The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  understanding; a vast philanthropy; and finally, as if the result of the others, an irrepressible, exquisite delight; as if inside his brain, by another hand, strings were pulled, shutters moved, and he, having nothing to do with it, yet stood at the opening of endless avenues down which if he chose he might wander. (67)

  Peter’s sense of self, like that of the soldiers, whose actions are automatic, is cancelled out. Someone other than him appears to be controlling his consciousness – pulling the strings, moving the shutters. But at the same time his sense of self is affirmed, glorified. Rendered foreign to himself, he is freed. It is as if he stands at the centre of a city whose roads radiate out from him in the form of limitless possibilities.

  Liberated for an instant from the need to find himself, Peter does for an instant find himself. He feels ‘utterly free – as happens in the downfall of habit when the mind, like an unguarded flame, bows and bends and seems about to blow from its holding’ (67). But this ecstasy cannot be maintained. At least, it is rapidly displaced into a hard, gem-like desire for an attractive young woman he happens to see crossing Trafalgar Square:

  Straightening himself and stealthily fingering his pocket-knife he started after her to follow this woman, this excitement, which seemed even with its back turned to shed on him a light which connected them, which singled him out, as if the random uproar of the traffic had whispered through hollowed hands his name, not Peter, but his private name which he called himself in his own thoughts. (68)

  This is Peter as predator: Pete the Ripper. ‘Stealthily fingering his pocket-knife’, like an onanist or a potential rapist, he follows her along the Haymarket, up Regent Street, to Oxford Street, past all the shops (68). ‘He was an adventurer, reckless, he thought, swift, daring, indeed (landed as he was last night from India) a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties’ (69). This is a deeply disturbing fantasy of male sexual potency, potency that overrides precisely those proprieties on which, in a patriarchal society, it secretly depends.5 And it cannot, frankly, be too reticent.

  Finally, Peter pursues the young woman as far as Great Portland Street, where she enters a house in a side street, casts ‘one look in his direction, but not at him’, and is gone: ‘It was over’ (70). There has been no échange de regards. As Rachel Bowlby has pointed out, this passage constitutes a ‘parody of the amorous clinch or climax that might have been expected’, underlining the satirical role played by her glance back.6 She has triumphed over him.

  Peter is disappointed at the outcome of this game, which has sublimated what he called, in his reflections on the soldiers, ‘the troubles of the flesh’; but he is not deflated. Certainly, he doesn’t feel ashamed of his predatoriness, which is inseparable, so he unconsciously assumes with classic male complacency, from his playfulness. The libidinal after-effects of his epiphany persist, in fact, and he relishes the sense that, ‘like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets’ (70). Life, then, is like the knife he fingers in his pocket. It is something he might use to strike straight through the streets, as he strides straight through the streets.

  The female pedestrian on whom he has predated, flashing up in the form of a kind of after-image, is thus represented in coded form as the victim of a more or less frenzied, sexualized attack (the phrase ‘struck straight through the streets’ seems to echo a sensationalistic newspaper headline). Peter’s unconscious, according to the dream-logic of displacement, substitutes ‘life’ for the ‘knife’ he has forgotten he is fingering; and it thus enacts the violence that his conscious thoughts merely brought him to the edge of imagining.

  ‘Where should he go?’ Woolf writes in free indirect style, as the episode ends:

  Where should he go? No matter. Up the street, then, towards Regent’s Park. His boots on the pavement struck out ‘no matter’; for it was early, still very early. (70)

  The ‘no matter’ that his boots beat out on the stones like a tattoo is an unconscious abdication of precisely the responsibility and autonomy he had sought to preserve in the face of those soldiers who ‘marched with their eyes ahead of them’. For Peter, too, it transpires, ‘striding’ and ‘staring’ are inseparable activities, for striding has spontaneously resulted in staring. And, like the badaud whose archetypal example he implicitly resisted, he has become, in the terms that Benjamin transcribed from Fournel, ‘an impersonal creature,’ one who is ‘no longer a human being’.

  This scene from Mrs Dalloway, initiating the action of ‘The Hours’, constitutes the novel’s seminal scene. But it also constitutes what Marshall Berman characterizes, in a celebrated account of the dialectics of modernity, as a ‘primal modern scene’.

  Berman formulates the term during a discussion of Baudelaire’s Paris after 1848, the time when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and Georges-Eugène Haussmann ‘blast[ed] a vast network of boulevards through the heart of the old medieval city’, creating a culture of spectacle in which, alongside the regimentation and reification of everyday life in the city, ‘urban realities could easily become dreamy and magical.’ But the notion of the ‘primal modern scene’ refers more generally to ‘experiences that arise from the concrete everyday life’ of the metropolis in capitalist society; experiences that ‘carry a mythic resonance and depth that propel them beyond their place and time and transform them into archetypes of modern life’.7 It is in anticipation of something like a ‘primal modern scene’, for example, that D. H. Lawrence’s protagonist Paul Morel, disavowing both his mother and his lover, ‘walk[s] towards the city’s gold phosphorescence’ in the final paragraph of Sons and Lovers (1913).8

  It is above all in the street, the site where private and public experiences intersect, that these scenes are acted out. There, the dialectics of exterior and interior that are structural to the everyday conditions of modernity are constantly dramatized. ‘The street’, André Breton asserted in the formula that Benjamin liked to cite, is ‘the only region of valid experience.’9

  Alongside Mrs Dalloway, a series of significant European novels in the early twentieth century situated the relationship between the city and consciousness, or what the pioneering sociologist Georg Simmel typified as the metropolis and mental life, at the centre of their attempt to solve the representational problems thrown up by the social and cultural developments of the time: James Joyce’s Stephen Hero (1904); Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907); Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten (1909); Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–); Joyce’s Ulysses (1922); Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience (1923); André Breton’s Nadja (1928); Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities (1930–42); Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936); and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939) – among others. These are novels in which, as Raymond Williams summarized it in relation to Ulysses, ‘the forces of the action have become internal and in a way there is no longer a city, there is only a man walking through it.’10 Or a woman. In Samuel Beckett’s late-modernist fiction, for its part, from Murphy (1938) on, the social is internalized to a pathological extent, and ‘the city becomes prolapsed’, as one critic expressively puts it.11

  The drama of Peter’s epiphany on the roads of imperial London in Woolf’s novel about the metropolis and mental life is of primal significance for both abstract and concrete reasons. In the concrete terms on which I propose to concentrate in the first instance, Peter’s epiphanic experience dramatizes an encounter between the archetypal hero of modernity identified by Baudelaire in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), namely the ‘passionate spectator’, and the representative forms of urban spectacle – here, the troop of soldiers and the female passer-by.12 This relationship between spectator and spectacle finds its template in Paris, where Haussmann, driving boulevards through in order both to reinforce the counter-revolution and provide the optimum environment for the profit motive, and displacing some 350,000 people in the process, set out the geometries of commodity capitalism.

  But it is not limited to Paris at this time; the c
oncept of the ‘primal modern scene’ can be extended to describe some of the political and psychological effects of the monumental spaces of other cities, especially in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when an emergent culture of consumption, embodied most strikingly in the development of the department store, was superimposed onto the spatial order of the imperial metropolis.

  The ‘passionate spectator’ sketched by Baudelaire is a middle- or upper-middle-class man who freely resides ‘in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite’, as he puts it in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (9).

  The function Baudelaire ascribed to this spectator was to act as an exquisitely tuned instrument for conducting and transmitting the contradictory energies of capitalist modernity, a state of permanent social and existential transformation. Women and working-class men were for the most part disqualified from performing the role of spectator due to the social restrictions that, in the class-divided, patriarchal conditions of capitalist society, determined their relations to the city. If the ‘passionate spectator’ defined modernity, because he had the requisite economic or social independence, then in an urban context he also marginalized these subaltern actors in relation to it.

  For historical reasons, Williams observes, ‘perception of the new qualities of the modern city had been associated, from the beginning, with a man walking, as if alone, in its streets.’13 Perhaps the crucial phrase here, certainly in relation to Woolf’s novel, is ‘as if alone’, for it hints at all those whose individual identities are erased in the streets in order to sustain the male, middle- or upper-middle-class spectator’s sovereign subjectivity. Their reticences, to put it in Woolf’s terms, sustain his irreticences.

  The solitary man in the streets of the metropolis – a spiritual if not social aristocrat – is essentially a post-Romantic archetype. Baudelaire, like his hero Edgar Allan Poe in ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840), transposed the alienated but finally privileged individual crucial to Romantic ideology from the landscape to the cityscape. The modernists, of course, both extended and challenged this archetype. From Conrad to Barnes and Beckett, they variously displaced its social identity and delved deep into its existential one. In Ulysses, for example, Joyce located the life of the city in the consciousness of a lower-middle-class Jewish man, Leopold Bloom, whose vicambulations lead him on a tour of Dublin in the course of one day in June 1904. In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf centred it on the consciousness of an upper-class woman, Clarissa herself, whose own movements trace a path through central London on one day in June 1923. ‘I love walking in London,’ she declares the first time she speaks in the novel, adding for emphasis that ‘it’s better than walking in the country’ (6).

  ‘What else, after all, would Clarissa’s surname have led us to expect,’ Bowlby wryly comments, ‘than the woman who likes to dally along the way, the flâneuse herself.’14 Mrs Dalloway is one of Woolf’s numerous affirmations, in articles, diary entries and letters, of her right as a female citizen, in spite of the social and moral restrictions historically imposed on women, freely to roam the streets of the city.

  No doubt the richest of these declarations, aside from this novel, is the essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ (1927), her distinctly Dickensian celebration of what she calls ‘the greatest pleasure of town life in winter – rambling the streets of London’. Woolf’s particular predilection, she admits, is for solitary walking on a cold, dark evening, because she relishes ‘the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow’: ‘We are no longer quite ourselves.’15 Mrs Dalloway is among other things an exploration of the ways in which we both are and aren’t ourselves in the public spaces of the metropolis.

  In Mrs Dalloway, in addition to asserting the rights of the flâneuse, Woolf deployed her principal male characters in ways that challenge the flâneur’s monopoly over representations of the modern metropolis. She uses Peter – whose shadowy form can be glimpsed in the penultimate paragraph of ‘Street Haunting’, where Woolf briefly portrays the city, in gendered language, as a ‘forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men’ – to expose the social and sexual politics that have shaped the paradigm of the flâneur.16 In his character, as Benjamin said of Poe’s old man in ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840), she ‘purposely blurs the difference between the asocial person and the flâneur’.

  In the character of Septimus, with his psychotic, shell-shocked mind, Woolf presses the paradigm of the flâneur to the point of collapse. If for Poe, according to Benjamin once more, the flâneur is ‘above all, someone who does not feel comfortable in his own company’, then in Septimus this inability to feel at home in his own skin becomes pathological.17 For Septimus, as for some of Beckett’s characters, the city becomes prolapsed.

  As an upper- or upper-middle-class man, Peter is an exemplary candidate for the role of flâneur, but his relationship to the metropolis is itself far from comfortable. In fact, Woolf identifies in him an immanent critique of this post-Romantic archetype; that is, she uses him to deconstruct it from the inside.

  In Peter’s stroll along Whitehall, she stages the ideological drama of the spectator’s encounter with the concrete forms of metropolitan spectacle: the soldiers, who stand in for the culture of imperialism; and the female pedestrian, who stands in for the culture of consumerism. Woolf employs the phrase ‘spectacular images’ in reference to the military statues that Peter passes in Whitehall, but it applies to these other reified figures, too, frozen as they are by the gaze of the man walking, as if alone, in the streets (66). In the portrait of Peter, Woolf reveals the ways in which Baudelaire’s ‘passionate spectator’ colludes – as Benjamin recognized when he spoke of the flâneur surrendering to ‘the intoxication of the commodity immersed in a surging stream of customers’ – in the culture of the spectacle.18

  Alongside the dandy, both the soldier and the female passer-by play a privileged role in Baudelaire’s poetics of modernity, a phenomenon he summarizes in terms of ‘the outward show of life, such as it is to be seen in the capitals of the civilized world; the pageantry of military life, of fashion and of love’ (24). The pageantries of military life and of fashion and love are spectacular expressions, respectively, of the cultures of imperialism and consumerism – the principal components of capitalist society in the European metropolis from the mid- to late nineteenth century. ‘In many respects,’ David Harvey has argued, ‘imperial spectacle dovetailed neatly with commodification and the deepening power of the circulation of capital over daily life.’19

  In addition to mobilizing support for imperial authority, the boulevards that Haussmann built in Paris, serving as sites of both production and consumption, created employment and ‘facilitated circulation of commodities, money, and people’. Hence the ‘sociality’ of the people that inhabited their precincts ‘was now as much controlled by the imperatives of commerce as by police power.’ In this context, the soldier and the female passer-by both act as ‘bearers of the spectacle’.20

  First, then, the spectacle of the soldiers. Baudelaire comments that the painter and illustrator Constantin Guys, the artist who for him most conveniently embodies the aesthetics of metropolitan modernity, ‘shows a very marked predilection for the military man, the soldier’. And he speculates that ‘this fondness may be attributed not only to the qualities and virtues which necessarily pass from the warrior’s soul into his physiognomy and his bearing, but also to the outward splendour in which he is professionally clad’ (24).

  Baudelaire appears to share his friend’s predilection. In the most substantial section of ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, he glorifies Guys’ love of ‘the landscapes of the great city’, his delight in its ‘universal life’, and imagines a military parade: ‘A regiment passes, on its way, as it may be, to the ends of the earth, tossing into the air of the boulevards its trumpet-calls as winged and stirring as hope’ (10). He pictures Guys’ spontaneous artistic response to this sight, and evo
kes the alacrity with which, in his sketches, he examines and analyses ‘the bearing and external aspect of that company’ (11). Baudelaire mimes this rapid, poetic reaction in his own prose, which excitedly registers ‘glittering equipment, music, bold determined glances, heavy, solemn moustaches’ (11).

  Baudelaire’s description concludes in a paean to Guys’ capacity for identifying with the phenomenon he represents, for collapsing subject into object: ‘See how his soul lives with the soul of that regiment, marching like a single animal, a proud image of joy in obedience!’ (11). It is an unsettling outburst. Berman has pointed out that ‘these are the soldiers who killed 25,000 Parisians in June 1848 and who opened the way for Napoleon III in December of 1851’ – occasions when Baudelaire opposed the men whose militaristic glamour appears to thrill him a decade later.21

  Uncomfortably, Baudelaire’s celebratory image of troops marching through the roads of the capital, as if to the farthest reaches of the empire, carried cataclysmic implications for the proletarians of Paris (who were slaughtered in comparable numbers by Thiers’s troops, it might be added, at the demise of the Paris Commune in 1871). Berman, in his account, underlines ‘the tremendous importance of military display – psychological as well as political importance – and its power to captivate even the freest spirits’.22

  But, if it captivates Baudelaire, it does not captivate Woolf. In the aftermath of the Great War, she strips away the pretensions of military spectacle. Peter perceives the ‘stiff yet staring corpse’ underlying the spectacular image of the marching soldier (66). Stiffening, staring. For this spectator, the thrill that Baudelaire had experienced is no longer possible. The horrors of history interrupt the spell of the imperial spectacle.