The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  At the core of the pre-eminent utopian dream of the late nineteenth century, then, in spite of the supremely rationalist social and political principles it dramatizes, lies the dystopian nightmare of an urban subject whose solitude is a kind of psychosis and whose unpredictable movement in both space and time signifies some radical instability.

  The critical consensus about Looking Backward, which insists that, like most utopian fiction of the late nineteenth century, it is emotionally flat and lacking in affect, thus falsifies Bellamy’s achievements. The book’s protagonist, for example, does not make an untroubled transition to the society of 2000, as the critics have conventionally assumed. In fact, West suffers something like a trauma in time-travelling to the future – one far more severe than that experienced by the Time Traveller in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), who is afflicted by a kind of motion sickness that is distinctly upsetting to the nerves but not permanently damaging.

  West’s psychology is a disturbed one that raises fascinating questions about the stability of the human subject under the peculiar temporal conditions of utopian imagining. Bellamy reinvented the utopian form in part by conceptualizing it as the psychological portrait of an individual who effectively becomes dislocated from time; from both the present he half escapes and the future to which he is half assimilated. It is a study, in sum, of time out of joint. ‘That story of another world’, writes the narrator of one of Bellamy’s short stories, ‘has, in a word, put me out of joint with ours.’15 Throughout his fiction, he is fascinated by the psychology of disjointedness, and of divided consciousness.

  In an intriguing article on ‘The Insomnia of Julian West’, Tom Towers once argued that the ‘chronic insomnia’ from which Bellamy’s protagonist suffers in the late nineteenth century ‘becomes the comprehensive symbol of the totality of Julian’s sense of social and psychic disturbance’. His emphasis on the hero’s damaged psyche is original and persuasive, but the article makes a misleading assumption that the damage is spontaneously repaired once West has appeared in the utopian society of the twenty-first century: ‘Julian seems reborn into a new selfhood, making him for the first time at peace with himself and his world.’16

  The opposite is the case: old neuroses cling to him, nightmarishly, and new ones suddenly emerge. Sleep, for example, remains a problem even after his reappearance in utopia. On his first night in 2000, it is in a state of ‘dread’ that West anticipates the moment at which he must be alone in the bedroom he has been allotted by the Leetes, his hosts in this socialist society, because he fears that the ‘mental balance’ that he has maintained in the presence of these ‘friendly strangers’ will collapse:

  Even then, however, in the pauses of the conversation I had had glimpses, vivid as lightning flashes, of the horror of strangeness that was waiting to be faced when I could no longer command diversion. I knew I could not sleep that night, and as for lying awake and thinking, it argues no cowardice, I am sure, to confess that I was afraid of it. (28)

  West has been poised, semi-consciously, above a psychological abyss, and he suspects that when he has to confront his existential situation alone, he will plummet into it. He is like one of those cartoon characters who, having scuttled unawares over the edge of a cliff, defy gravity until they look down.

  Terrified that the ‘horror of strangeness’ will finally overwhelm him, West therefore defers the moment when he must go to bed, questioning Dr Leete about the society of the future until three o’clock in the morning. At that point, in a tone that is at once benign and slightly threatening, Leete tells him that he is his patient as well as his guest, and administers a ‘dose’ that will ensure ‘a sound night’s sleep without fail’ (28). And West does indeed sleep deeply.

  It is when he wakes up the next morning, once the effects of the narcotic he has taken have lifted, that he first experiences a profound psychological crisis. As Philip Wegner has pointed out in an eloquent reading of the novel, in this passage ‘Bellamy evokes the condition of a subject literally pulled from the flow of history.’17 At first, West lies quite contentedly in bed, because he has no recollection of the fact that he has travelled through time (it is a ‘blank’ in his memory [45]). But when he realizes that he is in an unfamiliar bedchamber he starts up from the couch and stares wildly about the apartment:

  I think it must have been many seconds that I sat up thus in bed staring about, without being able to regain the clew to my personal identity. I was no more able to distinguish myself from pure being during those moments than we may suppose a soul in the rough to be before it has received the ear-marks, the individualizing touches which make it a person. Strange that the sense of this inability should be such anguish! But so we are constituted. There are no words for the mental torture I endured during this helpless, eyeless groping for myself in a boundless void. No other experience of the mind gives probably anything like the sense of absolute intellectual arrest from the loss of a mental fulcrum, a starting point of thought, which comes during such a momentary obscuration of one’s identity. I trust I may never know what it is again. (45)

  This condition, perhaps momentary, seems to last ‘an interminable time’, and West leaps from his bed and fights for his sanity in the face of ‘apparently irretrievable chaos’ (46). In a state of severe mental dissociation, he reflects on the likelihood that he has suffered a schizoidal split: ‘The idea that I was two persons, that my identity was double, began to fascinate me with its simple solution of my experience’ (46). Here is a first glimpse of the fugue character of his experience in the city of the future.

  West subsequently attempts to restore his precarious sense of equilibrium, shattered as it is from his sense of being cast into ‘a boundless void’, by putting on his clothes and leaving the Leetes’ house, though it is scarcely light outside: ‘I found myself on the street. For two hours I walked or ran through the streets of the city’ (46). In this scene, Bellamy situates a state of non-being in a specifically urban frame, dramatizing the protagonist’s loss of self in terms of an agoraphobic reaction to the unfamiliar, the alien city.

  Here, the space of the city is susceptible to a sort of psychosis. ‘So far as my consciousness was concerned,’ he explains, ‘it was but yesterday, but a few hours, since I had walked these streets in which scarcely a feature had escaped a complete metamorphosis’ (47). He experiences the city as an impossible palimpsest, in which the past merges with the present, the nineteenth century with the twenty-first, ‘like the faces of a composite photograph’ (47). His mind cannot compute the competing claims of these opposing dystopian and utopian cities – ‘it was first one and then the other which seemed the more unreal’ (47) – and threatens to implode.

  Then, all of a sudden, West finds himself back at the Leetes’ house, on the site of his home in the nineteenth century, as if his feet have instinctively saved him from some complete psychological collapse in the vast, empty spaces of the city. Once there, he drops into a chair and makes a final, concentrated attempt to resist the city’s colonization of his mental space:

  I covered my burning eyeballs with my hands to shut out the horror of strangeness. My mental confusion was so great as to produce actual nausea. The anguish of those moments, during which my brain seemed melting, or the abjectness of my sense of helplessness, how can I describe? (47)

  In so far as it is experienced from the inside rather than the outside, as psychological rather than social space, the city of the future provokes an agoraphobic reaction. Its ‘miles of broad streets’ which stretch in every direction, its ‘large open squares’, its ‘public buildings of a colossal size’, are suddenly threatening, oppressive (22).

  The large-scale geometric space embodied in utopian Boston provides precisely the kind of environment that, in the late nineteenth century, kindled panic among individuals prone to agoraphobia. Kathryn Milun has argued that agoraphobia emerged ‘during a period of massive migration from country to city, together with the construction of monumental architec
tural forms that accompanied both metropolitan growth and the rise of the modern nation-state’. ‘Nineteenth-century agoraphobics experienced the gigantic squares and boulevards introduced into their cities as hostile environments,’ she goes on to claim. ‘They perceived these monumental spaces as “empty” and experienced intense anxiety that caused them to retreat to the curb, to their homes, and even to bed.’18 Agoraphobics, as Milun emphasizes, were often people who, because they had migrated from rural communities, felt overwhelmed by the gigantism of urban society.

  Bellamy’s protagonist, in spite of his name, is a migrant through time rather than space; but the pathological effect on him is the same.

  West is rescued from his agoraphobic collapse, in the first place at least, by the appearance of Dr Leete’s daughter Edith, who coaxes the visitor out of his psychotic or phobic state. But the descriptive intensity of the episode is such that, despite his superficially successful assimilation to the Boston of the future thereafter, he never seems fully to escape the threat of some relapse.

  The novel’s poetic as opposed to political force, in fact, depends on the idea established in this scene that his identity is in some sense doubled; and that, as someone who is simultaneously a product of the nineteenth and the twenty-first century, he is doomed to inhabit the historical equivalent of what Bellamy once described in another context as a ‘Jekyll–Hyde existence’.19

  Doubleness is indeed something like an obsession of Bellamy’s in his shorter fiction, where the past and future are often placed in unsettling tension with the present. Stories like ‘The Old Folks’ Party’ (1876) and ‘A Midnight Drama’ (1877), for all the quaintness of their romance plots, are probing, experimental investigations into what he describes in the latter as the ‘odd feeling of being double’.20 In the former, six young friends stage a fancy-dress party at which they must make themselves up as their future selves; that is, as they imagine they will look in fifty years’ time. This game produces ‘a singular effect’: ‘They began to regard every event and feeling from a double standpoint, as present and as past, as it appeared to them and as it would appear to an old person.’21 As in Miss Ludington’s Sister, then, past, present and future selves are rendered co-existent.

  Read from the perspective of these examples of Bellamy’s speculative fiction, Looking Backward can even be interpreted as an attempt to infuse the utopian form with psychological realism. It is a laboratory test of what, in ‘The Old Folks’ Party’, he had called ‘the fragile tenure of the sense of personal identity’.22 West does not become magically adjusted to the conditions of Boston in 2000. Plausibly enough, he remains maladjusted. Like Hamlet, he would no doubt count himself a king of infinite space were it not for the fact that he has bad dreams.

  These dreams – specifically the nightmare about returning to the nineteenth century in Chapter 28, the book’s final chapter, which like West the reader initially assumes is proof that Boston in 2000 was no more than a dream or fantasy – set out the limits of his social assimilation. In phantasmagorical prose, they stage the return of the repressed, dramatizing West’s constitutional inability to escape the pull of the dystopian past from which he has ostensibly escaped.

  In the hallucinated reconstruction of historical Boston that appears in the book’s final chapter, the neo-classical geometries of the vision of the city characteristic of the utopian tradition are shockingly disordered by the chaotic energies of the gothic form. ‘Up to this point the story has been told in limp and lacklustre prose,’ as Samuel Haber rather ungenerously puts it, ‘but now the tone becomes frantic and feverish.’23 Consequently, the phrase ‘hysterical Boston’ might better describe this chapter’s febrile image of a city of the late 1880s. For here Bellamy’s protagonist becomes a terrified pedestrian adrift in an urban environment that seems increasingly alienating and strange, despite (or perhaps because of) its sickening familiarity.

  In this scene, he must confront what Marshall Berman has called ‘phantoms in the street and in the soul’.24 The presence of masses of more or less animalized people induces a sense of panicked claustrophobia; a claustrophobia that is merely the obverse of West’s agoraphobia. In the dream, the labyrinthine streets of tenement districts are ‘thronged with the workers from the stores, the shops, and mills’ (188). The rookeries through which he drunkenly reels disgorge atavistic children in a state of advanced degeneration: ‘swarms of half-clad brutalized children filled the air with shrieks and curses as they fought and tumbled among the garbage that littered the courtyards’ (189). In effect, West thus undergoes a further, even more intense psychotic episode, one that is inseparable from his experiences as someone walking alone in the city.

  Even the novel’s final tableau – in which, having gratefully awoken from his bad dream and confirmed that his presence in twenty-first-century Boston is after all ‘reality’, he kneels before Edith in the Leetes’ garden with his ‘face in the dust’ – ultimately seems ambiguous (194). For if, on the one hand, it is an emblem of courtly love, and hence entirely consistent with the novel’s romance elements, on the other hand it is an image of what West earlier referred to as ‘abjectness’ (47).

  Bellamy thus dramatically redefines the narrator of utopian fiction, presenting him as someone terminally troubled by existential doubt and psychic uncertainty. In Bellamy, the protagonist of utopian fiction is genuinely agonistic.

  Bellamy’s conception of the utopian imagination is shaped by contemporaneous developments in psychology; and this helps explain the power of his novel, which is far more than simply an ideological blueprint for a state-socialist future. More particularly, though, he implicitly characterizes Julian West as suffering from a specific psychological disorder dating from the late nineteenth century. This singular condition, in which the afflicted individual suddenly abandons his identity and unconsciously begins to inhabit another one, came to be diagnosed as ‘psychogenic fugue’.

  As the word fugue suggests, derived as it is from fugere, the Latin for ‘to flee’, it entails a flight from the self. The OED defines fugue, in its psychiatric meaning, as:

  A flight from one’s own identity, often involving travel to some unconsciously desired locality. It is a dissociative reaction to shock or emotional stress in a neurotic, during which all awareness of personal identity is lost though the person’s outward behaviour may appear rational. On recovery, memory of events during the state is totally repressed but may become conscious under hypnosis or psycho-analysis. A fugue may also be part of an epileptic or hysterical seizure.

  In the United States, the first recorded case of fugue occurred in 1887, the year in which Bellamy completed Looking Backward.

  On 17 January 1887, a carpenter in his early sixties called Ansel Bourne, who lived in the settlement of Greene, on the Connecticut border, travelled to Providence, the capital of Rhode Island, removed his savings from the bank, and vanished. In spite of all efforts to reconstruct his movements, there seemed to be no trace of him at all. The man’s spouse, whom he had married after the death of his first wife in 1881, had no idea of his whereabouts. She had only recently persuaded Bourne, an itinerant preacher for almost thirty years, to cease travelling from home and take up professional carpentry, perhaps in order to prove his commitment to domestic life. It was this apparently settled, and comparatively parochial, existence that his disappearance violently ruptured.

  Bourne had become a preacher in the first instance as the result of a dramatic, indeed damascene, conversion. One day in October 1857, while journeying by foot to Westerly, Rhode Island, he experienced an acute physiological collapse. His sight, hearing and capacity for speech abruptly shut down, though he remained conscious. This blind, deaf and dumb state persisted for almost a month. It ended, in the convenient presence of a Christian minister and his congregation, at the precise moment that Bourne, finding he could still inscribe messages on a slate and interpreting the situation as a divine judgement on his sinfulness, recorded his resolution to commit himself
to God. His senses were instantaneously restored. Bourne was born again.

  In consequence, Bourne briefly became the object of medical and religious debate in the local press. Most of the commentators in this Puritan community interpreted his experience as a miracle; his doctor, however, diagnosed it as the effect of some mental disturbance. It is possible, as some specialists subsequently believed, that he was epileptic. The social anthropologist Michael Kenny, who has reconstructed Bourne’s case, speculates that he was ‘a repressed, isolated, sometimes depressed individual’. Interestingly, he adds that 1857 ‘was a year of major disturbance in national life’, and that this might have been ‘another factor’: ‘The stock market had crashed disastrously, leaving behind the wreck of individual fortunes, the failure of banks, and widespread apprehension about what the future would hold.’25

  But what of his disappearance? Almost two months after the fateful journey to Providence, on 14 March 1887, Bourne’s nephew, who lived in that city, received a telegram informing him that his missing uncle could be found in Norristown, near Philadelphia. When Bourne’s nephew reached Norristown, however, he discovered, to his obvious consternation, that his uncle had been living for some six weeks as a shopkeeper in Newton, New Hampshire, under the name Albert John Brown.

  A few days earlier, it transpired, Bourne had woken to find himself in an unfamiliar bed. The last thing he remembered was being in Providence two months earlier. To his astonishment, his neighbours in Newton insisted that he was a respectable businessman called Brown who had recently moved there and set up the variety store he occupied. He regularly attended church, they informed him, and sometimes visited Philadelphia to replenish his stocks of confectionery and stationery.

  According to Richard Hodgson, who recorded these details in an article on ‘Double Consciousness’ published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in 1892, the man ‘appear[ed] to his neighbours and customers as a normal person’; albeit one, so he surmised, who had been ‘in a somnambulistic condition all the while’.26 Bourne’s, or Brown’s, neighbours – these names, it is noticeable, are virtually anagrammatic of one another – nonetheless became increasingly suspicious. But he does not seem to have deliberately, elaborately deceived them.