Wanderlust: A History of Walking (32 page)

Aragon made the city itself his subject, but Breton and Soupault pursued
women who were embodiments of the city: Nadja and Georgette. Soupault writes of his protagonist spying on Georgette as she takes a customer to a hotel near the Pont Neuf and returns to the streets. Afterward, “Georgette resumed her stroll about Paris, through the mazes of the night. She went on, dispelling sorrow, solitude or tribulation. Then more than ever did she display her strange power: that of transfiguring the night. Thanks to her, who was no more than one of the hundred thousands, the Parisian night became a mysterious domain, a great and marvelous country, full of flowers, of birds, of glances and of stars, a hope launched into space. . . . That night, as we were pursuing, or more exactly, tracking Georgette, I saw Paris for the first time. It was surely not the same city. It lifted itself above the mists, rotating like the earth on its axis, more feminine than usual. And Georgette herself became a city.” Once again and yet more deliriously, Paris is a wilderness, bedroom, and book to be read by walking. The protagonist—nameless, without a profession, the perfect flâneur at last—has taken up Bretonne's task of exploring the night, but by pursuing a single woman entangled with a single crime, a murder whose aftermath they both witnessed. The protagonist is a detective on the trail of crime and aesthetic experience, and Georgette embodies both.

Later Georgette tells him she took up her profession because she and her brother needed to live, and “Everything is so simple when one knows all the streets as I do, and all the people who move in them. They are all seeking something without seeming to do so.” Like Nadja, she is a flâneuse, one who has made of the street a sort of residence. While
Last Nights of Paris
is a novel,
Nadja
is based on Breton's encounters with a real woman, and to underscore his book's nonfictionality, he reproduces photographs of people (though not of pseudonymous Nadja), places, drawings, and letters in the pages of his narrative. On one of their dates, Nadja leads him to the place Dauphine at the west end of the Île de la Cité, and he writes, “Whenever I happen to be there, I feel the desire to go somewhere else gradually ebbing out of me, I have to struggle against myself to get free from a gentle, over-insistent, and finally, crushing embrace.”

Thirty years later, in his
Pont Neuf,
Breton, in the words of one critic, “famously proposes a detailed ‘interpretation' of the topography of central Paris according to which the geographical and architectural layout of the Île de la Cité, and the bend of the Seine where it is situated, are seen to make up the body of a recumbent woman whose vagina is located in the place Dauphine, ‘with its triangular,
slightly curvilinear form bisected by a slit separating two wooded spaces.' ” Breton spends the night in a hotel with Nadja, and Soupault's narrator hires Georgette for sex, but in these tales eroticism is not focused on bodily intimacy in bed but diffused throughout the city, and noctural walking rather than copulating is the means by which they bask in this charged atmosphere. The women they pursue are most themselves, most enchanting, and most at home on the streets, as though the profession of streetwalker was at last truly to walk the streets (no longer victims of or refugees from the streets, as so many earlier heroines had been). Nadja and Georgette are, like most surrealist representations of women, too burdened with being incarnations of Woman—degraded and exalted, muse and whore, city incarnate—to be individual women, and this is most evident in their magical strolls through the city, strolls that lure the narrators to follow these sirens on a chase that is also an homage to and tour of Paris. The love of a citizen for his city and the lust of a man for a passerby has become one passion. And the consummation of this passion is on the streets and on foot. Walking has become sex. Benjamin concurred in this transformation of city into female body, walking into copulating, when he concluded his passage about Paris as labyrinth, “Nor is it to be denied that I penetrated to its innermost place, the Minotaur's chamber, with the only difference being that this mythological monster had three heads: those of the occupants of the small brothel on rue de la Harpe, in which, summoning my last reserves of strength . . . I set my foot.” Paris is a labyrinth whose center is a brothel, and in this labyrinth it is the arrival, not the consummation, that seems to count, and the foot that seems to be the crucial anatomical detail.

Djuna Barnes wrote a sort of coda to these books in her 1936
Nightwood,
where once again the erotic love of an enchanted madwoman mingles with the fascinations of Paris and the night. The heroine of Barnes's great lesbian novel, Robin Vote, walks the streets “rapt and confused,” abandoning her lover Nora Flood and directing “her steps toward that night life that was a known measure between Nora and the cafés. Her meditations, during this walk, were a part of the pleasure she expected to find when the walk came to an end. . . . Her thoughts were in themselves a form of locomotion.” A cross-dressing Irish doctor who frequents the pissoirs of the boulevards explains the night in a long soliloquy to Nora, and Barnes must have known what she was doing when she housed this Dr. O'Connor on the rue Servandoni by the place Saint-Sulpice, the same small street in which Dumas had housed one of his Three Musketeers and Hugo had settled
Les
Misérables
' hero Jean Valjean. Such a density of literature had accumulated in Paris by the time of
Nightwood
that one pictures characters from centuries of literature crossing paths constantly, crowding each other, a Metro car full of heroines, a promenade populated by the protagonists of novels, a rioting mob of minor characters. Parisian writers always gave the street address of their characters, as though all readers knew Paris so well that only a real location in the streets would breathe life into a character, as though histories and stories themselves had taken up residence throughout the city.

Walter Benjamin described himself as “a man who has, with great difficulty, pried open the jaws of a crocodile and set up housekeeping there.” He managed to live most of his life drifting about like a minor character in the literature he preferred. Perhaps it was French literature that led him to his death, for he delayed leaving Paris until it was too late. Boys' adventure books and the chronicles of the explorers would have better prepared him for his last years in the shadow of the Third Reich. When war broke out in September of 1939, he was rounded up with other German men in France and marched to a camp in Nevers, more than a hundred miles to the south. Now plump and afflicted with heart trouble that even on the streets of Paris had made him stop every few minutes, he collapsed several times on the march, but revived enough during his nearly three months of internment in the camp to teach courses in philosophy for a fee of a few cigarettes. His release secured by the P.E.N. club, he returned to Paris, where he continued to work on the
Arcades Project,
tried to secure a visa, and wrote the piercingly lyrical “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” After the Nazi occupation of France, he fled south and with several others walked the steep route over the Pyrenees into Port Bou, Spain. He carried a heavy briefcase with him containing, he said, a manuscript more precious than his life, and in a steep vineyard he was so overcome that his companions had to support him on the walk. “No one knew the path,” wrote a Frau Gurland who went with him. “We had to climb part of the way on all fours.” In Spain the authorities demanded an exit visa from France and refused to honor the entrance visa for the United States Benjamin's friends had finally secured. In despair at his circumstances and the prospect of having to walk back over the mountains, he took an overdose of morphine in Spain and died on September 26, 1940—“whereupon the border officials, upon whom this suicide
had made an impression,” writes Hannah Arendt, “allowed his companions to proceed to Portugal.” His briefcase vanished.

In the same essay, Arendt, who had lived in Paris herself in the 1960s, wrote, “In Paris a stranger feels at home because he can inhabit the city the way he lives in his own four walls. And just as one inhabits an apartment, and makes it comfortable, by living in it instead of just using it for sleeping, eating, and working, so one inhabits a city by strolling through it without aim or purpose, with one's stay secured by the countless cafés which line the streets and past which the life of the city, the flow of pedestrians moves along. To this day Paris is the only one among the large cities which can be comfortably covered on foot, and more than any other city it is dependent for its liveliness on people who pass by in the streets, so that the modern automobile traffic endangers its very existence not only for technical reasons.” When I ran away to Paris at the end of the 1970s, the city was still more or less a walker's paradise, if you discounted the petty lecheries and rudeness of some of its men, and I was so poor and so young that I walked everywhere, for hours, and in and out of the museums (which are free to people under eighteen). Now I know that even I was living in a Paris that was disappearing. The vast void on the Right Bank was the site where the great Les Halles markets had recently been eradicated, but I didn't know that the spiral-walled pissoirs like little labyrinths for the mystery of male privilege were vanishing too, that traffic lights would come to the crooked old streets of the Latin Quarter and illuminated plastic signs for fast food would mar the old walls, that the old hulk on the quai d'Orsay was to become a flashy new museum, that the Tuileries' and Luxembourg's metal chairs with their spiral arms and perforated circular seats (in much the same aesthetic vein as the pissoirs) would be replaced by more rectilinear and less beautiful chairs painted the same green. It was nothing like the transformations Parisians experienced during the Revolution, or during Haussmannization or at many other times, but this small register of changes has made me too the possessor of a lost city, and perhaps Paris is always a lost city, a city full of things that only live in imagination. Most dismaying of all when I returned recently was the change Arendt had foreseen: the dominance of the streets by cars. Cars had returned Paris's streets to the dirty and dangerous state in which they once had been, in the days when Rousseau was run over by a coach and walking the streets was a feat. To compensate for the automotive apotheosis, cars are banished on Sundays from certain streets and quays so that people might
once again promenade there, as they always have in the gardens and on the wide sidewalks of the boulevards (and as I write, efforts are being made to take back more space—notably the great expanse of the place de la Concorde, which has in recent decades become a congested traffic circle).

One glory remains to Paris, that of possessing the chief theorists of walking, among them Guy DeBord in the 1950s, Michel de Certeau in the 1970s, and Jean Christophe Bailly in the 1990s. DeBord addressed the political and cultural meanings of cities' architecture and spatial arrangements; deciphering and reworking those meanings was one of the tasks of the Situationist Internationale he cofounded and whose principal documents he wrote. “Psychogeography,” he declared in 1955, was a discipline that “could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals.” He decried the apotheosis of the automobile in that essay and elsewhere, for psychogeographies were best perceived afoot: “The sudden change of ambience in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of the city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the contour of the ground)” were among the subtleties he charted, proposing “the introduction of psychogeographic maps, or even the introduction of alterations” to “clarify certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences (influences generally categorized as tourism, that popular drug as repugnant as sports or buying on credit).” Another of DeBord's pugnacious treatises was the “Theory of the Dérive” (
dérive
is French for
drifting
), “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. . . . In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” That flâneury seemed to DeBord a radical new idea all his own is somewhat comic, as are his authoritarian prescriptions for subversion—but his ideas for making urban walking yet more conscious an experiment are serious. “The point,” writes Greil Marcus, who has studied Situationism, “was to encounter the unknown as a facet of the known, astonishment on the terrain of boredom, innocence in the face of experience. So you can walk up the street without thinking, letting your mind drift, letting your legs, with their internal memory, carry you up and down and around turns,
attending to a map of your own thoughts, the physical town replaced by an imaginary city.” The Situationists' combination of cultural means and revolutionary ends has been influential, nowhere more so than in Paris's 1968 student uprising, when Situationist slogans were painted on the walls.

De Certeau and Bailly are far more mild, though they see futures as dark as DeBord's. The former devotes a chapter of his
Practice of Everyday Life
to urban walking. Walkers are “practitioners of the city,” for the city is made to be walked, he wrote. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go, “since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements.” Further, he adds, “the walking of passers-by offers a series of turns (tours) and detours that can be compared to ‘turns of phrase' or ‘stylistic figures.' ” De Certeau's metaphor suggests a frightening possibility: that if the city is a language spoken by walkers, then a postpedestrian city not only has fallen silent but risks becoming a dead language, one whose colloquial phrases, jokes, and curses will vanish, even if its formal grammar survives. Bailly lives in this car-choked Paris and documents this decline. In the words of an interpreter, he states that the social and imaginative function of cities “is under threat from the tyranny of bad architecture, soulless planning and indifference to the basic unit of urban language, the street, and the ‘ruissellement de paroles' (stream of words), the endless stories, which animate it. Keeping the street and the city alive depends on understanding their grammar and generating the new utterances on which they thrive. And for Bailly, the principal agency of this process is walking, what he calls the ‘grammaire generative de jambes' (generative grammar of the legs).” Bailly speaks of Paris as a collection of stories, a memory of itself made by the walkers of the streets. Should walking erode, the collection may become unread or unreadable.