by Clark Blaise
In little more than a generation, England had gone from an agricultural and forest-based economy, unchanged since King John’s time, as Huxley put it, to a rail-dependent, coal-based dynamo that was, by anyone’s measure, demonic in its scale, noise, power, speed, and filth. Mountain ranges of slag ringed the new industrial centers. The long-range future of steam, however, was imperiled by its own inefficiency. The technology was condemned to gargantuism. The protective shielding and insulation required of a steam turbine, along with the difficulty of maintaining the proper pressure, made smaller steam engines uneconomical. Steam technology, therefore, developed noisily, sootily, even lustily. In the long run, the dimensions of steam applications were limited only by the availability of its energy source, and England, like France, Germany, and the United States, was endlessly blessed with coal.
The size and power of steam encouraged a swagger, a certain Gilded Age social and economic flamboyance, a cigars-and-brandy, godlike, frontier-pushing presumption of entitlement. The image of the glittering salons of the ever-larger steamliners and riverboats, of the upholstered saloon cars of the railroad elite, and the danger that lurked from sparks and boiler explosions—all fed a mounting psychic rebellion against restraint. The Gilded Age’s desire to see more, travel farther, and go faster, in luxury and in freedom, with aggressive displays of tasteless consumerism, has to be set against the measured restraint of a Sherlock Holmes, or the staid images we’ve preserved of Victorian decorum. Both, of course, are accurate. The accumulation of new wealth—the emergence of the bourgeois model of Victorian affluence, so much a feature of literature on the Continent, as well as in England and America—is matched by the hazard of new fortunes, and the speculative losses that wiped out securities, and lives, as often as it created them. New wealth—dirty money, literally and figuratively—was won in high-stakes, high-risk operations in dangerous places. Bribes had to be paid, junk bonds floated, buffalo herds and recalcitrant Indians removed from the right-of-way by any means available. Consolidation and monopolization, starving out the competition, forcing mergers, calling in political debts, fighting the unions (most infamously by George Pullman himself): it was a glorious time to be a buccaneer capitalist.
Towns became cities overnight. The rails brought immigrants, civilization, and new wealth. Growth, in the New World, whatever dislocation it caused, was viewed as superior to the emptiness it replaced, an attitude not unknown to this day. Demographics tell a tale, but so does myth. The myth of westward expansion had taken hold, manifest destiny was the call, the empty continent demanded settlers, and nothing would stand in its way.
BUT IN England, where village culture had been established for centuries, and where the unspoiled country in some Arthurian, Shakespearean or Wordsworthian, leech-gathering, Constable manner defined the national character, rural survival required two conflicting conditions. Villages had to be “up to date,” that is to say connected by rail and wire, and they had to persist unchanged in their nature. Could traditional country society, like “natural” thought in any of its manifestations, survive the industrial challenge?
The answer is clearly no. We’ve already cited Thomas Arnold’s intuition, “feudality is gone for ever,” from his first sighting of the railway in Rugby. D. H. Lawrence opened The Rainbow, which he was writing in the years 1912–14, with an evocation of the prerailway era in English country life that could have applied to Queen Elizabeth’s, or even King John’s time: “But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware of the lips and mind of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen.” The contact with industrialism permitted the link between the “unspoken” and the world of “utterance.” The city carried speech and mind, and spread contagions, such as land speculation, against which villagers were as vulnerable as Samoans before the common cold.
By removing horses from the power equation, steam began the long erasure of stylized nature itself from the countryside. Was a landscape still a landscape if it contained tunnels, bridges, a belching coal-fired locomotive, a railbed flanked by telegraph poles, and a string of passenger or freight cars, instead of a horse and wagon and the shell of a ruined castle? Was a village still a village if, gradually, it molded itself around the railway station and not the church or marketplace? What if, for survival, it learned to serve the needs and tastes of a few urban visitors, with inns and a semblance of city fashions? Could country life sustain itself if the young people were free to leave? And could an Englishman still feel English, still take for granted—as all great English authors had—a mystical connection between the national soul and stone-rimmed swards forever green?
Dickens, an arriviste country squire, came reluctantly to an answer. He viewed the scarring of the countryside and the effects of slash-and-burn railway construction in urban neighborhoods with a certain Tory horror. But he was Dickens. The squire might fret, but the writer was larger than his prejudices. Here was power as irresistible as flood or fire. If the energy released by technology could be internalized, and if the wealth created returned to society, poverty and dependency would end, and human beings would become supermen. His is the dominant voice of Britain’s ascendant decade, the 1850s, when young Victoria ruled with the sophisticated Albert at her side, and Darwin launched the revolution in thought that continues to this day. The transformations might be ugly, the uprootings painful, the chaos at times unbearable, and there would be thousands of victims, but …
All that was stagnant in the countryside could be quickened, and all that was brutal and exploitative in the city could be overturned by new wealth, new visions, new possibilities. Lawrence saw it that way, as did Hardy. Power, nothing symbolic or mysterious about it, awesome, godlike power to move mountains, dig canals, alter coastlines, send goods to the best-paying markets, receive information instantaneously—all of this had happened suddenly, and no king, no priest, no self-appointed rural or urban potentate could contain it. Here was the magic link between wealth and progress that had proved so elusive, because technology, industrialism, steam, and sexuality (and time! I would add), were at base democratic achievements, not aristocratic playthings. Dickens, in time, applauded the change.
Railroads in North America did not disrupt the landscape, nor did they have to compete with earlier, and presumably finer, standards of civilization, or confront established patterns of feudality. There was no recognized history of place before railroads created it. Rather than challenge a prevailing orthodoxy, as they did in Europe, railroads were seen as spreading culture and values; they were, in fact, the free expression of that very culture. American travel had been defined before rails by river travel, and had accepted, as normal features of travel, the meandering pace of the river and the relative luxury of the river steamer. The European notion of travel was brief, direct, uncomfortable; the American, lengthy, leisurely, luxurious. Grand-trunk rail service of 1870 America is comparable to interstate travel by Winnebago today.
THE ARCHAIC, if charming, clutter of ancient quartiers, a series of medieval hamlets making up the metropolis called Paris, did not escape redefinition by the railroad model. Baron Haussmann, in his redesign of Paris (what David Harvey termed its “creative destruction”), used his once-in-a-millennium opportunity to impose a bold grid of straight, broad, railroad-style boulevards through the nooks and crannies of medieval Paris. Proud France had been humiliated by technocratic, militaristic Germany, and part of the blame for the scale of the defeat was thought to rest with the country’s reverential embrace of its own self-regard. Europe’s first revolutionary society had grown complacent. The grands-boulevards were part of a cultural makeover that was to have profound effects on French contributions to art and science, and would result in a dramatic, almost pugnacious, spillover at the Prime Meridian Conference in 1884. The division of opinion on the results of the redevelopment of the city neatly correlate with received attitudes t
oward railroads in general. You can have speed and efficiency, or you can have charm and tradition, but you can’t have both. Haussmann at least attempted the delicate fusion of impossible demands.
The invention of standard time stands out as a defining act of social coherence, provoked by the spread of an invention that was slowly taking over our lives. Like the Chinese emperors of old, railroads bullied us, reigned over us, set their own clocks and calendars, created a handful of potentates, and left permanent clutter for others to clean up. Then we rebelled. The railroad was too important to eliminate, but we would put it on a strict schedule. We told it, literally, what time it was.
9
The Aesthetics of Time
The introduction of World Standard Time created greater uniformity of shared public time and in so doing triggered theorizing about a multiplicity of private times that may vary from moment to moment in the individual, from one individual to another according to personality, and among different groups as a function of social organization.
—STEPHEN KERN, The Structure of Time and Space, 1880–1918
All language is of a successive nature; it does not lend itself to a reasoning of the eternal, the intemporal.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES, “A New Refutation of Time”
CALLING A WORK of art timeless—for example, Nefertiti’s head, Kafka’s stories, Vermeer’s interiors, Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” the stories of Borges—or remarking on its eternal quality, is high praise indeed. To declare a work dated is to draw attention to inherent elements that do not translate temporally, that limit its appeal or even turn it ludicrous to readers or viewers of a different era. Time usually renders such works melodramatic, sentimental, or simply irrelevant. However, there are those works that capture the spirit of their times in such a way that we praise their datedness and the dead-on accuracy of their observations. We might cite The Great Gatsby, or The Sun Also Rises, Thomas Mann’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” the works of Willa Cather, Huckleberry Finn, The Secret Agent, and, of course, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. There may even be a fourth kind of temporality in the arts, neither poignant nor timeless. It involves the atomizing of time itself, an experimentalism that actually endures, a Ulysses, a To the Lighthouse or The Sound and the Fury, the works of Proust and Gertrude Stein.
At the top of the stairs, and dominating the first of the French impressionist rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, stands such a work, Gustave Caillebotte’s immense (seven feet by nine) masterwork called, in English, Paris Street, Rainy Day. The “street” is something of a misnomer since it has been replaced by a bay of shiny cobblestones called Place d’Europe, the broad, sterile intersection of rue de Moscou and rue de Turin opened up by Baron Haussmann’s leveling of an entire quarter. The canvas was finished in 1877, following several months of photographic preparation; the artist might have been working on it at about the same time Fleming was missing his train a few hundred miles away in Ireland. If the preexisting picturesque streets and quaint little corners of Paris had not been destroyed, we would not be talking of this particular painting.
Caillebotte’s style has been called “urban impressionist” for its bleached palette, as compared to that of his better-known contemporaries. Along the right edge of the canvas a decorous gentleman and lady stroll under a shared umbrella, their faces obscured in shadow. The sky is ashy-lemon, a sulfurous brew of clouds and coal-fed pollution. Slightly behind them and to the left, half a dozen figures dash across the wet, reflective cobblestones. Under scaffolding, Second Empire buildings of the new Paris line the receding streets.
Only twenty-nine in 1877, and trained as an engineer, the bourgeois bachelor Caillebotte never had to sell his work in order to survive—indeed, he used his wealth to buy the unsellable canvases of his impressionist friends. A slight taint of dilettantism clings to his reputation: too rich, too sociable, too willing to sacrifice his own career in order to write notes and publicity for the cause of impressionism. He was not prolific; Paris Street, Rainy Day is one of only two or three Caillebottes that have made it into the canon of nineteenth-century French painting. In the judgment of Kirk Varnedoe he was neither the draftsman nor the colorist that his more celebrated contemporaries were; but for Peter Gay he was a painter of “distinctive, long underrated talents.” In particular, Gay finds in Caillebotte’s Parisian street scenes and bridges “breathtaking perspectives.”
Paris Street, Rainy Day is not an ordinary street scene. It is something revolutionary, a sober portal in time standing outside Chicago’s rooms of bright, impressionist light. One can infer many quasinarratives from that rainy Paris scene: the featured couple’s ennui, their apparent lack of sexual tension, the stark soullessness—in the name of efficiency—of Haussmann’s rational modernity. We can almost supply a caption to the scene, or devise an anterior story line. (“Did you remember to turn off the gas?” “Where shall we dine?” “Do I dare …?”) Paris Street, Rainy Day foreshadows contemporary fascination with the not quite realistic world of Edward Hopper’s paintings, or some of the apparently candid photos of Cartier-Bresson. It seems analogous to a great many literary works over the next half-century, those of Henry James, for instance, for whom objective reality practically disappears under the greater energy of subjective analysis. Or the reflective faceting of Virginia Woolf, in which the apparent coherence of a scene breaks down upon closer analysis into noncommunicating shards of multiangled perspective. They could have stepped from an early monologue of T. S. Eliot.
To emphasize a sense of urban alienation, or perhaps his own loneliness, Caillebotte had grafted technology to his palette, taking photographs of pedestrians at random intersections and gridding them onto his canvas. The result is thus constructed or compiled, not organic. The distorted planes are not the result of faulty draftsmanship but are deliberate—Peter Gay’s “breathtaking” is not at all an exaggeration. The half-dozen figures crossing this cold, wet urban space are truly not related. Each figure seems like a monad in space clinging to a separate plane. The bored couple stroll purposelessly in the rain. No figure is posed. The presence of a painter is not even implied.
In the old Dutch interiors, particularly Vermeer’s, so precise is the compositional geometry that critics have been able to triangulate from the two-dimensional plane of the rendered figures to an implied third dimension—that of the artist himself. They can speculate on his distance from the subject, his height, even whether he had been standing or seated as he painted. Perfect perspective derives from a point of origin as well as a vanishing-point, all coming together at the centrally placed focus (in the case of Vermeer, the pouring of the jug of milk, the sheet of paper, the unfurled map), and the play of shadows from an exquisitely captured light source, a half-opened door, or narrow overhead window. That comforting perspective is missing in Caillebotte.
Of all the fine arts, painting would seem the most immune, or to have the least relationship, to time. The standards up to about 1875—in subject and execution—had been set forth by the Salons and the Academy, reinforced by critics and museums. Subject matter was suggested from myth, antiquity, national history, and religion, or from exercises in anatomy, still lifes and figure studies, outdoor vistas, street scenes, always with demonstrated mastery of technique: shadow, folded cloth, clouds and water. Commissions derived from flattering likenesses and richly rendered interiors. Prizes were awarded on demonstrated mastery of composition and color—color, that is, true to “nature” as captured by the human eye.
Fundamental questions had been opened up by new sciences, or, to put it in terms of this book, imperfect welds had been loosened by new velocities. How is reality really composed, how is consciousness constructed? We can’t trust our eyes (Muybridge and Marey showed us that), and if we can’t trust what we’ve just seen, can we rely on our memories? How to explore the opened-up gap between perception and reality? Cubism, to take a later example that seems peculiarly susceptible to temporal analysis, replaced the old con
secutivity and painterly narrative with simultaneity. The past, the present, even the future, happen at the same time on the same unmodulated plane of color. Breathtaking perspectives in all the arts, I would argue, are the result of the new consciousness of time.
The birth of modernism is a story well and frequently told: how Paris and Vienna and Berlin arrived at a new awareness, and how the intuition spread universally; how the structure of belief and notions of reality were revealed to be the unexamined residue of received opinion; how inherited forms were found to be arbitrary and outmoded (unreadable, unwatchable, unviewable, sentimental, and false). Artistic manifestos called for the disintegration of traditional form in all the arts. The cracks and fissures that Victorian culture had ignored, thinking them mere imperfections, that troublesome scurrying noise at our feet, could no longer be left out of the calculation. In fact, the imperfections became the whole story. Pursuing those cracks and fissures wherever they led opened up a virgin continent of uncertainty and the unconscious for exploration. Reality was, at best, an appearance, a reconstructed patchwork, an artifice.
The hierarchical world of painting imploded. Revolutionary conditions that had applied to the railroads and the sciences had arrived in the art world. France was once again a rising power with a confident bourgeoisie amply served by a coterie of taste—its galleries, dealers, and exhibitions. Paris had been “modernized,” as though a new time zone had sliced through the natural, medieval miasma of ancient streets.