{"id":2596,"date":"2021-01-06T08:23:17","date_gmt":"2021-01-06T08:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/?p=2596"},"modified":"2020-12-13T11:32:00","modified_gmt":"2020-12-13T11:32:00","slug":"alienation-on-the-strand-solitude-in-street-haunting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/2021\/01\/06\/alienation-on-the-strand-solitude-in-street-haunting\/","title":{"rendered":"Alienation on the Strand; Solitude in Street Haunting"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
WOOLF\u2019S WRITING HAS BEEN A PART OF MY LIFE FOR SO LONG I NO LONGER KNOW IF IT TAUGHT ME TO SEE THE WORLD THIS WAY OR JUST TAUGHT ME TO NOTICE THAT I DO.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n

\u2013\u00a0TRACY SEELEY<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There is perhaps no greater comfort nor reward granted by reading than\u00a0resonance<\/em>. It is an indescribable liberation to have our feelings corroborated; to sift through the works of writers centuries past and happen upon an unassuming strand of words that instantly articulates the inarticulable, that echoes an acute emotion lying dormant within. These discoveries serve as whispers through time, as a consoling hand-squeeze in the ether. In my first year studying on the Strand, Virginia Woolf\u2019s 1930 essay\u00a0Street Haunting: A London Adventure\u00a0<\/em>offered me this solace.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, November 2020<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Woolf\u2019s narrator, having \u201cshed the self our friends know us by,\u201d ventures out into the \u201clong groves of darkness\u201d and \u201cislands of light\u201d of a London winter\u2019s evening, ostensibly to buy a pencil. Leaving the familiarity of the home \u2013 \u201cthe shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves\u201d \u2013 we are cast out into the unknown. The voice spectrally floats through Holborn, Soho, Mayfair, with the ultimate end being the Strand stationary shop run by a bickering old couple.<\/p>\n

Or is the end something rather different? The fl\u00e2neur \u2013 a position in literary history hitherto reserved for men \u2013 describes a city-wanderer taken to the streets in search of inspiration. Encountering the shadow of a person who, it transpires, \u201cis ourselves,\u201d and asking the unanswered question \u201cam I here, or am I there?\u201d Woolf constructs an incorporeal, extra-temporal fl\u00e2neuse who makes not merely a double-journey, but a triple: through space, time and the self.<\/p>\n

Fl\u00e2nerie, according to novelist and war journalist\u00a0Martha Gellhorn<\/a>, is \u201cas necessary as solitude: that is how the compost keeps growing in the mind.\u201d And indeed, there seems an inextricable link between the fl\u00e2neur and solitude.\u00a0Rebecca Solnit<\/a>\u00a0described it as that \u201csubtle state most dedicated urban walkers know,\u201d \u201ca dark solitude punctuated with encounters as the night sky is punctuated with stars.\u201d This is what struck me upon my first reading of\u00a0Street Haunting<\/em>, how seamlessly and endlessly, while gliding through the streets alone, the voice falls inward.<\/p>\n

For in the absence of others, one\u2019s attention is invariably drawn to the self. The self Woolf\u2019s narrator describes is one whose \u201ccolours have run,\u201d a self that is \u201cneither this nor that \u2026 something so varied and wandering.\u201d We are whole for \u201cconvenience sake\u201d but in truth, we are fragmented, fractured, kaleidoscopic. We find shreds of ourselves strewn across the city, \u201cleaning over the Embankment on a summer evening,\u201d in a future that is \u201ceven now invading our peace.\u201d This inconstancy, this multiplicity of being; this bleeding across time of disparate iterations of the self is, for me, a distinctly metropolitan sensation.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

St Mary Le Strand Church, November 2020<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In my first weeks in London, the city had an air of intangibility to it; the Elizabethan and Edwardian architecture, the red buses and swarms of people all seemed reduced to two-dimensional iconography. The lavish surreality disorientated me in an almost claustrophobic myopia \u2013 I was hyper-focused on the pavement, then on the white stone, then a flock of pigeons, then the warm flush of bodies flowing past me. It felt as though if I were to walk to the Royal Courts of Justice, the Savoy Theatre, or Eleanor\u2019s Cross, and place my hand up against its cold exterior, it would simply fall through. My isolation in the city bred an unprecedented sense of detachment from the material world, one which was entirely alien and unfathomable to me \u2013 Wordsworth\u2019s \u201cdim sadness \u2013 and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name.\u201d Then, upon reading Woolf\u2019s fl\u00e2neuse \u201cgliding smoothly across the surface,\u201d upon meeting those \u201cbright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality,\u201d I was given a name.<\/p>\n

\n

FOR THE EYE HAS THIS STRANGE PROPERTY: IT RESTS ONLY ON BEAUTY; LIKE A BUTTERFLY IT SEEKS COLOUR AND BASKS IN WARMTH.<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Woolf claims that \u201cafter a prolonged diet of this simple, sugary fare, of beauty pure and uncomposed, we become conscious of satiety.\u201d This distillation of beauty resonated with me; the metropolitan landscape is one of beauty optimised, beauty both formless \u2013 \u201cuncomposed\u201d \u2013 yet built. And, as\u00a0Sam Wiseman<\/a>\u00a0puts it, \u201cit is precisely when civilisation and progress most confidently assert themselves that their fragility and contingency become most apparent.\u201d The masquerade of \u201cbeauty pure\u201d that the city upholds is immediately inviting for the wandering eye, but is ultimately fickle. The city is fallible, as we are fallible; the city is multitudinous, as we are multitudinous: as Wiseman continues, \u201cmetropolitan perception facilitates a more sophisticated understanding of the fragmentary, interdependent character of self.\u201d Suddenly, my disorientation was placated. In having this acute ailment articulated, I was grounded, and no longer alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cWoolf wrote,\u201d says Rebecca Solnit, \u201cof the confining oppression of one\u2019s own identity.\u201d\u00a0Street Haunting\u00a0<\/em>is a radical text \u2013 a radical rejection of the homogenous, single, self, a rejection of the rural\/urban binary, a rejection of the notion of fl\u00e2neur as an exclusively male role. It is one of Woolf\u2019s notorious attempts to, in her own words, \u201crecord the atoms as they fall upon the mind,\u201d and to give voice to the mind in its \u201csoliloquy in solitude.\u201d The narrator transcends boundaries corporeal, temporal and personal, forcing us to reckon with questions of the familiar and the strange, and to find in the reconciliation of these a new profound understanding. I cannot recommend it enough \u2013 particularly for lonely first-years on the Strand.<\/p>\n

Consulted Works:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Virginia Woolf,\u00a0Street Haunting: A London Adventure,\u00a0<\/em>1930 (Penguin: 2005)<\/a><\/p>\n