Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert)
Elissa Marder
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0804740720
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Through close readings of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Elissa Marder argues that these nineteenth-century texts can, paradoxically, make us aware of aspects of present-day life that are not easily described or perceived. Following reflections by Benjamin, Jameson, and Lyotard, she shows that the ability to measure time increases in inverse proportion to the human ability to express it and create meaning through it. Although we have increased our ability to record events, we have become collectively less able to assimilate the experience of the very events that new technologies enable us to record. The literary articulations of addiction and fetishism in Baudelaire and Flaubert reveal that these temporal disorders can be understood structurally as expressions of an inability to live in time. At a psychic level, they can be read as attempts to ward off increased stimuli and unwanted aspects of reality by stopping time.
The book also interrogates the relationship between misogyny and modernity. By revealing the privileged function assigned to feminine figures in Baudelaire and Flaubert, and engaging with contemporary writings in psychoanalysis, feminism, and cultural studies, this work shows how the experience of time—and the attempts to stop it—become inscribed on a feminine or feminized body. Dead Time provides us with a way of understanding how our own collective temporal disorders may be part of the unassimilated legacy of nineteenth-century modernity.
moyens, plus l’autre nous inspire de répugnance. On ne peut oublier le temps qu en s’en servant. (OC 1:669) [At every minute we are crushed by the idea and sensation of time. And there are only two means of escaping this nightmare,—to forget it: Pleasure and Work. Pleasure wears us down. Work fortifies us. Let us choose. The more we employ one of these means, the more the other inspires repugnance in us. On can forget time only by using it.] Although I am getting ahead of myself here, I hasten
ment. In “Les Petites vieilles” Baudelaire uses the same confusion between these two verbs (and the present and past tenses) to establish an empathetic connection between the poet and the old women: Women Tell Time 59 Je vois s’épanouir vos passions novices; Sombres ou lumineux, je vis vos jours perdus. [I see blossom your novice passions; Sombre or luminous, I live, I saw your lost days.] Here, by bearing witness to the womens experience, the poet relives their experience in the act of
konstruktive Geschichtkonzeption bei Baudelaire. Durch ihre starre Armatur schloss sie jede dialektische aus].23 If we recall Benjamins discussion of the function of allegory in “Le Cygne,” we remember that, for Benjamin, history becomes visible when modernity is petrified by antiq uity: “The city which is in constant flux grows rigid. It becomes as brittle and as transparent as glass.” The very rigidity of this structure renders it both brittle and fragile. If history cannot be conceived of in
of its spontaneous after-image, as it were [Dem Auge, das sich vor dieser Erfahrung schliesst, stellt sich eine Erfah rung komplementärer Art als deren gleichsam spontanes Nachbild ein]. Bergson’s philosophy represents an attempt to give details of this after-image and to fix it as a permanent record. His philosophy thus indirectly furnishes a clue to the experi ence which presented itself to Baudelaires eyes in its undistorted version in the figure of his reader [Sie gibt derart mittelbar
must be seen as the indelible archivist of the telling of the modern subject’s narration of his relationship to lost time, Flaubert can be read as the scribe, the copyist, of the modern subject’s non-narratable rela tion to wasted time. But unlike Proust’s narrator, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary cannot quest for lost time; instead, as the novel explicitly demonstrates, she is in search for time itself, in the form of an event. Unable to isolate any thing in her “daily life” that she can grasp in the