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universe through his grandmother’s bourgeois decorations, travel collections and the enduring heavy furniture of the 1870s, which emanates a sense of eternity in the apartment.
Benjamin’s detailed description of “her carpeted alcove” and “large
comfortable handwriting” (86), and “the oriental carpets as though they still concealed the dust of Samarkand” (87) clearly demonstrates his passion for this “cosmopolitan”
(86) house. Meanwhile, Benjamin’s awareness of his “almost immemorial feeling of bourgeois security” (88) emanated from the inventories in this apartment is
distinctive. It shows Benjamin’s feelings of comfort and familiarity. The world is seemingly condensed in the residence of his grandmother. The whole cosmos comes quite near and dwells in this interior because her travel souvenirs like all “postcards”
breathe in the air of Blumeshof, to which young Benjamin is profoundly drawn, more so than his paternal grandmother’s house.11 It is an Elysium for Benjamin, a realm inhabited by shades of the immortal spirit of his grandmother who passed away.
Thanks to his spatial experiences in the “most cosmopolitan” residence, young Benjamin’s vision of the whole universe becomes much wider through his
imaginative capabilities, which is quite similar to James’ cosmopolitanism. With a perceptive mind and free imaginations, young Benjamin receives his initiations of the distant worlds through his grandmother’s collections from all over the world.
2.4 A Cosmopolite Homing Elsewhere
Topophilia is enriched by cultural diversities in physical environments while it is comprised of an affective tie or empathy with the things in places. Every spatial movement contains both the extinguishment of national boundaries and a re-setting of
11 Benjamin’s maternal grandmother, a widow, was living opposite of his paternal grandmother for years.
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perspectives. For philosophers like Bachelard, in the continual movement between here and elsewhere, the physical boundaries are extinguished through mental activity.
In The Poetics of Spaces, Bachelard states that there are the “world-conscious”
philosophers who “discover a universe by means of the dialectical game of the I and the non-I” (4). We could see the “I” as the primitive home; the “non-I” as other physical environments, which phenomenologically are away from the inhabited space where one is originally from. One may always recollect homely intimacy of one’s early life through one’s own mental activity.
In a similar way, in his article “Imperial Panorama” (42-44) in his Berlin Childhood around 1900, Benjamin describes his initiation into a distant world from contemporary novelty — an art form like “Imperial Panorama” (Kaiserpanorama), which brings the distant world to its audience.12 Benjamin writes that “Distant worlds were not always strange to these arts [Imperial Panoramas]. And it so happened that the longing such worlds aroused spoke more to the home than to anything unknown”
(44). By seeing through the circular screen from each double window of the Imperial Panorama, the audience may gain an impressive spatial experience. Each picture would pass through each circular screen, and the audience may view through “a double window into the faintly tined depths of the image” (43). Each picture seen through the circular screen from each window permeates mysteriously an unknown world, especially for the curious children. The world is instantly accessible through each picture — from a curious child’s creative imagination. In a sense, by exerting one’s mental activity like the Benjaminian or Jamesian imaginative capability, consequently, one may home elsewhere.
12 In his Berlin Childhood around 1900, Benjamin introduces the imperial panorama as an art form surviving in the nineteenth century and dying out with the coming of the twentieth century. The travel scenes could be found from one’s viewing the circular screen through each double window of the imperial panorama while one seats in each station that surrounds each double window. (42-43)
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In a similar sense, the Jamesian cosmopolite, like the traveler, makes spatial movement in order not only to obtain different stimulations but to broaden visions.
Different physical landscapes are usually interwoven with one’s self-identification, which is a process of self-discovery as well as a process of homing. Bachelard’s
“world conscious” is relevant to the primitive experiences in childhood. It could be regarded as a perspective complimentary to the Jamesian spirit of cosmopolitanism.
Bachelard recognizes our physical house as our first universe, a real cosmos, a corner of the world. People may look at its nature intimately, “a primitiveness which belongs to all” (4) if they are willing to exert their mental activity. The philosophers imbued with “world-conscious” embrace a whole universe by means of day-dreaming. The idea that “the values of inhabited space, of the non-I that protects the I” (5) reveals that the being-here (“I”) is always supported by the being-there (“non-I”). No matter where we go, either in different new houses or travelling in new landscapes, the memory will always come back to us. Through one’s mental activity like
day-dreaming, we retain the treasures of childhood days in the various dwelling places in our later lives.
However, what makes the two different is that James emphasizes much more concrete spatial experiences while Bachelard focuses more on one’s mental activities.
The philosophers adhere to the primitive home in their minds since their minds could transcend any physical confinement. A Jamesian cosmopolite in different places embraces the similar trait of homing through his empathy with spatial things. For James, the curiosity to pursue cultural diversities serves as a main drive for his spatial movement. His novel-writing is a practice of presenting different dimensions of life by each of the “parts” (“Art of Fiction” 6) in life; mapping the fragmental facts and objects together discloses their connections. In other way, one may perceive numerous
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implications from the surface of things. In a few words, a novelist should seek not only to represent life, but to suggest spatial implications. One’s keen observations and imaginative capabilities of reading spatial revelations are pivotal for a writer. What is at stake here is that the premise for experience-acquiring is to make spatial movement
— through travelling. Not like a regionalist who is bounded by local idiosyncrasies, the Jamesian cosmopolite not only makes spatial movement but also thinks
universally.
For James, the curiosity for cultural diversities serves as a main drive to get oneself assimilated into different places, which provides diversified cultural
complexities. Only through the depictions of shifting locales does James present his unique observance of cultural diversities in different places. In his “Occasional Paris,”
James describes both senses of intimacy with the “familiar figure” (79) of the Paris ouvrier (“worker”) who “swarms in thousands, not only in the region of the
Exhibition, but along the great thoroughfare — the Avenue de l’Opera — which has just been opened in the interior of Paris” (79-80).
The Paris ouvrier with his democratic blouse, his expressive,
demonstrative, agreeable eye, his meagre limbs, his irregular, pointed features, his sallow complexion, his face at once fatigued and animated, his light, nervous organisation, is a figure that I always encounter again with pleasure. (86)
Like Baudelaire, a flâneur James’ seeking for the whole landscape in Paris demonstrates his intoxication with street images. His pleasure of encountering a passer-by, the familiar figure of the worker who might appear on every street in Paris unveils James’ infatuation with spatial images of ordinary people on streets. The fragmental images of the Paris ouvrier, “a figure that I always encounter again with
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his expressive, demonstrative, and agreeable eyes” mark out the origin of the flâneur’s great pleasure — his favor of diversified spectacles in a cosmopolitan Paris. The cheerful spatial experience is mixed up with excitements (“nervous organization”).
Therefore, James’ intoxication with things is essential to the flâneur’s topophilia. The flâneur’s quick glimpse of diversified images on street indicates his keen perception as well as an intimate excitement from his spatial experiences of the Parisian streets.
The cosmopolitan Paris is consequently the spatiality which exhibits both one’s topophilic feelings and a reverse manifestation of one’s embracing of cultural complexities. Paris is a synthesis of all these aspects imbued with these exotic elements and homely intimacy.
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Chapter Three Walking in Paris
The Ambassadors mainly centers on the revisit of the middle-aged American Strether in Paris. Nineteenth-century Paris is the main setting of the novel, and it is the city that leads to the problematic issues that this thesis intends to probe — how Strether’s topophilia is ignited through his walking. The first part of the chapter will discuss the context and distinguished features of the Benjaminian flâneur, the city walker in the nineteenth-century Paris. I will explore how the movement of “walking”
stands for a bodily practice of searching for homely intimacy in Paris. The second part will then move on to explore how Paris becomes a city for the flâneur like Benjamin and James, whose walking exhibits their homely intimacy in a distant world. The following discussions in the third part will testify how Strether’s walking practices the concept of the Benjaminian flâneur. The topographical analysis of Strether’s walking experiences, his flânerie in Bank Right and Bank Left of the Seine in central Paris, will be scrutinized. Strether’s walking exhibits not only his topophilia, but a gradual change of vision that shows his process of homing in Paris. Meanwhile, this chapter suggests that James’ topophilic emotion is akin to his figure Strether’s affective tie with Paris.