The passion of Baudelaire’s spectator becomes pathological in Septimus as he fails to cope with the ‘myriad impressions’ his mind attempts to assimilate. In ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925), Woolf pictures them as ‘an incessant shower of innumerable atoms’ – as if they are shrapnel.38
Septimus’s kaleidoscopic consciousness rotates in uncontrollable motion. It cannot process what Simmel calls ‘the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates’ – ‘the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions.’ Septimus is fatally susceptible to one of the ‘great dangers of the metropolis’ – ‘indiscriminate suggestibility’. What Simmel identifies as ‘the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli’ overwhelms him.39 The partition that, however porous, preserves the distinction between interior and exterior, mental life and metropolitan life, collapses completely.
In this sense, inhabiting the city is itself like subsisting in a permanent state of combat. Septimus cannot keep the battlefield out of either his consciousness or the city. Woolf sees the war that produces this susceptibility as the constitutive condition of urban modernity. It is the barbarism that subsists beneath London’s veneer of civilization; what Baudelaire, describing the Parisian courtesan in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, calls ‘the savagery that lurks in the midst of civilization’ (36).
Peter, for his part, is far closer to an embodiment of Simmel’s ‘blasé attitude’, and it might be claimed that the arc of his narrative traces his attempt to acquire, once again, the reserve, the self-protective disposition, needed to survive in the metropolis. This is the ‘dissociation’ that, for Simmel, is ‘in reality’ one of the ‘elemental forms of socialization’ in the city. Or, perhaps more precisely, it traces the failure of Peter’s attempt to acquire this ‘intellectualistic mentality’.40 For at the end of the novel his state of mind is far from indifferent. ‘What is this terror? What is this ecstasy?’ he asks, filled with ‘extraordinary excitement’, as he sees Clarissa at her party in the final sentences (255).
Earlier in the narrative, however, his efforts to distance himself from the city seem to have been successful. He relishes ‘the richness’ of London, ‘the greenness, the civilization,’ in part presumably because he has just returned from India. He objectifies it. Indeed, passing Septimus in Regent’s Park, in a moment of self-reflection for which he congratulates himself, he decides that, formerly, his ‘susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing’ (92).
This insight is more precarious than he suspects, as the ecstasy and terror he feels at the end of the day indicate. But it is more important to emphasize that, in spite of a certain unconscious kinship to Septimus, Peter can have no idea of what this susceptibility to impressions might mean for the anonymous working-class man he glimpses on the park bench: a psychotic who, at the highest pitch of ecstasy and terror, is on the point of killing himself (or being ‘suicided by society’, as Antonin Artaud might have put it41).
In the case of Septimus, in contrast to the Baudelairean hero, it is the ‘non-I’, teeming in the streets and parks of the city as on the battlefields of France, that has an ‘insatiable appetite’ for the ‘I’. The non-I obliterates the I.
One of the gnomic but luminous equations that Benjamin jots down in his Arcades Project reads: ‘The system of Parisian streets: a vascular network of imagination.’42 The representation of Septimus’s experience of inner and outer space in the modern city, which cannot be dissociated from the concatenations of solitude and multitude in the streets, violently collapses the arterial transport system and the vascular network of imagination in on each other. It requires that the relatively stable, static perspectives of nineteenth-century realist narrative are ruptured.
Woolf uses the double narrative perspective of indirect discourse, which is uniquely capable of exploring the dialectical relations of objective and subjective, to enact these tessellations and so rupture the realist paradigm:
He had escaped! was 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. I haven’t felt so young for years! thought Peter, escaping (only of course for an hour or so) from being precisely what he was. (67–8)
In this sentence, the narrator and Peter speak simultaneously; and their voices weave in and out of one another. In spite of the grammatical differences between them – the different personal pronouns, the different tenses – the exclamation ‘He had escaped!’ is scarcely less Peter’s own utterance, scarcely more the omniscient narrator’s, than the succeeding one, ‘I haven’t felt so young for years!’
Like Joyce’s narrative voice in Ulysses, Woolf’s delicately mediates between exterior spectacle and the intimacies of her character’s interior life. The distinction between inside and outside is delicately deconstructed in a displacement of the relations between the self and the city. Narrative voice, in Woolf’s novel, unifies the disparate, sometimes competing individualities that comprise life in the metropolitan city. ‘The omniscient narrator of Mrs Dalloway’, as J. Hillis Miller observes, ‘is a general consciousness or social mind which rises into existence out of the collective mental experience of the individual human beings in the story.’43 The narrator’s general language ingests the characters’ particular languages.
Language itself is thus the means not only of representing the relations between inner and outer but healing the split between them. ‘The most deeply known human community’, Raymond Williams reminds us in his comments on Ulysses, ‘is language itself.’44 Form, in modernist art and literature, is the means not simply of presenting or performing the contradictions of content but of solving them.
Woolf’s language attempts, too, both to unify and beautify the chaos of metropolitan life. This is the utopian dimension of modernist representations of the city – the dream of a form that, even as it reproduces the confusions of urban modernity, will assimilate and comprehend, in Simmel’s words, ‘the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions’. In Rosenberg’s terms, to cite them again, it is the dream of a form that will create ‘the melody of life’ from the city’s ‘turmoil and strife’. Modernist form is the imaginary resolution of those real contradictions, lived in the everyday metropolis, that it represents.
Metropolitan modernity in the early twentieth century entailed what Henri Lefebvre characterizes as a ‘massive injection of discontinuity’, as the older patterns in ‘knowledge, behaviour, and consciousness itself’ became more and more susceptible to the accelerating metabolism of commodity capitalism.45 For modernists like Woolf, in this cultural climate, artistic form itself, especially when it mimicked these discontinuities, secretly represented the dream of a deeper continuity. This continuity, then, might ultimately dissolve the reified opposition between metropolitan and mental life, the politics of spectacle and the poetics of introspection, in a dialectic of the interior and the exterior that is adequately textured to the reality of that experience.
8
Beginning
Georges Bataille’s
‘Big Toe’
In a fascinating, fragmentary essay on the mouth, published in 1930, the surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille stated that ‘man does not have a simple architecture like beasts, and it is not even possible to say where he begins.’1
As Roland Barthes understood, this is a statement of some philosophical importance. In ‘Outcomes of the Text’, Barthes noted that ‘Bataille raises the question of the beginning where it had never been raised: “Where does the human body begin?”’2 Bataille’s claim is that the mouth is the beginning, or ‘prow’, of animals. Implicitly, then, the anus, which is sometimes politely concealed by a tail, is the ‘end’ of animals.
Bataille confronted this ‘end’, in the
form of an ape’s protuberant anus, which he characterized with typical expressiveness as an ‘enormous anal fruit of radial and shit-smeared raw pink meat’, on a visit to London Zoo in July 1927. In his article entitled ‘The Jesuve’, also written in 1930, Bataille identifies his obsession with the ‘pineal eye’, which he dates to the period in 1927 during which he wrote ‘The Solar Anus’ (1931), as ‘an excremental fantasy’. He offers this autobiographical anecdote as a context for understanding it:
It would have been impossible for me to speak explicitly of it, to express totally what I felt so violently in early 1927 (and it still happens that I bitterly feel it) in any other way than by speaking of the nudity of an ape’s anal projection, which on a day in July of the same year, in the Zoological Gardens of London, overwhelmed me to the point of throwing me into a kind of ecstatic brutishness.3
This was an encounter that, because it seemed to him to violate the discreet seclusion of the human anus, proved at the same time horrific and epiphanic. ‘What in human beings has, since they have stood erect, withdrawn deep into the flesh and hidden from sight,’ as Bataille’s biographer Michel Surya observes, ‘in the monkey juts out, “a beautiful boil of red flesh”, in an obscene and illuminating way.’4
Bataille insists that, in contrast to an ape’s body, a man or woman’s body does not have a beginning or an end. But, reading Bataille against Bataille, I want to argue that, as a bipedal species, the human being begins with the big toe.
In 1929, the year before he published his essay on the mouth, Bataille wrote his essay on the big toe. There, in a satirical attack on André Breton’s anti-materialist mode of surrealism, he contended that, although the big toe is routinely regarded as base, if not contemptible, it is paradoxically the noblest part of the human body.
Exploring the ‘hideously cadaverous and at the same time loud and defiant appearance of the big toe’, which ‘gives shrill expression to the disorder of the human body’, Bataille there refers to ‘the hilarity commonly produced by simply imagining toes’.5 But the big toe, in his view, is secretly responsible for giving ‘a firm foundation to the erection of which man is so proud’ (87). ‘The big toe is the most human part of the human body,’ he explains from the outset, ‘in the sense that no other element of this body is so differentiated from the corresponding element of the anthropoid ape’ (87).
In spite of this, though, or because of it, it is routinely bound, hidden and treated as something shameful. The big toe is thus both the most significant part of the human anatomy and the part most neglected or denigrated in the cultural imagination. Le gros orteil, as the big toe is called in France, is in a dual sense ‘gross’: it is at once excessively obtrusive and, quite simply, obscene. Disgusting. As Barthes pointed out, ‘gros is repulsive in a way that grand is not.’6
The phrase ‘toe-rag’, still occasionally used as an archaic-sounding insult in English today, can communicate a preliminary sense of this contradiction between the anatomical significance and the cultural insignificance of the big toe. Everyday language is a good guide to the semiotics of the big toe. ‘How to make the body talk?’ Barthes asks; and he responds that it is necessary, as Bataille did, ‘to articulate the body not on discourse (that of others, that of knowledge, or even my own) but on language: to let idiomatic expressions intervene, to explore them, to unfold them, to represent their “letter” (i.e., their significance)’.7
‘Toe-rag’ is just such an idiomatic expression that articulates the politics of the body. It originated in the nineteenth century, as a contemptuous reference to tramps and vagrants who wrapped a piece of old cloth around their toes, especially their big toes, in order to prevent or alleviate blisters and corns. It therefore meant, and means, ‘a despicable or worthless person’, as the OED indicates; but, inadvertently, it also testifies to the heroic powers of endurance of the most immiserated sector of society, the lumpenproletariat; and, more concretely, to the heroic powers of endurance of the most oppressed (certainly, in the literal, physical sense, the most depressed) part of the body – the lumpy, lumpen big toe.
In terms of the politics of the body, as Shakespeare speculated, this makes the big toe analogous to the most strident representatives of the oppressed sections of society. In Act I, Scene I, of Coriolanus (c.1605–08), set in the Roman street, the patrician Menenius Agrippa characterizes the situation confronting the state in terms of the metaphor of the body politic. In his allegorical speech, he identifies the big toe as the leading figure in an insurrection of mutinous body parts against the belly, which stands in for the Senate, the locus of power. ‘What do you think,’ Menenius asks his interlocutor, the rebellious First Citizen, ‘You, the great toe of this assembly?’ ‘I the great toe!’ the Citizen responds indignantly, ‘why the great toe?’
Menenius responds like this:
For that, being one o’ the lowest, basest, poorest,
Of this most wise rebellion, thou go’st foremost:
Thou rascal, that art worst in blood to run,
Lead’st first to win some vantage.8
The big toe, according to Menenius’s metaphor, is the last part of the body to receive the nutrition circulated through the bloodstream by the belly, which stores, processes and distributes energy. Hence it is the most disgruntled, cantankerous part of the body, the first to agitate for revolution. The lowest, most extreme part of the body – the big toe – will act as the vanguard of the insurrectionary body. The basest will go foremost.
It is as if Bataille were glossing this scene from Coriolanus when he wrote that ‘the hideously cadaverous and at the same time loud and defiant appearance of the big toe … gives shrill expression to the disorder of the human body, that product of the violent discord of its organs’ (92). As a consequence of this rebellion of the body parts, the gros will become grand. Bataille announces in ‘The Solar Anus’ that ‘Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts.’9 Among these lower parts he is surely thinking of the big toe.
Bataille adds, in a spirit of insurgency, that ‘sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.’10 If the etymological meaning of the word ‘scandalous’ is insecure, wobbly, or limping, as Barthes proposes in his commentary on Bataille, then the big toe must play a leading role in displacing the bourgeois regime of the human body in which the head is dominant. As in the citizens’ rebellion in Coriolanus, it must give shrill expression to the disorder, the violent discord, of the various organs and parts that comprise the human body. Bataille, it might be said, calls for the dictatorship of the toeleprariat.
The big toe describes what Bataille, recalling a dream, characterized as a ‘kind of ambivalence between the most horrible and the most magnificent’.11 And it is on this dialectic of the magnificent and the horrible, the heroic and the pedestrian, the highest and the lowest, that my chapter on the biped concentrates. I should admit straight away, though, that it largely overlooks the idea of the big toe as a fetish – what Bataille, in a delightfully droll tone, calls ‘classic foot fetishism leading to the licking of toes’ (92).
Freud refers to the origins of this function in his comments on infantile sexuality from 1910, where he notes that, for the child, the lips, the tongue, the thumb ‘and even the big toe’ may be taken as objects for sucking, in spite of the fact that they offer no nourishment (as the mother’s breast once did).12 Barthes, silently leaning on Freud, summarized this dimension of the big toe in a note on its characteristic dynamics of desire: ‘the toe is seductive-repulsive.’13
The ‘seductive-repulsive’ is very much the shifting, unstable terrain on which Bataille’s thought operates: ‘Extreme seductiveness is probably at the boundary of horror,’ he observes in his essay on another bodily organ, the eye.14 But Barthes, who seems to have been entranced but never finally satisfied by the interest he felt in Bataille, seduced but oddly repulsed perhaps, domesti
cates his compatriot’s unruly philosophizing when he concludes his account of the fetishistic character of the big toe with this aphoristic verdict: ‘fascinating as a contradiction: that of the tumescent and miniaturized phallus’.15
This is the aspect of the big toe explored a generation ago by the Japanese novelist Rieko Matsuura in The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P (1993). Matsuura’s cult novel, which centres on the adventures of a young woman whose big toe, protruding at the end of her right foot, morphs suddenly one night into a tiny penis, exhaustively and rather predictably details the intriguing but finally rather reductive contradiction identified by Barthes.16 Bataille himself, as Rosalind Krauss correctly emphasizes, ‘does not work along the logic of the fetish’; and his essay on the big toe ‘explicitly dismisses the play of substitutions. Of sublimations. Of foot = phallus’.17
In what follows, I largely neglect this phallic aspect of the big toe. I am concerned less with the big toe as a tumescent and miniaturized phallus than with its physical role in the fact that human beings are bipeds. And the symbolic implications of this. This chapter, then, is about beginning with the big toe in three senses: anatomical; anthropological; and iconographical. I will examine these associations in turn before going back to Bataille’s philosophical reflections on the big toe.
‘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?’ This is the rhetorical question that Honoré de Balzac asks in his Théorie de la démarche (1833), ‘Theory of Walking’, which subsequently formed part of his incomplete Pathology of Social Life (1839). It is all the more extraordinary, Balzac underlines, because these questions ‘are tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world’.18
The Walker Page 22
