Paul de Man grasps the importance of the convalescent for Baudelaire when, in a discussion of him and Nietzsche in ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’, he offers this compelling claim:
The human figures that epitomize modernity are defined by experiences such as childhood or convalescence, a freshness of perception that results from a slate wiped clear, from the absence of a past that has not yet had time to tarnish the immediacy of perception (although what is thus freshly discovered prefigures the end of this very freshness), of a past that, in the case of convalescence, is so threatening that it has to be forgotten.54
The convalescent are not necessarily confined to a sickroom, or to some bucolic refuge, in spite of their infirmity and decrepitude. They embody the experience of modernity. Indeed, it might be said that to be absolutely modern, as Rimbaud demanded, one must be convalescent.
2
Going Astray
Charles Dickens’s
The Old Curiosity Shop
In ‘Night Walks’, an article published in his periodical All the Year Round in 1860, Charles Dickens describes how, in the aftermath of his father’s death in 1851, he took to the streets at night. He went out in order not to have to lie in bed suffering, as he puts it in understated tones, from an ‘inability to sleep’. This ‘disorder’, he reflects, ‘might have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed; but, it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise’.1
In this sentence from the article’s opening paragraph, Dickens gently mocks the bracing regime of exercise he prescribed himself. He hints that, in an ironic inversion, his nighttimes acquired the routine character of life in the city in the daytime. Getting up from bed, going out, coming home. It is a comically abbreviated description of a day’s commute – one that is roughly contemporaneous with perhaps ‘the first commuter in literature’, Mr Wemmick in Great Expectations (1860–61).2 Except that it doesn’t simply invert the logic of the diurnal routine (‘getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise’). It redoubles it; making it seem even more desperate, in spite of the light mood, because it leaves no room at all for sleep, for the restorative pleasures of home so cherished by Wemmick. The image of Dickens getting up directly after lying down at night evokes a daily existence of unsustainable alienation, its comedy darkened by the relentless grind of labour in an industrial society.
Dickens’s nightwalking after his father’s death, when he suffered from surfacing anxieties about his finances as well as from grief and a sense of filial guilt, is both a prescription and a neurotic compulsion. Cure and poison. For, if it is therapeutic, it also reinforces an almost psychotic sense of solitude. Nightwalking is a ghastly, sometimes horrifying parody of the comforting, regular life that, in the opening paragraph of ‘Night Walks’, he pretends that it simply mimics; albeit an oddly liberating one.
In the somnambulant conditions of the nightwalk, the city cannot be dissociated from the individual’s imagination. The metropolis and mental life collapse in on one another. Initially, in the couple of hours after midnight, Dickens’s own restlessness, his inability to rest, is mirrored by what he calls ‘the restlessness of a great city, and the way in which it tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep’ (71). This restlessness, a collective restlessness, eventually fades, and London does indeed ‘sink to rest’, as he puts it (72). But he remains terminally restless. ‘Walking the streets under the pattering rain,’ he reports, he ‘would walk and walk and walk, seeing nothing but the interminable tangle of streets’ (72). In this state of confused, repetitive solitude, which has the logic of a nightmare, everything is tainted. Everything becomes part of some gigantic pathetic, or neurotic, fallacy. The world is restless even when it is at rest. ‘The wild moon and clouds were as restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed’ (73).
Dickens, in spite of his respectability in the early 1850s (or because of it, since he cannot escape the memories of his financially bankrupt father’s lack of respectability), is an archetypal nightwalker.
What is a nightwalker? The singular, solitary individual who more or less aimlessly traverses the city on foot at night, or loiters in its darkened precincts, has from at least the seventeenth century figured in the popular imagination as a social renegade (in this sense, he is the direct descendant of the so-called ‘common nightwalker’ who, because he infringed the mediaeval city’s curfew, was criminalized by statute in the late thirteenth century).3 Consciously or unconsciously, the nightwalker refuses the logic of the diurnal city, the ceaseless traffic of its commodities and its commuters.
The nightwalker feels at home instead, partly at least, in the state of homelessness afforded by emptied, darkened streets. Dickens, after all, discovered a lonely sense of community in the cold depths of the London night, among men defined by ‘a tendency to lurk and lounge; to be at street-corners without intelligible reason’ (75). ‘My principal object being to get through the night,’ he wrote, ‘the pursuit of it brought me into sympathetic relations with people who have no other object every night of the year’ (71). Getting through the night …
It must of course be added, though, that the nightwalker only feels at home in the nocturnal city, if indeed he does feel at home in it, because he is a man. As my deliberate use of the male pronoun has already implied, the archetypal nightwalker is a man, since men are free, or comparatively free, from the moral opprobrium and physical danger to which women who walk the city at night are exposed. Apart from prostitutes, or streetwalkers, forced onto the pavements at night in order to commodify their bodies, there are for this reason few female nightwalkers in the nineteenth century.
But if female nightwalkers are completely unacceptable in bourgeois society, male nightwalkers are seen as distinctly disreputable. To walk at night is to yield to, or embrace, an outlaw status. It is an outlaw status, however, of the most quotidian kind; one to which any man, given the requisite circumstances, might capitulate, or to which any man might aspire. Night in the city, like the urban crowd, according to Walter Benjamin, is ‘the newest asylum for outlaws’ and ‘the latest narcotic for those abandoned’.4
In contradistinction to those who, from necessity, find themselves travelling from one place to another after dark, perhaps because they are compelled either to make a journey or to perform some professional duty (to travail, that is, in two distinct senses), walking at night is a kind of vocation. The nightwalker’s ambition is to lose and find himself in the labyrinth of the city. Like Thomas de Quincey, one of the great Romantic nightwalkers, he experiences the city as a form of phantasmagoria. In its tenebrous spaces he confronts the limits of his subjectivity. Every nightwalk is thus a fugue or psychogenic flight; an escape from the self and, at the same time, a plunge into its depths.
In ‘Night Walks’, Dickens recalls wandering near Bethlehem Hospital and pursuing a ‘night fancy’ in sight of its walls: ‘And the fancy was this: Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming?’ (76). At night in the city, according to Dickens, there is a democracy of dreamers, one in which there is almost no distinction between the thoughts of people asleep in bed and those of the semi-somnambulant nightwalkers who haunt the darkened streets like the undead.
Nightwalking, it might be said, takes place in the realm of the unnight, a liminal zone between the waking and sleeping city, and between the waking and sleeping state of mind. In the final paragraph of ‘Night Walks’, Dickens refers to ‘the real desert region of the night’ in which, to his persistent surprise, the ‘houseless wanderer’ finds himself almost completely alone (80). The time of night that most accommodates the nightwalker, ‘houseless’ as he is, and restless, is when respectable people are not only curtained off from the city in their more or less comfortable domestic interiors, their sitting rooms or bedrooms, but when they are helplessly deep in sleep. It is the time of night
when the city is almost entirely deserted.
In ‘The Heart of London’, an article printed in Master Humphrey’s Clock in 1843, Dickens discriminates between two phases of the night. The first of these, the social night as it might be called, is the night of ‘lights and pleasures’; the second, the asocial or anti-social night, is one of ‘guilt and darkness’.5 It is with the second of these phases that Dickens associates nightwalking. In the night of guilt and darkness, the night that refuses to be domesticated, the nightwalker, loitering in the streets, incarnates the unconscious drives shaping the dreams of those that sleep.
It is in this night, to echo the title of an article Dickens once wrote about getting lost in London as a child, that one is at risk of going astray.6
At the beginning of the article on ‘Night Walks’, as I have already noted, Dickens jokily characterizes nightwalking as a ‘brisk treatment’ for his inability to sleep.
In this context, ‘brisk’ primarily means fresh, stimulating, tonic in its effect. But it also, secondarily, applies to the action of nightwalking itself. We know that in general Dickens did walk at an extremely rapid pace, often covering twenty miles at a time, to the consternation of people who accompanied him on outings; so at one level this is probably an objective description. On another level, however, it seems to function ironically, since although he admits in ‘Night Walks’ to traversing ‘miles upon miles of streets’ (80), his prose implies that he moves at a relatively dilatory pace, in a desultory way. He gives the impression, most strongly, of wandering.
What is wandering? To wander, according to the OED, means ‘to move hither and thither without fixed course or certain aim; to be (in motion) without control or direction; to roam, ramble, go idly or restlessly about; to have no fixed abode or station’. This more aleatory form of ambulation, comparatively aimless, and open to chance happenings, is characteristic of the nightwalking tradition. So, it is almost as if Dickens is half-ashamed to admit how quickly he navigated through the city at night, in case this disqualifies him from his renegade status as a nightwalker.
Briskness is incompatible with wandering. One cannot wander briskly, just as one cannot saunter and hurry at the same time (though it might be claimed that this is precisely the paradoxical form of perambulation that Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, a character self-evidently indebted to Dickensian precedents, achieved – he both imitates the ‘abrupt movements’ of machines and the broader economic processes they enact, as Benjamin remarks of the figure of the clown, and artfully parodies and resists them).7
‘Brisk’, a word which first crops up at the end of the fourteenth century in the Old Welsh form brysg, ‘used of briskness of foot’, as the OED states, implies industriousness, purposefulness, busy-ness. In short, it means business. George Eliot, for example, refers in her historical novel Romola (1862–63) to ‘the brisk pace of men who had errands before them’.8 In the nineteenth century, as industrial capitalism increasingly remoulded people’s everyday experiences and perceptions, the apparently natural, spontaneous action of walking came to seem more and more culturally determined, more and more alienated.
For expanding numbers of people, the simple activity of travelling from A to B, from home to work, was subjected to the mechanical rhythms of factory production. The logic of capitalism, its profit motive, valorised ‘briskness of foot’. Lounging, by contrast, became unacceptable. The slogan ‘Down with dawdling!’ sponsored in the factories of the late nineteenth century by F. W. Taylor, the American apostle of ‘scientific management’, surely echoed through the factories of the mid-nineteenth century, too.9 People’s most ordinary mode of perambulation was reshaped by the discipline of capitalism. Business required busy-ness, briskness.
In one of the founding texts of capitalist theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith argued that the division of labour, the parcelling out of the tasks of production to different workers, or groups of workers, helped to prevent the pernicious habit of ‘sauntering’. According to Smith, sauntering was typical of a rural economy, in which the labourer ambled in his or her own time between several tasks, all of which he or she was responsible for executing:
The habit of sauntering and of indolent careless application, which is naturally, or rather necessarily acquired by every country workman who is obliged to change his work and his tools every half hour, and to apply his hand in twenty different ways almost every day of his life; renders him almost always slothful and lazy, and incapable of any vigorous application even on the most pressing occasions.10
In an emergent capitalist economy, where profit levels might be affected by the frittering of time, sauntering was by definition unproductive. Lounging, by the same token, was a positively flamboyant rebuke to the principle of productivity. Only briskness of foot was acceptable.
In his Principles of Political Economy (1848), John Stuart Mill cited Smith’s critique of sauntering, and declared that, in the intervening seventy years, this habit had in effect become an anachronism. Building on Smith’s argument, he claimed that factory workers would feel positively refreshed by walking swiftly between the tasks they had to perform.11 Hurrying was good for the individual’s state of physical and moral health, not merely for the state of the economy. According to this logic, those who had no reason to hurry, the unemployed for example, felt disqualified from a system that prioritized purposeful, purposive movement. Here is ‘the horror of not being in a hurry’ that, in a haunting formulation, the philosopher Theodor Adorno once evoked.12
To a hitherto unprecedented extent, walking became a self-conscious activity in the nineteenth century. Honoré de Balzac registered this shift when in his Theory of Walking (1833) he observed: ‘Isn’t it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first steps, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking?’ He insisted that these questions were ‘tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world’.13 And, it might be added, its economical systems. In the conditions of capitalist society, walking acquired a kind of political economy. The way one walked, as well as when and where one walked, took on socially significant meanings. People’s gaits became legible in terms of their position within the division of labour. Hurried or brisk walking, to polarize rather crudely, marked one’s subordination to the industrial system; sauntering or wandering represented an attempt, conscious or unconscious, to escape its labour habits and its time-discipline.14
Dickens sketches both these kinds of walking, in the guise of Boz, in articles printed in 1835. In ‘The Streets – Morning’, he describes clerks commuting through London on foot who have no time to shake hands with the friends they happen to meet, because ‘it is not included in their salary.’15 And in ‘The Prisoner’s Van’, by contrast, he celebrates a more dilatory pace of life: ‘We have a most extraordinary partiality for lounging about the streets,’ he boasts. ‘Whenever we have an hour or two to spare, there is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy.’16
The character of Dick Swiveller in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) provides an additional sense of this vagrant disposition. His name is of course evocative of evasive movement (though it also implies a certain nervous rapidity). And it is this that Thomas Hood emphasized when he discussed him in a mainly positive review of the novel for the Athenaeum in 1840. Hood characterizes Swiveller as a quintessential drifter:
There are thousands of Swivellers growing, or grown up, about town; neglected, ill-conditioned profligates, who owe their misconduct not to a bad bringing up but to having had no bringing up at all. Human hulks, cast loose on the world with no more pilotage than belongs to mere brute intelligence – like the abandoned hulls that are found adrift at sea, with only a monkey on board.
Hood identifies him, furthermore, as ‘an estray’, or someone who has strayed like an animal – ‘lax, lounging, and low, in morals and habit
s, and living on from day to day by a series of shifts and shabbiness’.17 A ‘swiveller’, from this perspective, is a slippery, spivish sort of saunterer. And he thus resists what Paul Carter, in a different context, has called ‘the ideology of the straight line’.18
Dickens was acutely conscious of the emblematic distinction between hurrying and sauntering in industrial society when, in his journalistic sketches of the 1860s, he adopted the persona of the Uncommercial Traveller. As he explains in the introductory piece, the Uncommercial Traveller ‘travel[s] for the great house of Human Interest Brothers’, ‘figuratively speaking’, and has ‘rather a large connection in the fancy goods way’.19 He is a collector of human curiosities, who accumulates not in order to sell but solely out of interest (the idea of ‘curiosity’, here and in The Old Curiosity Shop, is in part an attempt to de-commercialize the concept of ‘interest’). He celebrates use-value over exchange-value. He therefore constitutes an innate challenge to the culture of what, after Thomas Carlyle, was called the ‘cash nexus’.20
This is evident in the Uncommercial Traveller’s means of movement, his mode of transport. Even though the steam train has rendered many pedestrian journeys outmoded, he walks almost everywhere. ‘As a country traveller,’ he confesses, ‘I am rarely to be found in a gig, and am never to be encountered by a pleasure train, waiting on the platform of a branch station.’ More importantly, perhaps, his manner of walking is scandalous. For if he sometimes feels obliged to hurry purposefully, he far prefers to saunter purposelessly, ‘wandering here and there’.21
The Walker Page 6
