The Walker
Page 3
This book – which takes as its starting point Raymond Williams’s claim that ‘perception of the new qualities of the modern city had been associated’, at least since the Romantics, ‘with a man walking, as if alone, in its streets’ – centres on the solitary male walker.39 This privileged individual, effectively the male writer as walker, is the dominant metropolitan archetype in the literature on the ‘experience of modernity’ that I discuss. But this is not to imply that the solitary male walker is the only archetype. In spite of its excessively casual tone, the important qualification Williams makes in the statement I have cited – ‘as if alone’ – evokes the spectral presence on the streets of all those others who silently accompany him, either because they walk with him or because their activities, their labours, constitute the material and social conditions of the city in which he walks.
In particular, Williams’s cryptic, perhaps euphemistic qualification, ‘as if alone,’ invokes the presence, or absence, of women walking in the streets. Their absent presence. Lauren Elkin has forcefully pointed out that ‘if we tunnel back, we find there always was a flâneuse passing Baudelaire in the street.’40 Certainly, there are numerous examples, in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, of female writers and their heroines taking to the streets as observers of the urban scene, from Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, via Amy Levy, to Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Richardson. And feminist critics, in reshaping our understanding of the metropolitan streetscape, have rightly insisted on shifting them from its background, where they have so often been relegated, to its foreground.41
But, as Erika Diane Rappaport reminds us, there is no denying that, as distinct from a man’s, ‘a woman’s freedom to “walk alone” in the city was constrained by physical inconveniences and dangers as well as by social conventions that deemed it entirely improper for a bourgeois lady to roam alone out-of-doors’. When the flâneuse ‘walked in and wrote about’ the streets in this period, ‘she stepped out of her prescribed role into male territory.’42 The flâneuse – as distinct from women who, for professional or social reasons, simply in order to travel from here to there, passed through the streets of the metropolis – is not a common phenomenon. But her painful, paradoxical sense of simultaneously being both too invisible and too visible in the city streets was characteristic of all women in these fundamental circumstances.
It must be added, though, that the male territory to which Rappaport refers is by no means homogeneous or socially uniform – except, no doubt, in so far as it marginalises female pedestrians. For, as the writers I discuss here testify, many male pedestrians of the period, far from feeling entitled in the streets, find them distinctly hostile, for a range of different reasons. From Dickens’s Master Humphrey to Woolf’s Septimus Smith, they are the city’s internal exiles, even if their sense of unbelonging is from the start far less fraught, far less freighted with histories of exploitation and oppression, than that of women, or of men and women of colour.
It is the male territory on which this book concentrates, then, even when, as in the chapter on Mrs Dalloway, I examine Woolf’s more or less systematic critique of the sexual politics of the Baudelairean archetype of a man walking, as if alone, in the city’s streets. It does so principally in order to reconstruct a series of relatively deviant kinds of walker, taken from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who offer to displace the still persistent paradigm of the flâneur. In a sense, like Woolf in Mrs Dalloway when she portrays Peter Walsh on the streets of the capital, I offer an immanent critique of the flâneur; that is, operating on the familiar terrain of the male, middle-class walker, I seek to expose the points at which, surfacing or erupting in more or less psychopathological symptoms, its internal contradictions render this archetype unsustainable. My flâneur is in flight from the city to which he is fatally affiliated.
The flâneur glorified by Baudelaire was never the comfortable, complacent bourgeois stroller that had been so fashionable in the 1840s in those illustrations and journalistic sketches known as the Physiologies. As late as 1867, the French historian and journalist Victor Fournel was presenting flânerie, which he sketched in terms of ‘drifting along, with your nose in the wind, with both hands in your pockets, and with an umbrella under your arm, as befits any open-minded spirit’, in positively seraphic terms. In ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), however, Baudelaire was already emphasizing the flâneur’s restless, unsettled experience of both the life of the metropolitan street and his own skin.43
As Benjamin recognized, Baudelaire’s conception of this archetype was closer to that of his hero Edgar Allan Poe, for whom ‘the flâneur was, above all, someone who does not feel comfortable in his own company’, than to the one purveyed by the contemporary illustrated periodical press.44 This can be seen in a poem like ‘Le Soleil’, from the Tableaux Parisiens section of the second edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1861), where the impoverished poet describes venturing out alone (‘Je vais m’exercer seul’) in search of the poetry of the city’s streets: ‘duelling in dark corners for a rhyme / and stumbling over words like cobblestones.’45 Like the French language, the French capital is in this poem a distinctly hostile environment. So is the poet’s own body. By this point, racked by debt, Baudelaire was addicted to laudanum; mentally and physically ill. Here, the writer as walker is haunted and hunted.
My book pursues a series of prose writers and their characters, many of them indebted to the example of Baudelaire, whose experiences of walking dramatize a relationship both to the metropolitan city and to themselves that is disturbed and troubled. It stages a sequence of crises for the pedestrian, and especially for the flâneur. In a sense, the book presents a series of profiles of certain types of pedestrian as they attempt to come to terms with the experience of modernity in the streets. Like Balzac’s Théorie de la démarche (1833), one of the first ‘theories’ of walking, it tries to capture some of the variations of the human gait, in the belief that they can communicate a good deal about the embattled conditions of everyday life under capitalist modernity since roughly the time the French novelist was writing.46
The walkers examined here all experience modernity in terms of what, in the final substantive chapter of this book, which is about the contemporary city, I characterize in terms of ‘not belonging’. They are some of modernity’s anti-heroes. They are pedestrians who drift, loiter or aimlessly wander in the city; who collapse in the face of its immensities or accidentally stumble in its streets; who malinger in it after long illness; who mysteriously disappear from its precincts or, more dramatically still, are forced abruptly to flee from those that administer or police it. The book’s conviction is that those most attuned to the contradictions of metropolitan modernity, those who live them at the level of the pavement, are best placed to grasp not only the city’s alienating but its liberating possibilities. This is what it means to be a modernist of the street.
‘And every single fellow had a different way of walking,’ James Joyce wrote in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).47 If we attend carefully to some of these different ways of walking, I want to contend, and to the different ways in which, historically, they have been represented, in terms of narrative form as well as content, then we might be able to test both the different forms of alienation characteristic of capitalist modernity and the limits of this alienation, the possibilities of finding a certain freedom from it. In addition, we might come to understand what it means, in historical perspective, to walk distractedly and undistractedly. We might be able to ascertain which steps are lost and which are unlost.
How can we preserve the flâneur’s alertness and attentiveness to his environment, in our own efforts to cultivate a state of concentration-in-distraction on the streets, without reproducing the flâneur’s privilege and thus forgetting our sense of discomfort? It is doubtless the case, in the era of ‘distracted walking’, that we need to be both for and against the flâneur. We need to emulate the flâneur’s perceptiven
ess as someone who, like a skilled semiotician, patiently reads and interprets the city streets and the activities taking place there. Roland Barthes, who asserts that ‘when I walk through the streets, I apply … one and the same activity, which is that of a certain reading’, is exemplary in this respect.48 But we also need to recognize that, because of his prerogatives as a middle- or upper-middle-class white writer, he remains an outdated paradigm, and that it is therefore necessary to refuse his sense of entitlement. We need to decide what is living and what is dead in the tradition of flânerie.
‘Of the two hundred and fifty-four and a half persons whose gait I studied,’ Balzac declares (revealingly enough, he jokes that he has counted ‘a man without legs only as half a person’), ‘I have not found one who moved gracefully and naturally.’49 Perhaps, in capitalist society, we should not expect to find anyone who moves gracefully and ‘naturally’ (whatever that might mean). Obviously, there are today descendants of the early nineteenth-century flâneur who have the money, time and social entitlement to stroll along the more prosperous shopping streets of capital cities, with, as Fournel might put it, their nose in the wind and both hands in their pockets. But the mass of people are condemned by the economic and social pressures of capitalism, especially in a climate of precarity like the present one, either to rush from one place to another because they are compelled to do so by the time-discipline of the marketplace, or to saunter and wander simply because they cannot find full or fulfilling employment.
In such a city, built on barbaric social inequalities, most people’s bodies are in one way or another contorted by the labour they perform, whether they work in factories, fields or offices, and this makes it almost impossible for them to move ‘gracefully and naturally’. In this respect, it is of course moralistic to denounce the bent postures and blind motions, as well as the compulsion to check their smartphone screens, that is characteristic of distracted walkers. Everyone is to some extent the victim of a disciplinary regime that distorts their bodies, their selves, even when they perform the fundamental, indeed primal activity of walking.
Ultimately, then, we must look to some sort of post-capitalist society, however remote the prospect, to restore a graceful, ‘natural’ movement, through its liberating possibilities for everyday life, to the superficially simple activity of walking. Footsteps as the embodiment, not merely the emblem, of the free everyday … It was to this future, trivial though its emphasis might at first seem, that Benjamin’s friend, the philosopher Ernst Bloch pointed. Bloch insisted, in characteristically complicated prose, on ‘the recognition of the human right to “walk upright” [as] essential to the program of a socialist society and the humanity of its living praxis’.50
What Bloch called the ‘upright gait’ (aufrechter Gang), which he identified with the tradition of natural law, was for him the pre-eminent sign of a society committed to affording its citizens a dignity that is at the same time ‘respected in persons and guaranteed in their collective’. Bloch’s slogan, in outlining what might be called his orthopaedic politics, was ‘uprightness as a right’.51 It should be ours, too.
In the meantime, before we finally restore this right to ourselves as a collective, perhaps we should each individually strive to cultivate an upright gait, and an undistracted mode of walking, that are proleptic of this future. To trace unlost steps through the metropolitan city in the name of an unlost society.
1
Convalescing
Edgar Allan Poe’s
‘The Man of the Crowd’
In his ‘Meditations of a Painter’, composed in 1912, the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico narrated the mysterious but at the same time perfectly ordinary experience that had inspired his famous sequence of metaphysical cityscapes, commencing with the Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (1910):
One clear autumnal morning I was sitting on a bench in the middle of the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence. It was of course not the first time that I had seen this square. I had just come out of a long and painful intestinal illness, and I was in a nearly morbid state of sensitivity. The whole world, down to the marble of the buildings and the fountains, seemed to me to be convalescent. In the middle of the square rises a statue of Dante draped in a long cloak, holding his works clasped against his body, his laurel-crowned head bent thoughtfully earthward. The statue is white marble, but time has given it a gray cast, very agreeable to the eye. The autumn sun, warm and unloving, lit the statue and the dark façade. Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at all these things for the first time, and the composition of my picture came to my mind’s eye.1
This is a classic modernist epiphany. Life itself, condemned to a state of deadening repetition, especially in the routine spaces of the city, is apprehended as if for the first time. Earlier in the ‘Meditations’, de Chirico cites Schopenhauer’s dictum that, in order to have ‘immortal’ ideas, ‘one has but to isolate oneself from the world for a few moments so completely that the most commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence’.2
In the incident in the Piazza Santa Croce, the everyday is redeemed by what de Chirico calls ‘the enigma of sudden revelation’.3 Several of his canvases from the 1910s revisit this ‘primal modern scene’, as Marshall Berman might put it.4 In The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914), to take one example, a sudden silence seems to have descended on the city, softly flooding the most commonplace sights with some unidentifiable spiritual significance. The end of an ordinary day assumes the form of an ominous interruption. It is as if a mysterious curfew has been imposed on the city, less because of some specific threat of destruction than because of a generalized anxiety about death.
This city, as Walter Benjamin might have put it, ‘looks cleared out, like a lodging that has not yet found a new tenant’;5 or like one from which an old tenant has for nameless reasons been expelled. Its unsettling atmosphere is objectified in the sinister silhouette that falls across the piazza from the right-hand side of the composition, menacing the fragile, fairy-tale innocence of the child that scampers up the street with a hoop. With its blank colonnades and its baked, eerily featureless surfaces, the city is at once a desert and a labyrinth. The poet John Ashbery, an admirer of de Chirico, has suggestively referred to his ‘agoraphobia-inducing piazzas’.6
In The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, as in other paintings by de Chirico at this time, the city has become the implausible setting for what Marx once referred to, at least according to Benjamin, as ‘socially empty space’.7 Looking at it, the spectator experiences a creeping sense of agoraphobic panic, one that perhaps mimics de Chirico’s fear of fainting in the street, which he documented in his memoirs, and his neurotic habit, as a consequence, of sticking close to walls as he gropes through the city. ‘In the noisy street,’ he reflects in the ‘Meditations’, ‘catastrophe goes by.’8 So too, it seems, in the silent street.
The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street 1914 (oil on canvas) by Giorgio de Chirico.
The dreamlike stasis of The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street evokes the faint, residual delirium of someone recovering from, say, an intestinal illness. The city de Chirico imagines in this composition is a physiological phenomenon, a physical extension of the painter’s embodied consciousness. Its colonnades, streets and open spaces, in contrast to contemporary cities celebrated for their arterial freedom, themselves seem susceptible to a kind of intestinal inhibition that impedes uncomplicated movement, notwithstanding the absence of human throng. The city itself is in a state of preternatural sensitivity.
So, the painting depicts what Benjamin called ‘the infirmity and decrepitude of this great city’.9 But it also depicts the city’s capacity to be regenerated or reborn through the contractions that gently convulse it.
Though often overlooked, the most striking aspect of de Chirico’s autobiographical anecdote in the ‘Meditations’ is the emphasis on his convalescent state, and on the concomitant fact that the ‘whol
e world’ feels to him as if it, too, is convalescent.
In addition to de Chirico’s personal experience of recovering from intestinal illness, it is surely possible to detect the celebrated influence of Nietzsche on his thinking in this respect. As a young man, de Chirico was a fanatical reader of Nietzsche, and he consciously applied to painting what he called the ‘Nietzschean method’, which involved ‘see[ing] everything, even man, in its quality of thing’.10 This is an aesthetic in which ‘metaphysical revelation’, to frame it in the art historian Ara Merjian’s terms, ‘sits within the limits of physical reality.’11 The convalescent – for whom ‘all things have a new taste’, as Nietzsche puts it in Twilight of the Idols (1889), and who waits in expectancy – is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of the Nietzschean method.12 For the convalescent, the enigmatic thingness of the things to which he relates is readily apparent.
It is reasonable to assume that, in affirming convalescence as a regime of the senses, de Chirico was recalling the regenerative role played by the convalescent in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In Human, All Too Human (1878), for example, Nietzsche details what he calls ‘another step onward in convalescence’; that is, the moment when ‘the free spirit again approaches life, slowly, of course, almost recalcitrantly, almost suspiciously.’ He opens himself up to ‘feeling and fellow-feeling’, and to the world around him: