Friday, June 16th, 2023:

Approaches to the flâneur

Dear Gentle Readers,

there is a scene in the novel I’m writing—let’s call it Novel X for now, as the real title I is provisional anyway—in which one of the three protagonists, the only one conveyed using first-person perspective (let’s call him First Person, though he’s not the first person in the book), wanders out of their normal, upper class stomping grounds and into a poor urban neighbourhood. This story could be described as speculative fiction and the world—which is confined to a single city-state—is created from the ground up. It’s taken me a very long time to figure out what goes in it and what does not, what it looks like physically and what its unique characteristics are, and to be able to map it out in a plausible way. So I’ve finally done most of that and I need to bring my characters from two distinct areas together. For the most part, the characters who grew up in the slums spend their time in the wealthier centre, allowing us to see it through their eyes. But for this scene I wanted to take First Person out into their world, which he must in turn see as unfamiliar, even alien.

While looking for a suitable picture to illustrate the idea of the flâneur (this isn’t quite it), I came across this atmospheric painting by by Gustave Caillebotte, one of the more realistic of the Impressionists, and a painter with an early interest in photography. I hadn’t seen this painting before but recognized the artist immediately because of his skill at wet and shiny surfaces combined with attractive matte surfaces and expanses of smooth colour and clearly delineated shapes. So this becomes a Caillebotte festival and you can see the piece through which I met this artist further below. By Gustave Caillebotte - The first two versions of Ibiblio. The sources of the third and fourth release have not been specified by the uploaders., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52968

As a person with a particular love of wandering and an attachment to the Romantic idea of the flâneur (or flaneuse), which comes up quite a bit in On Opium, I definitely wanted such a scene. But the requirements of the story constrain the feelings and perspectives that are possible. This isn’t a recreation of my experience wandering around Buenos Aires in 2018 or Berlin in 2001: First Person is unfamiliar with this area but not a tourist. It’s more like me wandering around an unfamiliar part of Toronto. And while he shares some aspects of my personality, his background and perspective are very different. Other constraints lie in my attempt to avoid the dangers of being a flaneuse-writer who reads too much W.G. Sebald: the meandering style welded to the meandering narrator is too easily imitated without capturing what is magical about Sebald’s own work. Even novelists inspired (at least in part) by him and who successfully pull off an original version of what he attempts are trapped a little by this writer’s influence.