Creative writers, no matter their subject, have a problem to solve: In whose words shall we tell the story? A voice that rings true to character may not possess the range of language that artfully builds worlds and allows a piece to explore the larger human condition. But the neutral, more detached voice—the objective tone that delivers a story’s nuts and bolts—can hold readers at a distance when they long to come closer to the action. Both character voice and neutral narrator voice do the essential work of storytelling, but are they enough? Is it possible we need a third option?

Enter the “flâneur.” If the term is not familiar, it’s simply a French word that means “loafer.” We’ll define it shortly and take a brief look at its origins (for writerly purposes). But why does it matter? In our view, the flâneur offers a third storytelling option: a voice with the author’s sophisticated command of language—one that can comment on the greater implications of story events—yet remains seamlessly attached to the story world in such a way that the reader doesn’t cry “author intrusion!”

Though the term itself might not be heard in most workshops and craft lectures, the concept of the flâneur is nothing new. In the mid- to late-19th century, novelists were trying to break from the author-centric omniscient sto­rytelling conventions of the Romantic Era in which novels delivered moral les­sons through an overt dialogue between writer and reader. Writers of the time wanted to portray a greater social real­ism in their works, an unbiased view of character that didn’t romanticize, preach, or instruct. But without autho­rial comment from outside the nar­rative, who could interpret the story, especially if the characters had limited ability to articulate their situation? And how could an author expand the restricted scope of the story events to make a broader statement without ser­monizing to the reader?

One such experimenter in this emerging trend was Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), the French author of the novel Madame Bovary. To break from the old omniscient style—in other words, to provide insight that came neither from the author nor the characters—Flaubert employed a literary device borrowed from his poet friend Charles Baudelaire: the flâneur, a figure who wanders or strolls through the city, observing and commenting. Baudelaire had applied the idea of an invisible “stroller” to his poetry, incorporating a perspective into the text that was neither the poet nor the subject. Just as a painting on a canvas can provide an unseen perspec­tive—a “camera eye” positioned at a particular viewing point—the invisible flâneur stands at a particular place with­in a story, observing and commenting.

Flaubert used the flâneur narrative voice in Madame Bovary to solve the essential problem of the day—how to eliminate the omniscient, moralizing voice and tell a story that could stand on its own. He pioneered the use of a consciousness that commented on the story situation but avoided authorial intrusion—a voice wiser and more “art­ful” than the limited voice of the char­acter—a perspective that stayed within the story world but invited the reader to extrapolate to the world as a whole.

In Memoirs of a Madman, a semi-auto­biographical novel Flaubert wrote nearly twenty years before Madame Bovary, we see the old omniscient technique with a prominent authorial voice at work:

Why write these pages? What good are they for? What do I myself know about it? It is foolish enough in my view to go round asking the reasons for their actions and the things they write. Do you yourself know why you have opened the wretched pages that the hand of the madman is going to write?

In Madame Bovary, the evolution of Flaubert’s narrative range—and his use of the flâneur—became apparent, as he employed three separate vantage points. Consider the following example:

It was a Sunday in February, a snowy afternoon.

They had all gone off, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais and Monsieur Léon, to see a flax mill that was being built in the valley, half a league from Yonville. The apothecary had taken along Napoléon and Athalie, to give them some exercise, and Justin was with them, carrying several umbrellas on his shoulder.

In the first line, Flaubert uses a dis­tant, neutral, panoramic observation of time and weather—a snowy Sunday in February. What follows is a growing sense of an unnamed personage, invisi­ble but “on the ground,” observing the individuals in the scene. The next lines display flâneur commentary, leading into a sophisticated description that we cannot attribute to any of the characters:

Nothing, however, could have been less interesting than this point of interest. A great expanse of empty land, on which lay, here and there, among the heaps of sand and stones, a few already rusty cogwheels, surrounded a long rectangular building pierced with numbers of little windows. It was not yet finished, and the sky could be seen through the joists of the roofing. Attached to the beam of the gable end, a bouquet of straw mingled with ears of wheat was snapping its red, white, and blue ribbons in the wind.

A helpful question, when examining the source of insight or information within a text, is: To whom do the words belong? We might argue that the words above (“Nothing could have been less interesting”) belong to Emma Bovary, bored with her provincial surroundings and longing to escape their confines. But in this scene, Emma has not yet been differentiated from the other characters. The descriptive words that follow are certainly more artistic than anything Emma might produce: a build­ing “pierced” with windows, a bouquet “snapping” its ribbons.

Consider another example. In the section that follows, the “camera” pulls back to a broader view with neutral objective observation (the staging of Emma, Léon, and her husband Charles), followed by a perspective from Emma (Charles is stupid, plebe­ian), followed by more flâneur com­mentary (Emma derives sensual plea­sure from her irritation):

Emma, who had given him her arm, was leaning lightly against his shoulder … but then she turned her head: there was Charles.

He had his cap pulled down over his eyebrows, and his thick lips were quivering, which gave a stupid look to his face; even his back, his placid back, was irritating to look at, and she found all the man’s dullness dis­played there, on his coat.

As she was contemplating him, drawing a kind of depraved sensual pleasure from her irritation, Léon took a step closer.

Unlike his omniscient predecessors, Flaubert required that the psychologi­cal insight regarding Emma come from the flâneur consciousness instead of an author-voiceover pontificating about the characters. Though Madame Bovary does contain plenty of commentary about Emma Bovary and others—com­mentary that reflects the values of Flaubert, who was critical of the emerg­ing bourgeoisie and the grasping behav­ior of the upwardly mobile middle class—his incorporation of the flâneur voice accomplished a great step toward his goal of making the author invisible to the reader, allowing the reader to draw his or her own conclusions from the text itself. 

Lydia Davis, in the introduction to her translation of Madame Bovary, uses the term “ironic objectivity” to describe Flaubert’s newfound style. We propose that ironic objectivity is the flâneur at work—a voice neither fully objec­tive (neutrally observant) nor directly connected to a character’s subjective, interior consciousness (free indirect discourse), but instead an astute voice delivering observations from the streets of the story world, while critiquing the goings-on with a noticeable attitude.

In his book The Craft of Fiction, Percy Lubbock doesn’t refer to the flâneur by name, but he describes Flaubert’s use of the technique:

[The author’s] object is to place the scene before us, so that we may take it in like a picture gradually unrolled or a drama enacted. But then again the method presently changes. There comes a juncture at which, for some reason, it is necessary for us to know more than we could have made out by simply looking and listening. Flaubert, the author of the story, must intervene with his superior knowledge. 1

The question Lubbock puts before the writer is: How is this “superior knowledge” of the author to be com­municated, given that Flaubert wished to remain invisible to the reader? He accomplished this, Lubbock writes, through a “centre of vision,” with Emma as that center—conveying what she sees, feels, believes, and knows. Most writers are familiar with a limited point of view—and are often warned by workshop peers not to deviate from it. But in Madame Bovary, we see another voice at work in the text, and for good reason. “In Flaubert’s Bovary there could be no question but that we must mainly use the eyes of Emma herself … and yet Flaubert finds it necessary to look at her occasionally, taking advantage of some other centre for the time being.” 2 Prone to self-justification, Emma (and most of our characters) cannot fully pro­vide insight into their own situation. “[Emma Bovary’s] manner was utterly convincing while she exhibited it,” Lubbock writes, “but we always knew that a finer mind was watching her display with a touch of disdain.” 3 The ironic, “finer mind” Lubbock refers to is the flâneur, commenting from within the milieu of the story, without an overt authorial insertion of values.

Despite his efforts at author invisi­bility, Flaubert was still a product of his time and did occasionally revert to the familiar omniscient scaffolding:

León was tired of loving without having anything to show for it; then, too, he was beginning to feel the despondency that comes from leading an unvarying life, with no interest to give it direction and no hope to sustain it.

It stands to reason that Flaubert—working in an era of literary transition and attempting to pioneer a new meth­od—represented a mixture of new and old techniques. But thanks to Flaubert, early 20th century authors became increasingly suspicious of authorial intrusion, and at the same time, learned to utilize the flâneur in even more sub­tle ways than their predecessor.

One such writer is Willa Cather. Her novels progressively demonstrate the transition between the old omniscient and the new realistic style. In this para­graph from O Pioneers!, for example, the vestiges of authorial intrusion are evident:

The Bergson homestead was easier to find than many another, because it overlooked Norway Creek, a shallow, muddy stream that sometimes flowed, and sometimes stood still, at the bottom of a winding ravine with steep, shelving sides overgrown with brush and cottonwoods and dwarf ash. This creek gave a sort of identity to the farms that bordered upon it. Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

In her final novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather displays the more detached narrative voice championed by Flaubert and the realists and mod­ernists who followed. In the passage below, she treats a scene similar to the one above, but slips unobtrusively into artistic flâneur language that is surely beyond the character’s means of expres­sion. She then returns to character lan­guage so seamlessly that the un-alerted reader hardly notices:

The difficulty was that the country in which he found himself was so featureless—or rather, that it was crowded with features, all exactly alike. As far as he could see, on every side, the landscape was heaped up into monotonous red sand-hills, not much larger than haycocks, and very much the shape of haycocks. One could not have believed that in the number of square miles a man is able to sweep with the eye there could be so many uniform red hills … they were so exactly like one another that he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare; flattened cones, they were, more the shape of Mexican ovens than haycocks—yes, exactly the shape of Mexican ovens.

The vista in this selection is shown through Father Latour’s perspective, that is, as if the camera-eye of the story were mounted upon his shoulder while he comments on the footage shown (“one could not have believed … the hills are like haycocks, no—not exactly haycocks, but more like ovens … yes, exactly the shape of Mexican ovens.”) To whom do the words belong? They belong to Father Latour. But subtly slipped into the description we find more sophisticated flâneur language that points to the generalized human condition (“some geometrical night­mare”), language that lends depth, artistry, and insight. The reader scarcely notices—if at all, according to James Wood—“happy enough to efface the labor of the writer in order to believe two further fictions: that the narrator was somehow ‘really there,’ and that the narrator is not really a writer.” 4

Once considered a cutting-edge tech­nique, flâneur commentary has become such a common storytelling method that the origins of the device are all but forgotten; the flâneur is scarcely studied and rarely credited. Yet modern stu­dents of craft continue to wrestle with varying terminology to describe the complexities of author voice versus the voice telling the story. 

Craft author Sandra Scofield expands the conversation beyond simple ques­tions of point of view (first, second, third): “There are considerations of distance, intimacy, voice, authority, and more.” 5 Though Scofield doesn’t use the term flâneur, she identifies its func­tion as a narrative conscience that can serve as a “kind of overarching angel of the story.” Even with a close-third point of view, she writes, the text does not necessarily need to sound like the protagonist. Though Scofield doesn’t say so directly, we can infer that she’s referencing the flexibility offered by the flâneur. “You can choose to be mostly in the consciousness of the main char­acter, in a third-person POV, but I prefer to think of this as the voice of the novel (its narration) observing the character thinking, just as it observes the actions … it is possible to give the reader infor­mation that the character would know but isn’t necessarily thinking about at the moment. It is possible to remark on the character’s behavior or feelings.” 6 She goes on: “Note that I have referred to the ‘voice’ of the story or the ‘voice’ of narration. The ‘narrator’ is the some­thing, not quite a someone telling the story. As if stories come from heaven, or history, or fate. What you want to strive for is a kind of falling into that voice, that isn’t quite you (you are the author), and isn’t quite the character. It is the story telling itself. It is magic.” 7 The magic she refers to is the voice of the flâneur, positioned between the writer and the character.

The following is an example of flâneur activity in the work of a mod­ern writer, Joyce Carol Oates. Her short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” opens with language very close to—and perhaps even attributed to—the fifteen-year-old pro­tagonist, Connie: 

Her sister June was twenty-four and still lived at home. She was a secretary in the high school Connie attended, and if that wasn’t bad enough—with her in the same building—she was so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all the time by her mother and her mother’s sisters. June did this, June did that, she saved money and helped clean the house and cooked and Connie couldn’t do a thing, her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams.

In the paragraph that follows, Oates employs what we might call an “embed­ded flâneur,” subtly elevating the lan­guage by inserting a moment of flâneur commentary so deftly placed that the reader scarcely notices the shift. Oates then concludes the paragraph by returning to language close to Connie, convincing the reader that we’ve never left Connie’s side even while slipping in the voice of the flâneur:

Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.

Through her use of Connie’s vernacu­lar, Oates invites the reader to feel close to Connie, and this close identification renders the story’s ending (in which Connie gets into the car of two malev­olent strangers) weightier and more horrifying. Yet Oates also wants the story to show insight not yet available to Connie, and for this she commis­sions the flâneur. Oates repeats this embedded-flâneur pattern throughout the story, beginning a section with neutral description and “Connie-language,” slipping in a line of elevated observation that sheds an unfolding light on the story’s themes, and ending with neutral description and Connie-language to maintain reader closeness to the character:

… sometimes they went across the highway, ducking fast across the busy road, to a drive-in restaurant where older kids hung out. … One night in midsummer they ran across, breathless with daring, and right away someone leaned out a car window and invited them over, but it was just a boy from high school they didn’t like. It made them feel good to be able to ignore him. They went up through the maze of parked and cruising cars to the bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed up out of the night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for. They sat at the counter and crossed their legs at the ankles, their thin shoulders rigid with excitement, and listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

What is gained through the use of the flâneur is insight—a nuanced and wiser perspective than the character (in this case, a teenager like Connie) is capable of. What the author sacrifices in its use is closeness; the flâneur creates greater psychic distance as it momentarily turns away from the character to comment. In the Oates example above, the turn is brief. When employed strategically, however, an author can intentionally make good use of the greater psychic distance attained by a detached narra­tor—either to open a scene before bring­ing the camera close to character, or at the end of a dramatic scene (when the “heat” of the moment needs to cool).

Consider the “cooling” effect of the flâneur in this scene from the T.C. Boyle story, “The Fugitive.” Marciano the protagonist, infected with tubercu­losis, has been picked up by the police for violating the directive to wear a mask and receive regular injections. Marciano finds himself at the hospital with the news that he’ll soon be trans­ferred to a medical ward at the prison. In a dramatic moment, Marciano spits in the faces of the nurse and police offi­cer and takes off:

So now he was running again, only this time they weren’t chasing him, or not yet, because, mask or no mask, they were all three of them frantically trying to wipe his living death off their faces—and good, good, see how they like it, see how they like being condemned and ostracized and locked up without a trial or a lawyer or anything—and he didn’t stop spitting till he had the door open and was back out in the sunlight, dodging around the cars in the lot and heading for the street and the cover of the trees there.