1Such is the way in which Ford Madox Ford described reaching the city by rail in 1905. Viewing London from a moving train carriage only offered a succession of short-lived snapshots which prevented his mind from lingering on any of scenes abovementioned. Whereas the experience may seem commonplace today, in an age long accustomed to high speed trains or even to air travel, Ford’s frustration is tangible: he cannot form any satisfying mental image of London as a whole, for the train constantly disrupts his perception of the city and interrupts his trains of thoughts. Yet the title of the essay, The Soul of London (1905), suggests that his ambition is to capture the very essence of the modern city. However, London seems too complex and too dynamic an object to allow the mind to form any stable image of it. The city seems to disrupt the very form through which Ford would like to represent it. It is significant in this respect that he should establish a connection between his (frustrated) desire for ‘a story to have an end’, and the perception one gets of the city from a moving train carriage. Ford thus suggests that the traditional and chronological narrative form is unable to represent the modern city, with its ‘bits of uncompleted life’, its erratic and chaotic movements, its interruptions of all sorts—such as one can experience aboard modern means of transport. The disrupted form of representation explored by modernism is, arguably, indebted to the fragmented perception that urban travel offered in the early 20th century.

3Taking Fords’ Soul of London (1905) as a starting point, and then focusing on E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), this paper contends that the disruptive movements generated by modern and public transport at the beginning of the 20th century turned the city of London into quite an ungraspable object for contemporary writers. Yet, both Forster and Woolf met the challenge set by Ford—to find a form for this disruptive city—by crafting an aesthetics of interruption, or of disruption. By so doing, these authors showed that far from being an impediment to representation, disruption could become a fruitful aesthetical, if not philosophical, tool.

The City as Ungraspable Object

5Yet this expansion was not homogeneous, in particular in social terms. Ford remarks in his essay that while the rich travel more and more by motorcar, the electric tram tends to remain the means of locomotion of the poor, of the employees and clerks who gradually colonise the suburbs. This remark, made as if in passing, is actually of great importance, for it suggests that the corollary of the city’s expansion is a new form of geographical segregation.

6This twofold process is one of the great themes explored by E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). Indeed, while the wealthy Schlegel sisters, and the even wealthier Wilcoxes, live North of the Thames, the poor clerk Leonard Bast and his ‘wife’ Jacky, live in a Southern and dismal suburb of London. Through the peregrination of Leonard, Forster addresses the social segregation of London as well as the development of suburbia. Their emblematic flat is said to be ‘constructed with extreme cheapness’—a sign that it can be demolished and rebuilt at leisure, to please property developers. ‘All over London’, Forster writes, the same kind of scenes could be observed: ‘bricks and mortar rising and falling with the restlessness of the water in a fountain, as the city receives more and more men upon her soil’ (Forster 40). If the city expands ‘as it receives more and more men upon her soil’, Forster (like Ford) draws a link between city growth and public transport facilities. As a consequence of this incessant flow of people, bricks and mortar dissolve and become liquid—or they seem to become so, to the powerless viewer of this ‘restless’ movement of the city. This disruptive, ‘continual flux of London’ (Forster 156) was linked to mechanised construction, but was also generated by the ability to sweep through the city and to get to work quickly. London was thus disrupted by the development of public transport in that the latter always pushed further back the very borders of the city, which kept encroaching upon the countryside: ‘the contrast between the country and the city . . . is paradoxically eradicated by the very technology which enables the two to be connected.’ (Thacker 2007, 106). The district of Golders Green, for instance, was ‘rural until 1907, but by 1923 the population had doubled and it was part of what E. M. Forster, in Howards End, called the creeping “red rust” of London suburbia’ (Thacker 2007, 106).

7Thus, the face of London was changed ‘unrecognizably’, as Ford puts it, by the technologies of travel, not only because these technologies caused the city to grow larger by the day, but also because they changed the very nature of urban experience. In Howards End, London’s very architecture appears to be contaminated by this perpetual—and ever accelerating—sense of motion, as Margaret suggests with dismay:

In the streets of the city she noted for the first time the architecture of hurry, and heard the language of hurry on the mouths of its inhabitants—clipped words, formless sentences, potted expressions of approval or disgust. Month by month things were stepping livelier, but to what goal? (Forster 93)

8The city seems to become almost undecipherable, as the pace of its life is going faster and faster. What seemed stable, turns out not to be. Ultimately, the novel offers no firm ground on which to stand. Even the final image of the haven of Howards End is threatened by the ominous ‘red rust’ of the city looming over the countryside (Forster 289). Howards End, in this respect, is a novel about the disruption of London, as a location, as much as about the disrupting nature of the city, as a way of living.

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at 50 miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair! . . . Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair, all so casual, all so haphazard. (Woolf 2000, 54)

10Taking the Tube, if we believe Woolf, was therefore still a ‘hair raising’ affair in 1917, an experience which seems for Woolf to epitomise modern life itself. The elision of the journey itself, which happens so fast that Woolf mentions it only in a dash, suggests yet again this sense of extreme rapidity, and—hence—of disruption. For Julia Briggs, in ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (in which Woolf was already experimenting with the stream of consciousness technique), ‘the movement of thought is also its subject; like a railway train, it is always carrying the thinker away from a full engagement with passing sights or thoughts, so that knowledge or certainty can never be achieved’ (Briggs 61). To represent the city and its movement therefore, one must renounce a form of ‘knowledge’ and of ‘certainty’, in order, one way or another, to embrace disruption.

11But finding a form to convey this disrupted as well as disrupting city of London, was a challenge for a whole generation of writers and artists, a challenge with a double aim, that of both expressing and processing these destabilising changes.

Representing the City: An Aesthetics of Disruption

12In order to give a form to this urban reality which disrupts form itself in its movement, both Woolf and Forster crafted an aesthetics of interruption, indebted to modern means of transportation.

13As has been suggested, the difficulty in representing the city amounts to a difficulty in representing change itself, this movement which characterises modern life. Yet, for Woolf, such is precisely the challenge the modern writer must meet. When asked in 1924 to give a lecture on modern fiction, Woolf, as often, circumvents the expectation and begins with: ‘I will tell you a simple story which, however pointless, has the merit of being true, of a journey from Richmond to Waterloo, in the hope that I may show you what I mean by character in itself’ (Woolf 2008, 39). Before she deals with modern fiction, Woolf refers to her experience of taking a train into London; her experience of perceiving the modern city and other people, from a moving carriage. In a seemingly haphazard fashion, and without any apparent link with the subject of fiction, Woolf (or her persona) recalls: ‘I was late for the train and jumped into the first carriage I came to. As I sat down I had the strange and uncomfortable feeling that I was interrupting a conversation between two people who were already sitting there’ (Woolf 2008, 39). Woolf’s disagreeable feeling comes from her having interrupted her fellow passengers’ conversation. But also from her—soon to be frustrated—desire to ‘read’ these ‘characters’ and to decipher what is going on between them, in the manner of an omniscient narrator. She herself then, is not immune from the ‘dissatisfaction’ felt by Ford when the city disrupts her craving for narrative conclusion. But it is from this frustrated desire that Woolf develops the argument of ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’.

14The strength of this essay is that Woolf draws her argument about modern fiction from the tangible—if unstable—ground of a moving train carriage in which she did (supposedly) travel. The ambiguity between the literal and the literary in her anecdote, between the part of reality and that of fancy in her encounter, has to do with the disrupting nature of modern city life itself. Woolf’s choice of anecdote in the essay suggests that one never experiences modern city life better than aboard a train carriage travelling across London. Indeed, significantly in Woolf’s story, her train is not just travelling across any other English country landscape. It is travelling into London, for one is told precisely that it connects Richmond to Waterloo, with a stop at least at Clapham Junction, where the man gets off hastily before she has had time to make sense of his discussion with the woman she has chosen to call ‘Mrs Brown’. The sense of narrative emergency, of trying to make sense of the scene before the journey is over and the passengers each go their own way, grows stronger and stronger as the train approaches the centre of London. London thus fosters new modes of relationship, defined by transience and therefore sometimes, by emergency. Modern city life in that regard also disrupts the social codes and norms of the early 20th century. As Benjamin Bateman argues in Transports in British Fiction:

[M]odernity and the trains that connect its various locations multiply opportunities for chance and ephemeral encounters—indeed, they transform such encounters into a primary relational mode—they simultaneously demand a more direct, immediate, impromptu and improvisational interpretative approach to human relations. (Bateman 186)

15Thus, to describe modern city life and the disrupted modes of relations it triggers, the Georgian writer, according to Woolf, must come to terms with these new conditions of living, and revise entirely his or her conception of writing: ‘the Georgian writer had to begin by throwing away the method that was in use at the moment’ (Woolf 2008, 50). The ‘method that was in use’—the Victorian and then Edwardian tradition of novel-writing which Woolf criticises throughout the essay—can be defined as starting from a place, usually an estate or house, to draw a plot, a set of characters, with a social origin and function for each of them. But modern life, and even more so, modern city life are incompatible, Woolf argues, with such a method. Characters, as people, are only met in passing, and call out ‘catch me if you can’ (Woolf 2008, 37). The disruptive sense of motion which characterises modern life, requires the writer to resort to new and different tools—and to ‘[throw] that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window’ (Woolf 2008, 49)—one might say out of the moving train window. Thus, though apparently without connection with modern fiction, Woolf’s experience of travelling through London by train informs her idea of modern fiction. A jolting train carriage, a fleeting contact with fellow passengers, during a short-lived journey: these are, she claims, the living—and creating—conditions of the painter of modern life. The latter must learn therefore ‘to tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary’ (Woolf 2008, 54). It is only by tolerating the necessary jolts, collisions and bifurcations of a journey, that movement, the city, and the ephemeral relations it triggers, can be represented at all. For as Woolf knows well, movement is the ‘soul’ of the modern city. In order to represent it however, one must, one way or another, embrace disruption.

16Forster’s and Woolf’s relation to the city is of course very different, if not sometimes opposed. While Forster’s Howards End betrays his wariness of London, of the ‘civilization of luggage’ that it generates (Forster 128), Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway on the contrary celebrates the city’s restlessness as a liberating energy. Yet both, in their respective ways, welcome disruption—in particular that generated by modern means of transport—as a creative force. Disruption in the two novels is a force, which breeds an aesthetics of interruption indebted to the experience of urban travel.

17Howards End’s aesthetics of interruption, for one, always has to do with urban transport. On a narrative level, each plot twist is related to a belated journey, a surprise arrival, an accidental collision, a change of plan or the impossibility thereof, each having to do with modern transport. To take only one example, when Margaret rushes through London in a cab to join Mrs Wilcox at King’s Cross station, she has just made up her mind to accept the latter’s invitation to Howards End: ‘She was convinced’, the narrator tells us, ‘that the escapade was important, though it would have puzzled her to say why. There was a question of imprisonment and escape, and though she did not know the time of the train, she strained her eyes for the St. Pancras’ clock’ (Forster 73). Again, with a sense of emergency, Margaret feels that the apparently frivolous ‘escapade’ is actually a matter of ‘escape’, of freedom that is, a potentially life-changing journey well worth a change of plans. Yet as the two women gaily chatter away and walk up the platform to take their train to Hilton, they are stopped by Evie. Mrs Wilcox, bewildered, asks why her daughter is not motoring in Yorkshire with her father. Evie’s explanation comes in seven words, interspersed by dashes: ‘No—motor smash—changed plans—Father’s coming’ (Ford 74). The brief elliptic sentence is significant, mimicking as it does Evie’s breathless surprise, the interruption of the motor ride itself, and, more importantly, the disrupted perception motorcar riding creates, i.e. a succession of snapshots which the mind cannot shape into a whole.

18Andrew Thacker, in his seminal work Moving Through Modernity, has argued that ‘movement . . . intrudes even upon the language of modern life; but yet Forster cannot reproduce such a discourse, only catalogue its existence’ (Thacker 2009, 52). However, Evie’s sentence here may well be the closest Forster comes to rendering the ‘clipped words and formless sentences’ of London’s ‘language of hurry’ (Forster 93)—which elsewhere he seems incapable of depicting. It is thus through dashes, through elisions and interruptions, that he best conveys the ‘flux’ of modern life, and its corresponding disrupted and disrupting language. For a moment, he ‘tolerates’ ‘the spasmodic’ and ‘the fragmentary’ as Woolf advised, and thus manages—through this very interruption—to suggest flux and instability.

19The scene at the station, on the whole, amounts to a change of plan (Margaret eventually deciding to join Mrs Wilcox), an attempt at connection (between the two women), a collision (with Evie), a bifurcation (the whole party changing direction and taking Mrs Wilcox away from the train), and the final abandonment of the escape (Mrs Wilcox saying goodbye and returning to her husband, her children and their lodgings). Such unexpected bifurcations, collisions, and interruptions—such disruptions—are inherent, Forster suggests, to modern city life. It is through the space of the station and through modern means of transport that Forster best conveys this disruptive nature of the city, which more often than not disrupts and destabilises him.

20For Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, this disruptive ‘flux’ (or she might rather say ‘flow’) of the modern city is a reality that she embraces more readily, for it is usually associated in her novels, and certainly in Mrs Dalloway, with a liberating force.

21The most striking example of such liberating energy is probably Elizabeth Dalloway’s famous improvised bus ride through London, which takes place after she has just left the rather oppressive Miss Kilman. The passage is remarkable not only as a textbook case of Woolf’ stream of consciousness technique, but because Elizabeth’s train of thoughts is constantly being interrupted, but also by the same token guided and reoriented, by what she catches sight of from the omnibus’ top deck:

Oh, she would like to go a little further. Another penny was it to the Strand? Here was another penny then. She would go up the Strand.
She liked people who were ill. And every profession is open to the women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. So she might be a doctor. She might be a farmer. Animals are often ill. . . . This was Somerset House. One might be a very good farmer—and that . . . was almost entirely due to Somerset House. It looked so splendid, so serious, that great grey building. And she liked the feeling of people working. . . . In short, she would like to have a profession. She would become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliament, if she found it necessary, all because of the Strand. . . .
With thoughts of ships, of business, of law, of administration, and with it all so stately (she was in the Temple), gay (there was the river), pious (there was the Church), made her quite determined, whatever her mother might say, to become either a farmer or a doctor. But she was, of course, rather lazy.
It was the sort of thing that did sometimes happen, when one was alone—buildings without architects’ names, crowds of people coming back from the city having more power than single clergymen in Kensington, than any of the books Miss Kilman had lent her, to stimulate what lay slumbrous, clumsy, and shy on the mind’s sandy floor. (Woolf  2004, 119–21)

22Here, the cartography of the city shapes that of Elizabeth’s mind. The various sights and places inspire and progressively shape Elizabeth’s thoughts. As she ‘rushes up Whitehall’, she feels free, then ‘Somerset House’ suggests to her that she might be a farmer, the Strand makes her want to challenge authority—‘whatever her mother might say’—and become either a farmer, a doctor, or ‘possibly go into Parliament’ (Woolf 2004, 120).

23Strikingly, for Elizabeth, the disrupted sight of the city, perceived in short-lived snapshots through the omnibus’ chaotic movements, have more power than books or clergymen to ‘stimulate’ what lay dormant in the ‘mind’s sandy floor’. For a short moment, Elizabeth is able to confront what she has probably always been told about herself (‘she was, of course, rather lazy’) with desires and ambitions which she finds are hers. Quite clearly here it is thanks to the disrupted perception of the city which the omnibus offers that Elizabeth can envision a different future for herself, as she reflects: ‘One might be a very good farmer—and that, strangely enough was almost entirely due to Somerset House’ or ‘She would become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliament, if she found it necessary, all because of the Strand’ (Woolf 120; emphasis added). It is because of the haphazard glimpses that Elizabeth gets of Whitehall, of Somerset House, of the Strand, of the river or a church, that it dawns on her that she wants to have a profession. Paradoxically therefore, the reckless moves of the omnibus do not prevent Elizabeth from seeing, on the contrary they open up her vision. Her vision of herself—mediated by the disrupted sight of the city she gets from the omnibus—is thus transformed.

24It is a ‘moment of being’ of a special kind, a moment of unity between body and mind, in which she embraces disruption and interruption, and is awakened to unconscious desires. As Rachel Bowlby puts it: “[w]hen Elizabeth Dalloway steps out and takes the bus up the Strand on a fine June day in 1923, everything seems to suggest that she is the bearer of new opportunities for her sex, a woman who will be able to go further than her mother, still bound to the Victorian Angel in the House . . . ” (Bowlby 70). This coming-of-age scene is thus full of new possibilities, for Elizabeth as a character, who questions certain established roles, and for Woolf as a writer, who proves here that tolerating ‘the spasmodic and the fragmentary’ can turn out to be aesthetically, as well as perhaps philosophically, fruitful.

Disruption, Interruption and Connection

25As suggested earlier, Forster, who wrote Howards End between 1908 and 1910, is less formally experimental than Woolf, yet he does develop an aesthetics of interruption in Howards End, not only momentarily (as when Evie interrupts Margaret and Mrs Wilcox’s ‘escapade’ at the station), but also structurally. For interruption and disruption paradoxically foster connection in the novel.

26Towards the beginning of the novel for instance, when Mrs Munt learns that the Wilcoxes have rented lodgings facing the Schlegels’ flat, she warns Margaret to ‘be prepared’ (Forster 51) in case of an unwanted encounter with the Wilcox family. But Margaret’s immediate answer is that, on the contrary, she would rather ‘not be prepared’ (Forster 51; emphasis added), for:

she felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy. It is necessary to prepare for an examination, or a dinner-party, or a possible fall in the price of stock: those who attempt human relations must adopt another method, or fail. (Forster 51)

27Through Margaret, Forster’s narrator formulates a plea for unpreparedness, which appears to be necessary for any true connection between people to take place. Such an idea sheds a new light on the novel’s ‘connecting’ philosophy. Forster’s plea is not ‘Only’ to ‘connect’ (Forster 159), to ‘connect—connect without bitterness until all men are brothers’ (Forster 229). It is also an invitation to let oneself, potentially, be disrupted by the occasion or the circumstances of the connection, which is almost always sudden, brutal, and destabilising. Helen and Paul’s improvised kiss, for instance, is a case in point:

It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings . . . . It is so easy to talk of “passing emotion,” and to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open. (Forster 21; emphasis added)

28The common impulse when faced with a strong and sudden emotion is thus usually—so the narrator argues, using this inclusive, deceptive ‘we’—to disregard it precisely because it is only ‘passing’, meaning temporary, frivolous, insignificant, if not vulgar. The common ‘impulse’ is to repress the force of this emotion, for an ‘Englishman’ should only rely on permanent and stable relationships, and maintain a stiff upper lip. But the ‘passing’—and usually disrupting—emotion is also repressed because of its potential power to threaten established social relations. Yet precisely because of this unsettling power, Forster suggests that there is something noble in any impulsive emotion which may enable one, even for a fleeting moment, to question certain conventions and open oneself to a different form of contact with others.

29Strikingly, the lexical field of the passage, fraught with ‘chance collisions’, ‘passing emotions’ or ‘opportunities for an electrical discharge’, seems indebted to the modes of relation created by modern travel, and by urban travel in particular, which implies some measure of improvisation, of interruption, and of disruption. Urban travel precisely fosters such ‘chance collisions’, passing emotions, as well as an opportunity for encounters which might produce the kind of ‘electrical discharge’ described here. Far from dismissing the disruptive nature of urban travel therefore, Forster praises it precisely for its unsettling potential, which may ‘shake open’ the doors of heaven. By fostering connection, the chaotic nature of urban travel may thus paradoxically give meaning to this disrupted and disrupting city life. Indeed, such moments of ‘collision’ between people may be an occasion to experience a common sense of belonging to the same (disrupted) space of the city.

30As Jean-Luc Nancy has argued in ‘Un Art de la ville’, the city fosters a special kind of ‘being-in-common’, precisely because its essence is movement, circulation, transfers and transport(s): ‘[p]our qu’il y ait rencontre, il faut mouvement, déplacement. La ville est issue d’un déplacement et en reconduit la dynamique. . . . Non seulement la ville est traversée de voies de circulations, mais elle est elle-même toute entière en circulation—en circuit, en allées et venues, en transports et en transferts’ (Nancy 2009, 3–4). This dynamic and moving nature of the city generates a unique, urban way of being together, which consists, as Nancy puts it, in a paradoxical ‘common disjunction’: ‘[la ville est] un système de renvois, de correspondances et d’écartements entre des lieux qui ne sont ajointés que moyennant une commune disjonction’ (Nancy 2009, 4). Urban transport fosters exactly such haphazard encounters, such ‘common disjunction’, or as Catherine Lanone has translated it, such ‘(dis)connected togetherness’ (Lanone 5).

31It is perhaps no coincidence that, in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf should refer to all kinds of modern means of transport to create interruptions and shifts in focalisation, and to convey loose, paradoxical connections between characters who never meet. This strange—and typically urban—form of commonality—ties in with Nancy’s argument that any encounter in the city takes place against the backdrop of a ‘swarming agitation’ (‘une agitation vibrionnaire’):

La rencontre générale dont la ville est le théâtre se passe dans une agitation vibrionnaire qui donne en même temps la figure exacerbée de toutes les rencontres—trajectoires, intersections, chocs, attractions et répulsions—et celle de leur impossibilité—évitements, écartements, ignorances, insignifiances mutuelles de toutes ces allées et venues qui vont et viennent en tous sens mais jamais en un sens commun, sinon celui dont la ville elle-même est le concept aussi bien que la sensation. (Nancy 2009, 5)

32The city thus offers a fertile ground for encounters, thanks to its bustling movements and its mixing of people—yet its restlessness sometimes makes encounters impossible, for the lapse of time is often too short to meet or see anyone, or people may choose to avoid or ignore each other. However, in this very tension between the possibility and the impossibility of a chance meeting, the city is nonetheless the site of a ‘general encounter’ for Nancy. Among the erratic and chaotic itineraries of individuals, the city generates both the idea and the sensation, or experience, of being together in the same place at the same moment, what Nancy describes a paradoxical ‘sens commun’; ‘sens’ here meaning both a common direction and a common sense of being.

33Such a ‘general encounter’ in the city can be experienced in Mrs Dalloway. The reader must grasp the invisible connections between all the passers-by who try, for instance, to decipher the letters traced by a commercial plane in the London sky. More strikingly still, the moment when a motorcar backfires in Bond Street is a typical example of the way in which the ‘swarming agitation’ of the city becomes a vibrating and living milieu allowing surprising connections to take place:

Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body. . . . Mrs Dalloway, coming to the window . . . , looked out with her little pink face pursed in enquiry. Everyone looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. . . . It is I who am blocking the way, he thought . . . (Woolf 2004, 11–12)

34Through the motorcar’s explosion, the reader can sense a link between Septimus and Clarissa, an invisible connection which lies deeper than sex, social status, or profession. Through this interruptive connection a kinship is felt between Septimus’ angst and Clarissa’s own metaphysical questions a link invisible until this unforeseeable and unsettling disruption. Woolf thus suggests that Septimus’ and Clarissa’s common experience of the city through the shock of sound is not a superficial coincidence, for it gestures towards something much more profound, a sense of connection and belonging stronger than family ties or social background. As Gillian Beer argues in Virginia Woolf: Sharing Common Ground: ‘Being alive, on the same day, in the same city, [Woolf] suggests, involves a kinship more profound than all the chosen intensities of friendship and of passion that fiction ordinarily privileges.’ (Beer 1996, 5) Septimus and Clarissa mysteriously belong to the same ‘body’ whose pulse becomes—for a suspended moment—the throb of the cars’ engines. Woolf’s aesthetics of disruption, articulated through modern means of transport, thus helps reveal, in Mrs Dalloway, the (common) ‘pattern’ to modern life, which behind the ‘cotton wool,’ is made of a collective experience of city life.

Conclusion

35The turn of the twentieth century was the first time that machine transport became a central feature of the modern city. Motorised transport radically transformed the face and the experience of the city, as well as it disrupted the contemporaries’ perception of the world. In great part because of these new, mechanised and fast means of transport, the modern city became a doubly disruptive space. London for instance, as has been studied, was as much disrupted as a location (its boundaries constantly being redefined by new transport connexions and new movements of populations) as it was a highly disrupting as an environment (marked by ever more fleeting and rapid encounters between people, unpredictable moments of collisions, interruptions or bifurcations). This twofold nature of the modern city represented a challenge for modernist writers; for indeed how to represent an object which is always in the process of being changed, as much as it is always itself generating change? This article hopes to have shown that one of the answers given by modernist writers was to accept the ‘touch of pathos and of dissatisfaction’ which Ford had rightly identified in 1905 as a key feature of modern city life (Ford 61). As Woolf phrases it two decades later in ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown,’ the modern writer must learn to ‘tolerate’, and one could argue embrace—‘the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary’ (Woolf 2008, 54). Indeed, one of the only ways to depict this paradoxical nature of the modern city is perhaps to convey it to the reader by frustrating his or her ‘liking a story to have an end’ (Ford 61). By frustrating the reader’s craving for narrative conclusion, in the manner of the traveller who can only see ‘bits of uncompleted life’ (Ford 61) from the train window, the modernists thus managed to convey the experience of the modern city, which is—essentially—an experience of disruption.

36For the modern city is not simply a sight to be depicted, it is no longer a relatively static geographical area to be localised; it is on the contrary a highly dynamic and elusive entity. Ultimately, what the narrative techniques elaborated by the modernists’ (such as the stream of consciousness, the questioning of chronological linearity or of omniscience) help revealing is this fundamentally disrupted and disrupting nature of modern life, and of modern city life in particular. We have tried to argue that these techniques were indebted to the new perception created by modern means of transport.

37Finally, we have seen that modern means of transportation played a central role in the tolerance of disruption. In both Woolf’s and Forster’s works, interruptions paradoxically often foster unexpected moments of connection. Thus, the necessarily fragmentary nature of urban experience acquires a common dimension, which gestures back to the city’s living and dynamic nature. The modern city, because of its disrupted and disruptive nature thus generates, like the modernist text, both an idea and an experience of communality. Like the modernist text, one cannot make sense of the modern city until one travels—or reads—through it, thence establishing new connections and opening unforeseen itineraries. But the creation of meaning, in the city as well as in the text, remains always an experience to be made, a journey to undertake, in order for the experience of disruption to become a common experience of connection.