EDWARD
HOPPER (1882-1967)
Compartment C, Car 193 (1938)
oil on canvas 50.8 x 47.7 cm
Collection
IBM Corporation
I am fascinated by this picture,
probably one that is no better- or lesser-known than most of his other works.
It is initially the mystery that draws me into it.
Here we have a young woman sitting in
a night train (I’ll come to why I don’t think it is early morning). She is
dressed in black with a wide-brimmed hat pulled down and almost obscuring her
downcast eyes as she reads or leafs through unspecified reading matter. She
could be dressed for a funeral but it seems more like business clothes,
non-chic. She is middle-class, perhaps a secretary or personal assistant. She
has a sensuality, characteristic of Hopper in his female portrayals, as marked
out by her flaming hair under her sober hat, the shape of her breasts and her
crossed legs revealing her knees. But she herself is indifferent to her allure
and any sexiness originates solely in the male gaze. We can surmise a fair amount
about her but as in all Hopper characterisations, we know virtually nothing
about her, let alone what her thoughts may be.
Why does she sit one seat away from
the window? Have other passengers vacated the compartment? The light cast upon
her is the cold, chilling light from the aisle, yet there is a small wall-lamp
above her that would make reading easier and cast a warmer glow over the scene,
but she has not switched it on. The aisle seat itself is surely draftier than
sitting next to the window would be. But
how do we know that this woman is sitting with her back to the engine? There
is nothing obvious to tell us in which direction the train is travelling. Most
train passengers will opt to sit facing the engine and tend to choose vacant
facing seats rather than sit out the journey riding backwards (though some feel
‘safer’ with their backs to the engine). In fact she occupies probably the
worst seat in the compartment, apparently by choice. Somehow this travelling arrangement
is all wrong.
The scenery is by no means dull. Is
the bridge a railroad bridge, and are we approaching it or coming away from it?
Beyond that is a dark forest silhouetted by a blazing rising or setting sun.
It’s really quite dramatic as scenery from a train goes. But it holds no
interest for her. She seems to be reading casually rather than intensively:
perhaps the material is travel brochures, like the material lying on the seat
beside her. These tend not be exactly riveting. Is she informing herself on
where she’s going?
But how do we know that the train is
moving towards rather than away from the setting or rising sun? The composition
tells us as much, with a slanting, thrusting angle of the arrow-like windows
aiming the train from left to right, in the direction of the twilight, not the
opposite direction. If the woman is indifferent to the scenery, to the quality
of the light, to the lesser comfort of an aisle seat, why should she not be
indifferent to the direction in which the train is moving?
Perhaps an answer lies in what is
directly above her, for this is not a commuter train because of what appears to
be a folded-in upper bunk bed. Either the compartment has not yet been prepared
as a sleeper or it will not be for this particular compartment for one reason
or another. We do not have to be familiar with American sleepers ourselves to
know about these things if we have seen such films as ‘Some Like It Hot’ and
‘North By Northwest’, though the latter has a private stateroom: more expensive
than convertible curtained-off sleepers though the latter were more expensive than
a day-car only. (The much less comfortable French couchette is a rough equivalent.) Is she waiting for a porter to do
the changeover from daytime to night-time use? This would prosaically explain
why she is so indifferent to her present surroundings since they will be
transformed shortly. And incidentally would tell us that this is an evening
rather than early-morning train. (Today our American traveller would be going
by a red-eye or short-haul flight.) So, she is not a commuter but going by
express on a long or longish overnight journey. One is struck by the barrenness,
the chill of the whole. As if she were dressed – for her own funeral. The
closed upper bunk could be a metaphorical coffin. She is not facing the engine,
looking forward to more life, but is being passively carried to her unknown ‘setting
sun’ end, be it soon or much later. Passive lengthy travelling could be yet
another Hopper take on isolation and solitariness – a deathly kind of
depersonalisation, reached by killing time, which we do quite a lot of – that is,
killing our own time. These days we have smartphones for the purpose.
Rene Magritte (1898-1967) painted with
a meticulous realism of detail the better to create surrealist shocks, forcing
us to question our visual assumptions in general. Hopper’s mature style of
pictorial realism leads us in its deliberate but selective precision (the
details of the paintwork are not ‘mysteries’ in themselves) into facing the essential ambiguity and mystery of other
people whom we do not know and – in modern mass society – can never know. But
although anonymous to us, and to everyone else, they do have lives, inner lives, of their own: lives that cannot be shared,
which would seem to be a main part of living. As she travels along so
indifferently and incongruously one feels it must be sad to die not having
lived. With Hopper we are secure in what we are allowed to see but made the
more unsettled when not unambiguously knowing what we ought to be able to see. This is another way of interpreting what
Marx originally identified as alienation.
(Compare with the more sententious and
feel-good American realism of, say, Norman Rockwell.)
