The Monumental Everyday: Poiesis and Utopia in the Arrière-Pays

In a section of the Carnets du grand chemin on what he terms 'L'Allemagne itinérante du romantisme', Julien Gracq highlights 'Ce nomadisme perpétuel des écrivains, des penseurs et des philosophes, qui anime et réchauffe tout le grand corps d'un pays à l'égal de la circulation du sang'. 1 Gracq sees this nomadism as having introduced a cartographical dimension to the intellectual and artistic debates of the time.While in some respects suggestive of the positioning of polit ical subjects across the parliamentary hemicycle, this cartographical dimension nevertheless transcends the spatial abstractions of the political spectrum by posing the question of the fullness of lived experience in view of the human creative fac ulty.A given place appears as if infused by the ideas identified with an individual writer, who encounters in return 'un horizon tout charnel, comme les cités de la Grèce en fournissaient à leurs poètes et à leurs penseurs'. 2Using the canonical example, Gracq concludes: La symbiose harmonieusement cadrée d'un grand esprit et d'une petite ville que Goethe a réali sée à Weimar, et que la France centralisée était incapable de faire naître, a permis ce plaisant miracle d'une cité naine tout entière endossée par un génie comme on endosse un vêtement. 3 Beyond the intriguing alliance of place and subject in the process of national cultural mythmaking, Gracq's reflection is of interest here for the way in which it deploys 'la France centralisée' as a counterexample.The singular harmony of subject and polis seen as key to Goethe's creative exemplarity appears incompatible with the French spatial regime and its state underpinnings (of which the 'Hexagone', in its imaginary and discourses, could be argued to offer a refined mythological shorthand).This alleged incompatibility suggests in turn a rejoinder to the Benjaminian hypothesis on Parisian exemplarity for the condition of social organization and poetic consciousness in the nineteenth century. 4 French centralization, which begets a symptomatic 'cap ital' of emerging modernity in Benjamin's account, would do so (to follow Gracq's