Re-cycling the Flâneur: The Image of the Narrator in Three Postcolonial Novels on the Cities of Cairo, Karachi, and Beirut

The purpose of this thesis is to study the theoretical foundation and the representation of the relationship between the writer, artist, and flaneur and the city streets and crowd in a selection of literary texts. Thus my intention is to ‘re-cycle’ the phenomenon of the nineteenth-century flaneur and examine him in association with the narrator’s image in three postcolonial novels: Ahdaf Soueif s The Map of Love, Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography, and Elias Khoury’s The Journey o f Little Gandhi. Soueif s novel focuses on Cairo whilst Shamsie writes about Karachi, and Khoury,Beirut In these novels, we find that what binds the flaneur and the narrator is their relationship to the city streets and crowds.

Even though the notion of the flaneur predates the French poet Charles Baudelaire, it was he who added a literary connotation to the tenn, specifically in his essay ‘The Painter of Modem Life’. My aim is to examine Baudelaire’s use of the term flaneur in this essay, which was written in 1858. The German critic Walter Benjamin was the first to recover the figure of the flaneur for twentieth-century criticism. In The Arcades Project, he studies the flaneur as a phenomenon of the emerging urban experience of nineteenth-century Paris, reflected in the architecture of the city’s arcades. In this thesis, I will argue that the flaneur is an integral part of Benjamin’s theory of historical time, whilst demonstrating that his theory and method can be used as analytical tools for interpreting the postcolonial novel.

I will also argue that the flaneur's activity of walking is an attempt to create a cognitive image of the city, and in doing so the flaneur is building up a whole system of memories and social experiences, or rather a social map of relations which would enable him to locate himself within his material surroundings. The three novels under discussion seek to explore new spatial, social, and political dimensions to the relationship between the narrator/writer//?a«ewr and the postcolonial city streets and crowd. Thus I aim to explore some characteristics which link the Baudelairean flaneur with other phenomena and images examined by Benjamin, particularly the ‘collector’, the ‘allegorist’, the ‘Angel of History’, and the critic. I will also study such characteristics in association with those of the ‘intellectual’ in the postcolonial context.