The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  ‘The more rational, productive, technical, and total the repressive administration of society becomes,’ Adorno’s friend Herbert Marcuse wrote in One-Dimensional Man (1964), ‘the more unimaginable the means and ways by which the administered individuals might break their servitude and seize their liberation.’22 It is only by imagining total social and ecological destruction that an alternative to the rational administration of totalitarian society can be envisaged.

  For the Pedestrian, Bradbury suggests, this destruction, this alternative, only becomes imaginable because, in stumbling over the uneven paving stone, he is suddenly made conscious of the subterranean operation of a force that cannot be administered. Nature itself – notwithstanding the potentially terminal impact of climate change, under the impact of industrial capitalism, that has been discerned since the 1950s – cannot be administered out of existence.

  But in Bradbury’s narrative there is after all a political curfew, as well as the cultural or moral one enforced by the addiction of the masses to television. Mead’s apocalyptic imaginings as he steals across the city under the partial protection of the dark – his ecological fugue – are suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a car that flashes ‘a fierce white cone of light upon him’ (570). It is a police car. No logo or slogan is stencilled on the side of the police car; but, if there had been, it might have read ‘We Own the Night’ – the tagline of the NYPD’s Street Crimes Unit, disbanded after the brutal shooting of an unarmed immigrant in 1999.

  The vehicle recalls John Rechy’s description of a ‘copcar driving along the streets’ of Los Angeles in his novel City of Night (1963), like ‘a slowly moving hearse’.23 Mead stands ‘entranced’ before it, ‘not unlike a night moth, stunned by the illumination, and then drawn toward it’ (570). In fact, this is the only one in existence in Bradbury’s city of the future. ‘Crime was ebbing,’ the narrator explains; ‘there was no need now for the police, save for this one lone car wandering and wandering the empty streets’ (570–1). Meandering along the roads at night, the police car is Mead’s mechanical double. It mimics his aimless movements, cruelly mocking the limits of his freedom.

  In a ‘metallic whisper’ – which makes it clear that it is automated and contains no policemen – the vehicle interrogates the Pedestrian. It asks him first for his profession. Mead is a writer, as he confesses. The machine’s phonographic voice offers a clinical, if laconic, response: ‘No profession’ (571). By 2053, television has rendered books all but redundant. The disembodied voice of the state proceeds to question Mead further:

  ‘What are you doing out?’

  ‘Walking,’ said Leonard Mead.

  ‘Walking!’

  ‘Just walking,’ he said simply, but his face felt cold.

  ‘Walking, just walking, walking?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Walking where? For what?’

  ‘Walking for air. Walking to see.’ (571)

  Dissatisfied with this reason that is no reason at all – Mead’s statement is a tautological one that constitutes an affront to a society defined, as Herbert Marcuse might have put it, by ‘the rational character of its irrationality’ – the police machine coerces him into the back seat of the vehicle.24 He will be transported in this ‘little cell’, he is informed, ‘to the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies’ (572). In the totalitarian state imagined by Bradbury, then, to walk in the city at night is not only to transgress; it is to regress. Nightwalking, according to this logic, is intrinsically deviant, even atavistic. It transpires that the Pedestrian’s final nightwalk is a flight that concludes, as psychogenic fugues often do, in a psychiatric institution.25 The act of excarceration ends in incarceration.

  So, the narrative ends – abruptly: ‘The car moved down the empty riverbed streets and off away, leaving the empty streets with the empty sidewalks, and no sound and no motion all the rest of the chill November’ (572). Indeed, for all time, it is to be presumed. For Leonard Mead, who has carefully tried to curate the remaining residues of the alienated city’s humanity, is effectively its Last Man. Only the unevenness of the pavement, secretly undermined by feral plants, gives cause for hope.

  At the end of ‘The Pedestrian’, it still seems possible that Nature itself, at some far-distant date, in the form of an ecological apocalypse, might be a stumbling block to the totally administered society of the twenty-first century. If only for the reader, those empty streets that in the dark look like cracked, dried riverbeds are, potentially, desire paths.

  In the story of Lazarus in St John’s Gospel, Jesus observes that ‘if any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world’, adding that, if instead ‘a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him’ (John 11:9–10). Mead stumbles when he takes the aimless walk in the night described by Bradbury, not because there is no light in him but for precisely the opposite reason. He stumbles because, alone in this totalitarian conurbation, he does contain an inner light.

  The other citizens are bathed in the feverish half-light that leaks from the television sets in front of which they lifelessly sit; Mead seeks illumination in the darkness. In this respect, he is like one of those persecuted sixteenth-century mystics who were driven by the surveillance operations of the post-medieval Church to find spiritual consolation in the night, and who valued not simply light in the dark but ‘the darkness that illuminates’. This phrase is taken from St John of the Cross, perhaps the most famous of these mystics, who was forced by his experiences as a prisoner in an almost lightless cell to identify faith, in an apophatic inversion of traditional theological assumptions, with the darkness of midnight rather than the light of midday. ‘The more the soul is darkened,’ John affirmed, ‘the greater is the light that comes into it.’26 For Mead, as for the theologians of the night, the dark has become a place of refuge and a site of possible redemption.

  Obversely, illumination is associated with oppression, as when he is immobilized by the beam of the police car that arrests him. The ‘light of this world’ (John 11:9), in Christ’s formulation, is an agent of post-Enlightenment oppression. By contrast, the absence of light – in the sort of fully enlightened, highly technologized society that, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘radiates disaster triumphant’ – offers a form of freedom.27 Strolling through the streets of Los Angeles after dusk is, for Mead, a spiritual, if not religious, ritual. Reclaiming the city at night, when no one else is about, he redeems it; and in so doing he retains a fragile hold on his humanity.

  He is the post-contemporary equivalent of a benandante, or ‘good walker’, one of those medieval Italian peasants who set out at night to do battle with witches. In the eyes of the authorities these benign walkers were malign walkers. Mead’s sacred walks, like those of the benandanti, who claimed their nighttime activities took place in a dream-like state between sleeping and waking, are finally punished as satanic.28

  Mead’s humanity consists in being, mere being – not a state of subsistence, like that of the numbed citizens connected to their screens as if to life-support machines, but being for its own sake. The nightwalker walks because he likes to breathe, as he admits, and because he likes to see; but he also walks because he likes to walk. He just walks. The nightwalker does not walk from one point to another in order to reach a destination. Hence it does not matter which direction he takes when he stands at the crossroads at the commencement of the night. He simply walks, opening himself up to the empty city.

  In the night, Bradbury indicates, the Pedestrian likes to stands at a silent intersection, the junction at which the city’s main roads meet, precisely because in the day it is ‘a thunderous surge of cars, the gas stations open, a great insect rustling and a ceaseless jockeying for position as the scarab-beetles, a faint incense puttering from their exhausts, skimmed homeward to the far directions’. At nighttime, this intersection becomes a somnambulist’s dream space. The roads are ‘like streams in a dry season, all st
one and bed and moon radiance’ (570). This is the landscape of the ‘moonlit enchanted night’ celebrated by the German Romantic poet Ludwig Tieck. It is the realm of ‘irrealism’ in which Michael Löwy has discovered ‘a critical attitude towards the disenchanted modern world, illuminated [as it is] by the blinding sun of instrumental rationality’.29

  The Pedestrian does not commute, then, unlike the other citizens of this future, because commuting, travelling directly from one place to another, far from commuting him or transforming his identity, reinforces his sense of sameness. The commuter, as Rachel Bowlby observes, is ‘a traveller along straight, known lines, not an aimless, curious drifter’.30 It is precisely in order to be commuted, or spiritually transmuted, that the Pedestrian does not commute. His routes through the city are the opposite of a commute; they are a more or less conscious indictment of its instrumental regime. Mead’s pedestrianism, at once calculated and spontaneous, defies the metrics of the commute. The nightwalker sets himself against the rhythms of the city’s traffic, the frenetic movements of its commodities and people. He is a romantic anti-capitalist who nonetheless remains passionately in love with the modern metropolis. He refuses the city in the name of the city.

  In this context, nightwalking is a radical activity, in both the political and more literal senses of the term (it brings to light the root of his being). Or, to put it in the terms of the police state depicted by Bradbury, it is both a transgressive and a regressive tendency. It is inherently countercultural, as Mead’s ultimate incarceration demonstrates; but it is also an activity that, to the scandal of an automated, mechanized culture, goes back to the root of what it is to be human.

  Walking in its countercultural mode can in this latter sense be identified with what Marx called men and women’s ‘species-being’, or ‘species-life’, the fundamental properties of their physical and spiritual existence that define their humanity.31 It is not constituted by exchange-value but by use-value. Nightwalking, for Mead, is not instrumental; it is an end in itself. Something like a negative dialectics of the nightwalk is thus made visible in Bradbury’s narrative. As in Samuel Beckett’s universe, according to Adorno, the empty nocturnal cityscape of ‘The Pedestrian’ is ‘the negative imprint of the administered world’.32

  Nightwalking constitutes a rejection, conscious or unconscious, of the tedious logic of the diurnal city. It renounces the predictable trajectories, the teleologies, of what William Blake, in his poem ‘London’ (1794), called its ‘chartered streets’; and it does so in the name of what Blake called ‘midnight streets’.33 It glories in the contingent, the tangential. Walking, for Mead, satisfies a human need. And it is this that renders it unacceptable to a society like the one portrayed by Bradbury, where human needs have become so attenuated that they can be satisfied, for almost all of the population, by automobiles and TV comedies.

  In so far as it is an allegory of oppression, ‘The Pedestrian’ was probably influenced by ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ (1928), a short story first published in Amazing Stories, under the editorship of Hugo Gernsback, by the popular science-fiction writer David H. Keller. Far more reactionary than Bradbury’s fantasy, Keller’s dystopian fable centres on a hyper-mechanized society in which the so-called Automobilists, humans whose legs have progressively atrophied because they are so dependent on motorized transport, oppress an embattled minority of enlightened Pedestrians whom they are encouraged by the state to exterminate.34

  But ‘The Pedestrian’ was also the product of a psychological obsession reaching back into Bradbury’s childhood. Aged sixteen, some three years after his family had moved to Los Angeles, he witnessed a car crash involving several fatalities, and became traumatized. ‘I walked home holding onto walls and trees,’ as he put it, like someone describing an acute attack of agoraphobia. He subsequently elaborated his almost pathological opposition to the automobile into a political position, writing an anonymous editorial for his high-school magazine, when he was no more than eighteen, entitled ‘Pedestrian becomes Freak among Modern Inventions’. Bradbury recapitulated the theme of this article on numerous later occasions: ‘I would replace cars wherever possible with buses, monorails, rapid trains – whatever it takes to make pedestrians the center of our society again, and cities worthwhile enough for pedestrians to live in.’35 He never held a driving licence.

  ‘The Pedestrian’ was however more immediately precipitated by Bradbury’s Kafkaesque encounter with the LAPD one night in 1949. He and a friend happened to be walking along Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, deep in conversation, ‘when a police car pulled up and an officer stepped out to ask what we were doing’. Bradbury responded: ‘Putting one foot in front of the other.’ This did not impress the policeman, so Bradbury added, ‘Breathing the air, talking, conversing, walking.’ The officer remained mystified. ‘Walking, eh? Just walking?’ Eventually, after giving it some thought, he dismissed the two nightwalkers, telling them not to do it again. It was this ‘Alice in Wonderland encounter’, as Bradbury characterized it, that provided the impetus for ‘The Pedestrian’.36

  Bradbury had undergone similar experiences several times before this date, as he subsequently testified: ‘I had been stopped on numerous occasions for walking at night, for being a pedestrian.’ As far back as 1941, for example, the police had accosted him and another friend sometime after midnight in Pershing Square. He extrapolated ‘The Pedestrian’ from these experiences, developing a sort of politics of pedestrianism in the process. As Bradbury’s biographer has argued, he ‘had come to see the pedestrian as a threshold or indicator species among urban dwellers – if the rights of the pedestrian were threatened, this would represent an early indicator that basic freedoms would soon be at risk.’37

  ‘The Pedestrian’, for its part, sparked the composition of Fahrenheit 451 (1953), probably Bradbury’s most famous dystopian fiction (not least because François Truffaut adapted it for the cinema in 1966). Soon after finding a publisher for the short story, as Bradbury has explained, he decided to take his ‘midnight criminal stroller out for another job around the city’.38

  Fahrenheit 451 describes a totalitarian society – its population, too, is pacified if not completely sedated by television – in which literature is forbidden. In this future, it is the function of firemen not to extinguish fires but to burn books. The protagonist of Bradbury’s humanist fable, Montag, is a fireman who, after meeting an enlightened, quietly incendiary young woman, starts to rebel against this regime.

  In the end he escapes from the city, where he has become a fugitive, and joins a community of exiles who, living like hobos or tramps, have memorized the contents of classic books in order to preserve the remnants of civilization from the authoritarian interventions of the state. At the close of the novel, in a far-off cataclysm, the metropolis from which Montag has escaped, along with other American cities, is abruptly flattened by atomic bombs; and he imagines the 5 a.m. bus ‘on its way from one desolation to another’, its destination suddenly ‘meaningless’, ‘its point of departure changed from metropolis to junkyard’.39

  Originally entitled ‘Long After Midnight’, traces of the nightwalking episode that constitutes ‘The Pedestrian’ can be discerned in Fahrenheit 451. The novel begins with a commute – though in this case one that has a genuinely transformative effect. Changing out of his protective clothing after a routine shift spent torching a house that contains books, Montag leaves the fire station in which he works, walks out ‘along the midnight street’ that leads to the metro, and takes a train back to the suburbs (12).

  Recently, when returning home from the station, Montag has sensed someone else’s presence on the street at night; but, on checking, he has seen ‘only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk’ (12). As in ‘The Pedestrian’, which also includes images of buckling sidewalks, this is a city that by night is almost as uninhabited as a lunar landscape. On this occasion, though, he encounters a girl, aged seventeen, called Clarisse – her name is emblematic of the role
she plays in enlightening and hence radicalizing Montag. In a calculated attempt to meet him, Clarisse is strolling apparently casually along the ‘moonlit pavement’ (13). This is the domain, once again, of the enchanted city at night, though in this case the street is also the site of a kind of political or spiritual conversion.

  Intrigued, Montag asks the girl what she is doing ‘out so late wandering around’; and she tells him, with a simplicity that charms him, that it is ‘a nice time of night to walk’: ‘I like to smell things and look at things, and sometime stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise’ (14). Like Leonard Mead, she invokes the city’s poetic function at night. They walk together on the ‘silvered pavement’, with ‘the faintest breath of fresh apricots and strawberries in the air’, and she gives him a detailed account of her family, made up of booklovers and intellectuals – i.e., deviants (14). In particular, she relates that her uncle has twice been arrested, once for driving too slowly on a highway (‘He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days’), and once ‘for being a pedestrian’ (16–17).

  Clarisse disappears shortly after this episode, and the reader assumes that she has either been detained or murdered by the authorities. But by this time the clandestine nightwalks that Montag shared with her, which have been unimpeachably chaste, have had the requisite effect on his political consciousness. As the fire chief later contemptuously puts it, she appeared in his life ‘like the midnight sun’, upsetting the natural order (121). She concentrated or reflected the darkness that illuminates, to formulate it in mystical terms.