Modernism's Traffic-Sense
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Modernism’s Traffic-Sense ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! —Ezra Pound Recent work in modernist studies has taken a keen interest in crossings of various kinds: transgressions, transitions, borders, hybridities. This essay concentrates on the rather more mundane (but no less modern) experience of crossing the street in heavy traffic. Such quotidian crossings might seem unremarkable when set against other, more spectacular, encounters with traffic — motor-accidents, for instance, have a well-established place in modernist scholarship — but in the early years of the twentieth century they were still perilous enough, and unfamiliar enough, to demand attention.1 By 1926 Robert Graves could identify an awareness of traffic as one of several new ‘senses’ fostered by or foisted on modernity, all of which had served in his view to diminish the audience for poetry: ‘The public which is acquiring a short-story sense and a film-sense and a traffic-sense and a radio-sense is neither dull nor lazy […] but it happens that poetry is no longer in fashion, and the poetry-sense has not been cultivated correspondingly with the other senses’.2 Graves’s ‘traffic-sense’ might be thought to sit slightly oddly in the middle of this list of incontrovertibly modern media, as if ‘traffic’ were itself a cultural form with particular communicative potentials and resistances rather than a set of mobile and life-threatening obstacles to be avoided. Instead of emphasising sudden sensory interruption, the association of traffic with new media stresses the new forms of competence — of sensory adaptation — that such innovations demanded. One thing traffic has in common with short stories, radio, and film is its demand for an alteration in the modality of attention brought to bear by a perceiving subject. Each of these forms was widely understood to require particular kinds of mental and physical attunement: whether a brief but intense concentration (as in the short story), an aural decoupling allowing for the simultaneous performance of other activities (as in the radio), or a gaze figured as passively receptive (as in the cinema). Before they mediate messages, such new media mediate attention itself. Redirected into a variety of such new ‘senses’, attention is reconfigured as a process of subject-formation rather than an innate property of already-existing subjects, and a reflexive attentiveness to the nature of attention becomes, as Jonathan Crary puts it, ‘a sign, not so much of the subject’s disappearance as of its precariousness, contingency, and insubstantiality’.3 Rather than a shocking interruption, I want to argue, modernism’s traffic-sense is best understood as the operation of a dialectic involving the inculcation of habit and the shaping of attentiveness. This in turn tells us something about the precariousness of modern subjects, who find themselves caught between (or, with a different emphasis, produced by) the competing imperatives of automatism and self-awareness. To possess traffic-sense is thus to exist in a state of oscillation between confidence and wariness, to cultivate an everyday form of the dissociation or double-consciousness that to many modernist writers seemed characteristic of their own historical and cultural condition. For them, traffic was no longer merely a danger to be noticed and avoided. It became instead a new medium, one that every citizen would soon be obliged — however precariously — to inhabit. Kerbside In a survey of popular paintings for The Strand Magazine in 1901, the actor and art critic Rudolph de Cordova gamely worked his way through thirty years’ worth of fin-de-siècle eye- candy — scenes sentimental and heroic, religious pictures and Pre-Raphaelite icons — before turning to a print whose outlandish success had surprised even its publishers. ‘It is questionable,’ he wrote, ‘whether any plate has, in the same time, had a greater vogue than that of “His Majesty the Baby”’.4 The picture, a chocolate-boxy piece by Arthur Drummond, shows a cherubic Fauntleroy, rosy of cheek and golden of curl, being led across a busy street by his nurse, while in the background an obliging policeman stems the flow of bicycles, carriages and omnibuses. Drummond’s painting had proved such a hit with the public that reproductions were soon being sold across Europe, North America, and the Empire. It even came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, who in his 1914 essay ‘On Narcissism’ alludes, giving the title in English, to ‘the centre and core of creation — “His Majesty the Baby”, as we once fancied ourselves’ [fig. 1].5 fig. 1. Arthur Drummond, ‘His Majesty the Baby’ ‘The scene represented in “His Majesty the Baby”,’ according to de Cordova, ‘is the corner of Piccadilly where Old Bond Street runs into it, and it is a faithful presentation of the spot’. The junction was notorious. At the turn of the century, the rapid increase of road traffic in London was beginning to be recognised as a pressing problem, and Piccadilly became a focus of public displeasure. The plight of the pedestrian caught in the midst of all this became a staple topic for letters and leaders in the major newspapers. It also became a rich resource for their cartoonists, of whom the most consistently traffic-obsessed was the Daily Mirror’s W.K. Haselden. A 1906 Haselden cartoon shows a well-dressed Edwardian couple marooned on a traffic island while horse-drawn carriages jostle around them and motor-omnibuses squash luckless passers-by: ‘Farewell, dearest. I may get across safely, but if I don’t I have the satisfaction of knowing I leave you well provided for!’ Another, from the following year, wonders, ‘Would Hercules himself have crossed the road at Piccadilly Circus?’, while a third, from 1908, suggests a variety of technological fixes ranging from zip-lines and catapults to stilts and blow-up ‘never-mind- being-run-over’ suits [figs 2, 3, 4]. In 1905, a Royal Commission reported that between 1881 and 1901 the number of rail, tram, and omnibus journeys per capita within Greater London had increased by more than 127 per cent. Congestion was endemic. Observers on Piccadilly recorded 20,474 vehicles passing between the hours of 8am and 8pm, with delays totalling 3 hours, 41.4 minutes East-West and 1 hour, 47.3 minutes North-South.6 fig. 2. ‘Farewell, dearest!’ fig. 3. Hercules at Piccadilly fig. 4. Traffic precautions Despite the Commission’s report, the problem rumbled on. Relentless traffic unsettles Charles Marlow in Conrad’s Chance (1914) when he has to save his friend Mr Fyne from a close brush with a pair of oncoming cart-horses. Fyne, though a practiced distance-walker in the fields of the Home Counties — ‘this […] notable pedestrian’ is the epithet bestowed upon him by Marlow — is unaccustomed to the different requirements of metropolitan pedestrianism. But he is also distracted. Having failed to dissuade his young protégée Flora de Barral from eloping with the mariner Captain Anthony, Fyne proves less than attentive to the rhythms of urban walking. ‘He skipped wildly out of the way and up on the curbstone with a purely instinctive precision; his mind had nothing to do with his movements. In the middle of his leap, and while in the act of sailing gravely through the air, he continued to relieve his outraged feelings’.7 ‘Sailing gravely through the air’ is a subtle but effective bit of Conradian (or Marlovian) drollery: the downward tug of ‘gravely’ substitutes for the expected uplift of ‘gracefully’ in a way that makes gentle fun of the rather earnest Mr Fyne. But gravity and grace aren’t the only pair of opposing forces between which Fyne finds himself suspended. For Fyne is perhaps less wild than Marlow thinks, or at least more modern. His narrow escape owes less to his attentiveness than to his instinct; what’s more, the physical leap he makes in no way interrupts the flow of verbal outrage. Fyne is both wild and precise, grave and graceful, distracted and attentive. He is distracted from paying attention to the traffic because he is paying attention to his outrage, yet that canalization of conscious attention appears to liberate Fyne’s body to work instinctively: ‘his mind had nothing to do with his movements’. Dissociation of this kind had become a common literary response to the traffic problem. In the same year, The Egoist published a series of poems by the American poet John Gould Fletcher under the general title London Excursion. One poem in the sequence, ‘Transposition’, offers an Imagist’s account of crossing the street: A million forces ignore me, I know not why, I am drunken with it all. Suddenly I feel an immense will Stored up hitherto and unconscious till this instant, Projecting my body Across a street, in the face of all its traffic. I dart and dash: I do not know why I go. These people watch me, I yield them my adventure.8 Like Haselden’s cartoons, Fletcher’s ‘Transposition' turns crossing the road into a heroic accomplishment. As the pedestrian takes on the mantle of adventurer, his encounter with the stream of traffic becomes both a moment of performance, in which the hitherto ignored body of the man in the crowd breaks free to become the object of temporarily concentrated attention, and an occasion for the manifestation of unconscious drives. Tempting as it is to construe the poem as a piece of nostalgic Baudelairean flânerie, Fletcher seems to deny even the possibility of such casual composure in the busy capitals of the twentieth century. The congested London of 1914 presents the walker with a stark choice: wedge yourself dully into the pavement crowd, or try to regain some conscious control by way of a daring (if distinctly un- flâneur-ish) dash into the passing traffic.