The Walker
Page 8
No doubt it is because of the risk his readers might make precisely this association that Dickens decided to amend his first draft of the story. Originally, he specified that, when she meets the narrator, Nell is a ‘young female, apparently in some agitation’, and that she is ‘looking archly’. He also indicated that she has diamonds to sell. In the amended text she is simply a ‘pretty little girl’ who, in spite of the secret that compels her onto the streets at night, is smiling.41 In this manuscript version, the opening of The Old Curiosity Shop remains disconcertingly close to a depiction of the encounter between an old male nightwalker and a young female streetwalker.
But Dickens does not fully erase the traces of such an encounter even in the final version of the novel. ‘I have lost my road,’ Nell announces in the ensuing dialogue, in a sentence that – like the phrase going or gone astray – is freighted with moral associations (9). It is designed gently to hint once again that she might be a fallen child, or at the least a potentially corruptible one – perhaps in order to transmit an added frisson of excitement to the reader. For if young girls walking alone in the city’s streets were not necessarily prostitutes, they were, in the popular imagination at least, potential prostitutes, vulnerable to predatory pimps.
Dickens had himself reflected on the criminalization of young girls in an article for Bell’s Life in London of November 1835. There, he watches two sisters being placed in a prisoner’s van on the street, and sermonizes as follows: ‘Step by step, how many wretched females, within the sphere of every man’s observation, have become involved in a career of vice, frightful to contemplate; hopeless at its commencement, loathsome and repulsive in its course; friendless, forlorn, and unpitied, at its miserable conclusion.’42 Nell, parented by a grandfather who is deeply in debt and fatally addicted to gambling, is perhaps taking her first steps along this path.
Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851), to give another, slightly later example, included a quotation from the opening address of ‘The London Society for the Protection of Young Females, and Prevention of Juvenile Prostitution’, founded in 1835. The lecture at one point discusses those who trap, or ‘trepan’, girls of between eleven and fifteen in order to prostitute them:
When an innocent child appears in the streets without a protector, she is insidiously watched by one of these merciless wretches and decoyed under some plausible pretext to an abode of infamy and degradation. No sooner is the unsuspecting helpless one within their grasp than, by a preconcerted measure, she becomes a victim of their inhuman designs.43
An association with criminalized or victimized young girls on the city’s streets, then, and with the contemptible, rapacious men who exploit them, flickers uneasily at the corners of our consciousness as we read of Humphrey’s encounter with Nell at the start of The Old Curiosity Shop.
Dickens does not directly identify Nell and Master Humphrey with the social outcasts that people Mayhew’s taxonomies and his own journalistic sketches. But at the beginning of The Old Curiosity Shop we can nonetheless briefly glimpse an alternative London – the dystopian London, perhaps, that he will explore more fully in mature novels such as Bleak House (1852–53) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), with their persistent concern for repressed secrets. We can consequently glimpse an alternative novel, too. The one invoked by Joyce when he rechristens it The Old Cupiosity Shape.
After all, when Humphrey agrees to take Nell back to her grandfather, he grows fearful that, if she herself recognizes the way home, she will take her leave of him. So, he leads her there by a curiously circuitous route: ‘I avoided the most frequented ways and took the most intricate, and thus it was not until we arrived in the street itself that she knew where we were’ (10). This is at the very least an odd, slightly sadistic way of proceeding. In a strict etymological sense, it is a seduction, a leading away.
I am not proposing that Master Humphrey is a paedophile (the ‘kidnapper of children’ or ‘monster’ for which his neighbours once took him), simply that he might not be what he seems. He too is a collector of curiosities, of human ones, as I have observed; and he too, it seems, is reluctant to relinquish his hold on such curiosities. In Joycean terms, he assumes the shape of ‘cupiosity’, a curiosity darkened by libidinal desire.
An insidious, subtle sense of moral and psychological danger is therefore squandered when Humphrey suddenly disappears from The Old Curiosity Shop. Like the clock with which he is associated, Humphrey himself contains a deep, dark, silent interior in which secrets are concealed – as his roaming in the streets of the capital at night in the seminal scene of The Old Curiosity Shop seems to imply. Perhaps this is the reason Dickens dismisses him from his role as the narrator of Nell’s story. Perhaps it is Humphrey’s darkness, rather than his cumbersomeness, that prompts Dickens to expel him.
We have to wait until sixteen years after Dickens’s death for a revision of the opening chapter of the Old Curiosity Shop that teases out the disquieting subtext of the novel to which I have adverted. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the latter is introduced in the following description of a violent nocturnal encounter between a man and a young girl:
All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground.
Here, in the shape of Mr Hyde, who is ‘pale and dwarfish’ and gives an ‘impression of deformity’, Humphrey is transformed into Quilp.44
Stevenson’s reinterpretation of the primal scene of The Old Curiosity Shop reveals that Humphrey and Quilp have been doubles all along, like Jekyll and Hyde. Quilp, according to this reading, is Humphrey’s evil conscience, his unconscious.45 In his description of the first appearance of Hyde in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson replays the opening sequence of The Old Curiosity Shop at an accelerated speed, as if he is turning a phenakistoscope, and the repressed sexual energies of Dickens’s novel explode into violence as a result.
These energies bubble back up, irrepressibly, in two of the most significant and challenging late modernist novels, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). In these experimental fictions, the obscene unconscious of Dickens’s novel becomes visible. The protagonist of Finnegans Wake is another Humphrey – Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. But if his first name echoes that of Master Humphrey, his second and third names bear traces of Quilp’s character. For Quilp, who is more than once identified by Dickens with a monkey,46 is a compulsive eavesdropper, or earwigger (as in Chapter 9, where he spies on Nell and her grandfather, who are having the conversation during the course of which they decide to leave the city and ‘walk through country places’ [79]).
These distant associations become more meaningful in the context of a novel that centres on a mysterious moment of obscenity visited by Humphrey on his daughter in a park. For Joyce’s Humphrey does indeed appear to have paedophile tendencies. In the ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ section of Finnegans Wake, two washerwomen analyse the stains on Humphrey’s underwear and decide that they are evidence of sexual impropriety, in particular his desire for young girls. Later on, Humphrey calls out in Danish, ‘I so love those beautiful young girls.’47 Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker thus threatens to expose or ‘out’ Dickens’s Humphrey. In Joyce’s own words, ‘to anyone who knew and loved the christlikeness’ of the ‘cleanminded’ Humphrey, ‘the mere suggestion of him as a lustsleuth nosing for trouble’ seems preposterous. But, once the suspicion has been raised in relation to The Old Curiosity Shop, this is precisely the suggestion that lingers around the narrator.48
In Lolita, the ultimate novel about illicit relations between an ageing man and a young girl, Nabokov too seems to invoke The Old Curiosity Shop, leaving Dickens�
��s Humphrey even more exposed by the company he is forced to keep in subsequent literary history. This connection is in part mediated through Finnegans Wake, for Humbert Humbert’s name echoes that of Joyce’s Humphrey, who is also known as ‘Mr Humhum’.49 Nabokov’s Humbert at one point refers to himself as ‘a humble hunchback abusing [him]self in the dark’ – a formulation which might even serve as a cynical description of Master Humphrey in the opening chapter of The Old Curiosity Shop.50
More specifically still, the mystery of Master Humphrey seems to haunt the passage in which Humbert describes arriving in Briceland, where he plans to seduce or rape Lolita in an inn called ‘The Enchanted Hunters’. Only moments before their arrival, he has kissed her ‘in the neck’, a gesture that stings her into calling him a ‘dirty man’:
Dusk was beginning to saturate pretty little Briceland, its phony colonial architecture, curiosity shops and imported shade trees, when we drove through the weakly lighted streets in search of The Enchanted Hunters. The air, despite a steady drizzle beading it, was warm and green, and a queue of people, mainly children and old men, had already formed before the box office of a movie house, dripping jewel-fires.51
A queue of children and old men in a town containing curiosity shops … In the United States in the 1950s Humphrey and Nell end up outside a cinema ‘dripping jewel-fires’; or, like Humbert and Lolita, inside the Enchanted Hunters.
If Dickens’s Humphrey can be identified with the sick man in St Martin’s Court mentioned in The Old Curiosity Shop, who is mesmerized by the ‘hum and noise’ of feet pacing the streets of the metropolis, then he too is a Mr Humhum. He is the ancestor of both Joyce’s Humphrey and Nabokov’s Humbert. A ‘lustsleuth’. These are the vermiculations of Master Humphrey, whose mysterious character becomes modified in the guts of Stevenson, Joyce and Nabokov. From the perspective of the nightwalking scene with which The Old Curiosity Shop starts, the ‘cupiosity shape’ secreted in Dickens’s supposedly sentimental novel eventually resolves itself into the even darker visions of their experimental fictions.
3
Disappearing
Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward
‘What if one person woke up one day and was another person?’ the film-maker David Lynch once asked.1 As his films Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001) testify, with their abrupt narrative and psychic displacements, Lynch has long had an interest in so-called fugue states.2
Dissociative or psychogenic fugue is a rare psychological condition in which, as a result of an amnesiac episode precipitated for example by a traumatic incident, the patient experiences a loss of identity. Individuals who suffer from the condition, which was first diagnosed in the late nineteenth century, often find themselves in unexpected places, even far from home, with no explanation as to how they arrived there. The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (2013), in its section on dissociative disorders, refers to ‘dissociated travel’ and ‘the perplexity, disorientation, and purposeless wandering of individuals with generalized amnesia’.3 But if psychogenic fugue entails a loss of identity, it can also involve the acquisition of a different, entirely unfamiliar identity. In some cases, people disappear from their everyday lives and reappear as … other people.
Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward (1888) was the most successful utopian fiction published in the late nineteenth century. In his negotiations both with the utopian city in which he arrives and the dystopian city to which he appears to revert near the end of the novel, and which he traverses in panic on foot, Bellamy’s time-travelling protagonist betrays the characteristics of someone undergoing a psychogenic fugue. He thus represents an important precursor to the fugueur recently celebrated by Iain Sinclair. In London Orbital (2003) and elsewhere, Sinclair affirms that he finds ‘the term fugueur more attractive than the now overworked flâneur’. In an attempt to characterize his circumlocution of the M25 motorway that encircles London, which he undertook in response to ‘the increasing lunacy of city life’, he remarks that fugue is ‘a psychic commando course’.4
Its ‘key image’, Sinclair argues, is a lost picture by Vincent Van Gogh – The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888). This painting, subsequently emulated by Francis Bacon in a series of tenebrous studies, is the haunted and haunting self-portrait of a solitary man on a road who is ‘tracked by a distorted shadow.’5 It was painted, it so happens, in the year that Looking Backward was published. This novel is in part the study of a fugitive in time and space, one who closely resembles the figure of the fugueur that appears in fin-de-siècle diagnoses of mental illness.
In Bellamy’s bestseller, an inhabitant of Boston named Julian West, who suffers from chronic insomnia, falls into a deep sleep one night in 1887, thanks to the assistance of a mesmerist, and wakes up one day in the year 2000. The United States, it transpires, has in the meantime evolved quite naturally and peacefully into a socialist society. Published during the most prolific epoch in the history of utopian thought, the book had a profoundly influential effect on the development of utopia as a literary and political discourse, principally because it located its state-socialist society at a point in historical time rather than geographical space.
‘Looking Backward was written in the belief that the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us, and is not far away,’ Bellamy declared in the Postscript to the book’s second edition.6 The final clause of that sentence, ‘not far away’, seems ambiguous, for if it means that the origins of the Golden Age lie in the nineteenth century rather than some far-distant future, then it also means that it can be found in the United States rather than some far-distant island. The utopian tradition that commenced with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) had of course generally located the ideal society in unmapped space; Bellamy’s formal contribution to this tradition was to cement its association with unmapped time, by projecting the ideal society into an imaginable future.
In his review of Looking Backward from 1889, the British Marxist William Morris claimed that ‘it is the serious essay and not the slight envelope of romance which people have found interesting’.7 Like a number of subsequent critics, he implied, first, that the book’s essayistic and romantic elements are its sole formal components; and, second, that the latter can be dismissed as of merely incidental importance. More recently, for example, Krishan Kumar has remarked that, of all the utopian fictions discussed in his compendious, authoritative account of Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, ‘Bellamy’s is in fact the least interesting, considered as literature.’8
Bellamy himself, despite his comparative commercial success as an author of ghost stories and romances, seems to have sanctioned this assumption. In an article of 1890, he observed that, in recasting the manuscript of Looking Backward after devising the idea of the ‘industrial army’, which he identified as ‘the destined corner-stone of the new social order’, he retained ‘the form of romance’ only reluctantly and ‘with some impatience, in the hope of inducing the more to give it at least a reading’.9
Kumar has pointed out that, in adopting this attitude, Bellamy was ‘rejecting his own past as a romancer and story-teller’. ‘He was self-consciously taking on a new, more purposive role, as social critic and prophet,’ he concludes; ‘but in doing so he ensured that, once his ideas had been generally absorbed, or were no longer considered interesting, there was little to attract a later generation to the book.’10 This is a misrepresentation of Looking Backward, a novel that is in fact possessed of considerable psychological depth. In retrospect, Bellamy’s finest achievement is perhaps his rendering of the protagonist’s psychology – that is, the aspect of the book that has been most consistently overlooked in scholarly accounts of it.
Indeed, Looking Backward can be productively interpreted as a kind of case history in the psychology of the utopian imagination, one that centres on the fugue states experienced by the protagonist as he traverses the streets of t
he city of the future on foot. Ultimately, in fact, the novel implies that utopian dreaming itself induces a kind of fugue state.
If Looking Backward comprises both the essay form and the romance form, to apply Morris’s terms, then these might be described as torn halves that do not completely add up.11 But Bellamy’s utopia is all the more compelling because of this subtle inconsistency. Its most interesting ideas are lodged in the interstices of the text, those passages that describe West’s experiences on the cusp of present and future, for example, or that depict him as susceptible still to the nightmare of the past.
At the ragged edges of the ‘envelope of romance’, in Morris’s formulation, another sort of novel can be glimpsed, one that is unsettling and psychologically suggestive. In this respect, Bellamy’s utopia is continuous rather than discontinuous with his previous fiction in which he speculatively explores abnormal psychological states.12 In Miss Ludington’s Sister (1884), for instance, Bellamy speculates about ‘the immortality of past selves’, imagining an alternative state of being in which both one’s ‘past and future selves’ are immediately, perpetually present: ‘The idea of an individual, all whose personalities are contemporaneous, may there be realized, and such an individual would be by any earthly measurements a god.’13
If the political aspirations of Looking Backward have dominated its reception, it should in addition be understood as a protracted meditation, in the conditions of metropolitan modernity, on the idea of multiple personality, as this is articulated through a fugue state, especially in the form of ‘bewildered wandering’. Julian West – whose name superficially evokes the purposive, pioneering travel associated with the injunction to ‘Go West, young man, and grow up with the country’14 – turns out to embody a mobility of the most errant and apparently purposeless kind.