The Flaneur's Relationship to Marginal Types in The Old Acrobat

The Flaneur's Relationship to Marginal Types in The Old Acrobat

In Charles Baudelaire’s “The Old Acrobat,” the flaneur describes his encounter with a fallen figure who eventually reveals the lack of humanity in the city people’s hardened hearts. The flaneur finds comfort in people with border personality types because he can easily relate to them. He is an idler in a world which concentrates on excess, over-stimulation and one of which runs on a constant invisible ticking clock that pushes the masses towards desensitization and unhappiness. These, among many other pretentious things, make him seek out the uncommon populace, a breed of seemingly raw people who live their lives in front of the world’s eyes. He is bored and uninterested in the ennui, commonplace people who make up the majority of society because they can create facades to shield their faults from the world’s view. Rather than concentrating on the mundane and masked life of the middle and upper class, the flanuer focuses his attention towards the transient, eccentric “drifting clouds”1 who are not a part of the active social milieu.

In “The Old Acrobat,” the flanuer is lured by the naturalistic and crude appearances of the street performers caused by society’s need for abstract stimulation. The acrobat is physically and mentally drained from performing straining and exhausting tasks for the gratification of others. The dominant scent at the carnival is “a frying odor”2 which hints that the performers are sacrificing themselves and literally “frying” their souls away to satisfy their hungry audiences. Even the acrobat is described as being “illuminated all too well by two burned-down candles”3 which are “dripping and smoking.”4 There is a sense of...

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...o ponder whether the flaneur’s attraction is self-destructive as he states, “I have just seen the image of the old writer who has survived the generation whose brilliant entertainer he was...debased by his wretchedness and the public’s ingratitude, and whose booth the forgetful world no longer wants to enter!”17

Notes

1. Charles Baudelaire, The Parisian Prowler, 2nd ed. trans. Edward K. Kaplan (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1997),

2. Baudelaire, The Parisian Prowler, 29.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 27.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 30.

17. Ibid.

Bibliography

Baudelaire, Charles. The Parisian Prowler. Trans. Edward K. Kaplan. 2nd ed. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1997.