf’s description.
He’s right about everything: Kingsford Smith Drive, which is six lanes of roaring non-stop traffic from Pinkenba to Albion Park, is almost silent as you pass up Crescent Road alongside the high-built old Queenslander on the bluff overlooking the river.
Arran Avenue is in sight of it, a mere 75 metres away. Dante/Malouf’s street is an arcing one-block spur off Crescent Road that shortly ends in the cul de sac of some richard’s driveway.
I didn’t think I would have much luck finding a three-storey, river-facing, brick-veneer house that must be at least seventy years old, but the déco frontage of no. 19—presently up for sale, if you’re interested—fits the bill of Malouf’s description.
You might still see the river from the third-storey balcony over the shoulder of the house facing no. 19 if you stand on tip-toes.
“19 Arran Avenue, Hamilton, late afternoon”, photographed by Dean Kyte.
That is certification, and there is an example of flâneurial writing right there for you, chers lecteurs: If you can draw an accurate bead on an actual location from the author’s description of it, you’re dealing with something in the flâneurial line.
In one of the most significant of its dimensions, flânerie, I have discovered in my rootless, restless wandering of a country I have only grudgingly learned to love, but which I would still blow up tomorrow with all Johnno’s anarchistic antipathy towards it, is a form of embodied poetry.
As I have amply demonstrated in flâneurial films and videos like the one at the head of this post, flânerie is the application of the lens of a poetic vision over prosaic actuality: the flâneur makes the spleen of his prosy existence in Brisbane bearable by finding, through John Grierson’s ‘creative treatment’ of the documentary matériel of his life, the poetry in his banal actuality.
It’s this that Malouf manages to partially do in his novel—viscerally, with respect to Brisbane—and which both of his characters fail utterly to do. Their oppressive apprehension of ennui in Brisbane leads to spleen, but the manifold novelty of Paris does not necessarily lead either Johnno or Dante to find the Baudelairean ideal ‘du nouveau!’ there.
La vie parisienne est féconde en sujets poétiques et merveilleux. Le merveilleux nous enveloppe et nous abreuve comme l’atmosphère ; mais nous ne le voyons pas.
Parisian life is abundant in marvellous and poetic subjects. The marvellous surrounds us and suckles us like the air, but we do not see it.
Likewise, in the sultry, fuggish atmosphere of Brisbane, the milk and honey of poetry may yet be found by a soul that is not ersatz and barely sculpted, as if modelled in wet clay, but rigorously limned and scored, the æsthetic architecture of his life—the code by which he is determined to truly live—vigorously worked out.
Readers, I commence a new year on The Melbourne Flâneur with an important annonce: This year I begin rolling out The Melbourne Edition of my collected works, starting with a new volume of translations of the poetry and prose poetry of Charles Baudelaire which I intend to serve as the complement and counterpoint to my own work in The Spleen of Melbourne project.
A preview of Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms and Parisian Spleen, by Charles Baudelaire, translated and edited by Dean Kyte.
This new book, whose layout and design I finalized last month in Brisbane, is scheduled for release at the end of June. It features one-fifth of the total number of poems featured in the three editions of Les Fleurs du mal which Baudelaire (and then his mother) saw through the press, and one-quarter of the prose poems from Le Spleen de Paris.
At the time of writing, I have translated 89 per cent of the poetic and prose-poetic content I intend to include as a representative selection of Baudelaire’s æsthetic philosophy of flânerie.
And as a bonus that bridges his poetic and prosaic œuvres, I have decided to do a brand new translation of the only work of fiction that Charles Baudelaire is known to have written, “La Fanfarlo”. As one of the last tasks remaining before I bring this book to print, I will commence drafting that translation this month.
With a substantial critical monograph on Baudelaire and full-colour illustrations, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments is going to be a very handsome volume in both its hard- and softcover formats and a valuable introduction to the work of the first philosopher of flânerie.
To register your interest in purchasing one of the first copies in June, I invite you to avail yourself of the contact form below and join the mailing list as I send out monthly updates to my readers.
Dean Kyte presents a literary crime ficción in thestyle he has developed based on the Nouveau Roman.
—I just think—… Miriam abruptly swallowed her whispered words.
Al’s lips pressed more tightly together as he watched the needle indicating the floors sweep down. If only Miriam were…—somewhere else.
Roberts staggered past them and swayed uncertainly in the lobby. Verna was now very far away from him.
To Verna, he thought.
—Dean Kyte, “Crisscross”
Today’s video on The Melbourne Flâneur, “Crisscross”, represents an experimental departure for me, as I fling myself into new flâneurial territory of æsthetic investigation. I return to my pseudo-Cornellian, Conneresque roots, where the only ‘making’ of the film I can claim, in this instance, lies in the editorial realm of pure montage.
Three shots of second-unit stock footage mounted and hence tenuously related to each other, and an elliptical narrative in the nouvelle démeublée noire style which that short sequence seemed to suggest to me in a flash of inspiration;—C’est “Crisscross”.
I don’t know anything more about what’s going on in the conte than what the artifactual text (understood as the totality of image, sound and word) suggests, and this is the ambiguous, mysterious essence of the style of ‘literary crime fiction’ I call the nouvelle démeublée noire, based on the theoretical principles of the French Nouveau Roman articulated by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Dans les constructions romanesques futures, gestes et objets seront là avant d’être quelque chose ; et ils seront là après, durs, inaltérables, présents pour toujours et comme se moquant de leur propre sens….
In future novelistic constructions, gestures and things will be there before they are something; and they will continue to be there afterwards, hard, immutable, ever-present and as if mocking their own meaning….
—Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Une voie pour le roman futur”, in Pour un nouveau roman (1963, p. 20 [my translation])
Chers lecteurs with long memories may recall that I have already addressed the subject of Instantanés in a previous post on The Melbourne Flâneur—“The cinematic writing of Alain Robbe-Grillet”, published en pleine pandémie back in January 2021.
That post is one of the ten most popular in the lifetime history of this vlog. Its ongoing popularity, racking up exponentially more page views every month, testifies to the interest I have succeeded in arousing—especially among nos amis aux États-Unis—with my modest crusade to rehabilitate the reputation of a once influential, now unfashionable, French novelist and filmmaker.
When I first wangled a French copy of Instantanés off Amazon as one of my reads during the pandemic, The Spleen of Melbourne project was not only starting to crystallize under the imaginative constraints and pressures of lockdown, but it began to kick tentatively into a new phase.
In fine, at that time, diverging from the main channel of the prose poetry I was then writing about Melbourne’s Parisian underbelly under the influence of Baudelaire, a specifically fictional—as opposed to prose-poetic—sub-project began to emerge as an offshoot of The Spleen of Melbourne.
Elements latent in the prose poems I had written up to that time began to take on a new clarity and definition and began to demand a more analytic rather than lyric treatment.
I went straight to Robbe-Grillet and the short stories of Instantanés as sources of advice and inspiration on how I should practically proceed in treating these short pieces which I instinctively knew would owe a debt to the theoretic principles of the Nouveau Roman.
Robbe-Grillet’s world is neither meaningful nor absurd; it merely exists. Omnipresent is the object—hard, polished, with only the measurable characteristics of pounds, inches, and wavelengths of reflected light. It overshadows and eliminates plot or character. …
If Robbe-Grillet’s fiction, with its timetables, careful inventories of things, and reports on arrivals and departures, owes anything to the traditional novel, it is to the detective story.
And hence, what I variously call ‘the Jamesian/Robbe-Grilletian style’, the ‘literary crime fiction’, and the ‘nouvelle démeublée noire’ was born as a sub-project of The Spleen of Melbourne.
More than four years on from those stuttering experiments ‘pour une nouvelle nouvelle’ (to coin a particularly unidiomatic Gallicism), it seems a good time to reinvestigate the six nouvelles Robbe-Grillet collects under the head of Instantanés.
This concise book is a pivotal work in quite a literal sense:—like a hinge, Robbe-Grillet’s whole career turns upon it.
Instantanés recapitulates in miniature the chosiste style and technique of the 1950s novels I have analyzed in my previous articles in this series and which form the basis of what I call—(with a reverential nod toward fellow Anglophonic Francophile Willa Cather)—the nouvelle démeublée or ‘unfurnished short story’, since the idea of a ‘Nouvelle Nouvelle’, or ‘New Short Story’ written in the style of the Robbe-Grilletian Nouveau Roman, doesn’t make a great deal of sense in French.
Moreover, in the final short story of Instantanés, written significantly after the other works in the volume, at a time in the early sixties when Robbe-Grillet’s public and critical reputation as a writer and filmmaker is at its absolute peak, he gives a tantalizing—and not altogether palatable—preview of his direction of æsthetic travel from this point forward to the end of his career.
In the last novel we examined, Dans le labyrinthe (1959), Robbe-Grillet had begun to diverge appreciably from the quasi-noirish, chosiste style of his first three novels. The first five stories of Instantanés—“Trois visions réfléchies” (“Three Reflected Visions” in Bruce Morrissette’s translation), “Le Chemin du retour” (“The Way Back”), “Scène” (“Scene”), “La Plage” (“The Shore”), and “Dans les couloirs du Métropolitain” (“In the Corridors of the Métro”)—date from the years between the publication of Les Gommes (1953) and Dans le labyrinthe, and display the cold, hard, objectival style that initially brought Robbe-Grillet to the attention of the French reading public as a savantic freak of literature specializing in an inhuman kind of novel.
But in those same years, through a succession of literary prizes and laudatory appraisals from perspicacious early critics like Roland Barthes, Robbe-Grillet had succeeded in finessing himself from the margins of French literature to become the absolutely central and dominating figure by the end of the decade as the veritable ‘chef d’école’ du Nouveau Roman.
At this point, at the end of the fifties, Robbe-Grillet’s public and critical reputation catalyzed into an international fame that transcended the Francophonic world. With American interpreters and translators like Bruce Morrissette and Richard Howard as his champions, he conquered the States and thus the English-speaking world.
Yet, at the height of his international fame as a quintessentially French, high-brow novelist of a new type, in the next few years, Robbe-Grillet’s schedule of literary production declined, and instead of releasing a new, critically anticipated novel in the expected year of 1961, he went the conventional route of the commercially successful novelist and became a screenwriter.
It is in that year that Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad, based on a script by Robbe-Grillet, was released, and Marienbad became a global cause célèbre—‘le dernier cri’ in the phenomenon of the inscrutable European art film.
It was on the back of Marienbad that Instantanés was released, and if we see in the film not merely a lossless translation to cinematic form of Robbe-Grillet’s literary principles of chosisme as demonstrated in the short stories of the fifties, we can also see the generative influence of Marienbad reflected darkly, thematically forward in the last fiction of Instantanés, “La Chambre secrète” (“The Secret Room”), linking Robbe-Grillet’s new line of æsthetic experimentation, as commenced with Dans le labyrinthe, to the style of his films and novels in the 1960s.
As The Spleen of Melbourne project has advanced and developed simultaneously on two fronts which I regard as distinct—prose poetry and short fiction—Instantanés has remained as seminal a text for me with respect to the latter as Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (1868) is with respect to the former.
And as I now begin to rehearse the ‘scripts’—the cold, hard, objectival nouvelles démeublées of the forthcoming Melbourne Flâneur podcast written in a French-inflected, English version of the chosiste style of Instantanés—for audiences as part of my market testing for the podcast, I am surprised to hear how that bitterly analytic and inhumane fictive style sounds for my listeners like my lyrical, multilingual prose poetry!
It was not long after I released The Spleen of Melbourne CD in 2021 that I began to seriously interrogate myself as to whether Robbe-Grillet’s short stories in Instantanés, with their maniacal descriptive exactitude, could in fact be considered ‘petits poèmes en prose’.
Une idée folle, parbleu!
Description, deprecated by fiction as merely a utilitarian means of setting the scene for human drama, is elevated to a significant tool and strategy for forestalling and preventing the emergence of narrative in the prose poem.
As many listeners of my audio tracks note, as in Robbe-Grillet’s short stories, description plays such a salient rôle in my prose poetry that it overwhelms the human element, forcing what might become ‘characters’ in a story into the background, as mere figures in a landscape, pregnant with its own drama operating on longer, inhuman timelines, and thus unobservable by the anthropocentric eye.
While Robbe-Grillet might not have been personally hostile to poetry, he is hostile to the pathetic fallacy of poetry’s necessarily anthropocentric view of the objective world of things in his prose.
Narrative is the fallaciously selective structure that human subjects impose as a Foucauldian ‘grille’ over an objective world whose mathematical variety is beyond the regulation of our senses and cognition by incalculable orders of magnitude.
To put it unkindly (and I don’t think Robbe-Grillet would disagree too profoundly with me in this dismissive analysis), the mechanistic structure of faulty logic we call ‘narrative’ is a despicable form of ‘magical thinking’ whose evolutionary utility to human beings as a sensemaking heuristic has been over since at least the end of the Second World War.
In the nouvelles of Instantanés, Robbe-Grillet, by his maniacal technique of emphasizing static description and deprecating human agency, manages to forestall and prevent the emergence of narrative—of anthropocentrically observable cause and effect—more successfully than he is able to do so in his novels.
This is because the nouvelles of Instantanés share with prose poetry the fundamental criterion identified by the scholar Suzanne Bernard in her seminal—and monumental—work on the subject, Le poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (1959)—which is to say, these short stories are exceedingly brief.
Bernard identified the criterion of brevity as one of the few discernible essentials in this hybrid, interstitial genre of literature emerging from the French prosodic tradition in the nineteenth century.
Pedro Baños Gallego of the University of Murcia tested Bernard’s criterion by assessing the work of four nineteenth-century prose poets following Baudelaire’s trailblazing example and found that of all the criteria for the form suggested by various critics and scholars, brevity was in fact the most reliable trait for identifying a potentially poetic text written in prose.
Voici quatre auteurs qui représentent quatre manières assez dissemblables d’envisager la création du poème en prose. En laissant de côté leurs différences quant aux choix de thèmes, lexique, syntaxe ou distribution des paragraphes, nous observons qu’ils vont tous converger dans la recherche d’une certaine longueur dont les limites ne sont pas trop floues. Après la lecture des quatre recueils, il nous semble que la frontière établie entre les trois – quatre pages reste toujours présente pour eux. Même si c’était l’époque de l’éclatement du genre et de l’expérimentation technique, où le corpus des œuvres s’adhérant à l’étiquette « poème en prose » faisait preuve d’une hétérogénéité notoire, voici la constatation empirique de l’existence d’une conscience collective concernant, du moins, la longueur des textes.
Here are four authors who represent four quite different ways of considering the creation of a poem in prose. Leaving aside their differences concerning the choice of themes, vocabulary, syntax or paragraphing, we observe that all converge in their search for a certain length whose limits are not too vague. After reading the four collections, it seems to us that an established limit of between three and four pages remains a constant for these authors. Even if the late nineteenth century was the period in which the form—and technical experimentation with it—burst upon the scene, where the body of works adhering to the designation ‘prose poem’ displayed a notable heterogeneity, here a collective consciousness concerning, at least, the length of texts is empirically observed.
Three to four pages is the rough equivalent of 1,000 words, and thus, the threshold at which the static image of the prose poem undergoes a phase shift and the dynamism of narrative begins to enter the equation is round about the point where the prose text is accepted to be a ‘short story’—more specifically, what is nowadays termed ‘flash fiction’.
Except for the three quasi-independent vignettes which comprise both “Trois visions réfléchies” and “Dans les couloirs du Métropolitain”, the six short stories of Instantanés exceed this thousand-word threshold, but not by very much, with no work in the collection attaining even 2,500 words.
Thus, Robbe-Grillet largely manages to maintain the poetic ‘tension’ that scholar Yves Vadé saw as a peculiar property of the prosodic prose text, a tension of ‘stasis as image’ that fundamentally countervails against narrative’s prosaic drive towards dynamism, resisting its urge towards action, and thus the perception of human drama in the environment.
When we look at Marienbad, one of the first things we are struck by is Robbe-Grillet’s obsession with static tableaux, the mannequin-like poses of the actors, a signifying structure that appears prominently in no less than three of the short stories in Instantanés—“Le mannequin”, the first of the vignettes in “Trois visions réfléchies”; “L’escalier mécanique” and “La portillon automatique”, two of the vignettes in “Dans les couloirs du Métropolitain”; and “La Chambre secrète”.
According to Baños Gallego and Yves Vadé, ‘ekphrasis’, the detailed description of a work of visual art, was once a standard device in poetry, and as the ancient lyric poet Simonides of Ceos observed: ‘Poetry is a painting that speaks; painting, a silent poem.’
Since Baudelaire’s time, the relationship of prose poetry to photography has been remarked on by critics, and as a specifically modern, urban, poetic form, the poem in prose grew apace with the French—and specifically Parisian—revolution in photography during the nineteenth century.
Just as Baños Gallego finds a firm limit to the extent of the poem in prose, it seems more than structurally coincidental to me that the ‘flash fiction’ of Instantanés should take the ekphrastic concetto of the prosaic ‘snapshot’ as their literary analogue: The operative conceit of the ‘cliché’—(in both its French and English senses)—aligns Robbe-Grillet’s cinematic/literary project in this collection with the poetic tradition of ‘word-painting’ that Baudelaire’s direct and acknowledged influence, Aloysius Bertrand, invokes in the subtitle to his seminal collection of urban prose poems, Gaspard de la Nuit (1842).
Indeed, “La Chambre secrète” is entirely a deceptive exercise in pseudo-cinematic ekphrasis, and I would go so far as to say that “Scène”, with its theatrical aping of both painting and film, could also be considered an exercise in same.
Robbe-Grillet differs, however, from the poet in prose in that the function of description in the very elevated rôle he gives it in his fictions is essentially constructive: ‘Je ne décris pas, je construis’—‘I do not describe,’ he says, ‘I build.’
Here is explicit, definitive negation—by the author himself, no less—of Robbe-Grillet as a potential poet in prose: If description is a key tool and technique in prose poetry, Robbe-Grillet’s denial that he describes but rather ‘builds up’ a painterly image, as he does explicitly in “La Chambre secrète”, purely out of the material of words divorced from their referents, is a significant repudiation.
In this final nouvelle of the collection, written (one imagines) explicitly for the volume, Robbe-Grillet starts down a pathway that is appreciably different from the æsthetic parcours of the fifties charted by the first five stories and developmentally intercalated with the novels we have already investigated.
Where chosisme was Robbe-Grillet’s initial approach to a potential ‘New Novel’ and ‘New Short Story’, an explicit attention paid to the physical properties of objects and structures in the world without regard to their significance to human beings, in “La Chambre secrète” Robbe-Grillet develops a technique that is ancillary to the chosiste approach in Le Voyeur (1955), more significantly developed as a major branching from that path in Dans le labyrinthe, and, I suspect, was concretized by the kinetic affordances of cinema during his collaboration with Resnais on Marienbad.
Thus, rather than fictions that seek to forestall or prevent the emergence of a human-centred narrative by focusing as hard as possible on the world of things, in “La Chambre secrète”, we assist at a miniaturized, altogether more satisfying repetition of the experiment Robbe-Grillet undertakes in Dans le labyrinthe, watching as the text appears almost to ‘generate itself’.
Language and a certain poetic concatenation of ideas (which the poem in prose is perfectly poised to navigate and negotiate in its interstitial relation to both forms) work quasi-autonomously in this final nouvelle to generate a phantasy implied in Le Voyeur and Marienbad but now made explicit for the first time in Robbe-Grillet’s œuvre.
As Ronald L. Bogue makes clear in his article “A Generative Phantasy: Robbe-Grillet’s ‘La Chambre secrète’” (1981), a run of complex puns in the French serves, like a stream of consciousness, to progressively displace ideas produced in the ekphrastic description of images along tangential lines that ‘build up’ a unitary image in the most literal sense.
Bogue proposes the intriguing possibility of a coherent interrelationship between all the disparate texts in Instantanés written by Robbe-Grillet over an eight-year period, culminating in the tableau of “La Chambre secrète”.
I think this is unlikely, but as Roy J. Caldwell, Jr. argues in “Ludic Narrative in ‘La Chambre secrète’” (1993), in this final story, the operative conceit of the snapshot that Robbe-Grillet has employed to unify the disparate texts of the volume now becomes his modus ludens with the reader.
Doubtless inspired by his recent collaboration with Resnais and his own foray into filmmaking, whereas, in the preceding nouvelles, Robbe-Grillet has presented each story as reducible to a singular image (or triptych of such images), in the final and most ambitious story, the work is ‘composed’ of a montage of snapshots: It’s almost as if the earlier stories train us in how to read the last one as Robbe-Grillet prepares to go in a new direction in the sixties, abandoning chosisme for the auto-generative sado-erotic phantasies he dishonestly imputes to the novelistic and cinematic texts themselves.
L’écriture de Robbe-Grillet est sans alibi, sans épaisseur et sans profondeur : elle reste à la surface de l’objet et la parcourt également, sans privilégier telle ou telle de ses qualités : c’est donc le contraire même d’une écriture poétique.
Robbe-Grillet’s writing is without defence, lacking thickness and depth: it remains on the object’s surface and scans it evenly, without privileging any of its qualities. It is therefore the very opposite of poetic writing.
—Roland Barthes, “Littérature objective”, in Essais critiques (1964, p. 30 [my tranlsation])
I think this is undeniably true, and when I take the authoritative negation of Barthes along with denials made by the author himself, I have to rationally accept that Alain Robbe-Grillet is definitely not a poet in prose.
Yet, when it comes to the nouvelles of Instantanés which have been such fruitful sources of investigation in my own æsthetic parcours during the last four years, still I cannot shake the irrational feeling that, despite their coldness, their objectivity, their inhumanity, these short stories are so close to prose poetry as to be virtually indistinguishable from it.
Too many of the six pieces—“La mauvaise direction”, “Le Chemin du retour”, “La Plage”, and even “La Chambre secrète”—as much as they are ‘contes’ in the strict sense, take place in such abstract spaces (‘space’ as understood here as including the temporal dimension) that, as examinations of pre-existing structures in the environment that signify, they exist more in the kind of platonic, ideal world of the Rimbaudian illumination, the Kafkaesque fable—the various fragmentary territories taken in by the prose poem.
And even in those works which I have translated to refine my understanding of Robbe-Grillet’s style as I develop a French-inflected, English equivalent for the nouvelles démeublées of The Melbourne Flâneur, the purely mechanical structures of the Parisian Métro Robbe-Grillet describes—and which I recognize from my own experience of them—seem surreally, marvellously transformed by the flâneurial regard playing over escalator, tiled corridor, and possibly malfunctioning automatic gate.
As a sub-project of The Spleen of Melbourne, the chosiste pieces of The Melbourne Flâneur are moving ahead: In addition to writing new episodes, I am now designing soundscapes for the nouvelles démeublées, cobbled together from the more than 400 documentary recordings I have taken all over Melbourne during the past four years.
And as I begin to share the finished short stories in live readings, testing the market for a documentary on contemporary Melbourne life written in the objectival style of the Nouveau Roman, I am gratified to hear that there is curiosity, interest, and even a little excitement about this project—including a small knot of interest emanating from locations in Canada and the U.S.
I am still some distance from being in a place where I feel comfortable to begin releasing episodes on a regular basis, but if you are among those interested in speeding me along, the best way you can show your support is by purchasing the audio track below.
You can name your own price at the checkout and you can also opt in to become a fan of your Melbourne Flâneur on Bandcamp, where I will begin releasing episodes in due course.
The Melbourne Flâneur returns to Bellingen, NSW, and, in this lyrical prose poem enhanced with Super 8 film footage, ponders a flâneurial figure in the landscape even more conspicuous than himself—‘the Mem Hall’.
When God decides my days are done, perhaps then He’ll allow me to settle in Bellingen. Perhaps then He’ll permit me to be as permanent as that pile, the hall in Hyde Street whose peachcoloured walls, for a hundred years, have overlooked it all—even my errances and romances.
At times my eyes gloss the Memorial Hall with the memorious glaze des jours perdus, and the faded veneer of flâneurial souvenirs recover their lost colours.
For we have both been secret historians of this place, observant actors in the life of Hyde Street. His soldierly, literary footprint is sole and secular and unerasable while mine have been many, mobile and cancellable.
A holy light dawns about his walls and whole falls of buried memory cascade out of obscurity for me.
I hear an aura lingering in Maam Gaduying, scene of solitary sittings in wintry dusks, of escalations of les dames, things I’ve written about or hidden histories I am yet to write, but which the Mem Hall, whole library of unfiled memories, has watched, his façade regarding me as I act out my hours of drama in the Meeting Place Park.
The pillared bras of his façade have embraced it all; the corniced brows of his windowed yeux have watched me curiously through the years. I’ve read my Parisian poèmes on his scène, and opposite, au parc, I’ve acted out my Parisian vie de flâneur in Bello’s narrow boulevard de Hyde Street. For there is une autre espèce de flâneur—rooted, loitering—and the Mem Hall, in his commanding prospect de la rue, epitomizes him.
Perhaps one day mes os, in Bello, will be as permanent as the Mem Hall’s walls.
— Dean Kyte, “The Memorial Hall”
When duty called me up to the North Coast for two weeks in February, it had been twenty months since I had last seen Bellingen and a lot had happened during that time—very little of it unambiguously positive.
I dare say that the lifestyle of flânerie, seeking to fly by the nets of society at every turn, made the pandemic a more uniquely painful event for someone like myself who is both a Melburnian by election and a flâneur by inevitability.
And while I seemed, despite my lifestyle of country-wide travel, to come through the pandemic without either the CV or the vaccine ever touching me, the years 2020 through 2022 seem to run together for me in a lasting mental fog, leaving a scar on my life from which I’m still recovering.
Hence Bellingen in June of 2022, at the time when the images above were shot on Super 8 and digital video, seemed a very distant place when I saw the Memorial Hall for the first time in its new blue-and-cream livery in February.
Now I am coming rapidly—sadly—to the end of two months spent at Urunga, the town next door to Bello, which has allowed me to get across on a few occasions to the little town which ranks easily for me with Paris and Melbourne as a world capital of flânerie.
There was one Sunday in June 2022, just before I was due to depart Bellingen, when I spent a cartridge of Kodak Vision3 50D Super 8 film on two visions typical of the years I lived in Bello, including the Memorial Hall—affectionately known by the locals as ‘the Mem Hall’.
I had mentally budgeted out the three-and-a-half minutes of film available on the cartridge and knew exactly what shots I wanted from the two locations. And as is my usual practice when working with Super 8, I took back-up shots from the same set-ups using my trusty Olympus Stylus digital camera and recording location sound with my TASCAM digital sound recorder.
The only issue with the Mem Hall location, shot from the corner of Maam Gaduying, the ‘Meeting Place Park’ in front of the Bellingen Library, is that, at the time of my holiday in June 2022, temporary fencing garnished with a dirty great banner advertising Coffs Harbour Demolitions was set up before the doors of the Mem Hall.
Were they going to pull down our beloved, historic Mem Hall?
Fortunately not.
It was about to undergo renovation—including a new paint job—and although I had to grumpily contend with the banner and fencing prophesying the Mem Hall’s imminent demolition while I was filming it, when, in February, I saw the most iconically ‘Bellingen’ piece of architecture in Hyde Street for the first time in twenty months, now cream and blue instead of the surreal shades of rosy peach and apricot I had always known it as, I was glad that I had had an opportunity, on my last trip, to shoot it on Super 8 as I remembered it and had always experienced it—banner, fencing, and all.
This is not to cast shade on the new façade: I was blown away by the cream and blue. It gives the Mem Hall a more ‘Mediterranean’—rather than tropical—feel, and I actually prefer the new colour scheme.
But on Super 8, cream and blue would certainly not have come out as spectacularly as that peachy orange directly taking the rays of a Sunday afternoon in winter, reminding me, under the hybrid digital treatment I give those shots in the video above, of afternoons I spent sunning myself—gelidly, it seemed—in the Meeting Place Park.
For all the pseudo-Moorish intimations of the Mediterranean the new paint job gives it, whether in cream and blue or a rosy peach and apricot, the most iconically ‘Bellingen’ building in Hyde Street still manages to be marvellously surreal.
We can see the resulting building, a weird exercise in inclusiveness, and an attempt to reconcile irreconcilable functions: a library, a cinema, a dance hall, a theatre, an auditorium, a kitchen, a tea room, toilets, a war memorial and whatever other use you can make of it. Perhaps, in an exaggerated way, it reminds us that all buildings are like this. But at various meetings or in preparation for them people must have sketched designs that included space for the Literary Institute and library, absorbed the functions of the old School of Arts, made ‘provision of exclusive rooms for the use of returned soldiers’, tried to placate the view that ‘there was no form of sacrifice whatever about a hall and picture show as a memorial’. And in these drawings they would have accommodated or got rid of existing makeshift structures like the picture theatre and the dance floor. Rather than the result of a collaborative process consummated by a set of architectural drawings, it seems like the Hall designed and built itself in a self-steering process that went on over the heads of the individuals involved, like a demented version of Adam Smith’s guiding hand.
The prose-poetic commentary to the video above falls into that category of my œuvre I am now consciously styling as ‘flâneries’—literary peregrinations through sensibility, variously poetic, essayistic or fictional, which arise from my wider wanderings through this country, outside the Melbourne which forms the geographic basis for the prose poetry in The Spleen of Melbourne.
And though it probably sounds like a scoffable claim to mention the name of Bellingen (a town which, even in this country, few people have heard of) alongside such world-class centres of flânerie as Paris and Melbourne, I mean the claim quite seriously.
As much as Paris and Melbourne, Bellingen stands at the absolute centre of my literary life, and I would not be the writer and filmmaker I am today but for thirty months I lived there between 2014 and 2016.
While certain ‘regional writers’ become poetic spokesmen for a place, unofficial laureates of certain cities, communicating the genius loci to readers further afield, I am hard pressed to think of another writer for whom the specificity of place and time is as salient as it is to my work, and yet who has as wide an experience of geographically specific places and times.
Thus, while there was a ‘Gold Coast period’ of my literary life, and there has been ‘Parisian’ and ‘Melburnian’ phases, there has also been the ‘Bellingenian period’, and my years in Bellingen stand in respect to the Melburnian period as my years on the Gold Coast stand with respect to Paris.
Which is to say that Bellingen did not quite ‘complete’ me as a flâneurial writer and filmmaker, but that it is the place, like Paris, where I had the first opportunity to practically implement the evolving principles of my æsthetic lifestyle philosophy of flânerie—the praxis of a theory I had developed to a certain point of refinement in other landscapes, at other times of my literary life.
In the flâneurial video essay “On having left, but not yet having arrived”—also partly shot on Super 8—I say that Bellingen was ‘the scene of my longestlasting happiness’: splenetic, ennuyé, utterly Baudelairean soul that I am, never was I more consistently happy in my life than during the years I lived in Bellingen.
Only Paris approached it for the number of ‘jours parfaits’ I spent there.
Hence they are, though hemispheres apart, elliptically linked on the prime meridian of flânerie: these are the epicentres of a new and fruitful æsthetic life.
When I left Paris, I wept for weeks like a man who had lost the love of his life—and indeed I had, having seen—in the arms of a Parisienne—a vision of holy wholeness in my dying hours there which I have committed the rest of my life to prophesying and proselytizing.
When I left Bellingen for Melbourne, it was on account of a woman I could no longer bear to see in the Meeting Place Park, or at the IGA, in company of another man, and although I went forward with excitement to the next scene of my literary life, I carried as much buried mourning for the woman—and for Bello—as I had done for Paris and the Parisienne.
There are two paradoxical modes of Parisian flânerie, the wandering walk and the lingering loiter, both of which allow observation of the life of the street.
And as I say in the video above, if, in my years of living in Bellingen, I made a Parisian boulevard of Hyde Street in my dandiacal circuit up and down it, the Mem Hall, in its vantage-point overlooking a particularly animated corner of Bello’s main street, represented, in its outrageous livery of peach and apricot, the other pole of flânerie, observing the spectacle of the passers-by rather than being itself an active, ambulatory participant in that spectacular parade.
Equally, the Mem Hall observed me, many times a day, swanning past its portals in both directions. It had the privilege of observing me doing so at all hours of the day and night in those years, and not infrequently, in those endless hours of happiness, in the midst of some flâneurial experience—often with a woman—that would afterwards find its permanent record in my writing.
It was past the Mem Hall, for instance, that I marched the beautiful, enigmatic Emma in Follow Me, My Lovely… (2016), and it was within sight of the Mem Hall, at the corner of Bridge Street, that I first attempted to ‘mash a pash out of her’.
We set out, manoamano, shouldertoshoulder in the cold, clear air of 3:30 a.m. I built a little light rapport with her by laying out the thumbnail version of how I came to be in Bello, but I was tired of unwinding that yarn and didn’t do it as well as I might have. At the corner of Ford Street, we turned right onto the main drag and walked along the brickpaved sidewalk fronting the park.
…
In retrospect, it seems to me that there had been enough time in the space of that short block to build sufficient rapport with Emma in order for her to feel comfortable with me, yet I couldn’t say just when I had first become aware that I would have to make my move. I think I only became conscious that the moment of truth was fast approaching and I would have to physically turn her steps towards the river when we passed the Mem Hall.
In Follow Me, My Lovely… the Mem Hall plays a cameo rôle, having been, before the action of the story begins, the place where I first espied Emma at the Barefoot Boogie, a dance party that used to take place there on the night of the full moon during the years when I lived in Bello.
And in another reminiscence of my years in Bello, a longer work, as yet unfinished, called “Sentimental Journey”, the Mem Hall plays a more salient part. It’s the place where my tale begins, when, in the hours before I am due to get on an overnight train to Brisbane, I see Polanski’s La Vénus à la fourrure (2013) there, an event which, by obscure tangents among the degrees of separation in my rather extensive social network in Bellingen, leads me unexpectedly into the arms of another woman.
She plunged her arm into mine and we rounded the corner into Hyde Street….
While she jawed, I cast a cautious slant around as we stepped off the kerb in front of the post office: beside us, Bridge Street was an empty corridor of darkness illuminated by a solitary streetlamp at the other end of Lavenders Bridge. Across Hyde Street, a lonely brother to it loafing in front of the Mem Hall craned its neck over the main drag, the rose façade lit a livid orange by its yellow glare.
If anywhere in the world was a more romantic playground for seduction than Bello at night, I hadn’t yet experienced it.
We forded Bridge Street and regained the kerb—the kerb where I had tried to mash a pash out of Emma and had told her to come back to my place. We passed it, walking through those ghosts, and changed tracks, shunting onto the spur of footpath leading into the Meeting Place Park. A trio of lamps, spaced out in a loping curve, followed the line of the wide brick path sweeping round to the library and council buildings. Their ramrodstraight figures picked out among the trunks of the eucalypts, almost as straight, on the green sward made the park seem vaguely like an image by Brassaï, reminding me of Paris.
At a lonely hour in the early evening, I sometimes liked to sit here alone, watching the traffic roil around the intersection as I huddled against the cold on the pew in front of the historical museum. I scoped it out now as a potentially discreet venue for escalation: a lampadaire planted in the Lunchbox Garden in front of the council offices cast an oblique, chiaroscuro glare on that corner. It wasn’t mood lighting, but it did raise some harsh shadows, and if we huddled at one end of the pew, we should be reasonably protected from view of the street by the corner of the red telephone box and the extension of the Neighbourhood Centre.
— Dean Kyte, “Sentimental Journey”
As I say in the video essay above, both of us, the Mem Hall and myself, have been secret historians of Bellingen, memorious flâneurial observers of otherwise unremarked moments in the life of Hyde Street. The Mem Hall has watched me conducting my vie de flâneur just as I have watched the colourful characters in Bello’s streets.
And I think it is no geographic accident of synchronicity that the Mem Hall, the original ‘literary institute’ of Bellingen, faces the present town library, for as I intimate in the video essay, the building seems to me a vast cabinet of unfiled memories, leaves of time—so sheer as to be invisible—of all it has witnessed in its century of life, the secret history of the town which no one yet has had the soul and vision, the heart and spirit of service to properly write.
As I said in a previous article on Bellingen, a few well-known men of letters have, for a season of their lives, made a home for themselves in Bello, and by far the most famous of these writers is Peter Carey.
Carey, who lived here in the eighties as a tree-changing refugee from Sydney, sets Oscar and Lucinda (1988) in the vicinity of the Gleniffer Hall, but Carey’s historical novel lies well beyond what Henry James calls ‘the visitable past’—the rememberable history of one’s own lifetime and experience.
As the young James, flush from his first adult experience of the Roman relics, wrote his sister Alice, unless one’s mind is veritably sagging beneath the weight of material facts about the subject, historical fiction, for a novelist, is the least worthwhile pursuit: ‘The present and the immediate future seem to me the best province of fiction—the latter especially—the future to which all our actual modern tendencies and leanings seem to build a sort of material pathway.’
As far I know, the high-flying Carey has written nothing to commemorate ‘the modern tendencies and leanings’ of his time in Bellingen, one of the most artistically fruitful places on earth, the very Mecca, in my view, of a global ‘Vita Nuova’ towards which Bellingen, in its present and by its example, builds a material pathway.
I take it as a point of pride that, as the least well-known among the men the letters who have made a temporary life for himself in the landscape of this ‘Promised Land’, I have been the most committed to memorializing the visitable past of my experience in these climes.
And as an unofficial historian of the unnoticed hours of Bellingen life, I see a co-conspirator to my project in the architectural figure of the Mem Hall itself, who reminds me of the eponymous character in Jorge Luis Borges’ ficción“Funes, el memorioso” (1942).
Nosotros, de un vistazo, percibimos tres copas en una mesa; Funes, todos los vástagos y racimos y frutos que comprende una parra. Sabía las formas de las nubes australes del amanecer del 30 de abril de 1882 y podía compararlas en el recuerdo con las vetas de un libro en pasta española que sólo había mirado una vez y con las líneas de la espuma que un remo levantó en el Río Negro la víspera de la acción del Quebracho. Esos recuerdos no eran simples; cada imagen visual estaba ligada a sensaciones musculares, térmicas, etcétera. Podía reconstruir todos los sueños, todos los entre sueños.
Dos o tres veces había reconstruido un día entero; no había dudado nunca, pero cada reconstrucción había requerido un día entero. Me dijo: ‘Más recuerdos tengo yo solo que los que habrán tenido todos los hombres desde que el mundo es mundo’. Y también: ‘Mis sueños son como la vigilia de ustedes’. Y también, hacia el alba: ‘Mi memoria, señor, es como vaciadero de basuras’. Una circunferencia en un pizarrón, un triángulo rectángulo, un rombo, son formas que podemos intuir plenamente; lo mismo le pasaba a Ireneo con las aborrascadas crines de un potro, con una punta de ganado en una cuchilla, con el fuego cambiante y con la innumerable ceniza, con las muchas caras de un muerto en un largo velorio. No sé cuántas estrellas veía en el cielo.
At a glance, we notice three glasses on a table; Funes, all the stems and branches and fruits that make up a vine. He knew the shapes of the southern clouds at dawn on 30 April 1882 and could compare them in his memory with the grain of a book bound in Spanish leather he saw only once, and with the lines of foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. These were not simple memories: every visual image was linked to sensations—muscular, thermal, and so on. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his dreams within dreams.
Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day. He had never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day. He told me: ‘On my own I have more memories than all the men since the beginning of the world have had.’ And also: ‘My dreams are like the insomnia you fellows have.’ And also this, towards dawn: ‘My memory, sir, is like a garbage dump.’ A circle on a blackboard, a right-angled triangle, a rhombus; these are shapes that we can fully visualize. To Ireneo, the same thing happened with a colt’s wild mane, with the very tip of a knife, with the protean flames and innumerable ashes, with the many faces round a dead man at a large wake. I don’t know how many stars he saw in the sky.
Like Ireneo Funes, the Memorial Hall, to me, is infinitely memorious of Bellingen. It has seen—in the most exquisite detail—everything that has passed before it in its century of life.
It is truly a book of days.
And although, in its infinite discretion, it does not speak of what it has seen as I have privately journaled it, the Mem Hall remembers everything that has passed before or within it—including my presence on its stage, reciting my Parisian poems at the annual Poetry Slam, and upon the stage of the Meeting Place Park opposite, solitudinously sunning myself at dusk or making out with some dame after dark.
But I’m not entirely alone in this self-imposed project to be a flâneurial historian of Bello, the memorious recorder of its forgotten hours. One local writer I have respect for, and who seems to be involved in an analogous, albeit more ‘official’ project of public memoration, is Ross Macleay, one half of the North Bank Institute, Bellingen’s oldest—and smallest—think tank.
In “The Memorial Hall”, one of the essays in his collection On, in, from, over, Bellingen (2013), Macleay tells us that the ‘Soldiers Memorial Hall and Literary Institute’ opened to great civic fanfare on Wednesday 19 January 1921 with (among other visual confections) a presentation of Charlie Chaplin’s comedy “Sunnyside” (1919).
Describing the cinematic bill of fare on that night in his essay, Macleay explains how ‘the Mem Hall’ as Bellingenians know it today had not even been built on that fateful date, the ‘Grand Opening Night’ of the Bellingen Memorial Hall Pictures being a fundraising event to build the pile on Hyde Street.
The Memorial Hall began its life as a war between two motions passed at two meetings. At the first on 4 December 1918 a motion was passed to build a War Memorial in Bellingen at a cost of no more than ₤500, and a committee of twenty was formed. At the second on 6 June 1919 the original motion was cancelled, a substantial majority voted to build a memorial hall instead, and the committee, trimmed from twenty to seventeen, was given the job of raising funds. The building of the hall would be a war on two fronts, the first was against those who thought a monument was more fitting for military commemoration than the frivolity of a pleasure dome (plus easier and cheaper). The second was the long campaign to raise the money.
— Macleay (2013, pp. 147-8)
The money came, as Macleay tells us, from the showing of movies, and on 19 January 1921, the good burghers of Bello crowded onto the site of the present Mem Hall, under an open-air shed set up as insurance against the rain, to see Charlie Chaplin, Sessue Hayakawa, and a Pathé newsreel at ‘two shillings for a chair up the back, one for down the front on a log, and children [at] half price.’
Thus, from its inception, the Mem Hall, doing surreal double service as a perpetual monument commemorating local casualties in the Great War and as a meeting place for the celebration of living culture in a small town, secularly profaned itself as a picture show.
My first experience of the Mem Hall was when my friends dragged me along to see a John Pilger documentary in the great barn behind the façade—a fragrant experience spiced with the familiar scent of the chai tea concession set up on two trestle tables on the eastern side of the salle.
John Pilger, chai on the side, and barefoot kids running wild: that sums up both the experience of the Mem Hall and of Bello—of the Mem Hall’s significance to Bello life as a communal meeting place. It was at that screening, as I now recall, that I met several of the people who would become significant to me in those years, and among whose ranks, in my hats and suits, I would be the most unlikely ‘hippie’ by comparison.
As I have written in another of my flâneries, ‘the elevating experience of “enlightened” leftwing documentaries spiced with chai tea at the Memorial Hall’ is one of the typical memories I most cherish about Bello.
And that says so much about the centrality of the Mem Hall to Bello life. When I was in Euroa two years ago and attending a presentation of the documentary Happy Sad Man (2018) at the Euroa Community Cinema (which is also housed in the shire hall), the film’s Melbourne-based director, Genevieve Bailey, told the assembled townspeople that she had recently screened her doco at Bellingen, a little town in NSW, she said, not dissimilar to Euroa, and in a hall not unlike the Strathbogie Shire Council building.
As probably the only person in that room besides Ms. Bailey to have an experience of both venues—and then far more extensively, as regards the Mem Hall, than Ms. Bailey herself—I knew in my heart and my gut the visceral truth of the comparison she was making.
I love Bellingen as much as I love Paris—and I love these places as much, and in the same way, as some of the dearest women I have known.
And as I say in the video above, one day I hope my flâneries will at last be done and I can permanently rest my bones in Bello.
In this prose poem from The Spleen of Melbourne, Dean Kyte takes a nostalgic flânerie up the so-called ‘Paris End’ of Melbourne’s Collins Street as he reminisces about his last night in the Ville Lumière.
‘The Paris End’:—it’s one of those magick phrases which evoke the sweet life of flâneurial streetlife for me. And whenever I treat myself to a flânerie up ‘the Paris End’ of Collins Street, like someone raising and lowering their shades, I shuffle the rosetinted souvenirs de Paris over les scènes melburniennes before my gaze.
When I saw the rougetainted Regent Theatre lit up to fête Moulin Rouge!, like le coup d’un souvenir enfoui, the farded façade dans la place Blanche floated up, suddenly unballasted, and I remembered standing on the little asphalt île de la place on my dernière nuit à Paris. Then I knew what the phrase ‘the Paris End’ meant to me; it meant ‘la fin de Paris’.
—Dean Kyte, “The Paris End”
Last Monday night as I was hiking up Foveaux Street to The Carrington Hotel (your Melbourne Flâneur’s Sydney ‘office’, his lubricated lieu de l’écriture in the barbarous Harbour City), puffing hard as I approached the lip of Riley Street, Conte before me glowing redly in the dusk, I realized with a thrill of satisfaction so rare in my life that my whole relationship with France and the French language has undergone a quantum change in the last two or three years.
As I laboured up the hill, in my mind’s eye I saw myself more than a year ago frequently taking this flânerie up Foveaux Street to The Carro, the 1,300-page Gallimard edition of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s complete Romans noirs cuddled to my breast.
In a moment of expensive madness I had acquired the Manchette for a portrait of Monash upon discovering Sydney’s Abbey’s Bookshop and its feast of foreign-language books on the first floor some months before. I knew nothing of M’sieu Manchette; I was literally judging this hundred-dollar book by its cover—a print, by Gérard Fromanger, of the Parisian café Le Paillard rendered in an inky blue with the red silhouettes of some hinky flâneurs fogging up the boulevard des Italiens before it.
Manchette, I suspected, would be un type sympa—or at least, he would be a writer sympathetic to my cause of a Melburnian literature flâneurially evocative of Paris, of the nouveau roman written under the guise of the roman noir.
My mission on those nights, as on this, was to enjoy a good dinner and a Guinness at The Carro, masticating my Manchette over my parma and pint, and then, my wits sufficiently elevated by the brew, to debrief my brains of the day’s doings in my journal.
And now as I was grappling up the escarpment of Foveaux Street over a year later, another wad of dough freshly blown on bloody French books from Abbey’s, the red neon and the green bricks of Conte burning provocatively—like the Negroni they serve there and the Absinthe they ought to—in the sympa Sydney dusk, that small, irrational feeling of bien-être the flâneur occasionally feels when there’s no objective reason for contentment with his ennuyé life now descended on me.
Ah! comme la vie est belle!
I’m not quite sure why Conte should bring this feeling of the flâneurial merveilleux out of me: Did it, in its ‘italienneté’, recall Fromanger’s depiction of the boulevard des Italiens on the cover of the Manchette?
Or, in its position à l’angle, on the plateau of Riley Street, ahead of me as I marched the martyrizing hill of Foveaux Street as I had once climbed steeper streets in Montmartre, throwing its deep red and green over the corner, did it recall to me my beloved Cépage Montmartrois, the ‘sein d’or’ whose catalyzing golden light upon the rue Caulaincourt I immortalized in my first book Orpheid: L’Arrivée (2012), the golden bosom where I went to write every night in Paris over a demi de bière—indeed, where I learned this Parisian habitude, which has served me so well en Australie, of writing in bars and cafés?
Or was it simply that, one night, diverted from The Carro and into the boisterous bosom of Conte, I had, with my Manchette, sat at the bar, swooning over my Negroni and a piatto di prosciutto beneath the Italian movie posters, looking as keenly up at the red one-sheet for Blowup (1966) over the bar, hypnotized by it as if it were the movie itself?
Je ne sais pas.
What I know is that something has fundamentally changed for me in my relationship with France and its language during the last few years.
I’m hard pressed to put a date to it, and I only became conscious that a major phase shift had occurred in January this year, on my forty-first birthday, when I found myself sitting in Chloe’s Room, at Young & Jackson, arguably ‘the nation’s pub’, writing my first poem in French, moved by the French muse who holds court in this very Australian bar.
It’s a connection still very much buried to the eyes of my countrymen.
While the British colonial influence still lies on the surface of everyday life in Melbourne, with the lion and unicorn of the Royal Coat of Arms gracing everything from the portico of the Immigration Museum to the masthead of The Age, the French connection lies at a deeper, subtler stratum—deeper even than the Chinese, Greek and Italian influences on Melbourne life.
One has to dig back into the literature of the nineteenth century, when Paris was indisputably the capital of the civilized world, or the first half of the twentieth, when it was still coasting on a century of accumulated cultural prestige even after World War II, to perceive where and how Melbourne owes a subtle debt to French culture.
The clues to that subterranean French influence upon our civic life are buried in plain sight: they’re in the mansarded roofs of various town halls and the oblique allées of public gardens, the stone quays which pen the Yarra and the plane trees lining Collins Street.
Indeed, the eastern end of Collins Street, between Spring and Swanston, just barely retains into the twenty-first century its nineteenth-century designation as ‘the Paris End’, the prestigious address of doctors during the marvellous period, then, in the twentieth, with all the connotations of fashion that the magic name of Paris had conferred upon it, the favoured address of milliners, couturiers and cosmeticians.
Everyone important in the monde de la mode from Helena Rubinstein to Helmut Newton has either hung out their shingle or just plain hung out in ‘the Paris End’ of Collins Street, the most fashionable thoroughfare in this nation for nigh on two centuries.
To see these chthonic clues to the French influence upon our civic life, one has to have a constant eye to Paris: she must forever be in one’s consciousness, as she is in mine, for one to perceive these subtle analogies between the Mecca of modernity and her cultural colony at the nethermost ends of the earth.
Paris is always ‘devant mes yeux’, perhaps now more than she ever was, even when I was writing daily of my remembered experiences in her streets in Orpheid: L’Arrivée.
She has truly become the ‘moveable feast’ promised and prophesied by Hemingway as the eternal boon of the man lucky enough to have walked her streets, sat in her cafés, and loafed in her parks in his youth.
Doubtful that I will ever lay eyes again upon this city more beloved by me than any woman I have ever known, somehow the longer I have lived in exile from Paris in the country of my nativity, the more subtly French, the more subtly Parisian I have become.
It is a fact that certain writers and artists can live a very great deal on their memories, and in the exile of return to their homelands, the places of their actual experience are subtly, albeit marvellously transformed—as the façade of Conte momentarily was—by analogy with Paris.
Edward Hopper, for instance, though a painter, was no mean expert in French poetry, keeping abreast of literary developments in France even after he had ceased to go there for the living tutelage that the streets of Paris provide the artistic student of life.
Condemning himself to his native New York, Hopper had absorbed enough of the French spirit of life to infuse his visions of the local scene with some curious quality, apprehended at first as a weird novelty by his fellow countrymen, but later recognized as an authentic vision of American life in the first half of the twentieth century.
C’est très bien de copier ce qu’on voit, c’est beaucoup mieux de dessiner ce que l’on ne voit plus que dans sa mémoire. C’est une transformation pendant laquelle l’ingéniosité collabore avec la mémoire. Vous ne reproduisez que ce qui vous a frappé, c’est-à-dire le nécessaire. … Voilà pourquoi les tableaux faits de cette façon, par un homme ayant une mémoire cultivée, connaissant les maîtres et son métier, sont presque toujours des œuvres remarquables.
It’s all very well to copy what you can see, but it’s even better to draw what you can no longer see, except in memory. A transformation is worked upon the base material of actuality in which genius collaborates with recollection. You only reproduce what has struck you, which is to say, that which is essential to the image. … That is why paintings made in such a manner by a man with a cultivated memory, one who knows both the Old Masters and his trade, are almost always remarkable works.
—Edgar Degas (my translation)
Such artists hold themselves aloof from the circumambient culture of their countries and yet are more in the vital current of the nation’s life than their fellow countrymen, for the gift of the supple, subtle French language gives them an alternative grille through which to view the humdrum actuality before their eyes.
In the days when I wrote my first book, I did everything to keep myself insulated from the common life of Australia, to focus only on my memories of Paris, terrified that I would lose some detail which was, as Degas says, ‘essential to the image.’
Probably the work which marks the climax of my jeunesse, I still think Orpheid: L’Arrivée is a ‘remarkable’ tableau of the rue Caulaincourt in Degas’s sense, almost Rousseauian (by which I mean le Douanier, not Jean-Jacques) in the naïveté of its ‘weird novelty’, but I think the approach of hermetic insulation from the common life de l’Australie was wrong to take, though perhaps necessary and inevitable for a young man still learning his métier.
In those days, I needed my eyes and ears to be blindfolded and plugged against the actuality of my prosaic surroundings with media that reminded me of the poetry of my life in France. I couldn’t take on any new sensual experiences in these climes until I had gotten the results of the Parisian experiment in flânerie down on paper in a form I was substantially satisfied with.
But one grows, and the harder one works in youth to master the craft of writing, the more the RAM expands and the wider one’s capacities grow to register and retain those ‘essential traits’ of life which Degas says mark out the remarkable works of the artists of genius—for as Proust is at pains to impress upon us, the greater part of artistic genius lies in memory.
One is more able to take into oneself the poetic riches that lie in prosaic banality and the material conditions of one’s life are marvellously transformed by their analogy with the places and experiences of memory.
At mid-life, reconciled to my exile in the country of my birth, I now carry a bit of Paris, a morceau of its moveable feast, about with me as I sweep my fashionable path through Melbourne’s streets, unnoticed by my countrymen except as novel spectacle.
How do I do it? How do I subtly maintain the flâneurial ethos I acquired in Paris here en Australie?
The simple answer is the language, which provides me with a point of view, one of critical removal upon the currents of cultural life around me.
I think it’s fair to say that if one comes to a foreign language much beyond the age of easy acquisition in childhood, one will always be a ‘student’ of it to some extent, the more so if one comes to a foreign language in adulthood, as I did to French.
As Henry James—whose prodigious command of the language had been easily acquired in his Continental childhood—once wrote to a young French author, enjoining diligence upon him in his study of English: ‘One’s own language is one’s mother, but the language one adopts, as a career, as a study, is one’s wife, and it is with one’s wife that on se met en ménage [“one makes a common life”].’
I’ve been an earnest ‘student of French’ now for about two-fifths of my life, but it seems that at some point in the last few years, I became substantially less of a ‘student’ than I had been: having joined my life to the French language some quinzaine d’années ago, somehow my ‘wife’ and I have truly become one, body and soul, only lately in our marriage.
More than half my reading diet these days is composed of books in French, and when Abbey’s Bookshop isn’t getting a substantial tranche of cash out of me for crisp, virginal volumes like the Manchette, I’m on the hunt in thrift stores and secondhand bookshops for old books that have been passed around as once I prowled the booklined quays of Paris for saucy finds.
And just as, ‘in my day’, the bouquiniste on the quai des Célestins used to be a good place to go for a disreputable pute of a book, in Melbourne, if you like to get your tongue around a little French, certain lieux in the City of Yarra and the City of Darebin can be depended on to furnish an encounter with a vieille fille ‘on the shelf’.
Though I have largely given up the fetishistic desire which possessed me in my youth to acquire new books, I find at mid-life a resurgence in that desire when it comes to French literature: to have a naughty French novel in my satchel to whip out at an idle moment in my flâneries, to be able to momentarily set a bit of Paris before my eyes as I sit on Melbourne’s Metro, puts me simultaneously in the swim of two cultures.
To be able to excavate my copy of Camus’s L’Étranger (1942)—another Abbey’s trouvaille—from my Commie officer’s mapcase recently made the interminable trajet on the Lilydale line more bearable. At least I could fill the time by substituting Meursault’s ennui for my own.
Then too, in place of consuming much local media, I listen to a great deal of Radio France and watch French movies. I think I was partly inspired to write my first poem in French on my birthday after seeing Coup de chance (2023) at Palace Kino, in the Paris End.
Having failed to quite catch Woody Allen’s Whatever Works (2009) in Paris, posters for which frequently tantalized me in my flâneries through the Quartier latin, to immerse my eyes and ears in—of all improbable things—two of my favourite things in the world combined, a Woody Allen movie and a French film, probably helped to inspire me after a morning of frittering my fric away on Balzac, Chateaubriand and Adamov.
Listening to the world through the medium of a language where one is perpetually the amorous student is actually more fruitful for a writer than paying attention to his own media.
It is not merely that, in training the ear trumpet far afield and listening to what is going on in the Francophonic world, ignoring what is going on closer to hand in Australia, I hear a perspective on global events that is not parochially Anglocentric, but when I do happen to tune in to a few minutes of Australian media, I’m often surprised at the comparative puerility of what the media is propagandizing as ‘mainstream’ Australian culture.
The one exception to this is Australian cinema. I find I’ve been getting a lot of value lately out of revisiting the Aussie films I reviewed twenty years ago as a film critic on the Gold Coast, and this engagement with an aspect of our culture that has always struggled (under the Anglophonic imperium of Hollywood) to be ‘mainstream’—even domestically—supports my diet of French cinema.
In the interplay between French and Australian films, I find the questions I ask myself as a writer, with respect to literature, even more keenly put: Does Australia have a ‘national cinema’ that is equally an ‘art cinema’ the way that the French have a proud national cinematic tradition? Have we yet produced a stylistic storyteller who has written the national myth in images?
The films that represented us at Cannes in the years I was writing for magazines—the domestically decorated Somersault (2004), for instance—now seem to me interesting and instructive failures, fruitful clues for a writer and filmmaker embedded in the subterranean stream of his society and yet able, via the supple and subtle French language, to view the mainstream trends on the surface of Australian life with some critical distance.
In some significant sense, the prose poems of The Spleen of Melbourne project in their visual form, as hybrid Super 8 and video ‘cinepoems’ like “The Paris End”, constitute my own practical attempts to wrestle with those theoretic questions.
And what becomes clear to me as I begin to show and perform pieces from The Spleen of Melbourne is that, like the epiphany in Foveaux Street, what is felt by the flâneur walking the streets of this country as an inward experience of total sensual derangement à la Rimbaud is outwardly experienced by his fellow countrymen as ‘surrealism’: the supple and subtle French language putting a gloss of romance upon places familiar to Melburnians renders these recognizable places ‘new’ to their eyes.
Thus it is that I’m in the swim of two cultures at once. Becoming less of a student and more of a master of French in the last few years has allowed me to see a subterranean dimension of Australian life and bring it to the surface of my country’s vision.
And it could well be that, like Edward Hopper with respect to New York, in seeing what is quintessentially ‘Parisian’ about Melbourne, I am seeing something that was always there as a chthonic layer of our culture, but that only future eyes will recognize as an authentic vision of Australia’s present.
There are now nearly forty pieces in The Spleen of Melbourne project and I’m getting on towards the next iteration of the collection as a thematically navigable Blu-ray Disc of films and videos. You can support me in that endeavour by purchasing the soundtrack of “The Paris End” for $A2.00 below—or by naming your own price at the checkout, if you feel more generous.
The advantage is that by purchasing the soundtrack to the video, not only do you get access to unlimited streaming and/or high-quality download in your choice of audio format, but you can also opt in to become one of my fans on Bandcamp, where I occasionally post new pieces from The Spleen of Melbourne project which don’t have an audio or video component, as well as other photos and prose poems from my flâneries around this country exclusively for my fans on the Community tab.
As I say in the video above, I love St Vincent Gardens because it has a sort of ‘place des Vosges’ feel about it with its rows of Victorian terrace-houses boxing in the leafy square. In a moment of splenetic nostalgie leaning back against les bancs in the park, I can imagine myself back in my beloved Paris in those days of heroic flânerie when the productive indolence of walking and writing was my sole occupation.
It’s therefore the perfect Melburnian setting in which to introduce you in-depth to The Spleen of Melbourne project, which unites the most Parisian city on Australian soil with the first city of flânerie.
One of the key characteristics of my flâneurial literary style as a poet in prose on The Spleen of Melbourne CD is geographical precision: I want the listener to walk alongside me in my flâneries, to see exactly in his or her mind what I have seen with my eyes, to hear what I have heard, to share with me the full sensory experience of a real place in his or her imagination.
But as flânerie is a praxis for inducing in oneself an altered state of consciousness, I also want the reader to equally walk with me through a networked conceptual landscape—almost platonic in its forms—which the built urban environment educes from me.
In other words, I want the reader to also experience the thoughts and feelings I have as I flâne about Melbourne.
This geographic precision about the Melbourne of my prose poems is in distinct contrast to the approach that Charles Baudelaire takes with respect to the Paris of his own collection of prose poems, Le Spleen de Paris (1869). For, curiously, there is a conspicuous lack of geographic specificity in Le Spleen de Paris. No streets are directly referred to—not even the inescapable Seine.
This is a curious oversight since Baudelaire is the premier poet of modernity, the first to trade in the sublimity of Nature for the marvellous spectacle of the modern urban scene. As Carol Clark says in her introduction to the Selected Poems (1996), Baudelaire is the first versifier to introduce the ‘indecorous’, ‘improper’ subject of the modern city into French prosody—and the modern city, of course, is Paris, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’.
Far less than Les Fleurs du mal, the Paris of Le Spleen de Paris, which takes as its ostensible subject this ‘Mecca of Modernity’ whose profane empire of taste has stretched around the globe to intimately influence every city—even far-flung Melbourne—is hardly there as a unifying ambiance, an organizing theme that lends coherence to the collection.
Il est un point par lequel la nouvelle a une supériorité, même sur le poëme. Le rhythme est nécessaire au développement de l’idée de la beauté, qui est le but le plus grand et le plus noble du poëme. Or, les artifices du rhythme sont un obstacle insurmontable à cette développement minutieux de pensées et d’expressions qui a pour objet la vérité.
There is a point through which the short prose account achieves a superiority, even over the poem. Rhythm is necessary to the development of the concept of beauty, which is the greatest and noblest end of the poem. Now, the artifices of rhythm present an insurmountable obstacle to that minute development of thoughts and expressions which has truth for its end.
I don’t entirely agree with this statement, for ‘truth’—the absolute vérité—can only be expressed in its wholeness, and that is the purview of poetry. But one must step a great deal back and see things at a lower level of resolution in order to see them in their totality.
Baudelaire is correct in noticing that prose, uncorseted from the straitjacket of rhythm, has a distinct advantage over poetry in being able to report the superficial detail which makes up that totality at a high level of resolution, but this is not necessarily ‘truth’—only the factitious parts of it seen in close-up.
This is the reef against which the analytic, prosaic sentiment founders. A poet pur-sang like Baudelaire, having a holistic, totalizing vision and world-view, sees the harmonious repetition of a beautiful order—its rhythm—throughout the cosmos.
A natural prosateur like myself, by contrast, sees the discordant disjunctions, juxtapositions, enjambments and adjacencies. The lines of logical thought may ‘flow’, as a set of premises to their conclusion, but not with the harmony of rhythm. Each premise as sentence or paragraph must be ‘developed’, like a musical theme, or a leitmotiv. It must be planed and turned and set into the logical architecture only once the prosateur is certain that it can bear the logical load of the next idea to be set upon it.
Thus the Melbourne of the prose poems on The Spleen of Melbourne CD is a very ‘concrete’ city: that built environment of conceptual forms which are consubstantial with actual things the contemporary flâneur will encounter in Melbourne is explicit.
And on the other hand, the Paris of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris is far less concretely delineated than my Melbourne. It is an implicit city.
Of course, Le Spleen de Paris is a largely ‘posthumous’ work: Published two years after Baudelaire’s death, we know that, at fifty completed pieces, he only achieved half of his projected vision for this collection before the paralyzing stroke which rendered him mute and immobile for the last year of his life.
Having translated about a dozen of the prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris, I’m not sure myself whether many of the pieces in the collection genuinely qualify as being ‘musical without rhythm or rhyme’.
I’m not flattering myself to say that this discordant intellectual ‘music’ is something I regularly achieve in the prose poems which comprise The Spleen of Melbourne project: I’m a prosateur, and I have a more natural sense of the musical possibilities of the sentence—the sound that is linked directly to concrete sense—than Baudelaire, who more naturally inhabits the much stricter form of verse.
Moreover, the three titles that Baudelaire meditated for the collection complicates the issue of his ultimate artistic intent. Though first published—and equally known—under the title of Petits poèmes en prose (“Little Poems in Prose”), at a certain point early in the composition Baudelaire intended to call the collection “Le Rôdeur de Paris” (“The Prowler of Paris”), which sustains the view that the modern city of Paris, as a unifying subject and theme, is central to a global interpretation of the work.
I think we have to conclude, as a working hypothesis, that if as careful and precise a poet as Baudelaire declines to make explicit references to the contemporary urban scene in his prose poems (which comprise a form which lends itself more easily to explicit geographical precision than restrictive rhyming verse), then this is a deliberate æsthetic decision rather than a clumsy oversight on his part.
If, in a poem like “Le Cygne”—perhaps Baudelaire’s single greatest work in verse—as in the “Tableaux parisiens” section of Les Fleurs du mal more generally, he can find a way to make clear and explicit geographic references to the colossally disrupted Paris being pulled down and put up around him by Baron Haussmann within the restrictive straitjacket of the alexandrine, then there is no reason why he could not have taken the same high-resolution approach within the freer form of the prose poem—a form Baudelaire was essentially inventing.
Even if we allow that the corpus of prose poems Baudelaire has ultimately bequeathed to us in Le Spleen de Paris is only half-complete, there are simply too many of the fifty pieces that make some reference, however vague and anecdotal, to contemporary life in Paris under the Second Empire, for us not to provisionally conclude that his vagueness is an æsthetic strategy of some kind, though to what end it seems difficult, in light of the ‘inachevé’ nature of the work, to say.
Thus, while the Paris of Les Fleurs du mal is paradoxically ‘explicit’, clear-eyed, sharply defined, and high-resolution when it would seem that the extreme brevity, condensation and restriction of the verse form would call for a ‘softer’, more global and holistic vision of the modern city, the Paris of Le Spleen de Paris is ‘implicit’: it has this softer, vaguer quality where the freeness of the prosaic form would easily allow for cleaner lines and a sharper delineation of detail—an altogether more remorseless and unsentimental approach.
And without explicit geographic signifiers to orient us in space, Baudelaire’s mid-nineteenth-century Paris might, with a little mutatis mutandis, be any modern city anywhere.
Which leads me to propose, as I do in the sleeve booklet accompanying The Spleen of Melbourne CD, that Baudelairean Spleen, that ‘bilious melancholy’ and ‘choleric sorrow’ which Baudelaire perceived as a specific quality of modern Paris, is a mood of ‘sinister tristesse’ that attends every modern city everywhere that has been touched by the corrupting tentacle of that ‘empire of taste’ which had its Holy See aux Tuileries—including Marvellous Melbourne.
In reading Baudelaire’s tableaux parisiens redux in Le Spleen de Paris, with their hermetic discontinuity from each other, I am often reminded of those beautiful Japanese screens depicting scenes from The Tale of Genji, the salient ‘images’ of Lady Murasaki’s great novel, the high points of emotion in her long, story-like chapters being separated from each other by labyrinthine clouds of gold ground.
As I have written in one of the novelistic chapters of my Orpheid, my experience of Paris (particularly Montmartre) would be something like living in a Japanese screen where the discreet scenes of one’s existence, the high prosaic moments of flâneuristic exploit and artistic heroism dans le quotidien, were separated from one another by dense, serried hedges of cloud, as though one were wandering through a labyrinth that took in tout Paris.
One descended into the misty maze of the Métro at Lamarck-Caulaincourt and popped up again, by mysterious shifts onto other lines and arrow-led leggings through white-tiled corridors communicating between them, at some other point which had no visual continuity with it, prowled around in that milieu, learning its secret byways, how blocks, streets, whole neighbourhoods connected up with one another, and then re-descended to some other part to do the same again.
And yet somehow, a holistic sense of Paris, of the totality of its detailed organization, emerged by this flâneuristic means of random randonnée just as, in the letter to Arsène Houssaye which prefaces Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire proposes the ‘vertebral’ discontinuity of his work as its chief and unique virtue:
Mon cher ami, je vous envoie un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire, sans injustice, qu’il n’a ni queue ni tête, puisque tout, au contraire, y est à la fois tête et queue, alternativement et réciproquement. Considérez, je vous prie, quelles admirables commodités cette combinaison nous offre à tous, à vous, à moi et au lecteur. Nous pouvons couper où nous voulons, moi ma rêverie, vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture ; car je ne suspends pas la volonté rétive de celui-ci au fil interminable d’une intrigue superfine. Enlevez une vertèbre, et les deux morceaux de cette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine. Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister à part. Dans l’espérance que quelques-uns de ces tronçons seront assez vivants pour vous plaire et vous amuser, j’ose vous dédier le serpent tout entier.
My dear friend, I send you a little work of which one is not able to say, without being unjust, that it has neither top nor tail since everything in it is, on the contrary, top and tail simultaneously, alternatively, and reciprocally. Consider, if you please, what admirable convenience such a combination offers to all of us—to you, me, the reader. We can slice it and dice it as we please—me, my reverie, you, the manuscript, the reader, his reading; for I do not keep the restive attention of this latter hanging from the interminable thread of some super-fine plot. Take away a vertebra and the two pieces of this tortuous phantasy will merge together again effortlessly. Chop it up into numerous fragments and you will see that each of them can live on its own. In the hope that some of these sections are lively enough to please and amuse you, I take the liberty of dedicating the entire serpent to you.
—Charles Baudelaire, “À Arsène Houssaye”, Le Spleen de Paris (2000, p. 5 [my tranlsation])
Of course, there was no Métro in Baudelaire’s day, so he is proposing in his work, by a prophetic fantasy, the Ouroboran organization of the modern city Paris will become as a circular snake. Somehow the linear network of discreet vectors which compose the modern city of Paris as designed by Baron Haussmann form a recursive maze which feeds endlessly upon itself.
Thus, in place of geographic specificity in Le Spleen de Paris, we get a proto-Benjaminian catalogue of prototypical things commonly encountered in the implicit city—Paris in this instance, but it could be any modern city touched by Paris’s influence—repeated from prose poem to prose poem.
There is the theme of ‘the streets’ which crops up again and again as the principal linking vector. We are led from the streets back into ‘the room’ in prose poems like “La Chambre double” and “À une heure de matin”. Equally, there is the recurrent theme of ‘the park’ in “Le Fou et la Vénus” and “Les Veuves”, common ground for mutual civic enjoyment of the urban spectacle. And this theme segues into communal fêtes of marvellous spectacle, as in “Le Vieux Saltimbanque”.
A thematic organization of Le Spleen de Paris has not, as far as I know, been attempted along the Benjaminian lines of The Arcades Project (1927-40), but I’ve detected at least a dozen discreet urban themes into which the prose poems can be classified and re-classified.
And as per Baudelaire’s boast to Houssaye, if a thematic parcours of Le Spleen de Paris were attempted, one could create a conceptual city—perhaps an almost infinite number of conceptual cities—based upon the combinatorial and permutational arrangement and re-arrangement of the prose poems.
‘Commerce and fashion’, ‘urban types’, ‘the revolutionary spirit’, ‘sounds’, ‘food’, ‘animals’, ‘crowds’, ‘women’, ‘cafés, libraries, shops’:—In these content niches, into which the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris can be endlessly categorized and re-categorized, Baudelaire prototypes an implicit modern city from the specific parts of his experience of Paris in the middle years of the nineteenth century.
The implicit Paris of the prose poems is one which we can still recognize today, wherever in the world we are. It is perhaps no coincidence that in the last line of the last prose poem on The Spleen of Melbourne CD, “Milton, when a youth”, I invoke ‘the labyrinthine banality of my habitual solitude as a flâneur in the grand green maze of a great city in the late afternoon.’
Melbourne is not invoked specifically in that line, and indeed, in the prose poem, set in the Carlton Gardens, I disturb my female companion by volubly evoking passionate memories of afternoons passed idly in Paris’s Tuileries Gardens: The two places and times merge momentarily for me, and in ‘the grand green maze’ of time and space linking the suburbs of my life across a universal city in two hemispheres, the city of Paris is implicit in the explicit city of Melbourne.
Paris, as Hemingway said, is ‘a moveable feast’: if you’ve had the good fortune to live there as a young man, you carry it with you wherever you go for the rest of your life.
And thus, Baudelairean Spleen—le spleen de Paris—that ‘bilious melancholy and choleric sorrow’ that modern urban life engenders in us, is equally, for the Parisian flâneur displaced to antipodean climes and damned to walk, as a refugee, down-under in search of his heart’s home, ‘the spleen of Melbourne’, the most Parisian city on Australian soil.
It is urban spleen tout court.
You can purchase your own copy of The Spleen of Melbourne audiobook below. As I say in the video, every copy of the physical CD comes personally signed, wax-sealed as a guarantee of artistic authenticity, and gift-wrapped by yours truly. If you choose to purchase the digital album, you’ll also get a bonus track not on the physical CD itself.
“The Spleen of Melbourne” [CD audiobook]
Personally signed, sealed and gift-wrapped by the author. Price includes worldwide postage. Purchase the physical CD and get bonus MP3 versions of all the tracks absolutely free!
A$31.95
“The Spleen of Melbourne” [MP3 audiobook]
12 MP3 tracks downloadable onto any device plus bonus trailer. 24-page PDF booklet featuring Dean Kyte’s evocative street photography of Melbourne. Worldwide delivery with 24 hours.
Download your free MP3 audio trailer for The Spleen of Melbourne CD as featured in this video! Just click the options button on the player below to download.
‘This is the city. Melbourne, Victoria. It’s a big one. Second-largest city in Australia; it’s still growing. It’s a big animal with a big appetite. Five million people. There are five million stories in this naked city. The stories you’re about to hear are true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Hell, nobody’s innocent.
There’s a bilious melancholy, a choleric sorrow to Melbourne behind the magic mystery of the real. That’s the Spleen of Melbourne. It’s Paris-on-the-Yarra, a place of love and crime. And beneath its Parisian underbelly, the lonely experience of abortive, fugitive romance feels like the obscure workings of some organized crime.
And that’s my business. I live here. I’m a flâneur.
Well, a happy new year to all the fans, friends and followers of The Melbourne Flâneur vlog at home and abroad! And as my personal new year gets set to kick off this week with the Sun’s segue out of Capricorn and into Aquarius, it augurs beaucoup propitious to announce the release (which formally occurred on New Year’s Day) of my brand-spanking-new audiobook, The Spleen of Melbourne: Prose Poetry & Fiction.
Feast your peepers upon the nouvel évangile below.
The Spleen of Melbourne CD features 12 audio tracks with a total run-time of approximately 50 minutes.
I’m very proud of this CD. It was the fruit of my lockdown in Newcastle last year, one of the very few things which kept me sane during that period (not always the easiest thing for an Aquarian to be). And a shout-out to Implant Media, in Brunswick East, who mastered and produced the album for me. Despite some fatiguing delays in production which prevented me from getting this baby out before 1st January, they rendered my vision exquisitely so that the physical artefact you see above is precisely what I was imagining in my little villa in Newy.
The Spleen of Melbourne is a project I’ve been working on almost for as long as I’ve been living in Melbourne, and I’m certainly not done with it yet—not by a long shot. In fact, in several of my posts on this vlog, you will have heard me use the phrase ‘the spleen of Melbourne’ in reference to my prose poetry. As I explain in the short the preface to the sleeve booklet accompanying the CD:
There is a sinister tristesse, a bilious melancholy to Melbourne. Just as Baudelaire saw the choleric sorrow beneath the gaiety of Paris, the flâneur of Melbourne sees the chthonic element of its Parisian underbelly—the spleen of softly-lit milieux at eventide when the Angelus of the trambell tolls; or the rage of white-hot days when the Seine-like Yarra, in its moutonnement, mooches like brown mud between the quais as it mutters its way from Richmond.
—Dean Kyte, “Preface to The Spleen of Melbourne CD”
Of course, the title of this project is an hommage to Charles Baudelaire’s collection of prose poems, Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen), published posthumously in 1869. Also known as Petits Poèmes en prose, this collection of fifty short prose pieces is as significant a landmark in modern poetry as M. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857).
Indeed, although M. Baudelaire drew his inspiration, in turn, from Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit (1842), which is considered to be the first collection of ‘poems in prose’, imagining a kind of medieval Paris, it was not until M. Baudelaire turned his merciless gaze upon the modern ruins of that Paris imagined by M. Bertrand, the Paris of the Second Empire, undergoing radical renovation via the vandalism of the self-proclaimed ‘demolition artist’ Baron Haussmann, that ‘prose poetry’, as a peculiarly modern form of verse, one infinitely appropriate to modern, urban conditions of speed and rapid change, was legitimately born.
As M. Baudelaire writes in a letter to his friend, Arsène Houssaye, which forms the preface to Le Spleen de Paris:
Who among us has not, in his days of ambition, dreamed up the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough and yet sudden enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie, to the somersaults of consciousness?
It is, above all, the frequentation of enormous cities, it is the intersection of their innumerable connections, which engenders this obsessive ideal.
To which I can only say, with my hand on my heart and a profound reverence towards mon maître, ‘Mais oui.’
It is indeed ‘la fréquentation des villes énormes’ and the flâneur’s apperception of their ‘innombrables rapports’ which engenders in the literary soul given to strolling this ‘idéal obsédant’ to create prosody out of the prosaic, often horrifying, prose of modern, urban life.
Having been a flâneur in Paris, when I first came to Melbourne, I perceived immediately its intimate connection to my heart’s home, the first city of flânerie, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century. It’s an apperception which is, perhaps, not obvious to the native-born Melburnian, nor to the Australian generally, but to a Parisian soul whose karma has cursed him to be born in the antipodean hell of these climes, that clairvoyant poetic apperception of Melbourne’s subtle similitude to Paris makes my prosaic passegiate through this Inferno, far from my heart’s home, more bearable.
And in The Spleen of Melbourne audiobook, you’ll not only hear that subtle similitude to Paris in my prose poems, which are amplified by the artificial paradises and altered states of my dense soundscapes, but you’ll also see the similitude that I see. The CD, packaging, and 24-page sleeve booklet are all illustrated with my analogue photographs of Melbourne, shot on Kodak film.
The CD, packaging, and booklet are designed by Dean Kyte and feature his photographs shot on Kodak film.
The Spleen of Melbourne project, which has encompassed parts of my writing, sound design, videography, filmmaking, and photography for the last five years, is more than merely about prose poetry. M. Baudelaire dreamed of ‘le miracle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rhythme et sans rime’, one capable of juxtaposing the Spleen and the Ideal of modern, urban life.
In other words, living and dying shortly before the birth of the cinema, he dreamed of a form of ‘literary’ montage, an imperfect, proto-cinematic form of writing that Walter Benjamin would appropriate as the overarching editorial æsthetic of his Arcades Project.
As a writer whose first passion, above even words, is film, the art of mounted, edited, moving images, I dream of the miracle of a flâneurial cinema, prosaic and yet prosodic, one where sounds and images rhyme; and where the prosy poetry of my voice-overs and narrations reflect that lyrical movement of my soul in flânerie, the slow-sudden cuts and shifts of dream and memory, the cartwheels of consciousness I turn as I trip down la rue.
M. Baudelaire dreamed of a prose that was poetic; I dream of a cinema that is poetic.
The CD I imagined into being in Newcastle is but the first iteration, the first physical essay of an idea for a completely interactive, multimedia ‘book’ of some kind, the impractical idea of which I have dreamed of in my ‘jours d’ambition’ ever since I first sailed into Melbourne and saw that it was a place where the prose of its own life is profoundly overlaid, for the clairvoyant, Rimbaudian seer, with the poetry of a Paris remembered, imagined and dreamed. I have called this project in writing, audio, video, film and photography “The Spleen of Melbourne”, and over the next several years you will doubtless see further versions of this project in different media as I make other essays at realizing my impossible book.
The Spleen of Melbourne is about the poetic soul of the world’s most liveable city; it’s about how a poetic soul who suffers in the artificial paradise of this faux-Paris-on-the-Yarra experiences it in his flâneries. The theme of The Spleen of Melbourne is the inexplicable melancholy, grief and loneliness we feel as postmodern, urban men and women wandering amidst the wreckage and ruination of modernity which M. Baudelaire predicted as the end of technological progress in his visions of a ruined, renovated Paris.
But where, pray tell, is the guarantee of progress for the morrow? For the disciples of the sages of steam and chemical matches understand it thus: progress only manifests itself to them under the guise of an indefinite series. Where, then, is the guarantee? It only exists, I say, in your credulity and fatuity.
I leave to one side the scientific question of whether, in rendering humanity more delicate in direct proportion to the new pleasures it delivers them, indefinite progress might not be humanity’s most ingenious and cruellest of tortures; if, proceeding through an obstinate negation of itself, it might not be a form of suicide unceasingly renewed, and if, enclosed in the fiery circle of divine logic, it might not resemble the scorpion that stings itself with its terrible tail, this eternal desire which ultimately makes for eternal despair?
In this urban landscape of seductive alienation—the whole City as Luna Park—I write elegiacally about the frustrating griefs I’ve experienced pursuing the Baudelairean Ideal of love through Daygame—fugitive, ephemeral, abortive romances which all soured and turned rapidly to Baudelairean Spleen—sometimes within the course of a single day.
The constant metaphor I revert to in describing my experiences of love in The Spleen of Melbourne is the metaphor of crime. This is an appropriate poetic figure for a city notorious for its connections to the Calabrian Onorata Società, colloquially known not as the ‘underworld’ of Melbourne, but, in a particularly Aussie tournure, as its ‘underbelly’.
I speak on the CD, as I have done on this vlog, of the ‘Parisian underbelly’ of Melbourne. The ‘chthonic element’ of Melbourne I mentioned above is this ‘under-world’, this poetic apperception of a stratum of reality beneath the manifest which is the intimate yet invisible relationship this city has for me with Paris. Sometimes at night, in the streets, in the dark, when I’m out with my cameras hunting, as Brassaï hunted his ‘Paris de nuit’, my Melbourne by night, I feel myself close to this soft, Parisian underbelly, and I can remember what it’s like to walk les rues de Montmartre, the friendly menace of the streets and squares softly-lit at late hours.
Thus, I hold a dark mirror up to the city in the prose poems and photographs on this CD, revealing a different, more Parisian, more surreally noirish Melbourne than most Melburnians will immediately recognize. But, as M. Rimbaud famously said:
… One must be a seer; one must make oneself a seer.
The poet makes himself a seer through a long, immense, and rational derangement of all his senses.
—Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871 (my translation)
As a Capricornian Aquarian—a ‘Capriquarian’, if you will—born on the cusp of Mystery and Imagination, like my fellow Capriquarians on the other side of the divide, David Lynch and Federico Fellini, altered states and artificial paradises of bleak fantasy appeal to me, and I think you’ll find a ‘friendly menace’ in my darkness and deranged vision of Melbourne.
Mystery and Imagination are two qualities distinct, and yet, like darkness and light, they co-exist in an inyo, ever-revolving, and one is needed to penetrate the other. All, for me, is Mystery; so much becomes clear in The Spleen of Melbourne as I ponder the ‘baffling crimes’ of my heartbreaks. And all, equally, is Imagination, that ‘Reine des Facultés’, as M. Baudelaire termed her—that Queen of the Faculties which every true poet from Blake onwards has intuitively known is the firm ground of our mysterious reality, and the one diamond-headed pick by which we may crack the granite fog of mysterious reality on which we eternally stand in perpetual darkness at noon.
You can purchase your copy of The Spleen of Melbourne below, or visit the product page in the Dean Kyte Bookstore for more info, including a video of yours truly giving you the guided tour. Every physical copy of the audiobook comes personally signed, wax-sealed, and gift-wrapped by the same two hands that wrote the poems, shot the photos, and designed the artefact. That’s your exclusive guarantee of artistic authenticity.
And to celebrate the release of my new audiobook, I am going to hold an online launch for The Spleen of Melbourne via Zoom. I’m currently developing a PowerPoint presentation in which I take you through the history of the project. I’m going to take you on a whirlwind tour from Paris to Melbourne, via Berlin, discussing my æsthetic philosophy of flânerie. I’ll introduce you to the landmark figures in my thinking, from Charles Baudelaire, to Walter Benjamin, to Oswald Spengler, and more.
It will be the first time I’ve ever attempted to set forth my philosophy of flânerie in public in a concentrated oral form, so if you want to know how all the diverse things I write about on The Melbourne Flânerie vlog dovetail in one Unified Field Theory of Flânerie, you won’t want to miss this dilly of a PowerPoint presentation I’m preparing.
There’ll be readings of pieces that are on the CD with live accompaniment, readings of pieces that aren’t but will be in future versions of this project, films, videos, and a live Q&A. A date hasn’t been definitely decided, but when it is, expect an invite in your inbox!
Dean Kyte on location with The Spleen of Melbourne CD.
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The Melbourne Flâneur, on location in Eltham, reading an extract from his first book.
Today The Melbourne Flâneur comes to you from Eltham, a charming suburb on the northeastern outskirts of Melbourne where urbanity begins to shade into rusticity.
I love Eltham. It’s got a good bookshop in the main street, a multitude of nice cafés in which to write, and it was the memorable scene of your Melbourne Flâneur’s last great seduction before he retired from Daygame, so its streets have the vivid imprint of potent memories embedded in them for your pocket-edition Casanova.
But rather than reflect on that, in the video above I lounge with all my flâneurial indolence in Eltham’s gilded greenery (reminiscent, when viewed through heavily squinting eyes, of a Parisian park) as I read you a few pages from my first book, Orpheid: L’Arrivée (2012).
That’s the non-fiction novel where a very thinly disguised avatar for yours truly (one who is hardly more than a floating consciousness with a mythological nom de guerre) makes an epic voyage as laborious as walking across the bottom of the sea in a diving bell.
The premise of the book is very simple: my first night in Paris, the first night of my life off the terrestrial shore de l’Australie in foreign climes. But the extended metaphor I use throughout the book to describe the experience of being halfway around the world, at night, in a foreign country is the metaphor of space travel and setting foot on the moon. And nowhere do I use this metaphor more extensively than in the extract I read you above, which I think contains one of the longest sentences in the entire book, a burlesque of President Kennedy’s famous speech at Rice University which lasts more than an entire page.
Watch for the moment in the video when I have to sneak a breath to get through it!
I don’t really consider myself to be a comic writer, although some people have told me that they like my writing best when my satirical fangs show through. In this book, the fangs are definitely embedded in myself—right up to the gums: I never miss an opportunity to ironize my own neurotic foibles, frequently styling myself, in my Chaplinical dandyism, as ‘our presumptuous little hero’.
In that sense Orpheid: L’Arrivée is a ‘comic epic’: the ‘comedy’ lies in the fact that I treat—with a Keatonianly straight face—what would ordinarily be the most banal events and actions as I undertake to manœuvre myself and my small mountain of luggage de l’aéroport Charles-de-Gaulle à l’Hôtel Caulaincourt as if these were noble and heroic acts worthy of immortalization in an Homeric epic.
Like an astronaut setting foot upon a foreign world, everything that passes before my eyes becomes fascinating, exerts its own peculiar gravity which arrests my progress momentarily, drawing me towards it to pause and investigate. In fine, the experience of the book is intended, for the reader, to be what the experience of that night was for me: the most acute example I had yet known of the psychogeographic experience of flânerie itself—what M. Rimbaud calls ‘un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens’ (‘a long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses’).
I’ve described Orpheid: L’Arrivée as an ‘epic prose poem’, and I think that sums up both my strengths and my limits as a writer. In a recent post on this vlog I asked the question ‘Can prose be poetry?’, and admitted that, like M. Flaubert, one of the great banes of my life is that I’m a prosateur by nature, not a poète—although I have the reputation of being one.
As I said in that post, the habits of mind associated with prose and poetry are really antithetical to each other, and I’m rarely so inspired as to write verse. Most of my poetic output was written in France, when, like a flower, I felt my soul expand in its natural climes, swimming in the sea of soil and air, of Truth and Beauty, which surrounded me every day.
Otherwise, like M. Flaubert, whatever inclination to lyricism there is in me (et l’inclination est forte) finds itself kinkily perverted away from prosody and funnelled along the unnatural channel of prose, a narrow watercourse most unsuitable for the efflorescent floods of rhapsody which overtake me. Like M. Flaubert, I have the rather painful experience, as a writer, of being a poet by inclination but without natural talent in that direction, my analytic habits of mind, like his, being more suited to prose than prosody.
And yet, for reasons which mystify and miff me, I have the reputation of being ‘a poet’.
In recent years, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I will never succeed in talking people out of this misconception of me, and even to feel that, if they’re so stubbornly insistent in their error, then they’re probably right.
In lieu of forcing my mind into the crystal lattices of verse, a skill and habit I admire in poètes pur-sang but cannot emulate, I have always written my peculiar espèce de prose prosodique with its multilingual patois and neologisms, and have always been, bastard cousin to them, un poète en prose.
The essence of prose poetry, I think (an essence which Orpheid L’Arrivée demonstrates at quite a remarkable scale of simultaneous expansion and concentration, considering the typical brevity of the form), is ‘seeing the ordinary anew’.
What people have most often remarked to me about a prose they deem to be ‘poetic’ is that there is an unusual capacity in my writing to present a new vision of things, a different angle on the familiar which they recognize but which they tell me is not necessarily obvious to them until I drew their attention to it, a quality which is more ‘latent’ in the things themselves than apparent on first view.
Well, this is a perfectly natural skill for someone who began his career as a professional writer in the domain of film criticism to possess. My ‘journalistic training’ was as a foreign correspondent in a realm which is all about reporting vivid descriptions of vision, about lyrically communicating the experience which these visions in the dark provoked in me. It was a training which both formed and rewarded the analytic habit of mind, the incontournable désir to break down the parts of my pleasure and analyse what makes the machine of it run, which is natural to me.
I don’t know that I was ever conscious, as a young man writing film criticism for magazines on the Gold Coast, of styling my thumbnail reviews as ‘poems in prose’, but certainly I was so conscious of the little space I was afforded that, in retrospect, it seems I schooled myself in squeezing my mind into something like the crystal lattice of verse. I made a form of my own which was so tight that the rhapsodic results were often explosive for the readers.
In order to see the prosaic world painted anew on the page, a lyrical, rhapsodic style of prose is called for. If I’m honest, I don’t know if there are any poètes pur-sang today. A poet is a flower of humanity that can only grow up in a natural environment, and we live in such an artificial one, where technology is the very air that we breathe, that perhaps prose is the only weak poetic weapon with which to tackle and attack our prosaic reality, to beat back its encroachment on our humanity.
M. Aragon was a poet first and prose-writer second, a survivor of the race of poets when there were still some lines of lineage of that endangered species left to dribble into the future. He was also a surrealist in the first, enthusiastic, misguided but organic flush of that movement when, weak as it was, surrealism was yet a shield to bludgeon and beat back a usurping technological artificiality which was not yet all-powerful.
The English title of Le Paysan de Paris does not quite give the sense which M. Aragon intends to convey in French. Yes, ‘paysan’ may be translated as ‘peasant’, but in poetic conjunction with the name of the French metropolis, the Capital of Modernity, he is trying to suggest that to be a Parisian is to be a type of provincial, someone who is yet still close to nature in the midst of this technological marvel with all its glittering, seductive artificiality.
Now, here we have a little secret password of freemasonry by which fanatical Paris aficionados, French as well as foreign, recognize one another. This word is ‘province.’ With a shrug of the shoulders, the true Parisian, though he may never travel out of the city for years at a stretch, refuses to live in Paris. He lives in the treizième or the deuxième or the dix-huitième; not in Paris but in his arrondissement—in the third, the seventh, the twentieth. And this is the provinces.
—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, “First Sketches”, p. 832
It took reading Hr. Benjamin’s insight to put the vague apprehension into sharp relief, but as soon as I read those words, I recognized the truth of them in my own experience.
Only the day after the events recounted in Orpheid: L’Arrivée, as I ambled about the 18e, seeking by daylight what I had but glimpsed in a tourbillon of light and colour the night before, I would have the sense—which would never leave me in Montmartre—that this paradis artificiel would be sufficient for a lifetime. You could live in this small tranche of Paris, on its northern outskirts, and never be bored, never have cause to venture outside it.
I seem to associate that sensation of mind—too diffuse to be a thought—with the memory of a man, grey-haired, who shuffled out of the dazzling sunlight and into the cool, wood-panelled oasis of the Café de la Place and up to the comptoir beside me as I was drinking my demi. Between him and the patron passed that secret handshake of freemasonry, the handshake of merely being Montmartreans together on another day in bourgeois paradise, and by the end my time there, the ineffaceable patina of being a ‘Parisian provincial’, a ‘dix-huitièmard’ (to coin a term), would varnish the wood of my soul too.
In her journal article “The Surrealism of the Habitual: From Poetic Language to the Prose of Life” (2011), Alison James discusses surrealist prose poetry with respect to Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations into language. She cites André Breton’s argument in defence of M. Aragon when he was accused, after the publication of one of his poems, of incitement to murder.
… [T]he goal of poetry and art [according to Breton] has always been to soar above the real and above common thought…. In formulating this argument, Breton refers to Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics and in particular to Hegel’s insistence on the distinction between poetry and prose. For Hegel, poetry is the most perfect and universal of the arts because it comes closest to the self-apprehension of spirit. However, its linguistic medium poses a problem, for art ‘ought to place us on ground different from that adopted in everyday life, as well as in our religious ideas and actions, and in the speculations of philosophy’…. Language, when used in poetry, should therefore not be left ‘in a state in which it is used every day’ … but must set itself apart from the ‘common prose of life’ … —an expression that Hegel uses to refer to both the ‘prosaic’ dimension of existence and to linguistic signs that mediate this level of experience.
But in Le Paysan de Paris, M. Aragon (who himself has not infrequent recourse to Hegel) is most trenchant in his view that the prosodic lies in the prosaic. This is perhaps one of the few genuinely revelatory concetti to emerge from surrealism as an intellectual movement and as an artistic mode of militant resistance to the increasing ‘banalization’ of technologically-driven modern life.
Certains lieux, plusieurs spectacles, j’éprouvais leur force contre moi bien grande, sans découvrir le principe de cet enchantement. Il y avait des objets usuels qui, à n’en pas douter, participaient pour moi du mystère, me plongeaient dans le mystère. … Il me semblait bien que l’essence de ces plaisirs fût toute métaphysique, il me semblait bien qu’elle impliquât à leur occasion une sorte de goût passionné de la révélation. Un objet se transfigurait à mes yeux, il ne prenait point l’allure allégorique ni le caractère du symbole; il manifestait moins une idée qu’il n’était cette idée même. Il se prolongeait ainsi profondément dans la masse du monde.
I felt the great power that certain places, certain sights exercised over me, without discovering the principle of this enchantment. Some everyday objects unquestionably contained for me a part of that mystery, plunged me into that mystery. … I felt sure that the essence of such pleasures was entirely metaphysical and involved a sort of passion for revelation with regard to them. The way I saw it, an object became transfigured: it took on neither the allegorical aspect nor the character of the symbol, it did not so much manifest an idea as constitute that very idea. Thus it extended deeply into the world’s mass.
—Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, “Le sentiment de la nature aux Buttes-Chaumont” (translated by Simon Watson Taylor), pp. 140-1 [p. 128]
This anti-platonic intuition that objects themselves—in all their crude, material reality—are the eternal Forms is perhaps, as I say, the only really revelatory idea to come out of surrealism, and sets the stage for a ‘poetry of modern life’ that is deeply immersed in the prosaic and the temporal, in the marvellous flux of artificial forms that speed surreally by the flâneur’s eyes in his investigations of arcades and parks.
In his coda to Le Paysan de Paris, M. Aragon indulges himself (perhaps satirically) in one of those chauvinistic manifestoes favoured by the surrealists—or at least by his hierophantic, inquisitorial friend, M. Breton. But M. Aragon is a greater intellect than M. Breton, just as he was a greater writer, and the slash and sweep of his pronouncements cut vividly through, just as the notion articulated in the quote above does, to add in one breathless burst of premises several firm planks to a nascent æsthetic philosophy of literary flâneurism:
Du plus rapide apercevoir une apparition se levait. Je ne me sentais pas responsable de ce fantastique où je vivais. Le fantastique ou le merveilleux. C’est dans cette zone que ma connaissance était proprement la notion. J’y accédais par un escalier dérobé, l’image. La recherche abstraite me l’a fait tenir pour une illusion grossière, et voici qu’à son terme la notion, dans sa forme concrète, avec son trésor de particularités, ne me semble plus en rien différente de ce mode méprisé de la connaissance, l’image, qui est la connaissance poétique, et les formes vulgaires de la connaissance ne sont, sous le prétexte de la science ou de la logique, que les étapes conscientes que brûle merveilleusement l’image, le buisson ardent.
Je sais ce qu’une telle conception choque, et l’objection qu’elle comporte. Un certain sentiment du réel. Pur sentiment. Car où prend-on que le concret soit le réel? N’est-il pas au contraire tout ce qui est hors du réel, le réel n’est-il pas le jugement abstrait, que le concret ne présuppose que dans la dialectique? Et l’image n’a-t-elle pas, en tant que telle, sa réalité qui est son application, sa substitution à la connaissance? Sans doute l’image n’est-elle pas le concret, mais la conscience possible, la plus grande conscience possible du concret. D’ailleurs peu importe l’objection quelle qu’elle soit qu’on oppose à une semblable vue de l’esprit. Cette objection même est une image. Il n’y a pas, foncièrement, une façon de penser qui ne soit une image. Seulement la plupart des images, faiblement prises, ne comportent dans l’esprit qui les emploie aucun jugement de réalité, et c’est par là qu’elles gardent ce caractère abstrait, qui fait leur pauvreté et leur inefficience. Le propre de l’image poétique à l’encontre de l’image essentielle, pour m’en remettre à ce qualificatif médiocre, est de comporter ce caractère de matérialisation, qui a sur l’homme un grand pouvoir, qui lui ferait croire à une impossibilité logique au nom de sa logique. L’image poétique se présente sous la forme du fait, avec tout le nécessaire de celui-ci. Or le fait, que personne jamais n’a songé à contester, fût-ce Hegel, et même celui-ci ne lui accordait-il pas une importance prépondérante, le fait n’est point dans l’objet, mais dans le sujet: le fait n’existe qu’en fonction du temps, c’est-à-dire du langage. Le fait n’est qu’une catégorie. Mais l’image emprunte seulement la forme du fait, car l’esprit peut l’envisager en dehors de lui. L’image donc aux divers stades de son développement apparaît à l’esprit avec toutes les garanties qu’il réclame des modes de sa connaissance. Elle est la loi dans le domaine de l’abstraction, le fait dans celui de l’événement, la connaissance dans le concret. C’est par ce dernier terme qu’on en juge, et qu’on peut brièvement déclarer que l’image est la voie de toute connaissance. Alors on est fondé à considérer l’image comme la résultante de tout le mouvement de l’esprit, à négliger tout ce qui n’est pas elle, à ne s’adonner qu’à l’activité poétique au détriment de toute autre activité.
…
C’est à la poésie que tend l’homme.
Il n’y a de connaissance que du particulier.
Il n’y a de poésie que du concret.
La folie est la prédominance de l’abstrait et du général sur le concret et la poésie.
…
La réalité est l’absence apparente de contradiction.
Le merveilleux, c’est la contradiction qui apparaît dans le réel.
L’amour est un état de confusion du réel et du merveilleux. Dans cet état, les contradictions de l’être apparaissent comme réellement essentielles à l’être.
Où le merveilleux perd ses droits commence l’abstrait.
Le fantastique, l’au-delà, le rêve, la survie, le paradis, l’enfer, la poésie, autant de mots pour signifier le concret.
Il n’est d’amour que du concret.
From the swiftest glimpse an apparition arose. I did not feel responsible for this zone of the fantastic in which I was living. The fantastic or the marvellous. It is within this zone that my knowledge constituted true notion. My access to it was by a secret stairway, the image. Abstract research had induced me to consider it a crude illusion, yet finally notion, in its concrete form, with its treasure of particularities, no longer seems to me in any respect different from this despised method of knowledge, the image, which is poetic knowledge; while the vulgar forms of knowledge are nothing more, under their guise of science or logic, than the conscious halting places past which the image scorches, the image transformed marvellously into a burning bush.
I realize how shocking such a conception seems, I know the objection that may be made to it. A certain feeling for the real. For how did the idea come about that it is the concrete which is the real? Is not the concrete, on the contrary, all that is beyond the real, is not the real the abstract judgment which the concrete presupposes only in the dialectical process? And does not the image, as such, possess its own reality which is its application to knowledge, its substitution for it? The image is not in itself the concrete, of course, but the consciousness, the greatest possible consciousness of the concrete. In any case, whatever kind of objection may be made to such a view of the mind is itself of little importance, that very objection being an image. Basically, no way of thought exists that is not an image. However, most images are registered so weakly by the mind employing them that they incarnate absolutely no estimation of reality, and consequently retain the abstract nature which determines their impoverishment and ineffectiveness. The property of the poetic image, as opposed to the essential image, … is to incarnate this quality of materialization, one that exercises a tremendous power over man and is quite capable of making him believe in a logical impossibility in the name of logic. … [T]he image is the path of all knowledge. One is then justified in regarding the image as the resultant of all the mind’s impulses, in ignoring everything that is not image, and in devoting oneself exclusively to poetic activity at the expense of all other activity.
…
It is towards poetry that man is gravitating.
There is no other knowledge than that of the particular.
There is no other poetry than that of the concrete.
Madness is the predominance of the abstract and the general over the concrete, over poetry.
…
Reality is the apparent absence of contradiction.
The marvellous is the eruption of contradiction within the real.
Love is a state of confusion between the real and the marvellous. In this state, the contradictions of being seem really essential to being.
Wherever the marvellous is dispossessed, the abstract moves in.
The fantastic, the beyond, dream, survival, paradise, hell, poetry, so many words signifying the concrete.
There is no other love than that of the concrete.
—Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, “Le songe du paysan” (translated by Simon Watson Taylor), pp. 243-5, 248 [pp. 213-4, 217]
Thus, in M. Aragon’s surrealistic view, the poetic is quite firmly embedded in the concrete, in the prosaic, and what appeals to the eye as a poetic image provokes M. Rimbaud’s definition of ‘clairvoyance’—literally ‘clear-seeing’—that ‘long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.’
Etymologically, the concept of ‘surréalisme’ suggests something—a dimension, a reality—above or over concrete reality, and this view of surrealism as a poetic reaction to the banality of the everyday is certainly implied by M. Breton’s appeal to the æsthetic authority of Hegel.
And this doctrinaire view of what it is for a work of art to be ‘surreal’—to be ‘over’-real, too real to be apprehensible with the concrete eye in our diminished platonic state—is a view that M. Aragon appears to reject. One paints not what is in the mind’s eye, superimposing this image, as a kind of overlay, or ‘filter’, upon the image of the world which appeals to our physical vision, but the disruptive element of the marvellous which is always—and already—present within things as their secret substance, the irrational contradictions which are already there, in plain sight but overlooked, ignored by consciousness.
La vie parisienne est féconde en sujets poétiques et merveilleux. Le merveilleux nous enveloppe et nous abreuve comme l’atmosphère; mais nous ne le voyons pas.
Parisian life is abundant in marvellous and poetic subjects. The marvellous surrounds us and suckles us like the air, but we do not see it.
Hr. Benjamin, in his classic essay on surrealism, written when the movement was already on the intellectual decline, speaks of it as possessing access to ‘profane illumination’. With as cunning an artificer as Hr. Benjamin, we must assume that an indirect reference to the title of M. Rimbaud’s prose poetry collection (which he cites directly in his essay) is not coincidental.
Taking the word ‘vulgar’ in its Catholic sense, the ‘vulgar incidents’ and the ‘vulgar objects’ of our banal, artificial modernity shine forth their ‘profane illuminations’, and as M. Aragon states in his preface to Le Paysan de Paris:
Des mythes nouveaux naissent sous chacun de nos pas. Là où l’homme a vécu commence la légende, là où il vit. … Chaque jour se modifie le sentiment moderne de l’existence. Une mythologie se noue et se dénoue. … M’appartient-il, j’ai déjà vingt-six ans, de participer à ce miracle? Aurai-je longtemps le sentiment du merveilleux quotidien? Je le vois qui se perd dans chaque homme qui avance dans sa propre vie comme dans un chemin de mieux en mieux pavé, qui avance dans l’habitude du monde avec une aisance croissante, qui se défait progressivement du goût et de la perception de l’insolite.
New myths spring up beneath each step we take. Legend begins where man has lived, where he lives. … Each day the modern sense of existence becomes subtly altered. A mythology ravels and unravels. … I am already twenty-six years old, am I still privileged to take part in this miracle? How long shall I retain this sense of the marvellous suffusing everyday existence? I see it fade away in every man who advances into his life as though along an always smoother road, who advances into the world’s habits with an increasing ease, who rids himself progressively of the taste and texture of the unwonted, the unthought of.
—Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, “Préface à une mythologie moderne” (translated by Simon Watson Taylor), pp. 15-6 [p. 24]
In fine, rather than a superimposition of something above this reality upon our vision of it, the surrealist dérèglement is ‘seeing anew’, perceiving the marvellous reality of the poetic that is already there in our stultifying banality, the irrational discordances between our bizarre, artificial objects and customs—the whole apparatus of ‘le spectacle’, as Guy Debord calls it—which familiarity with them has made us blind to.
As Ms. James explains, Hr. Wittgenstein was deeply concerned with the problem of ‘re-concretizing’ language (to coin a term), to bring words back from the airy abstractions of the intellectuals and re-couple them to the gold standard of everyday usage. But, as she states in her article, ‘[r]ather than “bringing words back”, [surrealism] is a literature that aims to defamiliarize, to make new, to take language and thought away from the commonplace.’
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.)
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, cited in James (2011, p. 416)
Refamiliarization by defamiliarization: To take the pseudo-Freudian aspect of surrealism’s revolutionary program, if we are so immersed in the abstract, artificial spectacle of modern life that we cannot perceive the irrational discordances embedded in our artefacts and customs, the defamiliarization of abstracted language serves as a lens to consciously refocus our inward vision upon the madness of our concrete reality.
One might say that the prose poetic impulse to ‘see the ordinary anew’ is a function of Ezra Pound’s demand of modern artists that they should ‘make it new’—create (as M. Aragon seeks to do in Le Paysan de Paris) a mythology of the modern which is itself the basis of a new classicism.
The classical forms of poetry are unsuited to the spirit and conditions of our prosaic modern life, one in which Mr. Kurtz’s horror is kept in continual, uneasy abeyance, but which forever threatens to eclipse and overwhelm us. Beauty and horror, as M. Baudelaire, exercising profound clairvoyance, could perceive at the birth of modern poetry, are the two sides of the coin of banality we trade in daily.
Thus, in this banal, prosy landscape of indentured drudgery which is the modern city, perhaps only a ‘poetic’ prose, one which re-alerts us to the omnipresent but invisible marvellous by stealth, appropriating the utilitarian literary form of prose which science and commerce have elevated to a global lingua franca, is the only means to be authentically a ‘poet’ in this open-air, unbarred prison we all live in.
The poet in prose sneaks his profane illuminations of the marvellous reality, the beauty of our universal horror, out through the horizontal bars of uniform, black-inked type. He squeezes the folded letter out through the bars, but because it is written in prose, the cryptic cypher of the concealed poem fails signally to reach all but his fellow illuminati—the brethren of other flâneuristic souls who suffer in our Edenic Hell.
… [T]he most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug—ourselves—which we take in solitude.
The situationists, who were really the last inheritors of the tribal, faddish tendencies of European modernism, tracing their line of descent directly from the surrealists, were also, like them, one of the last résistants to the bulldozing banality of modern life, the flipside of its horrible beauty.
In their pseudo-scientific study of the urban environment known as psychogeography, and more specifically in their method of scientific investigation, the dérive(literally, the ‘drift’), the situationists codified a method of experimental urban exploration pioneered by the surrealists, and of which M. Aragon gives us perhaps the first scientific account in the second movement of Le Paysan de Paris: “Le sentiment de la nature aux Buttes-Chaumont” (“A Feeling for Nature at the Buttes-Chaumont”).
In that section, he describes how he, M. Breton, and a fellow Surrealist, Marcel Noll, undertook an ambitious pilgrimage one night to the parc des Buttes-Chaumont, in the 19earrondissement, on the northeastern outskirts of Paris. Assailing the gates of the citadel (which they found, to their surprise and delight, to be open), the three amigos undertook a circumambulation of the park, which centres around a man-made lake and a tiny, mountainous island. At the top of the butte is a very picturesque little belvedere which one approaches by means of a footbridge known to Parisians as ‘le pont des Suicidées’ because it’s a charming spot to take a brodie from.
The dérive, to my mind, is slightly different to flânerie, and therefore more suited to having a ‘surreal experience’ of the ordinary places of modernity, such as the parc des Buttes-Chaumont as M. Aragon describes it in Le Paysan de Paris.
The dérive, in my experience, is more about the absorption and synthesis of the ‘trade winds of vibe’ that course through the vectors of the urban milieu, while flânerie is an æsthetic investigation, and therefore more analytic. The flâneur is on the hunt for modernity, as M. Baudelaire says, whereas the dériveur opens himself up to being a willing prey to modernity’s alternating, alienating vibes of beauty and horror.
Walking is itself the most prosaic experience, and as American poet Edward Hirsch writes in his article “‘My Pace Provokes My Thoughts’: Poetry and Walking” (2011), walking through artificial urban spaces is, for the modern, urban poet, a most fructifying experience.
Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry—a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language—and walking seems to bring a sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.
A walk is a way of entering the body, and also of leaving it. I am both here and there, betwixt and between, strolling along, observing things, thinking of something else. I move in a liminal space.
You will recall, chers lecteurs, that in my previous post I said that the bar, the café, the scene of Vivian Sobchack’s ‘lounge time’ and another site of flânerie, was a ‘liminal social space’. Whether walking or pausing in his progress, the flâneur’s natural environment is not so much the city itself as liminal space—adjacent places of multiple, contradictory usage, spheres of ambiguity, sites of transitory passage.
Mr. Hirsch, in his article, delineates the types of walking, and he cites Thoreau, who mistook the origins of the word ‘saunter’, a type of frolicking stroll akin to flânerie at its most energetic, as coming from medieval pilgrimages ‘à la Sainte Terre’ (to the Holy Land). Mr. Hirsch sets us straight on this score, telling us that ‘[t]he word saunter comes from santer, meaning “to muse”, to “be in a reverie”’. Thus, the flâneuristic relationship between walking and thinking is still completed in the word, though not in the way Mr. Thoreau imagined.
Mr. Hirsch goes on to describe this ambulatory form of reverie, this ‘dream-walking’ while wide-awake, as ‘a way of ruminating, … a form of labor without laboring, what Kant calls “purposiveness without purpose.”’
Now, these two paradoxical phrases are instructive, for a phrase of my own which you will encounter time and again in the Orpheid is the description of ‘our presumptuous little hero’ as being engaged in the equally paradoxical occupation of ‘productive indolence’: My flâneuristic days in Paris were taken up with the ‘work’ of walking, of thinking, of lounging in cafés, of writing in parks, of drawing at the Louvre. By the standards of our technocratic society, I was a ‘fainéant’—literally, a ‘do-nothing’, an idler, and yet I have never, in my entire life, turned out more pages of prose, and poetry, and art, than in those days.
That’s the flâneurial paradox of Hirsch’s ‘labor without laboring’, of Kant’s ‘purposiveness without purpose’, and my own ‘productive indolence’: the prosaic poet of modern life is a résistant in the ‘Worker’s Paradise’ of the City, a passive idler by the standards of commerce, but as much of a driven ‘producer’—and not a passive consumer—as one of Ayn Rand’s technocratic supermen.
I had my own ‘dérive à trois’ at the parc des Buttes-Chaumont, with a couple of Californian friends I met in Paris, one of whom I still keep in occasional contact with. It was nothing near as blissful as M. Aragon’s tramp by night with MM. Breton et Noll, but I still remember the vivid poetry of life in ‘les Tuileries des gens’: a girl, lying on the grass in the sunshine, reading Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale in a cream-coloured, Gallimard wrapper; the gaggle of little French schoolchildren who descended on us from the pont des Suicidées as we paused in our ramble under the shelter of the belvedere at the top of the butte.
Rereading my second draft of the account of that day, I notice that I say that the children’s voices ‘perfumed’ the air for me, a poetic tournure that suggests the evanescent beauty that quite ordinary (and I’m sure, for my companions, quite unmemorable) incursion into our sanctuary had for me as we gazed back towards Sacré Cœur.
The ambition is still to tell the story of that day, and of the days preceding it, when an Englishman we met introduced me to my destiny as a poet, albeit in prose. To be a flâneur; to be deeply embedded as an anarchic undercover résistant in this prosaic modern reality, with its banal horror and flashes of beauty; to be able to see, and to say, both; to allow the dérèglement du dérive to surreally overtake one like a drug, but then to be able to apply analysis to the parts of one’s pleasure;—that is really what it is to be a prose poet.
But that memoir of my halcyon days in Paris is some way off. In the meantime, if what I have said here has whetted your appetite for what might just be one of the most surreal reading experiences you’ve ever had, do you dare to take a walk on the wild side, accompanying yours truly on a neurotic comic dérive around Montmartre by night?
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What esprit de flânerie had drawn him here he could not say. But the image of it,—the rusted tracks, their ties overtaken by the marauding verdure; the red, unrolling rollingstock blocking tracks which vanished in the horizon of ruinous green,—seemed an apt metaphor for his life with women.
As afternoon segued to evening with the savageness of a cut, he saw himself as an empty, twilit platform where no woman would again alight, the unchalerous shell of a darkened station which would no more warmly receive the transitory train of her ambassade through the embassy set over the foreign country of his interior life. A lamp which illuminated nothing; a sign which apprised no one of nowhere; a bench conveniently placed, and upon whose convenience no one rested and refreshed themselves:—Sometimes places, in their abstraction, resemble us more closely than do other people.
—Dean Kyte, “駅の物語” (“Conte de gare”)
I’ve always had a fascination with trains and train stations. You might think train travel a rather contradictory passion for a flâneur, the most freewheeling of voyageurs: Why should this epic pedestrian, drawn in his dreamy dérive by lines of random desire which sing out to his eye from every street corner, be inexorably attracted to the most restrictive and linear mode of movement through space, one which offers only limited scope for him to exercise his predatory passion for æsthetic investigation?
Hélas, if, like Walt Whitman, I contradict myself, then, dear readers, I contradict myself. As I hope the video and prose poem above attest, I contain multitudes. My soul is as large, as empty and as cryptic a labyrinthine structure as that palatial tomb which lounges alongside the Yarra, receiving and debouching visitors to Melbourne.
And it is certainly no coincidence that as a Melbourne flâneur, I should equally be an aficiónado of that kissing cousin of the train, the tram.
As an aristocrat of the gutter, a gentleman who makes his home in the street, to park my wheels momentarily in the tram, democratic chariot of Melburnians of every caste and class, and exercise my penetrating gaze over Collins or Bourke or Flinders streets from the very midst of them is to enjoy a flâneurial delectation which no other city in the world can offer to as extensive an extent. Verily, to make one’s royal procession up Bourke street on the back of one of these reines de la rue, shaking her bells at the milling mallers who make deferential way for her, is really to get a recherché experience of one of the world’s great thoroughfares.
I’m not quite sure what it is about trains and stations that has always attracted me to them, except that, as Sig. De Chirico seemed to apprehend in paintings such as Gare Montparnasse (1914), both the station and the train are places of dream.
Like Cole Porter, I get no kick in a plane. Flying too high with some guy in the sky is my idea of nothing to do. But lay me down in the gently rocking berceau of a roomette and let me nurse my dreams on that flux of images flying by the window, towns known and unknown, and I will feel myself swaddled in a womb of contentment.
Soon my month-long sojourn in Wagga Wagga ends and I reboard the train, bound for the destinations which are the purpose of my three-month voyage in NSW—Coffs Harbour and Bellingen.
Of course, the destination is a woman. Or women, as the case may be.
I’ve been nursing the dream of seeing Bello again since our second, soul-destroying lockdown in Melbourne last year. In the four months I was under house arrest in a West Melbourne hotel room, my restless esprit ennuyeux de flâneur confined to perambulations through dreams and memories inspired by old photographs and footage taken, as in the video above, during other voyages, writing the second draft of my current work in progress, set in Bellingen, Brisbane, and the Gold Coast, was one of the few things that kept me sane.
When our ‘Dear Leader’, Mr. Andrews, deigned to release us last November, dangling a tentative morsel of liberty before us (albeit one bounded by a radius of 25 kilometres), my experience of coming out of deep freeze was the inverse of what my Melburnian confrères had complained of all through lockdown: I had lived tensely on my nerve endings for so many months that I felt a sudden crash in energy and an onset of depression at being abbreviatedly free, whereas most of my fellow Melburnians had had their dose of depression in the prison of their homes.
Almost the first thing I did as soon as I was out of the cage was to re-open lines of communication with a woman, the thought of whom, like Dulcinea, had been one of those few things which kept my windmill-wizened brain sane when it seemed eminently possible that the Victorian Government and Victoria Police would go full Stasi on us.
And, as you can imagine with these undependable dames, even a polite inquiry into one’s health was met with radio silence.
That, and freedom, and the American election all coinciding at once seemed to soak my vibe of every adrenal ounce I had needed to endure four months of lockdown in a state which had descended with frightening rapidity towards totalitarianism.
And it was in that state of physical and emotional exhaustion that I made the video above and penned the attendant prose poem.
Trawling through my footage, I seemed to find in the abandoned Trentham train station an image of my soul at that desolate moment. Trentham’s a little town, about halfway between Woodend and Daylesford, which reminded me a great deal of Bellingen when I had stayed there about two years before. As refugees from Newtown in Sydney ‘tree change’ to Bellingen, imagining a verdant, paradisal embassy of inner-city liberalism in the country, so Fitzrovians fleeing Melbourne are steadily driving the property prices in Trentham up above a million dollars.
I’m told you can follow the old railway ties, half-buried in the verdure, from the station to quite a good pub in the next town, but that was a flânerie too energetic for yours truly, being more in the way of a ‘hike’, and my Italian-shod soul demands a nature denuded by copious asphalt and good paving to support it. I probably walked no further towards the slaking refreshment of that mythical pub than where you find my camera set up in the first two shots of the video.
But in the image of an abandoned country railway station at dusk, and in the ghostly sound of a spectral steam train puffing along a ruined route down which no train could nowadays pass, I saw an image of myself, shagged and fagged and fashed on the threshold of middle age, my days as a ladies’ man now well behind me down that ruined pike, having decided that there was one woman left for me in the world to conquer or none at all, one whose tardy silence to my text seemed to leave me, like my camera in the video, lingering restlessly for a train that had been infinitely delayed—and maybe even derailed long before I had arrived at the terminus of this moment of realization that there was but one woman in the world I would deign to travel to the end of the line with.
That sense of the mood—and often the melancholy mood—of empty places which I have elsewhere called ‘the Spleen of Melbourne’, a dark, ponderous sadness about the unpeopled spaces of the city, the unfathomable, heart-breaking mystery of the real and manifest and visible which I and my cameras seem very sensitive to, was potent for me then.
I did eventually hear from the lady in question, and her perky obliquities were worse than if she had left me mired in my tristes mystères of unknowing and Jamesian speculation upon the multiple potential motives of her silence.
And I admit that, since November of last year, I haven’t been quite myself, and I certainly haven’t been at my best. I haven’t entirely recovered from that triple blow of sudden decompression from lockdown, a conversation unresolved and infinitely deferred, and the latest (as it then was) apocalyptic twist to the devolving screw of Western civilization which an American election in the time of Coronavirus represented.
Mostly since then I’ve just tried to beat back my spleen, tamp it down by blows and kicks and cudgels until such time as I could get on that train and find out for myself what goes on with this dame.
Now the train of months has just about drawn up to the platform, and I’m about to find out if this whole trip to NSW, assiduously planned, was worth the price of knowing the truth, or whether I would have been happier trying to decipher unhappy mysteries from the distance of another state.
The train and the station seem quite significant symbols for me in my writing, as in my life. My latest work in progress, a memoir of seduction, is about an occasion when I took the XPT from Bello (or Urunga, to be more precise) to Brisbane, partly to catch the last few days of David Lynch’s exhibition at GoMA, Between Two Worlds, and partly to slay myself in the kind of unfettered Daygame you can’t do but covertly in a small town.
I was all set to get on the train at around 11:00 that night when, an hour or two before I was due at the station, I had the romantic encounter, right there in Bello, I was going to Brisbane for.
I almost missed my train: the lady in question was showing me such a good time I almost blew off a whole trip to Brisbane just to finish what I had started with her. I didn’t sleep that night—and not because it’s damn difficult to do blanket duty on the overnight XPT: I nursed the memory of her kisses as the train rocked and rolled me to Briz Vegas, tried not to let their reality dissolve into dreams until such time as I would be able to write this totally unexpected victory down verbatim in my journal.
I’m now 93% through the second draft of that book, and last week I had a chance to get down to the commencement of the finale, my second round with the redhead, when I was back in Bello, finishing off the pleasure I had deferred for the love of art.
Possibly it makes a difference to be on this side of the border, to be this much closer to the place, both in space and time, for there was a moment, in rewriting the scene, when the sensual reality of the experience—not just her hand in my lap and mine under her dress, but the little park before the library with its globes of yellow light giving it a Parisian air, and the delicious freddezza of Bello in June, made more delicious still when you have the warmth of a woman in your arms—produced the same sensual frisson in me as I felt that night so many years ago.
I could see the place and hear it again. I could feel the chill, valley night which I’ll know again, after so many years’ distance, in another week or two. Having taken me away from a place where the spectres of myself in scenes of dead love with various women are still vivid in my memory, the train will take me back there.
If I were to connect the psychological network map of my amoursmorts, I think I would discover that women and trains and stations all seem unconsciously connected to me, and that, indeed, I can plot the points of some of the stations of my experience as equally the terminuses of my affairs with several women.
There was the French girl, never to be forgotten, and never, I fear, to be sufficiently honoured in the pearl-like words of peerless prose her soul deserves, whom I kissed goodbye with the heart-breaking knowledge that I would never see her again in this life at the turnstile to the Métro in Belleville.
A few hours hence, I would be getting on the Eurostar to London, and thence, by tube, to Heathrow, carrying the sacred chalice of her kiss across continents and time zones as I wrote the memory of her down in my journal.
The last girl who was of any significance to me before I gave up Daygame, I also saw off on the Metro—at Eltham Station in Melbourne. A Dutch girl of Persian descent, I still see her pretty, dark face framed with ringlets becoming as small as a postage stamp through the pane of the door as it flies away from me, back to Holland.
And as for the object of my fact-finding mission north of the border, the last time I saw her was when we were on a train together in Brisbane, far removed from the climes in which we had known each other in Coffs.
I remember writing to her in a belated birthday card about a year after that last rendez-vous that, when I had gotten off the train at Roma Street, I had not looked back at her—had not been able to look back at her—because I was looking forward to the next time I would see her.
After a lot of near misses in the intervening years, the moment I have been looking forward to may be imminent. The tragedy would be to discover that that last moment of loving vision I sacrificed for this next moment, and which I have looked forward to with anticipation, was really the end of our relation; that I missed my connection with her; and that, for years, I have been wandering around the tomb of Roma Street, not even realizing that I am in the terminus of love.
If you enjoyed the video and the prose poem, you can download the soundtrack for $A2.00. Just click the “Buy” link below.
People are different at night. Under cover of its camouflage, their true, lupine colours show through.
But after experiencing the giallonoir lights of Paris, I seemed to lose my fear of night and the city. And over time, I learned to love to bathe in golden shadows. For things other than fleurs du mal bloom at night:—I love the lights, which, like penetrating rays of consciousness, flashes of inspiration blossoming in the black soil of the subconscious, require the loam of deep darkness to spark the oneiric reverie of their fiorrific flames.
In time I understood, like reading the rebus of a dream, what the clairobscure image of night and light was telling me: the lonely tiges of these solitudinous sentinelles, aureoled in melting platinum and nodding in la notte, were images of my own sombre soul burning tygerbright fra le selve oscure della gente.
—Dean Kyte, “Nightflowers”
When I lived in Bellingen, I earned an epithet which never quite escaped me.
Every year, around the Queen’s Birthday, Bellingen hosts its annual Readers & Writers Festival, and the highlight is the Poetry Slam on the Saturday night, an event which draws as competitive a murmur around town as the Melbourne Cup. Form of certain contenders is compared and bruited abroad in the days and weeks leading up to it, a noise which gathers to a crescendo as the poetic nags prance up to the gate of the Mem Hall.
My first year living in Bello, I charged out of nowhere, surging out of the pack from six lengths behind at the turn, like a dark horse whose form was utterly unknown in those climes, to carry off the big novelty cheque bestowed upon the runner-up. It was a complete fluke, but after that night I was known around town as ‘The Poet’—an utterly undeserved appellation, as I had used up about half of all the poems I have ever written in my life that night.
Most of my ‘poetic output’ is, strictly speaking, not my own, but translations from French, Italian and Spanish. My reputation around town as a translator of Baudelaire contributed somewhat to the capital T, capital P appellation, and perhaps inheriting his credentials as a spiritual sire gave me the thoroughbred look of a literary man born to the saddle of poetry.
I have never regarded myself as being ‘a’ poet, let alone ‘the’, but I could never shake off the definite article designation after that, despite polite explanation that I’m a ‘writer’, not really a ‘poet’ per se. To my ear at least, the vocation of ‘writer’ has an all-around, tradesmanlike sound to it, one which indicates a general maestria of the manifold forms of written language (most of which are prose), rather than the specific expertise of the ‘poet’.
I admire poets enormously, but however masterful I am at hammering out a well-turned sentence, I don’t consider myself to be anywhere near their priestly rank in the hierarchy of writers. Poetry, it seems to me, is not something that you write: it is something that is written through you, a message from God that you channel. People who have their antennæ turned towards and tuned in to receive the celestial communication on a more than hit-or-miss basis have my admiration.
If I have written a dozen poems worthy of the name in my entire life, I would be surprised to discover such prodigious production from a soul who, like M. Flaubert, suffers to turn one golden word from the dross of his mind.
Most of the poetry I have ever written was written in a few months, on Parisian soil, when the fecund inspiration of ‘the reality of experience’, as Mr. Joyce calls it, interpenetrated the soil of my soul, made ready for it by thousands of hours of toil in another, antipodean atmosphere.
To carry on the metaphor, a poem is like a flower: it grows within you of its own volition, the natural product of soil and light and air, and you are the gardener charged by God with gathering this bud in the ephemeral fullness of its flowering. I have expressed this conviction more fully in a memoir yet to be published, recalling the moment, in the cours La Reine in Paris, when I felt the first thing I could honestly call a ‘poem’ germinate and spring to sudden life within me:
This was the truly rare thing, the thing which had made Orfeo despair of ever ‘being’ un poète rather than le prosateur he knew himself, aucœur, to be:—for he knew innately that this natural emergenza, this illuminating insight, this sudden, lucid pénétration de la conscience into la vraie nature des choses which takes sudden, stunning shape in a small number of perfect words perfectly arranged, could not be forced, could not be le produit d’un moi, of a mind consciously writing to ‘produce’ un poème, but was itself un acte gratuit de la Nature as rare, as long an odd as that interpénétration des individus which yet produces a third, equally unique, equally irreplaceable individu from that contingent comingtogether….
But now le miracle de la Nature was taking its course in him: the event longwaitedfor, almost despaired of, the spontaneous, paroozianic excrescence of something real, something that was meant to be, and to have une vie propre dans le monde indépendant d’Orfeo, the way any authentic poème which has survived to be repeated by successive générations des êtres humains as expressing in some perfect, immediately apprehendable way l’essence tragique de notre condition has lived, whether it emerges from la sensibilité unique of a Keats, a Coleridge, a Rimbaud, a Baudelaire, a Wordsworth, a Goethe, a Blake; and which we immediately sense, on the reading of it, the profound interaction of une conscience unique avec ce monde, such that these words in this form must be;—must take their life, separate de leur créateur and without propriety anymore than un enfant est la propriété de son parent; to strike their harmonious accord within him and then to vibrate outwards to touch des autres âmes à travers le temps as the apprehension—sudden, lucid, clear—of some vérité éternelle de notre relation avec la Nature. Le poème was, in fine, necessary dans l’histoire du monde: it must be, just as those œuvres—les Manet, les Courbet—Orfeo had seen au musée d’Orsay,—et toutes les autres œuvres which he had been privileged to see all this extraordinary semaine de sa vie,—were fated by this same poetic inevitability to be. They spoke to something essential dans la condition de l’homme, and those luminous, irridescent traits dans le bouquet de l’Olympia, no less rude and irregular than these crude lines taking spontaneous shape sous la main d’Orfeo, were, comme les enfants d’une vision formed in its own kink, et perversité de l’esprit, et particularité to see ces traits où les autres, avant Manet, could not, no less essential a fleuring in that concatenation de l’histoire than the flowering de l’orchidée rare qui était Manet luimême, budded up from the sterile staff d’un juge bourgeois out of the unpropitious field of une fille de diplomate. Our presumptuous little hero had the grave and awful sense pour la première fois dans sa vie that what he committed here, en ce jour, dans le cours la Reine, would echo long into l’éternité: The great grave bell had been struck, and the peal of his fame, that of our ridiculous little dandy, cloaked in the conspicuous sable of his ostentatious anonymity pendant sa vie, would resound from this moment of sincere sentiment when he had abased son âme devant l’Olympia, would echo, growing—ironically, paradoxically—louder, not dimmer and more muffled as this instant of time slipped further from him, the words he now committed à la page slipping further from his hand to become no longer his property, but something dans le patrimoine de toute humanité, to take its place, alongside the most essential art, in the vast, grand jardin du domaine public. If he did nothing more with his life than what he did on this day, Orfeo had ascended, accédé à l’Académie des Phares with this cri which emerged, déchirant, de son cœur: It would be taken up, cette torche, par mille sentinelles, par mille portevoix, passed, de main en main, d’âge en âge, only to flicker and die à la dernière syllabe of recorded time, at the last rippling ondulation of its écho, au bord de l’éternité. Here was la poésie, in this osmotic interaction of that which was without Orfeo with that which was within him; it emerged, unforced, unbidden, by this mysterious alchimerical interaction, as rare a transubstantiation as lead into gold, and if the effect was rather, from a more objective standpoint, the imposition, by Orfeo, of his sensibilité sur la nature, as of a pathetic fallacy upon this indifferent scene, it had rather the effect upon him that he was discovering some profound truth latent in the design of what appeared to be un chaos harmonieux.
—Dean Kyte, Orpheid: L’Olympia
The babel of that quotation gives you some sense not only of how little I consider myself to be a poet, but, suffering like M. Flaubert from the knowledge that my antennæ are not turned, on balance, towards the celestial, poetic realm, but towards the prosaic, terrestrial world, how much, in compensation, I have sought to make my prose scintillate with that ‘speaking in tongues’ natural to the priestly poets.
With a deep bow of reverence to Howard Nemerov’s provocative entry on poetry in the Encyclopædia Britannica (which is worth repeated readings), one might almost say that prose is the ‘science’ of literature and poetry the ‘art’ of it.
Like science, prose is a purely descriptive account of nature. I often call written language ‘the algebra of thought’, and like the workaday symbology of algebra between scientists, prose is intended to get an idea, a descriptive account of external reality, out of one mind and as neatly, efficiently, and accurately into another.
Poetry, on the other hand, does something even more abstract with the abstract symbology of language than prose. It attempts to make music out of units of concrete meaning.
I have always been of the view that the highest demonstration of artistic genius is when an artist takes his medium and makes it do the opposite of what it is intended to do as, for example, when Robert Bresson suggested that the highest end of cinema was to ‘film the invisible’. In some sense, music (which it appears to have co-evolved with) is the contrary of language, and the poetic attempt to void words of their workaday meanings and make them into abstract sounds—the music of the spheres—is, in my view, the highest form of literary expression.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge proposed two neat equations, stating that ‘prose = words in the best order’ and that ‘poetry = the best words in the best order [my emphasis].’ The latter equation implies concision as a corollary, and concision seems to be a natural feature of poetry, from the haiku to the epic: If a poem constitutes the best words arranged in the best possible order, it naturally excludes from itself any words which do not cumulatively contribute to the peerless effect it produces.
I think this sense of concentrated concision native to poetry, which expresses the essence of living reality without superfluity, and yet transcends the purely descriptive account of prose, such that whatever description it does supply abstractly transcends the material so that multiple meanings operate simultaneously on multiple levels, is what makes even such fastidious craftsmen of prose as M. Flaubert and myself despair of ever being ‘poets’ in the priestly sense I have described above.
Though the modern prose poem was officially inaugurated by M. Baudelaire, arguably it is his contemporary, M. Flaubert, who is the first modern ‘poet in prose’. He suffered, as he wrote to Louise Colet in 1852, to write a style of prose ‘qui serait rythmé comme le vers, précis comme le langage des sciences’.
And as much as the recluse of Croisset was held, in the middle-class circles he despised, as a literary freak, dangerous to bon sens et bonnes mœurs, even M. Flaubert’s most tory critics had to concede that, despite the apparently insane ends to which he turned the French language, hardly anybody writing during the Second Empire had as firm a reign on words, nor could they polish each part of a prosaic sentence up to the point of being something akin to poetry.
M. Flaubert’s writing process has become legendary for its redundant exactitude, and when one reads of the tireless synopses, synopses of synopses, drafts and drafts of drafts that he went through, one almost feels as though the greatest writer of French prose in his day were conducting himself like an absolute neophyte, a perpetual student of bonne forme.
As his good friend, George Sand, wrote to M. Flaubert, chastising him for his grumbling over the negative reception of L’Éducation sentimentale(1869):
Au fond, tu lis, tu creuses, tu travailles plus que moi et qu’une foule d’autres. Tu as acquis une instruction à laquelle je n’arriverai jamais. Tu es donc plus riche cent fois que nous tous ; tu es un riche et tu cries comme un pauvre. Faites la charité à un gueux qui a de l’or plein sa paillasse, mais qui ne veut se nourrir que de phrases bien faites et de mots choisis. Mais, bêta, fouille dans ta paillasse et mange ton or. Nourris-toi des idées et des sentiments amassés dans ta tête et dans ton coeur ; les mots et les phrases, la forme dont tu fais tant de cas, sortira toute seule de ta digestion. Tu la considères comme un but, elle n’est qu’un effet.
In the final analysis, you dig, you work harder than myself and a whole host of other writers. You have acquired an erudition to which I shall never attain. You are a hundred times richer than the rest of us; you are rich and yet you cry poor! You want that I should dispense alms upon a beggar whose cup is full of gold, but who does not want to feast except on well-turned phrases and the choicest of words? Dummy, dig in your cup and eat your gold! Nourish yourself upon the feelings and ideas hoarded in your head and heart! The words and phrases, the ‘form’ over which you make such a fuss, will emerge naturally from your digestion. You consider ‘form’ to be an end in itself, but it’s merely an effect.
—George Sand to Gustave Flaubert, 12 January, 1876 (my translation)
Mme. Sand’s maternal whipping is a quote I come back to whenever I beweep my outcast state as a prosateur, aspiring, like le Grand Ours who predominates the firmament of French literature, to turn machine-tooled sentences as rhythmical as verse and as precise as the language of science.
Precision, by Coleridge’s definition, is the mark of both the prose stylist and the poet: both know the multifarious tools of written language to an extraordinarily intimate degree, and yet there is something altogether different—and missing in M. Flaubert’s sensibility, as in mine—between shaping the prosaic table of a sentence, which must bear all kinds of objects in carefully arranged orders upon the sturdy, yet elegantly turned, legs of grammar, and fashioning, as in Exodus 27, the high altar of a poetic strophe or stanza, which both comes from God and praises God in its infinitely rich design.
There is a certain point where precision turns towards analysis, and at this point prose and poetry would appear to diverge.
Though he had a poet’s command of his tools, M. Flaubert had an analytic sensibility, and he wielded words like a scalpel, not merely to gouge and dissect his eternal enemies, the bourgeoisie, but to layer on the tiny couches of colour which are the myriad details and objects he populates his canvas with.
The concision of the poet is, in some sense, a function of the holistic God’s eye view he taps into in a moment of inspiration. Analysis of detail is antithetical to this macro-level vision. But the writer of prose, the novelist or short story writer, is firmly on the ground. He gazes ahead and about himself, seeing a maze to be dissected by induction and deduction, not the mandala which the whole world forms when viewed from on high.
In this plodding, linear movement through the environmental and Balzacian social maze, the prosaic, purely descriptive account of phenomena is called for as a compass. Poetry won’t get you far when confronted with a Rastignac.
The modern poets of novelistic prose, M. Flaubert, Mr. Joyce, are very much in this naturalistic world which has its roots in the ‘social scientific’, analytic prose style of M. Balzac. Moreover, in the supremely artificial phenomenon of the City, these novelists no less than a prose poet like M. Baudelaire see in the multitude of details they microscopically describe and analyse some macrocosmic totality like unto the poet’s God. Mr. Joyce, of course, claimed to be an atheist, but the whole Dublin of Ulysses (1922) is pervaded with an atman-like oversoul which proclaims, echoing the throwaway pamphlet that Mr. Bloom sends sailing into the Liffey, that ‘Elijah is coming!’
It’s the great misfortune of a writer’s life to come upon Joyce and Ulysses too early, as I did at a tender, precocious age. You’re ruined for straight-talking, undemonstrative, definitely unpoetic, Hemingwayesque, prosy prose after that. When you see the peerless example that Mr. Joyce, battling both poverty and blindness, made to make every word of his prose shine with the celestial lustre of poetry, you must forge each word in the smithy of your soul under his heavy shadow, just as he forged words under M. Flaubert’s.
And it’s no disrespect to this all-around writer, this supreme homme de lettres who is the easy (and only) equal for verbal inventiveness to Shakespeare in our language, that he, like M. Flaubert, is not really a poet. There are a few charming lyrics in Chamber Music, and his long, Rabelaisian broadsides against the bourgeoisie of Dublin ought to be better known and widely recited for the comic masterpieces they are, but apart from “Ecce Puer”, almost none of Mr. Joyce’s poems are memorable.
We know Shem the Penman, il caro Giacomo, as the formidable maestro of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (1939), two epic novels which render a city by day and again by night, and as the author of those vignettes in Dubliners (1914) which, in the tart cleanliness of their prose, out-Hemingways Hemingway well-avant la lettre.
In his exquisite workmanship with words, which do multiple functions and have multiple meanings even in the relatively straightforward short stories of Dubliners, Mr. Joyce follows the Flaubertian example of making every single word in every single sentence the best possible word in the best possible order. It is a mark of his poetic sensibility détourné de la poésieelle-même that Mr. Joyce finds poetry (which he called ‘epiphanies’) in the most prosaic moments of Leopold Bloom’s day—like letting go his bowels.
That analytic, microscopic, naturalistic vision of life, which parses reality and excludes no part of it, finding the poetic totality in the prosaic banality of describing everything, is where the great reconciliation between prose and poetry occurs in Mr. Joyce’s œuvre. He find the epiphanic God of poetry in everything: he has Stephen Dedalus call Him ‘a shout in the street’. He finds Him as present in Mr. Bloom’s merde as in the bar of Sweny’s lemon soap in his pocket.
Today we commemorate the 117th anniversary of Mr. Bloom’s immortal flânerie around Dublin (or equally, the 117th anniversary of Mr. Joyce’s first flâneuristic date with his future wife and muse, Nora Barnacle, the Galway lass who would ‘stick’ to him). In his encylopædia of Dublin on the day of June 16th, 1904, he shows us how prose—the unprosiest prose possible on what Arnold Bennett called ‘the dailiest day possible’—can be ineffably poetic. The God-like macrocosm is contained within the microcosm of Dublin, all time contained within the grain of sand of a single day, and poetic totality contained within the prosaic banality of everything.
If you enjoyed my prose poem, “Nightflowers”, you can download the soundtrack to the video for $A2.00. Just click the “Buy” link below.
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