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life. Central to the flaneur is an identity that is incomplete, an existence that is dissatisfied. 2 As Bauman notes, the flanuer is the mirror-image, the imitation, the product of the stocktaking, the forced adjustment and mimicry of the modern world - which is itself the original flaneur. 3 The flaneur occurs in tandem and in response to the rise of the modern city. For the modern city became the exilic, nameless, empty, shifting space and place that was traditionally the realm of the desert and the wilderness. One went alone to the desert, the wilderness, to the empty spaces to find one-self, to discover and encounter truth and meaning - and once upon a time God. Today however the desert of modernity has come to us: it begins outside our front door. In opening the front door, in walking out into the constantly shifting desert of modern life, in confronting the city, the flanuer confronts themself. Their response is to undertake what can be termed a redemptive process involving, as Gleber notes, a central impulse to „write, register and redeem what has been seen.‟ 4 It was the German-Jewish critic and intellectual Walter Benjamin who in his unfinished masterpiece The Arcades Project positioned the flaneur as central to the analysis and experience of modern life. Drawing on Baudelaire‟s identification of the flaneur as a distinctly modern and urban figure, Benjamin appropriated the already-extinct figure of the nineteenth-century Parisian whimsical stroller as the critical position for an engagement with modern life. Following Benjamin‟s re-positioning, the flaneur wanders now as much through and against ideas and texts as they do the physical experience of the modern city. In thinking what this means for the question of „Man Alone‟, drawing on Benjamin the experience of the landscape of modernity becomes central to its reimagining: „Landscape – that, in fact, is what Paris becomes for the flaneur. Or, more precisely: the city splits for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room.‟ 5 This engagement with landscape is often overlooked in discussions of the flaneur and yet it offers rich possibilities for re-thinking and relocating the discussion of the flaneur into a reassessment of New Zealand literary culture. For landscape is the constant trope, experience, and back-drop location for so much of our literary and cultural reimagining. Yet we must remember too that New Zealand is a highly urbanized society and was so from the early days of the twentieth-century. The landscape, rural myth of New Zealand is a type of Potemkin identity for what was and is a highly urbanized society. This was especially so for the European population, for even in „1926 over a third of the population lived in the four main cities and nearly half the population lived in towns larger than 8000.‟ 6 We should always remember that with 86% of our population urban, we are more urban than France (85%), Netherlands (83%), United States (82%), United Kingdom (80%), Germany (74%) Italy (68%) and Japan (67%). 7

The Antimodern Manifesto of the Rural Flaneur: When D'Arcy and John Go For a Wander