Neither a passerby nor a pedestrian, the stroller has been left out of the history books. However, strolling is linked to emancipation, and also to revolt. Could urban space be a feminist issue?
“Let’s go then, you and I…”
— T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” (1917)
Haunt boulevards and avenues and let yourself be captivated, captured by their sinuous twists and turns; to anchor oneself, by step, in the city and belong to it; register, through writing, in the place we live while walking: such are the strolls of flâneuses including Lauren Elkin. There is something captivating and viral in its invitation to take to the streets and follow its lovingly erudite drift.
From New York, where she was born, to Paris, where she lives, via London, Venice and Tokyo, the author wanders between academic research, journalistic criticism and fictional writing (lecturer at the University of Liverpool , Lauren Elkin is a reviewer for the Times Literary SupplementTHE New York Times Book Review and the Paris Review. She is also the author of the novel A year in Venice). A city butterfly, she takes you into her city foraging, both intimate and literary.
Claiming a right to wander, this voluntary wanderer offers us an essay in the first sense of the term: a text which (is) trying, which takes the risk of proposing novelty and which offers a new word for an experience so far without a name – flâneuserie –, thereby shaking up definitions (the “flâneuse”, for the dictionary, is a folding wooden seat serving as a deck chair). At the crossroads of literary criticism, biography and autobiography, Flâneuse updates the cultural history of a long-neglected figure, that of the woman freely walking the streets.
Wandering psycho-geography
The primary challenge of this singular text is to characterize the flâneuse, a little-known character who is neither a passerby (too attached to the figure of the prostitute) nor really the feminine version of the Baudelairian flâneur. Always visible, because it occupied the space of the streets, but never considered or even written about, it has been left out of the history books. Yet she was there, this incorrigible pedestrian! And Lauren Elkin to give her body and life again, to reinscribe her in the urban landscape, in order to discover what the urban experience meant for her, even if it meant redefining the masculine concept inherited from Poe and the poetry of XIXe century
In between, at the interface of a concrete topography and an individual cartography, the flâneuse invests the urban space and appropriates it to make it an “intermediate area of experience”, or, according to Winnicott, a potential space that allows creative life to be experienced. Thus the reflection is anchored in the personal experience of the author. Stemming from academic work, it was built through wanderings on three continents; it is the fruit of a journey that is at once academic, personal and geographical.
Exploring the neighborhoods she loves, Lauren Elkin experiences strolling, bringing back her childhood memories and her fantasies as a young American. She wanders, giving herself over to the demands of the land, reading the city as one reads a novel. The pedestrian reverie that she gives us summons what the psycho-geographer Guy Debord called “ambient units”, the unprecedented interaction between the atmosphere of a place and the emotional behavior of that which invests it. Walking to (re)invent herself, she takes possession of a metropolitan space haunted by the works and heroines of a flock of women artists.
“Looking back, we think through our mothers”
By summoning the novelists (George Sand, Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf), reporters (Martha Gellhorn) or visual artists (Sophie Calle and Agnès Varda) who have accompanied her over the years, the essayist constitutes a matrilineal heritage and makes urban space a feminist issue. From a reified fantasy, the flâneuse becomes a visible and committed being who carries the utopia of an unhindered space, the dream of a city that has become a common place, neutral and neutralized in terms of gender (ungendered). In this sense, the essay overlaps with certain issues now addressed by researchers in urban planning and geography, in sociology and anthropology. It shows that, for a woman, walking in the street remains a subversive and even political act.
Urban strolling is thus seen as linked to emancipation, but also to revolt (sometimes revolution) and protest. Women in movement, deliberately unassignable, the flâneuses claim their “right to disturb, to observe (or not to observe), to occupy (or not to occupy) and to organize (or disorganize) the space according to their own terms” (p 288). And it is in Tokyo that urban wandering becomes fully rebellious and reprimandable, where being a woman means being enclosed.
But liberation also involves drifting, a letting go which encourages open-mindedness and adaptation, to becoming; an availability of being which moves in plasticity and makes writing happen. In this, strolling takes on an experiential, existential dimension (see the pages dedicated to doubt or the uncomfortable position of the “suitable” immigrant). Linking her readings to her cosmopolitan experience – Jean Rhys and the discovery of Paris, Sophie Calle and the labyrinthine exploration of Venice – Lauren Elkin records the particular phrasing of cities to develop her own urban phrase.
The urban phrase
Thus, the chapters of Flâneuse trace a sensitive and sentimental constellation to form a “research text” whose peripatetic writing nourishes a formal hybridity and speaks of the writing self. Worked by the image (ekphrasiscinema and photography), the essay assumes polymorphism, integrating within it diaristic fragments (correspondence, notebooks and journals), extracts from texts or films (Lost in Translation by Sofia Coppola and Cleo from 5 to 7 by Agnès Varda) in addition to citations from academic studies. Strolling is achieved through this writing strategy.
By walking, by writing, Lauren Elkin assumes a rigorous subjectivity that she claims as a posture that is as much ethical – “it was decisive to include myself in the frame, to assume who speaks and where I speak” – as it is poetic. At ease, she instills something lively and relaxed, a “joy” which gives energy, includes “play and happiness”. Playful, it places topographical tracks before each new chapter, short paragraphs which launch the march, advance the text and lead the reading. Deploying their incentive ramifications, the latter make strolling a ritual and modern practice, a daring and creative practice.