VV(18): A curious country ...

[Dave Monroe]

"... a world if not created then at least described to its fullest by Karl 
Baedeker of Leipzig.  This is a curious country, populated only by a breed 
called 'tourists.'  Its landscape is one of inanimate monuments and 
buildings ....  More than this it is two-dimensional, as if the Street, as 
are the pages and maps of those little red handbooks." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. ii, 
p. 409)

>From Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity 
(Trans. Patrick Camiller.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994) ...

"Imagine a city with several entrances, a labyrinthine proliferation of 
squares, crossroads, thoroughfares, and side streets, a kind of multibody of 
past and memory.  In short, a baroque town: Rome, Vienna, perhaps Mexico 
City.  Here a flaneur is eagerly seeking out the new and the strange 
scale-games played with reality and unreality.  In this theatre the 
traveller with no homeland and no source of rest meets a venerable old man.  
'Who are you? he asks.  'I am disillusion' (Yo soy el desengano) comes the 
reply.  The man takes him on a tour of this phantasmal city with a thousand 
faces.  They come to a amian street, nameless and without end, inhabited by 
a thousand figures: the Street of Hypocrisy.  And there they find a 
beautiful woman who leaves hearts filled with sighing and desire, a gentle 
face of snow and roses wrapped in her own aura--the very object of love.  
The master of disillusion then reveals all: her teeth have been artificial, 
her hair dyed, her face skillfully made up, and behind the appearances age 
and death are doing their work.  Everywhere in this street of the mighty and 
the beautiful, teh world is upside down.  Madame Fashion and Madame Death 
are on the prowl.  It must be turned the right side up again: to baffle all 
the frontiers of the real and unreal, belief and knowledge, world and 
theatre; to see the world from within.
   "Such is the great allegory that Quevedo deploys in one of his Suenos: El 
mundo por de dentro ('The World from Within').  Such too might be the 
thoroughly Baudelairean city-allegory, woman-allegory ...." (p. 39)

And see, e.g., Francisco de Quevedo Villegas, Dreams (Trans. Wallace 
Woolsey.  New York: Barron's Educational Series, 1976) ...


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