Romance Studies, Vol.

22 (I), March 2004

THE ARCADE AS HAUNT AND HABITAT:

ARAGON, BENJAMIN, CELINE
DOUGLAS

SMITH

University College Dublin

Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris (1926) established the moribund Parisian passage, or nineteenthcentury shopping arcade, as the privileged site of a Surrealist mythology, where the casualpasser-by is
solicited by strikingly incongruous objectsfrom another era. Aragon's work elicited a critical response
from both Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project (1927-1940)) and Louis-Ferdinand Celine
(Mort a credit (1936)). Mile Benjamin insists on the economic context of the obsolescenceof
commodities that for him produces the Surrealist sense of the marvellous, Celine presents the arcade as
a miserable habitat dominated by thefear of bankruptcy experienced by its petit bourgeoisshopkeepers.
For all their differences, the materialist views of the arcadepresented by Benjamin and Celine share a
common origin in the nineteenth-century traditions of autodidact socialist and esoteric thought. But
Benjamin ultimately shares Aragon's fascination with the emancipatory potential of the obsolete rather
than Celine's reactionary anxiety over obsolescence.The dominant early-twentieth-century view of the
arcadeis, then, that of a haunt rather than a habitat, a placefrequented by transients and ghosts rather
than residents, a place of transition that anticipates contemporary definitions of urban space even as it
exceeds them in its emancipatory resonances.
Habitat has been a constant preoccupation of French literature since at least the nineteenth
century. From Balzac to Zola and beyond, the role of the environment in the shaping
or expression of human behaviour has been explored through a variety of representational
techniques. Particular environments have of course been the object of sustained interest.
This is the case of the Paris passage or arcade, which was exploited as a location by
nineteenth-century fiction (Zola) and poetry (Lautreamont), then retrieved from oblivion
in the twentieth century by the Surrealist Louis Aragon in Le Paysan de Paris, before receiving theoretical consecration in the last unfinished work of the German critic Walter
Benjamin, The Arcades Project.1 Concurrent with Benjamin's work, and pursuing what are
in certain respects similar aims, albeit in very different ways, is Celine's second novel Mort
credit, an autobiographical fiction based partly on Celine's experience of growing up in the
Passage Choiseu1.2 While Benjamin's arcade, like Aragon's, is a thoroughfare for shoppers
and contemplative passers-by, Celine's passage is instead a habitat, a place of residence and
work rather than of leisurely consumption. The purpose of this article is to explore the
significance of the arcade as an emblematic space of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

Address correspondence
Dublin 4, Ireland

2004

to Dr Douglas Smith, Department of French, University College Dublin, Belfield,

University of Wales Swansea

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DOUGLAS

SMITH

centuries through an examination of the critiques of Aragon advanced by Benjamin and

Celine. If Aragon mythologizes the arcade, Benjamin seeks to demystify the Surrealist myth
in Marxist terms, while CHine subjects it to nihilistic desublimation. In the process, Celine
implicitly challenges the extent to which Benjamin successfully dispels the illusions associated with the arcade, a question posed also in explicit terms by Theodor Adorno. In their
different ways, Benjamin and Celine work through the intellectual and political legacy of
nineteenth-century
autodidact socialism, with its idiosyncratic combination of materialist
and esoteric elements, an ambiguous tradition that for both is embodied in the arcade itself

A Brief History of the Passage

The passage, or arcade, is essentially a covered walkway lined with shops and represents the
major retail and leisure innovation of the early nineteenth century. Typically a converted
alley between two existing buildings, its enclosed space, protected from the elements by a
glass roof, allowed a different kind of shopping and social experience in a changeable
northern climate at a time when pedestrian negotiation of streets could be an unpleasant
and even risky business. The earliest surviving Parisian arcade is generally agreed to be the
Passage du Caire of 1799, built in the first flush of Egyptomania following Napoleon's
colonial and scientific expedition to North Mrica, complete with pseudo-hieroglyphics.
Beyond the orientalist decor, which led many commentators to compare the passage to a
Middle Eastern souk or bazaar, the structure and architecture of the arcade anticipates many
modem building techniques, most notably the use of glass and iron in the roof, and the
serial or modular structure of the retail outlets. Like Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace of 185I,
the arcade represents one of the prototypes of the International Modem Style of architects
such as Le Corbusier. The popularity of the design reached its high-point in France under
the Restoration and the early July Monarchy, before entering a slow decline consolidated
by the improvement of the external urban environment and the development of the department store from the I860s on. By the early twentieth century, the Paris arcades were
moribund, home only to ailing small businesses and shopkeepers trading in the goods of a
bygone era. Such is the context for the treatment of the arcade in the work of Aragon,
Benjamin and Celine.3
Aragon's I.e Paysan de Paris (1926) opens with an elegiac evocation of the about-to-be
demolished Passage de l'Opera, and establishes the arcade as the privileged site of a modem
mythology, an inexhaustible source of evocatively obsolescent objects. Benjamin's Arcades
Project, his last, unfinished work pursued through the I930S but only published posthumously in 1982, takes the passage as the starting point for a wide-ranging archaeology of
nineteenth-century French urban culture. Celine's Mort credit (1936) recounts the story of
the son of petit-bourgeois shopkeepers who grows up in an arcade whose atmosphere is
defined by claustrophobia and paranoia, and who embarks on a series of unsuccessful careers
as delivery boy, salesman, and private secretary to an eccentric inventor. Each of these three
texts offers a different but related perspective on the arcade.

From A to Z to ABC:

Writing the Arcade

Benjamin's Arcades Project is an A to Z of the Paris passage, a retrospective encyclopaedic

enquiry, whose starting point is A for Aragon and destination Z for Zola. For Benjamin,

ARCADE AS HAUNT

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19

Aragon's Surrealism represents a rehabilitation of the arcade whose decline had been
mapped decades earlier in the Naturalist novel, most particularly in Zola's Therese Raquin
(1867), where an arcade that has seen better days supplies the fateful decor for a menage
trois ending in murder, guilt and recrimination (AP, pp. 203-04). But a reading of Celine's
Mort credit suggests that Zola's work does not in fact represent the definitive endpoint of
the decline of the arcade, and that the Surrealist recuperation does not pass unchallenged.
The guide to the arcade offered by the A to Z of Aragon to Zola finds an alternative, then,
in the ABC of Aragon, Benjamin and CeIine.4
As Benjamin notes, the twentieth-century rediscovery of the arcade is in the first place a
Surrealist achievement. Fascinated by the surviving remnants of nineteenth-century Paris
that served their cult of the merveilleux, defined as a psychic shock produced through the
incongruous juxtaposition of objects or a mysterious personal encounter, the Surrealists
haunted flea markets, pawnshops and secondhand stores in rundown areas of Paris and its
suburbs. The semi-derelict arcades with their faded and eccentric shops full of unlikely
goods from another age and customers of dubious morality offered a privileged terrain
for Surrealist investigation, one strewn with quirky antiques and inhabited by intriguing
characters.5 Surrealism could even be said to have been conceived in an arcade: in his
memoirs, the Spanish film director Luis Bufmel recounts how his parents spent their
honeymoon in a hotel in the Passage jouffroy, a honeymoon from which his mother
returned pregnant with her Surrealist son-to-be.6 But the most famous Surrealist account of
the arcades remains Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris, from which the following quotation
is drawn:

[La lumiere modeme de l'insolite] regne bizarrement dans ces sortes de galeries couvertes qui
sont nombreuses a Paris aux alentours des grands boulevards et que l'on nomme d'une fa<;on
troublante des passages, comme si dans ces couloirs derobes au jour, il n'etait permis a personne
de s'arreter plus d'un instant. Lueur glauque, en quelque maniere abyssale, qui tient de la darte
soudaine sous une jupe qu'on re1eve d'une jambe qui se decouvre. Le grand instinct americain,
importe dans la capitale par un prefet du Second Empire, qui tend a recouper au cordeau Ie plan
de Paris, va bientot rendre impossible Ie maintien de ces aquariums humains deja morts a leur vie
primitive, et qui meritent pourtant d'etre regardes comme les receIeurs de plusieurs mythes
modemes, car c'est aujourd'hui seulement que la pioche les menace, qu'ils sont effectivement
devenus les sanctuaires d'un culte de l'ephemere, qu'ils sont devenus Ie paysage fantomatique des
plaisirs et des professions maudites, incomprehensibles mer et que demain ne connaltra jamais.
(PP, p. 19)

Aragon details several important features of the Surrealist passage: the erotic frisson it elicits,
its abandonment by fashion, its relation to the ephemeral. For the Surrealists, the arcade
is an obsolete retail model threatened by modem urban development, and its obsolete
form is mirrored by the obsolescence of the shops and businesses housed within it. As its
name suggests, the passage is a space of transition, made for passing through, a space
containing transitory commodities, which are also in a psychoanalytic sense transitional
objects, carrying an erotic charge displaced from previous owners. As such, the arcade is the
perfect pilgrimage site for the Surrealist cult of the ephemeral, whose principal inspiration
is precisely the lapsed expiry date.
A further important aspect of Aragon's reading of the arcade, and one that provides
the starting point for the counter-readings of Celine and Benjamin, is its mythological
dimension. For Aragon, the arcade is an important element of a modem mythology, part

DOUGLAS SMITH

20

of a Surrealist attempt to re-enchant the disenchanted, rationalized world of bourgeois

industrial capitalism. It is a place of the revelation of the marvellous, a quite literally magic
space conceived in terms inherited from the esoteric and occult traditions of the nineteenth
century.
As Michel Beaujour has observed, Celine's response to Aragon's marvellous mythology
of the arcade is to subject it to radical desublimation? In fact, Celine's description of the
passage concurs with Aragon's in only one respect, namely the lack of light:
II faut avouer que Ie Passage, c'est pas croyable comme croupissure. C'est fait pour qu'on creve,
lentement mais a coup sur, entre l'urine des petits debs, la crotte, les glaviots, Ie gaz qui fuit.
C'est plus infecte qu'un de dans de prison. Sous Ie vitrail, en bas, Ie soleil arrive si moche qu'on
l'edipse avec une bougie. (MC, p. 572)

The Surrealist sanctuary of the ephemeral is thereby desecrated, transformed into a dark and
putrid sewer, an unsanitary prison, unfit for human habitation.
This last element unfitness for habitation - implies the fundamental difference
of perspective that separates Mort
credit from I.e Paysan de Paris. While Aragon gives
the passer-by's view of the passage, Celine gives the resident's; the casual Surrealist windowshopper is confronted by the desperate retailer, for whom the outwardly marvellous
spectacle of eclectic objects represents instead the imminent bankruptcy of unsold and
unsaleable stock. One consequence of this is the radically different phenomenology of
the object to be found in Surrealism and in Celine. However incongruous in itself or in
conjunction with its surroundings, the Surrealist object arguably retains its contours, the
strangeness of its new identity depending on the secure borders that mark it off from other
objects and enable it to move freely between different contexts:

Bizarre attrait de ces dispositions arbitraires: voila quelqu'un qui traverse la rue, et l'espace
autour de lui est solide, et il y a un piano sur Ie trottoir, et des voitures assises sous les cochers.
Inegalite des tailles des passants, inegalite d'humeur de la matiere, tout change suivant les lois de
divergence. (PP, p. 59)

For Aragon's aesthetic of collage, the Surreal shock of the meweilleux results not from the
intrinsic oddness of an isolated element but from the unlikely collision of two realities
within the context of a wider reality that serves to defamiliarize them: 'Mais Ie drame est Ie
conflit des elements disparates quand ils sont reums dans un cadre reel ou leur propre realite
se depayse'.8 In contrast to the object as an element of Surrealist collage, the Celiman object
rapidly loses its specific contours; an alternately jagged or viscous concentration of matter,
it stubbornly refuses to circulate smoothly as a commodity, preferring to snag on or stick to
any available surface and to accrete with other like objects in precariously teetering piles of
undifferentiated junk:
Jamais je n'avais vu si moche et tant d'horreurs ala fois '" Une gageure ... Un enfer de poche
... Tout ce qu'on ouvrait, c'etait infect ... Rien que des grimaces et des ludions ... en plombs
tarabiscotes, tortures, rafistoles degoutamment ... Toute la crise des symboliques ... Des bouts de
cauchemars ... [... J Tout rra devait se passer dans les doigts, ala ceinture, dans la cravate. <;a
devait se suspendre aux oreilles? '" C'etait pas croyablel ... Et puis il fallait que rra s'achete? (MC,
p. 671)

ARCADE AS HAUNT AND HABITAT

21

To the enchanted object-world of Surrealism, CHine opposes the nightmarish vision of

refractory and formless matter, forever on the point of dissolution and collapse, and
absolutely devoid of market value.9
Benjamin's view of the obsolete objects that wash up in the arcades is different again
and indicates the divergence between his critical approach to Aragon and CHine's. For
Benjamin, the object is primarily a commodity, and his aim in Marxist terms is to demystify
its fetishized image, to re-situate it within its wider social and economic context that has
been concealed by the operations of capitalist production. Ultimately, the deciphering
of the social meanings of individual commodities will dispel the greater mystification
of consumer society itself, understood as a vast phantasmagoria or optical illusion. For
Benjamin, Surrealism intuits certain characteristics of the commodity form that help to
demystify the social relations around it, even as in other respects the movement privileges
certain mystical or mythological meanings. In other words, Surrealism combines elements
of quasi-religious experience with moments of secular insight in what Benjamin terms
'profane illumination' .10 Benjamin's self-appointed task is then to secure the profane
character of the illumination, to re-historicize the Surrealist myth and retrieve its social
core:
Delimitation of the tendency of this project with respect to Aragon: whereas Aragon persists
within the realm of dream, here the concern is to find the constellation of awakening. While
in Aragon there remains an impressionistic element, namely the 'mythology' [... ], here it is a
question of the dissolution of 'mythology' in the space of history. (AP, p. 458)11

Benjamin's critical reading of Surrealism is premised upon his interpretation of the obsolescence of commodities in a capitalist economy. For Benjamin, modern capitalism produces
commodities in rapid cycles of fashionableness and obsolescence, in accordance with a
febrile rhythm that discards objects almost as soon as they are produced. Capitalist modernity is a place where alienation has not only saturated all aspects of human life but even
death itself, whose reified form stares back at us from the discarded consumer disposables
and depreciating consumer durables that surround us. Abandoned commodities then
become emblems of human fragility and finitude and the built-in obsolescence of the
commodity confronts us with our mortality as alienated labour-power. This is where the
Surrealist treatment of the object comes into play. From Benjamin's materialist perspective,
the Surrealists realized that the alienation of human mortality in the form of the obsolescent
commodity contained an explosive revolutionary potential. In the first place, the discovery
of the intrinsic obsolescence of all commodities under capitalism relativizes the social life of
the present as nothing more than an ephemeral style already dismissed by future fashion.
But this negative insight contains the potential to unleash a revolutionary will to change a
social and economic order based on obsolescence. As Benjamin writes:
Surrealism can boast an extraordinary discovery. It was the first to perceive the revolutionary
energies that appear in the 'outmoded', in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings,
the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five
years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them [... ] No-one
before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution - not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects - can suddenly be transformed
into revolutionary nihilism. (8, pp. r8r-82, translation modified)

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DOUGLAS SMITH

The revolutionary nihilism of Surrealism as identified by Benjamin contrasts dramatically

with the very different nihilism evident in CHine's response to the problem of obsolescence. For CHine as for Benjamin, capitalist modernity is an economic system marked by
death and obsolescence. The very title of Mort
credit indicates that even death does not
come free; once taken possession of in advance at birth, it must be paid off retrospectively
in instalments, in a kind of Heideggerian hire-purchase arrangement where being towards
death is refigured as a long-term loan, and where we simultaneously pay and decay as
we earn. If life for CHine is then biologically marked by death from the beginning, its
moribund character is exacerbated by the social and economic conditions of modernity,
which reduce life itself to the status of an obsolescent commodity. Obsolescence is in fact
in many respects the central theme of Mort credit, as the novel recounts the slow agony of
the Parisian petite bourgeoisie of small shopkeepers and artisans in their struggle to compete
against department stores and factory mass production in the years leading up to the First
World War.12
In their respective responses to Surrealism, then, Benjamin seeks to retain the revolutionary potential of the movement's emphasis on myth and the marvellous, understood as
the oblique expression of a valid materialist insight, while CHine opts rather for a nihilist
insistence on the abject, non-transcendent elements of arcade life. Surrealism's revolutionary nihilism is met with reactionary nihilism, and Benjamin's optimistic dialectical materialism with the fatalistic materialism of a world in terminal decay. But in proposing his
own versions of nihilism and materialism, Celine implicitly poses the question of whether
Benjamin's ostensibly revolutionary materialist reading of Surrealist mythology actually
succeeds in moving beyond the mythical. To use the critic's own terms, how profane is
Benjamin's own illumination?

The Architecture of Utopia

The question of Benjamin's relation to esoteric thought recurs in relation to a further
theme of the Arcades Project that is relevant here, namely that of utopia and its architecture.
In an intriguing fragment, Benjamin identifies Andre Breton and Le Corbusier as the
twin poles of early-twentieth-century
French culture: 'To encompass both Breton and
Le Corbusier - that would mean drawing the spirit of contemporary France like a bow,
with which knowledge shoots the moment in the heart' (AP, p. 459). For Benjamin, the
dialectical tension of twentieth-century Modernism is embodied in this juxtaposition of
poet and architect, Surrealism and Purism, primitivism and technology, the unconscious
and social engineering, the occult and an aesthetic of transparency. While Benjamin
certainly saw the arcade as the privileged site of Surrealism and its cult of the marvellous, he
also viewed the passage as the template for the utopian architecture of the communities
imagined by nineteenth-century French Socialism. The use of glass and iron, the collapse of
the distinction between outside and inside, the modular structure of infinitely extendible
units, all these features of the arcade echo the phalanstere of Charles Fourier or the
combined social and mechanical engineering of the Saint-Simonists, while, as mentioned
earlier, they anticipate also the light and hygiene of the International Style housing projects
envisaged by later figures such as Le Corbusier.

ARCADE AS HAUNT

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But if Benjamin's arcade offers the open possibility of utopian community, albeit nostalgically, CeIine's passage embodies the CEdipal claustrophobia of the single child living in
cramped conditions above his parents' shop, in perpetual fear and loathing of competing
and gossiping neighbours. The anxious downstairs daily grind of shop keeping on the verge
of bankruptcy is matched upstairs by the crushing weight of parental expectation and the
threat of domestic violence. In contrast to Benjamin, CeIine's arcade is a dystopia, so his
putative utopia is located elsewhere, first in the exiguous but exotic offices of Ferdinand's
ultimate employer, the inventor Courtial des Pereires, located in the Palais-Royal, and then
in the rural community founded by Des Pereires at Bleme-Ie-Petit.
Bleme-Ie-Petit is the last stage in Des Pereires's attempts to envisage a different kind
of human habitat and social organization. Appalled by the urban development of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Des Pereires first attempted to devise an alternative to the imposed slum housing of the Paris suburbs in the form of a 'chalet polyvalent',
a prefabricated, multipurpose housing unit that could be constructed and customized by its
users (Me, 869-']1). The venture failed, largely due to the fact that, on first being presented
to the public, its prototype was destroyed by the curiosity and acquisitiveness of crowds of
cannibalizing do-it-yourself enthusiasts. In a sense, this episode represents the failure of the
Modernist ideal of architecture within the novel, as a technologically sophisticated response
to the problems of modem urban living is thwarted by the destructiveness of the people it
is intended to serve. Des Pereires's ultimate response is to flee the city altogether and to
attempt to resurrect the ideal of the nineteenth-century utopia in the countryside.
Bleme-Ie-Petit is explicitly described as a Fourierist experiment, a phalanstere where
children from urban backgrounds are to be educated and improved through healthy
outdoor work and exercise (Me, 100S-II). Its educational mission is accompanied by a
technological one, as Des Pereires attempts to improve crop yields through exposing
vegetables and cereals to pulses of electricity. But the utopia gradually breaks down, since
the policy of allowing children to follow their impulses leads to their stealing from
neighbouring farms and having sex with the postman, while Des Pereires's agricultural
innovations result only in acres of rotting potatoes. In a sense, the fate of the community is
indicated from the outset in the form of the derelict farm in which it takes up residence;
the ramshackle and flimsy buildings, forever on the point of collapse, are never adequately
repaired or renovated, and their physical dilapidation anticipates the ultimate economic and
social disintegration of Des Pereires's utopia.
The Bleme-Ie-Petit episode is Celine's satirical critique of utopianism, in both its backto-nature and technologically advanced forms. If anything, the children are corrupted by
their exposure to nature, while the attempt to industrialize agriculture fails miserably. In
many respects, this section of the novel echoes Bouvard et Pecuchet, Flaubert's last comic
narrative about two Parisian autodidacts who retire to the country in order to embark on
a number of hilarious social and agricultural experiments, much to the bemusement and
amusement of the locals. Flaubert's novel is essentially a critique of the received ideas and
ideological stupidity that in his view characterized the civil society of Second Empire
France. Celine radicalizes Flaubert's critique of utopianism, in terms of a thoroughgoing
materialist nihilism. So the character of Des Pereires represents a nineteenth-century
tradition of self-education and popularization of science that has degenerated into pathological obsession and confidence trickery.13 The positivism of Auguste Comte (on whom
the character of Des Pereires is partly based) that inspired this autodidact tradition has itself
quite literally turned into religion and superstition, and is all the more readily manipulated

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DOUGLAS SMITH

for unscrupulous ends (MG, 924-27). For CHine, then, the radical utopian tradition of the
nineteenth century falls ultimately into the hands of cranks and crooks. Its positivist basis
turns into a blank cult of science that is in itself a form of superstition related to esoteric
thought, where the technology of electricity is all too easily aligned with the invisible occult
powers invoked by Theosophists and mediums. Des Pereires's personal fate underscores the
bankruptcy of this tradition as Celine sees it. Committed to the life of the mind and the
supremacy of intelligence over mere matter, he none the less reduces himself to an inanimate parcel of meat by committing suicide when confronted with the failure of his rural
utopia. For CHine's nihilistic materialism, as opposed to Des Pereires's mystical positivism,
matter, beyond which there is nothing, wins out over mind.
Notwithstanding its very different character, Benjamin's work is equally engaged with
the utopian tradition of the nineteenth century. His interest in the possibility of profane
illumination through Surrealism opens up the perspective of relations between the utopian
French socialist tradition and contemporary occult beliefs and practices. His attempt to
retain the radical charge contained within the esoteric dimension of art and politics helps to
explain the complex and hybrid nature of his Marxism, aptly described by Margaret Cohen
as 'Gothic Marxism' .14This emphasis on the mystical accounts also for the reservations that
Benjamin's work elicited among fellow Marxists such as Theodor Adorno.

Between Magic and Materialism

The correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin constitutes an extended methodological argument. Essentially, Adorno disliked what he viewed as the lack of adequate
mediation in Benjamin's work, in other words, the latter's tendency to move directly from
a detailed inventory or examination of cultural artefacts and practices to a general invocation of economic context, with little or no discussion of the complex and differentiated
relations between the two dimensions. Such a leap from superstructure to base represented
for Adorno the worst kind of vulgar Marxism, combining a positivist fascination with brute
facts with a quasi-mystical belief in capitalism as the Ultimate Cause and Prime Mover of
the universe. As Adorno wrote to Benjamin in a letter of 10 November 1938, 'if one
wished to put it very drastically, one could say that your study is located at the crossroads
of magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched' .15 And of course, the subsequent development of Celine's work, which is also located between the magic and positivism of the
tradition represented by Des Pereires in Mort
credit, demonstrates just how bewitched
this spot is: disillusionment with magical positivism can easily lead to nihilist materialism
and then fascism. But in another sense, of course, Adorno is missing the very point of
Benjamin's work, whose aim is precisely the exploration of the bewitched spot between
magic and positivism that is none other than the passage itself as site of profane illumination.
Benjamin, as a student of Surrealism, is interested primarily in the cognitive shock value of
abrupt transitions and juxtapositions between concrete and abstract, material and magical.
The Arcades Project as a whole is dedicated to the possibility of opening up new horizons of
thought through such a method, horizons closed off by more rigid Marxist models such as
Adorno's.16 As Benjamin states in relation to his own approach to his materials: 'Method
of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show' (AP, p. 460). The
rigorous but narrow intellectual work of mediation advocated by Adorno is here replaced
by the suggestive compositional play of juxtaposition.

ARCADE AS HAUNT

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Habitat and Haunt

In conclusion, I want to consider briefly how the passage relates to more recent conceptualizations of space. It could be said that the arcade begins as a kind of 'non-lieu' or nonplace, in Marc Auge's sense an anonymous infrastructural shopping thoroughfare
designed primarily for people to pass through in large numbers.17 As obsolescence sets in,
the arcade gradually becomes a 'heterotopie', or heterotopia, to use the term coined by
Michel Foucault - a marginal space for the activities of excluded or deviant groups (such
as Celine's petite bourgeoisie or Aragon's Surrealists).18 Finally, in recent years, the passage
has become a 'lieu de memoire', as defined by Pierre Nora, a symbolic object of cultural
memory whose integration into the national heritage has been ratified through programmes
of renovation and gentrification.19 But equally it might be said that the Parisian arcade in its
present form embodies these three types of space not in historical sequence but all at once.
For if some passages currently retain a viable and lively commercial function, others have
fallen into a shabby and seedy neglect from which they have not emerged, while yet others
have been rehabilitated as sites of heritage and tourism. In this respect, the arcade at the
beginning of the twenty-first century is simultaneously 'non-lieu', 'heterotopie' and 'lieu de
memoire', a multiple identity made possible in theoretical terms by the fact that neither the
arcade nor any of these subsequent models conceives of space as habitat. None addresses
Celine's fictional critique of the viability of certain spaces, including the arcade, as places
to live and work. What the comparison with contemporary spatial models ultimately
reveals is that, in spite of Celine's counter-reading, the general cultural significance of the
arcade throughout the twentieth century resides less in its status as a habitat than as a haunt.
For the passage is a haunt in at least two senses: first, as a place frequented in passing by
twentieth-century j1lmeurs such as Aragon and Benjamin; and secondly as a paradoxical
home to the absent ghosts of nineteenth-century socialist and esoteric thought. Notwithstanding its affinities with subsequent models of space, then, the arcade retains its own
identity, partly because of the strength and interest of the literary and theoretical texts it has
generated, but also because of the specific character of the place itself, with its idiosyncratic
combination of the obsolescent and the modem, the magical and the material, the utopian
and the quotidian. To paraphrase Adorno while reversing his value judgement, the arcade
is a bewitched spot whose spell continues to fascinate.

I would like to acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social
Sciences, whose funding of a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship enabled me to complete
the work presented in this article.
1 See Louis Aragon, I.e Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris: Gallimard, 1995), and Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades
Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999). Further
references to these editions are given in parentheses in the text, using the abbreviations PP and AP
respectively.
2 See Louis-Ferdinand
CHine, Mort
credit (1936), in Romans, ed. by Henri Godard, 4 vols (paris:
Gallimard, 1981-93), I, 507-1104. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text,
using the abbreviation MG.
3 For a comprehensive
history of the arcade in Paris and elsewhere, see Johannes Friedrich Geist,
I.e Passage: un type architectural du XIXe siecle, trans. from the German by Marianne Brauch (1969; Brussels:
P. Mardaga, 1989).

26

DOUGLAS SMITH

4 For a reading that stresses the arcade as a predominandy

Naturalist topos, briefly appropriated by Surrealism, but more broadly characterized by the line that stretches from Zola to CHine, see Michel Meyer,
Le Paysan de Paris d'Aragon (paris: Gallimard, 2001), pp. 85-86.
5 On the importance
of the passages for the Surrealists, see Marie-Claire Bancquart, Paris des sum?alistes
(Paris: Seguers, 1972), p. 14 and pp. 85-86, and Kiyoko Ishikawa, Paris dans quatre textes narratifs du
surrealisme: Aragon, Breton, Desnos, Soupault (paris: L'Harmattan, 1998), pp. 128-29.
6 See Luis Bunuel, Mon dernier soupir (paris: Robert Laffont, 1982), p. 94.
7 See Michel Beaujour,
'La Quete du deIire', Cahiers de I'Herne 'L.-F. Celine', 3 & 5 (1972), 285-302
(pp. 286-87).
8 See Louis Aragon, 'La Peinture au defi' (1930), in Les Collages (Paris: Hermann,
1965), pp. 31-61 (p. 54).
On the essentially realist nature of collage in Aragon, see Nathalie Piegay-Gros, L'Esthetique d'Aragon (Paris:
SEDES, 1997), p. 121. For wider surveys of the theory and practice of collage in Aragon's work, see
Wolfgang Babilas, 'Le Collage dans l'reuvre critique et litteraire d' Aragon', in Revue des Sciences Humaines,
151 (1973), 329-54, and Marc Chassal, Aragon/Peinture/Ecriture:
la peinture dans l'&riture des Cloches de Bale
a la Semaine Sainte (Paris: Editions Kime, 1999), pp. 42-49.
9 On the phenomenology
of the object in Celine, see Jean-Pierre Richard, Nausee de Celine (paris: Fata
Morgana, 1973), and Marie-Christine Bellosta, Le Capharnaum celinien, ou, la place des objets dans Mort
credit, Archives des Lettres Modemes, 164 (Paris: Minard, 1976).
10 See Walter Benjamin, 'Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European
Intelligentsia' (1929), in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, ed. by Peter Demetz (New
York: Schocken Books, 1978), pp. 177-f)2 (pp. 179-80). Further references to this edition are given in
parentheses in the text, using the abbreviation S. For a reading of Benjamin focused on the notion of
profane illumination, see Margaret Cohen, Profane fllumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist
Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
11 For a discussion of the relations between
Aragon's and Benjamin's views of the arcade, see Jacques
Leenhardt, 'Le Passage comme forme d'experience: Benjamin face Aragon', in Walter Benjamin et Paris:
coUoque international, 27-29 juin 1983, ed. by Heinz Wismann (paris: CerE, 1986), pp. 163-'72, and Josef
Fiirnkas, 'Das Ephemere der Geschichte: Louis Aragon und Benjamin', in Bucklicht Mannlein und Engel der
Geschichte: Walter Benjamin, Theoretiker der Moderne, ed. by Margarethe Gerber et al. (Berlin: Heenemann/
Werkbund-Archiv,
1991), pp. II6-23.
12 For contrasting views of CHine's representation
of the crisis of the petite bourgeoisie, see Nicholas
Hewitt, 'Mort
credit et la crise de la petite bourgeoisie', in Australian Journal of French Studies, XIII, nos
1-2, pp. II 0-1 7, and Pascal lfri, 'Une reconsideration
de 1a crise de la petite bourgeoisie dans Mort credit',
in Actes du coUoque international L.-F. Celine de Paris (1er-5 juillet 1994) (paris: Du Lerot & Societe d'Etudes
CHiniennes, 1996), pp. 105-12. Hewitt endorses CHine's vision of tum-of-the-century
lower-middle-class
life as overshadowed by the threat of imminent bankruptcy, while Ifri contests it as historically, if not
psychologically, inaccurate.
13 On this tradition and CHine's relationship to it, see Philippe Muray, Le XIXeme
Siecle travers les ages
(paris: Gallimard, 1984), 'Mort
credo: CHine, Ie positivisme et l'occultisme', in Actes du colloque international L.-F. Celine de La Haye (25-28 juillet 1983) (Utrecht: CHine Genootschap, 1983), pp. 95-II6, and
'Le Siecle de CHine', in L'Infini, 8 (1984), 31-40; and Yves Pages, Les Fictions du politique chez L.-F. Celine
(paris: Seuil, 1994).
14 See Margaret Cohen, Profane fllumination,
pp. 1-15.
15 See Adorno to Benjamin, 10 November
1938, in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. by Ronald Taylor (London:
Verso, 1980), p. 129.
16 For a useful summary and explication of the methodological
divergence between Benjamin and Adorno,
see Giorgio Agamben, 'Le Prince et Ie crapaud: Ie probleme de la methode chez Adorno et Benjamin', in
Enfance et histoire: destruction de l'experience et origine de l'histoire, trans. from the Italian by Yves Hersant (1978;
Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2002), pp. 187-215.
17 See Marc Auge, Non-lieux:
introduction
une anthropologie de la surmodernite (paris: Seuil, 1992).
18 See Michel Foucault, 'Des espaces autres' (19671r984), in Dits et &rits 1954-1988,
ed. by Daniel Defert
and FranlYoisEwald, 4 vols (paris: Gallimard, 1994), IV, 752-62.
19 See Pierre Nora, 'Entre memo ire et histoire: la problematique
des lieux', in Les Lieux de memoire, ed. by
Pierre Nora, 3 vols (paris: Gallimard/Quarto,
1997), I, 23-43.