The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  He almost feels as if his eyes were only now open to what is near. He is amazed and sits motionless: where had he been, then? Those near and nearest things, how they seem to him transformed!13

  Nietzsche’s description reads like a snapshot of de Chirico on that clear autumnal morning when he sat on a bench in the middle of the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence. Or, more precisely, de Chirico appears to be acting out Nietzsche’s prescription.

  Perhaps the painter was also thinking of a crucial section on the concept of the ‘eternal return’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), where Nietzsche devoted a section to ‘The Convalescent’. There, Zarathustra’s animals coax him from the cave where he has lain for ‘seven days, with heavy eyes’, telling him, in a beautiful formulation, that ‘all things want to be [his] physicians!’ When in the course of his conversation with the animals Zarathustra recalls his sickness, and his ‘disgust at man’, they interrupt him: ‘Speak no further, convalescent!’ they command, ‘but go out to where the world awaits you like a garden.’14 In the Piazza Santa Croce the city waits for de Chirico like a garden, even if in its fallen state it is at once a desert and a labyrinth.

  In a later retrospective account of the factors that shaped his ‘Pittura Metafisica’, entitled ‘Some Perspectives on My Art’ (1935), de Chirico confirmed that the important canvases he painted in Paris between 1912 and 1915, which were shaped by a visit to Turin in 1911, ‘owe[d] a great deal to Friedrich Nietzsche, whom I read passionately at the time’. ‘His Ecce Homo [1888],’ de Chirico specified, ‘written in Turin shortly before he succumbed to madness, greatly helped me understand the city’s peculiar beauty.’ The peculiar beauty of Turin, he continued, resided in its autumnal quality:

  Autumn, as it revealed Turin to me and as Turin revealed it to me, is joyful, although certainly not in a gaudy, dazzling way. It’s something huge, at once near and distant; a great peacefulness, great purity, rather closely related to the joy felt by a convalescent finally cured of a long and painful illness.15

  De Chirico had previously identified convalescence with the melancholic atmosphere and muted affects of autumn – the season’s distinctive Stimmung – in his elusive novel Hebdomeros (1929). There he declares that ‘summer is a malady, it’s all fever and delirium and exhausting perspiration’, whereas ‘autumn is convalescence, after which life begins (winter)’.16 As his evocation of the ‘clear autumnal morning’ in the Piazza Santa Croce indicates, de Chirico’s paintings are autumnal in this precise sense. They consciously evoke the space and time of convalescence, a delicate state of suspension and transition between two opposed modes of being. Convalescence is a heightened condition of openness or receptiveness to the world, in which traces of fever dissolve in a consciousness characterized by a feeling of preternatural calm.

  Either from fear or from a reckless happiness, the child in The Melancholy and Mystery of a Street dances a little desperately up the street with her hoop. She is a displaced, perhaps idealized image of the convalescent painter’s frail openness to re-experiencing the concussions and the percussive rhythms of the city. In ‘Some Perspectives on My Art’, de Chirico portrayed the artist’s experience of an ‘inspiration’ or ‘revelation’ as ‘like a child being handed a toy’: ‘The likeness between the joy of the artist touched by a revelation and that of the child surprised by a present depends, I believe, on the fact that both joys are pure.’17

  In the literature on convalescence as an aesthetic, if I can put it like that, which dates back to the Romantics, and specifically to Coleridge in a rural context and Baudelaire in an urban one, the convalescent’s experience of his or her environment is often compared to that of the child. Such a delicate, almost helpless responsiveness or susceptiveness to life, and to its forgotten sensations, has something of the child’s brittle innocence: ‘I had the strange impression that I was looking at all these things for the first time,’ de Chirico comments on his convalescence.

  The ‘nearly morbid state of sensitivity’ evoked by de Chirico in his ‘Meditations of a Painter’, associated as it is with the aftermath of a long illness, situates the artist within a tradition that I want to characterize, in a deliberately Baudelairean formulation, as that of the convalescent as hero of modernity. As de Chirico’s anecdote announces, the convalescent, and particularly the male convalescent, who is for social reasons less physically restricted than the female, less confined to the domestic domain, is in spite of his infirmity and decrepitude not necessarily confined to the sickroom.

  I am especially interested in the moment when the urban convalescent, notwithstanding his frail nerves, takes his first, reckless steps in the city from which he has been temporarily exiled, and experiences a sense of freedom at once tentative and abrupt. The streets, which the convalescent approaches cautiously, still a little feverishly, at first perhaps as an observer who must half-protect himself from the impact of the city, are the site of his groping re-engagement with everyday life.

  Occupying some indeterminate space between health and illness – even, in his residual feverishness, between reason and unreason – the convalescent is at once acutely sensitive to his environment and oddly insulated from it. ‘The body after long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain it,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in Jacob’s Room (1922).18 The convalescent is both alive to the life that continues around him, and dead to it. He is at the same time calm and restless, contemplative and thoughtless.

  In Sons and Lovers (1913), D. H. Lawrence also narrated an epiphanic moment in which the whole world seems convalescent. ‘In convalescence,’ the narrator comments, after describing an attack of bronchitis, ‘everything was wonderful.’19 The world has been renewed. As in de Chirico’s contemporaneous moment of revelation, the distinctive state of convalescence releases the young protagonist Paul Morel’s sense of the pictorial qualities of everyday sights, albeit in the country rather than the city. Seated in bed in his sickroom, he abstractedly concentrates on the wintry view through the window, where snowflakes cling to the pane for a moment and are gone.

  In convalescence, as in the Baudelairean conception of spleen explored by Benjamin, ‘time is reified: the minutes cover a man like snowflakes.’20 From Paul’s convalescent perspective, the land suddenly comes to seem like a landscape; that is, detached from its instrumental functions, the countryside is spontaneously rendered aesthetic. In this scene, the architrave effectively functions as a picture-frame, and the deep snow outside acts as a blank canvas: ‘Away across the valley the little black train crawled doubtfully over the great whiteness.’21 In de Chirico’s paintings from this period, too, black trains that creep against the background are symbolic of an industriousness, indeed an industrialism, from which the convalescent feels gratefully exempt.

  In the context of an urban convalescence, the aesthetics of the city and its anaesthetics are inseparable. The convalescent is thus an excellent instance of what Benjamin called ‘the law of the dialectic at a standstill’ – a social being whose immobility itself incarnates the characteristic ambiguities of everyday life in a metropolitan city.22 As someone cautiously emerging from the state of isolation associated with sickness, and experiencing in consequence a process of more or less reluctant re-socialization, he is a graphic instance of the metropolitan relationship between the individual and society, the private and the public.

  As an aesthetic archetype, furthermore, the convalescent is precisely situated on the cusp of Romanticism and Modernism, both of which, I am assuming, are politico-cultural responses to capitalist modernity. Convalescence is one of the means by which, in an industrial society and in the increasingly uniform, utilitarian culture associated with it, the subject’s body obeys the injunction, characteristic of both Romanticism and Modernism, to ‘make it new’. In this respect it also represents a revolt, albeit a passive one, that is characteristic of the aesthetics of romantic anti-capitalism; in other words, it is a redemptive reaffirmation of ‘the repressed, man
ipulated and deformed subjectivity’ manufactured by capitalism.23

  There are of course a number of other, superficially more plausible candidates, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for the Baudelairean role of hero of modernity. The most famous of these, and still the most popular, is the flâneur (whose affinities to the commodity, repeatedly emphasized by Benjamin, are all too often forgotten by those that celebrate him). As a social archetype, the convalescent has a certain amount in common with the flâneur: both of them, for example, tend to perambulate the city at a distinctly dilatory pace; and for both of them, as Benjamin puts it, ‘the joy of watching is triumphant’.24 Like his cousin the flâneur, the convalescent inhabits what Fredric Jameson has called ‘the bereft condition of the anti-hero who has no motivation at all’.25 The convalescent – who does not patrol the marketplace; who, in Benjaminian terms, looks about but does not seek a buyer – is the flâneur’s poor relation. More precisely, perhaps, he is his poorly relation.

  The convalescent is significant because, above all in Baudelaire and Poe, he provides an alternative account of the relationship between the metropolis and mental life in the nineteenth century, one in which the immobility of the urban subject is as important as his mobility.

  ‘It is strange that while so much has been written for the invalid in the time of sickness, there are but few books which deal with the special needs of Convalescence.’26 So argued the Rev. S. C. Lowry in Convalescence: Its Blessings, Trials, Duties and Dangers: A Manual of Comfort and Help for Persons Recovering from Sickness (1845), a book that explores convalescence as a spiritual, no less than physical, condition.

  The same statement holds true about contemporary scholarship on the culture of modernity, and this too has helped to make the convalescent almost invisible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sickness, and its role in nineteenth-century literature and culture, has been discussed ad nauseam, so to speak. Athena Vrettos, for example, who has devised a ‘poetics of illness’, asserts convincingly enough that ‘fictions of illness make their appearance in multiple and shifting areas of Victorian thought.’ Symptomatically, though, her narrative of these ‘somatic fictions’ abruptly shifts ‘from disease to health’, and in so doing completely effaces the importance of convalescence.27 There is at present no poetics of convalescence.

  So how can convalescence be defined, if at all, in a technical sense? In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, when its impact on literature became apparent, a number of French medical students wrote dissertations on convalescence as part of their final examination.28 One of these, which I have chosen almost at random, can therefore function as a preliminary definition. In his thesis presented at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris on 3 August 1837, Hyacinthe Dubranle makes this statement:

  Convalescence … is an intermediary state between the illness that it succeeds and the condition of health that it precedes. It begins at the stage when the symptoms that characterize the illness have disappeared, and it finishes at the stage when the free and regular exercise of the functions that constitute health is fully restored.29

  This definition is manifestly problematic, because like all definitions of convalescence it cannot make sharp distinctions between this transitional phase and the phases that precede and succeed it. Is it possible, one might ask, to identify the moment when the symptoms of the disease disappear? Or when the free and regular exercise of those functions that constitute healthiness is fully restored? It is, however, useful enough; and not least because, in making obvious the difficulty of providing a precise definition at all, it implies that convalescence is a diffusive condition, one that spontaneously undoes an uncomplicated opposition between disease and health.

  If, on the one hand, convalescence simply occupies the neutral border territory through which the patient must travel in order to escape from disease, on the other, the convalescent state stealthily colonizes health itself, sometimes comprehensively. What the great Romantic essayist Charles Lamb, in the mid-1820s, depicted as ‘this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet far enough from the terra firma of established health’, has a habit of surreptitiously encroaching on terra firma.30

  The effects of an illness are often especially difficult to eradicate once the patient has resumed ordinary life, once he or she has resumed their role in the production process, even if these effects manifest themselves mainly in the form of psychosomatic anxieties. In the early nineteenth century, when time became increasingly industrialized and commodified, labour was significantly reshaped by emergent forms of temporal discipline associated with the proliferation of clocks and watches. ‘Not the task but the value of time when reduced to money is dominant’, as E. P. Thompson has explained; ‘Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.’31 In this context – one in which invalids were invalidated – sickness could not be countenanced. Individuals therefore frequently had to live with illness, accommodating it to everyday life, adapting it to the demands of the production process, in order to sustain themselves.

  Prematurely forced by economic necessity to make regular if not necessarily free use of their physical and mental functions, many people were – and are – arrested in an almost perpetual state of transition from sickness to health, from health to sickness. These people, more or less forced to participate in a society in which they feel perpetually unfit, are at once hypochondriac and heroic. Convalescence is in this sense a chronic rather than an acute phenomenon, and it might even be identified as one of those almost existential conditions characteristic of the historical process of industrial modernization.

  Life in the metropolitan city is itself ineradicably febrile. ‘The resistance that modernity offers to the natural productive élan of an individual is out of all proportion to his strength,’ Benjamin writes in ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’ (1938); and ‘it is understandable if a person becomes exhausted and takes refuge in death.’ For this reason, he argues, ‘modernity must stand under the sign of death’.32 It might equally be said to stand under the sign of convalescence. The experience of modernity is one of being suspended between vitality and exhaustion, life and death.

  If convalescence is a state of transition from sickness to health, then in narrative terms this process is not automatically a ‘comic’ one, in the sense of providing formal or official resolution. To the extent that sickness offers temporary respite from the disciplinary demands of industrial capitalism, convalescence promises not so much the social reintegration that, like marriage, it signals in the plot of the nineteenth-century novel, as a form of disintegration instead.33 Reintegration and disintegration go together for the convalescent.

  So, in his essay ‘The Convalescent’ (1825), which dramatizes the narrative of convalescence as a tragicomic one, Lamb provocatively celebrates sickness. His mischievous claim is that, in the ‘regal solitude’ of his sickbed, the patient enjoys positively autocratic privileges which he should only reluctantly give up. In the kingdom of the sick, according to Lamb, all citizens are monarchs. ‘How the patient lords it there! What caprices he acts without controul [sic]! How kinglike he sways his pillow,’ Lamb exclaims.34 The sick man is thus paradoxically ‘disalienated’.35 ‘How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man’s self to himself!’ continues Lamb in ecstasies of self-afflation. The convalescent, in contrast, is like a despot who has been violently deposed: ‘from the bed of sickness (throne let me rather call it) to the elbow chair of convalescence, is a fall from dignity, amounting to a deposition.’36

  Specifically, Lamb complains that, as a convalescent, he has once more been made susceptible to the pressures of labour. The convalescent therefore feels his body, after a delightful interval of enforced unproductivity, being gradually instrumentalized and commodified again. Lamb insists that, paradoxically, because he must divest himself of ‘the strong armour of sickness’, robust health makes him vulnerable.37 Under capitalism, our bodies are reified, although we are habi
tually forced to forget this fact. In the ambiguous state of convalescence, however, when we are uncomfortably poised between the health that qualifies us for the production process and the sickness that should disqualify us from it, we are briefly made conscious of the alienation of our physical lives from our mental or spiritual lives.

  The incontrovertible evidence for the relapse into a state of alienation decried by Lamb is of course the article on ‘The Convalescent’ itself, which he offers his editor – who has impatiently requested publishable copy from him – in the deliberately self-reflexive flourish of the final paragraph. Lamb’s essay thus reinscribes his convalescence as an abrupt fall back into labour, which in a tone of satirical contempt he calls ‘the petty businesses of life’.38 It describes a brutal transition from a prelapsarian state, the domain of use-value, to a postlapsarian state, the domain of exchange-value. Ironically, however, it is the delicate nerviness of the convalescent, his euphoric sensitivity even, which has made it possible for Lamb to produce this clever, supremely self-conscious effusion for publication in the first place.

  Lamb complains that convalescence ‘shrinks a man back to his pristine stature’, using ‘pristine’ in its strict sense to mean original, primitive or ancient.39 He employs this adjective to evoke the almost primordial helplessness of the convalescent when, as if in some painfully mundane re-enactment of Adam’s deposition from Eden, he is violently forced back into the everyday conditions of an advanced civilization. If human beings themselves, as Freud allegedly argued, are born prematurely, then the convalescent, once he or she inhabits the streets again, is in effect prematurely reborn as an urban subject.

  In the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s allusion, in the essay on ‘The Mirror Stage’, to the ‘real specific prematurity of birth in man’, he discusses the ‘relation between the organism and its reality’ in the infant’s initial development. This is a complicated process of mutual accommodation ‘between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt’, between individual consciousness and the environment. The infant’s neo-natal months are characterized by what Lacan calls ‘signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination’; and the ‘mirror stage’ itself is among other things the process by which these signs of ‘foetalization’ come to disappear and the infant assumes instead, as he writes in terms that might almost have been taken from Wilhelm Reich, ‘the armour of an alienating identity’.40