Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century vanguard visions of aesthetic and social transformation preserved these appeals to fluidity and the constant release of creative energy, but they did so in a more determined and insistent way. In 1922 the surrealist theorist and publicist André Breton, in a comment that marks in a way the end-point of the history I will try to trace in this chapter, hailed Marcel Duchamp for showing the way “to liberate modern consciousness from that terrible fixation mania” that had kept it from achieving the liberation it sought. Duchamp by then had (or seemed to have) abandoned the traditional artist’s vocation of making special kinds of objects in favor of what he called “readymades,” ordinary articles of everyday use supposed to be encountered at unpredictable moments – a bicycle wheel, a bottle drying-rack, a urinal – and given the status of art by the act of creative imagination that chose them. The artist of “readymades” no longer pursued the traditional aim of producing beautiful or interesting things, he merely designated objects in the world as “works.” Liberated from the daily grind of the studio and the obligation to pursue goals defined in advance, he was able to give free rein to his creative energies whenever they bubbled up, dedicating himself to a life of chance encounters. So free was Duchamp that he could happily let the toss of a coin decide whether to go on a long journey or stay put. What made this move so exemplary in Breton’s eyes was that it put an end to the self-defeating search for new styles and programs in which vanguard schools had engaged for half a century, a way of being modern that repeatedly raised up some new limit to creative imagination in the very act of seeking to unshackle it. Duchamp (who cherished his found objects in part because they had no stylistic features in common) showed that it was possible to take an axe to “the famous intellectual crab-apple tree which in half a century has borne the fruits called symbolism, cubism, futurism, dadaism.” Freed of the obsession with art’s products Duchamp provided a way of being an artist that empowered the creative imagination to overflow into the world around it, drawing all things into its sphere. Breton would seek to fashion surrealism on this model when he wrote its Manifesto in 1924, dedicating himself and his friends to the simultaneous destabilization of art and of life.5
Behind Breton’s vision lay a history of claims by successive aesthetic movements to represent the true nature of modern existence, beginning with romanticism (which Victor Hugo defended for its harmony with modern experience in the 1820s) and including realism and impressionism as well as the later schools Breton listed. He recognized their serial appearance as itself a testimony to the constant change at the heart of modern culture, and yet at the same time to its proclivity for investing the flow of energy it generated in defined and therefore limited embodiments. What the rest of this chapter seeks to show is not that Hegel’s or Ferguson’s or Marx’s pronouncements about the relations between modern life and fluidity were somehow picked up by the avant-garde in the fin-de-siècle, but rather that the conditions to which the earlier writers were responding also shaped the visions of the later ones. By the middle of the nineteenth century these conditions had come to include the new situation of culture itself that I sought to elucidate in Chapter 12, whereby the more public and tangible forms in which cultural activities were carried on were simultaneously the frames within which ungovernable private experiences could unfold, allowing people to follow where fancy and imagination led them. The desires called forth by commodities and the feelings given free rein by private encounters with literature or music were two sides of the imaginative life generated by modernity, and they flowed in and out of each other. But their potential was judged differently from diverse points of view.
Already in the eighteenth century Smith’s understanding that people were drawn to objects by the imagined satisfactions they seem to promise was being applied to quite ordinary commodities, for instance by Wedgwood when he named pottery designs for aristocrats or royals and by shopkeepers who set up alluring window displays in town streets and squares. Such phenomena are part of what leads Colin Campbell to propose that modern consumption has ever since been driven by a “romantic ethic”: when things are displayed, advertised, or seen in the possession of others, we project onto them some of the idealized pleasure generated in fantasy and day-dreaming. A buyer is drawn to some good because he or she believes it “can supply experiences which [s]he has not so far encountered in reality.”6 This connection between consumption and fantasy grew more widespread and intense during the nineteenth century, especially as department stores spread after 1850, with their attempts to appeal to growing numbers of potential buyers through an ever-wider set of techniques: creating an “image” of the stores through posters, distributing illustrated calendars and agendas, sponsoring concerts and other on-site activities, and creating displays whose colorful juxtaposition of different articles encouraged buyers to imagine a range and depth of gratification beyond what individual items might promise. Store owners doubtless hoped that such techniques would overcome customer resistance to spending money; certainly this was an aim of Gustave Mouret, Zola’s fictionalized hero in The Ladies’ Paradise (based loosely on Aristide Boucicaut, the founder of the Bon Marché), and some shoppers could not resist buying or even stealing things they could not afford.
In her remarkable book Dream Worlds, devoted to debates about consumption and its place in modern life, Rosalind Williams showed that the fantasies generated around consumption goods played a part in shaping the projects conceived by modernist movements. One example was the proto-symbolist protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysmanns’ widely remarked 1884 novel Against Nature (À Rebours), Des Esseintes, who surrounds himself with carefully chosen objects calculated to turn the world he inhabits into a mirror of his mental interior and thus a site where the desires generated by his powerful imagination find no material barriers to their fulfillment. Des Esseintes suffers defeat in the end, finding that his attempt to live only with material objects that sustain his aesthetic sense leaves him without the minimum physical nurture necessary to support his life, so that he has to return to the ordinary world in order to survive. But his project would echo in later ones, as Breton testified when he wrote about Picasso that the artist’s aim in picturing things as he did was “to render the exterior object adequate to his desire,” and thus to turn the world with its capacity to impede satisfaction into a vehicle of it. We shall look more closely at the diverse ways by which vanguard artists pursued this aim in a moment.7
Art as life: bohemia
First, however, we need to recognize the existence of a region of nineteenth-century experience that both dramatized these exchanges between bourgeois life and artistic creativity and made them the stuff of everyday existence, the simultaneously real and fictional realm of bohemia. Although one can find the term “bohemia” used in something like the sense it still bears today in the eighteenth century, the idea and the mode of life it represents only became objects of widespread pubic attention in the 1830s and 1840s, and first of all in France. To understand bohemia’s cultural significance, we need to see that its prominence drew on two seemingly conflicting developments. The first was the heightened emphasis placed on what separated art and literature from ordinary social occupations; the second was a changed notion of what it meant to be an artist or poet, expanding the category in ways that attached these labels to a wider range of people than commonly bore them before. The emphasis on artists as separate kinds of beings was tied up with the exaltation of creative activity connected with the notion of “art as such,” and to which Wackenröder gave voice when he exalted artists as “the highest of earthly beings.” Such a description might be expected to narrow the boundaries of those to whom the label of artist could apply. By early in the nineteenth century, however, the close association between artistic identity and inner feeling promoted by romanticism, combined with the Revolutionary program of “careers open to talents,” was issuing in a broadening of the category of artists, extending it to include all those whose beli
ef in the special quality of their imaginative and emotional life set them apart from others.
A classic instance was the image of the poet defended by Alfred de Vigny in the preface to his 1835 play Chatterton, the drama of a neglected and suffering English writer who ended his life in suicide. Vigny specifically distinguished the kind of poet Chatterton represented from the “great writer.” Whereas the latter (Victor Hugo, for example) had no trouble finding favor with the public, poets such as Chatterton lived in the shadows and might never demonstrate the reality of their vocations. The title of poet rightfully belonged to them all the same, because their deeply felt passion for dreams and the imagination made them unfit for ordinary occupations, impelling them to live in accord with a pure devotion to their ideal. So important were they in the human economy that society ought to support even those among them whose achievements would never validate their ambitions: “What gives us the right to snuff out the acorn by saying that it won’t be an oak?”
Vigny’s notion was part of a general romantic critique of the modern failure to give creative people their due that often took the bourgeoisie as a particular object of enmity, but so broad an extension of artistic identity could not help but weaken the very border between poets or painters and bourgeois it was intended to defend. Such weakening was at the center of the much more skeptical eye cast on people like the ones Vigny championed by a young writer who would have a long albeit never much-celebrated career in French literary circles and emerge as a supporter of the Commune of 1871, Félix Pyat. Writing just a year earlier than Vigny, Pyat found both significance and amusement in observing that nowadays little or nothing restrained people from claiming to be artists, visual or literary: “One is an artist the way one used to be a property-owner, it’s the distinguishing mark of those people who don’t have any.” Drawn by the aura of a Hugo, young men who could do no more than touch his hand sought to live out this “artistism,” refusing to take on ordinary work. The trouble was that those among them who lacked real originality would end up isolated from the life around them, “alien and bizarre,” using their false sense of themselves as a justification for not becoming contributing members of society. They were, Pyat concluded, proposing a metaphor that would long echo in cultural history, “the bohemians of today.”8
Pyat’s word was bohémiens and translating it as “bohemians” is pushing things a bit. At the moment he used it, the term referred chiefly to gypsies (to call them Roma, as we are now asked to do does not convey the etymological link with the region that is now the Czech Republic where they were wrongly thought to originate; the English equivalent rests on a similarly mistaken notion that they stemmed from Egypt), and by extension to marginal street people who had been objects of interest and suspicion in Paris since the late Middle Ages. By applying the label to those afflicted with “artistism,” Pyat attributed to them a comparable position on the margins of society, to which they belonged in some way but did not fully join. The people he had in mind were mostly young bourgeois, many of them students, including a good number of provincials. As such they were illustrative of a recognized bourgeois devotion to mobility, giving them a connection to those to whom the term bohémiens originally applied that was developed in a revealing way by a writer for the Magasin pittoresque in 1851. Because modern conditions made social relations more organized and rigid, he observed, the carefree, fluid gypsy lifestyle was threatened. At the same time, however, modernity provided a kind of replacement for nomadic wandering by drawing far-off peoples into closer relations: modern travel and communication increased people’s knowledge of foreign places and conditions and expanded their horizons. The result would be that things it had once been possible only to imagine would come to be objects of actual experience; fantasy, having once been the special realm of poets, would take on “a social character. The gypsies of the old civilization will have become the messengers of the new.”9 Thus would the ability of modern networks to establish closer relations between people at a distance bring aspects of experience once confined to the margins into society’s center. Bohemian “artistism” testified to bourgeois life’s role as both the death and the resurrection of gypsy existence.
An additional tie linked bourgeois mobility to what Pyat dubbed “artistism,” namely that novelists and painters were among the most visible and striking examples of the “self-made man.” Claims to have risen wholly by one’s own efforts were entered on behalf of businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and publishers, but there was hardly a more striking success story than that of the family Balzac. The novelist’s father (as we saw above), the son of poor peasants and the only one among eleven siblings who learned to read, went off to Paris where he rose by his own efforts to a high position in the royal administration. Honoré was born into the considerable comfort this ascension made possible, but also into a family rendered tense and unhappy by the mismatch between his father and the romantic and mystical grocer’s daughter the elder Balzac married. From these origins their son emerged just as driven to make his own way as were any of the characters he created, determinedly and even obsessively devoting himself to writing partly in order to pay the debts he incurred through the collapse of the publishing venture he hoped would make him rich in the 1820s. Victor Hugo and Eugène Sue came from more comfortable and established backgrounds, but their fame made them seem self-made all the same; this was one reason Pyat gave Hugo a central role in his sketch. The self-consciously rural Courbet represented the same phenomenon among painters.
By the time Pyat used the term “bohemian” to refer to young bourgeois who imagined themselves as leading a life unimpeded by ordinary social obligations, the idea had been partly anticipated. Balzac in one story wrote of bohemia as the domain of talented young men not yet able to assume the social roles that awaited them, and George Sand portrayed an artist who labeled his freedom from ordinary social attachments bohemian. None of these instances gained much resonance, however. The term began to acquire its lasting popularity and notoriety toward the end of the 1840s, when Henri Murger published the tales and sketches he would use as the basis for a highly successful play in 1849, and that he collected as Scenes of Bohemian Life in 1851. (The play and stories provided the characters and situations later dramatized in Giacomo Puccini’s more famous opera.) It was Murger who put bohemia on the map of modern culture, portraying it as an abode of artists while simultaneously highlighting the presence in it of many people who were not. In his hands the figure of the bohemian artist became a touchstone for a broader, and – as we will see in a moment – chiefly bourgeois, identity.10
In the preface to his collected Scenes of Bohemian Life Murger defined bohemia as the temporary habitation of young artists not yet able to support themselves with their work, “all those who, driven by an unstinting sense of calling, enter into art with no other means of existence than art itself.” It was to this group that he assigned the Rodolphe and Marcel of the tales, the fictionalized versions of himself and his one-time apartment-mate Jules Fleury, later known under the name Champfleury. But he went on to describe two other camps whose presence was no less characteristic of the territory. On the one side were a group he called the “unknown bohemians,” those who would never emerge from apprenticeship to become recognized artists, either because they were too infused with a stoic ethic of purity to take any of the practical steps that success required, or because what really drew them to live among poor painters and writers was an indomitable rebellion against ordinary life. On the other wing were the “amateurs,” young bourgeois whose comfortable family position saved them from any pressing need to live in poverty but who chose bohemia for the sake of the adventure, freedom, and solidarity with other young people it offered. (At least some of them were involved in what Erik Erikson would later call a psychic “moratorium,” a period of putting off troubling decisions about personal identity.) Although Murger made the real future artists out to be the central figures, the other two groups played a larger role in his bo
hemia than that claim presumed. He sometimes scorned the “unknown bohemians” as “ridiculous martyrs,” warning against the dangers of “remaining too long in bohemia,” but he had been close to people like them (for instance to Joseph and Leopold Desbrosses, a would-be painter and sculptor with whom he joined in a group who called themselves the “Water-Drinkers” in the early 1840s), and some of his most engaging and touching portraits were modeled on these onetime friends. At the same time he was friendly and sympathetic, both in real life and in his writing, toward some of the amateurs whose status as future artists was most questionable: Charles Barbara, called Barbemuche in the stories, who supplemented the support he received from his wealthy family with tutoring and an occasional newspaper piece, and Alexandre Schanne, the Schaunard of the tales, who later abandoned bohemia to take over his father’s toy business.
What especially made the presence of these two groups significant in the bohemia Murger depicted was that the stories revolved more around a set of issues dramatized by their lives than around questions of moment to early nineteenth-century artistic practice. One looks in vain in Scenes of Bohemian Life for any discussion of pressing aesthetic issues of the day: romantic versus classic, nature versus artifice, sublimity versus beauty, color versus line. What recur instead are a series of moral and social polarities: wealth versus poverty, enjoyment versus work, indulgence versus duty, communal obligation versus the individual focus on the self. Murger’s bohemians are all in some way at odds with the bourgeois life around them, but for contrasting reasons. Sometimes what alienates them are the harsh and constricting limits society places on individuals, inhibiting their development and their pleasures through the imperatives of the market or the demands of moral conformity; but others draw apart from the same world because its potential enjoyments threaten to weaken and corrupt their devotion to some high calling. What turns the first away from bourgeois life is its rigidity and inflexibility, while the second fear the opposite, the debilitating temptations and satisfactions it offers. This dialectic creates a complex moral structure in Murger’s tales whose presence contemporaries often recognized, but seldom with sympathy. As one wrote, “Contempt for the goods of this world has been, ever since Seneca, a philosophic and honorable sentiment – but on condition that one has authentic contempt for them and gives them up, and doesn’t dream about them night and day and shed tears over their absence like a lover crying over his mistress.”
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