23/10/2024
Wandering in the City: Lecture 8
● Theorise the city as a modern experience from 1880 to 1940.
● Modern city has a relationship to literary modernism.
● Spaces of alienation - disaffected figures wander away into dark corners of the mind and the
city.
‘These [new] media, the technological investment which mobilized them and the cultural forms which
both directed the investment and expressed its preoccupations, arose in the new metropolitan cities,
the
centres of the also new imperialism, which offered themselves as transnational capitals of an art
without frontiers. Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London, New York, took on a new silhouette as the
eponymous City of Strangers, the most appropriate locale for art made by the restless mobile émigré
or exile, the internationally anti-bourgeois artist. [….] The whole commotion is finally and crucially
interpreted and ratified by the City of Emigres and Exiles itself, New York’. Raymond Williams,
‘When Was Modernism?’
Ways of Thinking
● Meandering or striding out
● Loneliness in the Crowd
● Opportunity or Frustration
● Bustle and Noise
● Modernity and History
● Strangeness and Estrangement
● Transport and Movement
● Compulsion or Freedom
● Unity or dissipation
Looking Down On A City: Michel de Certeau: French Theorist: ‘Seeing Manhattan from the 110th
floor… beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts
up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of
Midtown, quietly passes over Cental Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A
wave verticals. Its agitation momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilised before
the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide - extremes of ambition and
degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrast between yesterday’s buildings, already
transformed into trash cans, and today’s urban interruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome,
New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its presentinvenrs itself,
from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the
future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a
universe that is constantly exploding’. (‘The Practice of Everyday Life’).
Woolf’s, ‘The Voyage Out’:
● ‘As the streets that lead from the Strand to the embankment are very narrow, it is better not to
walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist lawyer’s clerks will have to make plying leaps into
the mud; young lady typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where
beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall,
to wear a long blue cloak, or to bear the air with your left hand’.
● Virginia Woolf begins with the city in her first novel, ‘The Voyage Out’ .
● ‘Young lady typists’ - Sense of women in mechanised labour.
● Image of an untidy and uncomfortable city contrasted to that of London in ‘Mrs Dalloway’.
Woolf’s, ‘Mrs Dalloway’:
, ● ‘Such fools we are, she thought crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one
loves it so, making it up, building round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but
the verist frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do
the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason:
they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and uproar; the
carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands, barrel
organs; in the triumph and jingle…was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.’
● Asyndeton - device compress and create an exciting spectacle of the city. Sense of urban
ecstasy.
● Absence of conjunctions ‘and’ or ‘with’.
● Style has become much more confident.
De Certeau: Walking in the City
● ‘The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the threshold at which visibility
begins. They walk – an elemental form of this experience of the city; they are walkers…,
whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to
read it.’
● ‘The city becomes the dominant theme in political legends, but it is no longer a field of
programmed and regulated operations. Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the
ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable transparency, they are impossible
to administer.’
● ‘I would like to follow out a few of these multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures
that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised, and which should
lead us to a theory of everyday practices, of lived space, of the disquieting familiarity of the
city.’
● Resistant and stubborn wandering away from the norm.
‘Bond Street’ in ‘Mrs Dalloway’:
● ‘Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags; its
shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his
suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an ice block.’
● ‘That is all,’ she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. ‘That is all,’ she repeated, pausing for a
moment at the window of the glove shop where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect
gloves. And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her gloves [….] Gloves and
shoes; she had a passion for gloves; but her own daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not a straw
for either of them.’
● ‘Not a straw, she thought, going up Bond Street to a shop where they kept flowers for her
when she gave a party; Elizabeth really cared for her dog most of all.’
● Marking out Elizabeth as a more modern woman compared to Mrs Dalloway.
triggers memories and operating in her own way, meandering at ground level.
Elizabeth Escapes
● ‘And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It was so nice to be out of doors. She
thought perhaps she need not go home just yet. It was nice to be out in the air. So she would
get on an omnibus. And already, even as she stood there, in her very well-cut clothes, it was
beginning…’
● ‘Buses swooped, settled, were off, -- garish caravans, glistening with red and yellow varnish.
But which should she get onto? She had no preferences. Of course, She would not push her
way. She inclined to be passive. It was expression she needed [….] What could she be
thinking? Every man fell in love with her, and she really was awfully bored.’
● Capriciousness and the stubbornness of Elizabeth.
● Buses are described in an animalistic way.
● Sense of buses being alien, exciting and exotic.
