The condition of solitude and terror evoked by Borges is that of an individual compelled to stare into the void lodged like an irreducible fragment at the core of his being. It is a long way from the ‘Perils of Invisibility’ imagined by W. S. Gilbert, in the innocuous comic ballad of that name from 1870, which probably served as one of Wells’s sources.52 The perils of invisibility explored by Wells involve not simply physical vexation, or even social exclusion, but existential or spiritual annihilation. For Griffin, the flâneur’s princely incognito, which he had hoped to exploit with impunity, is replaced by the pauper’s experience of precarity and radical non-entity.
The Invisible Man finally enacts the state of being, or non-being, experienced the previous year by the narrator of Wells’s short story ‘Under the Knife’ (1896). This man speculates about his physical and metaphysical status, after apparently experiencing his own death, in the moment immediately before he starts to return to life:
Were there other souls, invisible to me as I to them, about me in the blackness? or was I indeed, even as I felt, alone? Had I passed out of being into something that was neither being nor not-being? … Everything was black and silent. I had ceased to be. I was nothing. There was nothing, save only that infinitesimal dot of light that dwindled in the gulf. I strained myself to hear and see, and for a while there was naught but infinite silence, intolerable darkness, horror, and despair.53
Darkness, blackness, nothingness … This is the undead condition that the Invisible Man too inhabits. Except that he inhabits it not in abstract space but in the concrete conditions of metropolitan modernity at the end of the nineteenth century.
5
Wandering
G. K. Chesterton’s
The Man Who Was Thursday
In the autumn of 1893, G. K. Chesterton enrolled at University College, London, in order to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, dominated at the time by the baleful influence, as he perceived it, of the American painter J. M. Whistler.
This was undoubtedly the unhappiest period of Chesterton’s life, as he testified both in his Autobiography (1936) and, far more obliquely, in The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), a novel that is among other things a bizarre, dream-like allegory of the diabolism and nihilism that beset him as a student. In the mid- 1890s, Chesterton experienced something like a spiritual or psychological collapse, one that was inseparable from his rejection of both Impressionism, the aesthetic then fashionable at the Slade, and the relativist philosophical implications it seemed to entail. What were these philosophical implications, precisely? Impressionism, the narrator of The Man Who Was Thursday declares, ‘is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe’.1 Existential and epistemological doubts are thus intertwined.
Chesterton’s dedicatory verse to his old school-friend E. C. Bentley, at the beginning of The Man Who Was Thursday, is a melancholy description of the spiritual sclerosis that he thought crippled society at the end of the nineteenth century. ‘The world was very old indeed when you and I were young,’ Chesterton intones, like a man who has himself aged prematurely because he has been fatally contaminated by the climate of decadence (xxxix). The Dedication is in part a re-inscription of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), a poem which had mourned the retreating roar of the ‘Sea of Faith’ on the ‘naked shingles of the world’, and, in muted apocalyptic tones, evoked ‘a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night’.2
In the opening lines of the Dedication, Chesterton recalls the storm cloud of the 1890s, in rhetoric that is Ruskinian as well as Arnoldian, and paints an atmosphere of ‘aimless gloom’, illuminated only by the ghastly luminescence of the white streak that famously surmounted Whistler’s dark head of hair. The prevailing mood of pessimism is ‘a sick cloud upon the soul’ (xxxix).
The fin de siècle that the Dedication depicts – in which ‘Science announced nonentity and art admired decay’ – is a nightmarish morality play in which Chesterton and Bentley have become trapped. ‘Crippled vices’, among them Lust and Fear, encircle these innocents ‘in antic order’ (xxxix). ‘This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells,’ he continues (xl). Nonetheless, the Dedication testifies to the fact that, thanks in part to ‘some giants’ who ‘laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world’, above all his heroes Robert Louis Stevenson and Walt Whitman, this nightmare has ended (xxxix).
Crippled vices, giants … Chesterton inhabits the landscape of mediaeval legend. And, in this context, it is the archetypal romantic figure of the wandering knight, battling with his moral enemies on foot, who promises to bring redemption.
In his Autobiography, Chesterton emphasized that during the early 1890s, when decadence was in its ascendancy, ‘the whole mood was overpowered and oppressed with a sort of congestion of the imagination.’ He admits that he too was briefly infected by this condition: ‘As Bunyan, in his morbid period, described himself as prompted to utter blasphemies, I had an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images; plunging deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide.’3 Chesterton suffered, that is, from something like the aesthetic equivalent of Tourette’s Syndrome, or that variant of it, at least, that is characterized by the tendency to blurt out blasphemies or obscenities.
The monstrous ideas and images of The Man Who Was Thursday, which Chesterton subtitled ‘A Nightmare’, are thus traces of his apparent inability, at the fin de siècle, to repress the impulse to represent a state of incipient spiritual suicide. But his time at the Slade was not completely despondent. The ‘dark side of his undergraduate years’, as William Oddie has recently noted, ‘was the obverse of an intellectually more productive and generally more cheerful aspect of the same period’, which pivoted on the courses that he took in both French and English Literature.4 Most importantly, Chesterton attended the lectures of W. P. Ker, one of the pioneering architects of English Literature as a university subject, who exercised an important intellectual influence on him.
In the Introduction to Ker’s Collected Essays (1925), Charles Whibley observed that Ker was ‘at once scholar and wanderer’: ‘The word “adventure” was always on his tongue or at the point of his pen.’5 And the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography confirms that he ‘always kept the spirit of an adventurer, wandering far afield when the spirit really prompted, carrying his students with him by his power of mind and temper’. In the Autobiography, Chesterton expresses his gratitude for ‘the extraordinarily lively and stimulating learning of Professor W. P. Ker’ (61). He attended his lectures so loyally, in fact, that on one occasion he ‘had the honour of constituting the whole of Professor Ker’s audience’ (62).
Ker was a polymath, but his most significant contribution to scholarship was probably in the field of mediaeval literature. His first book, Epic and Romance (1897), drawing in part on material used in lectures he delivered at UCL, was a panoramic survey of Teutonic, Icelandic and French epic that identified the rise of mediaeval romance, and its ‘wandering champions’, with the decline of the heroic age – ‘a change involving the whole world, and going far beyond the compass of literature and literary history’.6
In another of his lectures at UCL, Ker emphasized that ‘the enormous and unfair advantage over other writers’ that Rabelais, Shakespeare and Cervantes all possessed, apart from their literary abilities, was their relationship to the Middle Ages:
They had the whole abandoned region of medieval thought and imagination to take over and appropriate. Of course they saw the absurdity of it, but that was only one charm the more in their inheritance. They had all the profusion and complexity, all the strength and all the wealth of the Middle Ages to draw upon.7
It is this image of the ‘whole abandoned region of medieval thought and imagination’ that interests me here, because just such an abandoned region interested Chesterton, too, in all its absurdity, complexity and strength. ‘Mankind has not passed through the M
iddle Ages,’ Chesterton admonished his readership in 1910; ‘rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout.’8 Even more bluntly, in the introduction to Alarms and Discursions, also published in 1910, where he celebrates his love of the grotesque, he makes ‘the high boast that I am a mediaevalist and not a modern’.9
Central to Chesterton’s recourse to mediaevalism, and the pre-modern forms of epic and romance that he learned to love at UCL, were the ‘wandering champions’ that Ker had identified in his book. He saw these champions as a means of redeeming the damaging legacies of Enlightenment rationalism, as exemplified during his own time in the Impressionist ethics and aesthetics he associated with the fin de siècle. These wanderers are agents of the exception that at once negatively constitutes the logic of Enlightenment rationalism and positively escapes its regime.
‘Chesterton’s aim’, Slavoj Žižek has commented, is ‘to save reason through sticking to its founding exception: deprived of this, reason degenerates into a blind self-destructive skepticism – in short: into total irrationalism.’ Chesterton thus pits the irrational, in the form of the spiritual, against the irrationalism implicit in the imperial intellectual project that is Enlightenment rationalism. This was his ‘basic insight and conviction,’ Žižek continues: ‘that the irrationalism of the late nineteenth century was the necessary consequence of the Enlightenment rationalist attack on religion’.10 He preferred to affirm the pre-Enlightenment spirit of the Middle Ages. It is in this that what might be called his counter-modernism consists.
Chesterton’s prose and verse, shaped by Ker’s visions of the past, consistently praised the ethical example of the chivalric champion. Knights errant, itinerant in their movements and vagrant in their imaginations, but implacably committed to the spiritual salvation of an embattled, fallen universe, seemed to him to represent agents of moral regeneration in a society beset by cynicism and scepticism. Wandering, then, especially in the conditions of metropolitan modernity, was for Chesterton shaped by a spiritual vocation. Wandering is, in the chivalric sense, a kind of erring. Wanderring.
Chesterton’s first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), a thought experiment that, perhaps all too programmatically, imagines ‘a revival of the arrogance of the old mediaeval cities applied to our glorious suburbs’, offers a revealing instance of his mediaevalism.11 In his Autobiography, Chesterton describes the incident that inspired this strange romance, which took place close to his family home:
I was one day wandering about the streets in that part of North Kensington, telling myself stories of feudal sallies and sieges, in the manner of Walter Scott, and vaguely trying to apply them to the wilderness of bricks and mortar around me. I felt that London was already too large and loose a thing to be a city in the sense of a citadel. It seemed to me even larger and looser than the British Empire. (68)
The metropolis, like the imperial project of which it is the geopolitical centre, is impossibly incoherent. Chesterton therefore needs some device, one derived from the traditions of epic and romance, both for comprehending and redeeming the ‘wilderness of bricks and mortar’ that is the industrial city.
At this point, Chesterton continues, his eye was suddenly arrested by a block of ‘lighted shops’, and he fantasized that ‘they contained the essentials of civilisation’: a chemist’s, a bookshop, a shop for provisions, a public house; and, at the end, in echo of his hero Dickens, ‘a curiosity shop bristling with swords and halberds’. Finally, he looked up and glimpsed, ‘grey with distance, but still seemingly immense in altitude’, the Waterworks tower that overlooked Notting Hill and Holland Park (68).
‘It suddenly occurred to me’, he concludes with a final flourish of his mediaevalist imagination, ‘that capturing the Waterworks might really mean the military stroke of flooding the valley; and with that torrent and cataract of visionary waters, the first fantastic notion of a tale called The Napoleon of Notting Hill rushed over my mind’ (68). In this book’s Dedication, to his friend Hilaire Belloc, Chesterton characterized it as the ‘legend of an epic hour’, dreamed up ‘Under the great grey water-tower / That strikes the stars on Campden Hill’.12
It is this industrial tower that, set against an apocalyptic sunset printed in red and black, illustrates W. Graham Robertson’s imposing cover for the first edition of the novel. The Grand Junction Water Works Company, which had built a reservoir on the elevated ground at Campden Hill in the early 1840s, subsequently constructed both a pumping station and the tower to which Chesterton alludes. This tower, designed in a loosely Italianate style by Alexander Fraser in 1857 and 1858, played a significant part in the ‘social landscape’ of Chesterton’s childhood, to use one of his formulations from the Autobiography (14).
This memoir opens with a reference to Chesterton’s baptism, which took place ‘in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge’ (1). The church of St George’s on Campden Hill, built in the so-called eclectic Gothic style with variegated patterns of brick and stone, was consecrated in 1864, as if to rebuke the hubristic Waterworks Tower. These two neo-mediaeval constructions – one religious, the other secular; one picturesque, the other an instance perhaps of the industrial sublime – were the totemic forms that shaped Chesterton’s metropolitan imagination as an infant.
Chesterton confirms as much at the end of this chapter of the Autobiography when he explains how these structures imparted ‘a visionary and symbolic character’ to the cityscape of his childhood:
In one way and another, those things have come to stand for so many other things, in the acted allegory of a human existence; the little church of my baptism and the waterworks, the bare, blind, dizzy tower of brick that seemed, to my first upward starings, to take hold upon the stars. Perhaps there was something in the confused and chaotic notion of a tower of water; as if the sea itself could stand on one end like a water-spout. Certainly later, though I hardly know how late, there came into my mind some fancy of a colossal water-snake that might be the Great Sea Serpent, and had something of the nightmare nearness of a dragon in a dream. And, over against it, the small church rose in a spire like a spear; and I have always been pleased to remember that it was dedicated to St. George. (14)
The emblematic image of a tower, symbolizing some sort of impossible spiritual quest, recurs again and again in Chesterton’s writings during the 1900s. It is the point of the compass to which his knights errant angle their pennants. In Orthodoxy, for instance, in the course of what can be classified as an anti-Enlightenment defence of reason, he evokes a ‘modern world’ that, beset by rampant scepticism, is paradoxically ‘at war with reason’; and concludes by declaring that ‘the tower already reels’.13 In ‘The Advantages of Having One Leg’, reflecting on the relationship between singularity and universality, Chesterton suggests rather more enigmatically that ‘if you wish to symbolise human building, draw one dark tower on the horizon.’ ‘The poetry of art’, he goes on, ‘is in beholding the single tower.’14
In the ‘wilderness of bricks and mortar’ that are the streets around which he ambled when he dreamed up the narrative of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, an ‘abandoned region’ that lies open to the mediaevalist imagination, to paraphrase Ker’s formulation, Chesterton is himself a kind of knight errant. That is, he is both a knight that travels or adventures and one that deviates or wanders. The adjective errant, as the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, originally comprised ‘two distinct words, which, however, were to some extent confused in French’. The first of these words is derived from the Latin errare, meaning to stray; the second from the Old French errer, meaning to journey.
Chesterton, in effect, glorifies this confusion. For him, to travel is to deviate and to deviate is to travel. Indeed, the truth can only be attained by celebrating that which is subtly errant; the eccentric element that, in Orthodoxy, he characterizes as ‘this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element in everything’. Nothing is ab
solutely symmetrical in the universe, and it is the slight deviations that matter to Chesterton. ‘Everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable,’ he writes. ‘It escapes the rationalists, but it never escapes till the last moment.’15 The incalculable, the errant, is the basis of his critique of Enlightenment reason.
This is the Chestertonian dialectic. Reality lies in Elfland; and Elfland is to be located, like a second hidden city, in the streets of the modern metropolis. As the narrator of The Napoleon of Notting Hill comments, ‘the boundary of fairyland runs through a crowded city.’16 It is a sentiment the Swiss writer Robert Walser, Chesterton’s almost exact contemporary, expressed in the voice of the eponymous narrator of Jakob von Gunten (1909): ‘Often I go out onto the street, and there I seem to be living in an altogether wild fairytale.’17
The allegorical form of the chivalric quest, which appeared to Chesterton to encode the promise of spiritual emancipation, was for him one of the most significant legacies of Ker’s ‘abandoned region’ of the Middle Ages. The knight’s quest is a recurrent motif in Chesterton’s work: ‘But I, by God, would sooner be / Some knight in shattering wars of old’, he writes in ‘Vulgarised’, a poem from 1900.18 Under the influence of Robert Browning, one of his most important literary precursors, he attempts in his first published poems and in The Man Who Was Thursday to rethink the relevance of the quest to metropolitan modernity and to relocate its heroics to the terrain of the city’s streets.
In a review of Chesterton’s collection of stories entitled The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922), the anonymous critic of the Observer spotted that his detective fiction was indebted to Browning’s poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ (1855). Chesterton’s ‘mind is so swift and sententious,’ he remarked, ‘his incidents are so apocalyptic, his characters such monstrous creatures of shadow, his scenery so reminiscent of Roland and the Dark Tower, that it is an intellectual adventure to follow the bewildering mazes of his imagination.’19 Browning’s dramatic monologue, one of the greatest poems of the nineteenth century, details the apprentice knight Roland’s half-suicidal journey through a nightmarish landscape to the Tower, with its ‘round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart’. Roland happens upon this tower, he tells us, ‘in the very nick / Of giving up, one time more’.20
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