The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  23 Kathryn Milun, Pathologies of Modern Space: Empty Space, Urban Anxiety, and the Recovery of the Public Self (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 2. See also Shelley Z. Reuter, Narrating Social Order: Agoraphobia and the Politics of Classification (Toronto: University Press of Toronto, 2007).

  24 Trotter, ‘The Invention of Agoraphobia’, p. 465.

  25 Ford Madox Ford, Selected Poems, ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), p. 35.

  26 Ford Madox Ford, ‘Preface’, in Jean Rhys, The Left Bank and Other Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927), p. 10.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Henry Sutherland, letter, The Lancet (17 January 1885), p. 131.

  29 Ford, ‘Preface’, pp. 10–11.

  30 Carter, Repressed Spaces, p. 69.

  31 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), p. 37. Of Benjamin, T. J. Clark laconically remarks that ‘agoraphobia was not his thing’ (see ‘Should Benjamin Have Read Marx?’ in boundary 2 30 [2003], p. 47).

  32 Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, p. 10.

  33 Adam Phillips, ‘First Hates: Phobias in Theory’, in On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), p. 16.

  34 Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, p. 132. Trotter notes, incidentally, that the Professor in Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) ‘suffers from an intense dread of the “mass of mankind in its numbers” which looks a lot like agoraphobia’ – see ‘Introduction’, in The Uses of Phobia, p. 12.

  35 Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story, ed. David Seed (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), p. 35.

  36 Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, ed. Thomas C. Moser (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1999), p. 82. See Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, p. 434.

  37 See Trotter, ‘The Invention of Agoraphobia’, pp. 471–2.

  38 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 72. See Carter, Repressed Spaces, p. 168.

  39 Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 73.

  40 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 31.

  41 Neale, ‘Agoraphobia’, p. 1323.

  42 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 310.

  43 Trotter, ‘The Invention of Agoraphobia’, p. 471.

  44 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997), p. 301.

  7. Striding, Staring

  1 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, in Selected Writings Vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 41.

  2 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed. Claire Tomalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 65. Hereafter, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation.

  3 See Virginia Woolf, Night and Day, ed. Suzanne Raitt (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1999), p. 209.

  4 See Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, p. 83, n. 189.

  5 The word ‘buccaneer’, which evokes the activities of imperial plunderers, is derived from the French term for a kind of barbecue on which, following the practices of the colonized people of Saint-Domingue in the seventeenth century, flesh is dried or roasted. Peter’s consciousness, in this scene, is itself a kind of rude frame on which he heats and cooks his erotic fantasies.

  6 Rachel Bowlby, ‘Walking, Women and Writing’, in Feminist Destinations and Further Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 205–6. See also Deborah L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 73–4.

  7 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 148, 150, 152.

  8 D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Keith Sagar (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 492.

  9 André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 113.

  10 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, 1993), p. 243.

  11 Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 121.

  12 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), p. 9. Hereafter, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation.

  13 Williams, The Country and the City, p. 233.

  14 Bowlby, ‘Walking, Women and Writing’, p. 206. See also Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (London: Chatto & Windus, 2016), pp. 69–93.

  15 Virginia Woolf, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, in Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 177.

  16 Ibid., p. 187. It is impossible, I think, not to suspect that Woolf intended the phrase ‘fellow men’, for all its superficial universalism as a euphemism for ‘human beings’, to be gendered specifically as male.

  17 Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, p. 27.

  18 Ibid., p. 31.

  19 David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 212.

  20 Ibid., pp. 212, 221.

  21 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, p. 137.

  22 Ibid.

  23 Charles Baudelaire, ‘In Passing’, in Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard (London: Picador, 1987), pp. 97–8.

  24 Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, trans. Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingston and Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 37.

  25 Bowlby, ‘Walking, Women and Writing’, p. 198.

  26 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Return of the Flâneur’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 265.

  27 Woolf, ‘Street Haunting’, p. 187.

  28 Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 28.

  29 Philip Fisher, ‘Torn Space: James Joyce’s Ulysses’, in The Novel: Volume 2, Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 668.

  30 Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Fleet Street’, in London: A History in Verse, ed. Mark Ford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 519.

  31 Sean Pryor, ‘A Poetics of Occasion in Hope Mirrlees’s Paris’, Critical Quarterly 61: 1 (2019), p. 43.

  32 Hope Mirrlees, ‘Paris: A Poem’, in Collected Poems, ed. Sandeep Parmar (Manchester: Carcanet: 2011), p. 3.

  33 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), pp. 194, 192.

  34 Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe, 1900–1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 137.

  35 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), p. 65.

  36 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Town in 1917’, in The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, eds Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 171.

  37 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, eds David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 174–5.

  38 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1994), p. 160.

  39 Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, p. 179.

  40 Ibid., pp. 177, 180.

  41 See Antonin Artaud, ‘Van Gogh: The M
an Suicided by Society’, trans. Mary Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in Artaud Anthology, ed. Jack Hirschman (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965), pp. 135–63.

  42 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 901.

  43 J. Hillis Miller, ‘Mrs Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising of the Dead’, in The J. Hillis Miller Reader, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 171.

  44 Williams, The Country and the City, p. 245.

  45 Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 179–80.

  8. Beginning

  1 Georges Bataille, ‘Mouth’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. and ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 59.

  2 Roland Barthes, ‘Outcomes of the Text’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 240–1.

  3 See Georges Bataille, ‘The Jesuve’, in Visions of Excess, p. 78. The ape, it might be said, is the ultimate anti-bourgeois.

  4 Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 109–10.

  5 Georges Bataille, ‘Big Toe’, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary and Related Texts, trans. Iain White (London: Atlas Press, 1995), pp. 90, 92. Hereafter, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation.

  6 Barthes, ‘Outcomes of the Text’, p. 245. Note that Barthes also mentions Bataille’s essay on the big toe in relation to his definition of ‘obtuse meaning’ in ‘The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills’, in Image, Music, Text, ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 59–60.

  7 Barthes, ‘Outcomes of the Text’, p. 244.

  8 William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, I, i, 154–8, in The Alexander Text of the Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1951), p. 829.

  9 Georges Bataille, ‘The Solar Anus’, in Visions of Excess, p. 8.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Georges Bataille, ‘[Dream]’, in Visions of Excess, p. 4.

  12 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 96.

  13 Barthes, ‘Outcomes of the Text’, p. 245.

  14 Georges Bataille, ‘Eye’, in Visions of Excess, p. 17.

  15 Barthes, ‘Outcomes of the Text’, p. 245.

  16 See Rieko Matsuura, The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, trans. Michael Emmerich (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2009).

  17 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 184. Patrick French confirms – in ‘Documents in the 1970s: Bataille, Barthes and “Le gros orteil”’, Papers of Surrealism 7 (2007), p. 8 – that ‘Bataille’s fiction of the body … is posed alongside the psychoanalytic semiotics of fetishism, not against it.’

  18 Quoted in Joseph A. Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York: New York University Press, 2004), p. 1.

  19 Wilfred Bion, Cogitations, ed. Francesca Bion (London: Karnac, 1992), p. 71.

  20 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1, eds Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 337–8.

  21 Barthes, ‘Outcomes of the Text’, p. 246.

  22 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 230.

  23 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, in Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 50.

  24 Quoted in ibid.

  25 Dudley J. Morton, The Human Foot: Its Evolution, Physiology, and Functional Disorders (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), p. 140.

  26 Shane O’Mara, In Praise of Walking: The New Science of How We Walk and Why It’s Good for Us (London: Bodley Head, 2019), p. 72.

  27 A dactyl, incidentally, is a metrical foot consisting of a long syllable followed by two short ones, probably derived from Latin dactylus, Greek δάκτυλος, meaning a finger, a date, a dactyl (from its three joints).

  28 Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’, ll. 5–8, in The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2002), p. 134. It seems strange that there is no reference to Hopkins in Marc Shell, Talking the Walk and Walking the Talk: A Rhetoric of Rhythm (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

  29 Bataille, ‘The Jesuve’, p. 75.

  30 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: Selection in Relation to Sex, eds Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), p. 28.

  31 Quoted in Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Verso, 2001), p. 41.

  32 Dean Falk et al., ‘Metopic suture of Taung (Australopithecus africanus) and its implications for hominin brain evolution’, PNAS 109: 22 (2012), pp. 8467–70.

  33 Leslie Klenerman and Bernard Wood, The Human Foot: A Companion to Clinical Studies (London: Springer, 2006), p. 9. Note that I am grateful to Christophe Soligo, of the Department of Anthropology at University College London, for his generosity in teaching me the anatomical and anthropological significance of the big toe.

  34 Solnit, Wanderlust, p. 35.

  35 For the range of hypotheses, see ibid., p. 40.

  36 Campbell Rolian, Daniel E. Lieberman, and Benedikt Hallgrimsson, ‘The Coevolution of Human Hands and Feet’, Evolution 64: 6 (2010), p. 1565.

  37 Ibid., p. 1566.

  38 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), pp. 41–2.

  39 Carol V. Ward, William H. Kimbel and Donald C. Johanson, ‘Complete Fourth Metatarsal and Arches in the Foot of Australopithecus afarensis’, Science 331 (11 February 2011), p. 753.

  40 Amato, On Foot, p. 22.

  41 Nick Land, ‘Spirit and Teeth’, in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007, eds Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (New York: Sequence Press, 2011), p. 188.

  42 Carlo Emilio Gadda, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, trans. William Weaver (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), p. 271. Hereafter, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation.

  43 Incidentally, Gadda’s revisionist account of Renaissance art, in which he seizes on the most insignificant feature of its iconography, iconicizing the irreducibly non-iconic or anti-iconic, is also a guide to his own innovations – at once literary and philosophical – as a writer. For, as Italo Calvino underlined, in addition to forging an extraordinarily original use of language, in which the erudite and the popular are freely, energetically intermingled, Gadda developed a form of narrative composition ‘in which minimal details take on giant proportions and end up by occupying the whole canvas and hiding or obscuring the overall design’. See Italo Calvino, ‘Carlo Emilio Gadda, the Pasticciaccio’, in Why Read the Classics? trans. Martin McLaughlin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009), p. 201.

  44 Raymond Tallis, Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence (London: Atlantic Books, 2010), p. xvii.

  45 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 46.

  46 Surya, Georges Bataille, pp. 122–3. For an excellent account of Bataille’s materialism, see Pierre Macherey, ‘Georges Bataille: Materialism Inverted’, in The Object of Literature, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 112–31.

  47 Surya, Georges Bataille, p. 146.

  48 André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 26.

  49 Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2
006), p. 96.

  50 Karl Marx, ‘Postface to the Second Edition’, in Capital, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 103.

  51 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 200–2.

  52 Adam Lowenstein, ‘The Surrealism of the Photographic Image: Bazin, Barthes, and the Digital Sweet Hereafter’, Cinema Journal 46: 3 (2007), p. 6.

  53 A translation of the fragment, from which these quotations are taken, appears in Lucette Finas, ‘Reading Bataille: The Invention of the Foot’, diacritics 26: 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 97–8. For a probing, richly illustrated discussion of the role that feet played in the iconography of the First World War, and of Modernism more generally, see Maud Ellmann, ‘More Kicks than Pricks: Modernist Body-Parts’, in A Handbook of Modernism Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 255–80; see also the hint contained in Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 78, where she briefly refers to ‘the grey feet of the Crucified’ in Mantegna’s painting.

  54 See Finas, ‘Reading Bataille’, p. 104.

  55 Barthes, ‘Outcomes of the Text’, p. 239.

  9. Stumbling

  1 Ray Bradbury, ‘The Pedestrian’, in Stories, vol. 2 (London: Harper-Collins, 2003), p. 569. Hereafter, page references appear in parenthesis after the quotation.

  2 Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011), p. 23.

  3 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 205.

  4 William Henry Whitmore, The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts. Reprinted from the Edition of 1660, With the Supplements to 1672 (Boston: City Council of Boston, 1889), pp. 198–9. On the history of the nightwalker, see Matthew Beaumont, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, Chaucer to Dickens (London: Verso, 2015).

  5 Quoted in Martha Grace Duncan, Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 172.