Flanerie and Writing the City in Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory, Edmund White's The Flaneur, and Jose Cardoso Pires's Lisboa: Livro de Bordo
2 Graeme Gilloch, commenting on the unlikely re-emergence of the figure of the flâneur in contemporary theory, a figure he himself had written off as obsolete seven years earlier (see Gilloch 1992), declares that " the flâneur returns as the perspicacious pedestrian, a figure with privileged insights into, and precious knowledge of, the modern city. Resurrected and recast, the flâneur-as-historical-figure becomes the flâneur-as-heuristic fiction " (1999: 105). In short, the flâneur re-emerges as a way in which to expound a vision of the city. This essay will examine the way in which three contemporary works use flânerie, the activity of the flâneur, as a way of both investigating metropolitan space and constructing a textual representation of it. These works are: Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory, José Cardoso Pires's Lisboa: Livro de Bordo and Edmund White's The Flâneur, dealing with London, Lisbon and Paris respectively. Before moving on to the primary texts, it is important to delineate the features comprising the concept of flânerie in modern social and literary theory. The flâneur originally arose as an historical figure in the early nineteenth-century. Paradigmatically, he 1 was an aloof dandy of independent means, ostensibly idling away his time ambling through the Arcades of Second Empire Paris. However, beneath his cover of disinterest and detachment, the flâneur was an ever-observant artist who 1 The flâneur, as the French noun indicates, is a male figure. For a discussion of the problems and 3 used his perambulations to amass knowledge of the metropolis, as material for the production of literary, or journalistic, texts for later publication. His flickering existence was eventually extinguished in the mid-nineteenth-century, when the increasingly unfashionable Arcades became obsolescent. In addition to the disappearance of the flâneur's favourite haunts, according to Benjamin (1974), it was a combination of the historical figure's increasing identification with the commodity, together with the quickening pace and spatio-temporal reorganisation of metropolitan existence, that eventually led to the extinction of the flâneur. The passing of the historical figure paved the way for the resurrection of the flâneur as a methodological persona, adopted in order to pursue the exploration of the city. Stripped to its basic characteristics and used as a modus operandi for the writer, flânerie, as a scopic methodology, involves mobile observation on the part of an individual consciousness from the supposed viewpoint of a pedestrian city dweller. As Shields (Tester, 1994: 65) says " …