The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  In the central section of the novel, Bradbury charts his protagonist’s deepening disaffection with the barbaric regime of which he has hitherto been an obedient agent. A disaffection that can be measured by the number of books that, instead of destroying, he secretly accumulates at home.

  It is once his cache of books has been discovered that the state ruthlessly pursues him. At this point, the moonlit city that had opened up to him on his perambulations with Clarisse is transformed into an obscure labyrinth from which he must desperately escape. ‘Watch for a man running,’ the police announce to vigilant citizens, ‘watch for the running man … watch for a man alone on foot’ (132). The nightwalker has been forced to go on the run.

  As the narrative of Fahrenheit 451 starts to accelerate to its conclusion, Montag furtively enters a gas station in order to wash himself (‘Men as a rule do not visit gas stations at night on foot,’ as the authors of an article in an American journal of criminology wryly remarked in the mid-1930s, in the course of their reflections on a case concerning ‘night prowlers’40). Then he steals out ‘into the darkness’ and stands in silence looking onto a vast, empty boulevard. He must traverse this road in order to elude his pursuers, even though it will make him highly visible (not least because of streetlamps that seem ‘as bright and revealing as the midday sun’ [133–4]). He has to reach the safety of a dark alley he can see across the road.

  It is a richly dramatic scene taken straight from the noir cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, and it offers a reminder that Truffaut’s mistake, when he filmed the novel in the mid-1960s, was to disregard this noir element and instead set all the exterior action in the daytime. If only Fahrenheit 451 had looked more like Alphaville (1965) … In Jean-Luc Godard’s far more atmospheric science-fiction film, the eponymous futuristic city constitutes the centre of a technocratic society that is supposedly entering ‘the Civilization of Light’, one in which emotions have been criminalized and citizens have been made the ‘slaves of probability’. But Godard’s cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, deliberately portrays it as a city of darkness. He dramatizes this irony – this noirony, as it might be called – in a series of cool, cynical shots of slickened, crepuscular streets in a dystopian Paris of the night.

  After leaving the gas station, Bradbury’s protagonist begins ‘his little walk’ across the deserted road, which looks like a ‘vast concrete river’: ‘He put his right foot out and then his left foot and then his right. He walked on the empty avenue’ (134). But Montag is aware that he can be seen by a half-concealed vehicle with its headlights on, three blocks distant from him. The car accelerates in his direction and he starts to run. Then he abruptly reduces his pace so as not to attract attention: ‘Walk, that’s it, walk, walk’ (134).

  The car continues to hurtle closer and closer, a hostile emissary of the technological culture from which he has recently exiled himself.

  He began to shuffle idiotically and talk to himself and then he broke and just ran. He put out his legs as far as they would go and down and then far out again and down and back and out and down and back. God! God! He dropped a book, broke pace, almost turned, changed his mind, plunged on, yellowing in concrete emptiness, the beetle scuttling after its running food, two hundred, one hundred feet away, ninety, eighty, seventy, Montag gasping, flailing his hands, legs up down out, up down out, closer, closer, hooting, calling, his eyes burnt white now as his head jerked about to confront the flashing glare, now the beetle was swallowed in its own light, now it was nothing but a torch hurtling upon him; all sound, all blare. Now – almost on top of him! (135)

  Montags’s increasingly panicked motions, as the thumping syncopations of the second of these sentences in particular indicate, are reduced to their basic mechanical components. In ‘The Pedestrian’, it will be recalled, travelling by foot is classified as a ‘regressive tendency’. Here, in this skilfully written passage, with its breathless rhythms, it describes a process almost of terminal collapse.

  Montag plunges on across the road; and, as Mead had done, stumbles. And falls. But, at the last moment, the car misses him. Instead of the police, it contains thrill-seekers: ‘children out for a long night of roaring five or six hundred miles in a few moonlit hours’ (136). They must, he thinks, have accidentally seen a ‘very extraordinary sight’ – ‘a man strolling’ – and decided to ‘get him’ just for the hell of it (136).

  They failed to kill him because he happened to fall. A fortunate fall, then. Felix culpa. Montag speculates, though, that it might have been kids like this, and not the police, that killed Clarisse simply because she liked to walk at night. Perhaps she was not a political martyr after all. Perhaps she was just another senseless victim of a mechanized society careering out of control.

  Montag staggers onto the far kerb, ‘telling each foot to go and keep going’ (136). Then he hides ‘in the safety of the dark alley for which he had set out’, standing ‘shivering in the night’ as the youths in the car circle back for him (137). Soon he has to move. The state continues to track him as a fugitive, instructing all citizens to leave their television sets in order to stand at their front doors and identify his fleeing outline: ‘He couldn’t be missed! The only man running alone in the night city, the only man proving his legs!’ (146).

  Montag manages to escape, of course; first up the river, then along a desire path that takes the form of a forgotten train track. In the end, he finds the other refugees from this totalitarian society – exiled intellectuals who have adopted the identities of the books they have memorized (‘I am Plato’s Republic’, etc. [158]). One of them has a portable television, so the former fireman is able to see a triumphant live broadcast of his own death, dramatized by the state for the benefit of the docile masses sitting semi-comatose in their homes.

  How is this spectacle possible? It transpires that the authorities have targeted ‘some poor fellow [who] is out for a walk’ in the night, and persuaded the audience, through some deft manipulations of the camera, that he is Montag (156). Any social outcast will do. ‘Don’t think the police don’t know the habits of queer ducks like that,’ he is told by one of the other fugitives, ‘men who walk mornings for the hell of it, or for reasons of insomnia’ (156). This innocent pedestrian – perhaps it is Leonard Mead – is tracked down and exterminated on screen. In Bradbury’s dystopian imagination, once again, the nightwalker, a ‘midnight criminal stroller’, is the quintessential heroic outcast.

  The anonymous nightwalker made to stand in for Montag by the state when it stages its retribution as a television spectacle is, like the protagonist of Wells’s The Invisible Man, a scapegoat. Montag is a scapegoat, too. And so is Mead. In Bradbury’s totalitarian future, these nightwalkers are like the pharmakoi, the scapegoats of ancient Greek religion: criminalized but nonetheless sacred outsiders whose social function is to incarnate the guilt of the community from which they have been emblematically excluded.

  In the dystopian narratives in which they feature, they are therefore innately double, at once sanctified and accursed; the ‘symbol of both transgression and redemption’, in Terry Eagleton’s terms. As such, they represent a homeopathic form of hope. At the end of ‘The Pedestrian’, the reader pities Mead when the police deport him in silence to the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies (which functions as an ancient zone of exclusion that has been relocated inside the city’s precincts).

  As Eagleton has argued, compassion for the pharmakos is a form of identification that has the effect of displacing feelings of outrage and disgust onto the social order that has victimized him:

  The scapegoat, itself beyond speech and sociality, becomes a judgement on that order in its very being, embodying what it excludes, a sign of the humanity which it expels as so much poison. It is in this sense that it bears the seeds of revolutionary agency in its sheer passivity; for anything still active and engaged, however dissidently, would still be complicit with the polis, speaking its language and thus unable to put it into question
as a whole. Only the silence of the scapegoat will do this.41

  When Mead closes his eyes and stands stock-still in the street at night, picturing the city as a desert plain, he is this scapegoat. At the end of the story, ‘the empty streets with the empty sidewalks’, which are disturbed by ‘no sound and no motion’, represent a materialization of his mute, passive protest (572). The city itself, in its silence and through its cracked sidewalks, constitutes a concrete refusal of the totalitarian logic that has deformed it. It has been reduced to a state of Beckettian resistance. But the nocturnal city’s bare life, and the one man who inhabits the night, haunting it like the undead, points beyond itself to an apocalypse from which it might ultimately be rebuilt.

  Perhaps the most significant moment in ‘The Pedestrian’, as I have already implied, is when Mead misses his step on the warped or buckled pavement: ‘He stumbled over a particularly uneven section of sidewalk’ (570). If there are no lost steps, as Breton’s Nadja professes, then there are no missed steps either.42 Every misstep is significant. ‘The walker who stumbles’, Paul Carter writes in his book on the aesthetics of agoraphobia, ‘invalidates the modern city,’ because he or she fails to conform to its accelerationist logic.43

  Mead’s stumble momentarily points to the utopian remainder embedded or hidden in this dystopia. The loose stone, a token of both past and future that juts into the present, is the skandalon, meaning a stumbling block, one which will become the cornerstone of some new social order.

  In the language of Adorno’s friend Ernst Bloch, it is a utopian surplus or excess, symbolic of the ‘Not Yet’.44 It marks the site from which this apparently indestructible totalitarian society will start to undermine itself and collapse. The nightwalker also marks a point of deconstruction. He too is a scandal.

  According to St John’s Gospel, to walk in the night is by definition to stumble, to admit to having fallen or lapsed: ‘But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.’ The verb ‘to stumble’ comes from Old Norse, meaning to grope or trip in the dark. To walk in the night is to be benighted, morally blinded. Only those who have no light in them walk at night. But in spite of stumbling, or because of it (it is another fortunate fall), Bradbury’s Pedestrian finds in the night, in the darkness that illuminates, an inner light.

  In this sense, over and above his incarceration at the end, Mead embodies hope. Excluded from the diurnal city, like the sixteenth-century mystics who reclaimed the dark for spiritual purposes, he is forced to find redemption in the night. In this respect, the Pedestrian himself, in his stubborn refusal of the rules of Bradbury’s totalitarian society, dramatized in his nightwalking, is this society’s stumbling block or skandalon.

  Nightwalking is, in a dual sense, scandalous: the rambling and stumbling of the nightwalker is socially unacceptable; but, if he has been scapegoated, historically, then his aimless activity is, potentially at least, the cornerstone of a different kind of society.

  10

  Not Belonging

  On the Architectural Logic of

  Contemporary Capitalism

  There is in Jean Rhys’s novel Good Morning, Midnight (1939) a powerful account of what it feels like to walk about the streets of a city when one has no money and no status. Rhys’s female narrator, Sasha, an alcoholic leading a penurious, fairly peripatetic existence in Paris in the 1930s, describes the animosity and hostility of the buildings past which, as in some urban fairy tale, she must venture on foot in order to return at night to the dreary, flea-bitten hotel where she is a restless and reluctant tenant.

  ‘If you have money and friends,’ Sasha points out, houses ‘stand back respectfully’. But if you don’t, if you are penniless and rootless, then they intuit this – ‘they know’ – and they adopt a far less respectful, indeed a demeaning, insulting attitude:

  Then they step forward, the waiting houses, to frown and crush. No hospitable doors, no lit windows, just frowning darkness. Frowning and leering and sneering, the houses, one after another. Tall cubes of darkness, with two lighted eyes at the top to sneer. And they know who to frown at. They know as well as the policeman on the corner, and don’t you worry …1

  At our most vulnerable, perhaps we have all experienced this paranoid relationship to the built environment. Perhaps, as individuals, we have all felt persecuted and victimized by the ‘waiting houses’ that stare and sneer at us as we sidle past them on foot, as in some ritual of humiliation. Walking in the city, especially when our lives are precarious, entails a perpetual struggle to resist the intimidating permanence and stability of the built environment; the sense that it is home to others but not to us.

  Do we feel at home in the cities we inhabit? This, then, is the question. There are, of course, innumerable ways in which ordinary people, especially the poor and those from marginalized social groups, experience an almost permanent sense of displacement in the urban environments in which they live, even if the consolations of belonging to a particular, more or less organic, community can at times alleviate this fragile state of being. There are forms of economic exclusion, political exclusion and social exclusion – competing and overlapping in complex, shifting patterns – that determinately shape the everyday lives of individuals in cities, especially in so far as these are also defined by gendered, racial and religious identities.

  The built environment actively contributes to these modes of displacement; and in the early twenty-first century it is probably more aggressive in prosecuting or reinforcing this politics of exclusion than ever before. As Margit Mayer has written, ‘cities have transformed into gated communities and privatized public spaces, where wealthy and poor districts are increasingly separated by invisible barriers, and access of the poor to the amenities and infrastructures that cities once held for all have become more and more restricted.’2

  The specifically urban forms of alienation and exclusion to which I have alluded are perhaps most acutely experienced by those classified by the state, for transparently ideological purposes, as illegal immigrants. But there is also a chronic and pervasive sense of unease that, whoever we are, from wherever we have come, is virtually constitutive of our experiences of living in cities. No doubt it was this existential as well as social condition that theorists of the metropolis, from at least the advent of the industrial European city in the nineteenth century, diagnosed in their accounts of its intrinsically alienating effects.

  The individual’s need for ‘self-preservation in the face of the large city’, as Georg Simmel famously expressed it in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), requires as its prerequisite a ‘mental attitude’ that he designated in terms of ‘reserve’.3 The reserved disposition that the individual self-protectively adopts in relation to the urban environment he or she inhabits presupposes – and at the same time compounds – a state of dissimilation that perpetually vitiates his or her sense of assimilation. Perhaps cities, at least in the alienated conditions of capitalist society, are precisely those social collectives in which, as a matter of definition, no one ever feels completely at home. The fundamental, if not predominant, phenomenological experience of the built environment, from this perspective, is one of discomfort.4

  Here, I want to explore some aspects of the role that buildings play in reinforcing the concrete and the more abstract forms of this feeling of not being at home in the urban environment. Of not belonging. I am inspired in part by the novelist China Miéville’s article ‘The Conspiracy of Architecture’, a brilliantly imaginative but at the same time rigorously materialist analysis of what he calls ‘the animate, alien building’.5

  To put it in phenomenological terms, I am interested not simply in how we relate to buildings, as sentient beings, but in how buildings, as effectively animate entities, relate to us (Bruno Latour, in his Actor-Network Theory, has pioneered the assumption that buildings ‘act’, not least because they arouse ‘a sense of wellbeing or an impulse to flee’).6 To put it in psychopathological terms, so to speak,
I am interested not only in how we look at buildings but, more significantly still, in how buildings look at us; that is, in how we internalize the gaze of buildings.

  Applying Slavoj Žižek’s fertile notion of the ‘architectural parallax’, in addition to other theoretical resources, I use this chapter to examine the ways in which, moving through the contemporary city on foot, buildings negotiate us just as we negotiate buildings; and I explore the ways in which, in some fundamental sense, they reinforce a sense of the city’s uncanniness, its unhomeliness. I go on to detail some of the ways in which a specific type of contemporary architecture, which I characterize in terms of its ‘visored’ façades, dramatizes the intrusive, even offensive, relation to the individual I initially outline.

  In developing the concept of the visor, I revisit some of the ideas and tropes explored by Jacques Derrida in his Specters of Marx (1994), especially in his suggestive interpretation of the opening scenes of Hamlet. Finally, I propose a symptomatic, or more precisely homeopathic, solution to the pathological relation in which these visored buildings, indeed urban buildings in general, situate us. What Alejandro Zaera Polo has pursued in the shape of a ‘politics of the envelope’ lies behind my reflections, throughout this chapter, on what I call the politics of the visor.7

  These reflections, it can be added, also comprise a contribution to recent debates about the ‘right to the city’. Peter Marcuse has helpfully reminded us that this Lefebvrian slogan, which dates from the late 1960s, articulates both a ‘demand’ and a ‘cry’ – the demand of ‘those who are excluded’ and the cry of ‘those who are alienated’. ‘The demand is for the material necessities of life,’ he elaborates, ‘the aspiration is for a broader right to what is necessary beyond the material to lead a satisfying life.’8