The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, by Giorgio de Chirico on p. 25: Private Collection/the Bridgeman Art Library Copyright DACS.

  Gros orteil (Sujet masculin, 30 ans), by Jacques-André Boiffard on p. 208: Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Centre de création industrielle. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Philippe Migeat.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 72.

  2 Marshall Berman, Modernism in the Streets: A Life and Times in Essays, eds David Marcus and Shellie Sclan (London: Verso, 2017).

  3 André Breton, ‘The Disdainful Confession’, in The Lost Steps, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 4.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Breton, Nadja, p. 113. Cited in Walter Benjamin, ‘Marseilles’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), p. 131.

  6 Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 73.

  7 Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps, trans. Harriet de Onís (London: Minerva, 1991), p. 250. For Auden’s image, see W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, in Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), p. 81.

  8 See André Breton, ‘The New Spirit’, in The Lost Steps, p. 73.

  9 See Paul Celan, ‘Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen’, in Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), p. 34 – though note that, disappointingly, Waldrop translates unverloren not as ‘unlost’ but as ‘secure’.

  10 Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive’, in The Situationists and the City, ed. Tom McDonough (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 77–85.

  11 Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones, trans. Samuel Beckett (Calder & Boyars, 1972), p. 7. See Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries, 1936–1937 (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 17; and Samuel Beckett, Watt, ed. C. J. Ackerley (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), pp. 200f. The settings of both Waiting for Godot (1953) and Endgame (1957) might also be usefully identified as salles des pas perdus.

  12 Breton, Nadja, p. 71.

  13 Henry Miller, Black Spring (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 3.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, eds Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 44.

  16 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), p. 62. John Carey, in The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 10, rather drily observes that, ‘largely through Eliot’s influence, the assumption that most people are dead became, by the 1930s, a standard item in the repertoire of any self-respecting intellectual.’

  17 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983).

  18 See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version)’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4, p. 269. For a fine essay on the complexities of Benjamin’s evolving understanding of the dialectical relationship between attention and distraction, see Carolin Duttlinger, ‘Between Contemplation and Distraction: Configurations of Attention in Walter Benjamin’, German Studies Review 30: 1 (2007), pp. 33–54.

  19 Howard Eiland, ‘Reception in Distraction’, boundary 2 30: 1 (2003), p. 60.

  20 T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, p. 174.

  21 Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, p. 41.

  22 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, eds David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 175, 178.

  23 Ibid., p. 179.

  24 See: nsc.org/home-safety/safety-topics/distracted-walking.

  25 Jun-Ming Lu and Yi-Chin Lo, ‘Can Interventions Based on User Interface Design Help Reduce the Risks Associated with Smart-phone Use While Walking?’ in Proceedings of the 20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2018), vol. 2, eds Sebastiano Bagnara et al. (Cham: Springer, 2018), p. 269.

  26 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Black & Red (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2013), p. 17.

  27 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 325.

  28 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), p. 10.

  29 Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 2017), p. 79.

  30 Ibid.

  31 See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 35.

  32 See Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, pp. 41, 83.

  33 Greenfield, Radical Technologies, pp. 48–9.

  34 Setha Low, ‘How Private Interests Take Over Public Space: Zoning, Taxes, and Incorporation of Gated Communities’, in The Politics of Public Space, eds Setha Low and Neil Smith (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 82.

  35 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 93.

  36 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 96, 105, 107, 108.

  37 Virginia Woolf, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, in Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), pp. 177–87.

  38 Susan Sontag, ‘Foreword: Walser’s Voice’, in Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories, trans Christopher Middleton et al. (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013), p. ix.

  39 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, 1993), p. 233.

  40 Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (London: Chatto & Windus, 2016), p. 11.

  41 For pioneering work in this field, see for example Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Deborah L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

  42 Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 7, 116.

  43 For this quotation from Victor Fournel’s Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (1867), see Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 3. See Tom Gretton, ‘Not the Flâneur Again: Reading Magazines and Living the Metropolis around 1880’, in The Invisible Flâneuse: Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, eds Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 95.

  44 Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, p. 27.

  45 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Sun’, in Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard (London: Picador, 1987), p. 88.

  46 For a recent theory of walking, one that oddly doesn’t cite Balzac’s, see Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2014).

  47 James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 10.

  48 Roland Barthes, ‘The Kitchen of Meaning’, in The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 157.

  49 For this translation, see Anna Fuchs, ‘Modernist Perambulations through Time and Space: From Enlighte
ned Walking to Crawling, Stalking, Modelling and Street-Walking’, Journal of the British Academy 4 (2016), p. 204.

  50 Dennis J. Schmidt, ‘Translator’s Introduction: In the Spirit of Bloch’, in Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, trans. Dennis J. Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. xvi.

  51 Ernst Bloch, ‘The Marxist Distance to Right and Even to Natural Right; the Problem of a Classless Quintessence of “The Upright Path” in Natural Right’, in Natural Law and Human Dignity, p. 208.

  1. Convalescing

  1 Giorgio de Chirico, ‘Meditations of a Painter’, trans. Louise Bourgeois and Robert Goldwater, in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 397–8.

  2 Ibid., p. 397.

  3 Ibid., p. 398.

  4 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), p. 148.

  5 Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2: 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingston, eds Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 519.

  6 John Ashbery, ‘Introduction: The Decline of the Verbs’, in Giorgio de Chirico, Hebdomeros, trans. John Ashbery et al. (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1992), p. x.

  7 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, pp. 101–2. I have been unable to locate this concept in Marx’s writings; but this might not matter, for the formulation in any case seems more Benjaminian than Marxian. Benjamin himself, however, uses it rather enigmatically. He invokes it in relation to some lines from Baudelaire about an old woman who, because she is excluded from ‘the large, closed parks’ of Paris, sits alone and pensive on a bench in a public garden, ‘at that hour when the setting sun / Bloodies the sky with bright red wounds.’ The only other use of the phrase ‘socially empty space’ I have been able to find is in an article by J. B. Harley, ‘Maps, Knowledge, and Power’, which argues that maps ‘“desocialize” the territory they represent’, and so ‘foster the notion of a socially empty space’. See Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds, The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 303. See also Matthew Beaumont, The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), pp. 97–120.

  8 De Chirico, ‘Meditations of a Painter’, p. 400.

  9 Walter Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, in The Writer of Modern Life, p. 134.

  10 De Chirico, ‘Meditations of a Painter’, p. 397.

  11 Ara H. Merjian, Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 1.

  12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, ed. Michael Tanner, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 54.

  13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, ed. and trans. Marion Faber (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), p. 8.

  14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), pp. 233, 235–6.

  15 De Chirico, ‘Some Perspectives on My Art’, trans. Mark Polizzotti, in Hebdomeros, p. 252.

  16 De Chirico, Hebdomeros, p. 109.

  17 De Chirico, ‘Some Perspectives on My Art’, p. 248.

  18 Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, ed. Kate Flint (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1992), p. 162.

  19 D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Keith Sagar (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 107.

  20 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in The Writer of Modern Life, p. 201.

  21 Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, p. 107.

  22 See for example Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1983), p. 12.

  23 Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, ‘Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism’, New German Critique 32 (Spring/Summer 1984), p. 58. See also Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

  24 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), p. 69.

  25 Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), p. 76.

  26 S. C. Lowry, Convalescence: Its Blessings, Trials, Duties and Dangers: A Manual of Comfort and Help for Persons Recovering from Sickness (London: Skeffington, 1845), p. 1.

  27 Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 1, 19.

  28 These studies might be seen as related to the pervasive interest in intermediate states of being, such as somnambulism and mesmeric trance, that Tony James has identified in France in the early nineteenth century – see Dream, Creativity, and Madness in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

  29 Hyacinthe Dubranle, Essai sur la convalescence: Thèse (Paris: Rignoux, 1837), p. 5. Translation mine.

  30 Charles Lamb, ‘The Convalescent’, in ‘Elia and the Last Essays of Elia’, in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 2, ed. E. V. Lucas (London: Methuen, 1903), p. 186.

  31 E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, in Essays in Social History, eds Michael W. Flinn and T. C. Smout (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 43.

  32 Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, p. 104.

  33 See Natalie Bell Cole, ‘Attached to Life Again: The “Queer Beauty” of Convalescence in Bleak House’, Victorian Newsletter 103 (Spring 2003), pp. 17–19.

  34 Lamb, ‘The Convalescent’, p. 185.

  35 On Marx’s concept of ‘disalienation’, see Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), p. 207.

  36 Lamb, ‘The Convalescent’, p. 185.

  37 Ibid., p. 186.

  38 Ibid.

  39 Ibid., p. 185.

  40 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 4.

  41 Ibid.

  42 George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1988), p. 230.

  43 Lowry, Convalescence, pp. 3, 33, 42, 42–3.

  44 Ibid., p. 33.

  45 Ibid., p. 11.

  46 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, vol. 1, eds James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 81.

  47 Ibid. Note that William Morris subsequently transmutes the Romantic tradition initiated by Coleridge, lending the idea of convalescence a utopian, anti-capitalist impetus in his lecture on ‘The Society of the Future’ (1887): ‘I remember, after having been ill at once, how pleasant it was to lie on my bed without pain or fever, doing nothing but watching the sunbeams and listening to the sounds of life outside; and might not the great world of men, if it once deliver itself from the struggle for life amidst dishonesty, rest for a little while after the long fever and be none the worse for it?’ See Matthew Beaumont, Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2009), p. 183.

  48 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), pp. 7–8. Hereafter, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation.

  49 It might be added that the prolific American writer Nathaniel Parker Willis – of whom Poe was at this time especially critical, but whose accounts of central London, published in The Romance of Travel in early 1840, are a plausible influence on ‘The Man of the Crowd’ – subsequently de-urbanized and de-modernized the convalescent, perhaps deliberately, in a collection published in
1855. See Nathaniel Parker Willis, Romance of Travel, Comprising Tales of Five Lands (New York: Colman, 1840); and The Convalescent (New York: Scribner, 1859).

  50 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’, in Selected Tales, ed. David Van Leer (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), p. 84. Hereafter, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation.

  51 Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, p. 188.

  52 Ibid., p. 191.

  53 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Works’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, p. 90.

  54 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, revised edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 157.

  2. Going Astray

  1 Charles Dickens, ‘Night Walks’, in On London (London: Hesperus Press, 2010), p. 71. Hereafter, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation.

  2 Rachel Bowlby, ‘Commuting’, in Restless Cities, eds Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart (London: Verso, 2010), pp. 47, 45.

  3 For a preliminary sense of this historical context, see Paul Griffiths, ‘Meanings of Nightwalking in Early Modern England’, The Seventeenth Century 13 (1998), pp. 212–38. See also Matthew Beaumont, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, Chaucer to Dickens (London: Verso, 2015).