H E L E N S TO D DA RT 113 we saw earlier, Bukatman identifies the emergence in the modern age of a ‘kaleidescopic perception’, and in the novel Walser, described as a ‘kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness’ (Pt I, Ch 1, p 10), echoes this perfectly Carter takes this phrase directly from an essay by the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), which is quoted in Walter Benjamin’s account of the modern city dweller (see Text and contexts, pp 22–4) Benjamin describes this figure as one who exists in a state of nervous excitement as he experiences ‘shocks and collisions’ from the crowds around him: ‘Nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession like the energy from a battery.’10 A sense of perpetual movement and fragmentation is also what typifies Walser at the beginning of the novel His chaotic career, driven by an addiction to sensational shocks and colourful, even violent, spectacle leaves him ‘weary with all the spinning’ (Pt I, Ch 1, p 10) The description reminds us of the pun involved in the name Walser shares with both a dance of eighteenthcentury origin and a well-known fairground attraction: the ‘waltzer’ spins its occupants around in dizzying circular twists of movement, again echoing and confirming his resemblance to the kaleidoscope with its emphasis on colour, ceaseless movement, circularity and the blurring of form and vision Yet Baudelaire, Benjamin and Bukatman’s ‘kaleidoscopic perception’ is without a built-in safe distance, whereas Walser’s cynicism initially appears to offer him some detachment He scoffs, for instance, at a Calcutta crowd’s reaction to a magician’s rope trick by referring to it as ‘a little primitive technology and a big dose of the will to believe’ (Pt I, Ch 1, p 16) – a description which could just as easily be applied to early cinema Though he is described as a ‘ “man of action” ’, and to this extent exemplifies Bukatman’s modern subject, is he also said to have ‘subjected his life to a series of cataclysmic shocks because he loved to hear his bones rattle’ (Pt I, Ch 1, p 10) The suggestion here is that Walser is both submerged in the experience of the shocks and slightly removed from it as he observes their effects on his bones with pleasure Carter reinforces this sense of his critical remove when she refers to him in interview as a ‘permanent bystander’ and as someone who, at the beginning of the novel, demonstrates a facility for distance and ‘habitual disengagement’ (Pt I, Ch 1, p 10), though he is then shaken out of this safe distance as soon as he sets off with Fevvers.11 Thus, Walser appears to have accumulated shocks, sensations and cynicism at the expense of insight, experience and belief The fact, however, that he has finally been ‘fooled’ at the end of the novel indicates that his mind has eventually been opened to the possibility of belief, and his performances as a clown with the Imperial Circus demonstrates his readiness at last to be the (humiliated) object of spectacle rather than merely its spectator Indeed Herr M.’s obsessive misuse of the new technology of vision described by Bukatman – the ‘Praxinoscope’, ‘Phasmatrope’ and ‘Zoospraxiscope’ (Pt I, Ch 5, p 136) – points to the dangers to women posed by thrill-seeking but detached male spectatorship The progress of Walser’s character, therefore, demonstrates Carter’s acute awareness of the shifts of perception and understanding brought about by the new forms of visual technology and spectatorial engagement that dominated the late nineteenth century and the new 10 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1992, p 171 11 Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p 89