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Annotation Left Bank Dream stages three characters longing for Paris. Their longing for place and the poetry of exile converge in the iconic figure of Charles Baudelaire. Recognized after his death and subsequently revered by surrealists and modernists as perhaps the greatest modern European poet, Baudelaire in his own time frightened many of his literary contemporaries with his gritty and sublime portrayal of the city, and the concomitant reshaping of poetic and aesthetic conventions. The Berlin writer and critic, Walter Benjamin, is the second historical character. He appears in Paris seventy years after Baudelaire's death. Baudelaire conceived of his own exile in his native city in circumstances that he had not planned, but Benjamin's exile, a victim of the Nazis, led him in search of his favorite poet - the key to his reading of modernity - in the same way that he had once followed a woman he loved back to her native Russia. Benjamin follows Baudelaire's traces throughout the streets of Paris. The story of Benjamin reading the poetry of the modern world in Baudelaire's notations of Paris shapes the views of the fictional narrator, the third character who arrives in Paris some seventy years after Benjamin's death. She walks along the quais and across the bridges, the river transforms the sky. Paris - Baudelaire-Ville - becomes a kind of detective story that unfolds the evidence of love in poetry, created in a network of chance encounters. The text unfolds in two night-stories as Charles the poet and Walter the critic pursue their constructions of the city, Paris, one image at a time. It is a love story, across continents, a suggestive encounter that is almost virtual, a blank page of borderline emptiness on one side, and a lurid fantasy life on the other. Which one is real? Each of the characters has a different answer. There is also a story that connects the Second Empire poet, stalking his unknown women as they advance through the city streets, with the critic in exile reliving the poetry in ecstatic bursts. The critic takes his passion for the underground life of the lost city to the national library, he reads and takes notes in a tiny cryptographic handwriting, as if he were a spy or someone watching through a keyhole. Like a figure in a silent film by the French director Germaine Dulac, there is a woman looking for answers in Baudelaire's poems. She reads them as a kind of divination. Their beautiful and harsh cries of love and anger vibrate against the thin walls of old apartment buildings in the early morning when you have the lights on because you can't fall asleep. The sky is strictly neutral, the voices are red. She is the narrator, who came a long way from the ghost world of a lost city, like Andromaque in mourning, the captive Swan who portrays exile in metamorphosis, or the foreign women walking through the underworld of streets. She wants to live; she waits for a sign (a hope of return) from the poet. Halfway between the poet's time and the now of the reader, the critic is caught in a darker time. With no money and no papers, he goes underground in Paris. In Baudelaire-Ville, he brings history up to the light of the future. The narrator is a writer who has fallen in love with a man from the hard high mountains of Europe. He is volatile and unpredictable. He gives love and takes it back, as if he were a god. She grows accustomed to watching the train pull out, the blue light and the red. On the banks of the Seine river and at the edges of the dream that offers a fantastic possession of the image of Paris, her part of the story joins the others. |
