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1. WALKING IN MALLS

'Have you noticed that, since we moved back, we don’t walk anywhere?’
'No, we don’t - as you keep saying. But I don’t see you planning hikes, either.’

My girlfriend and I have had versions of this conversation many times since we moved back to Cape Town last year.

It’s one of the things I’ve complained about most - that unlike Oxford/Norwich/London we simply don’t walk to places; when we do walk, it nearly always beneath a roof. It seems that I am perpetually, unfailingly beneath a roof. Apartment to car to mall to car to someone’s house to car to supermarket to car to restaurant. You can hike, of course, or traipse up and down one of the two see-and-be-seen strips of Cape Town – the Constantia greenbelt or the Seapoint promenade – but then you are not walking as an incidentally necessary part of life; you are driving somewhere for the express purpose of walking.

Most South Africans would, no doubt, see my complaint as ridiculous, hilarious, even offensive – the majority of our population walks vast distances every day, and not by choice.

Those walks are not undertaken easily, either. As Hedley Twidle explores in one of the essays in Firepool, the major walking thoroughfares are not conducive to walking at all, but very dangerous, occurring along the side of highways, through the gaps in fences.

That anyone who can afford it does not walk is, of course, by design. The uniquely noxious design of apartheid spatial planning, by which well-off landed white folks can be safely chaperoned by portable roofs from one enclave to another, prevented from encountering, well, anyone who doesn’t fit that description.

It takes the teeth out of my whining, doesn’t it?

But I find it hard to overrate the weirdness of this situation, how actively hostile to walking Cape Town is – anomalously so.

2. FLAUBERT TOUCHED GRASS

Most cities in the world evolved from towns with pedestrianised thoroughfares, and it is funny how this feature of urban development has had such an outsize influence on the the modern novel.

As many scholars have argued, walking is an essential feature of the novel after Flaubert, perhaps even an indispensable one.

This is to do with the soliloquy – a feature of drama which was too useful to do without and so was smuggled into prose fiction. But unlike in a play, a character cannot simply address an audience; or, rather, they could, except that it would violate the flow of the narrative, botch up the mimesis. A character in a novel has to be within a scene, ostensibly doing something (or, at least, it is generally supposed; Finnegan’s Wake would beg to differ, in which the character is doing nothing except sleeping).

And then, lo and behold, Flaubert and the lads happened upon walking.

Walking is uniquely capable of enabling the soliloquy in the novel, via a character’s thoughts or ‘interiority.’ It is an action which is simple enough and unobtrusive enough that the writer needs barely to narrate the action itself, and yet still moves the character around, allowing for scenic descriptions which can break up blocks of thought and so remind the reader that she is still inhabiting a fictional world. It is also a very natural place to put blocks of thought because walking, of course, stimulates thought (which is, incidentally, a common argument for the use of walking pads at standing desks).

But the walking-soliloquy method also allows for an important philosophical point – which is that thoughts and landscape are now placed in close proximity, on the same plane of existence, and rendered as both occurring within a character.

(This is more or less what Edmund Wilson argues in Axel’s Castle, and it’s a surprisingly zen point, the idea that the world is in us, rather than the other way around.)

3. READ OLD BOOKS

And so, walking in modern literature is the kind of the thing you can’t un-see, like the resemblance of Colonel Sanders’ bowtie, in the KFC logo, to miniature stick figure legs.

Joyce’s Ulysses, Hamsun’s Hunger,, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse – these are all novels which rely, in quite essential ways, on walking. I specifically mention To the Lighthouse, because while it has the least amount of walking of the three, the passages which have Mr. Ramsay pace around the garden are tremendous.

They start at the bit where he:

‘…looked once at his wife and son in the window, and as one raises one’s eyes from a page in an express train and sees a farm, a tree, a cluster of cottages as an illustration, a confirmation of something on the printed page to which one returns, fortified, and satisfied, so without his distinguishing either his son or his wife, the sight of them fortified him and satisfied him and consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly clear understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his splendid mind.’

Anyway, another novel which relies heavily on the interiority enabled by walking is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

This is a novel which I put off reading for a very long time; in large part because I tried it when I was nineteen and it completely depressed me while at the same time I didn’t understand a word. Since then, it got it into my head that it was impenetrable and not worth the bother.

But, actually, it’s incredibly readable.

What makes it a great novel is in large part a mastery of the techniques which make reading a novel pleasurable; plot, tension, character, humour, etc. We get a murder and a man on the run (if largely from himself). The one accusation which can’t be levelled here, is that ‘nothing happens.’ (This is one of the most common accusations against ‘classic’ novels, and also one of the most unfair; it can probably be chalked up to people being forced to read Tess of the d’Urbervilles in high school).

One of the particular pleasures in reading a novel like Crime and Punishment is being able to see, afterwards, the influence that it has had on later novels, the family resemblance – for me, I’ve seen this the most in Knausgaard, and especially the most recent translation of his work, The School of Night (which I wrote about a few weeks ago).

So, this is the provocation to, you know, read OLD BOOKS.

See you in two weeks,
Blake