Drew Kyser

The Writing of Modern Life, Term Paper

Professor Helsinger
Winter, 2009

Reading the Etcher’s Hand:

Legible Identity and the Collapse of the Aura

The etching revival that began in Western cities around the middle of the nineteenth-

century grew alongside the developing modern metropolis. The Parisian poet, Charles

Baudelaire, who was the first critic to adopt the term modernist to describe the urban, social

scene emerging at this time, wrote extensively on the etchings of Charles Meryon and his

contemporaries. Baudelaire‟s assessments express a fascination with the ability of etchings to

maintain and transmit the particular personality of the artist through each print; he often figures

this ability in a metonymy that connects the etched line to the artist‟s hand, and the artist‟s hand

to the artist‟s mind.

This fascination of Baudelaire‟s with the legibility of identity in etching is multiply

echoed by much of the rhetoric surrounding the etching revival, and is taken up by artists and

critics alike. The traditional retrospective account of this phenomenon views it as the

manipulation and adaptation of the marketplace to legitimize etching, emphasizing its

authenticity to raise its economic and cultural value. However, the labor involved in promoting

these connections between the prints and the artists as individuals, overshoots the mark of what

is necessary to merely establish authenticity. Benjamin‟s notion of auratic collapse provides a

compelling corollary to the economically and culturally market-driven explanation commonly

cited for the concatenation of personality to the etched image. Moreover, an explanation

expanded to include Benjamin‟s social critique may connect this proclivity, so evident in the

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rhetoric surrounding the etching revival, and in the over-determined signatory practices of

individual artists, to the similar valuation of signature and handwriting in late nineteenth-century

literary and scientific culture.

Issues of transitive, unfixable identity suffuse much of Charles Dickens‟s novel Bleak

House (1852-53); in Dickens‟s novel, it is difficult to locate any construct upon which one can

pin identity surely and unambiguously. Yet, within a space where a woman can hurry past her

pursuers unnoticed under a borrowed shawl, where a boy can be driven to terror by a parade of

indifferentiable women, and where our protagonist‟s face can transform completely in some few

weeks, there remains something so uniquely personal and unchangeable as to offer an absolute

guarantee of identity: one‟s handwriting. Lady Dedlock knows Captain Hawdon‟s handwriting

immediately even though it had been pressed into the rigors of a “law hand” (Dickens, 23). And

it only takes a moment‟s glance at the letter George brings him for Tulkinghorn to discern the

„real‟ identity of the dead scribe, Nemo (ibid., 511). In Bleak House, handwriting constitutes

material evidence, as unmistakable and irrefutable as a fingerprint.

Dickens is not alone in this conception either; handwriting and signature come to fulfill a

central and recognizable role in late nineteenth-century detective fictions especially. Even

earlier a villain than Tulkinghorn had already recognized the identifying quality of script and

stumbled upon the secret of another prominent lady. The Minister, D----- of Poe‟s short story,

“The Purloined Letter” (1844), comes to his position of power by immediately recognizing in the

handwriting of an address, the identity of the letter‟s author and the compromising position in

which such a letter‟s discovery would place its unspecified addressee.

Later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‟s Sherlock Holmes often gleans more from the

handwriting than the contents of a letter. In a long analysis of one such letter Holmes asserts

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that, not only can one deduce from their handwriting, the age of a person to the correct decade,

but also discern blood lines within familial samples. In Robert Louis Stevenson‟s famous novel

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), it is Henry Jekyll‟s signature on a cheque

cashed by Edward Hyde that first sparks suspicions and, though at times he takes pains to

disguise it, Jekyll‟s handwriting is the only concrete element to survive his transformations.

The notion that a fixable identity inheres in handwriting should not be seen as merely a

fashionable, rhetorical tool adopted by artists and critics; social sciences at this time also

embrace this conceit. The latter half of the nineteenth-century witnesses the birth of modern

graphology. In her study, Handwriting in America, Tamara Plakins Thornton asserts that

Adolphe Desbarolles‟s and Abbe Jean-Hippolyte Michon‟s 1872 book, The Mysteries of

Handwriting: The Art of Judging Men from their Autographs, acted as a bridge between the

arcane palmist and astrological traditions of chiromancy and graphology‟s eventual place in

psychology and forensic science (92). Graphology not only assumes the singularity of

handwriting (that an individual can be unfailingly identified from handwriting samples), but also

purports to scientifically catalogue the inherent psychological significance of certain recurring

elements across script samples generally. Thornton notes that much of the early work done to

legitimate the scientific nature of graphology revolves around the idea of the unconscious gesture

– that even under willful manipulation, an individual‟s handwriting not only does transmit, but

cannot conceal certain characteristics of her „real‟ personality (94). According to this emerging

science of graphology, the identity legible in the written line is not merely a surface, nominal

one, but a much deeper identity. Here, handwriting offers a window into personality and acts as

a social artifact by which an individual may come to be richly known.

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 This metonymic identification of individuality with the hand and the unmediated transfer

of personality to its lines also suffuse the critical rhetoric surrounding the etching revival.

Francis Seymour Haden claims that the etcher‟s line is “as personal as the handwriting,” and that

it is the child of “brain impulsion” (13). This double notion of the identification available in the

etcher‟s line neatly lays out two propositions that inform many of the accounts of etching at this

time, and identify the critical model that comes to define etching from the last half of the

nineteenth-century through the early part of the twentieth-century: that the identity of the artist is

legible within the lines of the print, and that these lines not only identify the artist, but provide a

direct connection to the artist‟s mind. Both of these points strive to establish authenticity within

each individual print by claiming an unbreakable bond between authorial presence, authorial

intent and the etched line.

In the case of this first tenet, that the identity of the artist is legible within the lines of the

print, the very production of each print is figured as a kind of signature. By this model, every

line serves as a paraph, and the total print becomes one complex, ideographic autograph.

Thomas Robert Way, in his 1905 monograph, The Art of James McNeil Whistler: an

Appreciation, makes this connection exceedingly clear. Way claims that all of Whistler‟s work

“bears the strong impress of his personality, and, slight as some of it appears to be, the „butterfly‟

signature is never really necessary as a means of identification. It is signed all over, and if in the

case of any picture purporting to be a Whistler it is found necessary to look for the butterfly

before all doubt is removed, it is quite certain that the work, if genuine, is not one of his

masterpieces” (98). This “butterfly,” Whistler‟s monogramatic pictogram of a signature will

come under consideration later, but Way‟s assessment accurately reflects the critical compulsion

to read the etcher‟s line like one would his handwriting or his autograph to fix identity.

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 The second proposition, that the etched line provides a direct connection to the artist‟s

mind, mirrors the work of graphology to imagine an unbreakable bond between the mind of an

individual and his handwriting. Baudelaire writes in his Art in Paris 1845-1862: Salons and

Other Exhibitions, “Not only does etching serve to glorify the individuality of the artist; it would

even be difficult for an artist not to describe his most intimate personality on the copper” (223).

This sentiment about the etched line echoes the claims of graphologists that handwriting, because

of its status as an unconscious gesture bodily transmitted to the page, cannot help but record an

individual‟s innermost personality. Alfred Whitman writes, in The Print-Collector’s Handbook

(1902), that “By this direct communication between the artist and his admirer, an intimacy is

established which brings the amateur face to face, as it were, with the master‟s mind, for no

agent, or middleman, stands between” (quoted by Tedeschi, 36). In the case of etching, the

availability of the artist‟s personality in each print transforms these prints into sites of social

connection wherein the viewer can come to „know‟ the artist.

In her article, “The New Language of Etching in Nineteenth-Century England,” Martha

Tedeschi painstakingly tracks and examines these phenomena of individuality as they appear in

the criticism surrounding the etching revival. Tedeschi compiles a choir of contemporary critical

voices that excellently illustrate these preoccupations with the autographic nature of the print, as

well as the print‟s ability to transmit personality. She argues that these phenomena actively

participate in the creation and aggrandizement of a market for etching in two steps: first, by

divorcing etching from its amateur connotations and associating it, through painter-etcher

practitioners, with high art; and second, by harnessing for etching the accepted status of high art

as an object of connoisseurship, and to this end, developing a new aesthetic sensibility among the

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cultural elite (26). The goal of these rhetorical moves is to raise the value of etching in the

intertwined arenas of cultural and monetary exchange:

Promotion of the new aesthetic meant proposing an alternative

set of artistic criteria that could be translated in the
marketplace into monetary value. Because etching was
marketed as a direct, unmediated link to the mind of the artist,
the character of the painter-etcher himself … became a
principal component of value. (“The New Language of
Etching in Nineteenth-Century England,” 32)

Tedeschi sees the role of this rhetoric of identification as that of a marketing ploy. By this

account, these etchings are made into transparent commodities. The social relationships that are

inherent in all production become the measurable determinants of cultural and exchange value in

the economy of the late nineteenth-century. The value of etchings as commodities in the

marketplace depends on their perceived status as placeholders for the absent artist as individual

(the etching as signature), and their ability to act as social artifacts, facilitating a relationship

between the artist and the viewer.

Tedeschi‟s argument is thorough, sound and convincing; yet this economic model cannot

by itself account for the over-determined signatory practices evinced in the etchings of this

period, nor even the fanaticism with which this rhetoric of identification is pursued by artists and

critics. The sheer volume of quotes from collectors, critics and artists themselves that resound in

so fervid a register in Tedeschi‟s article, belies a level of fascination with the individually

identifying character of etching that seems hardly commensurate with a purely economic motive.

Further, an examination of several plates from various artists prominent in the etching revival

reveals a signatory practice so complex and multivalent that it far outstrips the labor necessary to

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establish authenticity, especially if authenticity is safeguarded in the lines of the work itself, as

the rhetoric so often proclaims.

Two sites of identity, available in the critical discourse examined above, handwriting and

the etched line, are excellently wedded in Charles Meryon‟s etched verses (fig. 1). One should

not necessarily presume to say that this is Meryon‟s hand on display; however, the presence of

some hand is obvious. This uneven scrawl, filigreed and curlicued as it is, establishes its

presence against the uniformity of print and infuses each character with the metonymic liveliness

of a unique and individual hand. Further, Meryon‟s signature, at the base of the print (as author

and artist) matches the style of script seen in the verse. This is probably easiest to note in the

stylized “M” that appears constant between the title-cum-dedication at the top, the body of the

text (at the beginning of the seventh line), and the signature at the bottom. Meryon claims this

stylized hand (and thus the individuality that inheres therein) as his own by signing his name in

it; he takes pains to imbed his personality into the written/etched lines of the plate. This hand is

not constrained to one plate in particular either. If we look at the in-plate signature on Meryon‟s

etching, The Arch of the Notre-Dame Bridge, Paris (fig. 2), paying special attention to the

character of the “M” in his signature once again (fig. 2a, detail), we can see that this style is

stable, consistent, identifying.

Sir Frances Seymour Haden‟s use of written line in his print Hands Etching – O Laborum

(fig. 3), even though he employs block capitals with an even and steady hand, ensures the visible

presence of a hand, once again. His inscription of Horace‟s line Ô Laborum Dulce Lenimen (O

Sweet Solace of Labour), does not aspire to the uniformity of either printed text or similarly

engraved text. The bold lines comprised of several overworked, repeated passes with the needle

(fig. 3a, detail of text) not only belie the uniformity of engraved or printed text, they also point to

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the process of Haden‟s hand working these letters through the waxy ground: a formal indication

that is supported and repeated in the image of (presumably) his hands at work with the needle on

another plate. Though the style of his inscription does not match that of his signature (fig. 3b,

detail of signature) as Meryon‟s did, there is still significant work being performed by these

letters to etch the artist‟s presence onto the plate in his own hand.

Aside from these examples of text that comprise in whole or part, the image on the plate,

several artists at this moment are experimenting with modes of signature that might more firmly

inscribe their individuality on their work. Several of these experiments involve an imagistic

transformation of the artists‟ names or initials into sigil like figures. Meryon‟s sigil, created

from his initials and incorporating the alchemical symbol for copper (which is the same circle

and cross as the astrological symbol for Venus and the biological symbol for the female sex

(Stearn, 109)) appears on several of his etchings including Bain-froid Chevrier (fig. 4, detail of

signature fig. 4a). This sigil functions as an ideographic emblem of the artist and also nods to the

materiality of his medium; each print references its origin in the individuality of the artist and in

the material singularity of the plate from which it is pulled.

Better known and more remarkable than the monogramatic sigil of Meryon are the

pictographic character and transformations of James McNeil Whistler‟s etched signature. At

times Whistler is satisfied to attach his name to the plate prominently but in a manner that does

not trouble the relationship between signature and image, as in the bottom right corner of his

print, Black Lion Wharf (fig. 5). In other prints, Whistler moves his signature into more

prominent locations, pushing his signature and inscription into the plane of the image. This

practice is evident in Whistler‟s Title to the French Set (fig. 6). At times, Whistler‟s script even

blurs the line between signature and pictorial element; it‟s not clear whether his name on the

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wall, in Soup for Three Sous (fig. 7), is only a centrally placed signature over the image or a

visual element contiguous with the rest – Whistler‟s name as an act of singular vandalism on an

otherwise blank wall, perhaps.

Whistler‟s trend towards incorporating his signature as a pictorial element reaches its

peak with his authenticating butterfly. The Whistler butterfly, like Meryon‟s alchemical seal, is

another monogramatic sigil; its wings are delineated by the stacked “M” and “W” of McNeil and

Whistler, while the butterfly‟s long curving body is the “J” of James. In his print, Long Venice

(fig. 8), Whistler‟s butterfly appears in the lower left portion of the picture plane, in the empty

space of open water below the sky line of Venice (fig. 8a, detail of Whistler‟s butterfly

signature). Yet, the presence of Whistler‟s script signature (fig. 8b, detail of script signature)

below the image seems to make the butterfly redundant as an authenticating device. The viewer

is invited to see the butterfly, then, as an element of the image; Whistler‟s animistic signature is

the only sign of life, a butterfly fluttering over the water in the foreground.

The height to which this signing practice escalates is visible in two states of Buhot‟s 1879

etching, Landing in England. In the print‟s fifth and finished state (fig. 9), Buhot‟s presence, as

artist and individual, is so over-determined by signatory gestures that it is difficult to imagine

these signs as anything but compensatory. If one allows the rhetoric that figures an unmediated

connection between the artist‟s personality and the artist‟s line, then the largest signatory move is

constituted by the image itself. On top of this, Buhot‟s etched signature and date appear in the

lower right corner (fig. 9a, detail of script signature and date), his red owl stamp that attests to

his personal presence at, and approval of this pull (a stamp that, like Whistler‟s butterfly and

Meryon‟s odd sigil, makes an image of Buhot‟s name) appears below the plate, and his penciled-

in initials appear on the seal at bottom center (fig 9b, detail of red owl stamp and initials).

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 The print of the fourth state (fig. 10), adds yet more layers of authentication with Buhot‟s

signature style apparent in the symphonic margins at left (fig. 10a, detail of symphonic margin),

as well as a personal note detailing his estimation of this particular pull calling it his “fleur du

planche “ or flower of the plate (fig. 10b, detail of Buhot‟s note). These additions appear over

and above the inclusion of the authenticating owl stamp (fig. 10c, detail of the red owl stamp),

and script signature (fig. 10d, detail of script signature) also present in the finished state and

mentioned above. The lengths to which Buhot assures his own presence in the print, here, betray

a concern that goes beyond the necessities of marketing his work as authentic. These

individualizing gestures demonstrate a compensatory obsession with authenticity whose figures

appear to react to, yet cannot answer the slipping authenticity of a reproduction in an age of

reproductions.

By tying the artist‟s mind to his hand to his line, the rhetoric surrounding etching invokes

the artist‟s presence in each print despite the obviously mechanical production of each individual

image. By making his signature into a butterfly that flits above the water in front of a Venetian

skyline, Whistler imports himself into the very fabric of his reproducible image. These artists

and critics unblenchingly insist that each print is imbued with, and carries with it the physical

presence of the individual, even though it is certain that many of these prints were produced with

the artist notably in absentia. The rhetoric surrounding etching, the metonymy of the artist‟s

hand available in his line, the unmediated access to personality that is accorded to the

written/etched line, and the extravagance of signatory practices visible in these etchings indeed

function to raise the exchange and cultural values of these works in the marketplace; yet, at the

same time, all this also reflects the mad scramble of artists and critics to inject individuality and

personality into this newly revived art in the last half of the nineteenth-century. This

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preoccupation with the reproducibility of the individual, that gives rise to these over-determined

models of signature and the fever pitch of identifying rhetoric, resonate strongly with Benjamin‟s

notion of auratic collapse which is fixed in the modern city at precisely this historical moment.

Benjamin claims that the complex of distractions and signals, the ever-present din of

traffic and the inescapable jostling of the crowd, in short, the trappings of modern city life that

are exploding into the Paris of the late nineteenth-century, necessarily effect a change in

individual consciousness.

Moving through [the traffic of a big city] involves the

individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous
intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid
succession, like the energy from a battery. Baudelaire speaks
of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of
electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of the shock, he
calls this man “a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness.”
Whereas Poe’s passers-by cast glances in all directions which
still appeared to be aimless, today’s pedestrians are obliged to
do so in order to keep abreast of traffic signals. Thus
technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex
kind of training. (Illuminations, 175)

Benjamin‟s reference to Poe‟s “Man of the Crowd” (1840, a short story that Baudelaire very

much admired and translated into French) and quotation from Baudelaire‟s essay, “The Painter

of Modern Life” (1863), anchors his critique within a specific moment in the development of

Western urban modernity. A moment at which Benjamin fixes the beginning of an increasingly

stimulating modern city life. It also must be noted that this emerging modern city provides the

backdrop for every print mentioned above save Meryon‟s etched verse and Haden‟s disembodied

hands (fig. 1 and 3). Every other print either directly depicts a scene in Paris, London, or

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Venice, or invokes some city outside the frame by depicting a crowd of children or a bar full of

idling underlings.

Benjamin‟s deployment of the term “shock” attaches his critique to a psychoanalytic

notion of the role of the senses in the construction of consciousness. The particular valence

implicit in Benjamin‟s use of the term emerges when he refers the reader to Freud‟s essay,

“Beyond the Pleasure Principal” (1920). Quoting Freud at length, Benjamin accepts Freud‟s

idea that consciousness serves the same function as the more primitive, tangible, dead shell that

protects any living organism from “the effects of the excessive energies at work in the external

world” (Freud, 27). Freud posits that this shell allows these excessive energies “to pass into the

next underlying layers, which have remained living, with only a fragment of their original

intensity” (ibid, 27). This, he claims, is the role of consciousness: to protect the vital structures

of cognition behind a deadened, habituated membrane that allows for the transfer of stimulus at a

reduced and safer intensity. If consciousness functions properly by this account, then only the

most forceful of energies can penetrate through to affect the living tissue – here the unconscious,

which graphology informs us is the seat of personality. These external energies that would

threaten the living organism Benjamin labels “shocks” (“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 161).

According to Freud‟s analogy, there must be a correspondence between the strength of

the shield and the intensities of the forces that act upon it. He asserts that “as a result of the

ceaseless impact of external stimuli on the surface of the vesicle, its substance to a certain depth

may have become permanently modified” (Freud, 25). Here it is clear that such a shell as he

imagines consciousness to be, is formed in direct response to, and only in order to counter the

threat of these external stimuli. Further, Freud asserts the primary function of this shield to

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protect the organism from these stimuli over its ability to transfer stimulation to the organism

(Freud, 27). The role of consciousness is first to provide comfort.

When Benjamin highlights the rising concentration and intensity of shocks endemic to

modern city life, as well as their effect of isolating, of “blunt[ing]” the feeling of social

connectedness in individuals, his reference point is this model of consciousness (“On Some

Motifs in Baudelaire,” 174). By this model, the denizen of a modern city, subjected to these

shocks to a degree previously unimaginable, must develop a dead shell (consciousness) that is

thick enough to ensure her comfort – a dead shell thicker than any previously required. Only

then can she comfortably withstand the onslaught of shock at the level dispensed by the modern

metropolis.

However, the necessary result of such a thickening is to deaden the individual further to

all external forces, not just the threatening ones; among these external forces are all the

mechanisms of social interaction. In this amplified state of impenetrability, the individual is not

only protected from shocks but also isolated from her fellows. In support of this notion,

Benjamin quotes Valéry:

“The inhabitant of the great urban centers,” [Valéry] writes,

“reverts to a state of savagery – that is, of isolation. The
feeling of being dependent on others, which used to be kept
alive by need, is gradually blunted in the smooth functioning of
the social mechanism. Any improvement of this mechanism
eliminates certain modes of behavior and emotions.” Comfort
isolates; on the other hand, it brings those enjoying it closer to
mechanization. (“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 174)

When Benjamin relates this “smooth functioning of the social mechanism” to comfort, it is

impossible to miss the connection to his earlier adoption of Freud‟s model for consciousness. If

the role of consciousness is to insulate the individual against the shocks of external energies by
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virtue of its deadened habituation, thus ensuring her comfort; and if, in order to maintain this

comfort in an environment where these shocks come at greater speed and intensity than ever

before, the dead shell of consciousness must become thicker than ever before; and if, as a

necessary consequence of this increased protection, the individual becomes increasingly isolated

within society, then this growing dissociation inheres in the structure of the modern city and

infects the consciousness of its every participant.

This dissociation is crucial to Benjamin‟s claim that the aura‟s collapse is inherent in

modernity. Benjamin develops his concept of the aura in several works, most notably in “The

Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” and in “On Some Motifs in

Baudelaire.” Throughout these works, the core relation of the aura to sociality remains constant.

In fact, it is when people‟s eyes meet that the aura is most strongly perceptible (“On Some

Motifs in Baudelaire,” 188). The aura, though not always constituted by visible accents, nor ever

reducible to a visual effect, is most often bound to the gaze. This gaze is much more important

for its denotation of directed, focused attention, than for any connection to a particular sense

organ. Aura, after all, inflects inward perception as well, inhabiting the involuntary memory

(ibid., 186). Even while claiming the primacy of the gaze, Benjamin parenthetically

acknowledges the broader aim of his analogy:

But looking at someone carries the implicit expectation that

our look will be returned by the object of our gaze. Where this
expectation is met (which, in the case of thought processes, can
apply equally to the look of the eye of the mind and to a glance
pure and simple), there is an experience of the aura to the
fullest extent. (ibid., 188)

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The aura is more than a set of visible relations then; the aura is imbedded in all human

exchanges, both inter- and intra-personal.

Yet, the aura is not totally constrained to the interaction of individuals, an object may

obtain aura as well; however, the aura of objects remains founded in the same sociality as that

shared gaze between individuals. “The experience of the aura,” Benjamin writes, “rests on the

transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the

inanimate or natural object and man. … To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to

invest it with the ability to look at us in return” (“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 188). In

Benjamin‟s analysis, it would seem that the most common form this investment takes is the

ability to read an absent individual into the present object.

Writing about the difference between a story and information Benjamin binds the story to

the transmission of an experience (a term that has close ties to the aura through its association

with the involuntary memory C.f. sections II and III in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”) rather

than a happenstance “per se;” he offers that the story “bears the marks of the storyteller much as

the earthen vessel bears the marks of the potter‟s hand” (ibid., 159). He later asserts that “its [the

aura‟s] analogue in the case of a utilitarian object is the experience which has left traces of the

practiced hand” (ibid., 186).

The implied presence of the individual, so central to the over-determined authenticity of

the etching and its criticism, in Benjamin‟s analysis, functions as the foundation for any

experience of aura in an object. In “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological

Reproducibility,” Benjamin draws a close connection between a painting‟s aura and its

authenticity (21). This authenticity not only accounts for the character of a painting‟s uniqueness

(as over and against that of a forgery and thus connected to the artist as an individual) but its

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history as well. This history is itself a story of individuals owning, buying, selling and

maintaining the physical object.

In all of these accounts of the aura in objects, the overarching connection is to the

individual. It seems that any object may obtain aura precisely to the extent that it can be infused

with, and project the presence of the individual. This criterion for the presence of aura in an

object resonates strongly with the critical rhetoric surrounding the etching revival and indicates a

different aim of the over-determined signature practices discussed above.

Whether the aura is experienced inwardly through the enchantment of an involuntary

memory that has not been subsumed in the death of conscious memory, in a direct social

interaction as in a reciprocated gaze, or through the residue of an individuality that infuses an

object with a human presence, the possibility of social experience is always implicated in its

appearance. The aura lends its force to those external energies that consciousness struggles to

keep at a reasonable distance. Yet in the modern city, these external energies reach a fever pitch

and consciousness thickens in order to better insulate the individual. Therefore, as modernity

inexorably constructs walls between individuals, isolating each subject behind an increasingly

dead consciousness, one result of the modern city on its participants is the collapse of the aura.

As shocks rise in the modern city, so sociality loses purchase among its inhabitants; as

dissociation swells with the bloating of dead consciousness, so the aura cracks, crumbles and

falls apart.

Benjamin positions Baudelaire‟s poetry at the point and epicenter of the aura‟s collapse.

Analyzing Baudelaire‟s understanding of the gaze, Benjamin asserts that “The greater

Baudelaire‟s insight into this phenomenon, the more unmistakably did the disintegration of the

aura make itself felt in his lyrical poetry. … What is involved here is that the expectation roused

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by the look of the human eye is not fulfilled” (“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 189). Benjamin

carefully tracks instances in Baudelaire‟s poetry wherein “Baudelaire describes eyes of which

one is inclined to say that they have lost their ability to look” (ibid., 189). These vacant eyes and

blank stares indicate the dissociation that necessarily blocks the aura; in them, the aura is

unavailable.

Yet, Benjamin also notes the frustration of the otherwise effective aura by the turbid

modern city in Baudelaire‟s poem, “À une passante.” In this poem, aura is preserved in the gaze

shared by the speaker and the passing woman. Here, the gaze is invested with the trappings of

the deepest social connection. From one fleeting moment of eye contact, Baudelaire‟s speaker

not only recognizes someone whom he could love, but also sees that recognition reflected: “Of

me you know nothing, I nothing of you – you/ whom I might have loved and who knew that

too!” But their connection is frustrated, the speaker knows that they will never know anything of

each other, that for these two individuals, this moment is all the time they will have together.

Benjamin offers an explanation for this in the implied crowd that, unmentioned, provides the

necessary medium in which this scene is suspended. He writes that, in this poem “the crowd is

nowhere named in either word or phrase. And yet the whole happening hinges on it,” (“On

Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 168). The crowd, itself a product of the modern city in this

analysis, interposes between these individuals and blocks the social connection implicit in the

reciprocal gazes of the speaker and the woman.

Thus the modern city frustrates aura not only in the construction of individual

consciousness, but by its very structure. Benjamin claims that Baudelaire “indicate[s] the price

for which the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the

experience of shock” (ibid., 194). Through the imposition of its jostling crowds and other shocks

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between individuals at every moment, the modern city thrusts itself in the way of aura if it does

not deaden the individuals to it altogether.

This intense connection between Baudelaire‟s poetry and the aura‟s collapse can be

directly imported into a discussion of the etching revival through the figure and work of Charles

Meryon. In the published notes to his unfinished Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk),

Benjamin appears to be working up a conception of Meryon as analogue to Baudelaire in the

arena of art. Meryon appears twenty times in these published notes, the vast majority of these

instances occur in the notes for Benjamin‟s sections on “Baudelaire” and “The Flâneur .”

Benjamin inserts criticism of Meryon‟s prints in between commentaries on Baudelaire‟s poems

(The Arcades Project, 268: J22,3; 333: J58,2; 384-86: J91,1, J91,2, J91a,1, J91a,3) includes

several quotes of Baudelaire‟s writing on the poetic quality of Meryon‟s etchings (ibid., 231:

J2,1; 291: J35,4), adopts quotes from Baudelaire‟s poetry to describe Meryon‟s etchings (ibid.,

322: J52,5; 351: J69,1, J69,7; 362: J76,4), and even goes so far as to note the congruency of their

dates: “Meryon and Baudelaire were born in the same year; Meryon died a year after Baudelaire”

(ibid., 289: J33a,6).

Just as Benjamin positions Baudelaire‟s poetry at the end of one era and at the head of a

new modern era, Benjamin similarly fixes Meryon‟s etchings; he writes, “The etchings of

Meryon (around 1850) constitute the death mask of old Paris” (ibid., 23), and later, “With

Meryon, the majesty and decrepitude of Paris came into their own” (ibid., 346: J66,7). Like

Baudelaire, Meryon crosses the threshold of the modern city, and both, like Janus, look forward

and back simultaneously.

However, it‟s not just that their works complement each other nicely or that their

birthdays were close together that impels Benjamin to make this connection between Baudelaire

18
and Meryon; Benjamin is able to make some of the same arguments, locating the collapse of the

aura as coetaneous with the development of the modern city, in Meryon‟s prints as he does in

Baudelaire‟s poetry. Benjamin sees the tenuous position of the aura evidenced in Meryon‟s print

Pont au change (fig. 11):

Insight into the physiognomy of “overpopulated Paris” is

afforded by the background – empty of human beings – in
Meryon’s Pont au change. On this background we meet with
one or two very narrow (window-wide) and, as it were, spindly
houses. Their window openings strike the viewer like gazes;
they bring to mind the gazes of those spindly, hollow-eyed
children who appear – often gathered together in great
numbers – in pictures of poor people from that era, and who
stand there abashed and close-packed in a corner like the
tenements in Meryon’s engraving. (The Arcades Project, 385:
J91,2)

Benjamin does not comment on the men in the boat or the birds in the air; his concern is the

lifelessness of the background. And, though the tenement windows “gaze” out at the viewer,

their gaze is “hollow-eyed.” Here, Benjamin performs the same work on Meryon‟s etching as he

does on Baudelaire‟s poetry; he indicates an awareness of the aura‟s collapse by pointing out

instances of the ineffectual gaze, locating those eyes “which have lost their ability to look.”

Benjamin‟s figuration of Meryon as an analogue to Baudelaire, and his explicit attention

to a limited consciousness of the aura‟s collapse in both artists‟ work, makes it possible to read

an awareness of dissociation and auratic disintegration into the prints of the etching revival in the

last half of the nineteenth-century. When perceived through the lens of Benjamin‟s critique, the

over-determined autographic gestures within these prints, and the rhetorical insistences on the
19
transmission of identity through them, take on the character of defensive reactions. In this light,

the complex multivalence of signature represents a swelling self-assertion that might, by its

amalgamated force, penetrate the thickening shell of habituated consciousness engendered by the

shocks of the modern city; and the absolute assertion of an individual and personal presence

inherent in each print which fanatically inflects the criticism surrounding these etchings attempts

to overcome the increasing dissociation of the crowd. The vague perception of auratic collapse

that Benjamin attributes to Baudelaire and Meryon provides an explanation for the extent to

which these identifying practices, both in the art of etching itself and in the rhetoric around it,

overshoot the mark of economic development. Benjamin‟s analysis of the character of late

nineteenth-century life gives an object to this seemingly excessive labor and recognizes it as an

attempt to overcome the dissociation implicit in the modern city.

20
Figures

Figure 1
Charles Meryon
Verses Dedicated to Eugène Bléry, No. 2, 1854
The Art Institute of Chicago, Elizabeth Hammond
Stickney Collection, 1909.23

21
Figure 2
Charles Meryon
The Arch of the Notre-Dame Bridge, Paris, 1853
The Art Institute of Chicago, Bequest of Harold R. Warner, 1939.2070

Figure 2a
detail of signature

22
Figure 3
Seymour Haden
Hands Etching – O Laborum, 1865
The Smart Museum at the University of Chicago
University Transfer from Max Epstein Archive, Carrie B. Neely Bequest, 1940
1967.116.16

Figure 3a Figure 3b
detail of text detail of signature

23
Figure 4
Charles Meryon
Bain-froid Chevrier, 1864
The Smart Museum at the University of Chicago
Gift of Brenda F. and Joseph V. Smith
2003.29

Figure 4a, detail of signature

24
Figure 5
James Abbott McNeil Whistler
Black Lion Wharf, 1859
The Smart Museum at the University of Chicago
Gift of Brenda F. and Joseph V. Smith
2000.93

25
Figure 6
James Abbott McNeil Whistler
Title to the French Set, 1858
The Art Institute of Chicago,
Bryan Lathrop Collection, 1934.645

26
Figure 7
James Abbott McNeil Whistler
Soup for Three Sous, 1859
The Smart Museum at the University of Chicago
Gift of Brenda F. and Joseph V. Smith
2000.94

27
Figure 8
Long Venice, 1879-80
The Smart Museum at the University of Chicago
Gift of Brenda F. and Joseph V. Smith
2000.97

Figure 8a Figure 8b
detail of Whistler‟s butterfly detail of script signature
signature

28
Figure 9
Felix-Hilaire Buhot
A Landing in England, 1879
The Smart Museum at the University of Chicago
Gift of Brenda F. and Joseph V. Smith
2003.27
29
Figure 9a
detail of script signature and date

Figure 9b
detail of red owl stamp and initials

30
Figure 10
Felix-Hilaire Buhot
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Promised Gift from the Helena Gunnarsson Buhot Collection

31
Figure 10a Figure 10b
detail of symphonic margin detail of Buhot‟s note

Figure 10c Figure 10d

detail of red owl stamp detail of script signature

32
Figure 11
Charles Meryon
Le Pont-au-Change, 1854
New York Public Library
S.P. Avery Collection - MEZAC - Delteil & Wright 34

33
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Jonathan Mayne. New York: Phaidon, 1965.

Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. trans. Richard Howard. Boston: David R. Godine, 1983.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Thornton, Tamara Plakins. Handwriting in America : A Cultural History. New Haven: Yale
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Doyle, Arthur Conan. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. New York: Harper & Row, 1930.

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Haden, Seymour. About Etching. 3rd. London: Printed by John Strangeways, 1879.

Poe, Edgar Allan. A Chapter on Autography. Springfield Mo.:, 1952.

Poe, Edgar Allan, and Jacob Schwartz. The Purloined Letter. London: Ulysses bookshop, 1931.

Stearn, William T. "The Origin of the Male and Female Symbols of Biology." Taxon 11.4
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Stevenson, Robert Louis, et al. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: Limited
Editions Club, 1952.

Tedeschi, Martha. "The New Language of Etching in Nineteenth-Century England." The Writing
of Modern Life. Ed.. Anne Leonard. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2008.

Way, Thomas R., James McNeill Whistler, and G. R. Dennis. The Art of James McNeill
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34