Book Review: The Flaneur, by Edmund White (2001)

A few weeks ago, ma cherie amie La Belette Rouge wrote of Baudelaire and the personality of the flaneur, a character certainly not unique to Paris or even France but who will probably have to seek far and wide to find a place more agreeable to her fantasies than the City of Light.

Edmund White, author of The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, defines flaneur as thus: an “aimless stroller who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes wherever caprice or curiosity directs his or her steps.” His ode to his favorite city is admirably short but a thought-provoking, passionate read, just enough to stoke the interest of the budding (or even expert) flaneur without getting in the way of her calling as the quintessential wanderer and citizen of the road.

I loved finding out that there does indeed exist a delightful-sounding word to describe the person I become when I strap on my backpack and head towards points unknown. When B. and I were planning our backpacking trip around the world a few years ago, he was in charge of our five-week India sojourn. He meticulously filled a dozen or so pages in his journal with detailed notes on the many cities he wanted us to explore, including Dharamsala, Chennai (formerly Madras), and McLeod Ganj. As it happened, though, we ended up in none of those cities. Numerous unexpected delays leaving Delhi (our arrival point), unpredictable weather conditions in the north (where Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj are located), and serendipitous encounters with friendly (and sometimes not-so-friendly) Indians led us instead to Benaulim, Goa; Hampi; and Darjeeling.

I remember one morning in our little room in Hampi, a sort of open archaeological dig around which a village of enterprising vendors had bloomed to cater to the hordes of backpackers that descended on this tiny corner of India almost daily, B. and I lay on our stomachs staring at a map of India, wondering where we would go next. On a single page in our fat, dog-eared Lonely Planet guidebook, India seemed alluringly small, all points accessible to our eager selves.

Of course, it's not, as we found out soon enough. India is a ginormous country, laced with a complex network of long-distance buses and overnight trains that connects nearly every corner of this sprawling subcontinent. We didn't exactly close our eyes and jabbed a finger on a random spot, but choosing our next destination wasn't exactly a decision made after extensive cost-benefit analyses:

B: What about Darjeeling?

M: I know nothing about it except that it has something to do with tea.

B: It sounds romantic.

M: Doesn't it? Let's go there.

B: Okay!

Three full days on a train later, we landed in Darjeeling.

Not quite the stuff of a flaneur's dreams, but definitely in the spirit of the game. Exciting doesn't even begin to describe the heady anticipation of exploring a city or town on foot, seeing it at eye-level, and poking one's nose into its mysteries and charms. White offers the observation that France's admiration for intellectualism and its respect for artists and writers make it the ideal place for a flaneur to engage in this most civilized of exercises. Writers especially -- and White is nothing if not a writer's writer -- have always been drawn to Paris, and the city in turn has embraced them with a kind of all-encompassing love that can be found nowhere else. If you're a flaneur and a writer, Paris is about as close to Paradise as you'll ever get on this sweet earth.

What makes White's ode to Paris so compelling to a Francophile like me, however, is that the Paris he evokes in his straightforward, honest prose has little -- practically nothing -- in common with the Paris many American Francophiles find distasteful, or at best, marginal. Actress Juliana Margulies, in the current issue of American Way (American Airlines' inflight magazine), admits that "It isn't so much fun in Paris when you're broke." If your idea of Paris is endless shopping on the St-Germain-des-Pres, chock-a-block with the grand houses of France's most famous luxury brands, dining at the most expensive restaurants, and taking in a show at L'Opera, well, this book may not be for you. White's flaneur would enjoy taking in a stroll through fashion district and its forbidding facades, but it would be just one small segment in what will be a very different tour of Paris, through very different -- sometimes shadowy -- parts of one of the most fascinating cities in the world. If you approach White's book expecting to be regaled with insider secrets on the hushed world of haute couture, you'll be sorely disappointed.

On the other hand, if you're like me, a dabbler in the arts of beauty and fashion but in reality more at home in the more flamboyant, sometimes insane, sometimes scratch-your-head random world of artists and writers, this is your book. White's mental flaneur explores the true stories of Paris that don't often make the front pages of your favorite travelogue: the odd mix of racism and hearty welcome that North American blacks have found in the city for decades; the Jewish community and their anguished, complex history in the city; the vibrant, sometimes dangerous world of the gay and lesbian communities and the way in which their members tease the boundaries of society. He even delves briefly into the literal fringes of the city, where Arabs fill tenement housing and brim over with barely-concealed resentment and anger. It is here, White intones, where "the real vitality of Paris today lies [...], in Belleville and Barbes, the teeming quartiers where Arabs and Asians and blacks live and blend their respective cultures into new hybrids."

This isn't the Paris of Catherine Deneuve or even Audrey Tautou, but rather of the Arabs who stormed the city earlier last month and made headlines when they burned entire neighborhoods. This Paris belongs as much to James Baldwin and Richard Wright as much as to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And yes, this is the Paris whose most renowned (for good or ill) and most widely-read modern intellectuals -- the late Michel Foucault and Bernard-Henri Levy -- are Jewish.

This is the Paris that appeals to me, a woman of color with an intellectual bent and therefore someone who will -- in many ways -- always dwell in the margins of American society. White -- himself a gay Francophile and prominent intellectual and cultural critic with books about Jean Genet and Marcel Proust -- doesn't dismiss the upper-class stereotype of Paris and its Ile Saint-Louis denizens, but rather chooses to focus the spotlight on lesser-known but no less interesting (perhaps even more so, given their relative obscurity) characters and aspects of the City of Light. In this way, he adopts the flaneur's modus operandi (and here he quotes Baudelaire, the quintessential flaneur):

The crowd is his domain, as the air ist hat of the bird or the sea of the bish. His passion and creed is to wed the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate observer, it's an immense pleasure to take up residence in multiplicity, in whatever is seething, moving, evanescent and infinite: you're not at home, but you feel at home everywhere; you see everyone, you're at the centre of everything yet you remain hidden from everybody -- these are just a few of the minor pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial minds whom language can only awkwardly define.

In his book White takes on the literary flaneur's tour of Paris, dipping his curious nose into corners of the city often overlooked by its millions of annual tourists. It's a very quick read -- at 211 pages, yes, but the book is small and can be slipped in a purse or even a large pocket -- which suits the flaneur's temperament, especially as it's broken down into short-ish chapters, each devoted to a different aspect of the city's dynamic history and life. You won't get very detailed backgrounds on some of the more fascinating characters White introduces, but he very kindly has provided a very extensive bibliography in narrative form at the end of the book that's worth reading in itself.

This book is definitely worth adding to your library, particularly if you're interested in Paris' more unique but still very intriguing aspects. If you're a writer or artist, I think you'll enjoy this thoughtful, extended essay on the creative life of one of the most creative cities on the planet.

Final Note: The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, is part of Bloomsbury's Writer in the City series. Each book takes the reader on an intimate tour of a particular city through the eyes of a prominent literary writer. Others in the series include Prague Pictures by John Banville and 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account, by Peter Carey.