The View From the Train (3 page)

The point about subjective transformations of townscape is that they do depend on a certain state of mind, which can be adopted deliberately (this is why I write of ‘aggressive' subjectivity), but not by an audience (and probably best not at all, for it is best to take one's reveries as they come).

This was certainly the case on 14 April 1921, the date of the first Surrealist event. Organised by André Breton, it was to consist solely of direct experience of the city. The Surrealists had already explored brothels and the ‘cretinous suburbs' as well as the flea market, but they had not yet demonstrated their discoveries to the public.

The new itinerary would ‘put in unison the unconscious of the city with the unconscious of men', and was to take in St Julien-le-Pauvre, the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the Gare St Lazare and the Canal de l'Ourcq. The first expedition, advertised throughout Paris, to St Julien-le-Pauvre, was a complete failure. It rained and no tourists turned up, and the rest of the tours were cancelled.
⁵

It was more than thirty years before anyone tried anything like this again. Once more in Paris, in the early 1950s, the Lettrist group developed the techniques of ‘drifting' and ‘psychogeography'. Drifting was a free-association in space. Drifters would follow the streets, go down alleys, through doors, over walls, up trees – anywhere that they found desirable. Later ‘mass drifts' involved teams linked by walkie-talkie radio. Psychogeography was the correlation of the material obtained by drifting. It was used in making ‘emotional maps' of parts of the city, and in other ways.

In 1958, the Lettrists evolved into the Situationist International, and in 1968 their polemic was influential in
les événements
. Drifting was still a preoccupation. In
Ten Days That Shook the University
, an account of the election and subsequent propagandist exploits of a Situationist-inspired group who in 1966 gained a short-lived control of the students' union of Strasbourg University, there is a strip cartoon of two cowboys riding through a landscape:

‘What's your scene man?' asks one.

‘Reification,' the other replies.

‘Yeah? I guess that means pretty hard work with big books and piles of paper on a big table.'

‘Nope. I drift. Mostly I just drift.'
⁶

Drifting, it seems, has reconstituted itself as a myth.

Louis Aragon began writing
Le Paysan de Paris
in 1924, three years after the ill-fated touristic event. It is constructed about descriptions of two places: the Passage de l'Opera, in whose bars he and his contemporaries drank and talked, and the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, which they held in high esteem as an oneiric location, and which was to have been the subject of one of the touristic ventures. Between the two descriptions, he outlines the genesis of ‘a feeling for nature':

I have already compared this frisson to that preceding the click of a camera, but Aragon's account of his discovery outlines a way of looking at things that runs through the whole history of twentieth-century art, and twentieth-century attitudes to pre-twentieth-century art. On the next page he looks at petrol pumps: ‘The nameless sculptors who erected these metallic phantoms were incapable of conforming to a living tradition like that which traced the cruciform shapes of churches. These modern idols share a parentage that makes them doubly redoubtable.'
⁸

Petrol pumps like these turn up in the paintings of Edward Hopper –
Gas
(1940) and
Four Lane Road
(1956) – and in the photographs of Robert Frank –
The Americans
(1958). Similar perceptions of everyday objects occur in painting, sculpture, photography and film in areas as diverse as metaphysical painting,
film noir
or ‘conceptual' art, never mind pop art. The transformation may be seen both as a realisation of the ontologically miraculous and as a hysterical alienation from banality. What is remarkable about Aragon's transformation is not just that he managed to perform it without benefit of nostalgia, which so automatically provides a poetic cloak for any object (those petrol pumps, or their heads, also turn up highly priced in antique shops), but that he managed to direct it at whole districts of the city. André Breton said of him, years after their break: ‘I still recall the extraordinary role that Aragon played in our daily strolls through Paris. The localities that we passed through in his company,
even the most colourless ones
[my emphasis], were positively transformed by a spellbinding romantic inventiveness.'
⁹

Jacques-André Boiffard: ‘My point of departure will be the Hôtel des Grands Hommes …' from
Nadja
(1928). The statue, melted down during the occupation, was of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Breton, for whom the street was ‘the fountain of all true experience', wrote another classic text of Surrealist Paris, the story of his relationship with the enigmatic, innocent, experienced Nadja. An account of Surrealist love (shared revelation rather than physical passion), their affair takes place in the streets, in cafés, on trains. Some of these locations are illustrated by a number of remarkably prosaic photographs.

The eroticism portrayed is as much that of their relationship with their surroundings as with each other. Georges Bataille writes: ‘Erotic activity, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals their fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy sea.'
¹⁰

Love is the conquest of the discontinuity between individuals: hence the erotic dimension to ‘losing oneself in the crowd', or indeed losing oneself in the city, habitually so alienating, reconstituted instead as a dream. It is in such an appropriation, such a repossession of townscape – or landscape – that the possibility of an erotic relationship between people and public space is to be found.
¹¹

There are other Surrealist townscape texts: Robert Desnos's
La Liberté ou l'Amour!
(1927) and those of Walter Benjamin, notably
Marseilles
(1928), in which he converts the then new cathedral into a railway station, and
Hashish in Marseilles
(1928), which enjoys the transformations enabled by the drug.
¹²

Benjamin recounts the remark made of Eugène Atget that he photographed the deserted Paris streets ‘like scenes of crime': ‘The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance.'
¹³

Bernard Tschumi has written that, for Georges Bataille, ‘architecture covers the scene of the crime with monuments'
¹⁴
(this is perfectly true – just think of Trafalgar Square). Atget's depictions of public places in and around Paris captured, in the
most modest way (this is surely his strength), the sense that ‘anything could happen' that the Surrealists were later to write about, as well as being evidence of all the terrible things that already had happened. They reveal an ambiguity, a potential for transformations both subjective and actual, in ordinary locations. The crime that Bataille and Benjamin allude to is an ambiguous affair, but its major resonance is that of the rarity, in everyday experience and in actuality, of such transformations. They come about only, if ever, in reveries, revolutions, or the more poignant moments of war.

Atget's photographs were of the streets; Surrealist photographers went to more exotic locations. Eli Lotar's photographs of the abattoirs at La Villette illustrate Bataille's entry ‘abattoir' in the section ‘Chronique: Dictionnaire' in
Documents
.
¹⁵
Bataille concerns himself with outlining the significance of abattoirs, that they are the modern counterpart of sacrificial temples in which animals were killed for both religious and alimentary purposes, the cursed status of abattoirs in modern times resulting from the denial of their religious function. Lotar's photographs demonstrate this world within the one we think we know, as they demonstrate the camera's ability to unmask it. It is almost as if the machine was built for this purpose, as we now know only too well, for indiscriminate transformations of the ordinary into the miraculous now form one of the mainstays of advertising.

At the same time, the discovery of the ability to perceive the marvellous leads to the discovery that things have a habit of not staying that way:

In Poe's writing, taken as a whole, two things seem to stand out as most remarkable: his descriptions of extraordinary states of consciousness, and of rooms, buildings and landscapes. Many of his works consist of little else: ‘The Philosophy of Furniture', a treatise on decor; ‘The Domain of Arnheim' and its ‘pendant' ‘Landor's Cottage', which describe respectively the creation of a superlative landscape garden by an individual of exemplary endowments, and an idyllic cottage inhabited by an idyllic couple in an idyllic setting. There is no other purpose to these works than these descriptions. In ‘The Pit and the Pendulum', the greater part of the writing is description of the narrator's delirium as he hovers on the edge of consciousness, and most of the rest details his gradual awareness of the awful particularities of the dungeon into which he has been cast. In ‘The Fall of the House of Usher', the place and the state of mind of its residents are even more inextricably bound up, though not this time in the first person, for the narrator is a guest: ‘I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.'

With this observation, Poe distances the narrator from the reader, who cannot help imagine some ‘poetic' gloom precisely because it will only exist in his imagination. Poe is pinpointing a rather photographic dilemma – for photographs of unpoetic gloom, provided they are good photographs, generally make it look rather poetic whether this is the intention or not, as in war reportage and so on. The narrator goes on: ‘I looked upon the scene before me … with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium – the bitter lapse into everyday life – the hideous dropping off of the veil.'
¹⁷

Here he compares a particular state of mind with that following
the loss of another, again a kind of paradox. But this is typical, for Poe is at his best when describing not just the heightened states of mind of his characters, but the anguish which their (and presumably his) sensibilities bring about in their everyday lives. Thus, of Roderick Usher:

Throughout Poe's work, there is an implication that those who have access to heightened states of awareness are bound to suffer. Delirium is the result of illness or injury (‘The Pit and the Pendulum', ‘The Oval Portrait'), persons of extreme sensibility suffer (‘Usher'), are haunted by irrational fears (‘The Premature Burial'), or turn to drink and murder (‘The Black Cat'), and those who cultivate the senses in the face of suffering and adversity invite destruction nonetheless (‘The Masque of the Red Death'). He seems especially familiar, like the narrator in ‘Usher', with the depression encountered when any heightened state departs.