{"id":149087,"date":"2020-11-17T09:00:42","date_gmt":"2020-11-17T14:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=149087"},"modified":"2020-11-17T13:48:11","modified_gmt":"2020-11-17T18:48:11","slug":"no-walk-is-ever-wasted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/17\/no-walk-is-ever-wasted\/","title":{"rendered":"No Walk Is Ever Wasted"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Andr\u00e9 Breton. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

What are the politics of walking in the city? What are its poetics?<\/p>\n

In Nadja<\/em> (1928), Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s great surrealist novel, his autobiographical narrator at one point describes bringing a pile of books to a bar where he has made an arrangement to meet Nadja herself, who is fast becoming the object of his strange, not to say obsessive libidinal and spiritual investments. This pile of books includes a copy of Les pas perdus<\/em> (1924), The Lost Steps<\/em>, Breton\u2019s first collection of essays, which he no doubt brings, along with the first Manifesto of Surrealism<\/em> (1924), in an attempt both to educate her and aggrandize himself. \u201cLost steps?\u201d Nadja exclaims on seeing its title. \u201cBut there\u2019s no such thing!\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no such thing as lost steps! If one were to search for the principle that epitomizes what, in an echo of the title of a book by the late Marshall Berman, might be called \u201cmodernism in the streets,\u201d one could probably find it in this exclamation. It informs the writings of all those authors who consistently sought to make the cities with which they were familiar seem new or strange by traversing them aimlessly, sometimes desperately, on foot, in a state of heightened susceptibility to the relentless stimuli of the streets. But it is also a doctrine that, almost a century later, still resonates in the cities of today. <\/p>\n

Certainly, it is the article of faith according to which, as a committed, even devout pedestrian, I like to live. No walk, as far as I am concerned, is ever wasted. In contrast, for example, to a car journey. In a city\u2014especially one dominated by cars, by individualistic rather than collective, private rather than public modes of transport\u2014it is walking that habitually makes me feel alive. It makes me feel both vitally connected to the city\u2019s ceaseless circuits of energy and, at the same time, delicately detached from them. Stimulant, then, and narcotic.<\/p>\n

In the twenty-first century, in cities that are the site of acutely disorienting cycles of creative destruction, where pedestrians are increasingly inured to the environment they more and more mechanically inhabit, not least because of their dependence on the technology of smartphones and other handheld devices, we need another modernism of the streets. And we need to celebrate some of those embattled individuals for whom, in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, at the high tide of industrial modernity, this activity was a sort of spiritual imperative; a vocation.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no such thing as lost steps \u2026 Nadja does a lot of loitering on the streets of Paris, so her reaction to the title of Breton\u2019s essay collection, which I take to be spontaneously triumphant rather than merely defensive, is understandable. If you wander around the city, or hang about at street corners, things happen.<\/p>\n

Of course, people might think as a result that you\u2019re a pimp or a prostitute or some other undesirable, and if you\u2019re a woman you\u2019ll be especially exposed to demeaning assumptions of this sort; but things still happen. With any luck, in fact, you might encounter a surrealist, as Nadja does. Or, thirty or forty years later, a situationist. These avant-gardists are committed to the idea that it is the street, above all other venues, that provides what Breton, in the essay that opens Les pas perdus<\/em>, calls the \u201csurprising detours\u201d that shape a life in the conditions of capitalist modernity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe street, with its cares and its glances, was my true element,\u201d Breton declares: \u201cthere I could test like nowhere else the winds of possibility.\u201d The street, site of the most routine practicalities, such as shopping, is also a social laboratory in which all sorts of utopian potentialities can be tested. The street is the domain of the trivial; but\u2014as the etymological origin of this word suggests, derived from the Latin for a place at which three roads meet, typically at the volatile margins of the city where immigrants of all kinds congregate and circulate\u2014it is also a site of dynamic social experiment. It is a point of intersection, criss-crossed with restless feet, bristling with creative possibilities for collective life.<\/p>\n

Breton, it can safely be assumed, agrees with Nadja that there are no lost steps. For her, as he formulates it in a sentence that Walter Benjamin later cited as the epigraph to his essay on \u201cMarseilles\u201d (1929), the streets are \u201cthe only region of valid experience\u201d (\u201cla rue, pour elle seul champ d\u2019exp\u00e9rience valable<\/em>\u201d). And walking, implicitly, is the only valid means of traversing this region or, better, \u201cfield\u201d of experience (it is surely important, paradoxically, not to erase the ancient pastoral associations of this phrase). More specifically, that errant, meandering form of walking that is often classified as wandering is the only valid means of traversing this field of experience.<\/p>\n

Like other surrealists, and indeed like other modernists of every stripe, Breton believed that the footstep, as Michael Sheringham puts it, is the \u201cemblem of the free everyday.\u201d The footstep is an opportunity to escape the logic of abstraction, the logic of exchange-value constitutive of those modes of transport with which, in the industrial metropolis, the walker must compete, from automobiles to buses to trains. Every footfall, then, in contrast to the revolution of a set of wheels that travels along roads or tracks, is an adventure. A flight. It is open to \u201csurprising detours.\u201d And it is, at the same time, a faint imprint, on the pavements and other surfaces of the city, of these necessarily individual escapades.<\/p>\n

It is in this sense that the lost steps shaping the essays in Breton\u2019s Les pas perdus<\/em> are not in fact lost steps at all. They are affirmations of the surrealist\u2019s freedom simply to drift through the streets and through the corridors of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French literature, opening himself up to the everyday excitements of chance experience. The polemics, reviews, and sketches of comrades associated with Dadaism and surrealism that comprise Les pas perdus<\/em> don\u2019t go anywhere immediately obvious. They are diversions, meaning both deviations from the predictable or prescribed route and distractions. Recreational distractions that, as deviations from normative expectations, are in some fundamental sense re-creational \u2026<\/p>\n

In so far as Breton\u2019s collection, both its title and its surrealist spirit, was subsequently \u201cmodified in the guts of the living,\u201d to echo Auden\u2019s poem about Yeats, it certainly proved creative and regenerative: the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier\u2019s Los pasos<\/em> perdidos<\/em> (1953), The Lost Steps<\/em>, in some respects a postcolonial critique of surrealism, brilliantly explores not only what it means to get lost in the jungle but also just how difficult it is both to move on foot in the streets of a city and to live according to the \u201claws of collective motion\u201d that prevail in them. As individual pedestrians, isn\u2019t this what we are all trying to do in our everyday lives? Aren\u2019t we fighting, in effect, to coordinate the city\u2019s \u201claws of collective motion\u201d? Like a conductor who arrives at their podium halfway through the fourth movement of the symphony?<\/p>\n

Les pas perdus<\/em> includes the account of an adventure Breton and Louis Aragon had on a Parisian street when, to absolutely no narrative consequence, they became intrigued by an enigmatic and oddly disorientated woman. This passante<\/em>, the object of those \u201ccares\u201d and \u201cglances\u201d apparently legitimated, in a patriarchal society, by the sight lines and the sexual-political dynamics of the street, is a Baudelairean passerby who unlike Nadja resists with considerable insouciance the surrealists\u2019 more or less predatory attempts to recruit her to their schemes. Refusing to audition for the part of Nadja the two men are effectively hoping to cast, this anonymous woman ignores or, still more gloriously, remains completely unconscious of them: \u201cLouis Aragon and Andr\u00e9 Breton,\u201d the piece concludes, \u201cunable to give up the idea of finding the key to the riddle, searched through part of the sixth arrondissement\u2014but in vain.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Breton\u2019s article, titled \u201cThe New Spirit\u201d and first published in 1922 in the surrealist periodical Litt\u00e9rature<\/em>, is itself proof that their search was not in vain. For the surrealists, all experiences on the streets take the form of experiments, and no experiments are unsuccessful. Furthermore, if the point of this sketch is that it goes nowhere, Breton himself was clearly confident that he was going somewhere. The essays and fragments collected in Les<\/em> pas perdus<\/em>, which announce an arrival and a departure, function as important preparatory exercises. After all, the Manifesto of<\/em> Surrealism<\/em>, representing a signal departure for the avant-garde, appeared in the same year. There are no lost steps.<\/p>\n

In French, the phrase pas perdus<\/em>, \u201clost steps,\u201d recalls the phrase salle des pas perdus<\/em>\u2014the common, peculiarly rich name for the waiting room of a railway station. At once drearily prosaic and poignantly poetic, it evokes the aimless, restless pacing of those who kill time before the departure of their train, tracing a circular, almost self-canceling movement that collapses walking into waiting, the active into the passive. But, read with a different inflection, the phrase les pas perdus<\/em> can also mean \u201cthe not lost.\u201d It connotes the unlost (the poet Paul Celan once referred to himself, in a beautiful if painful formulation, as \u201cunlost amid the losses\u201d).<\/p>\n

Breton\u2019s essay collection is, then, about an intellectual and spiritual elect: Apollinaire, Duchamp, Jarry, Lautr\u00e9amont, Rimbaud, Vach\u00e9, et cetera. This elect, moreover, which is comprised of the not-lost, or the sort-of-saved, is implicitly recruited from the ranks of those who aimlessly pace the streets in pursuit of adventure. Wanderers. Fugueurs<\/em>. For Breton, and for friends such as Aragon and Philippe Soupault, themselves the authors of fine surrealist novels driven by the logic of what the situationists will subsequently call the d\u00e9rive<\/em>, or psychogeographic \u201cdrift,\u201d people who loiter or pace or wander are precisely not lost. On the contrary, they are preoccupied, consciously or unconsciously, with finding themselves.<\/p>\n

And they do find themselves\u2014in contrast, for example, to the inhabitants of that infernal cylindrical salle des pas perdus<\/em> at the center of Samuel Beckett\u2019s The Lost Ones<\/em> (1970), where the tortured relationship between waiting and walking acquires both mathematical and mythical overtones. Beckett\u2019s vision is shaped in part by Dante\u2019s account of the dead massed on the banks of the Acheron in the third canto of the Inferno<\/em>. Perhaps it is also a recollection of the night he spent in the waiting room of Nuremberg station in 1931, an incident that informed a scene in his novel Watt<\/em> (1953). Certainly, it is a vision of the damned: \u201cAbode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Breton\u2019s more redemptive vision is of the not-damned. Those who, like him, inhabit the immense salle des pas perdus<\/em> that is the metropolitan city might look like lost bodies, lost souls, but they are secretly the chosen ones. For they discover the marvelous in the everyday, reveal enchantment in the disenchanted spaces of urban life, find redemption in everyday forms of perdition. No doubt there are lost soles in the city, just as there are discarded gloves such as the one Breton\u2019s autobiographical narrator fetishizes in Nadja<\/em>; but there are no lost souls. The street redeems everyone. Indeed, its least bourgeois inhabitants, the bohemians, bums, and criminals, are for Breton and the other surrealists its saints and martyrs.<\/p>\n

In the city, then, for the surrealists and other \u201cmodernists of the street,\u201d every aimless step counts\u2014precisely because it cannot be counted. The more aimless the better \u2026 The American novelist Henry Miller, who made the streets of Paris his home throughout the thirties, offers an almost programmatic statement about the opportunities that open up to those who drift through the city on foot when, on the opening page of his novel Black Spring<\/em> (1936), he announces that \u201cto be born on the street\u201d\u2014as he himself claims he was because of his origins in working-class Brooklyn\u2014\u201cmeans to wander all your life, to be free.\u201d \u201cIt means accident and incident, drama, movement,\u201d he elaborates. \u201cIt means above all dream. A harmony of irrelevant facts which gives to your wandering a metaphysical certitude.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Matthew Beaumont is a professor in the department of English at University College, London. He is the author of <\/em>Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870\u20131900(2005) and the coauthor, with Terry Eagleton, of <\/em>The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He has edited or coedited several collections of essays: <\/em>As Radical as\u00a0Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century;\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble;\u00a0<\/em>Adventures\u00a0in Realism; and\u00a0<\/em>Restless Cities.<\/em><\/p>\n

From <\/em>The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City<\/a>,<\/em> by Matthew Beaumont. Used with the permission of the publisher, Verso Books. Copyright \u00a9 2020 by Matthew Beaumont.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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