The Text of the City

Peter Brooks

Oscar Wilde, in one of those epigrams that cut to the heart

of the matter, states our subject in broadest outline: "Balzac
invented the nineteenth century." The remark is profoundly
true, in that the identification of an era-its shape, salient
characteristics, its meaning-depends on its having been
self-consciously conceptualized and articulated. The sense
of an era comes to consciousness when it becomes a text.
And Balzac's Comedie Humaine is pre-eminently the text
in which the nineteenth century takes cognizance of itself,
recognizes itself as modernity, a new epoch governed by
new sets of laws, criss-crossed by new codes of significance.
Balzac is in fact one of the first writers to be aware of the
radically changed situation of literature in the new age: an
age that for the first time made of literature itself a commodity, a commercial. product which depended on the play
of market forces, including advertising, journalism, and the
attraction of investment capital, rather than on the old
system of royal or aristocratic patronage. This transformation is the theme of Illusions perdues, possibly Balzac's
greatest novel, which has been described by Georg Lukics
as the epic of "the capitalization of spirit." Along with the
commercialization of the very medium in which he was
working, the other inescapable phenomenon facing the
writer of Balzac's era was, not yet so much industrialization-this was only 'beginning to make its impact in continental Europe in the 1830's-but urbanization. From the
time of the French Revolution through the 1830's, the population of Paris had nearly doubled, largely because of immigration from the provinces-an example of which was Balzac himself. The growth of the city was apparent to the
observer principally, in two ways: in the building of new
residential areas in what had previously been suburb (to the
accompaniment of considerable land speculation) and, much
more strikingly, in a greatly increased density of inhabitation in the old quarters of the city, especially in the
working-class districts. The urban crowd became a recognizable phenomenon and a felt presence. There was a new
sense of the city as a total dynamic entity and way of life, a
total horizon bounding one's perception and one's life, beyond which was simply the unthinkable darkness of the
provinces. As the fates of so many Balzacian characters
show, while life in Paris may be a struggle, there are no

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viable alternative worlds elsewhere.

Balzac made the choice of Paris-resisting all his family's
urgings to return to the provinces-and immersed himself
in its commercial, journalistic, and literary lives. Yet his
reaction to the modern urban milieu is curiously one of
nostalgia and loss. The sentiment of loss has to do with the
density, anonymity, and uncenteredness of modern urban
life, or, in a term I find more specifically appropriate to his
problems as an artist, its indifferentiation. Again and
again, we find Balzac complaining about the "platitude" of
modern existence: its flatness, the way- it has been leveled
and has lost what he believes to have been an earlier system
of traditional distinguishing characteristics and marks. The
refrain comes back repeatedly; it is perhaps most succinctly
stated in the preface to one of his novels, Une Fille d'Eve
(1839), where he argues that in the hierarchical society of
the Old Regime one could tell who people were from their
outward appearance and demeanour, even from their
clothes. Bourgeois, merchant or artisan, noble, enslaved
peasantry: all had their distinctive and defining marks.
Now, however, equality has produced a world of "infinite
nuances." Previously, he writes, "the caste system gave
each person a physiognomy which was more important than
the individual; today, the individual gets his physiognomy
from himself." This is a lucid statement of a historical passage from what a sociologist would call a system of "assigned identity" to one of "achieved identity." Curiously,
this new individual self-definition makes it more, not less,
difficult to tell who anyone is, makes the process of differentiation infinitely more subtle and problematic. With the
eclipse of the political and spiritual center of social
authority-monarch and church-there has been a loss of a
clear and accepted system of signs with unambiguous,
hierarchized referents.
Balzac, a self-proclaimed political reactionary, finds what he
calls the "disorder" of modern existence to be both deplorable and exciting. The profusion of life styles and selfdefinitions which it offers creates a challenge and a problem
for the novelist. The writer who turns his attention to the
portrayal of modern life, particularly life in the urban landscape, must encounter and overcome the fact of indiffer-

entiation. He must find the system of nuanced distinctions,

contrasts, hierarchies which will allow him to create meaning in a social world. that appears threatened by a loss of
meaning. He must discover--or invent-those codes that
will allow him to make sense of the grayish phenomena
(blackish, in fact, since that has become the predominant
color of male dress) before his eyes. Indeed, since meaning
has in some sense been occulted, he may have to reach
beyond the surface appearances of reality, to uncover those
latent systems of signification which the surfaces mask.
We can witness Balzac attempting to recover meaning in
the urban landscape in such an early and apparently trivial
text as his Petit Dictionnaire critique et anecdotique des
Enseignes de Paris (1826)-dictionary of the tradesmen's
signs hung above shop doors along the streets of Paris.
Signed "Par un batteur du pave" ("By a stroller of the
streets") the Dictionary suggests already the Baudelairian
figure of the urbanj7dneur: the curious stroller or prowler
of the urban landscape.' But here the stroller is concerned
to organize a systematic interpretation of legible meanings
in the urban landscape. Recording and commenting upon
the shop signs in fact becomes a "semiotic" enterprise, a
consideration of how shops' names and pictorial emblems
relate to the interior aspects of the shops, their merchandise, the character of the establishment and its proprietor.
The Dictionary becomes an inquiry into one of the signsystems which the city has created to organize and convey
certain of its meanings.

nificance. In a series of occasional texts, such as the "New

Theory of the Luncheon," "The Study of Manners by Way of
Gloves," the "Physiology of the Toilette," he returns again
and again to the problem of distinctive marks or signs? For
instance, in the first part of "Physiology de la Toilette,"
entitled "On the Cravat, Considered in Itself and in its
Relations with Society and the Individual," he begins: "The
French Revolution was for the toilette, as for the civil and
political order, a time of crisis and anarchy. . . . During the
Old Regime, each class of society had its costume; one
recognized by his dress the lord, the bourgeois, the artisan." The cravat held no personal importance. Then
Frenchmen gained a theoretical equality, and differences in
the cut and material of clothing were no longer a sure
measure of social distinction. Threatened with this uniformity, how could one distinguish the rank of an individual? From this moment on, the cravat took on a new
destiny: "for it was called upon to reestablish the lost
nuances of the toilette." The cravat, tied by its owner,
becomes the sign by which man "reveals and makes himself
manifest." After Balzac has categorized the different manners of cravat-tying, the various possible messages made
available by its codes, the cravat has come, at the end of the
article, to approximate the literary text: an "expression of
thought, as is style." The cravat has thus been established
as a key signifier in the social text, a sign that traces
differences and distinctions.

Balzac apparently intended to group such articles as those I

have mentioned, plus a number of others projected but
The Dictionary is an early and relatively crude version of never written, in a volume which would bear the title,
what was to become an almost obsessive concern with Pathologie de la vie sociale, a complete "codification" of the
finding the bases of an urban semiotic: a way of discovering, "laws of exterior existence" and what it expresses. The
elaborating, the codes which would allow the indiffer- title, "The Pathology of Social Life," cannot but recall
entiated surfaces of modern urban existence to reveal their Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which is also
systematic meaning. In the manner that modern linguistics about the ways in which people reveal themselves in what
has discovered that language is fundamentally a system of may at first appear to be the innocent and insignificant
differences-that a, system of differences, beginning with gestures of quotidian reality. The most important fragment
phonological oppositions, subtends the process of selection of Balzac's projected pathology is no doubt the "Theorie de
and combination which creates the code and makes possible la demarche," a curious text which registers his discovery
the message-Balzac, we find, is concerned to locate differ- that everything in a person's bearing or gait, each posture
ences, distinctions which will allow him to discern basic and gesture, is somehow revelatory. The whole of human
units of meaning, and their articulation in networks of sig- movement is meaningful; it bears the imprint of will and

thought. Thus "a simple gesture, an involuntary tremor of

the lips can become the terrible denouement of a drama long
hidden within two hearts." This essay emanates a sense of
Balzac's excitement at his discovery that a whole realm of
human existence can become semiotic, a realm of messages
made available to the writer. These messages are in fact
latent within the demeanour and comportment of man in
society; the "Theorie" is a demonstration of how to read the
latent text in and through the manifest text, how to recover
the significations of the one through the indicators of the
other. As in Freud's Psychopathology, in Balzac's fragmentary Pathology we have a sense of a new field of meaning
recuperated for human discourse.

Paris constitute a free performance. And in fact, as Balzac 9

proceeds with his sociological cartography of Paris in this
article, the spiritual center of Paris, the place of its essential
drama, comes to be, not the Tuileries or the Assemblee
Nationale, nor even the Banque, but rather the Boulevard
du Temple, place of the principal popular theaters of the
city. Eight theaters, fifty open-air vendors, and a dense
crowd-the world recreated in Les Enfants du paradis:
here we have a kind of concentrated theater within the
generalized theater of Paris, the place where a culture puts
itself self-consciously on the stage, recognizes the need for
acting out its central concerns, legitimizes its informal
drama. That the productions of the Boulevard du Temple's
theaters at this time were principally melodramas is not
The discovery of a new way to read meanings in human unrelated to Balzac's quest for meaning. For melodrama is a
behavior-in the presentation of selves in everyday life-is form that calls for heightened meanings, meanings made
peculiarly tied to modern urban existence in that it permits explicit through their overt manifestation and acting out.
the decipherment of those occulted signs of character and Balzac sometimes complains that social comedy as it was
meaning in the urban crowd. It allows the "observer"-as known in the Old Regime-based as it was on a system of
the Balzacian narrator will so often label himself-to make clear social norms and distinctions-no longer is possible in
distinctions in the seta of bodies, faces, attitudes, gestures the modern era. Melodrama has in fact come to take its
before his eyes, and to penetrate to the latent signifieds place, to enact with obviousness and force essential truths
which these signifiers both conceal and reveal. Rehearsed about people and their relations, about ethical and
many times in Balzac's fiction is the moment where the psychological forces that risk remaining latent in everyday
observer's insistent ;gaze directed at reality begins to or- reality. Melodrama thus presents another version of Balganize its signs, then in a moment of penetration passes zac's concern with making manifest the systems of meaning
through surface forms to the messages they represent, that can be uncovered within and behind the indifferentiastrikes through to a vision of the networks of social and tion of surfaces.'
psychological meaning which constitute the latent texts of
individuals or social groups, and which allow them to be- Were there space here for more extended discussion, one
might consider further some of the moments in Balzac's
come legible.
novels that show the narrator-observer at work, interrogatThis kind of observation can be applied to the city as a ing the surfaces of urban life, searching for the systematic
whole, as in the "Histoire et Physiologie des Boulevards de orders that will allow him to detect the presence of meanParis," where Balzac begins by recording his preference ing, exercising on fagade, contour, posture, gesture a presfor Paris over London, Vienna, St. Petersburg, because, sure of insistence that makes them yield their significance in
despite the encroaching indiferentiation of modern exis- legible texts. For instance, in Ferragus (the first of the
tence, Paris displays a greater capacity for self-representa- "Scenes de la Vie Parisienne"), the narrator begins by an
tion, for spectacle: it puts itself on show more than other effort to organize the web of Paris streets into a morally
cities. Paris to the observer who has trained himself in the significant network: "There are in Paris certain streets as
distinction of social nuance can be highly dramatic, the place dishonored as a man accused of infamy; then there are noble
where repressed conflict and hidden symbolic action are streets, then simply honest streets, then young streets on
ever on the verge of becoming manifest. The boulevards of whose morality the public hasn't yet formed an opinion;

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then homicidal streets, streets older than old dowagers are

old, estimable streets. . . ." But this is not enough; the
narrator goes on to lay out the interrelations of different
quarters of the city and their characteristics, then finally
articulates the whole as the anatomical parts of a monstrous
body. The monster provides an organic metaphor of the
city, whose every detail is a "lobe of cellular tissue" in the
whole; but the i mage of the monster's articulations also
suggests how a significant message is put together from the
elements of the code. In another instance, at the start of La
Fille aux yeux d'or, Paris becomes a set of circles in imitation of Dante's Inferno, through which we spiral up or
down, moved by the universal principle: gold and pleasure.
In Illusions perdues, the ambitious young provincial, Lucien de Rubempre, goes for his first stroll in the Tuileries
garden and discovers he is at a performance, where the
littlest things-the "world of necessary superfluities"-are
used to create messages concerning vital social discriminations.

attained an altitude from which he can read Paris, seize it in

one possessive glance, interpret its messages, and utter his
famous line of challenge: "A nous deux maintenant!" ("Now
it's between the two of us!") which presages what we know,
from the sequels, to be a successful campaign of conquest.
The conquest of Paris ultimately depends on the reading of
Paris: being able to seize the city as a legible and meaningful
text.

This condition of legibility is one that all the ambitious

young Balzacian heroes aspire to, and one that their narrator must attain. All that we have said about Balzac's
efforts to work on and work through the apparent indifferentiation of surfaces, to systems of meaning which make of
the cityscape and the urban crowd legible texts, could be .
summarized in the statement that Balzac is everywhere
seeking to find, to postulate, to invent the semiotic preconditions that make the modern novel possible. The very
existence of what we think of as "the Balzacian novel" and
indeed as "the nineteenth-century novel" depends on this
Central to the different metaphors and schemes, grids of effort to make meaning in modern urban life. Starting from
perception and rhetorical devices, used to organize, the anxiety that this new world, deprived of its former clear
categorize, and. explain the physiognomy of Paris, is the codes of meaning, might be threatened by loss of
sense of city as theater:` not spectacle merely, but the meaning-as, socially and politically it is threatened by
potentially revelatory enactment of meanings, of the sort chaos-Balzac's response is the insistence on meaning. By
theoretically formulated in the "Theorie de la demarche." claiming, as he most explicitly does in the "Theorie de la
The observer is thus never a passive spectator: he must demarche," that nothing is meaningless, that the world
work on what is before his eyes, bring to it a pressure of cannot not mean, he makes possible the text of modernity.
insistence that. will make the latent text show through the He invents the nineteenth century by bringing to conmanifest text. Balzac's best-known novel enacts for us in its sciousness the very shape of modernity as a set of texts
final scene the ambition of the narrator-observer: at the end subject to our reading and interpretation.
of Le Pere Goriot, Eugene de Rastignac stands at the top of
By way of conclusion, I want briefly to reach beyond Balzac
the slope of the Pere Lachaise cemetery, and looks down on
Paris, stretched along the snakelike Seine, as dusk gathers to the poet who was his great admirer and who best underand the first lights begin to shine. Paris is spread before stood the importance of the city to the artist of modern life:
Rastignac like a n-i ap to be read, and the quarter inhabited Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire's celebrated essay on Conby high society--the world where Rastignac desires to stantin Guys, "The Painter of Modern Life," comes closer
succeed-is marked out as by two grandiose drawing pins: than any text I know of to defining the aesthetic of modern
the Column of the Place Vendome and the Dome of the urban art, "tyrannized by the circumstance," concerned
Invalides, both of which incidentally evoke the conqueror with the transitory and the fugitive, dedicated to wresting
Napoleon, and which organize the map into symbolic legibil- beauty from the restless crowdedness of the city streets.
There is a poem set as epilogue to Le Spleen de Paris
ity. Rastignac, who began the novel in the sordid quarters
which the narrator called a "valley of plaster," has now ( Baudelaire's collection of prose poems) in which the

speaker, imitating Rastignac's position at the end of Le Pere

Goriot, climbs to the heights of Montmartre to look down on
and possess through his gaze Paris stretched below him.
But I want to say a word instead about one of the poems
from the section of Les Fleurs du mal called "Tableaux
parisiens," the sonnet entitled "A une passante" ("To a
passer-by").
La rue assourdissante autour de moi, hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balangant le feston et 1'ourlet;
Agile et noble, aver sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crisl)e comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide on germe 1'ouragan,
La douleur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un eclair ... puis la nuit!-Fugitive beaut&
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaitre,
Ne to verrai-je plus que dans 1'eternite?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-etre!
Car (ignore ou to fuis, to ne sais ou je vain,
0 toi que j'eusse aimee, o toi qui le savais!

and attitude, precisely from her demarche indeed, the possibility of a new sweet and dangerous pleasure. When we
move from the quatrains to the tercets of the sonnet, the
encounter is already over; she is gone, she has passed by
like a lightning flash in the movement of the city street. This
urban beauty is unstable, fleeting, fugitive. What we have
had is a promise of meeting in love, and hence of a new
meaning-a lightning-like knowledge of reciprocity, message of revelation from the instantaneous reading of an
encounter-which is then obliterated, effaced. We have
here the dynamics of urban sentiment, always interruptus,
always menaced with effacement by that very crowd which
confers on this sentiment its excitement, its perverse tension. The excitement depends on the dynamics of urban
reading and interpretation, where the text may offer the
flash of revelation, the fugitive transparency of latent meanings, but is then immediately subject to the pathos of loss,
effacement. Meaning is indeed fugitive in the urban landscape. The act of reading is consubstantial with the act of
erasure, significance incorporate with loss. This is why to
those nineteenth-century writers who had chosen the city
as context and text, the city called for an ever-renewed
semiotic enterprise. Have we in our own time seen this
enterprise lose its potency: has the city ceased to be legible?
Has it been surrendered to loss of meaning?

(The deafening street roared around me. Tall, slender, in Notes

heavy mourning, majestic grief, a woman passed, with a 1. On the fldneur, see Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A
Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn
sumptuous hand raising, swinging the flounces and hem of (London: New Left Books, 1973). My remarks here are in general
her skirt, agile and noble, with legs like a statue. 1 drank, indebted to Benjamin's remarkable study of Baudelaire as urban
cet.
tense as a madman, from her eye, livid sky where tempests
~. These, and other essays, mentioned here (including the Dicgerminate, the sweetness that fascinates and the pleasure tionnaire), can most conveniently be consulted in Balzac, Oeuvres
that kills. A lightning flash ... then night! Fleeting beauty diverses, 3 vols. (Paris: Conard, 1935-40). Translations from Balzac are my own.
by whose glance I was suddenly reborn, shall I see you no 3. On melodrama, and Balzac's relation to it, see my study, The
more except in eternity? Elsewhere, far, far from here! too Melodramatic Imagination ( New Haven: Yale University Press,
late! never perhaps! For I know not where you fled, you 1976).
4. I owe this phrase, and the suggestive concept, to Richard
know not where I go, 0 you whom I would have loved, 0 Sennett, The Fall of Public Man ( New York: Knopf, 1976).
you who knew it!)'
5. 1 take this prose translation, which has the advantage of literalness, from the very useful anthology edited by Elaine Marks,
French Poetry from Baudelaire to the Present ( New York: Dell,
The poem describes an urban encounter, which is not quite 1962).
a meeting. The anonymous woman suddenly emerges from
the crowd, from the deafening street, while the speaker of
the poem watches, fascinated, reading from her costume

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