摘要：This article looks at the connection between walking, trauma and self-development in two novels of the interwar years from Italian and English literature, namely Massimo Bontempelli’s La vita operosa (Productive Life, 1921) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Identity processes and urban space have long been recognised as central to these novels, yet the effects of the war on the characters’ consciousness have received far less critical attention. While Mrs Dalloway is a highly experimental work set in London on a single day of June 1923 and centred on the actions and thoughts of the eponymous character, the bourgeois middle-aged Clarissa, Bontempelli’s (micro) novel is an autobiography recounting the adventures of a young idler in Milan in 1919. However, these novels share similarities in the depiction of two ex-soldiers – the narrator and protagonist of La vita operosa and the shell-shocked Septimus Warren-Smith, Clarissa’s double – wandering through the city. Placing particular emphasis on the modernist chronotope, i.e. the intersection of inner and outer time-space in modernist fiction, I will examine how memories of the war, as well as (day)dreams, interweave with the characters’ perception, affecting their city experience. Drawing on the conceptual framework of melancholia, I will link this specifically modern condition to the experience of the fragmented self in the metropolis. I will thus show that, in these novels, walking in the city represents a way of coming to terms with the trauma of the war, and overcoming the state of shock and paralysis resulting from it.
