Blue Studios by DuPlessis Rachel Blau

Author:DuPlessis, Rachel Blau.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780817381837
Publisher: University of Alabama Press

8

The Gendered Marvelous

Barbara Guest, Surrealism, and Feminist Reception

Some constellations. In a discussion of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin states that the “conditions for a positive reception of lyric poetry” have become more problematic in modernity because of a “change in the structure of [people's] experience” (Benjamin 1969, 156). What has changed? The “replacement” of narrative by information and “of information by sensation” means that both “experience” and memory become more desiccated (Benjamin 1969, 159). Involuntary memory, the memory activated in poetry, has not been assisted but, in fact, prosthetically replaced by mass-market pictures, such as news photographs, that cathect an individual to a managed, commodified memory. This limits the emotional ground for the lyric, for, at its best (an important qualifier), the poem activates involuntary memory. At the same time, the stunned senses of exposure in urban crowds, the “defensive reaction to [the] attraction and allure” of the “masses” that Benjamin calls “shock” have increased (Benjamin 1969, 167). Thus the formulation: “The disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock” (Benjamin 1969, 194). That disintegration does not mean the disappearance of aura (particular emanations from an artwork that incite awestruck response) but its attenuation and splitting.

Shockingly enough, this shock is particularly located in the implacable gaze of certain females in modernity, underlining the impossibility of the saturated mutual gazes of lover to lover, or the gaze of yearning at an iconic female, as models for the look of “recognition” between viewer and artwork. Benjamin speaks of an ideal reciprocal gaze in which lyric poetry is received, a moment when all the “objects” in the poem seem to look back at the reader from a saturated distance.1 He takes it as a problem for the lyric when this reverberating gaze back does not occur, for it is this imagined look that creates aura. Aura is “the aura of distance opened up with the look that awakens in an object perceived” (Benjamin 1999, 314; see also 447). But something strange has happened to the lyric; a closed up, resistant, implacable gaze has been found in it, a “gaze in which the magic of distance is extinguished” (Benjamin 1999, 314). Whose gaze is this? From a Baudelaire poem, words given much status in this argument, it comes from “satyresses or water sprites [nixies]” (“Satyresses ou des Nixes”) in a gaze that resists the “plunging” glance of the [male] viewer.

Benjamin's commentary opens fascinating issues concerning the lyric and the female in modernity. If lyric aura occurs with the postulate of reciprocal gazing or yearning distance, then the blank “inhuman” stare of women on the street, in Baudelaire's world the stare of prostitutes, has helped to destroy aura, because aura draws on and resembles erotic desire, not commercialized sex (Benjamin 1969, 188). Perhaps it is the particular commodification of sex in modernity that stares back and challenges, given the fact that there have always been prostitutes; their existence as such is not a historical change. The smooth, nixielike, implacable stare of a female figure who

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