The Arcade as Haunt and Habitat: Aragon, Benjamin, Céline

Abstract

Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris (1926) established the moribund Parisian passage, or nineteenth-century shopping arcade, as the privileged site of a Surrealist mythology, where the casual passer-by is solicited by strikingly incongruous objects from another era. Aragon's work elicited a critical response from both Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project (1927–1940)) and Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Mort à crédit (1936)). While Benjamin insists on the economic context of the obsolescence of commodities that for him produces the Surrealist sense of the marvellous, Céline presents the arcade as a miserable habitat dominated by the fear of bankruptcy experienced by its petit bourgeois shopkeepers. For all their differences, the materialist views of the arcade presented by Benjamin and Céline 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 Céline's reactionary anxiety over obsolescence. The dominant early-twentieth-century view of the arcade is, then, that of a haunt rather than a habitat, a place frequented 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.