The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  The second of Baudelaire’s vectors of modernity as spectacle is the female passer-by. Baudelaire presents the spectacular image of this archetypal figure in a section of ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ entitled ‘Women and Prostitutes’. He is especially interested in prostitutes.

  ‘In that vast picture-gallery which is life in London or Paris,’ he declares, ‘we shall meet with the various types of fallen womanhood – of woman in revolt against society – at all levels’, from courtesans to the ‘poor slaves’ of the stews (37). In classifying these types, and detailing their physiognomies, he insists that he is not trying ‘to gratify the reader, any more than to scandalize him’; and he is adamant that, if anyone is intending to satisfy ‘his unhealthy curiosity’, ‘he will find nothing whatever to stimulate the sickness of his imagination’ (38).

  In restaging the Baudelairean forms of the spectacle in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf hints that there is in fact an ‘unhealthy curiosity’ to Peter’s interest in the woman he covertly tracks through the streets of central London. This is in part because, even as he idealizes her, he objectifies her body: ‘she became the very woman he had always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting’ (68). This scene is a feminist re-inscription, not only of ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ but of Baudelaire’s famous poem ‘À une passante’ (1855), in which he describes a female passer-by dressed in mourning, ‘stately yet lithe, as if a statue walked’, investing this ‘lovely fugitive’ with his libidinal and spiritual longings.23

  But Peter’s curiosity is also implicitly unhealthy because, as he silently pursues the passer-by, he collapses her identity into the commodities amongst which, at the core of London’s culture of consumption, she circumambulates:

  On and on she went, across Piccadilly, and up Regent Street, ahead of him, her cloak, her gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the feather boas in the windows to make the spirit of finery and whimsy which dwindled out of the shops onto the pavement, as the light of a lamp goes wavering at night over hedges in the darkness. (69)

  Here are the operations of ‘fashion’, which – in Benjamin’s formulation – ‘couples the living body to the inorganic world’ in commodity society.24 In an almost cubistic effect, the woman’s body is broken up into discrete objects, including hands and shoulders. These then combine and intersect, in the reflective surfaces of the glass screening the shops or department stores, with the commodities on display. If the commodity itself, from the mid- to late nineteenth century, increasingly became the dominant form of the spectacle, then this anonymous woman, in acting as a ‘bearer of the spectacle’, is comprehensively colonized by it.

  In Peter’s consciousness, commodities are at the same time spiritualized, in the shape of the ethereal finery that spills onto the pavement, and eroticized. Bowlby, in her essay on Woolf and walking, revisits the journalist Louis Huart’s Le Flâneur (1850) and emphasizes that ‘the woman – the object par excellence of the flâneur’s interest – is in this regard analogous to the shop window’.25 In this passage from Mrs Dalloway, it might be added, it is a relationship of identity as much as analogy.

  Woolf uses Peter’s predatory activities on the street to demonstrate, in Benjamin’s compelling formulation from his essay on ‘The Return of the Flâneur’ (1929), ‘how easy it is for the flâneur to depart from the ideal of the philosopher out for a stroll, and to assume the features of the werewolf at large in the social jungle.’26 Peter – a werewoolf, so to speak – is the ‘passionate spectator’ as raptor; as one of those ‘wild beasts, our fellow men’, the inhabitants of ‘the heart of the forest’ that is the city, whom she mentions at the conclusion of ‘Street Haunting’.27

  Walking in the day, and stalking in the day, Peter recalls what Baudelaire identifies, in a phrase from Rousseau that appears in his account of Guys, as the ‘depraved animal’ who is visible at evening time in the city ‘wherever the sun lights up [his] swift joys’ (10). In this primal modern scene, Woolf implicitly presents a brutally unsentimental feminist critique of the Baudelairean hero of modernity.

  In the more abstract or formal terms that, before I looked at Baudelaire’s concrete instances of the soldiers and prostitutes, I briefly invoked in order to identify the significance of Peter’s epiphany on the roads of London in Mrs Dalloway, it is important to underline that this character’s perceptions of the city enact what the artist and art theorist Victor Burgin has usefully referred to as the ‘imbrication of social and mental space’.28

  This mutual interpenetration of inner and outer comprises an exemplary experience, in the urban imaginary limned by modernist art and literature, of the reciprocal relationship between spectacle and introspection. In this sense, too, the incident involving Peter in central London revisits the site of some of Baudelaire’s meditations on the poetics of everyday life in Paris. In the conditions of metropolitan modernity, private and public forms of space are liable to open into and enfold one another. For an instant, the multi-faceted forms of the individual’s mental and metropolitan lives, their shifting concavities and convexities, connect and intersect.

  At the moment of his epiphany in Whitehall, when he simultaneously experiences ‘understanding’, ‘a vast philanthropy’ and ‘an irrepressible, exquisite delight’, Peter feels his mind become ‘flat as a marsh’ and yet, at the same time, senses that he is suddenly standing ‘at the opening of endless avenues’ (67). In this dance of movement and stasis, surface and depth, of the interior and the exterior, the open and the closed, it is impossible to discriminate clearly between consciousness and the city. The contradictory effect of Woolf’s composite image is, in this respect, comparable to the interpenetration of spaces explored by several of the modernist painters and poets of her generation, whose characteristic productions simultaneously compress and explode urban space, flattening it and fragmenting it.

  Picasso’s and Braque’s ‘analytical cubist’ paintings from the first ten or fifteen years of the twentieth century, which used a monochromatic palette to intensify their multi-perspectival effects, provide a graphic illustration of the crisis of the old, apparently solid distinction between interior and exterior space, subject and object. Like the modernist literary experiments of the early twentieth century, they explore what Philip Fisher, writing about Ulysses, refers to as ‘torn space’ – ‘a multiple, distracted, interrupted spatial experience that is related to “looking around” and derives from our everyday, usually overlooked experiences in the city street.’29

  What about the poetics of the city in this period? Take Isaac Rosenberg’s ‘Fleet Street’ (1912). Here, the poet carefully orchestrates the relations of inside and outside in his depiction of the individual embedded in the disorienting everyday life of the metropolis. He immerses the reader in the anarchic conditions of the ‘shaking quivering street’, which has a ‘pulse and heart that throbs and glows / As if strife were its repose’. But, in spite of closing his ears to the chaotic metrics of this arterial road, he quickly capitulates to them:

  I shut my ear to such rude sounds

  As reach a harsh discordant note,

  Till, melting into what surrounds,

  My soul doth with the current float;

  And from the turmoil and the strife

  Wakes all the melody of life.

  The poem’s concluding stanza, in which both the buildings and passers-by that populate the street ‘blindly stare’ at its inhabitants, iterates the idea that the city is, in the end, repressive, secretive.30 This cannot erase the impression, though, that the poet’s private self has, for a moment, opened up to the public life of the metropolis, creating an almost miraculous harmony. The poet’s reticence, it might be said, finally concedes to the varieties and irreticences of the city, which constitute the poem’s very conditions of possibility.

  Hope Mirrlees, to take another example, explores comparable territory, at once psychic and social, in Paris (1920). This remarkable, if often obscu
re poem about the interrelationship of metropolis and mental life, which Woolf edited for the Hogarth Press, is formally more experimental than Rosenberg’s. As Sean Pryor notes, it is both ‘a journey across the city, registering a speaker’s encounters with people and places’, and, at the same time, ‘the interior monologue or phantasmagoria of a speaker ranging across Paris in her imagination’.31 It intermingles fragments of script from the streets of the French capital, especially in the form of notices and shop signs, with apparently random, dreamlike phrases that seem to have floated from the poet’s consciousness, like scraps of a torn-up notebook spilling from her pocket, as she wanders aimlessly through the city in the course of a single day.

  Mirrlees’ verse, endlessly inventive in its use of typography, like Braque’s and Picasso’s cubist paintings, is dense and hallucinatory: ‘CONCORDE // I can’t / I must go slowly.’32 Here, too, in language that anticipates Beckett as well as Eliot, the city seems to have prolapsed into the poet’s consciousness. ‘Concorde’ is both the Place de la Concorde, or the signage relating to it, and an ironic reference to the vision of a harmonious city that, in attempting to orchestrate the contradictions and cacophonies of the relations of consciousness and the street, the poet mocks. It is what Rosenberg identifies as ‘the melody of life’ that, if the poet can successfully orchestrate it, freely coalesces from ‘the turmoil and the strife’ of the metropolis.

  In ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Baudelaire had sketched these kinds of complicated, constantly changing spatial dynamics between the inner and the outer when he compared the passionate spectator in the city ‘to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of [the crowd’s] movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life’. Baudelaire adds: ‘He is an “I” with an insatiable appetite for the “non-I”’ (10).

  For Baudelaire, as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard emphasized, ‘immensity is an intimate dimension.’ In his subtle phenomenological meditation on the role of the word ‘vast’ in Baudelaire’s oeuvre, Bachelard quotes from the latter’s Journaux intimes (first published two decades after the poet’s death, in 1887): ‘In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it.’ ‘The exterior spectacle’, Bachelard explains, ‘helps intimate grandeur unfold.’33

  Modernist literature pursues and plays out the Baudelairean dialectic of mental and metropolitan space, of the intimate and the spectacular, in multiple directions. Christopher Butler has typified this in terms of the tension, in the ‘confrontation with the city’ characteristic of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, ‘between an introspective alienation and a celebration of the sheer energy and collective diversity of life.’ This is the contrast, he adds, between The Waste Land and Ulysses, both published in 1922.34

  In spite of their different forms and different emphases, both Eliot’s poem and Joyce’s novel explore the articulations of self and the city in a bid to apprehend the experience of metropolitan modernity (as do the poems by Rosenberg and Mirrlees). The former is a cracked collocation of voices that collectively evoke the consciousness of an imperial city in a state of terminal decline. The latter is a peregrination through the glorious, grimy life of a colonial city that, immersed in the present of its presiding consciousnesses, is filled with a sense of the future as well as the past.

  In the representation of its principal male characters, Peter and Septimus, Mrs Dalloway explores both of the tendencies outlined by Butler – ‘introspective alienation and a celebration of the sheer energy and collective diversity of life’ – with notable clarity. During Peter’s perambulation through central London, the city and his consciousness seem continuous, their spaces coterminous. But he remains within the orbit of the ordinary, the ostensibly rational. He is conscious, for instance, of ‘the strangeness of standing alone, alive, unknown, at half-past eleven in Trafalgar Square’ (67).

  Empirical reality thus retains its ontological priority. It doesn’t dissolve, however much it is transformed by being absorbed into Peter’s consciousness. The shops, the statues, the streets, remain independent of him. It is only as he falls asleep beside an elderly children’s nurse on a bench in Regent’s Park that the real, for a time, seems spectral. Lapsing into this hypnagogic state, he toys with the idea that ‘nothing exists outside us except a state of mind’ (73).

  Septimus, in contradistinction, does not remain within the orbit of the ordinary and ostensibly rational. For the shell-shocked soldier adrift in an indifferent metropolis, the exterior spectacle helps both an intimate grandeur and an intimate horror to unfold. Concrete reality is assimilated to his traumatized consciousness in a perpetual rush, at once exhilarating and terrifying. Exquisitely sensitive to his immediate environment, he feels as if his body has been ‘macerated until only the nerve fibres were left’:

  He lay back in his chair, exhausted but upheld. He lay resting, waiting, before he again interpreted, with effort, with agony, to mankind. He lay very high, on the back of the world. The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head. Music began clanging against the rocks up here. (88–9)

  The city itself is the cross on which Septimus is crucified. The sound of a motor horn, which reaches him from the road, cannons about in his consciousness, colliding in ‘shocks of sound’ that rise in ‘smooth columns’, and sliding in and out of his delirious fantasies (89).

  These fantasies, which echo some of the imagery of The Waste Land, find him marooned on ‘his rock, like a drowned sailor on a rock’, struggling for air like a beached swimmer that the tide rips back and forth between the earth and the sea: ‘and as, before waking, the voices of birds and the sound of wheels chime and chatter in queer harmony, grow louder and louder, and the sleeper feels himself drawing to the shores of life, so he felt himself drawing towards life, the sun growing hotter, cries sounding louder, something tremendous about to happen’ (89–90).

  Here, albeit in an accelerated form far more extreme than Peter’s experience, is a dance of movement and stasis, surface and depth, of the interior and the exterior, the open and the closed, that makes it impossible to discriminate clearly between consciousness and the city. In contrast to Peter’s hypnagogic state, though, Woolf portrays Septimus’s thought in terms of a hypnopompic state; in other words, the state that precedes not falling asleep but awakening.

  After his sleep, Peter passes the bench in Regent’s Park on which Septimus happens to be sitting with his wife. This is one of those encounters or non-encounters characteristic of metropolitan modernity, which is daily defined by contingencies that seem both meaningful and meaningless. Seeing Peter approach, Septimus spontaneously identifies him with one of his dead comrades from the Front. In a horrifying moment, sensing ‘legions of men prostrate behind him’, he apprehends Peter as ‘the dead man in the grey suit’ (91, 92). His painful experience of the synaesthetics of the city – the chime of another motor horn ‘tinkl[es] divinely on the grass stalks’ – has in an instant opened out into a vision of London as a city of the dead (90).

  This phantasmagoria provides a superimposition of two linked terrains: the prospect of urban modernity and the landscapes of technological war. ‘So many,’ as Eliot had intoned in an echo of Dante, ‘I had not thought death had undone so many …’35 The capital is suddenly a city composed not of streets encircling parks but of trenches bordering no-man’s-land; not of endless avenues, to put it in terms of Peter’s mental topography, but of marshland. A Waste Land.

  In Lawrence’s poem ‘Town in 1917’ (1918), an unsettling attempt to think through London’s imperial inheritance, the poet glimpses an apocalyptic London consisting of ‘Fleet, hurrying limbs, / Soft-footed dead’. Recalling Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), the nightmarish final stanzas of the poem, which evoke the imperial city’s past as a colonized
city, present the metropolis, in a time of cataclysmic war, as a place of primordial horror:

  London, with hair

  Like a forest darkness, like a marsh

  Of rushes, ere the Romans

  Broke in her lair.36

  It is to this horrifying hinterland, the territory of brutal, senseless military conflict, that Whitehall secretly leads in Mrs Dalloway. Septimus’s hallucination is the symptomatic expression of the imperial city’s unconscious. It reveals the barbaric horror on which the grandeur of the capital is built, which Woolf subsequently evoked to such sudden, frightening effect in the image of ‘the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men’ in ‘Street Haunting’.

  This is the repressed topography of the ‘landscapes of the great city’ that Baudelaire’s spectator gazes on, a city littered with the ghostly corpses of the 25,000 proletarians past which the regiment that thrills him have processed. It is the chaos and desolation that underlies ‘the amazing harmony of life in the capital cities’, which he glimpses in the fearful, infernal associations of the empty plain and the stony labyrinths of the metropolis (10).

  In the terms famously developed by Simmel in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), it might be said that Septimus fails ‘to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces’. Or, more precisely, his autonomy and individuality are at once erased and intensified in the everyday conditions of the modern city. In his case, the organ that the ‘metropolitan type of man’ develops in order to protect himself ‘against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him’ has degenerated.37 It has atrophied on the battlefields of Europe.