Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity 9783030552688, 9783030552695

Table of contents :
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
1 Introduction: Exploring the Spatiality of the City Across Cultural Texts
The City in Times of the “Spatial Turn”
Language, Narration, Semantics
Subversion and Variation
Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity
Bibliography
Part I The City and the Text/the City as a Text
2 City Scripts/City Scapes: On the Intertextuality of Urban Experience
Experiencing the City
Turning-Point: Mimesis into Performance
Performing the City
Bibliography
3 (Urban) Sacred Places and Profane Spaces—Theological Topography in  T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
Preliminary Remarks
Sacredness and Civitas: Augustine and the Idea of the “Two Cities”
Religious Readings of Space—“the Sacred” and Place
“The Mundane is Sin”: London’s City in “The Burial of The Dead”
Engaging with Urban Holiness: St Magnus the Martyr in “the Fire Sermon”
Falling Towers and Holy Waters in “What the Thunder Said”
Conclusion
References
4 Traveling Discourses: The Works of Pavel Ulitin (1918–1986) and the Problem of Narrative Alternatives
Introduction
Textual Spaces and Cognitive Mapping
Prose Alternatives in the Russian Literary Tradition
Narrative Form, Spacial Composition, and the Writing Process in the Ulitin’s Prose
Parallels Within the Global Context: W.S. Burroughs’ Cut-Ups
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part II Television Reading the City
5 “This America, Man.” Narrating and Reading Urban Space in The Wire
“Building a City”—The Narrative Space of The Wire
Reading Urbanity in The Wire
Narrating Urban Space in The Wire
Works Cited
6 Reading the City: “Mind Mapping” in Sherlock
Cityscape in Sherlock
Transmediality and the Digital in Sherlock
Navigating the City in Sherlock
Dimensions of Deduction in Sherlock
Merging Spaces in Sherlock
The City as Playground in Sherlock
Urban Mind Mapping in Sherlock
Literature
Part III Conflicting Narratives
7 Transcription: Addressing the Interactivity Between Urban and Architectural Spaces and Their Use
Transcription: Social, Experimental, and Interactive
Urban Space and Social Practice
The Role of Stories: Narrative as an Analytical Tool
Transcription: Architectural Perspectives
Daniel Libeskind: Experimental Processes of Writing and Design
Peter Eisenman: Exploring the Dynamics of Text and Architecture
References
8 Politics and the Production of Space: Downtown and Out with Rancière and Lefebvre
Lefebvre with Rancière
Mediation and the Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy
Communist Geography and Circulation Struggles
Coda
Works Cited
9 The People of New Jerusalem: Narratives of Social In- and Exclusion in Rotterdam After the Blitz of 1940
Introduction
New Jerusalemism in Rotterdam
Building the Urban Community of Rotterdam
Social Misfits and “Unofficial” Communities
Conclusion
Bibliography
10 Smart City Narratives and Narrating Smart Urbanism
Introduction
Critical Perspectives on Smart City Narratives
A Critique of Powerful ICT Corporations and their Modernization Promises
A Critique of Entrepreneurial Urbanization
A Critique of the Influence of Platform Economies on Smart Urbanism
Narrating Smart Cities: The Production of Space
Biopolitics and “Environmentalities”
Re-Acting, Governing and Participation
Digital Divide
Smart Urbanism and Digital Urban Cultures
References
Part IV Contesting the City I: Women on the Streets of London
11 Poetic Mobility and the Location of an Anglo-Jewish Self: Amy Levy’s and Elaine Feinstein’s Cityscapes
Constructing Urban Relations
Deviant Mobility
Exploring Hybridity
Poetic Mobility and Urban Polyvalence
Works Cited
12 Gender and the City: Virginia Woolf’s London Between Promise of Freedom and Structural Confinement
Works Cited
Part V Contesting the City II: Berlin, History and Memory
13 The City Stripped Bare of Its Histories, Even: Crisis and Representation in Two German Trümmerfilme of 1948
Metalepsis and Focalization: Narrativity and Identification
Palingenesis and Stasis: The City Between History and Futurity
Berliner Ballade:Fatalism and Fantasy
Und wieder ’48:Repetition, Ruin and Revolution
Works Cited
14 “A ‘Bridgehead’ in the Visible Domain”: Chloe Aridjis’s, J. S. Marcus’s and Theodore Sedgwick Fay’s Tales of Berlin
Introduction
The Countess Ida. A Tale of Berlin
The Captain’s Fire and Book of Clouds
Conclusion
Works Cited
Part VI Dis/Continuities
15 Finding Causes for Events: The City as Normative Narrative
Literary Spaces and “Degenerate Inhabitants”
Narratives of a Static City
Narratives of Urban Transformation
Works Cited
16 Private Topographies: Visions of Tōkyō in Modern Japanese Literature
Cityscapes, Mindscapes, and a Foreign Modernity: Edo Becomes Tōkyō
Edo’s Fortunes: hanjōkimono
Tōkyō of the Water: Kōda Rohan (1867–1947)
Marginalized Spaces: Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896)
Sensing the City: Nagai Kafū
Private Topographies
Bibliography
17 Reading Against the Grain: Black Presence in Lower Manhattan, New York City
The Architectural Site
The Black Atlantic
1. Reading Beyond the Architectural Narrative
2. Reading the Narrative of Memory
3. Reading the Narrative of Oblivion
Conclusion: Reading the City Critically
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

GEOCRITICISM AND SPATIAL LITERARY STUDIES

Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity Edited by Martin Kindermann Rebekka Rohleder

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

Series Editor Robert T. Tally Jr. Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15002

Martin Kindermann · Rebekka Rohleder Editors

Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity

Editors Martin Kindermann Joseph Carlebach School Hamburg Hamburg, Germany

Rebekka Rohleder University of Flensburg (EUF) Flensburg, Germany

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ISBN 978-3-030-55268-8 ISBN 978-3-030-55269-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: William C.Y. Chu/gettyimages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editor’s Preface

The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship. Spatially oriented literary studies, whether operating under the banner of literary geography, literary cartography, geophilosophy, geopoetics, geocriticism, or the spatial humanities more generally, have helped to reframe or to transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. Reflecting upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality, scholars and critics working in spatial literary studies are helping to reorient literary criticism, history, and theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a book series presenting new research in this burgeoning field of inquiry. In exploring such matters as the representation of place in literary works, the relations between literature and geography, the historical transformation of literary and cartographic practices, and the role of space in critical theory, among many others, geocriticism and spatial literary studies have also developed interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary methods and practices, frequently making productive connections to architecture, art history, geography, history, philosophy, politics, social theory, and urban studies, to name but a few. Spatial criticism is not limited to the spaces of the so-called real world, and it sometimes calls into question any too facile distinction between real and imaginary places, as it frequently investigates what Edward Soja has referred to as the “real-and-imagined” places we v

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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

experience in literature as in life. Indeed, although a great deal of important research has been devoted to the literary representation of certain identifiable and well-known places (e.g., Dickens’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, or Joyce’s Dublin), spatial critics have also explored the otherworldly spaces of literature, such as those to be found in myth, fantasy, science fiction, video games, and cyberspace. Similarly, such criticism is interested in the relationship between spatiality and such different media or genres as film or television, music, comics, computer programs, and other forms that may supplement, compete with, and potentially problematize literary representation. Titles in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the series reveal, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and the world. The concepts, practices, or theories implied by the title of this series are to be understood expansively. Although geocriticism and spatial literary studies represent a relatively new area of critical and scholarly investigation, the historical roots of spatial criticism extend well beyond the recent past, informing present and future work. Thanks to a growing critical awareness of spatiality, innovative research into the literary geography of real and imaginary places has helped to shape historical and cultural studies in ancient, medieval, early modern, and modernist literature, while a discourse of spatiality undergirds much of what is still understood as the postmodern condition. The suppression of distance by modern technology, transportation, and telecommunications has only enhanced the sense of place, and of displacement, in the age of globalization. Spatial criticism examines literary representations not only of places themselves, but of the experience of place and displacement, while exploring the interrelations between lived experience and a more abstract or unrepresentable spatial network that subtly or directly shapes it. In sum, the work being done in geocriticism and spatial literary studies, broadly conceived, is diverse and far-reaching. Each volume in this series takes seriously the mutually impressive effects of space or place and artistic representation, particularly as these effects manifest themselves in works of literature. By bringing the spatial and geographical concerns to bear on their scholarship, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series seek to make possible different ways of seeing literary and cultural texts, to pose novel questions for criticism and theory, and to offer alternative

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

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approaches to literary and cultural studies. In short, the series aims to open up new spaces for critical inquiry. San Marcos, USA

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Acknowledgments

It is with particular pleasure that the editors take the opportunity of acknowledging all the collective effort which went into making this project possible. We wish to thank everyone who helped make our “Narrating Spaces—Reading Urbanity” conference at the University of Hamburg a success back in September 2012, as well as everyone who subsequently contributed ideas and advice during the development of this volume. As usual in such cases, we have many people to thank, and some of them need to be singled out in particular. We sincerely hope we have not forgotten anyone who should be mentioned by name. Many thanks, first of all, to all original conference participants, including Alina Bothe, Anke Kell, Maciej Kowalewski, and Julia Leyda, who did not contribute to this book, but whose conference papers and subsequent input, along with the contributions of all other participants, enriched our discussion of the city, which ultimately led to this volume. Many thanks, next, to Prof. Dr. Susanne Rupp, Prof. Dr. Johann Schmidt, and Prof. Dr. Ute Berns for taking an interest in our project at various stages of its development. Many thanks also to two of our own contributors, Janina Wierzoch and Dennis Büscher–Ulbrich, for special assistance. And last but definitely not least we wish to thank Rachel Jacobe at Palgrave for promptly, patiently, and helpfully answering all our queries during the process of finalizing the manuscript.

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Contents

1

Introduction: Exploring the Spatiality of the City Across Cultural Texts Rebekka Rohleder and Martin Kindermann

Part I 2

3

4

1

The City and the Text/the City as a Text

City Scripts/City Scapes: On the Intertextuality of Urban Experience Andreas Mahler (Urban) Sacred Places and Profane Spaces—Theological Topography in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land Verena Keidel Traveling Discourses: The Works of Pavel Ulitin (1918–1986) and the Problem of Narrative Alternatives Daria Baryshnikova

25

45

65

xi

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CONTENTS

Part II Television Reading the City 5

6

“This America, Man.” Narrating and Reading Urban Space in The Wire Christopher Schliephake Reading the City: “Mind Mapping” in Sherlock Janina Wierzoch

Part III 7

8

9

10

101

Conflicting Narratives

Transcription: Addressing the Interactivity Between Urban and Architectural Spaces and Their Use Klaske Maria Havik

121

Politics and the Production of Space: Downtown and Out with Rancière and Lefebvre Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich

141

The People of New Jerusalem: Narratives of Social Inand Exclusion in Rotterdam After the Blitz of 1940 Stefan Couperus

167

Smart City Narratives and Narrating Smart Urbanism Anke Strüver and Sybille Bauriedl

Part IV

11

85

185

Contesting the City I: Women on the Streets of London

Poetic Mobility and the Location of an Anglo-Jewish Self: Amy Levy’s and Elaine Feinstein’s Cityscapes Martin Kindermann

207

CONTENTS

12

Gender and the City: Virginia Woolf’s London Between Promise of Freedom and Structural Confinement Claudia Heuer

Part V

13

14

15

16

17

225

Contesting the City II: Berlin, History and Memory

The City Stripped Bare of Its Histories, Even: Crisis and Representation in Two German Trümmerfilme of 1948 Daniel Jonah Wolpert “A ‘Bridgehead’ in the Visible Domain”: Chloe Aridjis’s, J. S. Marcus’s and Theodore Sedgwick Fay’s Tales of Berlin Joshua Parker

Part VI

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247

263

Dis/Continuities

Finding Causes for Events: The City as Normative Narrative Rebekka Rohleder

283

Private Topographies: Visions of T¯ oky¯ o in Modern Japanese Literature Gala Maria Follaco

301

Reading Against the Grain: Black Presence in Lower Manhattan, New York City Tazalika M. te Reh

321

Index

335

Notes on Contributors

Daria Baryshnikova currently works on her Ph.D. Thesis at Bielefeld University (Germany) investigating the specificity of cut-up-narratives within different cultural contexts. Her focus is on the representation of mind and mind processes in cut-up-literature. She graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow). In 2005, she defended her candidate dissertation in the field of history of culture. Since then, she has worked as a lecturer at the Russian State University for the Humanities and as a research assistant at the National Center for Contemporary Arts (Moscow). Sybille Bauriedl is Professor of Integrative Geography at the European University of Flensburg, Germany. She has been researching and teaching sustainable urban development, resource conflicts, and gender justice since the 1990s. Current research projects deal with decentralized energy transition, coloniality in port cities, mobility transition in European cities, and the geographical dimension of climate justice. See also her blog https://klimadebatte.wordpress.com. Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich is Assistant Professor of American Cultural Studies at the University of Kiel, Germany. He has published articles and book chapters on urban cultural studies, Marxist crisis theory, critical race studies, ideology critique, avant-garde poetry, zombie films, and black music.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Stefan Couperus is Associate Professor of European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He has worked on the history of urban governance, planning, and social order in Western Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He co-edited (with H. Kaal) (Re)Constructing Communities in Europe, 1918–1968 (Routledge, 2017) and he has published on urban governance practices, postwar reconstruction, community building, and social marginalization in journals such as Urban History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of Modern European History and International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity. Gala Maria Follaco is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at “L’Orientale” University of Naples (Italy). She has translated the works of several Japanese writers and published articles on urban representation in modern and contemporary Japanese literature. Her monograph, A Sense of the City. Modes of Urban Representation in the Works of Nagai Kaf¯ u (Brill, 2017), examines Nagai Kaf¯u’s (1879–1959) literary construction of urban spatialities from the late 1890s to the late 1930s. Klaske Maria Havik is Acting Professor of Methods & Analysis and Head of Research of the Department of Architecture at TU Delft, Netherlands. Her book Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing Architecture (Rotterdam: Nai010, 2014), based on her Ph.D., proposes a literary approach to architecture and urbanism. Other publications include Writingplace. Investigations in Architecture and Literature (2016), “Writing Atmospheres,” in Jonathan Charley (ed), Routlegde Companion to Architecture and Literature (London: Routledge, 2018) and Architectural Positions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere (2009). Havik is editor of the Writingplace Journal for Architecture & Literature, and Action Chair of the EU Cost network Writing Urban Places. Claudia Heuer is a freelance translator, writer, and university lecturer. She has taught at the University of Hamburg and Leuphana University Lüneburg (Germany). She works in popular fiction, nonfiction, and television, teaches twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture as well as academic and creative writing. She has already published in all of these fields, but her current academic work focusses on contemporary issues of identity formation (gendered identites, human-animal studies, cyborg theory).

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Verena Keidel has completed her doctoral thesis at Hamburg University on the “sacred” and its cultural dynamics in British and Irish Modernist Drama. She has published on the intersection of literature and religion, modernist and contemporary drama as well as Shakespeare on the German Stage. Currently, she works as a research associate at Leuphana University Lüneburg (Germany) and is preparing her thesis for publication. Martin Kindermann studied English literature, North American, and Russian literature at the University of Hamburg. He holds a Ph.D. in English literature; in his dissertation he analyzed the construction of space and the constitution of memory in contemporary Anglo-Jewish novels. From 2014 to 2016 he was a postdoc research fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Until recently he held the position of a research assistant at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Kindermann has published on AngloJewish and Anglo-Muslim Writing as well as questions of postcoloniality, and interculturality. Andreas Mahler is Professor of English Literature and Literary Systematics at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). Joshua Parker is an Associate Professor of English and American studies at the University of Salzburg (Austria), with interests in place and space in American literature, transatlantic relations, and narrative theory. His books include Metamorphosis and Place, Austria and America: CrossCultural Encounters 1865–1933, Austria and America: 20th-Century Cross-Cultural Encounters and Tales of Berlin in American Literature up to the 21st Century. Rebekka Rohleder is currently a Research Assistant at EuropaUniversität Flensburg, Germany. She received her Ph.D. at FU Berlin in 2017, and her Ph.D. thesis has been published in book form in 2019, under the title “A Different Earth”: Literary Space in Mary Shelley’s Novels. She has previously worked as a research assistant at the Department for English and American Studies of the University of Hamburg. She has also taught at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Her research interests include British Romanticism, in particular Mary Shelley and her circle; literary space, and contemporary depictions of work across media. Christopher Schliephake (*1985) is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Augsburg (Germany). He holds a Ph.D. in both

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American Studies (2013) and Ancient History (2018). His scholarship and teaching focus on the environmental history of antiquity, ecocriticism, urban studies, cultural memory studies, and classical reception studies. Recent essays appear or will soon appear in Ecozon@, American Studies, and Anglia. Christopher’s first book, Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture (2015) is available from Lexington Books. He is also the editor of Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity (2017, also available from Lexington Books). Anke Strüver is a professor of human geography with a focus on urban studies at the Karl–Franzens University Graz (Austria) since fall 2018. In 2004 she completed her Ph.D. at the University of Nijmegen (NL) on the sociocultural production of cross-border spaces and their effects on everyday practices. She became a professor of social geography at the University of Hamburg in 2010. Her research focuses on embodied human–environment relations in the city, especially along the themes of health, food, and active mobility, as well as digitalization and sustainable collaboration. Tazalika M. te Reh is an architect and academic whose research and teaching examines the relationship between architecture, space, and the racial, with a focus on the built environment. At the Salzburg Global Citizenship Alliance, Austria, she is a faculty member and a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar. Before finalizing her Ph.D. thesis in cultural studies at TU Dortmund University, Tazalika earned degrees from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Universities of Applied Sciences in Cologne and Bochum. In 2014, she was a visiting researcher at Columbia University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City. Janina Wierzoch, M.A., has recently finished her Ph.D. thesis “Home/Fronts” on representations of contemporary war in British literature, drama, and film at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She has been working as a research assistant at the university’s department for English and American studies and as a lecturer at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. With a degree in British literature and culture, media studies and German literature her research and teaching interests include British

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prose fiction from the nineteenth century onwards as well as contemporary drama; a special focus lies on film and television, extending more recently to other visual and new media. Daniel Jonah Wolpert is a College supervisor at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, UK. He is currently working on a book on German Postwar film under Allied Occupation.

List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4

African Burial Ground National Monument Dedication on the Wall of Remembrance The Ancestral Libation Court Overlay: outline of the historical and the current situation

323 327 328 331

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Exploring the Spatiality of the City Across Cultural Texts Rebekka Rohleder and Martin Kindermann

“The city” is everywhere. Both public and academic discourse are endlessly fascinated with it; with the city of the future and the past; with megacities; with the voting behavior of city dwellers as opposed to that of the inhabitants of the countryside; with urban riots; with gentrification; with the city as utopia, dystopia, or heterotopia, to name but a few of the ideas which come to mind. Is there then still anything to say about a concept that has been so thoroughly explored, and about which academic disciplines ranging from geography, sociology, and urban studies to literary and cultural studies are already supplying a constant stream of publications? Of course, this is at least partly a rhetorical question, coming as it does in the introduction of another such publication—in a place, that is, which implies that the intended answer will be, yes, of course there is still something interesting to be said about the city that has not been said yet, and

R. Rohleder (B) University of Flensburg (EUF), Flensburg, Germany M. Kindermann Joseph Carlebach School Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_1

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R. ROHLEDER AND M. KINDERMANN

that will follow in this volume. We believe that of course. But the question is not meant quite so dishonestly. After all, the concept which supplies the framework for the following chapters is not simply the city itself, but its narrative construction. This means that it is precisely the ideas and debates which we have just named which will themselves be under scrutiny. They all stand for specific ideas of the city, and in this volume such ideas of the city will be analyzed for their narrative construction and its implications. Indeed, the idea itself that the city is constructed in and through narratives arguably needs some scrutiny, too, and we intend to provide that in this introduction. It is, to begin with, surely an appealing idea, even in its most paradoxical-sounding form. To give an example: in his essay “The Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde plays with the idea that art has the power to change reality—including the city. It is art, according to Wilde, which has created the famous London fogs: The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of art. […] There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess.1

The Aestheticist point about life imitating art in Wilde’s witty play on the line between the plausible—artistic representation creating awareness of the fog—and the implausible—artistic representation creating the fog itself, and “carry[ing it] to excess”—is not quite the same point that a literary scholar today might want to make about the relationship between art and urban space. As for the actual London fogs themselves, they were not a natural phenomenon that had existed “for centuries” without being noticed, but a form of smog, not quite as recent as Wilde makes them, but still historically specific and largely the product of coal rather than art. But the nineteenth-century London fogs as a cultural phenomenon are arguably a completely different thing from a twentyfirst-century smog, which carries all the implications of air pollution and the necessity of countermeasures, but which does not lend itself to crime fiction or impressionist painting in the same way as the nineteenth-century 1 Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Collected Works of Oscar Wilde (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 919–943 (937).

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INTRODUCTION: EXPLORING THE SPATIALITY …

3

version. Therefore, the London fogs, in a sense, really “did not exist till art had invented them.” Urban space is never just the product of architects and urban planners, that is, but it is also constituted by works of art, by the media, and by academic discourse—it is also, for instance, constituted by stories such as Wilde’s little genealogy of the London fogs. In any case, writers clearly like to suggest that they are really the ones who construct a city. For instance, in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, one of the protagonists claims that it is the absence of fictional versions of Glasgow which is to blame for the inhabitants’ lack of appreciation of their city. “Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here,” said Thaw. […] “Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively”2

The choice of verb is interesting here; “using” a city seems a very profane formula for something which is, at the same time, described as an act of creation, no less. In addition to that, in their wider context, the characters’ comments draw attention to the fact that the novel Lanark itself is “using” Glasgow and therefore supplies the reader with one possible way of inhabiting a version of this city imaginatively; that the novel itself is already in the process of transforming the city into one that is the subject of, and constructed by stories. The underimagined city is one of the stories on offer, but by no means the only one. After all, as we will explain in the following, the narrative construction of the city always implies conflicting narrative versions of the same city. It is not simply about emphasizing the constructedness of the built environment and its representations. The city is clearly a construct, but it is no less powerful for that. At least since the emergence of the modern metropolis, that is, the city has become one of the most crucial topoi in the representation and reflection of human experience. Through the immediate encounter of various cultural and class backgrounds the city has therefore become the central location for negotiating as well as articulating different identities and interests. All of these constitute performative acts that take 2 Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (London: Panther, 1984), 243.

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part in the semantic formation of urban space and at the same time open it up to constant and ongoing redefinition.

The City in Times of the “Spatial Turn” The city is also subject to constant academic scrutiny and redefinition. In recent years, urban life as well as various medial representations of the city have been discussed in a number of studies, using, among other things, terms, and concepts taken from the writings of Henri Lefebvre, as well as other authors who have been rediscovered in the wake of the “spatial turn.”3 This redefinition of space has been followed by studies of the city from the point of view of various disciplines—such as literary studies,4 history,5 and theater studies6 —as well as a number of explorations of (representations of) a single city.7 This is the context in which we would like to place our own collection. Its discussion of urban theory as well as its case studies aim to enrich and complicate the notion of the city as a space with the notion of the city as narrative, and it does that from a transdisciplinary perspective. The immediate context for our approach to the city is thus provided by the spatial turn. After all, the academic discussion of space has a long history in various disciplines, but since the 1990s in particular, its social and cultural layers as well as their vital importance to the constitution of space have once again been foregrounded. The interaction between

3 For instance, Ben Highmore’s Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and

Symbolic City (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) as well as, more recently, Robin Smith’s and Kevin Hetherington’s collection Urban Rhythms: Mobilities, Space and Interaction in the Contemporary City (Malden, Mass: Wiley, 2013). Both work with Lefebvre’s idea of a “rhythmanalysis” of urban life. 4 See for instance the Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, ed. Kevin R. McNamara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 5 Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, Matthew P. Berg and Anastasia Christou, eds., Narrating the City: History, Space and the Everyday (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015). 6 Sophie Wolfrum, ed., Performative Urbanism: Generating and Designing Urban Space (Berlin: Jovis, 2015). 7 Such as The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin, ed. Andrew J. Webber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Michael Cronin’s Osaka modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), and Barbara Thornburg’s and Evelyn Schulz’s collection Tokyo: Memory, Imagination and the City (Langham: Lexington Books, 2018).

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the architectural design of space, its material aspects with questions of accessibility and mobility, social as well as cultural, have also received increased attention in academic discourses. Considering the sheer amount of distinct theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of space, we must surely hesitate to use the term “re-definition” with regard to notions of space. Nevertheless, speaking as literary scholars, we observe that discourse in the humanities concerning space clearly has changed in the wake of the spatial turn. Academic publications on the subject of space have taken on a more interdisciplinary character. And it is exactly this point of intertwinement of various seemingly distinct fields of research that seems to us the most promising and fruitful approach to the city. Nonetheless, the sociocultural redefinition of space as formulated in the wake of the spatial turn is by no means the first time the semantic implications of the constitution of space have been described. In literary studies at least, the spatial turn draws heavily upon previous approaches. To name only a few, Ernst Cassirer outlined in his reflections on mythic, aesthetic, and theoretic spaces in 1931 the vital importance of perception to any constitution of spatial structures.8 Walter Benjamin’s work stresses the relevance of movement and temporal layers in experiencing the modern industrial metropolis—and claims that the phantasmagorical entity of the city refuses any narrative approach. In the middle of the twentieth century Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault focus on space as reflection and articulation of power relations, albeit in very different ways. Their writings have helped us to see that spatial structures are being constituted through various individual and discursively articulated performative practices and are thus the product of the ways in which discursive power locates itself within the relational network of urban space.9 Here, modes of inclusion and exclusion as spatial dynamics receive an attention which the social construction of space was until then denied. As a result, space can now be understood as part of social practices. Indeed, this was the original aim of the spatial turn. The term was first used in a chapter heading in Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies (1989), “Uncovering

8 Ernst Cassirer, “Mythischer, ästhetischer und theoretischer Raum,” [1931] in Ernst Cassirer, Symbol, Technik, Sprache: Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1927 –1933, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995), 93–119. 9 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27.

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Western Marxism’s spatial turn.”10 Subsequently, the key word has then been taken up by theorists (including Soja himself11 ), who have changed its meaning in the direction of a turn in the sense of a paradigm change.12 In its first context, the phrase described a shift back to prioritizing space rather than time within Western Marxism—a shift represented mainly by the works of Lefebvre.13 From the beginnings of the spatial turn on, spatial practice has thus been regarded as inseparable from social practice. The literary construction of space is such a spatial practice, and therefore a social practice, too. The concept of narration has a valuable contribution to make here. After all, long before the call for a reconsideration of space was formulated in the spatial turn, the interconnection of the act of narration and the constitution of spatial representations in various art forms has all along been at the center of the work of some literary scholars, such as Michail M. Bakhtin and Yuri M. Lotman. Semantic layers inscribed into literary space are foregrounded in their crucial importance to the process of meaning-making with regard to works of literature and are thus established as a means of making literary space accessible to analysis. An interconnection of space and time is for example outlined by Bakhtin as early as 1938 in his work on the chronotope.14 Here, the intertwinement of temporal and spatial relationships, which cannot be perceived or described separately, becomes a vital part of narratological analysis.

10 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social

Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 39. Earlier in the same book Soja also ascribes a “precursory spatial turn” to Michel Foucault (16). 11 E.g., in “Vom ‘Zeitgeist’ zum ‘Raumgeist’: New Twists on the Spatial Turn,” in

Spatial Turn: Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaften, ed. Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008), 241–262. 12 The origin and subsequent history of the term is traced by Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann, in “Einleitung: Was lesen wir im Raume? Der Spatial Turn und das geheime Wissen der Geographen,” Spatial Turn: Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaften, ed. Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008), 7–45 (7–9). 13 Soja, Postmodern Geographies 39–42. 14 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes

Towards a Historical Poetics,” in Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258.

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Space in literature is thus no longer understood as a mere stage for the plot. The conditions of constructing space in works of verbal art have received more and more attention in the last few decades. In literary studies, it is in particular the approaches of Gaston Bachelard, Gerard Genette, Bakhtin, and Lotman which have been taken up in order to conceptualize the literary construction of space. Lotman is particularly relevant in the present context because he has stressed the connection of semantic and spatial mobility, when he linked questions of tellability to the crossing of a semantic boundary in his Structure of the Artistic Text and, in a much more open manner and to a much greater extent, in his later model of the Semiosphere.15 There, he describes space as a polyvalent network in which dynamic processes take place, and in which such processes can be located and characterized with regard to their respective positioning to the semiotic nucleus of a semantic sphere. Space can thus be read as a highly polyvalent structure endowed with multiple semantic, social, and historic layers, which not only influence but rather constitute our perception of the space surrounding us. And this notion can be extended beyond the field of literary discourse, to urban space. As Roland Barthes has outlined: Space is formed and designed by our daily performance and it is also a discourse in which we engage, and which limits and influences our mobility, semantically, and spatially.16 In a similar vein, Umberto Eco conceptualizes space as a network of “architectural signs.”17 And each performative act within this relational network can be regarded as a form of narration, of articulation.18 Performing space, narrating the relational network, has to be understood with regard to its significance in constitutive acts of constructing identity, individual and collective alike. It is in this interpenetration of constructed self and relational spatial network that we locate ourselves with regard to our 15 Yuri M. Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977); Culture and Explosion (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009); Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (London: Tauris, 1990); Semiosfera (Saint Petersburg: Iskustvo-SPB, 2010). 16 Roland Barthes, “Semiology and the Urban,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader

in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 2004), 166–172. 17 Umberto Eco, “Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture,” Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 2004), 182–202. 18 For instance by Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 97.

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surroundings, relate to our experiences and perceptions, and strive to construct meaning from this positioning. Whether we take the stance of the planer or designer, interested in making sure that commercial and social interactions can take place in an unimpeded manner, or whether we employ the perception of the pedestrian in the street: Urban space can be understood as a text which is produced, read, and reconstructed in acts of interpretation. It should already be noted at this point that conflict is central, not just to the narrative construction of the city, but also, and crucially, to its theoretical conceptualization. The semioticians’ project of finding and deciphering a universal code of space has been heavily criticized by Lefebvre, who underlines the importance of the material reality of space in his own discussion of historically specific codes of space.19 Indeed, both materiality and historic specificity should be taken into account in any reading of urban space. After all, the city can be described as the central location of the human condition since the emergence of the modern industrial environment, but at the same time, as David Harvey observes, “to claim the right to the city is, in effect, to claim a right to something that no longer exists (if it ever truly did),” and that can only be (re)created in and through conflict.20 Therefore the conditions inherent to the narrative formation of urban space, too, are open to conflict and reevaluation, and have to be constantly negotiated. Telling the city implies acts of self-empowerment and usurpation. Every act of assigning meaning to space, of interpreting it in a certain way locates this reading of space within social discourse, as places are assigned certain behavioral codes and discursively formed utilizations. Some of these versions are more dominant than others, since the assignment of meanings to space is always intertwined with power relations.

19 Lefebvre, Production, 7, 17–18, and 269–270. For Lefebvre’s own historical account of urban space in relation to the history of capitalism, see Henri Lefebvre, “Right to the City,” in Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Malden: Blackwell, 1996), 61–181. 20 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), xv.

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Language, Narration, Semantics Before we proceed, we would like to develop our notion of the narrative construction of the city with some more precision. After all, even in the wake of the “spatial turn,” the idea of narrating a city is not an entirely straightforward one. It entails a concept of narrative space, after all. Traditionally, narratology is much more interested in time than space, which means that the idea of narrative space, and narrative urban space requires some justification, and is of ongoing interest to narratologists.21 In what sense, then, can the space of the city be said to be narrated? To begin with, until the spatial turn, narratological accounts of space tended to favor the everyday notion of space as a container, rejecting concepts of space that contradict everyday experience. As a result, they often regard space merely as a setting for the plot of a literary text.22 This notion of space as a setting can be profitably combined with the idea of the text itself as a space.23 But if we read the city as a setting only, then we lack a way of describing the narrative construction of the city itself which goes beyond simply understanding it as backdrop for a story. Instead, we would argue that the stories that can be told about cities, as well as those which can take place in them, form and transform the city itself. In addition to that there is a narratological tradition which ties in with the idea of narrative space, and that is Lotman’s concept of spatial semantics. In The Structure of the Artistic Text, Lotman analyzes the ways in which literary texts make use of spatial metaphors, open and closed spaces, and boundaries in order to tell stories. The space created by a text is always also narrative space: it plays a crucial role in the creation of narrative meaning. It is also an essentially metaphorical space: any spatial opposition, such as high vs. low, and any act of boundary crossing carry

21 As can be seen in a recent special issue of Frontiers of Narrative Studies: Geographical Narratology, ed. Gerald Prince, special issue of Frontiers of Narrative Studies 4, no. 2 (2018): 175–392. 22 See Marie-Laure Ryan, “Space,” in The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al. (Hamburg: Hamburg University), created 13. January 2012, revised 22. April 2014. https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/55.html (accessed July 10, 2018); Katrin Dennerlein, Narratologie des Raumes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 59–67. 23 Gérard Genette, “La littérature et l’espace,” in Gérard Genette, Figures II (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969), 43–48.

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meaning beyond their immediate use in the story.24 In this system, space rather than time is fundamental to narration. In order to further develop an understanding of the city as narrated space, it is helpful to emphasize again that we understand space as a relational network rather than a container.25 For the city this means that the space of a city is the sum of everything this city consists in (its buildings, inhabitants, parks, rivers, etc.), rather than being a preexisting abstract space which is then filled with content. Everything a city consists in: this includes the relations between different places in the city, as well as the movement of its inhabitants through the city. Here, we can go back to Michel de Certeau’s notion of walking the city as something that is equivalent to a speech act. Walking the streets of the city is, de Certeau argues, “a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian,” “a spatial acting-out of the place” which depends on “relations among differentiated positions.”26 These spatial relations are a prerequisite for the act of walking, but they are also established in the same act of walking—by moving through the city. The city is not a stable, fixed space, then; it is continually reconstituted through various performative acts. These performative acts can all be read as acts of meaning-making: they are acts performed within a semiotic system. Eco’s “architectural sign” is pertinent here: after all, Eco claims that every architectural object becomes, first, a signifier of its own function and, secondly, of the “ideology of the function.”27 Thus, a door represents a function, namely, facilitating entrance to a room or a house. At the same time, depending on the house, room, and doorway, a door may also signify other things. The “ideology of the function” of a back door would be very different from that of the main entrance, for instance. The first architectural signs Eco traces are not even architecture proper, but the first inhabited caves, along with which the concept of a sheltered inside space was created.28 24 Lotman, Structure, 217–231. 25 The origins of these two contending concepts of space are explained in: Martina

Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2001), 17–68. (In 2016, Löw’s book has been published in an English translation by Palgrave Macmillan as The Sociology of Space: Materiality, Social Structures, and Action, trans. Donald Goodwin.) 26 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 97–98. 27 Eco, “Function and Sign,” 187. 28 Eco, “Function and Sign,” 182–183.

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This would be a purely semiotic overwriting of a preexisting space, but the space is, in fact, completely transformed by this overwriting. This gives the idea of the architectural sign the potential to be more than just a way in which architecture creates meaning. It extends the scope of the concept to that of a potential theory of space as a semiotic system: a structure that is inscribed with meaning, but that is also a tangible reality—which makes the meanings with which it is inscribed all the more pertinent. After all, as Pierre Bourdieu has observed, space naturalizes social hierarchies because of its specific mixture of symbolic inscriptions and physical reality, which creates a “naturalization effect.”29 These symbolic inscriptions can be read as similar to language; on the other hand, the materiality of space differentiates it from language, and has led proponents of the “spatial turn” to claim that this turn implies a turning back to the material instead of language.30 What makes space so interesting is primarily the conjunction of the symbolic and the material, though. Space is like a language, and it is also not like a language. This problematic is crucial to the narrative constitution of urban space, too, since language is also crucial to narrative. Urban space as a semiotic system interacts with the language(s) of narration. These interactions and their effects will be further explored in this volume.

Subversion and Variation To begin with, cities in literary texts (or indeed film and television) are by definition always more than just a setting for a story; rather, a version of the city comes into being by means of each act of narration. Furthermore, this concept of space enables us to include other acts of narration in a wider sense—de Certeau’s notion of walking as a speech act and a tactic for the appropriation of space, which will reappear in a number of chapters, but also, for instance, the act of telling and retelling stories of a city by architectural means. What all these different acts of narrating urban space have in common is that they construct the city by means 29 Pierre Bourdieu, “Site Effects,” Pierre Bourdieu et al. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 123–129. 30 For instance, in Rudolf Maresch and Niels Werber, “Permanenzen des Raums,” in Raum—Wissen—Macht, ed. Rudolf Maresch and Niels Werber (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2002), 7–30 (27); Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006), 284.

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of emplotment, to borrow Hayden White’s term. They do not just tell stories of the city, that is. They establish narrative patterns, making sense of the city in the process.31 Such narrative acts of giving the city meaning imply that, despite the “naturalization effect” mentioned above, there may well be some room for subversive stories in the narration of urban space. After all, all attempts at spatial meaning-making produce variants, so that there are always different narratives and versions of (to use the examples from Lanark quoted above) “Florence, Paris, London, New York” (or Glasgow for that matter). And these variant narratives exist in a state of constant conflict and interpenetration. Some of them are of course located in positions endowed with more cultural authority than others. In addition to that, their hierarchy is always dependent on the speaker’s point of view, and therefore, ultimately, on the question of authorship in narrating urban space. Different people with different social and spatial positions will narrate their city in different ways and with different results. These competing narratives give rise to contradictory readings of a city, each highlighting different facets and semantic layers inscribed into the relational network and constituting diverging spaces in the same place. Whether we think of, for instance, the East End of London, New York’s Lower East Side or Hamburg’s St. Pauli district: the diversity of inhabitants, the gentrification of formerly working-class neighborhoods, the construction of new neighborhoods from scratch, give rise to highly conflictual interpretations of how space is designed and formed. It is exactly because urban space is the location of negotiating such diverging concepts and social as well as historical interpretations that it is engaged in constant reformulation. This constant reformulation can, for instance, be outlined with regard to memory as it can be perceived in space: the city has been described as a palimpsest, as sediment of historic layer upon layer, which are inscribed into the relational network. Indeed, so persuasive is this metaphor as a description of urban space that Sigmund Freud transferred it directly to memory in Civilization and its Discontents, where he famously (and

31 For emplotment, see Hayden White’s, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 7. For narrativity as the (necessary) production of meaning, see also his The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1–25.

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impossibly) imagines a Rome in which all historical layers exist simultaneously, and in the same place.32 In actual cities, by contrast, the recipient depends on a narrative mediation of the past in order to read these layers and reconstruct past events in the present. Tourists for instance use guided tours, memorials, museums, in short, an explanation and interpretation of space, to assist them with their respective construction of a seemingly coherent narrative of a city’s history. Such narrative mediation of historical memory, too, is conflictual. The political implications of, for instance, a city’s statues, street names, and buildings may not be made explicit in (most) guided tours of the city. They can, however, make the city the place of political statements and struggles over the past (and thereby the present) through various acts of removal and rebuilding, official as well as unofficial. The toppling of the Colston statue by protesters in Bristol on June 7, 2020 can serve as an example of a conflict about history (and thereby also about racism in the present) and its representation in urban space. The much-debated removal and rebuilding of various representative buildings on the site of the former Berlin Stadtschloss (replaced by the Palast der Republik in the GDR; recently replaced by a new building with the Stadtschloss façade, which will, as the Humboldt Forum, also house the Ethnological Museum) is another case in point. Apart from this interpretative mediation of history, and thus of collective memory, in urban space, each narrative of space is an articulation of socially constructed layers inscribed into the relational network. Each neighborhood of a city gives rise to countless stories told by those who have lived there for generations, by those who have just moved into the neighborhood, by those seeking to make a political point, or those who are simply in search of reasonable rents. Here, a closer look at various narratives can reveal the intertwinement of seemingly oppositional interpretations, as social and economic change in space is always linked to reformulations that are based upon pretexts already articulated. For instance, an artistic or rebellious image and a history of social conflict, and even rioting, are able to render a neighborhood interesting to investors and upper-middle-class tenants as well as to the customers seeking a district’s bars, cafes and fashion boutiques. 32 Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur und andere kulturtheoretische Schriften, introd. Alfred Lorenzer and Bernard Görlich (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2004), 29–108 (37).

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Heightened social and spatial mobility as well as the contiguity of different social or cultural backgrounds, both of which can be regarded as constituents of the modern metropolis, bring about constant change and thus point to the continuous flux which is always inherent to space. The social and spatial mobility of its inhabitants changes a city and therefore the city also has to be described as the place in which social change is articulated through conflicting attempts at narrating and designing the city. Narrating the city is therefore always also performing conflict, interpenetration, and fragmentation. Urban space like no other has become the location in which conditions of coexistence are negotiated and constantly redefined. And this discourse does find its representation in the spatial design of the city: Whether through deviant behavior—Michel de Certeau here refers to wild trails or holes in fences used as shortcuts by pedestrians33 —or through architectural design: urban space is engaged in a process of constant formation, redesign, and reinterpretation. It is through these performative acts that various narratives of urban space clash and thus articulate dissensus, hybridity, and fragmentation. This concept of the conflictual narrative constitution of the city already formed the backdrop for an interdisciplinary conference entitled “Narrating Spaces - Reading Urbanity” which we organized at the University of Hamburg in September 2012. In bringing together scholars from various backgrounds, ranging from literary and media studies to history, sociology, architecture, and geography, we inevitably worked with different concepts both of narratives and the city back then. There were also genuine moments of surprise during the conference at how much common ground could be agreed on despite these methodological differences. Nonetheless, and completely intentionally, what we have to offer in this volume, in continuation of the papers which were presented back then and of the discussions around them, is a variety of narratives of the narrative constitution of the city—narratives which, however, interact in ways which we believe will be fruitful for further discussion.

33 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 91–110.

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Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity This volume is divided into six interlinked sections, each one of which foregrounds a distinct perspective on the narration of urban space. The chapters in the first section of our volume are all invested in the narrative construction of the city: the intertextual production of urban space as well as the relationship between the materiality of the city and that of the text. First, ANDREAS MAHLER complicates the interrelation of urban space, history, and literature by focusing on the intertextual construction of “city scapes” in “city scripts.” Mahler looks at a range of city texts from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, analyzing the ways in which these texts perform the city. He argues that the relationship of mimesis and performance in these texts is by no means a given: the literary text is not only a vehicle for depicting cites, but it is not exclusively constructing them either. Instead, Mahler shows that the relationship between mimesis and performance of the city in the text has to be historicized. The next chapter provides a case study of such a historicization. In T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, it is the poem’s intertextual relationships with other texts which construct urban space, and, as VERENA KEIDEL shows in her paper, in this poem the city is to be read in the context of a tradition of understanding urban space as sacred space which goes back to Augustine. Keidel underpins her reading of the poem with a discussion of religious spatiality, and shows how Eliot reintegrates Judeo-Christian notions of sacredness and profanity into the cityscape. The last paper of this section complements the other two by focusing on the materiality of city texts. DARIA BARYSHNIKOVA analyzes the construction of urban space in the works of the Russian poet Pavel Ulitin, in relation to the materiality of the literary text as a spatial object, which is made to represent an alternative public space of Moscow. Baryshnikova compares Ulitin’s writing technique and literary topography to William Burroughs’s cutup texts, focusing on the anti-representational, anti-narrative agenda of both authors. She argues that, as a result of his literary technique, Ulitin’s writings recreate the experience of modern urban life on the level of the text. The second section focuses on a different medium: it is concerned with the way in which two recent TV shows evoke and subvert the trope of urban unreadability. First, CHRISTOPHER SCHLIEPHAKE shows how the TV series The Wire (2002–2008) depicts post-industrial, post-9/11 Baltimore as a space which is (like Lefebvre’s abstract space)

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at once homogeneous and fragmented. With its multifaceted depiction of the urban drug trade in the context of the “war on drugs” and in particular through its representation of the city of Baltimore through semi-documentary means—including location shooting, fictional CCTV footage, and maps,the series depicts a hierarchical city in which everything is connected, but which does not therefore add up to a homogeneous whole. In the other chapter in this section, JANINA WIERZOCH’s reading of urban space in a very differently conceived show, namely, the BBC’s Sherlock (2010 ff) engages with the medial performance of London. In contrast to the David Simon TV series, Sherlock does not feature a large ensemble cast; it is very much focused on a small number of main characters. The problem of urban complexity is therefore posed in an entirely different manner. In the series, the detective (and the audience along with him) is able to read the twenty-first-century city through/as virtual reality. Wierzoch demonstrates that the series’ portrayal of Sherlock’s use of technology stands in the tradition of detective fiction, but that it deviates from this tradition in its involvement of the audience through the transmedial marketing of the series, which plays with the distinction between real and fictional space. In the fictional world of the series itself, she argues, the city is shown to require the detective himself in order to become readable at all: even technology is not enough on its own. The detective ultimately emerges as the “better” processing device, superior even to his own smartphone when it comes to navigating London. After this introduction to urban narratives in different media, the next four contributions are concerned with conflictual narratives of urban space. The first two theorize these conflictual narratives with the help of concepts taken from Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space; the other two look at utopian and dystopian stories of cities in the past and in the present. First, KLASKE MARIA HAVIK applies Lefebve’s notion of “representational space” as well as Michel de Certeau’s emphasis on the role of the user of space to architectural theory. She understands architecture as a social practice which is akin to writing, and which makes the user of a space just as crucial to the space as the reader is to the text. She describes this interactivity of the built environment as transcription (writing across)—a concept which she finds realized in the works of architects like Libeskind and Eisenman, who embrace the dynamics of transcription and who theorize the empowerment of users by their buildings. Next, DENNIS BÜSCHER-ULBRICH argues for repoliticizing the

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notion of urban space as a cultural construct. He explores the emancipatory power of urban spatial practice in times of neoliberalism, the spaces of which he characterizes, following Henri Lefebvre, as “abstract space,” that is, a space which is at the same time homogeneous and also fragmented. In order to make counter-spaces to this abstract space thinkable, BüscherUlbrich introduces Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus, arguing that spatial practice can contribute to the production of a differential space. In the following chapter, STEFAN COUPERUS offers a historical case study of power and its conflictual performance in urban space. He looks at two conflicting narratives of the rebuilding of Rotterdam after World War II: the first, the official narrative at the time, is one of social inclusion in the reconstruction of the city as a “New Jerusalem.” A second narrative has only come to the fore in more recent publications, which focus on the exclusion processes which went along with this act of reconstruction, and which led to the displacement of the less affluent population of the inner city to temporary settlements, and further marginalization which followed from that. Last, geographers ANKE STRÜVER and SYBILLE BAURIEDL explore the narrative construction of the smart city in the present, pointing out how these narratives take the form of either utopia or dystopia. In their analysis, the two geographers focus on questions of power over urban space, and the consequences of digitization for the city and its inhabitants. The chapter concludes by proposing an updated version of the idea of the “right to the city.” The two papers contained in the next section combine the notion of conflicting versions of the same city with the role of the subject and its acts of appropriation within the city as relational space. Both papers focus on literary portrayals of women exploring the streets of London. MARTIN KINDERMANN’s paper focuses on the individual’s movement through the city as a relational network, as it is depicted in the poetry of Victorian poet Amy Levy and contemporary poet Elaine Feinstein. Kindermann looks at both writers’ strategies for locating the speakers of their poems in the relational network of London. In the poems he analyzes, the self places itself in urban space, and constructs and reads the city by means of the speaker’s movement through the city. Kindermann argues that the individuals’ movement through and visual perspective on London serve to negotiate the construction and location of hybrid identities. In CLAUDIA HEUER’s paper, the focus is specifically on the female subject’s experience of urban space as gendered space. Heuer reads London in Virginia Woolf’s novels as a space that appears liberating and at

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the same time also threatening for women. She uses Lotman’s model of the spatial semantics of fictional worlds in order to analyze the female characters’ interaction with the city in Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and “A Room of One’s Own” (which Heuer reads as a companion piece to Orlando). In these texts, urban space as public space emerges as a largely positive alternative to the private space of the family home, which is, for women, a confining, not a protective space. Heuer argues that modernity and women’s liberation are, in Woolf’s fiction, quintessentially urban phenomena—a perspective which distinguishes Woolf from her fellow-modernists. The papers in the following section explore memory in the urban space of Berlin. Of the two articles in this section, the first is concerned with the suppression of memory, whereas the other deals with the return of a repressed past. First, DANIEL JONAH WOLPERT reads postwar German film as caught up in a crisis of representation. He analyzes the use of metalepsis in one West German film—R.A. Stemmle’s Berliner Ballade—and one from East Germany: Gustav von Wangenheim’s Und wieder’48. Wolpert concludes that both films make use of metalepsis in order to retemporalize the present and to overcome the implicit threat of the ruins of 1948 Berlin. Conversely, JOSHUA PARKER in his article engages with the literary reemergence of Berlin’s buried pasts. Parker applies the idea of postmemory to two novels, J.S. Marcus’s The Captain’s F ire (1996) and Chloe Aridjis’s Book of Clouds (2009), which deal with young Jewish US-Americans’ experiences in post-Reunification Berlin, and compares them with a nineteenth-century Berlin novel, Theodor Sedgwick Fay’s Countess Ida. In all three novels Berlin is understood as a hybrid city: the past remains present in present-day urban space. The last section pursues the theme of the narrative inscription of history in urban space, with three papers which focus on (literary and architectural) stories of continuity and discontinuity in urban space. REBEKKA ROHLEDER, in her paper, looks at the ways in which literary texts construct social space by constructing normative narratives of urban space, a process to which the temporality of the urban is crucial. She takes as examples three novels which explore processes of urban transformation: Mary Shelley’s Valperga (1823), a historical novel in which urban space is inextricably bound up with political and social developments; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), in which London’s pasts are continually told and retold up to the novel’s “present moment,” and Margaret Atwood’s dystopian segregated future cities in The Year of the

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Flood (2009). In these novels, literary space serves to critically engage with narratives of urban continuity and discontinuity and the normative implications of these narratives. The next chapter is a case study of precisely such urban discontinuity, but in a different cultural context. It engages with texts which, at the time of their publication, evoke a very recent past—a past which had, however already been obliterated when the novels were written. GALA MARIA FOLLACO explores the portrayal of Tokyo in novels published shortly after the Meji Restoration of 1867. In these novels Tokyo becomes a symbol of Westernization. Simultaneously, however, the novels explore the long literary history of the city and its pre-1867 incarnation, which is portrayed as a categorically different urban space. In the novels’ complex engagement with the intertextual construction of Tokyo, of its vanishing past and of the transformation which was in the process of taking place, the city emerges as “lived space” in a Lefebvrean sense. Last, TAZALIKA TE REH’s chapter approaches the presence of the past in urban space from another angle, namely, that of its deliberate architectonic evocation in a monument. Te Reh understands the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York City as a way of reading a Western metropolis against the grain by means of the narratives brought to the fore by the monument itself: first an architectural one, secondly a narrative of memory, and the third one of oblivion. Through all three narratives together, the monument, which marks the spot of a forgotten graveyard which was subsequently rediscovered, creates awareness of the African American presence in the history of New York. Taken together, the contributions which this volume brings together analyze and also exemplify the multiple and conflictual narrative constructions of the city across a range of cultural texts. The chapters in this collection explore architectural, textual, and medial constructions of the city and the resulting conflicting narratives of the city and cities in the present as well as the past. The conjunction of space and narration therefore emerges as a worthwhile contribution to the study of urban space. As the following chapters will show, this goes both ways: studying the city enriches our thinking about narration as well as space. This book thus invites its readers to continue exploring the intersections of narration and urban space.

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Bibliography Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 84–258. Barthes, Roland. “Semiology and the Urban.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach. London: Routledge, 2004. 166–172. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Site Effects.” In Pierre Bourdieu et al. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. 123– 129. Cassirer, Ernst. “Mythischer, ästhetischer und theoretischer Raum.” [1931] Symbol, Technik, Sprache: Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1927–1933, edited by Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois. Hamburg: Meiner, 1995. 93–119. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Cronin, Michael. Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Dennerlein, Katrin. Narratologie des Raumes. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. Döring, Jörg, and Tristan Thielmann. “Einleitung: Was lesen wir im Raume? Der Spatial Turn und das geheime Wissen der Geographen.” In Spatial Turn: Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaften, edited by Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann. Bielefeld: transcript, 2008. 7–45. Eco, Umberto. “Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach. London: Routledge, 2004. 182–202. Fischer-Nebmaier, Wladimir, Matthew P. Berg, and Anastasia Christou, eds., Narrating the City: History, Space and the Everyday. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27. Freud, Sigmund. Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Sigmund Freud. Das Unbehagen in der Kultur und andere kulturtheoretische Schriften. Introd. Alfred Lorenzer and Bernard Görlich. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2004. 29–108. Genette, Gérard. “La littérature et l’espace,” In Gérard Genette. Figures II . Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969. 43–48. Gray, Alasdair. Lanark: A Life in Four Books. London: Panther, 1984.

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Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2012. Highmore, Ben. Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. ———. “Right to the City.” In Henri Lefebvre. Writings on Cities, edited by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Malden: Blackwell, 1996. 61–181. Lotman, Yuri M. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977. ———. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. London: Tauris, 1990. ———. Culture and Explosion. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. ———. Semiosfera. Saint Peterburg: Iskustvo-SPB, 2010. Löw, Martina. Raumsoziologie. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2001. ———. The Sociology of Space: Materiality, Social Structures, and Action. Translated by Donald Goodwin. New York: Palgrave, 2016. Maresch, Rudolf, and Niels Werber. “Permanenzen des Raums.” In Raum— Wissen—Macht, edited by Rudolf Maresch and Niels Werber. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2002. 7–30. McNamara, Kevin R., ed., Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Prince, Gerald, ed., Geographical Narratology. Special issue of Frontiers of Narrative Studies 4, no. 2 (2018): 175–392. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Space.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University, created 13. January 2012, revised 22. April 2014. https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/55. html. (Accessed July 10, 2018). Smith, Robin, and Kevin Hetherington, eds., Urban Rhythms: Mobilities, Space and Interaction in the Contemporary City. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2013. Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1989. ———. “Vom ‘Zeitgeist’ zum ‘Raumgeist’: New Twists on the Spatial Turn.” In Spatial Turn: Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaften, edited by Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann. Bielefeld: transcript, 2008. 241–262. Thornburg, Barbara, and Evelyn Schulz, eds., Tokyo: Memory, Imagination and the City. Langham: Lexington Books, 2018. Webber, Andrew J., ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

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White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. ———. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” In Oscar Wilde. Collected Works of Oscar Wilde. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. 919–943. Wolfrum, Sophie, ed., Performative Urbanism: Generating and Designing Urban Space. Berlin: Jovis, 2015.

PART I

The City and the Text/the City as a Text

CHAPTER 2

City Scripts/City Scapes: On the Intertextuality of Urban Experience Andreas Mahler

Experiencing the City Taking up the cue of the editors of this volume,1 I would like to begin with Alasdair Gray’s 1981 novel Lanark and its somewhat skeptical view about Glasgow’s value as a textual city: ‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,’ said McAlpin. ‘Why do we hardly ever notice that?’ ‘Because nobody imagines living there,’ said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, ‘If you want to explain that I’ll certainly listen.’ ‘Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That’s all. No. I’m wrong, there’s also the cinema and the library. And when our imagination needs exercise we 1 See the editors’ ‘Introduction’ above.

A. Mahler (B) Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_2

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use these to visit London, Paris, Rome under the Caesars, the American West at the turn of the century, anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels.’2

What the quote points out is, above all, two things: (1) that urban experience seems to presuppose some previous act of textualization (‘Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films ’); and (2) that, in that sense, ‘reality’ always seems to rest on some process of imagination that helps to make it appear ‘real’ (one hardly notices Glasgow, Thaw argues, because ‘nobody imagines living there’; since the city ‘hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively’). In other words, there seems to be no proper experience of Glasgow as a ‘textual’ city since there are no, at least no canonical, ‘Glaswegian texts’ guiding (or misleading, or distorting, or even disappointing) our perception. For our experience to become meaningful presupposes some scripted experience preceding ours, some previous (pragmatic) ‘use,’ just as much as it relies on the result(s) of this use, which gives it some kind of semantic profile. For a city to become a city scape thus presupposes some kind of city script.3 And, of course, one could still always try and undertake such a project of creating a city script for Glasgow (exceeding the mere ‘music hall song and a few bad novels’ mentioned), just as it was undertaken a century ago by James Joyce for a place like Dublin, indelibly placing the Irish capital on the textual urban map. This dependence of a city scape on a city script (and not so much, as one might presume at first glance, the other way round) gives us a hint at the ‘intertextual’ nature of this relation (the word ‘text’ being used here in a wide sense of comprising all material artifacts in some way or other,

2 Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (New York: Braziller, 1985), 243; it should be noted that Lanark is not what can be called a Glasgow novel. 3 For the ideas of (semantic) ‘city scapes’ (‘Textstädte’) and (material) ‘city scripts’ (‘Stadttexte’), see my ‘Stadttexte—Textstädte: Formen und Funktionen diskursiver Stadtkonstitution,’ in Stadt-Bilder: Allegorie—Mimesis —Imagination, ed. Andreas Mahler (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1999), 11–36; for a wide-ranging survey of literary cities, from the enlightenment to the ‘postmodern,’ see Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998).

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conventionally and arbitrarily, transmitting meaning).4 The more there are pretexts guiding our imagination, the more we will find ourselves endowed with notions, ‘imaginations,’ preconceived ideas, and pictures, of what the corresponding city scape must be like (even though we might never have actually been there). Like Hester Lynch Piozzi or, rather, ‘Mrs. Thrale,’ the friend, and muse, of the famous eighteenth-century English lexicographer, and essayist, Dr. Johnson, visiting Venice for the first time in her life.5 In her Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany first published in 1785 she writes: We went down the Brenta in a barge that brought us in eight hours to Venice, the first appearance of which revived all the ideas inspired by Canaletto, whose views of this town are most scrupulously exact; those especially which one sees at the Queen of England’s house in St. James’s Park; to such a degree indeed, that we all knew the famous towers, steeples, &c. before we reached them. It was wonderfully entertaining to find thus realized all the pleasures that excellent painter had given us so many times reason to expect; and I do believe that Venice, like other Italian beauties, will be observed to possess features so striking, so prominent, and so discriminated, that her portrait, like theirs, will not be found difficult to take, nor the impression she has once made easy to erase. British charms captivate less powerfully, less certainly, less suddenly: but being of a softer sort, increase upon acquaintance; and after the connexion has continued for some years, will be relinquished with pain, perhaps even in exchange for warmer colouring and stronger expression.6

4 For an overall systematic account of the notion of ‘intertextuality,’ with its ‘pretexts’ and ‘posttexts’ and all, see Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: La Littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982); for a concise differentiation between structuralist and post-structuralist conceptualizations of that notion, see Manfred Pfister, ‘How Postmodern is Intertextuality?’ in Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), 207–224 (esp. 210 ff.). 5 I here take up some ideas that I have already used previously in my ‘Venedig als Xenotopos in der Literatur des ausgehenden neunzehnten Jahrhunderts,’ in Xenotopien: Verortungen des Fremden im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Volker Barth, Frank Halbach and Bernd Hirsch (Berlin: Lit, 2010), 209–221 (209 f.). 6 Hester Lynch Piozzi, ‘[On First Looking at Canaletto’s Venice],’ in The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers. An Annotated Anthology, ed. Manfred Pfister (Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996), 342 (342; editor’s title).

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For Hester Lynch Piozzi, the Venetian city scape is clearly based on a preexistent city script. The ‘Canalettoan’ pretext, ‘whose views […] are most scrupulously exact’ ‘inspires’ ‘ideas’ which can at best only be ‘revived.’ Having ‘seen’ the paintings, especially the ones ‘in the Queen of England’s house in St. James’s Park,’ seems to have conveyed the impression of ‘knowing’ the place even ‘before’ actually ‘reaching’ it. Venice thus appears as some strange ‘realization’ of the painter’s work which seems to be even more ‘real’ than the place itself. And it is seen as a kind of replica of what the paintings have already rightfully ‘given reason to expect.’ It is precisely in that sense that Venice is different from many ‘British’ cities such as, say, Glasgow. Venice finds itself, as it were, ‘over-scripted.’ It does not ‘increase upon acquaintance’ but is always already there: preexistent, overdetermined, ‘so striking, so prominent, and so discriminated’ that its experience, even in Mrs. Thrale’s description of her ‘own’ textual Venice, finds itself thoroughly influenced, deeply imbued, if not entirely contaminated, intertextually by a whole amount of Venetian pretexts that largely seem to determine what she then actually sees. And yet, Hester Lynch Piozzi is still in for some kind of surprise. Instead of being entirely disappointed by an impression of ‘having seen it all,’ of having to witness that her imagination takes over, and obliterates, what ought to be experienced as ‘real,’ she is apt to discover something new, something that exceeds the, as it were, intertextual ‘grid’: St Mark’s Place, after all I had read and all I had heard of it, exceeded expectation: such a cluster of excellence, such a constellation of artificial beauties, my mind had never ventured to excite the idea of within herself, though assisted with all the powers of doing so which painters can bestow, and with all the advantages derived from verbal and written description. It was half an hour before I could think of looking for the bronze horses, of which one has heard so much; and from which when one has once begun to look, there is no possibility of withdrawing one’s attention. The general effect produced by such architecture, such paintings, such pillars, illuminated as I saw them last night by the moon at full, rising out of the sea, produced an effect like enchantment.7

What Hester Lynch Piozzi experiences here is some shock of ‘authenticity.’ All of a sudden, all the preconceived ideas, ‘all I had read and

7 Lynch Piozzi, ‘[On First Looking at Canaletto’s Venice],’ 342.

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all I had heard of it,’ all her imaginations ‘assisted with all the powers […] which painters can bestow, and with all the advantages derived from verbal and written description,’ i.e., from ‘images’ and ‘texts’—all these previous inscriptions seem to become blank and find themselves annulled in the face of an unimaginably ‘true’ urban experience, an experience ‘my mind had never ventured to excite the idea of within herself.’ Dazzled by the ‘cluster of excellence,’ our urban traveler seems to forget about the prefabricated intertextual foil, about ‘living there imaginatively’ (‘It was half an hour before I could think of looking for the bronze horses, of which one has heard so much’); and it is only then that she begins to perceive the ‘real’ elements of the city, its ‘architecture,’ its ‘paintings,’ its ‘pillars.’ And what she gets is not so much an urban experience in the sense of ‘knowledge’ (i.e., of ‘knowing’ what the city of Venice is like) but, rather, one in the sense of ‘enchantment’: what she gets is some kind of ‘magical’ effect leaving a deep, indelible impression on her, never to be forgotten. One might call this some kind of sudden ‘evidence’ or ‘epiphany.’8 And this is precisely what ‘urban’ poets, in the times to come, are bent on producing in, and through, their ‘urban’ texts for the city they particularly want to promote, were it even for Glasgow. Roughly one century later, however, toward the second half of the nineteenth century, there seems to have developed some kind of semantic ‘overkill’ produced by an excess of intertextual ‘use’ by artists thematizing, again and again, the beauties of Venice. Venice seems to have lost (at least for some) the power of producing that kind of direct, mimetic ‘enchantment’ developed by ‘Mrs. Thrale.’ The poet Edward Lear, normally known for his humorous ‘nonsense songs,’ writes, rather grumpily, in 1857: Now, if you will ask my impressions of Venice, I may as well shock you a good thumping shock at once by saying I don’t care a bit for it, & never

8 For the idea of an ‘epiphanous’ experience through texts, see Jorge Luis Borges’ tentative definition of the ‘aesthetic’ as the ‘imminence of a revelation, which does not come about’ (‘esta inminecia de una revelación, que no se produce, es, quizá, el hecho estético’) in Jorge Luis Borges, ‘La muralla y los libros,’ in Prosa completa, ed. C.V. Frías, 3 vols. (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1980), vol. 2, 131–133 (133); for a more detailed discussion of the Borgesian concept, see my ‘Imaginäre Karten: Performative Topographie bei Borges und Réda,’ in Metropolen im Maßstab: Der Stadtplan als Matrix des Erzählens in Literatur, Film und Kunst, ed. Achim Hölter, Volker Pantenburg and Susanne Stemmler (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009), 207–239 (207 ff.).

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wish to see it again. Rotterdam & The Hague are 50 times as pretty—(with their green trees & pretty costumes—) barring some of the few buildings here. But those very buildings have been so stuffed & crammed into my sense since I was a child, that I knew the size, place, colour & effect of all & every one beforehand—& derived no one whit more pleasure from seeing them there, than in any of the many theatre scenes, Dioramas, Panoramas, & all the other ramas whatever.9

Mr. Lear’s knowledge of Venice is already perfect before he gets to the place. His urban experience is spoilt by, as I have tried to call it, some intertextual ‘overkill.’ His imagination is ‘so stuffed & crammed’ by representations (‘the many theatre scenes, Dioramas, Panoramas, & all the other ramas’) that he simply cannot enjoy the place itself (‘there’). His expectations are so much filled with Venetian ‘fictions’ that he is no longer interested in the ‘real’ Venice right in front of his eyes (or, as for that, of his nose): Nay—[Stanfield’s]—Cook’s & Canaletto’s pictures please me far better, inasmuch as I cannot in them smell these most stinking canals.—Ugh! A place whose attributes are those (externally) of mere architecture can be completely portrayed & represented to the mind.—Thousands of descriptions & millions of paintings could not do so with Egypt, Sinai, Greece, Sicily, or Switzerland, because the glories & beauties of nature are in their changes infinite:—here it is wholly otherwise: at least it is so to me.—[…] Well—this morning I suppose I must so far sacrifice to propriety as to go & see some ‘pictures’. Very few I intend to see. All the best I know by copies […]. So I shall go & see the portraits of the Doges—& then get away from Venice as soon as I can, thanking my fates I need not come back.10

To be sure, this is a far cry from Mrs. Thrale’s ‘clusters of excellence’ and their unexpected ‘enchantment.’ And it also indicates, of course, what happened in between: i.e., the Romantic turn to ‘nature’ and its alleged ‘unrepresentability’ as something that cannot ‘be completely portrayed & represented to the mind,’ simply because it is ‘infinite.’

9 Edward Lear, ‘[The Pictures Better than the Real Thing],’ in The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers. An Annotated Anthology, ed. Manfred Pfister (Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996), 349 (349; editor’s title). 10 Lear, ‘[The Pictures Better than the Real Thing],’ 349.

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So, by Lear’s time, the urban experience of Venice seems to have reached some point of saturation, and this point was apparently reached precisely because there were so many (fictive) representations around that one could ‘live there imaginatively’ without actually being there. The city scape had already been perfected by the city scripts, and the ‘real thing’ could only run the risk of spoiling the impression (as in the notorious poster lines saying ‘don’t give me the facts, my mind is already made up’). In this case, instead of experiencing the city, the only choice is leaving it.

Turning-Point: Mimesis into Performance So what have we got so far? On the one hand, it seems that a city needs some intertextual ‘ground’ in order to be able to develop some ‘imaginative’ profile (and this would be precisely what Glasgow, according to Alasdair Gray’s character Thaw, is missing). On the other hand, as we have seen with reference to Venice, a surfeit of intertextual references runs the risk of spoiling the urban experience altogether. In other words, there is no Glaswegian city scape because there are not enough Glaswegian city scripts whereas, in contrast to this, there seem to be (at least by the mid–1850s) so many Venetian city scripts producing such a ‘stuffed and crammed’ (textual) city scape that the ‘real’ Venice can no longer satisfactorily cope with it. On the one hand, the ‘reality’ isn’t set a-going because there seems to be no previous imagination; and on the other, it is stifled because there is definitely too much of it. Where do we go from here? In his 1834 novel La Recherche de l’absolu (‘In Search of the Absolute’), the French author Honoré de Balzac argues that the best way for an observer to find out the true semantics of a place is to strip it down to its foundations: Les événements de la vie humaine, soit publique, soit privée, sont si intimement liés à l’architecture, que la plupart des observateurs peuvent reconstruire les nations ou les individus dans toute la vérité de leurs habitudes, d’après les restes de leurs monuments publics ou par l’examen de leurs reliques domestiques. L’archéologie est à la nature sociale ce que l’anatomie comparée est à la nature organisée. Une mosaïque révèle toute

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une société, comme un squelette d’ichthyosaure sous-entend toute une création.11

What Balzac seems to be driving at is a palimpsest-like view of (urban) civilization: in order to discover the ‘truth’ of a city, we might need to ‘dis-cover’ layer after layer, script after script, of its intertextual disposition.12 And as soon as we get to the last (i.e., allegedly the first) layer, we will find its ‘metonymic’ (basic) truth, its essence, ‘reality,’ the thing itself ‘in a nutshell.’ Of course, as everyone will immediately realize, this is wildly optimistic. Due to its still largely Romantic point of view, it is imbued with an (historicist) optimism of being able to ‘reconstruct’ things, of (archaeologically) finding the ‘origin’ as the basis of where everything began. But, in fact, in these matters, there seems to be no beginning at all. As the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has shown for the idea of the ‘myth’ (and there may just as well be some such thing as a ‘myth’ of, say, Venice13 ), there is in actual fact no ‘first’ story from which all the other stories are derived but, rather, there seems to be an endless chain of reformulations and versions telling the same story again and again and again (following the insight that ‘repetition is identity with a difference’).14 In 11 Honoré de Balzac, La Recherche de l’absolu, ed. S. de Sacy (Paris: Gallimard, 1993),

21 f.: ‘The events characterizing human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that almost all observers are able to reconstruct nations or individuals, in all the truth of their behavior, by following the remains of their public monuments or by examining their domestic relics. Archaeology is to social nature what comparative anatomy is to living nature. A mosaic reveals an entire society, just as the skeleton of an ichthyosaur forms the basis of an entire line of creation.’ (My translation. A.M.) 12 For a (despite everything) highly suggestive attempt at writing an urban history of London by first and foremost drawing on its ‘stones,’ see Leo Hollis, The Stones of London: A History in Twelve Buildings (London: Phoenix, 2012). 13 For a critical discussion of the idea of a ‘myth’ of Venice, even though he himself (at times, despite everything) seems to fall prey to that notion, see Graham Holderness, Shakespeare and Venice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 1–17; for its positive description see, e.g., Peter Burke, ‘Early Modern Venice as a Centre of Communication and Information,’ in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297 –1797 , ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 389–419. 14 For the endlessness of ‘myths,’ with no ‘origin’ and no ‘telos’ either, see Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. R.M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988); for the differential aspect of ‘identity’ see Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, ‘The Paradoxical Status of Repetition,’ Poetics Today 1 (1980): 151–159.

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addition, as the history of Troy is apt to demonstrate, what we, for a long time, have considered to be the ‘true’ historical city of Troy now merely seems to be the umpteenth layer in a whole series of settlements, which makes it difficult for us to decide which layer precisely we would like to identify as the ‘Troy’ we are looking for. With regard to Venice, of course, this might turn out to be even more difficult, since the place is, as everyone knows, largely in the water (which means that its ‘remains’ and ‘relics’ are drowned and out of sight anyway). If, however, the intertextual display cannot be trusted to be geared or triggered by an initial text, i.e., by some ‘origin,’ or ‘ground,’ one may as well stop ‘copying’ what is allegedly there ‘in the first place,’ and, instead, add or invent or construct something that is not. This would be a shift from a ‘mimetic’ approach, bent on ‘representing’ what is already there, to a ‘performative’ one, creating, and thus ‘presenting,’ something that is not.15 This is precisely what seems to have happened in the second half of the nineteenth century: writers of the city seem no longer all that much preoccupied with imitating, even intertextually, what already exists (which, in the case of Venice, leads, as I have tried to indicate, to the semantic ‘overkill’ described) but, rather, they become interested in imagining, and constructing, cities of their own accord. Instead of reproducing the experience of some urban reality, they begin to consciously produce, and perform, some urban experience which may claim to be valid, too, even though it may not have been shared by anyone alive or dead.16 This seems to have been a decisive turn in (urban) text-making; it is the step from imitation to creation; from representing the ‘world’/the ‘city’ to world-making/city-making; from city scripts reflecting city scapes to city scripts producing them: from ‘mimesis’ to ‘performance.’17

15 For a differentiation between ‘mimetic’ representations and ‘performative’ presentations, see Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, trans. David Henry Wilson (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 16 This would be the shift from what I have tried to describe as ‘cities of the real’ (‘Städte des Realen’) to ‘cities of the imaginary’ (‘Städte des Imaginären’); see Mahler, ‘Stadttexte’ 28 ff. 17 For this distinction, which he develops from what he calls the ‘tilting game of imitation and symbolization,’ see Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, 281 ff. (resp. 250 ff.).

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If one accepts the idea that the act of fictionalizing consists in a kind of ‘crystallization’ of the imaginary by means of the ‘real,’ one can see how this ‘imaginary’ can be liberated by no longer being fettered to a ‘real’ allegedly serving as its legitimate ground. What we get are ‘fictive’ Venices, Londons, Parises that do not (at least not in all their details) have to tally with the preconceived images that we have already developed in our minds through other texts: Because this act of fictionalizing cannot be deduced from the reality repeated in the text, it clearly brings into play an imaginary quality that does not belong to the reality reproduced in the text but that cannot be disentangled from it. Thus the fictionalizing act converts the reality reproduced into a sign, simultaneously casting the imaginary as a form that allows us to conceive what it is toward which the sign points.18

Accordingly, the act of ‘fictionalizing’ Venice seems to convert the ‘real’ Venetian elements reproduced in the text into a sign, and, at the same time, it uses the imaginary elements so as to create a ‘form’ or, rather a ‘gestalt,’ which indicates what this sign might mean, thus creating some individual—and later on collective—‘myth’ of Venice (and this, again, would be precisely what the character of Thaw is missing for Glasgow). Let us take as an example Ian McEwan’s Venetian novel The Comfort of Strangers. One of his descriptions of Venice in the novel reads like this: To reach the hotel, it was necessary to walk across one of the great tourist attractions of the world, an immense wedge-shaped expanse of paving, enclosed on three sides by dignified arcaded buildings and dominated at its open end by a redbrick clock tower, and beyond that a celebrated cathedral of white domes and glittering façade, a triumphant accretion, so it had often been described, of many centuries of civilization. Assembled on the two longer sides of the square, facing across the paving stones like two opposing armies, were the tightly packed ranks of chairs and round tables belonging to the long established cafés; adjacent orchestras, staffed and conducted by men in dinner jackets, oblivious to the morning heat, played simultaneously martial and romantic music, waltzes and extracts from popular operas with thunderous climaxes. Everywhere

18 Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, 2.

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pigeons banked, strutted and excreted, and each café orchestra paused uncertainly after the earnest, puny applause of its nearest customers.19

Of course, McEwan’s text presupposes some kind of intertextual (if not ‘authentic’) knowledge. By obliquely hinting at the city’s most ‘prototypical’ elements such as St. Mark’s Place (‘an immense wedge-shaped expanse of paving, enclosed on three sides by dignified arcaded buildings’) with the Campanile (‘dominated at its open end by a redbrick clock tower’) as well as St. Mark’s itself (‘a celebrated cathedral of white domes and glittering façade’), it establishes a city space allegedly reproducing the ‘real’ while, at the same time, endowing it ‘mythologically’ with an atmosphere of the imaginary, which conveys to us the impression of some confusing, chaotic, disagreeable, dirty locale in which the two British tourists do not really manage to find their way.20 Instead of representing what can be known, the passage presents a very individual construct of what could be imagined: instead of imitating a well-known place, it rather performs it from the point of view of the two tourists on the point of getting lost. It is in that sense that McEwan’s novel—and the same would apply to, say, Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion and other texts of the sort21 — can be said to ‘perform’ Venice, i.e., to create a textual Venice that cannot be seen as a given but that comes into being in, and through, the act of narration (or, for that matter, of fictionalization or even ‘aesthetization’).22

19 Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers (London: Vintage, 1997), 48 f. 20 I here take up what I have developed in further detail in my ‘Writing Venice:

Paradoxical Signification as Connotational Feature,’ in Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice, ed. Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff (Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999), 29–44 (37 ff.); for the distinction between the ‘prototypical’ aspect of a city (focusing its pragmatics and syntactics) and its ‘mythical’ aspect (foregrounding its semantics), see Horst Weich, ‘Prototypische und mythische Stadtdarstellung. Zum “Image” von Paris,’ in Stadt-Bilder: Allegorie—Mimesis —Imagination, ed. Andreas Mahler (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1999), 37–54. 21 See Jeannette Winterson, The Passion (London: Vintage: 1996). 22 Compare the remarks on the ‘aesthetic’ quoted from Borges in note 8 above.

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Performing the City This idea of creating an urban experience by interweaving a reproduction of the ‘real’ with notions of an otherwise unfathomable ‘imaginary’ for which the ‘real’ is used as a sign, can be traced back, above all, to the poetical practice (in the 1850s) of the French poet Charles Baudelaire.23 Paris, he says programmatically in one of his texts, ‘Tu m’as donné ta boue et j’en a fait de l’or’: ‘Paris, you gave me your dirt’ (i.e., the ‘real’) ‘and I turned it into gold’ (into a fictive Paris that uses the ‘real’ dirt to produce highly imaginative art, i.e., ‘scripts’).24 This is what he does, for example, in his poem entitled ‘Une charogne’ (‘A rotting carcass’): Rappelez-vous l’objet que nous vîmes, mon âme, Ce beau matin d’été si doux: Au détour d’un sentier une charogne infâme Sur un lit semé de cailloux, Les jambes en l’air, comme une femme lubrique, Brûlante et suant les poisons, Ouvrait d’une façon nonchalante et cynique Son ventre plein d’exhalaisons.25

On the one hand, the speaker in the poem reminds himself (his ‘soul’; ‘mon âme’) of suddenly having seen (‘nous vîmes’), one beautiful and mild summer morning (‘Ce beau matin d’été si doux’), when moving through the streets of Paris, turning a corner (‘Au détour d’un sentier’), a rotting carcass (‘une charogne’), in an obscene position and full of evil 23 For Baudelaire and the poetical creation of a (lyrical) ‘myth’ of Paris, see Horst Weich, Paris en vers: Aspekte der Beschreibung und semantischen Fixierung von Paris in der französischen Lyrik der Moderne (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998) as well as Karlheinz Stierle, Der Mythos von Paris: Zeichen und Bewußtsein der Stadt (München: dtv, 1998) and Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); all three of them refer, of course, back to the writings of Walter Benjamin.—Incidentally, the year of publication of Baudelaire’s Parisian cycle Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857, happens to have been precisely the same year in which Edward Lear formulated his disgust at Venice’s mimetic ‘over-scriptedness.’ 24 Charles Baudelaire, ‘[Projets d’un épilogue pour l’édition de 1861],’ in Œuvres complètes, 2 vols., ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975/1976), vol. I, 191–192 (192, [II].34; editor’s title). 25 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (1861), in Œuvres complètes, 2 vols., ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975/1976), vol. I, 1–196 (31 f., v. 1–8).

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smell. This would be the ‘dirt.’ On the other, the writer of the poem seems to be doing his best to turn this vile urban ‘object’ into some exquisite aesthetic text by using rare and select vocabulary and by having recourse to a complex and intricate syntax.26 Baudelaire thus constructs a very personal Paris by making use of its everyday and ugly things in order to produce some poetic effect even where it seems to be most difficult. By carefully composing, word for word, a Parisian city script, he creates a Parisian city scape that might exist on paper only: he uses Parisian reality (the ‘sentier,’ the ‘cailloux,’ the ‘matin d’été’) not so much to represent a fact, some event, something that may have happened to him as a person, but to present an imaginary scene—a scene that could always have been possible even though it may never really have taken place. Following his idea of a ‘creative imagination,’ he begins to construct a ‘Paris of the mind.’27 So the vector between city scape and city script seems to have turned. If, in the texts allegedly (and ‘discursively’) communicating urban experience, we have the impression as if the city scape preceded the city script (‘Venice’ ← ‘this is Venice’), in the texts (as it were, ‘a-discursively’) ‘performing’ urban experience, we have to acknowledge that it is the other way round (‘this is Paris’ → ‘Paris’).28 An anaphoric (and, to some

26 For the (Parnassian and post-Parnassian) strategy of (lexematic, and metrical) ‘rarefaction,’ see Klaus W. Hempfer, ‘Konstituenten Parnassischer Lyrik,’ in Romanische Lyrik: Dichtung und Poetik. Walter Pabst zu Ehren, ed. Titus Heydenreich, Eberhard Leube and Ludwig Schrader (Tübingen: Narr, 1993), 69–91. 27 I take this cue from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s collection of poems A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems (New York: New Directions, 1968); for the idea of an ‘imagination créatrice’ see Baudelaire, Salon de 1859, and Le peintre de la vie moderne, in Œuvres complètes, 2 vols., ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975/1976), vol. II, 608–682 (esp. 619 ff.), and 683–724. 28 For the differentiation between ‘discursive’ and ‘a-discursive’ (or ‘counterdiscursive’) language use, see my ‘Diskurs: Versuch einer Entwirrung,’ Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 120 (2010): 153–173. For the notion of ‘discourse’ as something the production of which is ‘at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality,’ see Michel Foucault, ‘Orders of Discourse: Inaugural Lecture Delivered at the Collège de France,’ Social Science Information 10, 2 (1971): 7–30 (8); for its opposite as ‘counterdiscourse,’ see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A.M. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2002), 48 and 326 ff.

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extent, exophoric) ‘this’ (looking backward) seems to have turned into a kataphoric (and endophoric) ‘this’ (looking forward).29 In the wake of the Baudelairian experiment, this is precisely what will determine urban text-making (and not so much urban world-making) in the decades to come. What these texts do is create city scapes through city scripts. They use the ‘real’ in order to deploy an ‘imaginary,’ perhaps not so much merely to ‘narrate’ spaces but to ‘aesthetically’ create them; they, as it were, invent new ‘maps’ in order to show unforeseen ‘territories’ (and this is perhaps where the idea of the ‘epiphany’ mentioned earlier comes into play).30 Intertextually, they use scripts to create ever more scripts. As does, e.g., Raymond Queneau’s Parisian poetry. Let us have a look at the following poem from his collection Courir les rues (1967): sur Paris dormant ruisselait le vieux Paris n’est plus la forme d’une ville Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie traversant de Paris le fourmillant tableau Et le sombre Paris en se frottant les yeux vomissement confus de l’énorme Paris trouble vomissement du fastueux Paris et des fumiers infects que rejette Paris rêve parisien aussi devant ce Louvre une image m’opprime31

29 For the different types of reference (or ‘phoricity’) within and out of texts, with the ‘exophoric’ referring to the context, the ‘endophoric’ within the text itself, and the ‘kataphoric’ looking forward and the ‘anaphoric’ looking back, see Gillian Brown and George Yule, Discourse analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 190 ff. (192); see also M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Cohesion in English (London: Longman, 1976). 30 For the Borgesian idea of identifying the ‘aesthetic’ as the presentation of a presence that probably does not exist, thus creating the impression (or, rather, illusion) of an ‘epiphany,’ see note 8 above. For the play between texts (as material ‘maps’) and their content (as semantic ‘territories’), see Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, 247 ff.; for a use of the distinction between ‘map’ and ‘territory’ in the discussion of urban texts, see Mahler, ‘Imaginäre Karten,’ 223 ff. 31 Raymond Queneau, Courir les rues (1967), in Œuvres complètes, 2 vols., vol. I., ed. Claude Debon (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 349–431 (364).

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Even though admittedly in a syntactically rather oblique way, the poem seems to make statements about an urban experience in Paris. What we get is some kind of complaint about the changes in the city (‘le vieux Paris n’est plus’; ‘Paris change!’), the speaker’s melancholy mood (‘ma mélancolie,’ ‘sombre’), some kind of movement (‘traversant’) and a feeling of disgust in front of the Parisian masses (‘le fourmillant tableau,’ ‘vomissement confus,’ ‘trouble vomissement,’ ‘des fumiers infects’), all of which leads to a line apart designating the experience as a dream (‘rêve’) or, rather, as a nightmare that prolongs itself even in front of one of the most ample collections of art (‘ce Louvre’). But this impression seems to be the result of my ‘play’ with the poem only. Because I have not printed all of it yet. Queneau’s poem is entitled ‘Concordances Baudelairiennes (avec la gracieuse autorisation du Centre de lexicologie de Besançon)’ (‘Baudelairian Concordances, amiably authorized by the Besançon Centre of Lexicology’) and truthfully, in its entirety, it goes like this: 045008 089007 089029 091026 103027 105016 105016 105014

sur Paris dormant ruisselait le vieux Paris n’est plus la forme d’une ville Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie traversant de Paris le fourmillant tableau Et le sombre Paris en se frottant les yeux vomissement confus de l’énorme Paris trouble vomissement du fastueux Paris et des fumiers infects que rejette Paris

102000 rêve parisien 089033 aussi devant ce Louvre une image m’opprime

What we now see is a mere (and in the first ‘stanza’ almost chronological) list of lines from Baudelairian poems that somehow refer to Paris (those familiar with corpus linguistics will recognize the procedure).32 And what Queneau does is to literally ‘com-pose’ those ten lines in which Baudelaire has used the word ‘Paris,’ or anything that can be connected with it, in order to produce a new poem. His poem is ‘completely’ intertextual in the sense that it does not even add or change a single word but 32 The first three digits refer to the number of the poem in the collection, the last three to the line of the verse in question.

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merely juxtaposes Baudelairian lines in order to produce something new. It seems to make a city script out of another city script (so far, we have, in a way, only had city scapes turning into other city scapes). The intertextual game is no longer predominantly a semantic one (turning ideas into other ideas) but, rather, syntactic (turning/recombining material into different material). And the game continues. Raymond Queneau’s colleague Jacques Roubaud, in his Parisian collection significantly entitled La forme d’une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur des humains (1999), begins his first subsection ‘intertextually’ called Recourir les rues with a kind of homage to Queneau: Le Paris où nous marchons N’est pas celui où nous marchâmes Et nous avançons sans flamme Vers celui que nous laisserons.33

We immediately recognize the same melancholy and dark picture of Paris that we have encountered in the Queneau poem. Nevertheless, what is at stake here, is the same (syntactically, i.e., in this case metrically, guided) intertextual game that we have already seen in the relation between Queneau and Baudelaire. Accordingly, in the ‘Commentaire du poème précédent’ directly following, Roubaud explains his procedure: J.R.—Sept pieds huit pieds sept pieds huit pieds moi aussi j’ai fait un quatrain verlainien R.Q.—Oui, mais toi tu copies.34

‘Seven feet, eight feet, seven feet, eight feet, I can do what you do’—‘yes, but you’re copying.’ The object of the ‘copying,’ however, quite definitely 33 Jacques Roubaud, Recourir les rues, in La forme d’une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur des humains: Cent cinquante poèmes, 1991–1998 (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 9–29 (11). 34 Roubaud, Recourir les rues, 12.

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is no longer a ‘scape’ (or a series of scapes) via a ‘script’ but, rather, the ‘script’ itself: an endless flight of scripts infinitely producing text after (Parisian) text after (Parisian) text. Next to the (recto) chain of effects, we now also have a (verso) chain of processes: mimesis and performance seem to be in complete abeyance; and the urban experience is there and not there.35

Bibliography Balzac, Honoré de. La Recherche de l’absolu, edited by S. de Sacy. Paris: Gallimard (folio), 1993. Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres complètes. 2 vols., edited by Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). 1975/1976. Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth. Translated by R.M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Borges, Jorge Luis. “La muralla y los libros.” In Prosa completa, edited by C.V. Frías. 3 vols. Barcelona: Bruguera, 1980. Vol. 2. 131–133. Brown, Gillian, and George Yule. Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Burke, Peter. “Early Modern Venice as a Center of Communication and Information.” In Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297 –1797 , edited by John Martin and Dennis Romano. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 389–419. Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems. New York: New Directions, 1968. Foucault, Michel. “Orders of Discourse: Inaugural Lecture Delivered at the Collège de France.” Social Science Information 10, no. 2 (1971): 7–30. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by A.M. Sheridan. London: Routledge, 2002. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes: La Littérature au second degré. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Gray, Alasdair. Lanark: A Life in Four Books. New York: Braziller, 1985. Halliday, M.A.K., and Ruqaiya Hasan. Cohesion in English. London: Longman, 1976. Hempfer Klaus W. “Konstituenten Parnassischer Lyrik.” In Romanische Lyrik: Dichtung und Poetik. Walter Pabst zu Ehren, edited by Titus Heydenreich, Eberhard Leube and Ludwig Schrader. Tübingen: Narr, 1993. 69–91. Holderness, Graham. Shakespeare and Venice. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Hollis, Leo. The Stones of London: A History in Twelve Buildings. London: Phoenix, 2012. 35 For textual games as verso-recto processes see Mahler, ‘Imaginäre Karten,’ 219 ff.

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Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Translated by David Henry Wilson. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998. Mahler, Andreas. “Writing Venice: Paradoxical Signification as Connotational Feature.” In Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice, edited by Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999. 29–44. ———. “Stadttexte—Textstädte: Formen und Funktionen diskursiver Stadtkonstitution.” In Stadt-Bilder: Allegorie—Mimesis—Imagination, edited by Andreas Mahler. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1999. 11–36. ———. “Imaginäre Karten: Performative Topographie bei Borges und Réda.” In Metropolen im Maßstab: Der Stadtplan als Matrix des Erzählens in Literatur, Film und Kunst, edited by Achim Hölter, Volker Pantenburg and Susanne Stemmler. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009, 217–239. ———. “Venedig als Xenotopos in der Literatur des ausgehenden neunzehnten Jahrhunderts.” In Xenotopien: Verortungen des Fremden im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Volker Barth, Frank Halbach and Bernd Hirsch. Berlin: Lit, 2010. 209–221. ———. “Diskurs: Versuch einer Entwirrung.” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 120 (2010): 153–173. McEwan, Ian. The Comfort of Strangers. London: Vintage, 1997. Pfister, Manfred. “How Postmodern is Intertextuality?” In Intertextuality, edited by Heinrich F. Plett. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991. 207– 224. ———, ed. The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers. An Annotated Anthology. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996. Prendergast, Christopher. Paris and the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Queneau, Raymond. Œuvres complètes. 2 vols. Vol. I, edited by Claude Debon. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1989. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. “The Paradoxical Status of Repetition.” Poetics Today 1 (1980): 151–159. Roubaud, Jacques. La forme d’une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur des humains: Cent cinquante poèmes, 1991–1998. Paris: Gallimard (Poésie), 2008. Stierle, Karlheinz. Der Mythos von Paris: Zeichen und Bewußtsein der Stadt. München: dtv, 1998. Weich, Horst. Paris en vers: Aspekte der Beschreibung und semantischen Fixierung von Paris in der französischen Lyrik der Moderne. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998.

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———. “Prototypische und mythische Stadtdarstellung. Zum ‘Image’ von Paris.” In Stadt-Bilder: Allegorie—Mimesis—Imagination, edited by Andreas Mahler. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1999. 37–54. Winterson, Jeannette. The Passion. London: Vintage: 1996.

CHAPTER 3

(Urban) Sacred Places and Profane Spaces—Theological Topography in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land Verena Keidel

Preliminary Remarks Over 90 years after its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land still permits a wide range of different interpretations, some of which specifically explore ideas of the urban.1 In the poem, Eliot portrays cities like Munich or London and their actual topography of streets, gardens, and churches, as well as various intertextual allusions to literary predecessors dealing with urban space. Liliana Pop seems to state the obvious when she comments, The Waste Land “as the title already indicates,

1 See e.g., the volume edited by Joe Moffett, The Waste Land at 90. A Retrospective (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011).

V. Keidel (B) Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_3

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is primarily a space.”2 London, above all, emerges as the main urban venue of the poem reflecting many contrasting notions of the city. Eliot’s London is, in the words of Robert Crawford, “a city of the mind as well as a city of the external world”3 ; put differently, it is, as Bernard Bergonzi notes, “like an archaeological site”4 offering different (intertextual) layers of urbanity to be dug up and explored by the reader. My reading of The Waste Land’s cityscapes investigates urban space in terms of religious discourse from a twofold point of view. First the city in Eliot’s poem is discussed against a backdrop of the Judeo-Christian framework of late antiquity and its understanding of “spiritual citizenship”; using the Augustinian concept of “the city” as a model for comparison, Eliot’s cities are read as an urban culture in crisis. Second, these theological ideas are related to more recent debates on the interconnectedness of religion and urban space in the fields of religious studies and sociology. My position is that the Augustinian idea of space as an interior disposition and recent religious readings of spatiality permeate The Waste Land. More specifically, actual physical places and urban social spaces are discussed considering the following aspects: How is the religious meaning of the city as a civitas shaped within Eliot’s cityscapes? How is the sacred built environment embedded, constructed, and (re)shaped in urban space in the poem? Can urban topography in The Waste Land actually be read as theology?

2 Liliana Pop, “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Religion,” The Waste Land at 90. A Retrospective, ed. Joe Moffett (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011), 93–110 (101). 3 Robert Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 45. 4 Bernard Bergonzi, “Eliot’s Cities,” in T. S. Eliot at the Turn of the Century, ed. Marianne Thormählen (Lund: Lund University Press, 1994), 59–76 (66).

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Sacredness and Civitas: Augustine and the Idea of the “Two Cities” As the theologian Philip Sheldrake indicates, it is primarily the idea of “the city” that from the beginning of Christian theology has provided a cluster of religious symbolic meaning.5 The urban spatialization of religious ideas originates in the Book of Isaiah and Revelation6 ; the latter speaks of the New Jerusalem as “the holy city […] coming down from God out of heaven.”7 This understanding of “the city” as a transcendental center of sacredness symbolized in (New) Jerusalem finds its counterpart in Babylon, the representation of depravation, earthly vices and human hubris.8 Gerard O’Daly shows that the parallels between Jerusalem and Babylon, between the city as a symbol of (spiritual) salvation and one of damnation, draw on texts of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition which “stress the demonization of the present world, and contrast it with a heavenly world or city.”9 Augustine of Hippo, the philosopher and Church father, explored the contrasting notions of “the two cities” in his seminal work De Civitate Dei, written in the wake of the sack of the city of Rome by Alaric and the Vandals in 410. In the second part of his opus magnum Augustine recalls the biblical cities of Babylon and Jerusalem and envisions two contrasting urban spaces: the eponymous “City of God” and “the City of Man.” Choosing the term civitas, i.e., “community,” in his original Latin title, Augustine clearly regards the “city” not as a physical place (in the sense of urbs ) but as an immaterial social and religious space symbolizing two

5 Philip F. Sheldrake, “A Spiritual City. Urban Vision and the Christian Tradition,” Theology in Built Environments: Exploring Religion, Architecture, and Desig n, ed. Sigurd Bergmann (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2009), 151–172 (155ff.). 6 Jeanette S. Zissel, “Universal Salvation in the Earthly City; De Civitate Dei and the Significance of the Hazelnut in Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009), 331–352 (336). 7 The Bible. Authorized King James Version. With an Introduction and Notes by Robert

Carroll and Stephen Prickett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1997]), Rev. 21: 2. Hebrews also mentions Jerusalem as “the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem”. Hebrews 12: 22. Quoted in ibid. 8 Gerard O’Daly, Augustine’s City of God. A Reader’s Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 53. 9 O’Daly, Augustine’s City of God, 54.

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essential states of being: “A civitas is not just a group of people living together, but a community with its own religion […] culture and moral values.”10 Augustine portrays civitas dei as a symbol of the Christian community characterized by the love of God. He associates the “earthly city” with sinful pride, egoistic self-love, and “the clash of human wills.”11 The members of Augustine’s civitas terrena will suffer damnation at the end of time—Augustine here evokes the Babylonian judgement—while the members of the City of God will receive eternal salvation.12 Citizenship in the diametrically opposed cities of God and Man is, as Jeannette S. Zissel sums up, “defined by spiritual similarity rather than by any connection with geographical location, culture, or time.”13 Explicitly referencing the role of the sacred in Augustine’s work, Köhler-Ryan concludes that “the sacred finds its place in the city when represented by that which first brings persons together: their shared lived world.”14 Beginning with Augustine at the latest, cities have become, as Sheldrake notes, “powerful symbols of how we understand and construct community.”15 This very notion of the city as a space of sacredness and salvation in contrast to one of profane depravity and damnation has also served as a blueprint for various literary descriptions of urbanity throughout the centuries. As my reading of urban spaces in The Waste Land will show, Eliot’s poem is to be regarded as part of this tradition. Let me now turn from late antiquity and its theological construction of

10 Johannes Van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon. A Study into Augustine’s City of God and the Sources of his Doctrines of the two Cities (Leiden/New York: Brill, 1991), 104. For a profound discussion of the complex meaning of civitas see van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon, 102ff. See also Philip F. Sheldrake, “A Spiritual City? Place, Memory, and City Making,” Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place, ed. Gregory Caicco (University Press of New England, 2007), 50–68 (52ff.). 11 Patricia L. MacKinnon, “Augustine’s City of God: The Divided Self/The Divided Civitas,” The City of God. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Dorothy F. Donnelly (New York et al.: Lang, 1995), 319–352 (342). 12 Zissel, “Universal Salvation,” 336. 13 Zissel, “Universal Salvation,” 331f. 14 Renée Köhler-Ryan, “Communicating the Elemental Cosmos: The Hereford Mappa

Mundi, Sacred Space and the City,” in The Sacred and the City, ed. Liliana and Walter van Herck (London/New York: Continuum, 2012), 141–160 (154). 15 Philip F. Sheldrake, “Placing the Sacred: Transcendence and the City,” Literature & Theology (June 2007), 1–16 (3).

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the city as symbolic space to more recent reflections on conceptions of the sacred and the profane and their relation to spatiality.

Religious Readings of Space---“the Sacred” and Place Religious scholar Kim Knott argues that the interconnectedness between space and religion is, in fact, self-evident.16 Since the origins of mankind, religious practice has literally “taken place”17 in various physical settings such as temples, churches, mosques, or synagogues, as well as specific sites in nature. Etymologically, the Latin origins of “profane” and “sacred” contain a spatial meaning. Profanum denotes the space which lies outside the sacred center of the temple (pro fanum); sacer deriving from sancire means to encircle or to enclose.18 (Early) seminal thinkers of the sacred like Rudolf Otto or Mircea Eliade subject physical domains of worshipping to phenomenological readings of religious space.19 These physical places, however, also point to the social dimension of built environments, to the way this (sacred) space has been produced. In contrast to essentialist readings of the sacred that describe “the sacred” as an apriori-entity to be discovered and experienced by men, late-modern readings see the sacred not imbued in material or natural sites but as being produced—through religious practice—by the community of believers itself. In the tradition of Henri Lefebvre and Jonathan Z. Smith, Kim Knott elaborates on this process of producing (sacred) space:

16 Kim Knott, “Spatial Theory and Method for the Study of Religion.” Temenos 41, no. 2 (2005), 153–184 (153). 17 See the title of Jonathan Z. Smith’s seminal discussion on religious ritual and space: Jonathan Z. Smith, “To take Place,” in Ritual and Religious Belief: A Reader, ed. Graham Harvey (London: equinox, 2005), 26–50. 18 Liliana Gómez and Walter van Herck, “Framing the Sacred in the City: An Introduction,” in The Sacred and the City, ed. Liliana Gómez and Walter van Herck (London/New York: Continuum, 2012), 1–12 (3). 19 Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (München: Beck, 2004 [1963]); Mircea Eliade, Das Heilige und das Profane. Vom Wesen des Religiösen, trans. Eva Moldenhauer (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1998).

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Place is more than a natural or material space. It is lived first and foremost in hearts and minds. and is socially organised. Physical spaces whether “sacred” or “profane” […] follow. They take shape on the basis of […] socially constructed maps of the world.20

This approach to religious space resulting from social practice can be traced back to a reappraisal of “the sacred” and “profane” in the wake of the developing field of religious and sociological studies at the beginning of the twentieth century. The sociologist Émile Durkheim in his seminal work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915), (Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, 1912), argued for a functionalist interpretation of the sacred by locating it not in the realm of the transcendental but in the community of the believers themselves.21 Drawing on anthropological studies, Durkheim stated that all preindustrial societies are ruled by the separation of the spheres of the sacred and the profane. Participation in religious life results in spatial partition. At a more fundamental level, the French sociologist saw religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, […] beliefs and practices which unite in one single community, […] all those who adhere to them.”22 More recent discourses deal with the interplay of religion and space by following this functionalist interpretation of the sacred place as being produced, shaped, and reshaped within social (urban) contexts. Building on Durkheim’s model, Philip Smith explores the spatial dimensions of these concepts of profanity and sacredness. He considers the physical buildings, Christian churches, as “the most immediate example of sacred places in occidental society,” and argues that these buildings should be classified with reference to a reenactment of ritual or (self) sacrifice taking place in them: “The sacred status of sacred places is reproduced by forms of ritual, impersonal and bodily behaviour that set the space apart […]. Such ritualized activities may take the form of formal religious ceremonies 20 Knott, “Spatial Theory,” 170f. See also Kim Knott, The Location of Religion. A Spatial Analysis (London: Equinox, 2005), 100f. 21 Eliot had taken great interests in the writings of his contemporary Durkheim. While earlier criticism of The Waste Land concentrated on Eliot’s indebtedness to the writings of James Frazer and Jessie Weston, more recent criticism read Eliot’s depiction of urbanity against the backdrop of the developing fields of sociology and religious studies. See, e.g., Crawford, The Savage and the City, 95 ff. 22 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swan (Mineola/New York: Dover, 2008), 47.

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[…].”23 In contrast to (phenomenological) readings, which regard the sacred (as well as the sacredness of specific places) as transhistorical and transcultural, Smith’s analysis emphasizes the shifting meanings of (sacred or profane) places as a result of historical changes and/or social developments. Further, Smith makes an important modification to the Durkheimian model by creating a clear separation of “the profane” from what Smith calls “the mundane”: While the former is understood as the binary opposite to the sacred—and hence associated with depravation— the “mundane” occupies a more neutral position characterized by the ordinary and everyday thus exemplifying a specific urban environment.24 So far my reflections were meant to illustrate the interconnectedness of place, (urban) space, and religion. I will turn to selected passages of The Waste Land and analyze how religious discourse permeates Eliot’s cityscapes and how the physical sites in the poem convey notions of sacredness and profanity.

“The Mundane is Sin”: London’s City in “The Burial of The Dead” In a well-known passage taken from the first part of The Waste Land Eliot directly refers to specific places in London’s topography.25 In the poem King William Street, London Bridge, and the Church of St Mary Woolnoth, all focus us on London’s center of trade, the financial district of the City. It is a symbol of strictly material concerns and a setting of daily routine, a social space as well as a physical place:

23 Both quotations Philip Smith, “The Elementary Forms of Place and Their Transformations: A Durkheimian Model,” Qualitative Sociology 22, no. 1 (1999): 13–35 (17f.). Nick Osbaldiston and Theresa Petray draw on Smith’s reading and suggest to add a fifth category of Durkheimian space to Smith’s categories, that of the “left sacred.” “Horror, dread, awe and disgust—revisiting Durkheim and place,” TASA 2009 Conference Proceedings: The Future of Sociology. 1–11 (6f.). https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/14966/1/Osb aldiston%2C_Nick_and_Petray.pdf. 24 Smith, “Elementary Forms,” 21f. See also Osbaldiston and Petray, “Horror, Dread, Awe and Disgust,” 4. 25 For a more detailed account of Eliot’s use of “London landmarks” in the poem see Marianne Thormählen, “The Waste Land”. A Fragmentary Wholeness (Lund: Gleerup, 1978), 133–135.

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Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.26

In these lines the speaker depicts office workers crossing London Bridge on their way to work, a faceless crowd: “[…] each man fixed his eyes before his feet.” In Eliot’s London, the sacred site of Mary Woolnoth, originally a setting for religious ritual, is transformed into a topography of workplaces and public spaces which Philip Smith in his spatial reading of Durkheim associates with the “mundane”27 : an urban environment of (working) routine. The function of this physical place of Christian devotion clearly differs from its intended purpose. The bells striking with a dull and “dead sound” do not herald the gathering of the Christian community about to engage in sacred ritual, the holy mass. Rather, they set the pace for the city clerks on their way to their offices. As Liliana Pop rightly remarks, Eliot stresses the passing of chronological time28 —“Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours” (TWL 7, l. 67)—symbolizing a mundane routine. The primacy of material concerns symbolized by the financial institutions of London’s City supersedes the search for the sacred in collective ritual as it is understood by Durkheim and late-modern analysts. As Smith argues in his spatial interpretation of Durkheim’s ideas, the sacred potential of church buildings (like that of St Mary Woolnoth) cannot be reproduced without the reenacting of religious practice.29 Durkheim’s understanding of spiritual regeneration within the community and its ritualistic practices are thrown into sharp contrast when compared to the humdrum existence of the inhabitants of Eliot’s civic spaces. The practice of communal worship 26 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. Authoritative Text, Context, Criticism, ed. Michael North (New York/London: Norton, 2001) 7, l. 60–68. 27 Smith, “Elementary Forms,” 15. 28 Pop, “Use of Poetry,” 39. 29 Smith, “Elementary Forms,” 18.

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and its function as a “social cohesive” is replaced in a very real sense by the mechanical routine and anonymity of modern urban life. Existence in the urban waste land is, in the words of Russell Elliott Murphy, determined by a “transient service of materialism and of other temporal and empty pursuits.”30 Eliot’s contemporary London is devoid of communal (church) ritual in Durkheim’s sense. It seems also devoid of a shared existence in the sense of Augustine’s eponymous “City of God”: the vision of “people joined together by a communal bond.”31 Urban life in this passage represented by the city clerks on their way to work recalls Augustine’s concept of the civitas terrena and its depraved existence lacking in religious commitment as well as “love of God.” This is also Pop’s position as she states: “The quintessentially urban space, the very concrete business district of London, is also the place that is contrasted with the Augustinian City of God.”32 This figurative understanding of urban space in the Augustinian sense (as the spiritual state of a depraved existence) is supported by the allusions to a mere physical conception of damnation by the Italian writer Dante in the lines “I had not thought death had undone so many. /Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled”33 (TWL 7, 63f.). Eliot’s intertextual reference, The Divine Comedy, has an inherent spatial meaning, too. Drawing on antique models of the underworld and in contrast to the medieval Christian idea of the immateriality of the soul, Dante’s Inferno delineates the corporeality of the damned as well as defining the topology of hell. 30 Russell Elliott Murphy, A Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot. A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Facts on File, 2007), 449. 31 Van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon, 103, translation of De Civitate Dei 15, 8. William Chapman Sharpe points to an earlier draft of the poem which quoting from Revelation “links these crowds […]—of the ‘Unreal city’ stanza—to the citizens of Babylon, the worldly city of fornication.” Unreal Cities. Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 117. 32 Pop, “Use of Poetry,” 105. 33 “So long a train/of people, that I should not have believed/that death had undone so

many.” Inferno III, 55–57. The second Dantean echo refers to the Limbo (Inferno IV, 25– 27): “Here, there was to be heard/no complaint but the sighs, /which caused the eternal air to tremble.” Both quotations: TWL 22, notes 5 and 6. For a detailed comparison of Dante’s and Augustine’s conceptions of “hell,” see Rex D. Barnes, “Augustine and Dante’s Inferno: Depicting Hell,” Journal of Religion and Culture 22, no. 1 (2011): 1–15.

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Dino Bigongiari points this out in his analysis of Dante’s work: “So we should say of the souls in Hell: they cannot occupy space for they have no matter; but Dante treats them as if they do occupy space.”34 By using these spatial images of la città dolente, the “City of Woe,” Eliot blends the Christian vision of an infernal physical place with the spiritual depravation of contemporary London’s civitas. Thus, in “The Burial of the Dead” the ordinary, daily space of working routine in the financial district of the City also takes on aspects of “profanity” which is “associated with evil and pollution […] and speak[ing] of the depths of depravity.”35 As a result, “mundane” London topography in “The Burial of the Dead” is rendered “profane” in a very Dantean sense.36 The Dantean reference also has an ironic implication as pointed out by Andrija Matic, since Eliot’s city clerks, unlike the sinners of Dante’s Inferno, are “unaware of the horror, or spiritual hell, in which their souls roam.”37 The actual profane sinfulness as described in Dante’s Inferno has been replaced by the pure indifference of mundane urban limbo-state, which in Eliot’s own words is even worse. He stated this some years later after his conversion to the Anglican Church: “[…] damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation—of salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it at least gives some significance to living.”38

34 Dino Bigongiari, Readings in The Divine Comedy, ed. Anne Paolucci (Dover: Griffon

House, 2006), 51. 35 Smith, “Elementary Forms,” 16. 36 As Eliot himself explained in “What Dante means to me,” the reference to Dante’s

idea of damnation intended to make the reader aware of the parallels between “the medieval inferno and modern life.” T. S. Eliot, “What Dante means to me,” To Criticize the Critic and other Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965), 125–135 (128). Also, the implicit references to Charles Baudelaire and his nightmarish vision of modern urban existence in the phrase of the “Unreal City” enhance, of course, the idea of London as a setting of infernality. For a profound reading of Baudelaire’s influence on this passage see Sharpe, Unreal Cities, 114ff. 37 Andrija Matic, “T. S. Eliot, Dante and Irony,” in T. S. Eliot, Dante, and the Idea of Europe, ed. Paul Douglass (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 87–94 (90). 38 T. S. Eliot, “Baudelaire,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1972 [1932]), 419–430 (427).

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Engaging with Urban Holiness: St Magnus the Martyr in “the Fire Sermon” In the third part of The Waste Land, “The Fire Sermon,” Eliot again stresses the parallel between modern urban life and the idea of the depraved city. Not only does he include a reference to Babylon in the line “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept …” (TWL 11, l. 182)— referring to Psalm 137 “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”39 —, the speaker on his way along the river Thames also encounters a depraved, polluted environment of “dull canal[s]” (TWL 11, l. 189) and shores. Finally, however, he comes across another real-life London church building, St Magnus the Martyr, (re)built by the architect Christopher Wren: O City, City, I can sometimes hear Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, The pleasant whining of a mandoline And a clatter and a chatter from within Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls Of Magnus Martyr hold Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold. (TWL 14, l. 259–265)

Following Tiresias’s observation of the depressing sexual meeting between the typist and the young man, the dignified “splendour” of St Magnus the Martyr serves as a poignant contrast not only to the bleak human encounters but also to the earlier depiction of London’s City. While the function of the church of St Mary Woolnoth in “The Burial of the Dead” was reduced to determining the timing of modern working routine with a “dead sound” (TWL 7, l. 68), Magnus Martyr in “The Fire Sermon” is perceived very differently. The shining “white and gold” of the sacred built environment arouse a sense of awe and admiration. This sense can be associated with an experience of the “numinous,” a sense of awe, as it has been formulated by phenomenologist readings of sacred space by, e.g., Durkheim’s contemporary Rudolf Otto. In the notes to The Waste Land, Eliot stresses the “finest” interior (TWL 24) of Wren’s

39 The Bible, Psalm 137, 1.

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church, which seems to represent the very special pulchritude, which Sheldrake links—interestingly in a reference to Augustine—“to an ability to evoke wonder and to grant access to ‘the sacred’.”40 Eliot’s notes indicate that the portrayal of St Magnus the Martyr in The Waste Land is in response to an official report entitled The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches by the London County in 1920. This proposal caused a public outcry. In various articles Eliot protested against the impending destruction by insisting that the City Churches must be preserved not (only) because of their religious function (of offering a place for the Christian community) but rather for their special aesthetic appeal: […] they [the city churches] give to the business quarter of London a beauty which its hideous banks and commercial houses have not quite defaced. Some are by Christopher Wren, others by his school; […] As the prosperity of London has increased the City Churches have fallen into desuetude; […] To the one who, like the present writer, passes his days in the City of London […] the loss of these towers […] will be irreparable and unforgotten.41

As Atkins notes, the fact that the ecclesiastical buildings, among them Magnus Martyr, were facing demolition raised Eliot’s awareness of “the tension existing between the old churches, the developing City, and contemporary society.”42 This tension is also the subject of recent reflections on “the sacred and the city,” where the character of physical sacred sites is seen as being reshaped by modern urbanity43 : (Christian) Churches (like St Magnus the Martyr) are considered social spaces

40 Sheldrake, “Placing the Sacred,”14. 41 T. S. Eliot, “London Letter,” Reprinted in TWL 131. 42 Hazel Atkins, “Ways of Viewing Churches in The Waste Land and Little Gidding,”

Religion & Literature 44, no. 1 (2012), 167–173 (168). See also Matthew Bradley, “Sinful Cities and Ecclesiastical Excuses: The ‘Churches for Art’s Sake’ Movement from the Century Guild to Eliot,” The Yearbook of English Studies 37, no. 1 (2007), 193–208 (193). 43 See, e.g., Peter Nynäs and Anne Birgitta Pessi, “Relocating and Negotiating the Sacred: The Reception of a Chapel in a Shopping Mall,” The Sacred and the City (2012), 161–187; Liliana Gómez, “The Urbanization of Society: Towards a Cultural Analysis of the Sacred in the Modern Metropolis,” The Sacred and the City (2012), 31–51.

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enabling peaceful reflection, providing a communal though not necessarily religious experience as well as a special aesthetic experience of the “numinous” within the mundane environment of the city. Wren’s second church in The Waste Land illustrates this very intersection of historic Christian architecture with modern secular urbanity. It shows not only the “numinous” beauty of the physical sacred site, but also the social dimension of ecclesiastical buildings within an urban topography. In “The Fire Sermon,” the lines preceding the image of “Magnus Martyr” depict a community of fishmen accompanied, not by a “dead sound,” but by the “pleasant,” cheerful music of a mandolin (TWL 14, l. 261). Atkins argues that in these lines [the] colon [separating] the image of the lounging fishermen [sic] and the description of St. Magnus Martyr, [seems] to suggest a close relationship. If these lines do offer a glimmer of hope in the waste land, hope for a meaningful, cheerful community of people […], then perhaps the colon signifies that somehow the presence of the church fosters this kind of communal existence. If this church is perceived as a place of light and splendour, then perhaps this perception translates some meaning and joy into the lives of those who see it or lounge close to it.44

Atkins’s suggestion of interpreting the passage of Magnus Martyr as a symbol of hope in the urban waste land seems valid. In contrast to the depraved masses surrounding St. Mary Woolnoth in “The Burial of the Dead” the portrayal of the second church in The Waste Land points to a more positive interplay among the city, its inhabitants, and religious sites. Thus perceived, “The Fire Sermon” at least allows for the idea of urban space as a setting for spiritual awareness, an idea that is taken up shortly afterwards in a direct reference to St. Augustine’s autobiographical Confessions: To Carthage then I came […] O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest (TWL 15, l. 307–310) 44 Atkins, “Ways of Viewing Churches,” 169. Atkins also points to the possibility of

a different reading of Magnus Martyr: “the splendour, or the light, represented by the church building is inexplicable at least in part due to the unwillingness of people to understand it.” Before Atkins it was Jewel Spears Brooker who stressed the meaning of the colon in Reading “The Waste Land”: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 147f.

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The Christian philosopher here describes his return to the city of Carthage. While Carthage in one sense symbolized the depravation of the civitas terrena, Augustine in his writing treated it also as an essential step in his intellectual and spiritual development. It was in Carthage where he encountered the “unholy loves”45 of sexual debauchery; however, in his writing, he also points to the overcoming of sin: Augustine finally turned away from egoistic self-love toward “the holy love” of God, understood as an inner sacred space of the Civitas Dei. With this Augustinian citation as well as the portrayal of St Magnus the Martyr, “The Fire Sermon” provides moments and instances of an escape from the earthly “City of Man.” It provides an experience of numinous beauty and communal existence within the otherwise desolate urban cityscapes. Yet as the last part, “What the Thunder Said,” illustrates, The Waste Land’s ending offers no Christian redemption of the “earthly city.”

Falling Towers and Holy Waters in “What the Thunder Said” In the final part of The Waste Land, the speaker leaves the urban setting for the mountains. From afar he watches the destruction and fall of the “Unreal City”: What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London (TWL 17f., l. 371–375)

The crumbling of these cities, ancient and modern, the crashing towers and the collapse of London Bridge (TWL 19, l. 426), all seem to recall the fall of Babylon, the archetype of the earthly city. They are symbolic of urban depravation and chaos. Frank Kermode interprets this passage as the result of Eliot’s self-declared “Royalist and Anglo-Catholic” attitude. Eliot’s city, for Kermode, is the modern equivalent to imperial Rome: This imperialistic Eliot is the poet of the urbs aeterna, of the transmitted but corrupted dignity of Rome. […] The other site of this city is the 45 Augustine quoted in TWL 58.

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Babylon of Apocalypse, and when the imperium is threadbare and the end approaches […], this is the city we see. It is the Blick ins Chaos.46

Kermode’s reflections on the city in The Waste Land can be related to critical readings of St. Augustine’s concept of the “City of God” as a representation of dogmatic order, as a “strong monocultural Christian world in the making. This world is contrasted with the multitudes of semi-orders of the ‘barbarians’ all around,”47 or, in Eliot’s own words, of “those hooded hordes swarming/Over endless plains” (TWL 17, l. 368f.). The interpretation of the destruction of the cities in “What the Thunder Said” as a parallel to the final destruction of a corrupted civitas terrena in the sense of Augustine seems valid. However, Kermode’s position can be questioned by pointing to the fact that Eliot’s London is not transformed into a redeemed version of (imperial) Rome. For Augustine, as Van Oort points out, “[t]he true city is not Rome, but the city of God. […] Rome is the second Babylon, Babylon the first Rome.”48 This is the very symbolic plane of reference relevant for Eliot’s location of London in the first parts of the poem. Also, it is important to note, that Eliot, at the end of The Waste Land, does not conform closely to the Augustinian framework. The waste cityscapes after their destruction do not turn into the Augustinian civitas caelestis. Nor, which is probably more important, does the speaker of “What the Thunder Said” seem to deplore the (final) fall of the “Unreal City” of London, symbol of British financial and imperial power. He is sitting “upon the shore […] with the arid plane” (TWL 19, l. 423f.) of urban space behind him. If the poem’s spiritual waste lands provide glimpses of salvation in “What the Thunder Said,” then these do not point to Christian religion(s) or Western domination; rather, as many readings have pointed out,49 they

46 Frank Kermode, “A Babylonish Dialect,” The Sewanee Review 74, 1 (Winter 1966), 225–237 (231). 47 Rik Pinxten and Lisa Dikomitis, “Life Stance and Religious Identity in an Urbanized

World: The Meaning of Life as a Modern Predicament,” in The Sacred and the City, ed. Liliana Gómez and Walter van Herck (London/New York: Continuum, 2012), 108– 126(114). 48 Van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon, 96f. 49 See, e.g., Cleo McNelly Kearns, T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry

and Belief (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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are linked to the Eastern Indic traditions. The reference to Buddha’s Fire Sermon in the eponymous third part of the poem indicates this. While the Christian idea of the heavenly “City of God” does serve as a foil for comparison to the desolate urban existence of the first parts of The Waste Land, in “What the Thunder Said” notions of sacredness are (re)located in a very different context in the final vision of the river Ganges: “Ganga” (TWL 18, l. 395), in Hindu thought a symbol of pure sacredness, as it is noted by Harvish Trivedi: According to “the grand myth of its [of the Ganges] divine origin, its waters have proved holy enough to wash off all [… ] sins.”50 In contrast to the Thames, compared earlier to the waters of Babylon and used as a backdrop for human encounters resulting in physical violence, sexual indifference, and spiritual alienation, the sacred river of India provides a hopeful setting for regeneration (literally and metaphorically): a vision of “a damp gust/Bringing rain” (TWL 18, l. 393f.). The natural landscape of the Ganges awaits the thunder’s promise of regeneration with the (threefold) mantric formula Shantih denoting peace.

Conclusion The Waste Land’s civic spaces represent the very interplay of urbanity and religion that has been debated widely since this topos emerged in early theological and religious Judeo-Christian writings. Eliot reintegrates traces of Judeo-Christian notions of sacredness and profanity into his 50 Harish Trivedi, Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India

(Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 35. Rejecting Eliot’s remark of “Ganga is sunken,” Trivedi argues that “it is also Hinduism and the much vaunted Indian spirituality that are seen as sunken against the abiding and exclusive truths of Christianity.” However, in my reading I am following scholars like Cleo McNelly Kearns who point to the appreciation Eliot received for his knowledge and use of this important site of Indic traditions: “[…] Eliot demonstrated, as many Indian readers have testified, an almost uncanny ear for nuances and idioms of Indian thought. When in The Waste Land he refers to what the West class the Ganges as “Ganga”, Eliot’s more traditional and even colloquial term perfectly captures, according to C. Narasimhaiah, the poetic feeling associated with this river in Indic culture.” McNelly Kearns, T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions, 26. This reading is also backed up by Daven Michael Kari: “Any attempt to link Eliot with a strictly orthodox variety of Christianity is likely to fail. […] One must be careful not to use him as a watchdog for orthodoxy. Eliot was throughout most of his life the lone eagle, inspired by many but bound to none.” T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Pilgrimage: A Progress in Craft as an Expression of Christian Perspective (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 3.

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urban space—either through the “Babylon versus Jerusalem” frame of reference, or by the sacred built environment of London topography. The physical sites in London’s city (in the sense of urbs ) illustrate the spiritual state of the people inhabiting and defining this urban space, “communit[ies] as spiritual entit[ies]”51 : the city’s civitas in the sense of Augustine. In order to emphasize the spiritual indifference of London’s urban social space, Eliot (in addition to the Augustinian framework and its figurative understanding of condemnation) also draws on a spatial portrayal of damnation in “The Burial of the Dead”: His account of London’s City as a modern version of Babylon blends with Dante’s corporeal vision of hell, of la città dolente. Furthermore, the depiction of physical sites of sacredness in The Waste Land relates directly to more recent approaches to (sacred) space as being produced and reproduced within social urban contexts. While the church of St Mary Woolnoth seems deprived of its sacred status due to the lack of communal ritual within the City’s profane, desolate environment of working routine, St Magnus the Martyr in its splendor offers an aesthetic experience which echoes ideas of the “numinous.” Wren’s second church is also embedded in an atmosphere of joyful communal experience later to be followed by the Augustinian vision of the return from sinful existence to spiritual salvation. Whereas Judeo-Christian (literary and theological) intertexts as well as Christian buildings seem to dominate urban space in The Waste Land for the main part of the poem, the setting of contemporary London is exchanged for a holy natural site in the Indic tradition at the poem’s conclusion. In “What the Thunder Says,” Eliot transports the remnants of (Western) civic sacredness to the natural landscape of the Ganges. In this manner, he concludes his poem by creating a distinct space between his speaker and both urban social environments and Christian physical sites.

References Atkins, Hazel. “Ways of Viewing Churches in The Waste Land and Little Gidding.” Religion & Literature 44, no. 1 (2012): 176–173. Augustine. The City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2009. 51 O’Daly, Augustine’s City of God, 54.

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Barnes, Rex D. “Augustine and Dante’s Inferno: Depicting Hell.” Journal of Religion and Culture 22, 1 (2011): 1–15. Bergonzi, Bernard. “Eliot’s Cities.” In T. S. Eliot at the Turn of the Century, edited by Marianne Thormählen. Lund: Lund University Press, 1994. 59–76. Bible, the. Authorized King James Version. With an Introduction and Notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 (1997). Bigongiari, Dino. Readings in The Divine Comedy edited by Anne Paolucci. Dover, Griffon House Publications, 2006. Bradley, Matthew. “Sinful Cities and Ecclesiastical Excuses: The ‘Churches for Art’s Sake’ Movement from the Century Guild to Eliot.” The Yearbook of English Studies 37, no. 1 (2007): 193–208. Brooker, Jewel Spears. “Reading The Waste Land”: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Crawford, Robert. The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swan. Mineola/New York: Dover, 2008. Eliade, Mircea. Das Heilige und das Profane. Vom Wesen des Religiösen. Translated by Eva Moldenhauer. Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1998. Eliot, T. S. “Baudelaire.” In Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber, 1972 (1932). 419–430. ———. “What Dante Means to Me.” In To Criticize the Critic and other Writings. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965. 125–135. ———. “London Letter.” In T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. Authoritative Text, Context, Criticism, edited by Michael North. New York/London: Norton, 2001. 131. ———. The Waste Land. Authoritative Text, Context, Criticism, edited by Michael North. New York/London: Norton, 2001. Gómez, Liliana. “The Urbanization of Society: Towards a Cultural Analysis of the Sacred in the Modern Metropolis.” In The Sacred in the City, edited by Gómez, Liliana and Walter van Herck. London/New York: Continuum, 2012, 31–51. Gómez, Liliana, and Walter van Herck. “Framing the Sacred in the City: An Introduction.” In The Sacred in the City, edited by Gómez, Liliana and Walter van Herck. London/New York: Continuum, 2012. 1–12. Kari, Daven Michael. T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Pilgrimage: A Progress in Craft as an Expression of Christian Perspective. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990. Knott, Kim. “Spatial Theory and Method for the Study of Religion.” Temenos 41, no. 2 (2005): 153–184. ———. The Location of Religion. A Spatial Analysis. London: Equinox, 2005.

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Köhler-Ryan, Renée. “Communicating the Elemental Cosmos: The Hereford Mappa Mundi, Sacred Space and the City.” In The Sacred in the City, edited by Gómez, Liliana and Walter van Herck. London/New York: Continuum, 2012. 141–160. Lehan, Richard D. The City in Literature. An Intellectual and Cultural History. London: University of California Press, 1998. MacKinnon, Patricia L. “Augustine’s City of God: The Divided Self/The Divided Civitas.” In The City of God. A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Dorothy F. Donnelly. New York et. al.: Peter Lang, 1995. 319–352. Matic, Andrija. “T. S. Eliot, Dante and Irony.” In T. S. Eliot, Dante, and the Idea of Europe, edited by Paul Douglass. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. 87–94. McNelly Kearns, Cleo. T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief . Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Murphy, Russell Elliott. A Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot. A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 2007. Nynäs, Peter, and Anne Birgitta Pessi. “Relocating and Negotiating the Sacred: The Reception of a Chapel in a Shopping Mall.” In The Sacred in the City, edited by Gómez, Liliana and Walter van Herck. London/New York: Continuum, 2012, 161–187. O’Daly, Gerard. Augustine’s City of God. A Reader’s Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Osbaldiston, Nick, and Theresa Petray. “Horror, Dread, Awe and Disgust— Revisiting Durkheim and Place.” TASA 2009 Conference Proceedings: The Future of Sociology. 1–11. https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/14966/1/Osb aldiston%2C_Nick_and_Petray.pdf. Otto, Rudolf, Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen. München: Beck, 2004 (1963). Pinxten, Rik, and Lisa Dikomitis. “Life Stance and Religious Identity in an Urbanized World: The Meaning of Life as a Modern Predicament.” In The Sacred in the City, edited by Gómez, Liliana and Walter van Herck. London/New York: Continuum, 2012, 108–126. Pop, Liliana. “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Religion.” The Waste Land at 90. In A Retrospective, edited by Joe Moffett. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011. 93–110. Sharpe, William Chapman. Unreal Cities. Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Sheldrake, Philip F. “A Spiritual City? Place, Memory, and City Making.” In Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place, edited by Gregory Caicco. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2007. 50–68.

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———. “Placing the Sacred: Transcendence and the City.” Literature & Theology (June 2007): 1–16. ———. “A Spiritual City. Urban Vision and the Christian Tradition.” In Theology in Built Environments: Exploring Religion, Architecture, and Design, edited by Sigurd Bergmann. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2012 (2009). 151–172. Smith, Jonathan Z. “To take Place.” In Ritual and Religious Belief. A Reader, edited by Graham Harvey. London: equinox, 2005. 26–50. Smith, Philip. “The Elementary Forms of Place and Their Transformations: A Durkheimian Model.” Qualitative Sociology 22, no. 1 (1999): 13–35. Thormählen, Marianne. ‘The Waste Land’. A Fragmentary Wholeness. Lund: Gleerup, 1978. Trivedi, Harish. Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Van Oort, Johannes. Jerusalem and Babylon. A Study into Augustine’s City of God and the Sources of his Doctrines of the two Cities. Leiden/New York: Brill, 1991. Zissell, Jeanette S. “Universal Salvation in the Earthly City; De Civitate Dei and the Significance of the Hazelnut in Julian of Norwich’s Showings.” In Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, edited by Albrecht Classen. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 331–352.

CHAPTER 4

Traveling Discourses: The Works of Pavel Ulitin (1918–1986) and the Problem of Narrative Alternatives Daria Baryshnikova

Introduction In this chapter I proceed from the premise that, as a city consists not only of buildings and inhabitants, but also of representations of the city itself, so a literary work consists not only of narrative space, but also of the spatial extension of the text. My paper investigates how the prose writings

D. Baryshnikova (B) Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_4

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of Russian writer Pavel Ulitin1 in the 1960s and 1970s could be characterized and interpreted from the “spatial” point of view as an aesthetic reaction, not only to the cultural situation in Soviet Russia, but also to the new global state of postmodernity as defined by Fredric Jameson. This thesis will be supported by two lines of argument: from a theoretical viewpoint, I sketch the conception of postmodernity suggested by Jameson and investigate with its help the global context of Ulitin’s prose considering the lack of direct connections between Russian culture and the rest of the world. From a formal point of view, I define the characteristics and major “spatial” devices of Ulitin’s prose; then, I compare his method and principles with those of the same period by William S. Burroughs. Burroughs’ writings are chosen here because his literary techniques of the early 1960s, his cut-up experiments, are similar to Ulitin’s. Thus, I investigate the specificity of Ulitin’s prose within its historical–cultural context.

1 Pavel Ulitin was born in the village Migulinskaya on the Don River in Russia. He studied at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History (IFLI) but in his second year (1938) he was arrested and committed to Butyrskaya prison. Sixteen months later he was released due to poor health conditions. The injuries he received during his imprisonment left him permanently disabled. In 1951 he tried to get asylum in the American Embassy in Moscow, was arrested again and committed to the Leningrad Prison Psychiatric Hospital, where he remained until 1954. In 1957 he completed his studies at the Maurice Thorez Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages. He supported himself by teaching English and working in a bookstore. In 1962 there was a search in his flat and all his early manuscripts were seized. An almost unknown and unpublished writer during his lifetime, Ulitin was rediscovered and reassessed recently, and the number of studies on his prose has increased. To name but a few: Ilya Kukulin (2015) suggested to interpret Ulitin’s prose as deconstruction of autobiography and trauma writing. Alexey Konakov (2017) contextualizes Ulitin’s approach within a Russian experimental samizdat prose tradition. I assume that Ulitin by questioning the very process of writing, breaking with plots, text coherence and almost all the literary conventions, was able to express the concerns of his time in a new way. Ulitin’s pioneering writing manifests itself primarily as a thematization of the experience of his generation. His prose is not so much a meta-discourse, but rather a dynamic means of expression to represent the processes of meaning-making.

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Textual Spaces and Cognitive Mapping Recently there has been a growing interest in the spatial aspects of texts in the humanities.2 In this paper, the notion of “space” is mostly used in a metaphorical sense. It is used for analyzing not only the physical dimensions of spaces represented in text serving as a container for the events and other elements of the story, but also for analyzing the structural relations between various elements of the text itself and its contexts perceived by the reader. The reader may visualize the movements within a narrative space, construct mental models and navigate through maps in the represented narrative world. These relations are often explored in cognitive studies.3 For instance, Gilles Fauconnier develops a cognitive approach in the theory of metaphor4 and analyzes metaphors as facts of cognition (not merely of language) conceptualizing our views and forming mental spaces. According to Fauconnier, metaphorization is based on the process of frames and scripts recognition. Mental spaces are built throughout the process of cognitive mapping5 of the world perceived by a person. This process is based on one’s comprehension of representations of space. The concept of the mental map connected with an individual point of view in perception is elaborated in Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City.6 Lynch points out that most of our perceptions of the city are not sustained but fragmented and mixed with our other concerns. Lynch’s conception was later used by Fredric Jameson in his method of cognitive mapping.7 2 Gabriel Zoran, “Towards a Theory of Space in Narrative,” Poetics Today 5, no. 2 (1984): 309–335; Ruth Ronen, “Space in Fiction,” Poetics Today 7, no. 3 (1986): 421– 438; Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space,” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. D. Herman (Stanford: CLSI, 2003), 214–242; Sabine Buchholz and Manfred Jahn, “Space,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. D. Herman et al. (London: Routledge 2005), 551–554; Katrin Dennerlein, Narratologie des Raumes (Berlin: de Gruyter 2009). 3 Marco Caracciolo, “Narrative Space and Readers’ Responses to Stories: A Phenomenological Account,” Style 47, no. 4 (2013), 425–444. 4 Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 185. 5 Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 205. 6 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1960), 164. 7 Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.

Conference, 1983. Pub. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–360.

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Jameson extrapolates Lynch’s spatial analysis to the realm of social structure, transferring the concept of mental maps to social or global reality, using the Althusserian definition of ideology that “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”8 Thus, Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping aims at articulating the imaginary structure of our relationship to social structures larger than individual ones. There are also various forms of textual spaces defined in narratological studies. As Marie–Laure Ryan puts it,9 there is a narrative space in which characters act and the readers build this narrative space in their own mind by means of the imagination. Narrative space includes socio-historicogeographical settings, borders between them, and the cultural context. There are spatial extensions of the text which refer to the spatiality of the text as a material object (visual components are important here). Another one is the spatial form of the text; the term introduced by the literary critic Joseph Frank.10 He describes a type of modernistic narrative organization found in works by T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce that deemphasizes temporality and causality in a story. Frank distinguishes and analyzes such compositional devices as fragmentation, montage of disparate elements, and juxtaposition of parallel plot lines. Even time in Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time “is not time at all—it is perception in a moment of time, that is to say, space.”11 Frank introduces here an important aspect of interaction with space involving a subject who acts, perceives, emotionally reacts, and reflects upon it. In his later reconsideration of these ideas12 Frank draws the lines forming their theoretical grounds giving an important historical contextualization of the parallel development of theoretical ideas and artistic practices. He starts from Saussure’s theory of the sign, in which a sign was no longer the union 8 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” (1970) Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 121–176 (153). 9 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Space,” in The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al., https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/55.html. (accessed October 15, 2018). 10 Joseph Frank, “ Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” The Sewanee Review 53, no. 2 and 53, no. 3 (1945): 221–240, 433–456. 11 Frank, “Spatial Form,” 239. 12 Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form: Some Further Reflections,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 2

(1978).

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of a name and a thing and became a union of a sound image and a concept. Thus, language became a closed system in which meanings occur in relations within the system and not in relations of the sign to the external to linguistic reality. This conception was elaborated by Roman Jakobson in his theory of poetic language distinguished by the dominance of the message itself: “the preliminary reference to any word-group in a modern poem is to something inside the poem itself.”13 Applying these ideas to modern experimental prose where “the internal relation of words to each other play a predominant role,”14 Frank suggests that it focuses on the opposition between the temporal nature of the narrative medium (language) and experimental narrative which broke up narrative continuity in order to represent the mental functioning with its interweaving of time-shifts of memory and actual movements of consciousness. And, to go back to Ryan’s classification, there is space that serves as context for the text. Many narratives are situated within real-world space (mentioning certain historical places, landscapes, or city locations where narrated actions take place), and their relations to their environment go far beyond mimetic representation. My article, in line with these research efforts at understanding the spatial dimensions of text seeks to demonstrate that in his prose Ulitin creates narrative spaces which serve not only as settings for actions and reflections on the level of the story but give room for representations of lived experience conveyed by writing on the discourse level. Being marginal, experimental and innovative, his prose at the same time is very much in tune with the actual global cultural context. Fredric Jameson, describing the cultural situation which emerged in the 1960s, speaks of the problems of representation in the contemporary world with its exhaustion of narrative alternatives and multiplying realities that are “[…] not merely a drying up of narrative possibilities, so that all that remains is essentially remakes, but also a dawning suspicion of fiction and fictiveness and storytelling in general.15 ” According 13 Frank, “Further Reflections,” 280. 14 Frank, “Further Reflections,” 280. 15 Fredric Jameson, “Representation of Globalization,” unpublished manuscript of the

paper delivered at the Moscow conference ‘Contemporary Media—History, Theory, Practice’ (2006), 5; the only published version is the Russian translation by Andrey Paramonov of this paper in Siniy Divan (Moscow: Tri Kvadrata, 14, 2010), 15–27. I quote the original English text, which was kindly provided by the author.

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to Jameson, the limits and possibilities of artistic representation are set by a situation, characterized by the emergence of globalization, when the individual is characterized by her initial inclusion into the conditions of the global world and is unable to take an external position. Another cultural condition is the maturation of consumer and finance capitalism, in which ideology is always included in the historical considerations. In this situation theoretical analysis as well as artistic representation is always organized by a certain social imaginary. Finally, there is the prevalence of digital or informational technology. That means, Jameson claims, that the dominant aesthetic of this new system is not a literary or verbal one, but a visual one. At the same time, the “only way of grasping these larger social realities is by way of the imaginary, in fantasy, or in narrative,”16 and these imaginary schemata, according to Jameson, are closely related to stereotypes and clichés. The mediation of the imaginary between reality and the individual subject means that the process of representation cannot be mimetic. I would argue that the situation described by Jameson could be a topical issue for the Russian context of the period under discussion as well. There was neither multinational capitalism nor widely used digital technology in Soviet Russia during that period. But some of the functional tendencies in art production (literature and the visual arts) might be compared to those mentioned by Jameson and give us some far-reaching implications.

Prose Alternatives in the Russian Literary Tradition In the 1960s and1970s, the Russian literary underground, on the one hand, was looking for means of expression that would differ from the official language of power, which could continue the tradition of the Russian avant-garde with its search for non-conventional expression. Today one may link Ulitin’s prose or one of its aspects with the tradition of LEF’s (Left Front of Art group) principle of factography in literature, as developed by Sergey Tretyakov,17 whose idea was to follow only positive facts. He also demanded the undermining of the essential principle of artistic 16 Jameson, “Representation of Globalization,” 2. 17 Manifestos and materials are published in: “Literatura fakta: Pervy sbornik materialov

rabotnikov LEFa” (1929), ed. N.F. Chuzhak (Moscow: Zakharov, 2000), http://teatr-lib. ru/Library/Lef/fact/%23_Toc318542223. (accessed October 15, 2018).

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work: no work of art should be a kind of representation or critique, it should rather be a way to create a new reality. The reality should be transformed, not just passively perceived. The literature of fact should also be cleared from the author’s subjectivity. On the other hand, Russian nonofficial prose with its suspicion of the official language and devaluation of social realism as a style could be characterized as having an increasing interest in the documentary, or in documentalization of fiction.18 The “case of Ulitin” relates to these tendencies, but at the same time is rather different. Trying to “documentalize” daily conversations, Ulitin converted them into effective pieces of literature.19 In what follows, I examine how narrative space—settings burdened with emotional reactions of the narrator and characters and thematized as significant landmarks— transforms the subversive strategy of the fragmented prose. Thus, in this transformation the spatial form of the text conceptualizes the writing experience. At the same time, on the contextual level (space that serves as context for the text) an alternative public space in Moscow was formed and they were represented in a new way in Ulitin’s prose. This alternative space consisted of cafes, walking routes, and kitchens inhabited by people who perceived and formed the city space differently. As Zinovy Zinik, a writer who was Ulitin’s interlocutor for many years, describes this space: “Parallel to this kitchen existence of the Russian spirit in Moscow in the 1960–1970s, there was a no less mysterious and peculiar life led by vagrants and outcasts of another kind—the habitués of squalid cafes and eateries of every kind. […] Kitchen conversations of that period were a manifestation of civic conscience, and a cafe was a ground to search for a

18 Varlam Shalamov wrote in his essay O prose: “If one asks me, what do I write, I

answer: I do not write memoirs. There are no recollections in ‘The Kolyma Tales ’. I do not write tales either, or to put it more precisely, I try to write not a tale but something that would not be a literature. It is not the prose of a document, but prose, achieved to be a document through suffering.” Varlam T. Shalamov, Sobranie sochineniy. (Moscow: Chudožestvennaja Literatura, 1998), vol. 4. 357–370 (370) (my translation. D. B.). It is worth mentioning that in the 1920s Shalamov was a member of the “Young LEF” circle led by Osip Brik, and knew Sergey Tretyakov personally. 19 Razgovor o Rybe [1967] (Moscow: OGI, 2002), 208; Makarov cheshet Zatylok [1966] (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2004) 172; Puteshestvie bez Nadezhdy [1975]. (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2006) 208. First publication of Ulitin’s writings was in 1976 in Vremia i My magazine (USA), in Russia in 1991, the first book in 2002.

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new language.”20 Thus, through this new type of artistic life and communication a different public space emerged in Moscow in the 1960s. Zinik described his first meeting with Ulitin in 1964, when he saw him with a group of friends near a newsstand at Pushkin Square. They walked (and talked) together along Gorky Street, dropping in at some places, moving around. These rather chaotic strolls and conversations subsequently made up a part of Ulitin’s prose.

Narrative Form, Spacial Composition, and the Writing Process in the Ulitin’s Prose Ulitin’s texts were not within the conventions of literature in the traditional sense—when the writer writes, and the publisher publishes a book, or as it was in unofficial Russian culture when texts circulated in the samizdat or tamizdat.21 He made his books with his own hands from start to the hand-bound volume. They were not just books, but also a kind of art-object with their significant visual components: hand-made covers, usage of various typewritten fonts, handwritings, a combination of various foreign languages, an unconventional layout, the use of color ink, etc. All these features should be regarded as integral parts of the text structure. Another important component of Ulitin’s work was reciting fragments of his texts to his acquaintances in specific places (cafes, private apartments, during walks along the streets of Moscow in the company of his “confidants”)—all that was part of the “ritual,” part of a literary event. Mikhail Aizenberg, a Russian poet and long-time acquaintance of Ulitin, recalls: Regular visitors to Artisticheskoe cafe in the early 1960s must surely remember a man with a cane who was writing something on bits of paper, even on napkins, or uttering long monologues, conventionally addressing

20 Zinovy Zinik, “Na puti k ‘Artisticheskomu’,” Teatr 6 (1993): 123–142, http://www. stengazeta.net/article.html?article=2390 (accessed October 15, 2018). My translation. D.B. 21 Samizdat (literally “self-published”) was a form of dissident activity in post-Stalin Soviet Union when censored (or potentially censored) publications reproduced (or produced) by hand and distributed from reader to reader. Tamizdat refers to literature published abroad.

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them to any of the neighbors at the table. […] As a matter of fact, in such a way Ulitin gave trial runs of his prose.22

The narrative here, as Aizenberg posts it, turns into a new reality where the real and fictional facts intertwine, becoming a single realm of a literary event. In literary communication and in art production the writer’s attention now focuses not on a closed, self-contained object—the art-work as it is—but on the processes this object is involved in: how it is created, how its meanings are being constructed, how it is perceived. The writing here approaches the limits of narrative, or even goes beyond it articulating the very conditions, circumstances, and opportunities of this writing. Ulitin’s texts are usually described, by himself in the first instance, as following a style of the “concealed subject,” fragmentation, and overheard dialogues. The narrative (if to use the notion as a typological concept intended to capture texts’ structures and functions, and not as a classifying concept explicating a kind of text, as opposed to description, for instance) is organized by pauses, omissions, and logical failures that arrange memories and quotes in a discrete stream of consciousness.23 There is no plot in these texts, it is a range of experiential remnants of impressions and memory connected with already existing fragments of writing. It may reproduce and represent the movements of consciousness either on the reflexive or pre-reflexive level: Qepnovik 22 Tanec pqely. Bpedny gen. Ctapinnye xytki. Clova, zapicannye na koncepte Mpavinckogo. Malenka cimfoni v zamycle, a v pezyltate cymbypnoe qtivo. He vzvilc. He polyqiloc. He te glaza. A popytka byla. He znal, qto dae clyqano ppoqitannye clova otzovytc i bydyt imet znaqenie. Lyna packololac, vot imenno. tot ect vel za cobo cepi ectov. Qto tebe ctoit, a mne ppitno. Xopoxo infopmipovannye ldi pod vliniem ploxo pepevedennyx ppedloeni v yacno clonom mipe cami

22 Mikhail Aizenberg, “Otstoyat’ obednyu. O proze P.P. Ulitina,” Moskovsky Nablyudatel ’ 1 (1991): 61–62. My translation. D.B. 23 Aizenberg, “O proze P.P. Ulitina,”; Mikhail Aizenberg, “Znaki pripominania”, Vzgliad na svobodnogo khudozhnika (Moscow: Gendalf, 1997). 188–196; Zinik, “Na puti k ‘Artisticheskomu’ ”; Zinovy Zinik, “Bezhenets iz sobstvennoi epochi. O sovremennyh popytkah kommentirovania prozy Pavla Ulitina”, Volga 7–8 (2012).

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ne zameqat, otqego pazgopatc glaza. Tpiymf togo ivotnogo. Bez kontekcta clova vocppinimatc kak lekcika 17 veka. Maxinka ppevpatilac v topmoz. Ho poqemy vcegda tak vce zacyxeno? Hevano po kakomy povody, no clova zvyqali. Het togo owyweni poleta. Kpyl opt clomalic. Ptna qepnogo qictogo lda i poloca ctapogo belogo xepxavogo lda i zacneenny kycok gladko dopoki i vot y konek vpezaetc v ppimepzxi cneg. Betep dyet v cpiny, zvenit oblomok ldinki, mqatc nazad ogopody, doma, depev, kycty. Kto zabyl, a kto i pomnit. Bot vce. Xaxa. A y vac? Taka e nelepoct kak pyccka ctpoqka, napicanna na latincko maxinke. Qem vce to doctigaloc i kako ceno i ckolko bylo ycili i k qemy to ppivelo i pezyltatov kak bydto net i vce kak by c kem-to ewe ny covepxenno becpolezno. Bce to vypaeno v odno ctpoqke o klacciqeckom obpazovanii. U men net takogo pepepleta. On toe pabotal nad Fayctom i qyvctvoval ceb Mefictofelem.24

What is noteworthy about Ulitin’s works is their questioning of the possibility of communication and of exposing the mechanism of writing. This is not a literary work as a shaped object but rather a work-inprogress, a representation of a process in which thoughts are becoming literature, in which anything can be a part of literary work. A reading of such texts requires a sort of simultaneous perception of the total unity of 24 “Draft 22. A dance of a bee. A harmful gene. Old-fashioned jokes. Words recorded at the Mravinsky concert. An intention of a little symphony, but as a result - muddled reading. Did not soar up. It did not shape up. Not those eyes. But there was an attempt. I did not know that even words read accidentally would be echoed and would be meaningful. The moon has split up, that’s it. This gesture led to a series of gestures. It is no trouble at all for you, but I would be pleased. Well-informed people under the influence of poorly translated sentences in an awfully complex world do not notice themselves why the eyes sparkle. The triumph of this animal. Without context, the words are perceived as a Seventeenth century lexicon. The typewriter has become a brake. But why is it always so dried-up? It’s unimportant for what reason, but the words were heard. There is not that feeling of flying. The wings have been broken again. Spots of black clear ice and a strip of old white shaggy ice and a snow-covered part of a smooth track and so the skate is crashing into frozen snow. The wind is blowing into back, a piece of ice is clinking, gardens, houses, trees and bushes are rushing back. Who has forgotten, and who still remembers. That’s all. Ha-ha. And what is about you? The same absurdity as a Russian line, written on a Latin typewriter. How all that was achieved and at what cost and how much effort was there and where it led to and as if there were no results and everything seemed to be completely useless with someone else. All this is conveyed in a single sentence about classical education. I do not have such a binding. He also worked on Faust and felt himself like Mephistopheles.” (My translation. D.B.)

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the work, of its rhythmical relations of fragments, symmetry, repetitions, rhymes, and variations of perspectives. The above quoted fragment from the book Razgovor o Rybe contains, as I interpret it, reflections on how to write, how writing should affect its readers, on feeling and emotions intertwined and interconnected with memories—how the mind may work. Formally, such a work hardly correlates with explications of narration in classical narratology: there is neither a story nor events here.25 A story usually satisfies the following requirements: representation of a sequence of events; a mediating instance—who tells the story, relationships between story and plot, or the level of content (the “what” of a narrative) as opposed to the level of expression (“how” it is done).26 The distinction between story and plot, causal order and structure of appearance, first made by Victor Shklovsky, stresses the thematic element in prose instead of the causal-temporal. Story aims at being the causal-chronological sequence, discourse shifts attention from the flow of events to the narrator and the narration. “This helps to explain why an increase of interest in man’s subjective and emotional life [in Twentieth century literature], when translated into terms of literary form, automatically seems to lead to an increase in the spatialization of narrative.”27 In this short episode metaphors blend spaces and human emotional states with the writing process by attributing its movements through spaces: “Spots of black clear ice and a strip of old white shaggy ice and a snow-covered part of a smooth track and so the skate is crashing into frozen snow. The wind is blowing into back, a piece of ice is clinking, gardens, houses, trees and bushes are rushing back. Who has forgotten, and who still remembers. That’s all. Ha-ha. And what is about you?” Thus, he links human interactions with the environment and writing process and the imagery evoked by narrative space visualizes the abstract concept of creative writing. Ulitin also uses bodily metaphors to describe

25 “A change of state manifested in discourse by a process statement in the mode of Do or Happen. An event can be an action or act (when the change is brought about by an agent ‘Mary opened the window’) or a happening (when the change is not brought about by the agent ‘the rain started to fall’). Along with existence, events are the fundamental constituents of the story.” Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 28. 26 See also Prince, Dictionary, 91. 27 Joseph Frank, “Further Reflections,” 288.

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(his) experience of writing: “did not soar up,” “would be echoed,” “gesture led to a series of gestures,” “not notice themselves why the eyes sparkle,” “that feeling of flying.” Emotionally charged statements and metaphors like “muddled reading,” “I would be pleased,” “The triumph of this animal,” “is it always so dried-up” may reflect the narrator’s engagement with the writing process and evoke imagery for readers’ engagements with representations of writing. Experimental texts which look like chaotic compositions of disconnected fragments, random series of descriptions, quotations, and arbitrary succession of sentences can be more fruitfully explored within the framework of “natural” narratology introduced by Monika Fludernik28 where narrative is recognized as a discourse of human experience. Fludernik applies the idea of “naturalness” not to texts themselves, but to the cognitive frames by means of which texts are interpreted, and a key concept in the definition of narrativity in a literary work is experientiality. Fludernik stresses that experientiality “combines a number of cognitively relevant factors, most importantly those of the presence of a human protagonist and her experience of events as they impinge on her situation or activities. The most crucial factor is that of the protagonist’s emotional and physical reaction to this constellation, which introduces a basic dynamic feature into the structure.”29 Hence, these narratives portray human experience and a human story-world. According to Fludernik, readers narrativize such texts by resorting to the experience frames overcoming the strangeness of these narratives. The narrative structuring of such writings occurs, therefore, neither in the text nor in the context, but in their interplay with the reader’s perception. Thus, the narrative is organized in such a way that it is no longer a self-contained piece of literary work, but rather a process. That is why, for Ulitin the reading, the articulation of his writings in the community of like-minded people was a significant part of his work, as if he wanted to return the space-oriented fragmented narrative to its linear-temporal structure.

28 Monika Fludernik, Towards a “Natural ” Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996),

454. 29 Fludernik, “Natural ” Narratology, 1996, 22.

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Parallels Within the Global Context: W.S. Burroughs’ Cut-Ups Within a broader international context, which requires a more thorough research, Ulitin’s style and technique should be compared with those of Fluxus, The New York Correspondence School,30 with the circle of experimental authors in Sixties Britain included Alan Burns and B.S. Johnson among others, and in the first instance with William S. Burroughs’ style and technique. Zinik observes that [i]t was impossible for Ulitin, who monthly, almost daily went to the State Library for Foreign Literature, not to know about The New York Correspondence School. […] From the mid-1960s till the mid-1970s, the founder of that school did things which were very much similar to those done by Ulitin and Asarkan—who exchanged letters with self-made collages and abstracts of their daily conversations.31

Ulitin, as Zinik notes, mentioned in his writings the use of the cut-up method by William Burroughs. I would like to consider briefly Burroughs’ narrative method, the way he broke the narrative and the limits and power-structures of classical canons, language and form, by using in his cut-up experiments newspapers, magazines, and other writers’ and his own previous works as materials. Critics usually locate this technique within the avant-garde and postmodern tradition.32 Burroughs mentioned in his various texts and interviews33 that the cut-ups were suggested to him by Brion Gysin, his friend and co-author for many 30 Edward M. Plunkett, “The New York Correspondence School,” Art Journal 36 (Spring 1977): 233–241, http://www.artpool.hu/Ray/Publications/Plunkett.html (accessed May 28, 2013); Philip Leider, and David Bourdon, “The New York Correspondance School,” Artforum October 6, 1967, 50–55; Arthur C. Danto, “Correspondance School Art,” The Nation March 29, 1999, http://www.thenation.com/article/correspon dance-school-art. 31 Zinik, “Bezhenets iz sobstvennoi epochi” (my translation. D.B.). 32 See for the review: Edward S. Robinson, Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives from

William S. Burroughs to the Present (Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2011), 289. 33 William S. Burroughs, “The Name is Burroughs,” and “The Fall of Art,” The Adding Machine: Collected Essays. (London: Calder, 1985), 12 and 61; William S. Burroughs, “Extracted from the 1966 interview by Conrad Knickerbocker in Paris Review,” The Third Mind (New York: Viking, 1978) 1–8 (3); William S. Burroughs, “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin,” The Third Mind (New York: Viking, 1978), 29–33.

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years, who modified the cut-up method of dada poet Tristan Tzara. Tzara offered in the 1920s to create a poem by pulling words at random from a hat. Gysin’s cut-up method consists of cutting up pages of text and rearranging them in montage combinations. Concerning this montage principle Burroughs said: Now the montage is actually closer to the facts of perception than representational painting. Take a walk down a city street and put what you have just seen on canvas. You have seen half a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows— a montage of fragments. And the same thing happens with words […] Writing is still confined in the sequential representational straitjacket of the novel, a form as arbitrary as the sonnet and as far removed from the actual facts of human perception and consciousness as the Fifteenth century poetical form. Consciousness is cut by random factors.34

Burroughs’ principle, I believe, is geared toward practice, it is a knowhow that allows to produce experimental artworks. There is quite a developed procedure that he articulated many times in essays and interviews: what are cut-ups, why cut-ups, how to make them, and what can be achieved with cut-ups. Ulitin, in his turn, has no explanatory texts or interviews describing his method. His reflections on the principles of his work are always inherent in texts, and it could hardly be read as a directive rule. Instead, Ulitin demonstrates the process itself, grasping the principle of his writing during the writing: Uclovnye oboznaqeni. Zabytye lictoqki. Mne ne ppicnilc bolxo fopmat. Davno  ne pical qepno tyx. Bot ewe paz. Ele vykapabkalc. Tepep pontno, poqemy. He nado bylo na to obpawat vnimani. Ewe paz povtopi «ne nado». O naxix clovax, o vaxix zvykax. i bydy lbym cpocobom. Bot kak polyqaetc. Hi odno iz tix poctpoeni ne otveqalo napopy intonacii. A  qital vclyx qyo pacckaz. Heckolko ydivitelnyx otkpyti. 2 ctpanicy. Hiqego takogo ne bylo. Bce to nyno bylo dl pazgona.35

34 William S. Burroughs, “The Fall of Art,” The Adding Machine: Collected essays. (London: Calder, 1985), 62. 35 “Imaginary symbols. Forgotten sheets. I have not seen a large format in my dream. It is a long time since I wrote in black ink. Here once again. Barely managed to pull

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Burroughs, in my opinion, is more interested in the effects of the cutup method rather than in the principle itself. He considers cut-ups to be an artistic device more appropriate to contemporaneity and he shows how it works. He has clearly articulated his aims: to reveal ideas of language control and preconditioning constraints of normative rules of social interaction. Burroughs suggests that the word is a kind of virus, and the writer’s function in producing cut-ups is to free words and perception from all the constrains. Here is an example of what it may look like: Had a book he gave out… Ich sterbe …They were drafted. Marks fourth day… English governess for child exuding charm Service Chairman restated his agency lacks the kidnap rapist at that stage of the case … imprisonment without function; “We just dropped into see some friends” a population of patrols… “I have no enemies I turn them all into friends” Sheldon Thomas. Pillars of smoke premature Sir James said in the biological My young Flyn seeks position in rigged quiz show “Yeah but why?” Position Monday in the house … Good job it’s got such a soft mouth. How intimate sciences are nowadays … Swedish unwelcome visitor to the warren? Talent was gone … The temple reeked of Time principal and agency in force …36

Conclusion The spatial form of Ulitin’s text, on closer examination, appears to be more multi-level in comparison to Burroughs’. One can find here a torn narrative, but at the same time a discourse steeped in reflections on the basics of this narrative. Ulitin’s writings produce more associative connections between consecutive phrases, adding one to another, mapping significant situations, cultural artefacts and events, feelings and memoirs, as it may happen in the thinking process. This prose produces through. Now it is clear why. One should not have to pay attention to it. Repeat once again ‘no need to’. About our words about your sounds. And I’ll do it in any way. Here’s how it turns out. Not one of these constructions corresponded to the needs of intonation. And I was reading aloud someone else’s story. Some surprising discoveries. 2 pages. There was nothing like this. All that was needed for momentum.” Pavel Ulitin, Puteshestvie bez Nadezhdy (M: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2006), 208 (55). (My translation. D.B.) 36 William S. Burroughs, “First Cut-Ups (Cut-up from ‘Minutes to Go’),” The Third Mind (New York: Viking, 1978) 52–60 (58).

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both verisimilitude and alternation of narrative patterns. The meanings that may appear in the processing of fragmentary narrative could be more appropriate and closer to reality, or to the facts of perception in the new cultural conditions of the 1960s. Thus, the specificity of Ulitin’s work is in maximizing such features as fragmentation, montage of separate elements, and the importance of the layout. One can also speak of the specific spatial context in which Ulitin’s texts emerged were recited and circulated: alternatives to official public space—the paths of walks and talks, friendly correspondence, and kitchen conversations. Ulitin’s prose provides a new kind of representation of such a space and the characters acting in it. Nevertheless, spatial references play a minor role in Ulitin’s prose. Spatial descriptions or mentioning of any places become connected with emotional responses from the narrator, or a reader. Narrative spaces are always interrelated with experiential (imaginative and emotional) responses of the narrator to overheard dialogues, read books, etc. There is no apparent plot to be found in the narrative space of his writing, thus one can hardly speak of the mimetic representation of any consistent development in the sequence of events. As I have shown, Ulitin’s texts may represent evocations of mind and experience so they create quite a specific multivalent narrative space. The analysis of various spatial aspects of his texts (spaces of the story and spaces of the discourse) can contribute to an understanding of Russian culture in the 1960s and 1970s. The spatial form of the texts is fragmented, shifting the attention of a reader from the linearity of chronological flow to the interpretation of the relations between various fragments, intertextual allusions, and their possible contexts. And in doing so it conceptualizes the modes and principles of contemporary perception and writing process immersed in multiple streams of impressions and information. This prose allows a representation of experiences that goes to the limits of narrativity and beyond.

Bibliography Aizenberg, Mikhail. “Otstoyat’ obednyu. O proze P.P. Ulitina.” Moskovsky Nablyudatel’ 1 (1991): 61–62. ———. “Znaki pripominania.” in Vzgliad na svobodnogo khudozhnika. Moscow: Gendalf, 1997, 188–196.

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Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” (1970) In Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. 121–176. Burroughs, William S. “Extracted from the 1966 Interview by Conrad Knickerbocker in Paris Review.” In The Third Mind. New York: Viking, 1978. 1–8. ———. “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin.” In The Third Mind. New York: Viking, 1978. 29–33. ———. “First Cut-Ups (Cut-up from ‘Minutes to Go’).” In The Third Mind. New York: Viking, 1978. 52–60. ———. The Adding Machine: Collected Essays. London: Calder, 1985. Danto, Arthur C. “Correspondance School Art.” The Nation March 29, 1999. http://www.thenation.com/article/correspondance-school-art. (accessed October 15, 2018). Fauconnier, Gilles. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. ———. Mappings in Thought and Language. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a “Natural ” Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” The Sewanee Review 53, no. 2/, 53, no. 3 and 53, no. 4 (1945): 221–240, 433–456, and 643–653. ———. “Spatial Form: Some Further Reflections.” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 2 (1978): 275–290. Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 347–360. ———. “Representation of Globalization.” Unpublished manuscript of a paper delivered at the Moscow conference ‘Contemporary Media—History, Theory, Practice’ (2006); Russian translation by A. Paramonov in Siniy Divan. Moscow: Tri Kvadrata 14, 2010. 15–27. Kukulin, Ilya. Mashiny zashunevshego vremeny: kak sovetsky montazh stal metodom neofitsialnoi kultury. Moscow: Novoye Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2015. Leider, Philip, and David Bourdon. “The New York Correspondance School.” Artforum 6 October 1967. 50–55. “Literatura fakta: Pervy sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa” [1929], edited by N. F. Chuzhak. Moscow: Zakharov, 2000. http://teatr-lib.ru/Library/Lef/ fact/%23_Toc318542223. Lydenberg, Robin. World Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960.

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Plunkett, Edward M. “The New York Correspondence School.” Art Journal 36 (Spring 1977): 233–235. http://www.artpool.hu/Ray/Publications/Plu nkett.html. Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln & London, 1987. 126. Robinson, Edward S. Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Space.” The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn et al. https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/55.html. (accessed October 15, 2018). Shalamov, Varlam. Moya zhizn’—Moi neskolko zhiznei. http://shalamov.ru/librar y/27/. (accessed October 15, 2018). Shalamov, V. T. “O Prose.” In Sobranie Sochineniy. Vol. 4. Moscow: Khudožestvennaja Literatura, 1998. 357–370. Ulitin, Pavel. Razgovor o Rybe. Moscow: OGI, 2002. ———. Makarov cheshet Zatylok. Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2004. ———. Puteshestvie bez Nadezhdy. Moscow: Novoe Izdatel’stvo, 2006. Uritskiy, Andrei. “Chuvstvo poleta.” Drushba narodov 10 (2002): 215–217. https://magazines.gorky.media/druzhba/2002/10/chuvstvo-poleta.html. Zinik, Zinovy. “Bezhenets iz sobstvennoi epochi: O sovremennyh popytkah kommentirovania prozy Pavla Ulitina.” Volga 7–8 (2012). https://magazi nes.gorky.media/volga/2012/7/bezhenecz-iz-sobstvennoj-epohi.html. ———. “Na puti k ‘Artisticheskomu’.” Teatr 6 (1993): 123–142. http://www. stengazeta.net/article.html?article=2390.

PART II

Television Reading the City

CHAPTER 5

“This America, Man.” Narrating and Reading Urban Space in The Wire Christopher Schliephake

A trail of blood on cold street concrete, lit only by a dim street lamp, opens the scene. Flashes of the pulsing, rotating fluorescent emergency lighting of a police car dart over the night scenery, as the camera slowly pans along the blood trail on ground level. It fades to the quick succession of a few images, introducing the setting—a man lies in the middle of a road, gunned down from behind, a detective picks up the empty shells of the bullets that may have killed him, from the sidewalk, three

The work on my presentation of this subject at the interdisciplinary conference “Narrating Space, Reading Urbanity” in Hamburg in September 2012 has, in the meantime, resulted in a much larger study entitled Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015) that fuses ecocriticism, theories of space and place, and the “new materialisms” in close readings of contemporary cultural representations of cities. The essay is therefore concerned with material I also worked with in an extensive chapter on The Wire. C. Schliephake (B) University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_5

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young children are watching the gruesome scene, while a police officer is taking down notes. The camera then switches to the opposite side of the street: On the steps of an empty, boarded-up row house, a detective is questioning a witness of the crime. Except for the policemen preserving traces and a few onlookers, the neighborhood seems desolate and deserted, devoid of life. “So your boy’s name is what?” asks the detective (1.01).1 “Snot,” replies the witness. Both discuss the curious street-name, “Snotboogie,” of the murder victim, before they speak about the possible motive of the killing. According to the witness, “Snotboogie” had a reputation for robbing the pot of “back-alley craps games” that he joined in “every Friday night.” The Detective, irritated by what the witness is telling him, finally queries: “If Snotboogie always stole the money, why did you let him play?” The young African American man he has been questioning answers without hesitation, shaking his head and staring on the dead body in the street: “Got to. This America, man.” Then the camera takes in both men in a low angle shot from where the corpse is lying, before it fades out and the opening credits start to roll. Pondering which scene to choose as a starting point for the discussion of the HBO-series The Wire, which ran on the premium network from 2002 to 2008, seems an impossible task—considering the sheer magnitude and complexity of the series which unfolded over five seasons (or sixty hours of running time) in total; so it is probably best to start with the beginning. Looking back at the series, it is astonishing to what degree these opening minutes of The Wire set the mood for the remainder of the serial—empty streets adjoined by boarded-up vacant buildings make up one of its primary settings—and anticipate its main themes, although the murder itself is never touched upon again: The tempting, unforgiving nature of (street) life, and the inescapability of destiny are evoked, the code of the streets is pitted against the legal social frameworks, and, of course, the main theme The Wire aspires to be all about is introduced: “This America, man.” The witness’ comment does not only allude to abstract and complex questions of identity and self-images that harbor multifold powerful connotations which are repeatedly addressed—civil rights, the opportunity of social mobility, the American Dream, etc.—but 1 The Wire: The Complete Series (New York: HBO Video, 2008), season 1, episode 1: “The Target”, dir. Clark Johnson (i.e. 1.01). All subsequent citations from the series in the text refer in the same form to the respective season and episode.

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also points to what The Wire eventually projects on screen. Accordingly, the implicit statement of the opening scene is that the show will present its viewers with those aspects of American urbanity that are rarely touched upon or treated only marginally and superficially in the dominant cultural and political discourse, “the,” to quote a line from the series, “dark corners of the American experiment” (3.03). In fact, this cultural critique and its striving for social realism—in all facets of this complicated term—are two of the major aspects that different strands of criticism invoke in the discussion of the series. Both go hand in hand with the recognition of the literary quality2 of the show’s writing and its incredible density in character development and plotlines as well as with the analysis of the main subject of the series: contemporary American urbanity. Life in the postindustrial American city has been identified as the main focal point around which the narrative focus and structure of the series revolve. Consequently, The Wire is perceived as a show which is built, not so much around character, but around the story of the city, around the story of inner-city America. The reason why The Wire in particular lends itself to a close analysis in a volume on urbanity is because the show invites a re-reading of the contemporary American city that constantly oscillates between a stark realism and an imaginative intervention into what the shows’ creators perceive as misguided urban politics. Hence, this will be the main argument explored in this essay which is examined by, firstly, outlining the narrative space of The Wire; by, secondly, questioning what it, in turn, tells us about postindustrial/post 9/11-America; and, thirdly, by analyzing how city space is narrated in the series by making use of the television medium.

2 David Simon himself has actually referred to The Wire as “televised novel.” On the novelistic nature and approach of the series see, for instance, Lawrence Lanahan, “Secrets of the City—What The Wire Reveals About Urban Journalism,” Columbia Journalism Review 46, no. 5 (2008): 22–31 (24).

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“Building a City”---The Narrative Space of The Wire Looking back on The Wire, the show’s creator David Simon summarizes: “It was about the City,” about “how we in the West live at the millennium, an urbanized species compacted together.”3 Simon had always been obsessed by contemporary urbanity. Before he started working on the script of what would later turn into the television series, Simon had worked as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, ceaselessly looking and hunting for stories from the heart of the city portraying aspects that he felt were unaccounted for and unacknowledged in other (popular) representations of American urbanity which, most of the time, focus on the big metropolises like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, and that, in consequence, were marginalized in the dominant discourse.4 Accordingly, Simon’s work had always been concerned with an “America left behind.”5 An America that he felt was very much present and reflected in the conditions and social grievances which he witnessed and reported on in Baltimore. In this context, Simon perceives Baltimore as being indicative of a certain type of city that has evolved over the last few decades, “the post-industrial,” or as he puts it, “second-tier city”6 ; a city that has suffered from a decline of its once great industry due to structural shifts in the overall (world) economy which led to high rates of unemployment, cuts in public spending, and, in consequence, an overall impoverishment. These factors all contributed to and interacted with a transformation of urban space in general: As enterprises and labor force moved out of the city and the wealthy middle class relocated in a process of suburbanization, whole blocks of row houses became vacant and were left to decay in the inner-city areas.7 These deprived areas were, in turn, faced with a complex set of social grievances—from a high influx and circulation of drugs to the ensuing escalation of violent crime. Especially 3 David Simon, “Introduction,” in The Wire: Truth Be Told, ed. Rafael Alvarez (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 1–31 (3). 4 Nick Hornby, “An Interview with David Simon,” in The Wire: Truth Be Told, ed. Rafael Alvarez (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 382–397 (388). 5 Simon, “Introduction,” 8. 6 Hornby, “Interview,” 388. 7 Anmol Chaddah and William Julius Wilson, “‘Way Down in the Hole’: Systemic Urban Inequality in The Wire,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 1 (2011): 164–188 (172–173).

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in Baltimore, these problems were painfully felt as the city featured prominently in all the wrong statistics: homicide rates, numbers of drug addicts and drug deaths, school drop outs, homelessness, etc.8 From the beginning of his career in journalism, these were also the topics that Simon tackled in his writing for which he soon preferred the form of long, drawn-out reportages. Yet, journalism soon imposed too many limits on what could be shown, so Simon looked for other options that would allow him greater creative freedom, finally opting for the television industry. “Early in the conception of the drama,” said Simon, “Ed Burns and I […] conceived of a show that would, with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed.”9 This comment is important for our subject at hand, since it not only underlines the intention of the project, but also points to its status as an imaginative take on urbanity in America, as an artistic expression rather than a scientific or journalistic one, which, although it is—as we are about to see—very much based on real events or characters, makes apt use of the freedom of fiction when dealing with the issues that were identified as being, to a certain degree, reflective of contemporary urbanity. Accordingly, in Simon’s artistic vision, the television series becomes a medium in which different aspects of urbanity can be addressed that would otherwise be very hard to bring together in a comprehensive portrayal. Hence, from the very beginning, The Wire was intended as a template for a different form of the analytical reading of urbanity. Yet, David Simon’s télévision engagée is not only concerned with the portrayal of pressing urban concerns, but is also aimed at a transformation of the format of the television serial itself.10 Instead of presenting the viewers with a black-and-white image of crime fighting, based on rigid moral categories, The Wire was intended to question any media projected stereotype of the inner-city as an urban underworld, but rather challenged its audience by not placing judgment on its characters and by emphatically criticizing America’s “War on Drugs” that “has,” as Simon

8 Lanahan, “Secrets,” 25. 9 Hornby, “Interview,” 386. 10 Hornby, “Interview,” 386.

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suggests, “now mutated into a war on the American underclass,” further claiming that “what drugs have not destroyed in our inner cities the war against them has.”11 Accordingly, The Wire resets the categories by which the complex interactions and relations between cops and criminals, law enforcement and the drug trade, social frameworks and urban decay are measured—it is, in this sense, a television show which does not only aspire to be seen, but to make see. It is mainly through the use of an intricate “network aesthetic”12 that the “narrative potential of television” is expanded in The Wire, by drawing on “the expansive narrative space provided by seriality and ensemble casting, which accommodates the city as the primary unit of analysis.”13 In sum, The Wire not only challenges the narrative confines of the urban crime genre, but also challenges the notion of the city as a mere “abstraction.” Instead, the narrative space constructed by The Wire, “engenders a sense of the city in its entirety”14 and sketches out an almost analytical portrait of contemporary urbanity. How, then, is urbanity read in The Wire?

Reading Urbanity in The Wire The beginning of the third Season lends itself as a good starting point for a discussion of how contemporary American urbanity is read in The Wire. It sees the destruction of the so-called “Franklin Terrace High Rises” that featured prominently in Season One and Two of The Wire and that were, in many ways, the territorial base from which the Barksdale gang controlled the drug trade in West Baltimore. Accordingly, they “came,” as Mayor Clarence Royce explains to an expectant crowd, “to represent some of this city’s most entrenched problems” (3.01). As he promises that past “mistakes” in urban planning will not be repeated and asks the listeners whether they “are ready for a new Baltimore,” the camera constantly switches between him and three young African American men 11 Hornby, “Interview,” 386. 12 Patrick Jagoda, “Wired,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 1 (2011), 189–199 (191). 13 Marsha Kinder, “Re-Wiring Baltimore: The Emotive Power of Systemics, Seriality,

and the City,” Film Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2008): 50–57 (50). 14 Linda Speidel, “‘Thin Line ‘Tween Heaven and Here’ (Bubbles): Real and Imagined Space in The Wire,” Darkmatter 4 (2009): n. pag, http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/ wp-content/uploads/pdf/4_Speidel_Thin_Line_tween_heaven_and_here.pdf (accessed March 4, 2013).

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who watch the spectacle around them in astonishment. Their comments come to represent an aspect that the mayor leaves out in his speech: that the Towers, although they were certainly a crime-ridden inner-city neighborhood, where all three sold drugs to people from “all over the city, even the county,” were also a place of community. Malik “Poot” Carr proudly tells his friends that he lost his virginity there, and is clearly startled by the demolition, since, as he explains: “My whole life been around them Towers. I mean I feel. I feel like. Shit, like I don’t got no home no more.” Preston “Bodie” Broadus does not share in the feelings of his friend, pretending to be unmoved: “Y’all talkin’ ’bout steel and concrete […] You ain’t homeless,” and introducing another aspect of what the Towers mean: “You just damn near out of work is all. […] Man, look, you live in the projects, you ain’t shit. But you sling product there? You got the game by the ass, man. Now those downtown suit-wearin’-ass-bitches snatched the best territory in the city from y’all.” The city “territory” of the housing projects thereby takes on a different meaning, which far exceeds the political rhetoric of Mayor Royce: It becomes a place of great social importance “as focal point in the surrounding community” by “defining cultural space and in shaping [its] identity”15 as well as a place to which divergent economic interests are attached: what once was a thriving drug market that provided many young men with an income in an area of high unemployment and depravation has now turned into a lucrative property for urban developers. The mayor finally asks the crowd to count down with him and then pushes the detonator: The camera takes in the two towers from where the crowd is standing at a safe distance—as the first one collapses, the implosion is greeted by a big cheer, but when the second one falls, a huge smoke of dust suddenly covers the whole area and the on-lookers quickly cover their faces. Thereby, the camera presents the viewers with “an environment suddenly overcome by elements it had sought to eradicate: even in its death, the essence of the Towers cannot be easily contained.”16 The Wire’s portrait of urbanity is, as this scene makes perfectly clear, consequently closely connected to cultural memory: The way in which 15 Elizabeth Bonjean, “After the Towers Fell: Bodie Broadus and the Space of Memory,” in The Wire. Urban Decay and American Television, eds. Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2009), 162–174 (164). 16 Bonjean, “Space of Memory,” 163.

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the towers fall unquestionably alludes to 9/11, a watershed moment which ultimately gave way to a renegotiation of narratives and identities; and it alludes, to be more exact, to a post-9/11 America, in which the urgency of urban reform was cast aside for other more pressing issues like the “War on Terror” and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Accordingly, The Wire has a “strong thrust towards meta-narrative,” because its stories “point toward a larger story.” Its “intricate and interwoven storylines dramatize the dialectical interaction between individual aspirations and institutional dynamics,”17 between the need for urban reform and the transformation of city spaces, between, eventually, political rhetoric and urban realities. Thus, “the smoke cloud” not only “swallows” the mayor’s stage at the Franklin Tower demolition, “but undermines the words that prophesize its recovery.”18 It symbolizes, in the end, a policy which has turned a blind eye to the inherent problems of urbanity in modern America. What The Wire makes clear is that urban redevelopment—which is also connected to capital and property interest—will not be successful, if issues like inner-city drug-dealing, poverty, education are not dealt with. As long as a majority of its inhabitants are without any perspective or hope for themselves, without even a home to go back to, the city will not have a future. This latter aspect is rooted in Baltimore’s own cultural memory and recent history, since the fictional demolition of the Franklin Terrace housing projects is modeled upon the Lexington Terrace and George B. Murphy homes which were built in the 1940s and ‘50s and once ringed the city’s inner-city areas.19 Initially, these housing projects were intended to improve the living conditions for the urban working-class and poor people, but when the labor force moved out of the city in a process of deindustrialization, many African Americans who had migrated from the South were placed in these quarters.20 Yet, as these areas were predominantly without job opportunities and public spending concentrated on 17 Helena Sheehan and Sheamus Sweeney, “The Wire and the world: narrative and metanarrative,” Jump Cut 51 (2009): n. pag, https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51. 2009/Wire (accessed March 4, 2013). 18 David M. Alff, “Yesterday’s Tomorrow Today: Baltimore and the Promise of Reform,” in The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, eds. Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2009), 23–36 (33). 19 Rafael Alvarez, The Wire: Truth Be Told (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 51. 20 Chaddah and Wilson, “Inequality,” 172–173.

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the suburbs, they turned, in the course of a few decades, into urban ghettos, hotspots of drug-related crime and disease. In order to tackle these issues, city governments have often used drastic measures: Accordingly, the Lexington Terrace and George B. Murphy homes were torn down under the Clinton Administration, which resulted in similar steps taken in other cities nationwide. The creators of The Wire therefore used a residence for elderly people to re-enact the look of these apartment complexes, rooting its storyline in Baltimore’s own urban history.21 As Clandfield puts it: “This piece of virtual redevelopment reminds us that The Wire creates its own version of Baltimore, but also illustrates that the series gets its construction materials from concrete details of contemporary cities.”22 The reading of urbanity in the series thereby invites a ‘re-imagination’ of the deep-seated injustice and inherent problems which are at the roots of social grievances and, eventually, gives way to a renegotiation of city space which is skeptical of political programs or promises of “a new Baltimore,” but rather seeks “to recover the orphaned accounts, obscured histories, and undocumented lives of a city in desperate need of a more truthful and complex artistic narrative.”23 In this context, it is especially the failed “War on Drugs” that has taken its toll on the inner-city urban areas, which is based on a radical approach of law enforcement and a non-tolerance policy that is critically explored in The Wire. From the beginning of the first episode onwards, the question of how this parcel of the city is and should be policed is imaginatively examined in the series: In fact, as the following part of this essay will show, the inner-city is often rendered in abstract maps, photographs, and statistics that purport to reflect the realities in these neighborhoods with regard to crime and the high circulation of drugs,24 but they barely convey the life within these communities which not only have to suffer under the toxic substances and the ensuing high degree of violence, but also from neglect. The latter aspect is painfully felt especially by the children who grow up in this area and who have to try to make ends meet by themselves, since many adults are either dead, drug users, or in prison due 21 Alvarez, Wire, 51–52. 22 Peter Clandfield, “‘We Ain’t Got No Yard’: Crime, Development, and Urban Envi-

ronment,” in The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, eds. Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2009). 37–49 (38). 23 Alff, “Reform,” 26. 24 Speidel, “Real and Imagined Space.”

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to their involvement in the drug trade. Yet, the fact that the inner-city is more than a drug swamp or urban underworld is made clear in many scenes that deal with the daily community life in which the inhabitants have to face the (material) consequences of their drug-infested surroundings. That this challenge is made even more difficult by their lack of access to recreational areas,25 public facilities, and especially jobs is reflected in The Wire as well as the way in which these neighborhoods become stigmatized, stereotyped, and, socially marginalized in turn. Consequently, The Wire does not only evoke the narratives of people often overlooked in the public and political discourse regarding the innercity areas, but also brings about an imaginative renegotiation of city space and of the take on the urban drug trade. In the series, this is mainly negotiated through the character of Howard “Bunny” Colvin, the commander of the Western District, who becomes the exponent of a change of policy. Disillusioned by an often meritless fight against the drugs that flood his district and discontented with an approach promoted by the Baltimore Police Department that is aimed at producing a high number of arrests without taking into account the larger social surroundings and environment of the inner-city, he endorses a strategy of policing the district based on personal contact and reciprocal cooperation—as he puts it one point, “this drug thing, this ain’t police work,” because the “War on Drugs” and its radical rhetoric leads to an escalation of violence on both sides that turns the inner-city areas literally into urban battlefields (3.10). Hence, The Wire presents its viewers with multiple scenes in which police storm through inner-city neighborhoods, hunting drug dealers and chasing through backyards, apartment buildings, staircases, where ordinary people live. The suggestion is that an urban policy advocating an ideologically infused division of city space into good and bad, “neighborhood” and “territory” will not help in the prevention of crime, but further enhance it. Therefore, the third season meticulously shows how drug-related crime escalates after the demolition of the housing projects, because the drug trade, having lost its center, disperses over the inner-city area. The Wire’s critical reading of urbanity does not stop here, however, but evolves into a counter discourse in which “Bunny” Colvin takes on the leading role: He comes up with an approach that legalizes the open

25 Clandfield, “Crime, Development, and Urban Environment,” 45.

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sale and consumption of drugs in three designated and deserted areas, set for demolition. What soon comes to be called, in an allusion to Amsterdam’s liberal drug laws, “Hamsterdam” proves to be the most interesting imaginative intervention into America’s urban politics: Colvin’s experiment suffers a few setbacks in the beginning, but soon turns into a place that does not only reduce the overall crime rates in his district, but where community builders can reach out to the adolescent drug dealers and, more importantly, the drug users, providing them with sanitary care, medicine, and food. Through “Hamsterdam,” The Wire invites a re-imagination of America’s urban grievances not as crime issues, but as urban health problems.26 This is, on the one hand, done discursively, in the character of Colvin and in the political uproar “Hamsterdam” provokes after it becomes public (Colvin had kept it secret from his superiors and City Hall). In this context, it is especially the ambitious Councilman Thomas Carcetti who condones Colvin’s project and uses it in his mayoral campaign, which is mainly based on an agenda of crime prevention that exploits the “War on Drugs”-rhetoric (“we’re gonna lose these neighborhoods and ultimately this city forever. If we don’t have the courage and the conviction to fight this war the way it should and needs to be fought” [3.12]). Carcetti becomes Baltimore’s mayor during the fourth season, but his efforts remain as cumbersome and ineffective as those of his predecessors, whereby The Wire addresses a widespread and structurally established impossibility of urban reform. On the other hand, this counter discourse is also projected visually and aesthetically, by making skillful use of the television or film medium, by the way in which urban space is narrated in The Wire.

Narrating Urban Space in The Wire “Hamsterdam” is, in fact, a good starting point for the analysis of The Wire’s aesthetic, since the outcomes of Colvin’s project are negotiated visually: From the middle of the third season onwards, when “Hamsterdam” is implemented in deserted city areas, adjoined only by vacant row houses, the inner-city of West Baltimore has clearly changed its appearance. While the street corners were predominantly rendered as the 26 See on “Hamsterdam” also Clandfield, “Crime, Development, and Urban Environment,” 43.

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scenery of drug sale before, where young teenagers audibly advertise their product and organize in a specialized system of watching out for police, serving the addicts, handling the money, and guarding their “stash” of drug supply, and where they were often observed, chased, and arrested by policemen in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, they are depicted differently after the beginning of “Hamsterdam”: in one sequence, three young teenagers stride along the street with a basketball, while an elderly couple sits in front of their house in the warm sun (3.06); the camera follows one kid riding a scooter in a tracking shot to a corner, where another one has set up a lemonade shop. Across the street, some residents are doing some garden work. When Major Colvin rides through his district with his close confidant, the Deacon, he says to him: “In your life, did you ever think you would ever again see Mount and Fayette like this? Those aren’t touts you’re hearing, brother. Those are birds chirping” (3.08). His comment points to the way in which the drug trade had literally transformed the environment and the way in which the city space has changed its appearance after the disappearance of the drugs. On a metalevel, his remark is also partially directed at the viewer, because he/she, too, had never seen “Mount and Fayette” like that during the series. An entirely different impression is created by the way in which the imaginative urban experiment “Hamsterdam” is portrayed in The Wire: the seventh episode of the third season includes one of the darkest sequences of the entire series, when the drug addict “Bubbles” walks into one of the free zones with a cart from which he sells white Tshirts, bootlegs, and other things at night. The camera takes in his facial expressions as he slowly makes his way through one of the open air drug market streets and the scenes that go on around him: drug dealers and users swarm through the barely lit area, disoriented and sick; people who can barely stand on their own feet anymore stagger across the pavement, someone walks around with a plate of syringes, in a side alley a man inserts a needle into his arm, while prostitutes offer their services a few feet away. Due to the lack of electricity in this place, candles stand in the windows in the vacant buildings and give the scene an additional eerie and uncanny atmosphere. As McNeilly analyzes another scene set in “Hamsterdam,” it “lays out a human geography, a tangle of fleeting, fluid interactions, among a plurality of people and perspectives, moving

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like molecules within a contained chaos.”27 These scenes are clearly stylized and have a cinematic quality which brings about not only a certain distance, but also a space to come in for the viewer who has to constantly make sense of what he/she sees and, moreover, has to judge the ethical implications of “Hamsterdam.” The latter aspect is reflected on by the Deacon, who criticizes the project and who finally brings in community builders that reach out to the drug addicts with food, condoms, medicine, and drug treatment. The Deacon is, in fact, another interesting example of how space is narrated in The Wire, since he is played by Melvin Williams, a notorious Baltimore drug lord who controlled the city’s drug trade in the 1970s and ‘80s. He was arrested by Ed Burns, the co-creator of the show, when he was still a detective in the Baltimore Police Department, by the use of a wiretap investigation which became the inspiration for the plot of Season One. While Williams thereby became the model for Avon Barksdale, he himself was cast as a churchman after he was released from prison.28 These complex interconnections affect many other characters and plotlines in the series. For instance, when “Hamsterdam” is made public and Mayor Royce meets with city officials in order to discuss the way in which it should be approached, one of his advisors, the urban health commissioner, is played by Baltimore’s former mayor Kurt Schmoke who, in his time in office, became an outspoken critic of the “War on Drugs” and tried to implement programs that aimed at the decriminalization of drugs and promoted public health funding of drug treatment.29 These intricate intertextual/-pictorial relations between The Wire’s characters, plotlines, settings and their real-life counterparts root the series deeply in the local history of Baltimore and lead to an authenticity that many commentators note as one the show’s most striking characteristics,30 but also illustrate the fictional adaption of urbanity into the television medium. Moreover, the latter aspect is connected to the casting as well. As the show’s casting director Vince Peranio puts it: “We cast Baltimore. […] 27 Kevin McNeilly, “Dislocating America: Agnieszka Holland Directs ‘Moral Midgetry’,” in The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, eds. Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2009), 203–216 (207). 28 Alvarez, Wire, 50. 29 Mark Bowden, “The Angriest Man in Television,” Atlantic Monthly January–February

2008, 50–57 (54). 30 Bowden “The Angriest Man in Television,” 51.

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When it comes down to the corner, nobody can fill that space but people from the corner. These kids know what goes on down there and it made the show better.”31 The implicit argument made here is that different urban environments shape different urban characters, that city space has a reciprocal relationship with people moving in it, that both are mirrored by one another. The latter aspect also has to do with the language in which space is narrated: Thus, a lot of dialogues are in the vernacular of the subcultures in Baltimore and a dialect that is very hard to understand, even for native speakers. These are, of course, elements that the film or television medium can reflect and draw on in its representation of the inner-city area in a more direct and conscious manner than the written medium. The Wire does not only make extensive use of the possibilities of this medium, but also constantly renegotiates and questions its capacity of presenting urban space.32 This is made clear at the end of the third season, when “Hamsterdam” is shut down by city officials and the Police Department. When they rush into the area, they are also accompanied by news media, who take in the environment with their cameras and through photographic lenses which capture the spectacular events around them. As they project the city space in select images, it becomes clear that they focus on just a few segments of a large environment and miss out on a lot of its complex interactions, especially on “Hamsterdam’s” place in the wider district and the intentions that led to its implementation in the first place. Particularly in Season One, photos and images “seen through CCTV cameras”33 are employed to introduce the viewer to the inner-city area, especially to the drug trade in the so-called Low Rises. They are used by the Major Crimes Unit to get an overview over the workings of the drug networks in this area and are meant, together with the maps displaying the geography of the inner-city, to “represent […] social space,” but are, in the end, only an approach to it, an “abstraction” that stands in stark contrast to “lived social space.”34 Accordingly, the police rely on informants, interpreters of this environment, with the drug addict “Bubbles,” one of the show’s most interesting characters, playing a central role. He

31 Quoted in Alvarez, Wire, 176. 32 Speidel, “Real and Imagined Space.” 33 Speidel, “Real and Imagined Space.” 34 Speidel, “Real and Imagined Space.”

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helps identify some of the drug dealers and can literally “read” the city space. In fact, “Bubbles” becomes one of the characters through whom the viewer is invited to visit the inner-city area and to navigate through a space that seems, at first, strange and alien, but, on the other hand, hauntingly close. At one point, he is asked to assess the disguise of an under-cover cop and points to the soles of his shoes that do not show signs of “empty vials. You can’t walk down a Baltimore street without that shit crackin’ underneath your feet. You wanna know a fiend for real, check the bottom of his shoes” (1.03). His comment illustrates the way in which the whole environment is permeated by the all-consuming force of the drugs that can be perceived everywhere—also, of course, in his own body which shows clear signs of his addiction. It is through characters like “Bubbles” that The Wire narrates the inner-city space in personal narratives that show the complex interactions in contemporary urbanity and that also help to reflect on the deep-seated “divisions”35 between spaces in one city. Thereby the series not only critically comments on inequality when it comes to (social) mobility and access to space, but also renders the inner-city as a “lived environment”36 with the dire need of an urban reform which does not only attend to the criminal networks, but that acknowledges its specific social, ecological, and interpersonal identities. The Wire is a television series that seeks to comment on contemporary urbanity by focusing on inherent structural problems that, although they may show themselves in specific, isolated areas, are not unconnected and that pervade not only Baltimore but many major metropolises today.

Works Cited Alff, David M. “Yesterday’s Tomorrow Today: Baltimore and the Promise of Reform.” In The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, edited by Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2009. 23–36. Alvarez, Rafael. The Wire: Truth Be Told. New York: Grove, 2009. Bonjean, Elizabeth. “After the Towers Fell: Bodie Broadus and the Space of Memory.” In The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, edited by Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2009. 162–174. Bowden, Mark. “The Angriest Man in Television.” Atlantic Monthly. January– February 2008. 50–57.

35 Speidel, “Real and Imagined Space.” 36 Speidel, “Real and Imagined Space.”

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Chaddah, Anmol, and William Julius Wilson. “‘Way Down in the Hole’: Systemic Urban Inequality in The Wire.” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 1 (2011): 164–188. Clandfield, Peter. “‘We Ain’t Got No Yard’: Crime, Development, and Urban Environment.” In The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, edited by Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2009. 37–49. Hornby, Nick. “An Interview with David Simon.” In Rafael Alvarez. The Wire: Truth Be Told. New York: Grove, 2009. 382–397. Jagoda, Patrick. “Wired.” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 1 (2011): 189–199. Kinder, Marsha. “Re-Wiring Baltimore: The Emotive Power of Systemics, Seriality, and the City.” Film Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2008): 50–57. Lanahan, Lawrence. “Secrets of the City—What The Wire Reveals About Urban Journalism.” Columbia Journalism Review 46, no. 5 (2008): 22–31. McNeilly, Kevin. “Dislocating America: Agnieszka Holland Directs ‘Moral Midgetry’.” In The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, edited by Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2009. 203–216. Schliephake, Christopher. Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015. Sheehan, Helena and Sheamus Sweeney. “The Wire and the World: Narrative and Metanarrative.” Jump Cut 51 (2009): n. pag. https://www.ejumpcut. org/archive/jc51.2009/Wire (accessed March 4, 2013). Simon, David. “Introduction.” In Rafael Alvarez. The Wire: Truth Be Told. New York: Grove Press, 2009. 1–31. Speidel, Linda. “‘Thin Line ‘Tween Heaven and Here’ (Bubbles): Real and Imagined Space in The Wire.” Darkmatter 4 (2009): n. pag. http://www. darkmatter101.org/site/wp-content/uploads/pdf/4_Speidel_Thin_Line_ tween_heaven_and_here.pdf (accessed March 4, 2013).

CHAPTER 6

Reading the City: “Mind Mapping” in Sherlock Janina Wierzoch

“It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London,”1 Sherlock Holmes tells his friend Dr. Watson in the short story “The Red-Headed League” (1891). But he understates his case: The city is more than a hobby for him. The shifts and changes of the nineteenthcentury metropolis define the character of the detective; he is an answer to the concerns of his urban middle-class readership who experience the geographical and social maze of imperial London as impenetrable and alarming.2 As Holmes unravels the city—“not a mere setting […], but

1 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Red-Headed League,” in Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Ed., 2006), 449–468 (460–461). 2 The emergence of the detective is linked to contemporary urban developments; see Joseph McLaughlin, (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000), 29; Caroline Reitz, Detecting the Nation (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004), xix; and others. See Dan Ackroyd, London: The Biography (New York: Anchor, 2003), 578; Susan E. Sweeney, “The Other Side of the Coin in ‘The Red-Headed League’,” in Sherlock Holmes: Victorian Sleuth to Modern Hero, eds. Charles R. Putney et al. (Lanham: Scarecrow, 1996), 37–63 (56); and others.

J. Wierzoch (B) Hamburg, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_6

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the textual mystery that underwrites all [his] puzzles”3 —an aura of omniscient knowledge, popular methodology, and state-of-the-art technology surrounds him.4 When subsequently this metropolitan “master of information”5 transcends the boundaries of his canon and becomes a cultural icon,6 he continues to provide reassurance for his audiences updating the scientific and technological references of the canon. Discussing the BBC television series Sherlock (2010–2017), Anne Kustritz, and Melanie E. S. Kohnen show how the detective’s “technological expertise eases 21st [century] viewers’ anxieties about the digital city and information management.”7 Equipped with smart phone and 24/7 Internet access, Sherlock is turned into a “master of informational technology.”8 With these observations in mind, the present paper investigates more specifically the nexus of urban, virtual, and mental spaces in the Sherlock series and the impact on the detective as “reader” of the city. New ways of reading inform the representation and, more particularly, the spatial visualization of the detective’s mental capacity. And I will argue that, in the face of technology and based on modern-day principles of organization and experience of the urban world, Sherlock creates the site where the city is fully realized and deciphered within the figure of the detective himself. 3 McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle, 59. 4 See James R. Wright, “They Were the Very Models of the Modern Information

Age,” in Sherlock Holmes: Victorian Sleuth to Modern Hero, eds. Charles R. Putney et al. (Lanham: Scarecrow, 1996), 16–24; Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse, “Introduction: The Literary, Televisual and Digital Adventures of the Beloved Detective,” in Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, eds. Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse (London: McFarland, 2012), 9–24 (11); and others. 5 Rhonda Harris Taylor, “The ‘Great Game’ of Information: The BBC’s Digital Native,” in Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations, ed. Lynette Porter (London: McFarland: 2012), 128–143 (128). 6 See Christopher B. Weimer, “A Cervantine Reading of Conan Doyle: Interpolated Narrative in A Study in Scarlet,” in Sherlock Holmes: Victorian Sleuth to Modern Hero, eds. Charles R. Putney et al. (Lanham: Scarecrow, 1996), 196–210 (196). 7 Anne Kustritz and Melanie E. S. Kohnen, “Decoding the Industrial and Digital City: Visions of Security in Holmes’ and Sherlock’s London,” in Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom, eds. Louisa E. Stein et al. (London: McFarland, 2012), 85–100 (94). 8 Critical readings of Sherlock acknowledge and comment on the relevance of digital data and the omnipresence of technological devices and organizing principles in the series; e.g. Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse, eds., Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, (London: McFarland, 2012); or Lynnette Porter, ed., Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations, (London: McFarland, 2012).

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Cityscape in Sherlock The figure of Sherlock Holmes has been constructed as a “virtuoso reader of people and places.”9 He uncovers (i.e., reads) the hidden story of a crime10 that is inscribed into the fabric of the city, spatially and socially. According to Lynette Porter, in Sherlock this urban “reading matter,” a fictionalized modern-day version of London, is created as “a visual love letter to London,” the tourist destination.11 The city is decorated with iconic landmarks (Big Ben, the London Eye, etc.), black cabs, and red telephone boxes. The series’ visuals comprise the typical blend of historical facades and modern-day skyscrapers.12 Shot on-site in China Town, Soho, the Southbank Skate Park, and other recognizable locations, the series also echoes classical mystery fiction’s references to the reality of urban space.13 Beyond this facade the representation of the city in Sherlock is more than a collage of “travel guide” vignettes. The series’ version of the famous 221B Baker Street residence, for instance, constitutes an actual dislocation; outside shots of Sherlock’s apartment are conducted on central London’s North Gower Street. And, in turn, such production choices create their own urban realities: The real-life sandwich shop Speedy’s on Gower Street attracted public attention because it is located next door to the Baker Street apartment in the series. By now, it is part of the “Sherlock Holmes universe” and visited by fans of the series in real life.14 In any case, the series does not settle for a purely naturalistic image of the city. Instead, it presents urban space in an often subjectifying, visually alienating, and playful manner that consciously creates a multi-layered,

9 Kustritz and Kohnen, “Decoding the Industrial and Digital City,” 86. 10 See Peter Hühn, “The Detective as Reader,” Modern Fiction Studies 33, no. 3

(1987), 451–466 (451). 11 Lynnette Porter, “Welcome to London: The Role of the Cinematic Tourist,” in Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations, ed. Lynette Porter (London: McFarland: 2012), 164–180 (164). 12 See Kustritz and Kohnen, “Decoding the Industrial and Digital City,” 95. 13 See Malcah Effron, “Fictional Murders in Real ‘Mean Streets’: Detective Narratives

and Authentic Urban Geographies,” Journal of Narrative Theory 39, no. 3 (2009), 330– 346 (332–333). 14 See Porter, “Welcome to London,” 167.

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polysemous cityscape. The opening credits introduce a London panorama using a tilt-shift effect that creates the sensation of a toy-sized city.15 Images of Piccadilly Circus shot from above and superimposed by icons of investigation (e.g., a magnifying glass) visualize the masterful perspective of the detective on urban space.16 Sherlock’s London expands beyond the glossy surface as the series interweaves the city of touristic affluence with the detective’s view of a darker and more complex substructure: “Most people blunder around this city and all they see are streets and shops and cars. When you walk with Sherlock Holmes, you see the battlefield,” Sherlock’s brother Mycroft acknowledges in the first episode “A Study in Pink” (2010). A case in point is the way in which the same episode treats the issue of public safety through surveillance. The series updates the Victorian need to control the social sphere17 by addressing the extensive CCTV monitoring of post-millennial city space. But the policing technology in Sherlock’s London is easily manipulated to reverse the promise of security for the common man. The public cameras are purposefully turned away when John Watson is “abducted” against his will to meet with Sherlock’s inscrutable brother Mycroft. The series, as Kustritz and Kohnen argue, is aware of “the illusory nature of such fantasies of social control.”18 Another example of visual alienation of city space can be found in the episode “The Reichenbach Fall” (2012). An atmosphere of sensory distortion characterizes the showdown between Sherlock and his nemesis Moriarty on a central London rooftop. Eccentric camera angles, panning, and the use of a fisheye lens create a surreal mood, which is enhanced by the audio track (the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive”) drowning out all other sound. The highly stylized take represents the subjective perception of the ingenious, but doubtlessly maniac antagonist. Moriarty’s perspective on the city is distorted and perversive. The rooftop scene also serves as a

15 The effect is achieved by limiting deep focus to the center of the image, blurring the edges and changing chroma and contrast as well as speeding up the frame rate. 16 See Kristina Busse and Louisa E. Stein, “Conclusion: Transmedia Sherlock and

Beyond,” in Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, eds. Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse (London: McFarland, 2012), 224–231 (228). 17 Interestingly, the generic figure of the detective has been linked to Foucault’s remarks on the Victorian desire for the governance of urban space (see Reitz, Detecting the Nation, xx, xxii). 18 Kustritz and Kohnen “Decoding the Industrial and Digital City,” 87; see also 96.

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symbol for the superior minds of detective and criminal and their exclusive synoptic view: seeing but themselves unseen, at the same time in the heart of the city and removed from it.

Transmediality and the Digital in Sherlock In the series, Sherlock routinely looks up contextual information about urban space on his mobile phone. In the process, London is “miniaturized” to a digital surrogate of itself that is conveniently retrievable at any time. Despite (or rather because of) unrestricted access, the digitized city bears its own impenetrability: the labyrinth of information.19 The series captures this by superimposing another layer onto the city; it identifies London with its cartographic Web representations (as provided by Google Maps or Street View, for instance). Not only does the detective himself constantly utilize digital information about site-specific conditions to read the city; the virtual city of the series outgrows the limits of the fictional world and encourages fans to extend their experience of Sherlock beyond the medium of television. At the time, the transmedia strategy of the series involved audience addresses by the producers via social media websites to create “a sense of ownership of the television series” in the viewers.20 The interplay of series world and webspace was also maintained by the real-life counterparts for Sherlock’s fictional website thescienceofdeduction.co.uk and the blogs of John Watson and Molly Hooper. Such “narrative extensions”21 render appropriate transmedia engagement and re-enactment. And the independent website sherlockology.com further facilitated the merging of televised and digitalized city space by allocating filming spots using Google Maps. Via such media, viewers are able to follow in the virtual footsteps of the detective, creating a “virtual cosmopolitanism”22 that calls for a personal appropriation of the city.

19 See Taylor, “The ‘Great Game’,” 140; Stein and Busse, “Introduction,” 10; and Kustritz and Kohnen, “Decoding the Industrial and Digital City,” 95–96. 20 Porter, “Welcome to London,” 175. 21 Stein and Busse, “Introduction,” 13. 22 Rodanthi Tzanelli, The Cinematic Tourist: Explorations in Globalization, Culture and Resistance (London: Routledge, 2007), 17; see also Porter, “Welcome to London,” 173.

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Just like their hero the fans can use digital media to investigate the urban universe of Sherlock.23 The detective who inhabits this “augmented” city is, like his Victorian predecessor, “information literate.”24 He uses sources of information expediently and masterly; for Rhonda Harris Taylor he is a “digital native,” that is, entirely invested in the digital.25 This ties in with Kustritz and Kohnen’s claim that “Sherlock offers reassurance” for his contemporaries who may experience the glut of digital data as unmanageable and yet require constant Internet access.26 Svetlana Bochman diagnoses a “discomfort” with technology in contemporary culture which at times seizes Sherlock himself; he of course manages to unravel the knot of information eventually.27 After all, he is the “master of powerful technology (and the overwhelming information it brings),” as Taylor puts it.28 Sherlock’s affinity to technology leads Francesca Coppa to compare him to a cyborg, “an almost perfect synthesis of man and machine.”29 While not all of the implications of the term “cyborg” are relevant here, I want to emphasize the correlation of character and digital information media. This correlation is already part of the exposition of the detective in the series: Sherlock’s on-screen presence is not introduced through the performance of the actor; instead his presence is evoked by text inserts that visualize his mobile messages within the scene of a police press conference. The inserts imitate the style of such text messages: presenting short, unadorned lines of incomplete syntax and simulating the typography of mobile phone

23 Most fans engage with the series in virtual space; others visit real-life shooting locations—this “[c]inematic tourism blurs the lines between reality and fiction” on a different level (Porter, “Welcome to London,” 177). 24 Rhonda Harris Taylor, “A Singular Case of Identity: Holmesian Shapeshifting,” in Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations, ed. Lynette Porter (London: McFarland: 2012), 93–112 (104). 25 Taylor, “The ‘Great Game’,” 128, see also 131ff. 26 Kustritz and Kohnen, “Decoding the Industrial and Digital City,” 96, see also 97. 27 Svetlana Bochman, “Detecting the Technocratic Detective,” in Sherlock Holmes for

the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations, ed. Lynette Porter (London: McFarland: 2012), 144–154 (145). 28 Taylor, “The ‘Great Game’,” 142. 29 Francesca Coppa, “Sherlock as Cyborg: Bridging Mind and Body,” in Sherlock and

Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, eds. Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse (London: McFarland, 2012), 210–223 (211).

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software. The letter sequences “hover” above the heads of the assembled journalists and thus reference the spatial distribution of information, though as such they are not part of the diegetic world. On the diegetic level the messages rather appear on the mobile phones of the journalists present. What is more, the same means are subsequently used to convey Sherlock’s thoughts. As he inspects a crime scene in “A Study in Pink,” his observations and deductions pop up as text inserts in the same manner as his text messages or data from his mobile Internet searches. Aesthetically, the series locates Sherlock on the same level as technological devices and suggests that both are working in a structurally analogous manner. This equation of detective and technology is confirmed by himself30 : In the episode “The Great Game” (2010), he calls his brain his “hard drive” from which he can delete superfluous data at will.31 As Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse confirm, technological structures are written deep into the logic of the character: “Sherlock demonstrates his intuitive use of operations such as the interrelated actions of search and filter, key digital tools so deeply embedded in our culture that they have become fundamental cultural logics.”32

Navigating the City in Sherlock In Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock effortlessly navigates the spatial and social labyrinth of the Victorian city, even where the socio-political map overlaying the physical space indicates non-middle-class territory. This affirmation of the city’s controllability is appropriated to the context of Sherlock.33 The detective again is intimately acquainted with the city: “You know every street in London. You know exactly where we are,” his adversary in “A Study in Pink” concedes. But this knowledge is linked to new ways of processing information. Taylor, writing about the aspects 30 See Bochman, “Detecting the Technocratic Detective,” 152. 31 This “discarding” of information, Matt Hills argues, shows Sherlock’s fallibility in

the series, as “[n]o forms of know-how are now off-limits, or to be ultimately derided as valueless” in “Sherlock’s Epistemological Economy and the Value of ‘Fan’ Knowledge,” in Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, eds. Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse (London: McFarland, 2012), 27–40 (30, 31). 32 Stein and Busse, “Introduction,” 11. 33 See Kustritz and Kohnen, “Decoding the Industrial and Digital City,” 86–88.

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of “navigating and appropriately utilizing information resources,” argues that “these skills are critical for a consulting detective.”34 The reference to the digital city and the manageability of city space through technology in Sherlock is inextricably bound up with the figure of the detective himself. In the first episode, Sherlock chases a cab through the narrow streets of Soho. The high-revving sequence blends shots of the detective in closeup (mentally calculating a route) and full motion (following the route) with images of a digital street map. The position of the cab and the route of the detective are traced on the cartographical image imitating a GPS device. In the close-up, Sherlock estimates the cab’s itinerary, according to Kustritz and Kohnen, “much like a computer calculates a route from Point A to B.”35 The significance of this sequence for the figure of the detective lies in the details. Other than the text messages in the expository scene, the street map does not reproduce an image presented on a diegetic GPS device. Thus, navigational technology and its aesthetics are used to illustrate the detective’s interior reasoning; the map and calculation are entirely situated within the figure. The connection made between detective and digital device transgresses the ontological boundary between the diegetic level of Sherlock and the conceptual level of technological routing. Commenting on the same scene, Bochman recalls the famous comparison of the detective with a machine, the non-human, emotionless calculator introduced in Conan Doyle’s texts.36 In the series, she writes, “Sherlock’s rationalist intelligence sometimes serves to dehumanize him until he is almost at one with the technology he so adeptly manipulates.”37 And yet Sherlock is not merely “much like,” as Kustritz and Kohnen put it, or “almost at one” with the GPS system. While the GPS software is limited to the two-dimensional grid of streets, Sherlock navigates beyond these limits and augments the city map with information about hidden, unofficial, and unlikely shortcuts. Because he calculates on this basis of a more complex, three-dimensional topography, he can outrun the cab.38 Sherlock’s “grasp of unmapped areas” covers the “unruly”

34 Taylor, “The ‘Great Game’,” 129. 35 Kustritz and Kohnen, “Decoding the Industrial and Digital City,” 95. 36 See Bochman, “Detecting the Technocratic Detective,” 152, also 139. 37 Bochman, “Detecting the Technocratic Detective,” 152. 38 In “The Blind Banker” Sherlock also proves his knowledge of the social depth of the

urban geography: On seeking expert knowledge in the field of visual arts, he bypasses a

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space beyond the technologically manageable street layout.39 His mental capacity exceeds the device’s spatial range. Concurrently, the post-millennial detective also surpasses the capacity of his canonical predecessor. The scene is reminiscent of a famous cab ride of Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four (1890) during which he comments on his route through the urban labyrinth.40 But London is no less labyrinthine in Sherlock than in the canon, despite the technology that might suggest a more easily navigable modern-day city. The very conditions of modern-day metropolitan traffic reintroduce the idea of impenetrability in Sherlock. In the cab chasing sequence, these conditions are visualized as road signs flaring up in between the images of the map and close-ups of the detective. The road signs suggest a maze-like system of one-way streets and detours further obstructed by traffic timing. What marks today’s city as a labyrinth is no obscure layout but the restraints of traffic regulation and road work which must be, and is, conquered by Sherlock timing his route. On top of this, the protagonist of Sherlock is not only able to track and follow the cab. He anticipates the car’s itinerary to calculate his own route according to his prognosis—and thus gains a temporal advantage over his Victorian alter ego. The whole sequence represents the superiority of the detective’s mental processes and does so not only in comparison with but also under the conditions of the digital. Sherlock is ranked with the digital. Still, he is not simply like the technical apparatus but assimilates and surpasses technology at the same time. The BBC’s Sherlock is not an outright machine; his mind is the place where the digital and the human intersect. His access to off-the-record information shifts the representation of navigational capacity toward the advantage of the detective. For him, city space is elaborate, multi-layered, and yet transparent. Sherlock provides the “reassurance that we can make sense of the information […] that constantly surrounds us”41 in the urban sphere. And it is to this end, that the detective proves his superiority to technology.

museum (the “appropriate” space to seek such knowledge) and meets a street artist in a back alley who provides him with the inside information he needs. 39 Kustritz and Kohnen, “Decoding the Industrial and Digital City,” 96. 40 See Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Sign of the Four,” in Sherlock Holmes: The Complete

Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Ed., 2006), 95–174 (108). 41 Kustritz and Kohnen, “Decoding the Industrial and Digital City,” 96.

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Dimensions of Deduction in Sherlock To realize the detective’s interior reasoning in the audio-visual text of Sherlock, the representation strategically employs contemporary experience, namely, concepts and representational modes of the digital. But it is more than simply telling the otherwise non-communicable and more than just implementing Conan Doyle’s machine-metaphor.42 The various text inserts, for instance, are placed in the three-dimensional depth of the filmic image; and the virtual and mental spaces they represent are thus emphatically linked to the diegetic world. The typographical elements represent Sherlock’s thoughts and digital output. But while they ontologically retain their reality status as thoughts or texts on mobile screens, they are allocated expressly in the experiential (if fictional) realm of modern-day life on the visual level. The second season of the series further expedites the idea that Sherlock’s mind works—and can be presented—in spatial terms in a distinct way. In the episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” (2012), the detective introduces what he calls his “mind palace.” This interior mental space is the visualization of a memory technique using a three-dimensional structure to “place” (and thus store) information. The respective scene carries the idea from the first season, namely, to depict the detective’s thoughts as three-dimensional text inserts, one step further and visualizes his mental processes as modifiable pictorial and audible representations that “actually float around his head.”43 And what is more, Sherlock physically interacts with these images as he invokes and rejects associations for his deductive train of thought. For him, they become spatial objects, almost material, and he can shuffle through his visualized thoughts using his head and hands much like Tom Cruise’s character interacts physically with the futuristic information system in Minority Report (2002). Thus, as Taylor notes, “[m]ind, body, and data are part of an overtly integrated information system,”44 The space is organized according to digital logics and the detective operates in terms of “search and filter” here.45 He plays through the associations connected to his input (the words “Liberty” and “In”) 42 See Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia” [1891], in Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Ed., 2006), 429–448 (429). 43 Bochman, “Detecting the Technocratic Detective,” 52. 44 Taylor, “The ‘Great Game’,” 139. 45 See Stein and Busse, “Introduction,” 11–12.

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and then filters the information by probability and overlap. The mind palace is of course a reference to the “brain-attic”46 , the canon’s image for the detective’s mind. The series “upgrades” this idea, adapting it to the contemporary context and the self-aggrandizing character of its protagonist—an attic cannot adequately represent Sherlock’s brain, it must be a palace.

Merging Spaces in Sherlock In “The Reichenbach Fall,” the final episode of series two, spaces and spatial information converge in an even more complex node in the mind of the detective. In the respective scene, set on the office floor of a police station, the detective has to process information from different sources— both interior and exterior—to identify a location just outside of London (an old sweet factory in Addlestone). To contextualize and to connect the clues Sherlock repeatedly retreats to a version of his mind palace. The deductive process here is more sophisticated than in “The Hounds of Baskerville,” especially because it relates to the spatiality of both the computing space and the data concerned. Sherlock combines a mental map of London with bits of information: data on the soil from a lab report, input from Inspector Lestrade, and images of city spots digitally transmitted via mobile phone from an urban network of homeless people sent out to investigate in the streets. All of this he links to the London map “uploaded” from his “hard drive”; and he uses mentally stored data about the city to correctly place the input. The representation of Sherlock’s calculations works as an interface of actual space, digital supplements, and human capacity. The map of London is again “projected” as visible cartographic information in front of him. And though it represents part of his local knowledge rather than a factual virtual projection, it is visibly embedded within the setting of the police office. Even though the map is not part of “real” space, the detective can interact with the objects in this “chart room.” Instead of using his hands, however, he shifts, scrolls, and marks the map according to the input he processes via head and eye movement. The city representations and urban data in this scene have a different reality status, but the ontological boundaries in between are permeable. 46 Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet,” [1887] Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Ed., 2006), 12–93 (20).

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The mental space, for instance, transgresses its own limitation and reaches into the actual world of the story by manipulating its conditions. Whenever Sherlock crosses over into the mental-digital equivalent of the city, the reality of the office floor visually fades, however, not merely by postproduction editing like dimming the tone but by actually turning off the cold fluorescent office lights. They only “flicker” back on when Sherlock leaves the mind palace. The virtual data he receives via his mobile phone, on the other hand, is seamlessly integrated into the projection disregarding the boundary between telecommunication device and mental space. The images are retrieved and matched onto the map using a drag and drop mechanism controlled by Sherlock’s directive glances between digital images and mental map. The visual logic of the series thus includes the possibility of an overlap of the different levels or, in other words, a permeability of ontological borders within the detective’s consciousness. Sherlock’s superior grasp of mental, virtual and city space is on many occasions contrasted with the inability of other characters to even follow his inferences. And even John Watson generally relies on Sherlock as an interface to make sense of digital information. In the first episode, for example, John uses a GPS enabled mobile phone to follow and deliver his friend from the dangers of his intellectual competitiveness. Still, it was Sherlock who had decoded the clue to the phone and John merely retraces the logical steps of his friend. Sherlock is and will remain the only true manager of the digital city. And as the social demarcations of the Victorian city were no obstacle for Conan Doyle’s detective, who as easily investigated in “the lowest portions of the city”47 as he conversed with European nobility,48 the detective of the twenty-first century can shift the barriers between real life and the digital in his mind to make sense of seemingly incoherent or overwhelming information. The City as Playground in Sherlock As I have argued elsewhere, the detective in Sherlock is represented as a “gifted child.”49 His ambivalent sexuality can be understood as asexual 47 Conan Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet,” 19. 48 See, for instance, Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” 434. 49 See Janina Wierzoch, “‘It’s the Future Watson’: Die Figur Sherlock Holmes in

aktuellen filmischen Adaptionen,” in Innovation—Konvention: Transdisziplinäre Beiträge zu einem kulturellen Spannungsfeld, eds. Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich, Stefanie Kadenbach and

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(though the subtext is of course open to interpretation),50 but what is more, Sherlock is constantly playing. That London is aesthetically introduced as a toy version of the city as described above,51 ties in with this characterization of the detective. When introduced to his first case, he makes no attempt at disguising his eager excitement after a promising turn in a series of apparent suicides: “There’s no point sitting at home when there’s finally something fun going on!” (“A Study in Pink”). Despite his general detachment, he even hugs his landlady Mrs Hudson, who scolds him in a motherly fashion for being so indecently happy at the death of another victim. He exclaims: “Who cares about decent? The game, Mrs Hudson, is on!” (“A Study in Pink”). And though “[t]he Game is afoot”52 in the canon as well, Holmes is never so much a child as an adventurer in the Victorian stories. Furthermore, in Sherlock the detective permanently confirms his inability to empathize; his thoughts revolve around his own preoccupations. He is sulky, capricious, and inconsiderate. Like a child he lives in his own world, largely oblivious of the emotional needs of others. Besides, Sherlock is in constant conflict with the authority of the police. And Inspector Lestrade confirms: “Well, I’m dealing with a child” (“A Study in Pink”). The relationship to his brother Mycroft is described as “simply childish” and a “petty feud” in the same episode. That both brothers refer to their mother as “Mummy” certainly does not thwart the impression of Sherlock’s childishness. Interestingly, this characteristic of the detective coincides with his role as “digital native.” Taylor mentions that the digital native experiences both the world and technology at large as a game.53 Sherlock’s experience of urban and mental space is based on certain characteristics of computer games. The layout of the Soho neighborhood he passes through when

Martin Kindermann (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013), 87–109 (99–100); see also Ariana ScottZechlin, “‘But It’s the Solar System!’ Reconciling Science and Faith Through Astronomy,” in Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, eds. Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse (London: McFarland, 2012), 56–69 (61). 50 See Carlen Lavigne, “The Noble Bachelor and the Crooked Man: Subtext and Sexuality in the BBC’s Sherlock,” in Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations, ed. Lynette Porter (London: McFarland: 2012), 13–23 (18). 51 See also Coppa, “Sherlock as Cyborg,” 211. 52 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Abbey Grange,” [1904] in Sherlock Holmes: The Complete

Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Ed., 2006), 1046–1064 (1046). 53 See Taylor, “The ‘Great Game’,” 140.

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chasing the cab certainly shows features of the urban spaces of adventure games54 : compartmentalized and diverse with three-dimensional routes in unconventional “back alley” terrain. It is an urban topography that has to be traversed using different modes of movement like running, jumping, or climbing. The ludic quality of conquering this space is the purpose of the scene rather than gaining information in the criminal case. Catching the cab turns out to be a dead end in the investigation, at least until Sherlock can make the correct inference much later. In addition to this, the space of Sherlock’s “mind palace” is body-controlled like a console game. And the advanced version of his interiority, when he works out the location of the sweet factory, has already been characterized by the logic of drag and drop, not only but also used in computer games. The story of the episode “The Great Game,” that carries the idea of playing in its very title, is constructed as a sequence of minor cases, or “campaigns,” that lead Sherlock to different parts of the city. Sherlock has to solve these cases (or levels) before getting to the showdown scene— prepared by the game master Moriarty, who acknowledges: “I have loved this. This little game of ours. Playing Jim from IT. Playing gay.” In this episode especially (and similarly in “The Reichenbach Fall”), “Moriarty embodies the disorder of information overload” for Sherlock, a problem that, in a digitized world, frequently has to be conquered by his fans as well.55

Urban Mind Mapping in Sherlock The detective in Sherlock is a digitally adept calculator of urban data. His vision of London and urban life merges different dimensions to visualize the process of decoding the twenty-first-century city. The ground where this takes place is the mind of the detective. Reading or indeed “mapping” and decoding the city in Sherlock is not a one-dimensional matter. It relies heavily on audio-visual means to construct a three-dimensional reading space and on aesthetics drawing on popular modes of digital visualization. The detective appropriates the reassuring authority that is inscribed into his generic character for the purpose of dealing with current issues. He 54 Fittingly, the classic detective genre is related to the adventure story, a genre that features prominently in the embedded narrative in the first Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet. 55 See Taylor, “The ‘Great Game’,” 141.

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re-enacts contemporary difficulties56 of access to (and excess of) digital data from the vast and fuzzy space of the Web. In the end, however, he always conquers the digital domain and the city. But the reassurance he provides is not only a serious conquest of technology, the Web and the city due to his superior capacity. The infantine pleasure that informs his approach of the cases also hints at a more playful strategy: to displace anxieties by taking it all as a game, an innocuous adventure. In this light, the city becomes his playground. Soho is constructed as a three-dimensional labyrinth Sherlock has to traverse to catch the cab and “finish the level.” The design of this urban territory, especially the in-between spaces, does not resemble an authentic city terrain but a game layout, a scene enjoyable for its versatile spatiality and editing style. Even when the series turns to more serious, even fatal matters as in “The Reichenbach Fall,” where the detective eventually jumps off the roof of central London’s St. Bart’s hospital, it simply “reboots the level.” resurrects Sherlock and grants him “another try” in the third season. Even so, the digital informs the treatment of space and local information beyond that of the computer game. The reading of city data is constantly developed by the detective in Sherlock: from simply providing territorial data via mobile devices, to calculating the city with recourse to digital aesthetics, to actually shifting data in a three-dimensional mental space, and to augmenting a mental representation of the city that peripherally extends into the regions of both real-life and digital community. The process of reading the city takes place in a digitized interior of the detective’s mind. The series progressively displaces the prominent position of digital information technology per se; while Sherlock stays connected to digital information sources throughout the series, the mental space of his brain continuously evolves to eventually override the initial prominence of digital information in the series. The detective himself emerges as the more effective and capable processing device. And the fact that “knowledge [or rather information] is no longer located in his ‘brain attic’ but in the digital ‘cloud’”57 poses no problem because the digital appliances procure mere data in any case; the computing, that is the sense-making, is done in Sherlock’s augmented “palace of the mind.”’

56 See Kustritz and Kohnen, “Decoding the Industrial and Digital City,” 97. 57 Stein and Busse, “Introduction,” 11.

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Literature Ackroyd, Dan. London: The Biography. New York: Anchor, 2003. Bochman, Svetlana. “Detecting the Technocratic Detective.” In Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations, edited by Lynette Porter. London: McFarland, 2012. 144–154. Busse, Kristina and Louisa E. Stein. “Conclusion: Transmedia Sherlock and Beyond.” In Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, edited by Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse. London: McFarland, 2012. 224–231. Conan Doyle, Arthur. “The Abbey Grange.” [1904] In Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories. Ware: Wordsworth Ed., 2006. 1046–1064. ———. “The Red-Headed League.” [1891] In Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories. Ware: Wordsworth Ed., 2006. 449–468. ———. “A Scandal in Bohemia.” [1891] In Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories. Ware: Wordsworth Ed., 2006. 429–448. ———. “The Sign of the Four.” [1890] In Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories. Ware: Wordsworth Ed., 2006. 95–174. ———. “A Study in Scarlet.” [1887] In Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories. Ware: Wordsworth Ed., 2006. 12–93. Coppa, Francesca. “Sherlock as Cyborg: Bridging Mind and Body.” In Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, edited by Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse. London: McFarland, 2012. 210–223. Effron, Malcah. “Fictional Murders in Real ‘Mean Streets’: Detective Narratives and Authentic Urban Geographies.” Journal of Narrative Theory 39, no. 3 (2009): 330–346. Hills, Matt. “Sherlock’s Epistemological Economy and the Value of ‘Fan’ Knowledge: How Producer-Fans Play the (Great) Game of Fandom.” In Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, edited by Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse. London: McFarland, 2012. 27–40. Hühn, Peter. “The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 33, no. 3 (1987): 451–466. Kustritz, Anne, and Melanie E. S. Kohnen. “Decoding the Industrial and Digital City: Visions of Security in Holmes’ and Sherlock’s London.” In Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, edited by Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse. London: McFarland, 2012. 85–100. Lavigne, Carlen. “The Noble Bachelor and the Crooked Man: Subtext and Sexuality in the BBC’s Sherlock.” In Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations, edited by Lynette Porter. London: McFarland, 2012. 13–23. McLaughlin, Joseph. Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

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Porter, Lynnette. “Welcome to London: The Role of the Cinematic Tourist.” In Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations, edited by Lynette Porter. London: McFarland, 2012. 164–180. Reitz, Caroline. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. Scott-Zechlin, Ariana. “‘But It’s the Solar System!’ Reconciling Science and Faith Through Astronomy.” In Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, edited by Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse. London: McFarland, 2012. 56–69. Stein, Louisa E. and Kristina Busse. “Introduction: The Literary, Televisual and Digital Adventures of the Beloved Detective.” In Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, edited by Louisa E. Stein and Kristina Busse. London: McFarland, 2012. 9–24. Sweeney, Susan E. “The Other Side of the Coin in ‘The Red-Headed League’.” In Sherlock Holmes: Victorian Sleuth to Modern Hero, edited by Charles R. Putney et al. Lanham: Scarecrow, 1996. 37–63. Taylor, Rhonda Harris. “The ‘Great Game’ of Information: The BBC’s Digital Native.” In Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations, edited by Lynette Porter. London: McFarland, 2012. 128–143. ———. “A Singular Case of Identity: Holmesian Shapeshifting.” In Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations, edited by Lynette Porter. London: McFarland, 2012. 93–112. Tzanelli, Rodanthi. The Cinematic Tourist: Explorations in Globalization, Culture and Resistance. London: Routledge, 2007. Weimer, Christopher B. “A Cervantine Reading of Conan Doyle: Interpolated Narrative in A Study in Scarlet.” In Sherlock Holmes: Victorian Sleuth to Modern Hero, edited by Charles R. Putney et al. Lanham: Scarecrow, 1996. 196–210. Wierzoch, Janina. “‘It’s the Future Watson’: Die Figur Sherlock Holmes in aktuellen filmischen Adaptionen.” In Innovation—Konvention: Transdisziplinäre Beiträge zu einem kulturellen Spannungsfeld, edited by Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich, Stefanie Kadenbach and Martin Kindermann. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013. 87–109. Wright, James R. “They Were the Very Models of the Modern Information Age.” In Sherlock Holmes: Victorian Sleuth to Modern Hero, edited by Charles R. Putney et al. Lanham: Scarecrow, 1996. 16–24.

PART III

Conflicting Narratives

CHAPTER 7

Transcription: Addressing the Interactivity Between Urban and Architectural Spaces and Their Use Klaske Maria Havik

This contribution stresses the gap between the design of urban spaces and their use. It argues that the interactivity between writer and reader in literature, in the sense that the reader co-produces the text, also counts for the designer and the user (or perceiver) of architectural space. I propose the notion Transcription as an approach connecting this interactivity to the role of activities, movements, and events in the experience and the making of urban space. Literary concepts such as perspective, character, and narrative are brought into the realm of urban and architectural design. First, the paper brings to the fore the work of a number of

This text is an excerpt from the chapters “Transcription” and “Telling Places” of my book Urban Literacy, Reading and Writing Architecture (Rotterdam: Nai010 publishers 2014), reprinted here with permission of the publisher. K. M. Havik (B) Department of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_7

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theorists who have addressed the social dimension of space, for instance, Henri Lefebvre, stating that space is socially produced, and Michel de Certeau, who connects the spatial practices of everyday life to the idea of narrative. Second, the paper discusses how architects such as Daniel Libeskind and Peter Eisenman have attempted to transcribe such insights to their theoretical and architectural projects.

Transcription: Social, Experimental, and Interactive I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep-rooted; places that might be points of reference of departure, of origin […] Such places don’t exist, and it’s because they don’t exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident […] Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.1

As the French-Polish writer Georges Perec suggests, the relationship between architecture and the activities of the people who use and inhabit it is not neutral. This paper takes as its point of departure the observation that architecture is influenced by social practices, and that even so, architecture, by giving shape to people’s environment, in turn influences social behavior. The dynamic relationship between people and places is the key focus of this text, and I introduce transcription as a conceptual tool to address this interactivity. The word Trans cription implies a directional way of writing: “trans” is the Latin preposition “across” or “through.” The etymological dictionary notes: “to write across, i.e. to transfer in writing.”2 The directional and experimental character that the word transcription implies is crucial in that transcription can be understood as a dynamic notion. First, aspects of movement and activity in literary writings are closely connected to the spaces in which they take place, and often point toward social practices; offering information about the way people move through, 1 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (London: Penguin Classics, 2008),

91. 2 Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, ed. Eric Partridge (New York: Greenwich House, 1983 [1958]), 598, entry 22. transcribere.

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use, and appropriate space. In literary works, spatial metaphors often indicate direction and movement. Indeed, in writing about spaces, the aspect of action implied by the space—a passage, a pathway, a threshold, a door, an opening to another space—can play a part in the narrative. Space can encourage characters to move, pass through, and undertake action. In literary reflections about changes in society, architectural and urban scenes not only serve as the background against which narratives of activity can unfold; these scenes also play an important part in depicting social practices. As Marilyn Chandler argues, our built environment and the way we live in it “has a good deal to do with the way we tell our stories […] both architecture and literature are simultaneously reflective and formative social forces. In both, implicit issues of gender and class lie behind the politics of style.”3 Indeed, literature both reflects the social codes and the use of the city, while it may also take part in its process of change. Literary texts on how people behave in the city shine a light on power relations in society, showing how the social codes of different user groups relate to specific urban places. Both architecture and literature represent, reflect on, and produce societal conditions. Therefore, literary urban portraits are of interest for sociologists, cultural philosophers, and others concerned with social and spatial practices. A second aspect of transcription has to do with its potential as an experimental practice: it searches the boundaries of the discipline by “writing through.” The experimental practices of the literary movement Oulipo, or the “spatial” literature of James Joyce serve as literary examples. These authors experiment within the use of language, or within the production of text, but also experiment regarding the structure of the novel, and its content. They explore the possibility for confrontations and conflicts, openings to include the unexpected. In these writings, space, even the space of the novel itself, is constantly questioned, designated, marked, or conquered. Here, issues of transgression and violation within the space of literature are at stake. Third, the commonly used meaning of transcription is “to write a version of something,” or “to write in a different medium; transliterate.”4

3 Marilyn R. Chandler, Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 6. 4 The Penguin Pocket English Dictionary (London: Penguin Group, 1990 [1985]), 904, entry transcribe.

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When looking for direct transcriptions into other media, the transcriptions of literary scenes in film or theatre are probably the most common. Writing another version of a text, however, can also happen within literature itself, namely through the reader, who can take on the role of an active participant. Indeed, one can speak of the interactive production of the text on the part of both writer and reader. If transcribing indeed implies an active role of the reader as a producer, a maker of the text, architectural transcription might direct us to a similar role for the user of space.

Urban Space and Social Practice Thus, in literature, space is never neutral: it is the stage for social activities. Therefore, literature has the capacity to offer precise accounts of social processes, not only as vivid portraits of urban life, but also as “symptomatology” of social illness, to speak with Deleuze.5 Literature can provide a cure in the sense that it can offer alternatives, new directions for society. The field of tension between the reader and writer (or the designer and user) of a work comes to the fore as an important issue: the reader, by his very act of reading, has a role in the production of the text. Likewise, the role of the user of architecture can be brought into play when addressing the social dimensions of architecture. I will now bring to the fore how such aspects of transcription can be “transcribed” to architecture. One of the key arguments that Henri Lefebvre made in his conceptualization of lived space was indeed that such space is by definition socially produced. Like the reader, who has a role in producing the (experience of the) text, it is the user, the inhabitant, the passer-by, who has a role in producing the lived experience of space. In other words, lived space exists precisely through the actions of its users, inhabitants, and passers-by; it is dynamic and subject to change. It has the ability to speak, as it were, to address the visitor, user, or inhabitant: “Representational space [lived space] is alive: it speaks.”6 5 Ronald Bogue has in detail discussed Deleuze’s use of literature throughout his philosophical works. Borgue frequently refers to Deleuze’s metaphor of health: literary writers as symptomatologists of sickness in society, and as the ones capable of offering new possibilities. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Literature (New York/London: Routledge, 2003). See for symptomatology especially chapter one, “Sickness, Signs, and Sense,” 9–30. 6 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 42.

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For Henri Lefebvre, society produces its own space, through its own means of production. Social practices and structures of power thus play a role in this production of social space, and become visible in the streets and public spaces of everyday life. By analyzing the behavior of people in public urban spaces, social patterns can be found. In this way, Lefebvre argues, “social space works […] as a tool for the analysis of society,”7 or even, “[s]pace is social morphology.”8 In his earlier book The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre focuses specifically on urban society, claiming that the city is inextricably linked with social practices of everyday life.9 His hypothesis is that society will become completely urbanized. He believes that the transformations he perceives in the society of Western Europe in the late 1960s will lead to an ultimately urban society: a dominance of the city over the country. This urban society will lead to a new practice: urban practice.10 By this, he hints at a new mode of production: the citizen participating in the production of space. This production can also entail transgression of spatial and legal borders, as well as spatial violation, by means of which new rules, new spaces, and new forms of social life are initiated. Here, Lefebvre foresees a change in power structures: it is not the institutions, the formal bodies of power, that write the laws and rules of society; rather, urban society is produced in the streets, by people. Lefebvre sees the street as the place where changes in society become apparent, society becomes produced and “inscribed” in the streets, and this has to do with the function of the street as a space for social interaction: Revolutionary events generally take place in the street. […] The urban space of the street is a space for talk, given over as much to the exchange of words and signs as it is for the exchange of things. A place where speech becomes writing. A place where speech becomes ‘savage’, and, by escaping rules and institutions, inscribes itself on the walls.11

7 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 33–34. 8 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 94. 9 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution,

Minnesota Press, 2003). 10 Lefebvre, Urban Revolution, 5. 11 Lefebvre, Urban Revolution, 19.

(Minneapolis/London: University of

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Clearly, this interest in the streets as the place where societal changes are enforced by citizens could well be related to the political era in which Lefebvre’s argument should be placed: The Urban Revolution was published in France two years after the events in Paris of 1968, when indeed the streets were the locus for social and political change. The “Right to the City” that Lefebvre advocates12 may be read as the right of the participant to transcribe—and thereby to produce new urban practices. Similarly, Jane Jacobs referred to the power of the citizens in her critical comments on urban planning and economy in the 1960s and 1970s. She pointed out the importance of diversity in urban life and stated that planners and politicians should pay more attention to everyday practices that give shape to public life in the city, because: “The bureaucratized, simplified cities so dear to our present-day city planners and urban designers […] run counter to the processes of city growth and economic development.”13 Even though their contributions to the urban debate date from a specific period, their insights are far from outdated. Referring to both Henri Lefebvre and Jane Jacobs, the contemporary urban theorist Edward Soja argues that they were right: the twenty-first century has indeed become the era of urban society, and therefore it is necessary to acknowledge and study the productive capacity of users.14

The Role of Stories: Narrative as an Analytical Tool In this respect, a reflection on the work of Michel de Certeau is appropriate. This French theorist in the social sciences and literature has proposed a shift in thinking about the everyday: seeing everyday spatial practices as valuable aspects of culture. Like Lefebvre, De Certeau is interested in the role of users, or consumers, the word De Certeau employs

12 Henri Lefebvre, “Right to the City,” in Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2006 [1996]), 63–184. 13 Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (London: Penguin, 1972 [1969]), 97. 14 Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999 [1996]).

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for the “dominated” groups,15 in the production of culture. First, he makes a distinction between the “strategies” that those in power develop in order to organize and dominate society, and “tactics,” the ways of operating of the dominated groups. Such tactics can “use, manipulate, and divert”16 the spaces that are produced and imposed by means of strategies. Everyday practices such as talking, reading, cooking, and walking are, in his view, tactical. De Certeau argues that such practices have a much larger role in the production of society than is generally accounted for. It is through walking in the city, through the repetition of routes and rituals, through daily meetings, chats with neighbors or shop owners, that inhabitants live and produce urban life: The ordinary practitioners of the city […] walk—an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers […] whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it. […] The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. […] A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.17

De Certeau sets this urban life, generated by the patterns of its praxis, against the conceptual city as seen from above. As a model for the rational “Concept-City,” imposed by the ones in power, visible from above, De Certeau uses the view of Manhattan seen from the top of the former towers of the World Trade Center. In contrast to that bird’s-eye view, De Certeau points at the city as experienced from below: a complex and barely visible conglomeration of the patterns produced by its users, full of turns, rituals, and narratives. He recognizes in this city a different kind of spatiality, which is not a geometrical, but an anthropological space in which poetic experience plays a part. Similar to the productive role of the reader in appropriating and “inhabiting” a text, De Certeau argues that the consumer actually “produces” through his everyday practices: “Spatial

15 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, Berkeley, 1988 [1984]), xi. 16 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 30. 17 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 93.

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practices […] secure the determining conditions of social life.”18 In order to analyze this neglected aspect of urban practices, De Certeau suggests we turn to stories. He argues that literature provides an extensive source for research, and states that the novel “has become the zoo of everyday practices since the establishment of modern science.”19 Of course, Michel de Certeau is not the first to enter the field of social spatial practices, though for my argument he is the most relevant, because he investigates this field through literary means, as I will soon discuss in more detail. Indeed, De Certeau suggests that narrative can be of great scientific value for research on social spatial practices: Shouldn’t we recognize [the narrative’s] scientific legitimacy by assuming that […] it cannot be, or has not been, eliminated from discourse, narrativity has a necessary function in it, and that a theory of narration is indissociable from a theory of practices, as its condition as well as its production? To do that would be to recognize the theoretical value of the novel […].20

The concept of narrative could be of great value if we are to see how a form of architectural “transcription” could come about. This is not only because literary narratives frequently describe spatial practices, but also because of the role that stories play in the delimitation of space, in defining its boundaries. A story makes people identify with a place, just as the absence of stories leaves a space to neutrality. De Certeau distinguishes two roles for the story. First, it founds: it sets a field; it creates a stage on which actions can unfold. This field is by no means fixed and neutral. On the contrary, it can be “fragmented,” allowing different social groups to act upon it; “miniaturized,” offering not only an account of a large community but also individual stories or stories related to only small groups; and “polyvalent,” with many different voices and allowing multiple stories to coexist.21 Second, a story functions as a bridge and a frontier: it defines borders, delineates the field. By articulating the frontier, it can also be appropriated; connections are made between one side and the other. In this way it functions as a bridge, or 18 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 96. 19 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 78. 20 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 78, original italics. 21 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 123–125.

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as a passage.22 A story “establishes an itinerary (it ‘guides’) and it passes through (it ‘transgresses’).”23 It can thus be seen as a journey, a transport from one place to the other, transgressing borders. De Certeau refers to the ancient Greek metaphorai, “means of transportation.” Indeed, if we look at the etymological origin of the word metaphor, we find that the first meaning is “to bring across,” indeed, a transportation, be it physically, in space, or figuratively, in speech. The current meaning of metaphor, a figure of speech in which a certain concept or idea is explained by its analogy with another, is thus also a form of transportation. “Stories,” says De Certeau, “whether everyday or literary, serve us as a means of mass transportation, as metaphorai.”24 Space is thus part of a narration, but if indeed a story transports the reader from one place to another, movement is also part of a narration. This aspect of movement is of crucial importance if we want to connect the notion of narrative to architecture because it means that narrative is not only spatial but also temporal. The events in a story unfold in space and time. In architectural practice, the temporal aspect is often forgotten. Strangely enough, the architect’s involvement in a project does not reach much further than the day of the opening, while the life of the building or urban site starts after that: it changes in time, through use, activities, events. Spatial practices imply activity and movement, and thus time; lived experience is experience in time. According to Lefebvre, the contemporary focus on image has shifted the attention of architects and planners away from temporal experience, as the image “detaches the pure forms from its impure content—from lived time, everyday time […].”25 As Lefebvre has explained, lived space “embraces loci of passion, of action and of lived situations, and thus immediately implies time. Consequently, it may be qualified in various ways: it may be directional, situational or relational, because it is essentially qualitative, fluid and dynamic.”26 Indeed, space changes, it is used, appropriated, and transformed by everyday life. Space is thus “not a thing but rather a set

22 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 126. 23 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 129. 24 De Certau, Practice of Everyday Life, 155. 25 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 95. 26 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 42.

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of relations between things.”27 This relational aspect is important for our account of spaces and the role of the architect-writer. If space is indeed relational, then the task of architecture is not to design a fixed space, in which all actions are pre-programmed. Rather, the task could be, as in a story, to create a field in which actions and transformations can take place in time. If we follow De Certeau’s ideas on the role of the story, we can transcribe some characteristics of these literary concepts to the field of architecture. If we indeed see architecture as dynamic rather than static, as social rather than formal, and as participatory rather than imposing, a “narrative” approach to architecture can offer a passage to exploring its relation to human action and temporality. If the role of the story, according to De Certeau, is to set a field for human action and to function as a bridge and frontier, we might state that the task of a narrative architecture would be to offer a spatial field that invites human actions to take place, and that through this field, borders can be defined as well as transgressed. Can architecture, like narrative, bring together past, future and present in a moment of architectural experience? Can architecture be designed to give space to different temporal experiences, and simultaneously generate memories and evoke imaginations? Also, the architectural project mediates between the parts and the whole, between its details and the totality of its appearance. Like the narrative, it mediates between a large number of heterogeneous factors, such as its programmatic and functional demands, structure, climate, materiality, aesthetics, and so forth. And, it mediates between writer and reader. Likewise, in architecture, the participation of the user, inhabitant, or perceiver is at stake. Architectural design, then, does not offer one single narrative, but allows for different stories to happen; it allows for confrontations between spaces, users, and events. Transcribing in architecture, then, could be a socially engaged form of experimentation, ultimately aimed at provoking new or other uses of space, at challenging the unexpected, at transgressing boundaries of the commonly accepted. In this view, transcription provokes, rather than offering comfort, it searches the sublime, rather than the beautiful, and it points at difference, asking for an active participation of its reader or user.

27 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 83.

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Transcription: Architectural Perspectives How, then, can architects take into account these aspects of transcription? How can they provide a spatial setting for multiple events and narratives to unfold? How can architecture, which generally speaking puts physical material in place, thus solidifying rather than generating movement, play a part in the dynamics of city life? How can an architect define space and simultaneously provide possibilities for the users to “co-produce”? And how can transcription as an experimental practice help to explore the potential of architectural design? If transcription is an essentially dynamic notion, a dynamic definition of architecture should address aspects of use and activity. Such concerns have indeed been important for a number of architects, especially since the late 1960s. Around 1960, an international group of young architects known as Team 10, including Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck, and Georges Candilis, reclaimed attention for the social practices of everyday life.28 Their designs made use of studies of behavioral patterns of everyday life. The Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger and the Danish architect and planner Jan Gehl were among those arguing for more attention to be paid to the behavioral aspects in design, bringing knowledge from the fields of cognitive and behavioral psychology into the architectural debate. Likewise, Christopher Alexander considered the relation between architectural spaces and practices of everyday life in his architectural theory of behavioral patterns.29 In the Netherlands, architects and urban planners searched for new models in which the social aspect of the urban environment was emphasized, in reaction to rationalized modern planning. Dutch architects such as Herman Hertzberger, Piet Blom, and Aldo van Eyck strived for a more social approach to housing and urban space. New housing areas with a strong focus on collective, pedestrian space, and neighborhood structures

28 Tom Avermaete, Klaske Havik and Hans Teerds, eds., Architectural Positions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere (Amsterdam: SUN Publishers, 2009), 38–39. For a closer discussion of this paradigm shift in architectural thinking, see also Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel, Team10, 1953–1981: In Search of a Utopia of the Present (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005). 29 Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York: Oxford University Press 1977). See also: Avermaete, Havik and Teerds, Architectural Positions, 114.

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were, for example, the Cul-de-Sac housing estates in the Netherlands.30 John Habraken provided a theoretical framework with his differentiation between “support” and “infill.”31 In his view, architects and planners were first and foremost responsible for providing a supportive built structure, flexible enough to allow different infills by inhabitants. His was a bottom-up approach in which inhabitants would have a say in the design of their living environment. Also Lars Lerup was interested in the influence of users’ practices on the built environment. He has studied the interactions between the social and the physical world, stating that people are “active individuals who in their approach to things produce meaning.”32 The interactive relationship between writer and reader, or between architect and user/perceiver, has also been investigated by a number of architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, and Daniel Libeskind, who were interested in an experimental approach to architecture, in which the design process itself plays an important role. Their work relates to the experimental aspect of transcription I have discussed earlier in this text. They criticize mainstream architecture for its formality and its affirmative attitude concerning functional and aesthetic demands. Instead of comfort, stability, and stylistic clarity, these architects set out to search for the dynamic in architecture, looking for spaces that can take up various, even contradicting programs. They search for an architecture that provokes social interactions, events, and intense experiences. They are interested in time, change, and instability, and consider architecture as a design process rather than as a fixed object. Their work is transdisciplinary, in that they employ literary references, but also explore other fields such as philosophy, the social sciences, and cinema. Indeed, the “transcriptive” approach, as I call it, is without exception transdisciplinary. Architects explicitly search for connections with other fields, and not only the literary. Indeed, in the work of these architects, the borders between

30 For a Dutch perspective on social urban planning concepts, see: Martien de Vletter,

The Critical Seventies, Architecture and Urban Planning in The Netherlands in 1968–1982 (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004). 31 John Habraken, Supports: An Alternate to Mass Housing (Gateshead: The Urban International Press, 2000 [1972]). 32 Lars Lerup, Building the Unfinished: Architecture and Human Actions (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1977), 19.

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disciplines seem to merge. I will here devote some attention to the transcriptive experiments of Daniel Libeskind and Peter Eisenman, and refer for the role of Bernard Tschumi to my earlier articles on his seminal transcriptive investigations.33

Daniel Libeskind: Experimental Processes of Writing and Design Daniel Libeskind is one of the architects who have been intrigued by experimental writing processes and who have explored such literary interests in their projects. He has often compared architecture to language and in his projects—written, drawn, or built—he has investigated the possibilities that a literary approach has to offer to architecture. An early transcriptive project by Daniel Libeskind concerns the Chamber Works, a series of drawings based on themes of Heraclites, made in 1983. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclites (500 AD) is known for his aphorisms, the most famous of which is “panta rhei”: everything flows. Heraclites compares the state of being with the flow of the river, which is unique and unrepeatable.34 Libeskind’s architectural drawings can be seen as interdisciplinary transcriptions: the meditations on the texts concern their appropriateness for architecture; the interpretations are then transcribed to an architectural medium: drawing on paper. The drawings do not represent buildings; rather, they are works on their own, offering connections, rhythms, pause or speed, paths, and spaces on paper. Another of Heraclites’ aphorisms, which comes back in the work of Libeskind, is that beginning and end are connected in the same circle. In his 1991 text “Three Lessons in Architecture,” Daniel Libeskind describes the project for a “machine,” which departed from this idea of a circular connection between end and beginning, explicitly draws a connection between architecture and moments of reading, remembering,

33 See for instance: Tom Avermaete and Klaske Havik, “Accommodating the Public Sphere. Bernard Tschumi’s Dynamic Definition of Architecture,” in OASE#77 Into the Open, eds. Tom Avermaete, Klaske Havik and Hans Teerds (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008), 43–57. 34 J.H. Croon and A.R.A. van Aken, De antieke beschaving in hoofdlijnen (Amsterdam: Meulenhof Educatief, 1981), 115.

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and writing.35 Explaining his project for a handcrafted “machine” that addressed these aspects of architecture, Libeskind emphasizes the need for a participatory architecture: one in which the experience of the making, rather than the object itself, plays a central role. As a theoretical project, Libeskind developed a three-fold “machine,” totally handcrafted in wood, metal, graphite, and rope. It processes eight words, including spirit, being, power, and idea, in a complicated system, containing a reading, remembering, and writing part. Reading is described by Libeskind as an “experimental state” in which the architect searches for a deep understanding of craftsmanship, the very process of building. With the writing of architecture, Libeskind aimed at a process “to industrialise the poetics of architecture and to offer architecture as a sacrifice to its own possibilities of making a text.”36 The idea of a writing machine also appears in Deleuze and Guattari’s study of Kafka, as a “machine that makes things happen.”37 For his particular “writing architecture” machine, Libeskind refers to experimental writers such as Raymond Roussel, who has been of great influence of the Oulipo movement. Libeskind owes to Roussel the dynamic conception of the writing machine as something “unstable,” linking totally different aspects “in an unpredictable rationalisation of place, name, person.”38 The machine can indeed be regarded as a transcriptive exercise in the sense of “writing through”: an experiment concerning the process of making. Libeskind’s project for the Jewish Museum in Berlin (2001) was in another way a result of his explorations on the boundaries between architecture and literary experiment. In this project, the very plan of the building came out of a narrative: the lines are a literal transcription of the lines that Libeskind drew on the city map of Berlin, connecting the former residences of Jews who had been killed in the Holocaust. The interior of the museum continues these intersecting lines in the narrow strips of windows and the line on the ceiling. On top of this layer, another layer of “voids” is projected, expressing the emptiness of the non-graspable 35 Daniel Libeskind, “Three Lessons in Architecture,” in Architectural Monographs No. 16, Daniel Libeskind. Countersign (London: Academy Editions, 1991) 37–61. The project “Three lessons in Architecture” was exhibited in Modena, Italy in 1986. 36 Daniel Libeskind, “Three Lessons in Architecture,” 43. 37 Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Literature (New York/London: Routledge, 2003), 187–

192. 38 Daniel Libeskind, “Three Lessons in Architecture.”

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history. A long corridor leads to a heavy door, which opens to a cold, high space, in which the only light comes from the tiny strip of open air high above. It is a space of power and fear, a space in which different stories come together, in which the sudden cold and loneliness evoke an intense experience that unites knowing with the impossibility to understand. It can be argued that the transcription of the intersecting lines is too direct, too literal. However, with the voids, Libeskind has created narrative spaces which speak as much as they are silent.

Peter Eisenman: Exploring the Dynamics of Text and Architecture Architect Peter Eisenman is interested in precisely the possibility of architecture to address the theme of “absence.” “If architecture is primarily presence—materiality, brick, and mortar,” he states, “then otherness or secondarity would be trace, as the presence of absence.”39 Eisenman argues that aspects of otherness or absence, aspects that indeed exceed the common conditions of architecture such as function and style, can be found in textuality. A text, according to Eisenman, always refers to something other than itself. This is because a text can describe an object or situation outside the text itself. By definition, a text—especially a literary narrative—is interpreted by the reader. Therefore, there is not only one single way to read and understand a text: it is open to multiple interpretations. For Eisenman, a text is thus dynamic and multivocal: “It is not a stable object but a process, a transgressive activity which disperses the author as the centre, limit and guarantor if truth.”40 His ideas on textuality have largely been influenced by the philosophical discourse of deconstruction, especially by the contribution of Jacques Derrida,41 who 39 Peter Eisenman, “En Terror Firma: In Trails of Grotextess” in Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architecture Theory 1965–1995, ed. Kate Nessbitt (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 564–570 (569). 40 Peter Eisenman, “Architecture as a second language: The Texts of Between,” in Eisenman Inside Out: Selected Writings 1963–1988, ed. Peter Eisenman(New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2004), 227. 41 Peter Eisenman has frequently exchanged thoughts with Jacques Derrida about language, textuality and architecture in the light of Derrida’s theory of deconstruction. Choral Work was a joint project of the philosopher and the architect. Some of the correspondence between Eisenman and Derrida has been published in Re: Working Eisenman, (1993).

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sees writing as an essentially instable process. If writing is a process, then a conflict arises when a text is presented as a finished object. In architecture, Eisenman stresses the factor of temporality. A building, through its physical presence, seems to be located in only one specific place and one specific time. Eisenman is interested in bringing together different experiences of time. As Paul Ricoeur suggested in Time and Narrative, a text can mediate between different temporal dimensions, and Eisenman is in search of an architecture that can situate itself as a text “between” different times and places: if architecture is no longer seen as the now, but as a state “between,” then architecture can dislocate “not only the memory of internal time but all aspects of presence, origin, place, scale and so forth.”42 The concept of “dislocation” is important to Eisenman’s quest to find an architecture beyond its common presence: an architecture that indeed mediates between past, future, and present, that can be at once presence and absence, that leaves traces open between author and reader, that allows multiple meanings. Dislocation does not imply denying that architecture has a place and time, and that it functions and offers shelter. On the contrary, dislocating architecture in the view of Eisenman can respond to the primary needs a building has to fulfill, but simultaneously “speak of something else.”43 In his design work, Eisenman has explored many ways to achieve such dislocation in architecture. His early houses (House I–VI) were experiments that questioned the common roles of architectural elements such as walls and columns. These early houses were not conceived with the idea of textuality in mind, but retrospectively, Eisenman sees them as part of the same search: “One can find this inclination toward fiction already operating in these houses […] [they] were in fact […] fictionalizations, misreadings, creations of unreal histories.”44 Later, Eisenman placed aspects such as the fictional and textuality at the core of his work. The project Choral Work, carried out in 1985 together with Jacques Derrida, was an attempt to explicitly explore the parallels between architecture 42 Peter Eisenman, “Architecture as a Second Language: The Texts of Between,”

in Eisenman Inside Out: Selected Writings 1963–1988, ed. Peter Eisenman (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2004), 229. 43 Eisenman, “Architecture as a Second Language,” 233. 44 Peter Eisenman, “Misreading Peter Eisenman,” in Eisenman Inside Out: Selected Writ-

ings 1963–1988, ed. Peter Eisenman (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2004), 224.

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and deconstructivist ideas on textuality. Based on Derrida’s interest in Plato’s concept of chora, the hardly definable “space” that comes before everything else, that “gives place,” a design was made for a small garden within Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette. The collaboration was not successful in every respect, and was criticized for being too blunt an interpretation of philosophical themes, which caused Derrida to distance himself from further exchanges with Eisenman. In later projects, Eisenman continued to make designs that deliberately allow alternative readings. These “misreadings,” as Eisenman calls them, are provoked by “traces” in the design: traces of theories, of other architectural works, or distorted narratives of the history of the site. Temporality continues to play an important role. In the text “Time Warps,” written in 1999, Eisenman reflects on the issue of temporality in architecture in relation to his design for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (realized in 2005).45 Instead of representing a memory that is too big to grasp, Eisenman proposes to deal with the heavy load of memory by offering an immediate experience of the present: it is indeed through that immediate experience that associations with and memories of other times can be evoked.46 The wide maze of concrete blocks is accessible to the visitors, but functions as a labyrinth in which the orientation of the visitor becomes confused, despite the orthogonality of the grid. The temporal and spatial experience of being in this concrete maze forces the visitor to physically experience a sense of being lost. “In this context,” states Eisenman, “there is no nostalgia, no memory of the past, only the living memory of the individual experience in the monument. […] This feeling of being lost is a disjunction in time.”47 An architectural work, according to Eisenman or Libeskind, does not represent an ending, a final stage, but rather brings different temporalities together—in that sense resembling the narrative. Transcription thus ultimately points at the idea that urban space is never neutral, that it is intrinsically related to its use and interpretation, and that experimental practices, transcribing literary techniques to architectural and urban design provide the potential for productive 45 Peter Eisenman, “Time Warps: The Monument,” in Anytime, ed. Cynthia C. Davidson (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1999), 250–257; republished in Architectural Positions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere, eds. Tom Avermaete, Klaske Havik and Hans Teerds (Amsterdam: SUN Publishers, 2009), 242–247. 46 See also: Avermaete, Havik and Teerds, Architectural Positions, 223–225. 47 Peter Eisenman, “Time Warps: The Monument,” 245.

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exchanges—between designer and user, as well as between disciplines. In this paper, I have highlighted how architecture is connected to social practices, stressing the role of the user of space in its production and experience. Further, I have attempted to point to narrative as one of its fundamental tools. Then I have given a short overview of how different architects have used transcriptive experiments as a means to address social issues in architecture. Some architects, like John Habraken and the architects of Team 10 have searched for ways to give space for inhabitants to appropriate and change their living environment. Others, such as Daniel Libeskind and Peter Eisenman, have taken on an experimental, explicitly transdisciplinary attitude to provoke confrontations between spaces, people, and activities. Indeed, it is by a consciousness of the social dimension of architecture, and finding new (transcriptive) tools to address such issues that architecture can offer a passage to new ways of living.

References Alexander, Christopher et al. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Avermaete, Tom, Klaske Havik and Hans Teerds, eds., Architectural Positions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere. Amsterdam: SUN Publishers, 2009. Avermaete, Tom and Klaske Havik. “Accommodating the Public Sphere: Bernard Tschumi’s Dynamic Definition of Architecture.” In OASE#77 into the Open, edited by Tom Avermaete, Klaske Havik, and Hans Teerds. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008. 43–57. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Literature. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Chandler, Marilyn R. Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Croon, J.H. and A.R.A. Van Aken. De antieke beschaving in hoofdlijnen. Amsterdam: Meulenhof Educatief, 1981. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, Berkeley, 1988 [1984]. De Vletter, Martien. The Critical Seventies, Architecture and Urban Planning in the Netherlands in 1968–1982. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004. Eisenman, Peter. “En Terror Firma: In Trails of Grotextes.” In Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965– 1995, edited by Kate Nesbitt. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996. 564–570. ———. Inside Out: Selected Writings 1963–1988. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004.

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———. Re: Working Eisenman. London and Berlin: Academy Editions London/Ernst & Sohn, 1993. ———. “Time Warps: The Monument.” In Anytime, edited by Cynthia C. Davidson. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1999. 250–257. Habraken, John. Supports: An Alternate to Mass Housing. Gateshead: The Urban International Press, 2000 [1972]. Havik, Klaske. Urban Literacy, Reading and Writing Architecture. Rotterdam: Nai010 publishers, 2014. Jacobs, Jane. The Economy of Cities. London: Penguin, 1972 [1969]. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. London: Blackwell, 1991. ———. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 [La Révolution urbaine. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1970]. ———. Writings on Cities. London: Blackwell, 2006 [1996]. Lerup, Lars. Building the Unfinished: Architecture and Human Action. Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1977. Libeskind, Daniel. “Three Lessons in Architecture.” In Daniel Libeskind. Countersign. Architectural Monographs No. 16. London: Academy Editions, 1991. 37–61. Partridge, Eric, ed. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. New York: Greenwich House, 1983 [1958]. Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin Classics, 2008. Risselada, Max and Dirk Van den Heuvel. Team10, 1953–1981: In Search of a Utopia of the Present. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005. Soja, Edward. Thirdspace, Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999 [1996]. The Penguin Pocket English Dictionary. London: Penguin Group, 1990 [1985].

CHAPTER 8

Politics and the Production of Space: Downtown and Out with Rancière and Lefebvre Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich

The aim of this chapter is to advance a historical and dialectical materialist critique of the vulgar poststructuralist and ultimately idealist notion of the “narrative constitution” of capitalist social space in general, and (peri-)urban spaces and places in particular. Without wanting to advance a wholesale rejection of poststructuralist spatial thought and the notion of the discursive formation of the social, I side with Jacques Rancière’s critique of Jean-Francois Lyotard and related thinkers: “The notion of 1 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004), 38. Ranciere’s chief object of critique here is the work of JeanFrancois Lyotard, esp. in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984), where Lyotard elaborates the concept of minor and meta-narratives and their respective reality-constituting functions. It should further be noted that Rancière relies to some extent on Lyotard’s earlier work The Differend (1988). For an account of Rancière as “anti-Lyotardian Lyotardian” see Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 172.

D. Büscher-Ulbrich (B) University of Kiel (CAU), Kiel, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_8

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narrative locks us into oppositions between the real and artifice where both the positivists and the deconstructionists are lost.”1 If we begin from the critical understanding and well-justified axiom that “the real must be fictionalized to be thought,” this quasi-Lacanian proposition clearly needs to be distinguished from any theoretical or political discourse according to which “everything is narrative, with alterations between grand narratives and minor narratives.” Instead, Rancière suggests to conceptualize “fictions” more broadly as “material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done.”2 While it is, of course, correct to say that “the narrative construction of the city always implies conflicting narrative versions of the same city,” as the editors state in their introduction to this book, it often remains unclear how media representations of urban spaces and places—themselves shot through with contradictions—are thought to co-constitute social relations, identities, and events in relation to (a) emancipatory politics and social struggles and (b) the mode of production of capitalist social space. What is important with regard to the notion of “narrative construction,” therefore, is that the social production of space and its constitution in perception must be thought of as a set of (collective) material-symbolic practices and performative or ideological effects that create arrangements and rearrangements of what can be perceived, thought, and done. In order to preempt and challenge liberal readings of both Jacques Rancière and Henri Lefebvre, it may be conducive to think about a theoretical coupling of Rancière’s decidedly post-Althusserian theoretical edifice, including the conceptual notions of “politics/police” and “dissensus/consensus,” with Lefebvre’s rather well-established conceptual apparatus. But this would also mean to take on board and seriously engage the Marxian critique of political economy that Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space fundamentally relies on: (Social) space is a (social) product. This proposition might appear to border on the tautologous, and hence on the obvious. There is good reason, however, to examine it carefully, to consider its implications and consequences before accepting it. Many people will find it hard to endorse the notion that space has taken on, within the present mode of production, within society as it actually is, a sort of reality of its own, a reality clearly 2 Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 63.

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distinct from, yet much like, those assumed in the same global process by commodities, money and capital. […] Social space will be revealed in its particularity to the extent that it ceases to be indistinguishable from mental space […] on the one hand, and physical space […] on the other.3

For the purpose of this book, then, and taking its cues from Lefebvre and Rancière, my chapter will sketch a theoretical rapprochement between the former’s historical and dialectical materialist theory of space and the latter’s post-Marxist account of emancipatory politics. My aim is to provide a possible framework for approaching the problem of the relationship between aesthetic experience and political subjectivity, particularly as it relates to the representation and collective reappropriation of (peri)urban social space under conditions of capitalist crisis since the 1970s and present circulation struggles. My wager is that Rancière’s conceptual apparatus allows us to think the contingency of political subjectivity without fully severing the link to Marx’s “sphere of circulation” (Capital ) but that it needs to be supplemented by Marxist crisis theory to be able to come to terms with the spatial logic and compulsions of state and capital.

Lefebvre with Rancière Already from the point of view of Foucauldian discourse analysis there remain fundamental questions to be asked that a narrowly conceived semiotic or narratological approach to urban space falls short of asking: Who has access to what kind of discourse in the first place? What are the codes and practices of inclusion/exclusion that are constitutive of the bourgeois public sphere? What are the material dispositifs of “the urban”? Is there a specifically urban form of biopower? And, if so, how does it affect the subject and what forms of subjectivity does it seek to produce and master to begin with? In any case, a mode of analysis, which seeks to deconstruct the minor and meta-narratives of our present but sidelines capitalist social relations and the contradictions of capital accumulation on a global scale—including the spatial logic and compulsions of state and capital—certainly falls short of radical critique. Lefebvre’s work provides us with the conceptual apparatus to think “(social) space [a]s a (social) product”4 and to analyze changes in the 3 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden: Blackwell, 1991), 26–27. 4 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 26.

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mode of production of social space, i.e., the spatiality of human life as it is “simultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived.”5 The Marxist Lefebvre decidedly cautions his readers not to treat his famous conceptual triad(s) as an abstract model: The perceived-conceived-lived triad (in spatial terms: spatial practice, representations of space, representational spaces) loses all force if it is treated as an abstract ‘model’. If it cannot grasp the concrete (as distinct from the ‘immediate’), then its import is severely limited, amounting to no more than that of one ideological mediation among others.6

It should thus be noted that Lefebvre’s is a thoroughly (Hegelian-) Marxist notion of production and that his theoretical model of perceived, conceived, and lived spatiality is aided by another conceptual triad: (a) Spatial practice, which embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation. Spatial practice thus “secretes that society’s space; it propounds and presupposes it, in a dialectical interaction; it produces it slowly and surely as it masters and appropriates it.”7 (b) Representations of space, which are tied to the relations of production and to the “order” which those relations impose, and hence to positive knowledge, to signs, to codes, and institutions. In other words: “conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers, as of a certain type of artist with a scientific bent—all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived.”8 (c) Representational spaces, i.e., space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of “inhabitants” and “users” as well as artists, writers, and philosophers. For Lefebvre, “this is the dominated— and hence passively experienced—space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.”9

5 Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 351. 6 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 40. 7 Ibid. 38. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 39.

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Lefebvres’s dialectical materialist account of space and criticaltheoretical reflection of avant-garde praxis (Surrealism, Situationism, etc.), the exhortation to collectively reappropriate the body and urban space, fly in the face of a neoliberal spatial paradigm and pseudo-urbanism. For neoliberal capital, urbanization spells “real estate,” “financial architecture,” “surplus absorption,” and “reproduction,” with techno-managerial “urban planning,” national border regimes, and other mechanisms of exclusion and stratification to secure “cheap labor” and social atomization.10 With exchange value fully dominating use value, urban space has become both homogenous and fragmented, or, as Lefebvre writes apropos the “abstract space” of late capitalism: Abstract space is not defined only by the disappearance of trees, or by the receding of nature; nor merely by the great empty spaces of the state and the military—plazas that resemble parade grounds; nor even by commercial centres packed tight with commodities, money and cars. It is not in fact defined on the basis of what is perceived. Its abstraction has nothing simple about it: it is not transparent and cannot be reduced either to a logic or to a strategy. Coinciding neither with the abstraction of the sign, nor with that of the concept, it operates negatively. Abstract space relates negatively to that which perceives and underpins it—namely, the historical and religiopolitical spheres. It also relates negatively to something which it carries within itself and which seeks to emerge from it: a differential space-time. It has nothing of a ‘subject’ about it, yet it acts like a subject in that it transports and maintains specific social relations, dissolves others and stands opposed to yet others. It functions positively vis-à-vis its own implications: technology, applied sciences, and knowledge bound to power.11

Abstract space thus operates negatively, relates negatively to history in particular, and functions positively vis-à-vis knowledge/power. But what exactly does it mean, then, to conceptualize “social space as a social product ” rather than a (narrative) social construct? According to Marx, value in capitalist society is constituted by sociallynecessary labor time, and capitalist production is undertaken for the sole purpose of extracting surplus value through the exploitation of 10 See for instance Erik Swyngedouw et al., “Neoliberal Urbanization in Europe: LargeScale Urban Development Projects and the New Urban Policy,” Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 542–577. 11 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 50.

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living labor. The constantly expanding reproduction of capital increasingly compels all capitalists to obey its monolithic logic of self-valorization, and capital comes to exert an abstract form of domination that drives toward “accumulation for accumulation’s sake’, regardless of the social or ecological consequences. As Moishe Postone famously argued in Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993), it is, therefore, capital, rather than the proletariat, that constitutes the subject of modern capitalist history, a subject that the proletariat itself creates through its own alienated productive activity. As the emergent “automatic” subject of global capitalism, capital is “blind, processual and quasi-organic […] an alienated, abstract self-moving Other, characterized by a constant directional movement with no external goal.”12 It is capital that drives the transition from formal to real subsumption (of labor under capital), through which the labor process itself is transformed in accordance with the requirements of capital. With real subsumption enabling the production of relative surplus value, through the deployment of technologies that increase the productivity of labor and the rate of surplus value extraction, capital becomes an abstract form of domination. The transition from the formal to the real subsumption is therefore the dynamic that drives the becoming of capital as subject.13 For Lefebvre, that dynamic is also what drives the production of space under capitalism. The capitalist mode of production begins by producing things as commodities, and by “investing” in places. Then, however, the reproduction of social relations becomes problematic, as it plays a part in practice, modifying it in the process. And eventually it becomes necessary to reproduce nature also, and to master space by producing it—that is, the political space of capitalism—while at the same time reducing time in order to prevent the production of new social relations. […] The idea of producing […] today extends beyond the production of this or that thing or work to the production of space.14

Late capitalist social space, for Lefebvre, “has a part to play among the forces of production, a role originally played by nature, which it has 12 Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 270, 278. 13 Ibid. 283. 14 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 219.

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displaced and supplanted.” It further appears as “a product of singular character, in that it is sometimes simply consumed (in such forms as travel, tourism, or leisure activities) as a vast commodity, and sometimes, in metropolitan areas, productively consumed (just as machines are, for example), as a productive apparatus of grand scale.” And it is this apparatus, or productive framework, that “underpins the reproduction of production relations and property relations.” As such, it is “equivalent, practically speaking, to a set of institutional and ideological superstructures that are not presented for what they are,”15 creating the ideological “illusion of transparency.”16 But the production of space under capitalism is always-already tied to the crisis tendency of capital understood as a “moving contradiction.” In Marx’s famous formulation in the Grundrisse, “capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.”17 Like other Marxist theorists, Lefebvre insists that if the totality of capitalist social relations must be theorized as a complex, contradictory totality, then the contradictions at a simpler, more abstract level must be grasped as determinate moments of that same totality. This is not to be confused with economic determinism. At the same time, capitalist social space also contains what Lefebvre calls “potentialities—of works and of reappropriation—existing to begin with in the artistic sphere but responding above all to the demands of a body ‘transported’ outside itself in space, a body which by putting up resistance inaugurates the project of a different space (either the space of a counter-culture, or a counter-space in the sense of an initially utopian alternative to actually existing ‘real’ space).”18 Such “counter-space,” however, can only be effectively actualized through the collective agency of a political subject, i.e., if we are to avoid both the idealism of Michel de Certeau’s notion of individual appropriation and the positivization of social space in techno-managerial versions of urban planning. Marx famously insisted that political-economic conditions are never absolutely determining. The field of social contest is held in tension, dialectically, by

15 Ibid. 349. 16 Ibid. 27–29. 17 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1974), 706. 18 Ibid.

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both the capacity of humans to “make their own history” and “circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past,”19 which leads us to Rancière’s rethinking of “politics” and “police” as forms of “dissensus” and “consensus,” respectively. Rancière’s work provides an anti-essentialist and non-deterministic theory of political subjectivity, beginning with the paradoxical Marxian notion of a “class” that entails “the dissolution of all classes,”20 i.e., the self-emancipation and abolition of the proletariat by way of communism originally understood as “the real movement which abolishes [aufhebt] the present state of things.”21 In contrast to Marx and Engels’s insistence on the centrality of the material base of class struggle and communist praxis, Rancière focuses on the political moment and universalist logic of (self-)emancipation as such, offering a cogent rethinking of the aesthetics of politics and of the politics of aesthetics qua the concepts

19 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 11 (New York: International Publishers, 1979), 103. 20 Rancière develops this idea at its most elaborate in Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1999), arguing that political philosophy has conceived of three different scenarios to forestall the democratic event of politics proper: “archi-politics” (after Plato), “parapolitics” (after Aristotle), and “meta-politics” (after Marx) (61–94). While it is not necessary for the present chapter to rehearse Rancière’s argument in full here, the following excerpt from a 2003 interview helps clarify Rancière’s use of Marx: “In the young Marx, there is a kind of debasement of politics, politics for him being only superstructural appearance, and the real thing being the subterranean process of class war. I tried to overturn the position by appropriating for myself the enigmatic sentence of the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right where he writes that the proletariat is a class of society that is not a class of society, and is actually a ‘class’ that entails the dissolution of all classes. The question is: what does this mean, how do you think of this class which is not a class? In the same text, Marx makes the proletariat akin to a kind of chemical or biological idea of dissolution. The proletariat is thought as the process of the decomposition of old classes. […] It is not a matter of the historical and quasi-biological decomposition of old classes. I rather think this dissolution as a symbolic function of declassing. The class that is not a class thus becomes an operator of declassification. The proletariat is no longer a part of society but is, rather, the symbolic inscription of ‘the part of those who have no part’, a supplement which separates the political community from any count of the parts of a society. The idea of the dissolving class can thus give the concept of what constitutes a political subject.” Jacques Rancière, Max Blechman et al., “Democracy, Dissensus, and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle,” Historical Materialism 13, no. 4 (2005): 285–301. 21 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 57 (original emphasis).

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of “consensus/dissensus” and what he calls “the distribution of the sensible”: [T]he system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. […] This appointment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution.22

Rancière’s “partage du sensible” is a challenging concept which has variously been translated as “partition,” “division,” or “distribution” of the sensible, where “sensible” signifies both what is available to the “senses” and thus perceptible and what makes “sense” within a hegemonic regime of signification and meaning. The term refers at once to the conditions for distribution that establish the contours of a collectivity and to the sources of its antagonistic rupture. In contrast to narratologists and semioticians, the question of “fictions,” for Rancière, is first a question regarding the distribution of places: “From the Platonic point of view, the stage, which is simultaneously a locus of public activity and the exhibition-space for ‘fantasies,’ disturbs the clear partition of identities, activities, and spaces. The same is true of writing. By stealing away to wander aimlessly without knowing who to speak to or who not to speak to, writing destroys every legitimate foundation for the circulation of words, for the relationship between the effects of language and the positions of bodies in shared space.”23 Rancière understands “class struggle,” above all, “as the power of declassification,” resisting simultaneously Marxist orthodoxies and the “replacement of the proletariat by a multiplicity of minorities” on the basis that this is “not a choice between a ‘big’ subject and a multiplicity of little subjects” but rather between “an additive and a subtractive way of counting the political subjects, between the pluralization of identities and the universality of disidentification.”24 To be sure, if one identifies proletarian with factory 22 Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 12. 23 Ibid. 13. 24 Rancière in Blechman et al., “Democracy, Dissensus, and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle,” 289.

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worker or manual laborer, or with the poor in general, one misses what is radical in the proletarian condition: “The proletariat is the negation of this society. It is not the collection of the poor, but of those who are ‘without reserves,’ who are nothing, have nothing to lose but their chains, and cannot liberate themselves without destroying the whole social order.”25 For Rancière, who long since parted with both Althusserianism and Marxist communism, the emergence of a political subject proper that addresses an inaugural “wrong”26 and engages in politics as “the polemical verification of equality”27 is necessarily accompanied by the creation of symbolic “operators of declassification.”28 Politics thus creates “empty names of subjects” for counting anyone, including “the part of those who have no part,” identifying with the point of exclusion in a hierarchical order as a polemical concrete universal.29 From the Greek demos to the East German crowd’s chanting “We are the people!” in 1989 to the Egyptians on the streets of Cairo in the “spring” of 2011, the notion of “the people” has stood for universality not because it covered the majority of the population, nor because it occupied the lowest place within the social hierarchy, but—as Slavoj Žižek emphasizes—because it had no proper place within this hierarchy. Rather, it is “a site of conflicting, self-canceling determinations—[…] a site of performative contradictions,”30 epitomized by slogans such as Occupy’s “WE ARE THE 99 PERCENT,” the sanspapiers movement’s “NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL,” or the more recent “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” all of which are polemical rather than factual statements that actually express and enact social contradictions and political antagonism. The same holds true for the infamous “TOUT LE MONDE DÉTESTE LA POLICE.” In other words: Rancière’s work contains a political theory of emancipatory speech-acts and a speech-act theory of emancipatory politics.

25 Gilles Dauvé, Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement (Oakland: PM Press, 2015), 47. 26 Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 84, 93. 27 Ibid. 86. 28 Rancière, “Democracy, Dissensus, and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle,” 287. 29 Ibid. 30 Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 224.

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Rancière is not the first to insist that we think emancipatory politics as a radical rupture with the present state of things, of course. As Walter Benjamin reminds us in “On the Concept of History,” The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve.”31

In order to introduce “a real state of emergency,” proletarians and other sans-part (women, slaves, sans-papiers, etc.) would have to resist both the siren songs of right-wing “strongmen” such as Trump or Erdogan and the dominant neoliberal mode of ideological “interpellation” (Althusser) that Rancière has re-conceptualized as a kind of non-interpellation: “Move along, there is nothing to see here!”32 The latter encapsulates the ultimate “consensual” rationale of what Rancière aptly if polemically calls “police” distribution. In Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Rancière introduces the term “police” to refer to “the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution. […] I propose to call it the police.”33 Politics proper, for Rancière, thus always takes the form of a radical rupture. However, if we are to avoid lapsing into idealism on the one hand, and vulgar materialism on the other, this needs to be related to the sphere of circulation (of laboring bodies and commodities) and the 31 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938– 1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392. 32 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010),

37. 33 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999), 28. Rancière further differentiates “police” conceptually from the Althusserian notion of state apparatuses: “I do not, however, identify the police with what is termed the ‘state apparatus.’ The notion of a state apparatus is in fact bound up with the presupposition of an opposition between State and society in which the state is portrayed as a machine, a ‘cold monster’ imposing its rigid order on the life of society. […]. The distribution of places and roles that defines a police regime stems as much from the assumed spontaneity of the social relations as from the rigidity of state functions” (29).

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spatial logic and compulsions of state and capital (of value in the Marxist sense) on a global scale. The emergence of the demos, of a political subject that shatters the order and the confines of the polis, also would have to intervene in the global capitalist production of “abstract space” by actualizing a “counterspace,” and producing—through reintroducing historical time—a “differential space,” or the potential for it. For Rancière, “politics is an extremely determined activity antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration.”34 Accordingly, politics is not a matter of what people demand or receive, nor the exercise of power, and not a matter of the institutional creation of just social arrangements either. Rather, it is a matter of what people do that challenges the hierarchical order of a given set of social arrangements and therefore in the process constitutes a political subject. It is an antagonistic material-symbolic praxis. To challenge a hierarchical order, a given “partition/distribution of the sensible” secured by the “police order,” is to act under the presupposition of equality. Such action, if it is political, will disrupt not only the power arrangements of the social order, but also its perceptual and epistemic underpinnings, the obviousness and naturalness that attaches to the order. Such a disruption is what Rancière calls a political “dissensus.” A key notion in Rancière’s conceptual framework, “dissensus” more generally signifies a “disagreement [mésentente] about the perceptual givens of a situation,” of what it actually is that is given to the senses and what allows subjects to make sense of it, what can be perceived (aisthetically) and thus addressed (politically).35 “Consensus,” by contrast, entails the supposition of an identity between what can be perceived and what makes sense, through the matching of a poiesis with an aisthesis or “horizon of affects.”36 Rather than a mode of governing that appeals to expertise and policies of arbitration, “consensus” for Rancière refers to that which is censored:

34 Ibid. 29. 35 Jacques Rancière and Davide Panagia, “Dissenting Words: A Conversation with

Jacques Rancière,” Diacritics 30, no. 2 (2000): 2–3. 36 Ibid. 2.

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[C]onsensus is an agreement between sense and sense, […] between a mode of sensory presentation and a regime of meaning. Consensus, as a mode of government, says: it is perfectly fine for people to have different interests, values and aspirations, nevertheless there is one unique reality to which everything must be related, a reality that is experienceable as a sense datum and which has only one possible signification.37

It is not difficult to recognize in this description the rationale of liberalism, pluralism, and the neoliberal imperatives of the global market. In other words: “Consensus” is the dominant ideology of the bourgeoiscapitalist order, which is always also a spatial order. “Dissensus,” on the contrary, can broadly be understood as that which disrupts the identity and reveals the gap between poeisis and aisthesis, what is given to the senses and according to what regime of identification, or meaning, one makes sense of it. While politics is an activity hostile to all forms of “policing” that redefines what counts as “the political,” aesthetics is a paradoxical regime of the identification of art that both identifies “art” in the singular and effects a blurring of the boundaries between art and non-art.38 Since its emergence in the wake of the French Revolution, aesthetics has thus become a dispositif for artistic practice in its endeavor to effect “re-distributions of the sensible” in and through art. Eventually, however, because a radically antagonistic society cannot be overcome by means of artistic practice, it is all the more important “that the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics be raised at […] the level of the sensible delimitation of what is common to the community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization.”39

Mediation and the Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy Poststructuralist theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari, Kristeva, or Lyotard have conceptualized space in terms of affects and percepts, immediacy and emergence, libidinal flow and desire. Too often, however, as Lefebvre complained about most of the French structuralists and poststructuralists, they “spring without the slightest hesitation from mental 37 Ibid. 144. 38 Rancière, Dissensus, 115–133. 39 Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 18.

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to social [space],” jettisoning the concept of mediation in the process.40 Current sociological approaches, like that of Martina Löw, on the other hand, have combined a focus on and concern with the “constitution of space” in perception, with Anthony Giddens’s concept of “structuration/interaction” to advance a theoretical argument about the “structuration of spaces through the simultaneity of effect and perception.”41 Other sociologists of space have turned to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “field/habitus” or Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feeling” in order to get at, as it were, the complex reproduction of social practices understood as spatial practices.42 Rather unsurprisingly, as Doreen Massey has pointed out, the term “space” is ideally suited to express the spheres of juxtaposition and coexistence, the complex layering and simultaneity of modern capitalist society.43 What most sociological approaches tend to evacuate though—and this they have in common with today’s expert state—is politics. Rosalyn Deutsche’s work on spatial politics thus emphasizes that “social space is produced and structured by conflicts” and that “[a]ntagonism affirms and simultaneously prevents the closure of society, revealing the partiality and precariousness—the contingency—of every totality.”44 Antagonism and contingency, of course, have been key notions in radical democracy theory since Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s seminal work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics.45 In retrospect, however, it seems legitimate, perhaps even necessary today, to draw attention to a parallel between postmarxism and neoliberalism. Laclau, Mouffe, Castoriadis, Deutsche, and others, conveniently posit “the imaginary constitution” and “impossibility” of society due to a

40 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 6. 41 Martina Löw, “The Constitution of Space: The Structuration of Spaces Through

the Simultaneity of Effect and Perception,” European Journal of Social Theory 11, no. 1 (2008): 25–49. 42 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72–94, 159–196; and Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–135. 43 See for instance Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 9f. 44 Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1996), xxiv and 274. 45 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

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necessary lack of successful suture, or “quilting” (Lacan) of the symbolic, at a time when Reagan and Thatcher advertised precariously similar ideas (“there is no such thing as society”46 ), if only to foster social atomization and reified consciousness. In other words: The sewing machine of ideological discourse can only ever attempt to quilt the constitutive gap of the social totality. Yet “false suture” does occur, in ideological practice. This is the crucial insight of Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of commodities in Capital, Vol. 1. Capitalist social reality is itself ideological, symbolically structured by a web of social fantasies, or what Rancière calls “fictions,” that structure social practice at the most fundamental level. Postmarxist political theory tends to affirm rather than historicize and critique antagonism and contingency in the hope of inspiring a radical democratic politics. It emphasizes agency and deemphasizes structural causality. Marxist critical theory’s effort to always historicize and totalize, and thus to conceptualize the modern capitalist city as a concrete totality resulting from a historically specific mode of production of space (a la Lefebvre), is currently being isolated and defamed even within the academic left’s debates on urban politics and the city, as noted by Roger Behrens: Following the linguistic turn, which has eventually declared the city, too, to be a readable text, structuralist and poststructuralist theories, in particular, seek to homogenize [vereinheitlichen] “city” by way of discourse analysis; here the apparently material substrate is “power,” or, more precisely, urban space as a configuration of “dispositifs of power.” What is implicitly posited here as a basis for analysis is the architectural model of the baroque city; thus the only discourse that equally fits and applies to Bangkok, Tokio, Rio de Janeiro, New York, New Orleans, Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Genoa, even Heiligendamm, is the allegedly political discourse of security policy and surveillance, public space, segregation, criminalization, and discrimination.47

46 “They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people […].” Margaret Thatcher interviewed by Douglas Keay, Woman’s Own, October 31, 1987, 8. 47 Roger Behrens, “Kritische Theorie der Stadt,” WiderSpruch: Münchner Zeitschrift für Philosophie 46 (2007): 36 (my translation. D.B.).

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Unfortunately, there is a pronounced tendency among post-Marxist theorists of both radical democracy and urban space, to denounce the critique of political economy as a form of economic determinism that like other types of master knowledge serves to forestall radical democratic politics. A tendency which is perhaps best exemplified by Oliver Marchart, who in defense of Deutsche’s “democratic spatial politics” writes: The fact that economic determinism has often been connected with these guiding disciplines is the real problem [my emphasis]. After accepting the basic assumptions of anti-economic political theory […], Deutsche must thus fight on this front against the heirs of economic determinism in critical urbanism such as Harvey or Jameson. […] In these determinist approaches, politics and culture share the sad fate of being assigned to the (“purely formal”) superstructure that is supposedly determined by the economic base. The typical example of a theorist operating with this Marxist metanarrative is Fredric Jameson, for whom the cultural phenomena of postmodernism are, as we know, merely the “cultural logic” of late capitalism. This view is shared by David Harvey in his influential book The Condition of Postmodernity—of course, the “condition” of postmodernity in this case is again the economy.48

What anti-economic political theory necessarily fails to address is the politico-economic form of the social: capital’s contradictory accumulation and crisis-ridden reproduction. Radical democracy theory conveniently ignores the crisis tendency of capital. It cannot explain, say, the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States, or any other spatialized form of what David Harvey has called “accumulation by dispossession.”49 Not to mention the rise of the American carceral state and other structurally racist and race-making “spatial fixes” to capitalist crisis.50 Accordingly, it tends to offer reductive accounts of social struggles and the conditions of emancipatory politics.

48 Oliver Marchart, “Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s): Some Basic Observations

on the Difficult Relation of Public Art, Urbanism and Political Theory,” EIPCP 1999, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0102/marchart/en (accessed November 7, 2019). 49 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 159–165. 50 See esp. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

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For Žižek, “[t]he relationship between economy and politics is ultimately that of the well-known visual paradox of ‘two faces or a vase’: one sees either two faces or a vase, never both—one has to make a choice.”51 Postmarxists generally aim at a reduction of “economy” (of the material production of the social) to one of the positive social spheres, which is to say they end up reifying it. Within this horizon, then, there is no longer any place for the Marxian critique of political economy. Following Žižek, however, the political critique of Marxism should be “supplemented by its obverse: the field of economy is in its very form irreducible to politics— this level of the form of economy (of economy as the determining form of the social) is what French ‘political post-Marxists’ miss when they reduce economy to one of the positive social spheres.”52 Intertwined with this onto-epistemological “parallax” are the pressing questions of what material and symbolic constraints on subjectivity and agency exist today that help reproduce a consensual post-political formation. Although Rancière, too, generally avoids dealing with economic form, he emphasizes that the context that is most frequently invoked “to enforce the ideas and practices pertaining to ‘consensus’ is […] “economic globalization’ […] [p]recisely for the reason that it presents itself as a global development that is clear-cut and irrefutable.”53 While some have criticized Rancière’s ideas on the basis that notions like “perceptual dissociation” and “dissensuality” align too neatly with the demands of capital and neoliberal globalization, Rancière has vehemently rejected such criticism, which he thinks is predicated on “the somewhat too easily accepted thesis that today everything is becoming liquid; that soon the only thing capitalism will produce is life experiences for narcissistic consumers; and that the state’s only function will be to usher in the great flood.”54 Against Zygmunt Bauman’s “hallucinatory declarations” that states now restrain themselves from any will to military expansion and control, and that while they may sometimes send “smart” missiles discreetly over populations, that is only to open the floodgates wide to new “fluid, global, and

51 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT, 2006), 56. 52 Ibid. 53 Rancière, Dissensus, 144. 54 Jacques Rancière, Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, “Art of the Possible: Fulvia

Carnevale and John Kelsey in Conversation with Jacques Rancière,” Artforum 45, no. 7 (2007): 256–268, 264.

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liquid” powers, Rancière insists that “[w]e live in a world of absolutely material things produced by forms of work that are closer to sweatshop labor than to high-tech virtuosity.”55 In this world, the borders are as solid as the inequalities, and, until there’s proof to the contrary, the United States doesn’t envision tearing down its wall but adding a thousand miles to it. The truth is […] that the police order is always at once a system of circulation and a system of borders. And the practice of dissensus is always a practice that both crosses the boundaries and stops traffic.56

Rancière’s conceptual apparatus thus allows us to think the contingency of emancipatory politics without fully severing the link to Marx’s interconnected “spheres” of production and circulation and thus to the logic and compulsions of state and capital on a global scale.

Communist Geography and Circulation Struggles Capitalist crisis and class relations remain conspicuously absent from both Lefebvre’s and Rancière’s theoretical framework. Today, as the most precarious and stigmatized sections of the working class, including those rendered surplus by what Joshua Clover aptly terms “the production of nonproduction,”57 are put at an ever greater risk of falling victim to state violence as a consequence of racism and “wageless life,”58 the Right is pitting exploited and precarized wage laborers defined in nativist terms against racialized surplus proletarians without remorse. Such is the state of the rat race. But while the path of global class restructuring that neoliberal capital has taken since the 1970s has been one of intensified differentiation and inequality, the much greater inequality is between plutocratic capital and both wage laborers and surplus proletarians. What tends to get lost in both the liberal and social-democratic framing of the problem is the question of political subjectivity of the dispossessed and what it means to grasp categories of social critique as simultaneously abstract and 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (London: Verso, 2016),

26. 58 Michael Denning, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review 66 (2010): 79.

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concrete: the ability to “critique discussions already saturated by an excessive empiricism whereby categories of ‘discrimination,’ ‘exclusion’ and ‘expulsion’ [of labor] reductively obscure the antagonistic social processes constitutive of the capital-labor relation.”59 Marxist scholars need to call out and confront such blindspots if we are to fully grasp the significance of Trumpism and the New Right’s political pandering to those who are indispensable for capital and those who prove themselves useful to its unrestricted rule—whether as state functionaries, corporate managers, or fascist goons on the streets of Charlottesville and elsewhere. Our theoretical argument should thus be extended to a consideration of the spatial dimension of crisis and the political role of the far right in the present conjuncture. Phil Neel’s Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict (2018), a recent book of communist geography, insists that “the character of production sculpts the character of class.”60 In addition, it takes into account the ability of far-right militia’s in the hinterland to organize social reproduction for some. Neel demonstrates that political support under conditions of combined and uneven crisis in the hinterland tends to follow “whomever can offer the greatest semblance of strength and stability” and further emphasizes that traditional methods of “transforming class antagonism into racial difference are beginning to reach a sort of saturation point, as unemployment, mortality, and morbidity rates all start to overspill their historically racial boundaries.”61 Shifting our attention away from urban centers, Neel shows how, as capitalist crisis continues, (a) “the hinterland grows and peri-urban zones undergo the harshest forms of stratification,” (b) “white poverty deepens alongside the influx of new migrants and the displacement of inner-city poverty into the suburbs,” (c) “exclusion from the wage forces proletarians into vicious, predatory behavior for survival also ensures that the expanding bulk of corrupt bureaucracy will cleave such neighborhoods into warring parties, dividing them along lines of predation disguised as order on one side and abjection disguised as simple criminality or moral failure on the other.”62 In other 59 Surplus Club, “Trapped at a Party Where No One Likes You,” Kosmoprolet, May 13, 2017. 60 Phil A. Neel, Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict (London: Reaktion, 2018), 144. 61 Ibid. 80. 62 Ibid. 170–171.

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words: capital’s long crisis since the 1970s has created and continues to create the conditions for “whitelash” and, if only to some extent, fascism. Liberalism offers no solution, and the new rents (in the Marxian sense) of the near hinterland begin to determine new political polarities with opposing poles of the near hinterland warring against each other. The far right, then, is currently based in the hinterland’s white exurbs, “finding in these neighborhoods a pragmatic border between the poverty of the far hinterland and the predatory flow of income drawn from the city and the near hinterland.”63 The liberal residents of the city proper, as Neel insists, are able to build political legitimacy by “disavowing these right-wing hubs while still depending on them for the security of the palace walls.”64 This, in turn, “reinforces the warrior mythology of the far right, which sees itself as a form of bitter but necessary barbarity mobilized against the greater barbarity of the proletarian horde (of which they themselves are just one disavowed fragment).”65 Hinterland describes this as a geography of latent civil war—echoing Marx’s The Civil War in France—and argues that any evolution of proletarian riots and rebellions in these conditions will be defined by how it manages these polarities. This is a mode of critique that is completely absent from Lefebvre’s and Rancière’s accounts, respectively, in which crisis symptoms such as growing superfluity and the rise of the far right simply do not figure. Neel is surprisingly adamant in defending the riot as a tactic. His concern, however, is not that the riot could be appropriated by far-right militias but that the left ignores the task of building power and organizing proletarians in the most crisis-ridden spaces and places in and outside of the United States thus playing into the hands of the far right: “Far-right solutions—even spectacular ones that might glory in some success over parliamentarians or armed federal agents—will tend in the final instance to fuse with the predatory party [what Marx polemically called the ‘Party of Order’] in this civil war, as is obvious in the case of groups such as Golden Dawn in Greece, bolstered by the votes and donations of police, civil servants, and nativist workers. Communist, or at least proto-communist, potentials will exhibit the opposite tendency, advocating and inclusive allegiance with the abject, including poor whites,

63 Ibid. 173. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid.

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and the absolute rejection of any ‘community’ that denies such universalism.”66 For Neel, the evolution of proletarian riots and rebellions is a process of building power within the interstices opened by the long and perhaps terminal crisis of global capital. At the same time, he remains fundamentally agnostic with regard to such riots’ and rebellions’ revolutionary potential—perhaps also because as a materialist geographer he is keenly aware of the quasi-apocalyptic dimension of capital’s climate crisis. Hinterland thus concludes: Personally, I don’t understand the compulsion to mine history for words that might describe what’s to come. The fact is that the approaching flood has no name. Any title it might take is presently lost in the noise of its gestation, maybe just beginning to be spoken in a language that we can hardly recognize. There will be no Commune because this isn’t Paris in 1871. There will be no Dual Power because this isn’t Russia in 1917. There will be no Autonomy because this isn’t Italy in 1977. I’m writing this in 2017, and I don’t know what’s coming, even though I know something is rolling toward us in the darkness, and the world can end in more ways than one. Its presence is hinted at somewhere deep inside the evolutionary meat grinder of riot repeating riot, all echoing ad infinitum through the Year of our Lord 2016, when the anthem returned to its origin, and the corpse flowers bloomed all at once as Louisiana was turned to water, and no one knew why. I don’t call people comrade; I just call them friend. Because whatever’s coming has no name, and anyone who says they hear it is a liar.67

One benefit of Clover’s much-discussed book on the return of the riot to the center of social struggles (Clichy-sous-Bois, Exarchia, Tottenham, Cairo, Seattle, Oakland, Ferguson, Baltimore, Santiago, etc.) is that it provides a stringently argued historical materialist account of the riot as a form of struggle brought to the fore by post-1973 transformations in global capitalism. Drawing on the work of Robert Brenner and Giovanni Arrighi in particular, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (2016/2019) analyzes the riot as a “circulation struggle” waged primarily by members of the “relative surplus population,”68 who are excluded from the sphere of wage labor (and, hence, cannot engage in 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 175. 68 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 25.

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strikes, which Clover defines as struggles in the realm of production). African-American labor history is instructive here, as Clover is well aware: “Uneven deindustrialization first displaces black workers into informal economies and market struggles, people who now confront extreme policing, hyperincarceration, and the lived experience of being surplus to the needs of the economy.”69 Subject to police repression and excluded from the wage relation, they are “the exemplary subjects of a global recomposition of class since the 1960s within which the riot of surplus populations is not a likelihood but a certainty.” Since the turn of the century, the hyperghettoized global banlieues have seen a resurgence of a new kind of riot, often structured by racialized antagonism and triggered by habitual police killings of black youth. Such “surplus rebellions” generally occur in spaces of circulation rather than production where the most oppressed and immiserated groups increasingly find themselves. Positing a “deep relation of riot and crisis,” Clover thus conceptualizes the contemporary riot as follows: “[C]risis signals a shift of capital’s center of gravity into circulation, both theoretically and practically, and riot is in the last instance to be understood as a circulation struggle […].”70 Clover’s argument hinges on Marx’s “absolute general law of accumulation”71 and a Fanonian notion of neocolonial modernity: Since the “relative surplus population” is bound to grow as consequence of capital’s extended reproduction (i.e., accumulation)—primarily because of automation—and because the state can no longer “buy the social peace” in the form of wages and welfare for all, the riot will of necessity take center stage in any future revolutionary struggles against “a capitalism compelled to act as colonial.”72 As fewer and fewer workers are absorbed into capital, austerity, repression, and hard border regimes replace the discipline of the wage relation. Circulation struggles (riots, blockades, occupations, etc.) are eminently practical rather than political and bound to the site-specific infrastructure of state and capital. What the recent struggles in Oakland, Ferguson, and Baltimore reveal very clearly is that racialized surplus proletarians, or what Rancière would call the sans-part, 69 Joshua Clover, “Surplus Rebellions,” The New Inquiry, May 17, 2016. 70 Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (London: Verso, 2016),

129. 71 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 25. 72 Joshua Clover, “Fanon: Absorption and Coloniality,” College Literature 45, no. 1

(2018): 44.

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have nowhere to go and nowhere to hide: “The police now stand in the place of the economy, the violence of the commodity made flesh.”73

Coda When David Harvey, in his “Afterword” to The Production of Space, notes that Lefebvre “fought to rescue dialectical materialism from the Marxists, history from the historians, the capacity for revolutionary action from the structuralists and the social from the sociologists,”74 it is hard to think of a contemporary thinker whom this description—mutatis mutandis— would fit better than Rancière. If Rancière, today, insists on the necessity of reclaiming (the notion of) politics, it is because, as Lefebvre uncannily projected in 1974: The state is consolidating on a world scale. It weighs down on society (on all societies) in full force; it plans and organizes society ‘rationally’, with the help of knowledge and technology, imposing analogous, if not homologous, measures irrespective of political ideology, historical background, or the class origins of those in power. The state crushes time by reducing differences to repetitions or circularities (dubbed ‘equilibrium’, ‘feedback’, ‘self-regulation’, and so on). Space in its Hegelian form comes back into its own. This modern state promotes and imposes itself as the stable centre —definitively—[…] of (national) societies and spaces. As both the end and the meaning of history—just as Hegel had forecast—it flattens the social and ‘cultural’ spheres. It enforces a logic that puts an end to conflicts and contradictions. It neutralizes whatever resists it by castration or crushing. Is this social entropy? Or is it a monstrous excrescence transformed into normality? Whatever the answer, the results lie before us.75

Over and against the ideological and perceptual closure that is effected through consensual (spatial) practices that foreclose emancipatory politics through a kind of non-interpellation of the policed subject (“Move along, there is nothing to see!”), dissensual practices capacitate the subject precisely by thresholding settled frameworks of perception, cognition, and feeling—the consensual framing of a non-antagonistic social whole where

73 Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot, 125. 74 Harvey in Lefebvre, Production of Space, 429. 75 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 23.

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politics is ruled out from the start—in order to repossess spaces, relations, and articulations. As is obvious in the case of Rancière, one need not be a Hegelian Marxist to concur with this. Moving beyond a limited scholarly concern with “reception” and “narrative,” we can conceive of the reading, listening, viewing, and thinking subject as a site of ideological contestation—both in terms of cognitive mapping and as body-subject in its material-symbolic and affective formation. For Lefebvre, the project of “differential space” is a project of collective reappropriation; a politics of space would thus accord appropriation a special practical and theoretical status: “For appropriation and for use—and against exchange and domination.”76 “Any revolutionary ‘project’ today,” he declares, “whether utopian or realistic, must, if it is to avoid hopeless banality, make the reappropriation of the body, in association with the reappropriation of space, into a non-negotiable part of its agenda.”77 Rather than narrowly “reading” the city, and “reading” representations of urban spaces and places, we may ask whether and which social movements, political subjects, theoretical discourses, and cultural representations politicize social space in such a way as to aid in the production of a “differential space” over and against the “abstract space” of global capital. Lefebvre’s Hegelian account of the state notwithstanding, the present crisis of capital also expresses itself as a crisis of the state that is characterized by debt, austerity, and repression, as militarized police are concentrated in immiserated areas emptied of capital. Postmarxism notwithstanding, questions of capitalist crisis and class composition pose themselves with a vengeance in their spatial dimension.

Works Cited Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origin of Our Times. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 2010. Behrens, Roger. “Kritische Theorie der Stadt.” WiderSpruch: Münchner Zeitschrift für Philosophie 46 (2007): 13–38. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Translated by Harry Zohn. Selected Writings. Vol. 4, 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 389–400.

76 Ibid. 368. 77 Ibid. 166–167.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Brenner, Robert. The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005. London: Verso, 2006. Clover, Joshua. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. London: Verso, 2016. ———. “Surplus Rebellions.” The New Inquiry. May 17, 2016. https://thenew inquiry.com/surplus-rebellions. ———. “Fanon: Absorption and Coloniality.” College Literature 45, no. 1 (2018): 39–45. Dauvé, Gilles. Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement. Oakland: PM, 2015. Denning, Michael. “Wageless Life.” New Left Review 66 (2010): 79–97. Deutsche, Rosalyn. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Malden: Blackwell, 1992. Löw, Martina. “The Constitution of Space: The Structuration of Spaces Through the Simultaneity of Effect and Perception.” European Journal of Social Theory 11, no. 1 (2008): 25–49. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Marchart, Oliver. “Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s): Some Basic Observations on the Difficult Relation of Public Art, Urbanism and Political Theory.” EIPCP. 1999. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0102/marchart/en. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1976. ———. “The Class Struggle in France, 1848 to 1850.” In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Collected Works. Vol. 10. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978. 45–145. ———. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works. Vol. 11. New York: International Publishers, 1979. 99–197. ———. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin, 1974.

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Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers, 1972. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Neel, Phil A. Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict. London: Reaktion, 2018. Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2010. ———. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009. ———. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. ———. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999. Rancière, Jacques, Max Blechman et al. “Democracy, Dissensus, and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle.” Historical Materialism 13, no. 4 (2005): 285–301. Rancière, Jacques, Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey. “Art of the Possible: Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in Conversation with Jacques Rancière.” Artforum 45, no. 7 (2007): 256–268. Rancière, Jacques, and Davide Panagia. “Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière.” Diacritics 30, no. 2 (2000): 113–126. Soja, Edward W. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Surplus Club. “Trapped at a Party Where No One Likes You.” Kosmoprolet. May 13, 2017. https://kosmoprolet.org/en/trapped-party-where-no-one-lik es-you. Swyngedouw, Erik et al. “Neoliberal Urbanization in Europe: Large-Scale Urban Development Projects and the New Urban Policy.” Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 542–577. Thatcher, Margaret and Douglas Keay. “Interview for Woman’s Own.” Woman’s Own. 31 October, 1987, 8–10. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT, 2006. ———. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.

CHAPTER 9

The People of New Jerusalem: Narratives of Social In- and Exclusion in Rotterdam After the Blitz of 1940 Stefan Couperus

Introduction We want to live, we want to build, we—particularly we from Rotterdam!— want to work, we want to take it on immediately. We want to get back on our legs, we want to create, and to create something good, we long for ‘quality’ since we don’t accept less. And that’s why we want to build a very good, new Rotterdam, and we have to do that together, we, people of Rotterdam. Our city will be our own work. It will not be worse or better than what our own capacities, devotions and good will are able to establish.1

1 Adviesbureau Stadsplan Rotterdam, Het nieuwe hart van Rotterdam: Toelichting op het basisplan voor den herbouw van Rotterdam (Rotterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1946), 7. All translations from Dutch are my own unless stated otherwise.

S. Couperus (B) University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_9

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This quote, from an explanatory brochure (1946) dedicated to the reconstruction plan of Rotterdam, invokes an alleged collective spirit of perseverance and resilience. Rotterdam was one of many European cities that needed to be rebuilt after the devastating aerial bombardments (Blitzes) during the Second World War. The Blitz of 14 May 1940 and the subsequent (unintended) destructions by allied bombs (1943) and German sabotage strategies in the port districts (1945) made Rotterdam continuously prone to debates about its redevelopment during and after the war. The quoted brochure, published under the aegis of the local authorities, was one of many texts that linked the future of Rotterdam to the resilience and agency of its people. It should, however, not be read exclusively as an instance of encouragement or stimulus couched in the turgid language of post-catastrophic, collectivist propaganda. First and foremost, the quote, and other texts as well, should be interpreted as a discursive practice aimed at generating public legitimacy for the dirigist planning practices that were employed by the mandated reconstruction authorities. The fallow planes of the pulverized former inner cities proved to be projection screens par excellence on which images of the rationalized harmonious city were put on display by the agents of the reconstruction authorities. In its very essence, the reconstruction of Rotterdam was a top-down process, conducted by officials, administrators, architects and planners who had but one goal: to organize the city according to the perceived logics of their modernist visions of urban society.2 This paper wants to question this politico-administrative technology and its manifestations during the 1940s and 1950s. It will claim that behind the inclusionist intent—“we, people of Rotterdam”—one can observe a normative agenda of social inclusion and—with emphasis—an agenda of social exclusion as well. Two overarching narratives will be key to this analysis. These two core narratives, which can be discerned in many variations and guises during the post-Blitz years, gave meaning and expression to realities of, on the one hand, highly normative social

2 Cor Wagenaar, “Wederopbouw. Idee en mentaliteit,” in Een geruisloze doorbraak: De

geschiedenis van architectuur en stedebouw tijdens de bezetting en de wederopbouw van Nederland, ed. K. Bosma and C. Wagenaar (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1995), 225– 231; Koos Bosma, “Het politiek-organisatorisch kader,” in Een geruisloze doorbraak: De geschiedenis van architectuur en stedebouw tijdens de bezetting en de wederopbouw van Nederland, ed. K. Bosma and C. Wagenaar (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1995), 231–241.

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inclusion in the post-war urban society and, on the other hand, implacable social exclusion from the soon-to-be-resurrected city of Rotterdam. The local consequences of aerial warfare between 1940 and 1945 were immense for Rotterdam. Just some cold figures: over 1200 people were killed by aerial bombing, many thousands were wounded, approximately 28.000 dwellings were destroyed, hundreds of factories and shops were demolished, and, taken together, nearly 100.000 people (a sixth of Rotterdam’s population) in total lost their homes during the war. This context of destruction, human loss, spatial emptiness, ruptured social and spatial fabrics provides the backdrop of two emerging narratives about post-war and future Rotterdam. The first narrative will be referred to as the New Jerusalemist narrative. In brief, this narrative frames the city of Rotterdam as a hub to the world, a city whose fabric is shaped by human productivity, modernist planning, family life and welfare determinism; it depicts Rotterdam as the New Jerusalem in the making. The second narrative—or set of narratives—is rather difficult to subsume in one metaphor or term. Its narrators are to be found among the victims of the Blitz, the former inhabitants of the old inner city. They became the unhappy recipients of dirigist, top-down post-war urban planning practices. This minority group narrated a tale of post-war Rotterdam that invoked a rather insular imagery of a different Rotterdam. This chapter does not employ a systemic narratological inquiry into the urban narratives that accompanied the resurrection of post-war Rotterdam. Rather this contribution intends to lay bare, first, the exclusionist impact of a perceived inclusionist narrative of New Jerusalem with its semantics of social equality, harmony and inclusion, and, second, it addresses the marginalized narrative of post-war reconstruction which fostered alternative practices of place-making and community-building among an ostracized social minority with limited visibility and voice in the city’s political and cultural archive.

New Jerusalemism in Rotterdam Before elaborating on what is here dubbed the New Jerusalemist narrative that emerged after the Blitz of May 1940, a brief excursion into the specific discursive appreciations of Rotterdam is necessary to understand how negative connotations of the modern city gradually transformed into positive ones and vice versa. A frequent reminder of the repudiation which accompanied the city’s transition from a regional center of trade into

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an industrialized port city of global transit trade, is a single line from a poem by the progressive author E. J. Potgieter from 1879: “O, ugly, ugly art thou, industrial, new Rotterdam.”3 This phrase reflects a clear hesitance toward the enormous infrastructural and physical aggrandizement provoked by an ever increasing growth of activity in Rotterdam’s port around the fin-de-siècle. Infused by new intellectual and cultural orientations in architecture and the visual arts (film!), the interwar period witnessed an inversion of this mode of “city hating”, as Patricia van Ulzen convincingly argues.4 Instead of cultivating a local nostalgia, a group of prominent authors, architects and artists represented the new Rotterdam, whether as a whole or by focusing on single landmarks such as new buildings or bridges, as a showcase of a globalized urban development leading toward the twentieth-century metropolis. Famous expressions of this kind of cityboosterism are films by Joris Ivens (The Bridge 1928, about a new hydraulic bridge) and Andor von Barsy (Rotterdam. The city that never rests 1928, inspired by Walther Ruttmann’s cinematic documentary about modern Berlin, Die Sinfonie der Großstadt from 1927). The popular magazine Groot Rotterdam (Big Rotterdam, 1923–1940) depicted all sorts of metropolitan landmarks linking up Rotterdam’s future with, for instance, one of the paragons of the interwar metropolis, Chicago.5 Underneath these celebrations of Rotterdam’s (envisaged) achievements in modernism slumbered a growing dissatisfaction with the perceived anachronisms and irrationalities of the historical city center.6 The major part of Rotterdam was seen as an impediment to rationalizing motorized traffic, to separating urban functions in space, to ameliorating the social conditions of the urbanites, and to reconfiguring socio-spatial relations for the benefit of modernist town planning. When confronted with the prevailing urban realities, many urban visionaries saw their imaginations of metropolitan Rotterdam being thwarted by the tenacious 3 Quoted in: Paul van de Laar, Stad van formaat: Geschiedenis van Rotterdam in de negentiende en twintigste eeuw (Zwolle: Waanders, 2000), 14. 4 Patricia van Ulzen, Dromen van een metropool: De creatieve klasse van Rotterdam, 1970–2000 (Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 2007), 47–63. 5 Van Ulzen, Dromen, 58–59. 6 For the wider phenomenon of ‘city hating’ during the interwar period see: Christopher

Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

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juridical, social, and spatial legacies of the ancient régime. Within the prevailing (democratic) polity, no interventionist arrangement capable of erasing old relations of (land) ownership, of clearing slums, and of restoring alleged fading community bonds was conceivable. The destructive impact of aerial raids offered radical new options for modernist urban reformers who became frustrated with the limitations of the existing city. After the fires were extinguished, the dust had settled on the inner city ruins and the horrifying experiences of death and destruction were gradually superseded by the daily urgencies of survival, advocates of modernist reform were far from reticent about the possibilities the new fallow plains—a planners’ tabula rasa—offered for the redevelopment of Rotterdam. Wartime experience and destruction invested the interwar modernist discourse with urgency as Rotterdam wanted to catch up with the post-war economic order and sustain its ambition of being one of Europe’s (trading) hubs to the world, a city arising from the smoldering debris which would epitomize the demands and needs of the modern era. Recent inquiries into the conceptions of the Blitzed cities of Europe have revealed that a widely shared idea existed about post-Blitz redevelopment as a window of opportunity, or, to put it more bluntly, “a blessing in disguise.”7 Bombs had proven to be the most effective means to remove old arrangements which had allegedly hindered urban reform for decades: alleys, slums, property rights, old industries, and social misfits inhabiting the city center. This sentiment surely applied to the Rotterdam case. As one prominent architect wrote in 1946: “Do you realize, people of Rotterdam, that many of the most precious memories about what has been lost during those days in May [the bombardments in 1940, SC], are, from a sensible perspective, clustering around the shortcomings of our old city?”8 Similar appeals to contain sentiments of nostalgia and judge the disappeared city on its “true” merits are to be found among many post-war architects and planners. The old needed to be replaced by something new, something that marked the era of the New Jerusalem in the making. In the context of post-war reconstruction, the term ‘New Jerusalem’ was coined as one 7 Jörn Düwel and Niels Gutschow, “Community and Town Planning: Debates of the First Half of the 20th Century,” in A Blessing in Disguise: War and Town Planning in Europe 1940–1945, ed. Jörn Düweland Niels Gutschow (Berlin: DOM, 2013), 14–51. 8 Adviesbureau Stadsplan Rotterdam, Het nieuwe hart van Rotterdam, 10.

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of the main metaphors of emerging British post-war welfare statism, employed by the then ruling Labour Party under prime minister Clement Attlee.9 However, the label of New Jerusalem has become a familiar urban signifier among reconstruction historians, hinting at a host of cultural and political expressions with regard to post-Blitz redevelopment in mid-twentieth century European cities.10 “New Jerusalem” also entails narrative elements which hark back to its biblical semantics: it is the final destination of God’s people after the Last Judgment whereas non-believers and sinners would face “the outer darkness [where] there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”.11 It is not difficult to equate the Last Judgment with the Blitzes of the Second World War and their social implications: only those fitting in the new, post-war template of the perfect urbanite were allowed in—the unfit were to be refused without remorse. This plot is surely traceable in post-Blitz Rotterdam. A rapidly emerging New Jerusalemist narrative of the city’s resurrection and regeneration presented a spatial and social imagery of the new metropolis. This imagery emanated a highly inclusionist ambition for Rotterdam’s inhabitants, but, as will become clear, also implied a normative social politics that generated practices of social exclusion and displacement. Parallel to the emerging plans with regard to the physical space of the city e.g., high rises, broad traffic lanes, modernist architecture, radical rearrangements of the urban grid, which predominate the reconstruction literature and historiography, normative postulations about the social qualities of the urbanite strongly resonated in Rotterdam’s New Jerusalemist narrative. In fact, through new planning categories such as the neighborhood unit and the standardized family dwelling, the social was inextricably entwined with modernist architecture and town planning. Thus, a preconception of the social, particularly within the urban 9 Vernon Bogdanor, From New Jerusalem to New Labour: British Prime Ministers from Attlee to Blair (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Andrew Davies, To Build a New Jerusalem: The British Labour Party from Keir Hardy to Tony Blair (London: Abacus, 1996). 10 Tristram Hooley, Visions of a New Jerusalem: Predictive Fiction in the Second World War (Leicester: PhD thesis University of Leicester, 2002); Nick Hayes, “An ‘English War’, Wartime Culture and ‘Millions Like Us’,” in ‘Millions like us’? British Culture in the Second World War, ed. Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 1–32 (17). 11 King James Bible, Cambridge Version, Revelation 3:12 and Matthew 22:13.

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context, preceded the modernist trademarks of post-war Dutch planning and architecture, as a group of architects had already acknowledged in 1944: “Architecture and town planning are nothing but reflections of the community. At present, we are convinced that knowledge and skills are not sufficient to fulfill our building task. Healthy societal relations have to lay the vital foundations for that task.”12 Notions about the nuclear family and the family’s course of life were at the very heart of designs of, for instance, the standardized single-family dwelling, the eengezinswoning. The ethos of architects shifted from the primacy of design to the primacy of society, as one professor in architecture decreed to his students in 1947: “we all have the duty to strive for a better, humane society, with all the powers of our heart and mind.”13 To understand the agendas of social exclusion underpinning the New Jerusalemist narrative in Rotterdam, at least four interrelated spheres can be distinguished within which the qualities of the ideal post-war urbanite are prescribed. The first sphere entails the socio-spatial orientation toward the city’s inhabitants and found its clearest expression in the propagation of the neighborhood unit, a strictly planned decentralized residential zone whose organization revolved around the nuclear family as the main living unit. The second sphere centers on the consumerist imperative that profoundly informed the socio-cultural agenda of Rotterdam’s reconstruction. Thirdly, the productive virtue of each urbanite (i.e., [industrial] labor) is to be found in the prominent post-war discourse about the city’s socio-economic ambition as a global port city. Fourthly and finally, and to a large extent interwoven in the New Jerusalemist narrative as a whole, is the dimension of the perceived social and gendered logic of the (reproductive) nuclear family as the basic cell of the harmonious urban community.

12 Quoted in: Willem van Tijen, Gronden en achtergronden van woning en wijk: Een bijdrage tot het ‘herstel; van de ‘vernieuwing’ op het gebied van het wonen (Amsterdam: Van Saane, 1955), 52. 13 J. F. Berghoef, Over de architectonische vorm en zijn betekenis: Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar aan de Technische Hogeschool te Delft, op woensdag 15 october 1947 (Amsterdam: Van Saane, 1947), 24.

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Building the Urban Community of Rotterdam All four spheres and their concomitant prescriptive social templates are to be found in a great number of texts and images which were produced or induced by a set of actors that stemmed from the milieu of administrators, planners, architects, and entrepreneurs who found themselves at the heart of the governance cluster engaged in Rotterdam’s reconstruction, and commissioned filmmakers, writers, playwrights, and artists. To them the New Jerusalemist narrative was a vehicle to legitimize the reconstruction plans publicly. Lacking the practice of public consultation and debate— let alone plebiscitary references—, as was the case in many Blitzed cities in Britain, it was a means to communicate with Rotterdam’s citizens, who, to a large extent, were defined as the mere inhabitants, end-users one might argue, of the new metropolis.14 One significant topos in the New Jerusalemist discourse was the socalled wijk or wijkgedachte (neighbourhood unit). The neighborhood unit was coined by the American sociologist and planner Clarence Perry in the late 1920s, and was gradually adopted in various urban planning contexts also across the Atlantic. In the particular case of Rotterdam, the neighborhood unit was debated among architects and planners during the war, before it became publicly known and recognized as a widely endorsed urban planning instrument by means of which one was able to create and maintain decentralized socio-spatial units which constituted the residential areas of the city. These units (wijken), on the one hand, provided for a set of amenities and services (e.g. schools, churches, parks, sports accommodations, leisure centers) allowing them to be autonomous urban entities outside of the city center. On the other hand, the wijken were part of a much replicated depiction of the concentric city, a model which represented the interrelated social spheres of urban life, ranging from the family home, the street, the neighborhood unit, to the city center and the city as a whole. In terms of social profiling, the neighborhood unit generated a clear-cut generational conception of the urban community. Standardized dwellings, divided over the wijk’s territory according to an algorithmic pattern, would accommodate urbanites in the various, predefined stages of family life young couples without children, families with children and 14 Susanne Cowan, Democracy, Technocracy and Publicity: Public Consultation and British Planning, 1939–1951 (Berkeley: PhD thesis University of California, 2010).

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the elderly. The same applied to the use of the wijk’s facilities; the use of designated public space was linked to the different generations of coexisting families—babies and toddlers only needed a simple playground whereas older children had to live closer to the schools, sports grounds and the various youth centers. The premises of the apartments for the elderly included social meeting centers and grocer’s stores. The envisaged social pattern that would determine the make-up of the urban community is key to the narratives that were employed by neighborhood unit advocates. These narratives had two aspects in common. The textual parts were phrased in a rather simple language, reducing the complexities of Rotterdam’s urban history to episodes of stasis, decay and regeneration—the latter stage of course being fueled by the marvels of neighborhood-planning and community-building. The visual parts of the publications, whether magazines, brochures, booklets, or posters, were abundant, colorful, and eye-catching. Most images included artistic impressions of what the neighborhood units—or at least parts of them— would look like after completion. The depictions of the neighborhoods also included the nuclear family—man, wife, and child(ren). Sometimes they would contemplate the new neighborhood, their soon-to-be home. In other cases the neighborhood and the family are connected through a concentric model which suggests the socio-spatial logic of their inevitable convergence. The brochure Wij en de wijkgedachte (1946), which was aimed directly at the citizens of Rotterdam, illustrates this evocatively. In a richly illustrated historical narrative, the author (the civil servant and social planning advocate W. F. Geyl) builds up a storyline which presents the neighborhood unit as the inevitable and ultimate response to the historical developments of industrialization and urbanization in the Netherlands and Rotterdam. The downsides of industrial production and metropolitan scale had fostered an awareness of the loss of community, urban citizenship, and social qualities that would be restored within the framework of the neighborhood, de wijk.15 The neighborhood unit became highly attractive to various stakeholders in Rotterdam’s redevelopment. One group of community-building advocates, united in the Rotterdamsche Gemeenschap (Rotterdam Community) almost entirely grafted its activism

15 W. F. Geyl, Wij en de wijkgedachte (Utrecht: V en S, 1946).

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on the neighborhood unit, again vesting it with the capacities to arrest the waning of metropolitan life: One of the central ideas of the Rotterdamsche Gemeenschap is the neighborhood unit. In our conversations, we started from the assumption that the modern big city confronts man with a number of difficulties and dangers which can only be suppressed successfully within smaller units such as neighborhoods. The loss of community ties, the waning and atomization of modern man must be resisted.16

Along the lines of gender, the other spheres of social life were similarly put to the fore in a range of other publications, again most often directly aimed at the population of Rotterdam. To furbish and decorate the new family dwellings, the housewives were induced to go out shopping in the soon-to-be built shopping precincts, of which De Lijnbaan (which opened in 1953) would become the paragon. The male head of the household was to participate in the reconstruction of the city through hard labor in the local (building) industry or the port.

Social Misfits and “Unofficial” Communities The inclusionist promises underlying the New Jerusalemist narrative tended to conceal the exclusionist effects of post-Blitz reconstruction practices. In essence, the ambitions of post-war Rotterdam implied the displacement of residents from the city center—the new exclusive locus for shopping, trade, finance and administration, spaces not intended for living—, and the regeneration of the nuclear family within the setting of the neighborhood unit as the building block of a socialized, (re)productive, and affluent urban community. Not all inhabitants were of course eligible to participate in this imagined trajectory of urban life. Many of the original residents of the old inner city did not meet the requirements of the propagated form of urban citizenship. This group experienced the bombardment as the first of a series of traumas. After destruction came displacement, after displacement came a life permanently detached from the New Jerusalem in the making. The most noticeable environment where this group of urbanites ended up were the so-called emergency villages, enclaves of temporary dwellings 16 N.N., Wat wil de Rotterdamsche gemeenschap? (Rotterdam: N.N. 1944), 20.

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at the urban fringes which were built to provide shelter for the homeless victims of the Blitz. From as early as the spring of 1940 onwards, seven emergency villages were built at the city borders. They were designed to last for about five years, and its inhabitants had to move to the new neighborhoods once completed—at least this was the intention. However, these emergency villages were about to have life spans varying from 20 to over 60 years. Well over 2000 of such “temporary dwellings” were built during the war. The emergency villagers increasingly narrated their own tale of a post-Blitz urban community. Its narrators were not allied to the official institutions of post-war reconstruction and redevelopment. Nor did they adhere to the axioms of the New Jerusalemists. Its media were not the widely distributed propaganda texts or information brochures, sanctioned or commissioned by the (local) planning authorities. Instead, it was the ostracized people themselves who gave expression to a nostalgia—and responded to the perceived negation of a recent past—which was lacking in the tale of the New Jerusalem. They found their stages in pavilions and locally circulated newsletters and bulletins. One might argue the New Jerusalemist narrative buried a past that still had psychological value to at least the villagers. Initially, many (male) inhabitants of the emergency village were involved in the actual physical displacement of their environments. Many low-skilled men were hired as rubble removers. The rubble from the inner city was used to elevate and level the land on which some of the emergency villages were built. Some materials were reused in the construction of temporary dwellings. The rubble became a material reminder of the past and the future. This provoked a community narrative that capitalized on loss and continuity in the same breath: the inner city was lost forever, but its people and bricks had found a different location—albeit in a rather different configuration. Already during the war, the emergency villages became clear spatial markers of alleged moral decay and seclusion—the loci where the unwanted “slummers” of the destroyed inner city ended up. An above average amount of people in the emergency villages were branded antisocial by the reconstruction authorities and in popular discourse. Being subjected to an all-encompassing scheme of social re-education in one case (in the so-called Noorderkanaalwegcomplex or Drentsedorp), alleged anti-social inhabitants had much direct contact with social workers,

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housing inspectors, police officials, and other supervisors. These encounters fostered a strong anti-authoritative attitude that intermingled with collective images of otherness and social exclusion that also affected the other emergency villages where conditions were significantly better.17 Rogier van Aerde’s novel of 1951 (Nooddorp) about the emergency villages only confirmed existing biases: “Nobody prided themselves on them [the emergency dwellings, SC], and that is why they were put at the outer fringes of the city […] It looked like a concentration camp, sadly lying a few hundred meters off the road. Long rows of low, filthy living barracks—like prisoners’ sheds. Only the barbed wire and the watching towers with machine guns were lacking […].”18 Van Aerde’s representation of the inhabitants of this “camp” reflects the stigma attached to the Noorderkanaalwegcomplex—the village that was gradually turned into an experiment with repressive social work and re-education during the war—in particular. He clearly described the inevitable stigma of the villagers: They were marked by the single fact that they lived there [in the emergency village, SC]. An employer hesitated to hire a laborer coming from the village. A landlord would not have any villagers amongst his tenants. It was a bad certificate everywhere, a label that was equally stuck on all, no matter how much they differed among themselves. Many felt it was a hurtful injustice imposed upon them. Some were encouraged by that and worked themselves up. Others gave up entirely. Immense sums of money were spent on the village—but one could hardly notice.19

In the lengthy reports about the results of the social work one finds similar descriptions: […] one sees a mentality among these families which is aimed at the exploitation of social amenities and the perpetuation of life in straitened circumstances. In most cases, the men are uneducated stevedores, while

17 For this see the first-hand account by the former inhabitant of the Noorderkanaalwegcomplex, Alexander Roodbol: Alexander Roodbol, Wij ‘a-socialen’: Het lot van honderden Rotterdammers (1940–1960) (unpublished memoirs, 1984). 18 Rogier van Aerde, Het Nooddorp (Utrecht: Bruna, 1951), 5–6. 19 Van Aerde, Het Nooddorp, 7.

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the women are spineless, garrulous creatures negligent of their duties and with no inclination whatever to look after their houses or families.20

Immediately after the war, the perceived worst cases were deported to asylum camps in the Northern part of the Netherlands—by force. This story of the “social misfits” of the Noorderkanaalweg has long been overshadowed by the Messianic purport of the New Jerusalemist discourse. Only rather recently, journalists and former inhabitants have written about the atrocities of deportation and social exclusion in post-Blitz Rotterdam.21 Whereas the Noorderkanaalwegcomplex was demolished by the end of the war, most other emergency villages formed long-term communities whose members did not want to leave their premises. Community life was thriving in the emergency villages from the late 1940s onwards. The most feasible expression was the foundation of numerous formal and informal voluntary associations relating to gardening, football, playground, or needlework. Particularly in the so-called Geldersedorp, one of the emergency villages that contained higher quality dwellings, a blossoming youth center was established by the orthodox-protestant church.22 Social isolationism was often crafted as part of narrative strategy. The shared experience of being bombed, displaced and isolated, the thin walls and limited privacy of their alleged temporary dwellings, tapped into a collective sense of exclusion in isolation. Being a misfit became a selfproclaimed honorary sobriquet. At one of the many emergency village reunions that have been organized since the 1970s, one former inhabitant was recorded saying: We were living in poverty, but everyone helped each other out. A cup of sugar? The neighbor would give it […] Outside the village we found 20 Adrianne Dercksen and Loes Verplanke, Geschiedenis van de onmaatschappelijkheidsbestrijding in Nederland, 1914–1970 (Meppel: Boom, 1997), 77. 21 Dick Rackwitsz, Van puindorp tot tuindorp: Rotterdamse noodwoningcomplexen als object van beleid en beschavingsarbeid, 1940–1970 (Rotterdam: MA thesis Open University, 1998); Ben Maandag and Tonny van der Mee, De ‘asocialen’: Heropvoeding in Drentse kampen (Rotterdam: Donker, 2005); Rein Wolters, Verdwenen Rotterdamse nooddorpen: Herinneringen aan het Gelderse, Utrechtse, Drentse en Brabantse Dorp (Zaltbommel: Uitgeverij Aprilis, 2004); and Frits Baarda, Rotterdam 14 mei 1940. De ooggetuigen, de foto’s (Bussum: Uitgeverij THOTH, 2015). 22 Rackwitsz, Rotterdamse noodwoningcomplexen, 19–22.

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no support. The children from Blijdorp [an adjoining, richer, permanent neighborhood, SC] were not allowed to play with us. Like as if we consciously decided to have our houses bombed.23

Social surveys, undertaken by the municipality and social scientists, as well as charity organizations in the 1950s and 1960s, learnt that villagers hardly interacted with people from the adjoining permanent neighborhoods and vice versa.24 This alternative narrative of community-building and urban placemaking was of a radically different kind than the New Jerusalemism. The neighborhood unit was non-existent, many villagers were unemployed, single, or divorced; generally speaking, they were too poor to indulge in consumerism, and many households did not coincide with the desired ideal of the nuclear family. Their community was certainly not the one envisaged by the planners. Their places were limited to emergency villages in the outer city margins. The burden of the social odium that was projected onto most of the emergency villagers, spurred an inward discourse of seclusion. Their new social environment, the emergency village, was a continuous reminder of what was lost—their inner city biotope with its vibrant street life and social pluralism—and what was retained—a perceived old-fashioned neighborliness which was unaffected by the agendas of social monism—or at least the mitigation of social heterogeneity—imposed by the reconstruction authorities. In the emergency villages, thus, a whole different kind of post-Blitz Rotterdam was narrated; a Rotterdam that allowed for the commemoration of what was lost during those traumatizing days in May 1940.

Conclusion Narratives about Rotterdam as a New Jerusalem—a city arising from the smoldering debris which would epitomize the demands and needs of the modern era—were composed by planners and administrators who were at the heart of public reconstruction authorities, both at the local and the national level. The separation of the functions of urban space (housing, 23 Maassluise Courant —De Schakel, 13 December 2007. 24 Rotterdam City Archive, Collection J. Simonse—emergency villages, reports, theses

and memorandums about the emergency villages in Rotterdam 1940–1970.

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commerce, leisure and industry) entailed the displacement of residents from the inner city to the fringes of Rotterdam. As such, the top-down interventionist agenda of reconstruction was a necessary condition for alternative narrations of redevelopment—of the old city and its social realities—to emerge. Both narratives, as two sides of the same coin, in a way share the same plot: the perseverance of the people of Rotterdam in an urban environment which seems to continuously suffer from and is able to adapt to endogenous change, be it bombs and German occupation, or, in the case of emergency villages, the imposition of interventionist planning practices. However, whereas the New Jerusalemists linked this attitude to a continuous mode of regeneration of socio-spatial relations along the lines of a conception of a family-based community, the inhabitants of the emergency villages connected messages of resurrection to their own personal lives, particularly to the restoration of some form of local belonging. The rather swift adherence of most of the inhabitants to their temporary homes has to be explained by yet another significant personal (mostly male) experience. Many of the homeless people, due to the bombardments, engaged in the clearance of debris in the inner city. Saliently, most of the materials were re-used in the construction of their new homes. As such, homeless rubble cleaners directly contributed to the restoration of their own family life and were able to share the experience of having cleaned up the debris of their former homes, which had provided the material for building their new temporary dwellings. In short, the New Jerusalemist narrative envisaged a whole new city, whereas the villagers narrated their own micro-tale of reconstruction, which was irreconcilable with the new modernist cityscape that was being realized a few kilometers away, in their former living areas. To the New Jerusalemists, destruction was a blessing in disguise. The Blitz created an enormous window of opportunity to embark on the realization of the perfectly planned urban society. Urban space had to be divided functionally into suburban residential zones, an inner city life determined by shopping, trading and entertainment, and economic productivity centering on the port area. The social fabric had to be woven around the nuclear family, which had to be rooted in neighborhood units providing all the necessary amenities. Narratives ensuing from politico-administrative and town planning practices, claimed an inclusive conception of post-war Rotterdam. However, at the same instance, a group of people living in the enclaves at the city’s

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ends was subjected to governmentalities that framed these people into a category ineligible for the new city; they were the social misfits. To the villagers, reconstruction meant restoring the social bonds that had given meaning to their urban lives before the war. Together with the remnants of the old city (i.e., rubble), they were displaced to isolated and well-supervised suburban environments. A grassroots process of community-building seemed to re-invoke the disrupted prewar social fabric. However, the popular narratives were only echoed within the spatial confines of these temporary settlements, and referred to the new Rotterdam as “the other world”. Through the materiality of their surroundings, burgeoning associational life and the growing resistance to top-down interventions into their communities, they were able to forge narrative representations in which poverty, stigmatization and exclusion were represented as the generic downsides of post-war life, but comradeship, public spirit and social cohesion—ironically the same tropes employed by the New Jerusalemists at large—were proudly described by the narrators as the idiosyncratic features of “their” post-war Rotterdam.

Bibliography Adviesbureau Stadsplan Rotterdam. Het nieuwe hart van Rotterdam: Toelichting op het basisplan voor den herbouw van Rotterdam. Rotterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1946. Aerde, Rogier van. Het Nooddorp. Utrecht: Bruna, 1951. Berghoef, J. F. Over de architectonische vorm en zijn betekenis: Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar aan de Technische Hogeschool te Delft, op woensdag 15 october 1947 . Amsterdam: Van Saane, 1947. Bogdanor, Vernon. From New Jerusalem to New Labour: British Prime Ministers from Attlee to Blair. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Bosma, Koos. “Het politiek-organisatorisch kader.” In Een geruisloze doorbraak: De geschiedenis van architectuur en stedebouw tijdens de bezetting en de wederopbouw van Nederland, edited by K. Bosma and C. Wagenaar. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1995. 231–241. Cowan, Susanne. Democracy, Technocracy and Publicity: Public Consultation and British Planning, 1939–1951. Berkeley: PhD thesis University of California, 2010. Davies, Andrew. To Build a New Jerusalem: The British Labour Party from Keir Hardy to Tony Blair. London: Abacus, 1996. Dercksen, Adrianne, and Loes Verplanke. Geschiedenis van de onmaatschappelijkheidsbestrijding in Nederland, 1914–1970. Meppel: Boom, 1997.

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Düwel, Jörn, and Niels Gutschow. “Community and Town Planning: Debates of the First Half of the 20th Century.” In A Blessing in Disguise: War and Town Planning in Europe 1940–1945, edited by Jörn Düwel and Niels Gutschow. Berlin: DOM, 2013. 14–51. Geyl, W. F. Wij en de wijkgedachte. Utrecht: V en S, 1946. Hayes, Nick. “An ‘English War’, Wartime Culture and ‘Millions Like Us’.” In ‘Millions Like Us’? British Culture in the Second World War, edited by Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999. 1–32. Hooley, Tristram. Visions of a New Jerusalem: Predictive Fiction in the Second World War. Leicester: PhD thesis University of Leicester, 2002. King James Bible. Cambridge Version. Klemek, Christopher. The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Laar, Paul van de. Stad van formaat: Geschiedenis van Rotterdam in de negentiende en twintigste eeuw. Zwolle: Waanders, 2000. Maandag, Ben, and Tonny van der Mee. De ‘asocialen’: Heropvoeding in Drentse kampen. Rotterdam: Donker, 2005. N.N. Wat wil de Rotterdamsche gemeenschap? Rotterdam: N.N., 1944. Rackwitsz, Dick. Van puindorp tot tuindorp: Rotterdamse noodwoningcomplexen als object van beleid en beschavingsarbeid, 1940–1970. Rotterdam: MA thesis Open University, 1998. Roodbol, Alexander. Wij ‘a-socialen’: Het lot van honderden Rotterdammers (1940–1960). Unpublished memoirs, 1984. Tijen, Willem van. Gronden en achtergronden van woning en wijk: Een bijdrage tot het ‘herstel; van de ‘vernieuwing’ op het gebied van het wonen. Amsterdam: Van Saane, 1955. van Ulzen, Patricia. Dromen van een metropool: De creatieve klasse van Rotterdam, 1970–2000. Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 2007. Wagenaar, Cor. “Wederopbouw. Idee en mentaliteit.” In Een geruisloze doorbraak: De geschiedenis van architectuur en stedebouw tijdens de bezetting en de wederopbouw van Nederland, edited by K. Bosma and C. Wagenaar. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1995. 225–231. Wolters, Rein. Verdwenen Rotterdamse nooddorpen: Herinneringen aan het Gelderse, Utrechtse, Drentse en Brabantse Dorp. Zaltbommel: Uitgeverij Aprilis, 2004.

CHAPTER 10

Smart City Narratives and Narrating Smart Urbanism Anke Strüver and Sybille Bauriedl

Introduction Within the last decade, smartness in general and smart cities in particular have become dominant narratives for the future of cities. In this paper, we introduce Smart City Narratives as utopia and dystopia, with a special focus on their narrative construction—that is, on the debates about smart cities taking place in urban studies and beyond.1 For example, we address

1 Some parts of this paper have been published prior to this in German in a book chapter: Sybille Bauriedl and Anke Strüver, “Raumproduktionen in der digitalisierten Stadt,” in Smart City. Kritische Perspektiven auf die Digitalisierung in Städten, ed. Sybille Bauriedl and Anke Strüver (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018), 11–32; reprint with kind permission of Transcript Publisher. Copy-editing of the translation was assisted by Laura Cuniff.

A. Strüver University of Graz, Graz, Austria S. Bauriedl (B) European University of Flensburg, Flensburg, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_10

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the issue of “smart cities as corporate storytelling,”2 paying special attention to conflicting stories of sustainability, social justice, and ecological modernization as paths to a Smart City3 or when looking for “alternative smart cities”4 and smart citizens.5 We thus do not address Smart Cities as a single narrative, but as polyphonic and contested narratives with correspondingly different imaginary representations for present and future cities.6 Smart City imaginaries offer scenarios that both support and criticize an urban transformation accelerated by digital infrastructure. While some people associate Smart Cities with a utopia offering a safe environment and a high quality of life,7 others link the term to a dystopia of control and surveillance in both public and private spaces. Moreover, urban futures are not exclusively 2 Ola Söderström, Till Paasche, and Francisco Klauser, “Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling,” City 18, no. 3 (2014): 307–320; see also Richard G. Hollands, “Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?” City 12, no. 3 (2008): 303–320; and Donald McNeill, “Global Firms and Smart Technologies: IBM and the Reduction of Cities,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40, no. 4 (2015): 562–574. 3 For a critique, see James Evans et al. “Smart and Sustainable Cities? Pipedreams, Practicalities and Possibilities,” Local Environment 24, no. 7 (2019): 557–564; Maria Kaika, “‘Don’t Call Me Resilient Again!’: The New Urban Agenda as Immunology … or … What Happens When Communities Refuse to Be Vaccinated with ‘Smart Cities’ and Indicators,” Environment and Urbanization 29, no. 1 (2017): 89–102; Marit Rosol, Gwendolyn Blue, and Victoria Fast, “Social Justice in the Digital Age: Re-thinking the Smart City with Nancy Fraser.” UCCities Working Paper 1, 2019, https://doi.org/10. 31235/osf.io/wkqy2 (accessed August 2, 2019); and Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika, “Urban Political Ecology. Great Promises, Deadlock… and New Beginnings?” Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica 60, no. 3 (2014): 459–481. 4 Colin McFarlane and Ola Söderström, “On Alternative Smart Cities,” City 21, nos. 3–4 (2017): 312–328; Elke Rauth, Smart Tales of the City, 2015, https://www.eurozine. com/smart-tales-of-the-city/ (accessed July 28, 2019). 5 Anthony M. Townsend, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); Michiel de Lange and Martijn De Waal, “Owning the City. New Media and Citizen Engagement in Urban Design,” First Monday 18, no. 11 (2013): 1–15; Dan Hill, On the Smart City; or, a ‘Manifesto’ for Smart Citizens Instead, 2013, www.cityofsound.com/blog/2013/02/on-the-smart-citya-call-for-smart-citizens-instead.html (accessed August 2, 2019); and Alberto Vanolo, “Is There Anybody Out There? The Place and Role of Citizens in Tomorrow’s Smart Cities,” Futures 82 (2016): 26–36. 6 See Sybille Bauriedl and Anke Strüver, eds., Smart City—Kritische Perspektiven auf die Digitalisierung in Städten (Bielefeld: Transcript. 2018). 7 Summarized in Ayona Datta, “A 100 Smart Cities, a 100 Utopias,” Dialogues in Human Geography 5, no. 1 (2015): 49–53.

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determined by smart technologies; they rely on social change, cultural developments, and political decision-making. Hence, in addition to technical capabilities, there is a critical need for a public debate of the central issues that Smart Cities entail: socially and digitally just cities, smart urbanism, and a “digital right to the city”8 as part of the recent dynamic narratives of digitalization in cities. This paper discusses contemporary changes in the narration of urban spaces, with a special focus on the production and perception of urban space brought about by increasing access to and use of digital technologies and digitally connected infrastructures in cities. The topic covers new coalitions of ICT corporations (Information and Communication Technology) and city governments that view cities as agents of capitalist control (as corporations and surveillance areas) and as democratic citizenship initiatives (e.g. new municipalism) that test new ways of networking and community building.9 The term “smart city” is thus less a status-marker for a city than a label that promises to expand its level of digitalization. In addition, given that digitalization changes not only cities, but also urban citizens themselves, a digitized city must be expected to change urban practices as well. In looking at Smart City Narratives, we need to consider exactly who it is that defines the problems, explanations, and solutions in a city: is it citizens, city governments or ICT-corporations? The definition of urban phenomena as urban problems related to mobility and housing, density, diversity, etc., mirrors both powerful discourses on urban regeneration and actual developments in cities. In this paper, we address a fundamental dilemma that is symptomatic of the ongoing discussions on smart cities.10 On the one hand, there is an almost general agreement among visionaries and utopians that digitalization and digital technologies are prerequisites for improving the quality of life in cities and for effective urban governance. Every city wants to be “smart” in this sense, and every city relies on techno-managerial solutions. On the other hand, there is growing uncertainty among urban citizens about the extent to which they will gain or 8 Joe Shaw and Mark Graham, eds., Our Digital Rights to the City (London: Meatspace Press, 2017). 9 Simon Marvin, Andrés Luque-Ayala, and Colin McFarlane, eds., Smart Urbanism. Utopian Vision or False dawn? (London: Routledge, 2016). 10 The comments in this paper refer exclusively to existing cities and do not address smart cities as newly developed towns.

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lose basic life freedoms as a result of digital sensors in urban spaces, their control and monitoring functions in digital surveillance networks, and increasing real-time data production and processing by ICT corporations. The latter in particular, which is authorized by local governments, raises a crucial question: who has access to this data and who controls its further use? Against this background and in order to introduce and advance the debate, we consider existing critical research on the digitalization of cities in two ways. First, we analyze the social and spatial implications of Smart City Narratives, including those proposed scenarios for the future digitalization of urban environments which tend to be marginalized by scholars, urban planners, and politicians. Given that studies in favor of smart cities are largely oriented toward the controlling interests of global ICT companies and entrepreneurial urban policies, understanding alternative ideas about urban futures, digitalization and communities seems especially crucial. Only with such an understanding can we critically respond to the existing affirmative research on this subject. Second, digitalization is not the only urban dynamic that influences the ways in which the meanings and materialities of space and place are experienced and lived. At the same time, many other aspects of urban life are changing as digitalization intersects with urban population growth, as well as with gentrification, social segregation, privatization, re-municipalization, climate change, new mobilities, right-wing populism, an aging urban population, and new urban living preferences. The objective of this chapter is to bring these narratives together. We assume that the concept of the Smart City will not simply vanish into thin air during the years to come, nor will digital technologies disappear or powerful ICT corporations (Google/Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Cisco, IBM, Siemens, etc.) begin to share their acquired digital knowledge and data with the public as part of the common good. Critical perspectives on Smart City Narratives, as we discuss below, are yet not fundamentally hostile to technology. Rather, they are critical of universalized notions of urban futures and urban design, as well as of the standardized narratives regarding urban practices, social coexistence, and identities in cities. This means that critical perspectives on dominant Smart City Narratives are not directed against digitalization per se, nor do they simply offer advice on how to avoid digital technologies and media. They are, however, directed against the big ICT corporations with their

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core interest in making profit beyond the reaches of democratic legitimation, and their claim to be able to offer technological solutions for any kind of urban crises. Such criticism is also aimed at urban governments that open the door to ICT corporations through public-private partnerships without developing a long-term strategy to avoid conflicts over data privacy, access to collected data, and dependencies on business software (for example, by using proprietary software instead of systems with open-source codes, thereby producing “lock-in effects”). This paper is organized as follows. First, we look at three different strands of critical perspectives on dominant Smart City Narratives. After that, we discuss affirmative and alternative productions of urban space through digitalisation. Finally, we argue that a critical investigation of dominant Smart City Narratives needs to elaborate more extensively on the urbanity and the smartness of urban citizens, rather than on smartness as such, or smart urbanism.

Critical Perspectives on Smart City Narratives It is not self-evident that digital technologies are now essential to cities; in fact, digital networks and infrastructures may be even more indispensable in rural areas. Given that planetary urbanization results not just from the increasing number of people worldwide who live in cities, but also from the global impact of urbanization processes, this needs to be considered more intensively. Moreover, in addition to what we will call “planetary urban digitalization,” the urbanization of digital technologies also refers to the fact that seemingly everyone—and every corporation—is busy thinking about how they can use the city for themselves. For some, the focus is on personal freedom and community-based creative possibilities, whereas for others it is on economic profit. Digital technologies seem to offer something for each one of these interests. The period since the end of the 1990s has witnessed the rise of a subfield of urban research, which addresses the role of ICT in the production of urban spaces—such as, for example, digital cities 11 or cyborg

11 Toru Ishida and Kathrine Isbister, eds., Digital Cities: Experiences, Technologies and Future Perspectives (Heidelberg: Springer, 2000).

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cities.12 Researchers have critically examined the interdependencies of social and technical transformations, including the shift in power relations in favor of capitalist exploitation. As economic interests play an increasingly important role in the expansion of digital infrastructures in cities, criticism in recent years has focused more and more on the modernization promises of the dominant Smart City Narrative, the expansion of the entrepreneurial city through public-private partnerships, the monitoring, surveillance, and control of citizens by ICT companies, and the influence of ICT platforms such as Airbnb and Uber on the production and use of urban spaces. A Critique of Powerful ICT Corporations and their Modernization Promises IBM was the first company to offer hardware and software services under the name “Smart City,”13 with the result that the term was originally associated solely with economic interests. Other ICT companies have also been targeting cities as new markets for their products since the mid1990s.14 With global urbanization, the administrative and control tasks in cities and the consumer power of their inhabitants have become more and more interesting to profit-oriented, international ICT companies, prompting the latter to develop integrated software and hardware packages and offer them to city governments with full-scale contracting. IBM’s Smarter City® and Microsoft’s CityNext® promise to improve the quality of public services while at the same time increasing resource efficiency and sustainability. This results in new interdependencies between urban development actors and in new forms of control over urban infrastructures, the use of public space, and the personal data of the population. The increasing automation of urban infrastructures brought on by digital technologies promises to bring with it numerous improvements in

12 Matthew Gandy, “Cyborg Urbanization. Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 1 (2005): 26-49. 13 Söderström, Paasche, and Klauser, “Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling”; McNeill, “Global Firms and Smart Technologies.” 14 Ishida and Isbister, eds., Digital Cities; Marvin Simon and Andrés Luque-Ayala, “Urban Operating Systems. Diagramming the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41, no. 1 (2017): 84–103.

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city dwellers’ quality of life: more efficient mobility services, more easily accessible public administration, faster information flows, more diverse social communication, reduced resource consumption, increased security in public spaces, more comfortable housing and many other things that serve to satisfy the so-called basic functions of existence. In contrast to urban transformations that began centuries ago, such as the construction of a central water supply and sanitation system starting in 1850 or the planning of a car-friendly city starting in 1950, the Smart City is not associated with only one, but multiple functions.15 The Smart Cities Narrative promises a simultaneous improvement of urban health, mobility, and many other areas of urban life. In principle, digitalization does not change the functions of the city, only the speed and degree of connectivity and control of data and infrastructures. What is more, dominant corporate Smart City Narratives are “bound to repeat the worst planning disasters of the twentieth century.”16 A Smart City is not inherently demand-oriented; that is, its promise to modernize and renew does not respond to the most pressing needs of the majority of urban citizens. The point of departure for the dominant Smart City Narrative is not urban renewal nor any kind of urban social, economic or ecological crisis, but the technological feasibility of digitalization. Alberto Vanolo describes the Smart City as “an urban imaginary combining the concept of ‘green cities’ with technological futurism and giving a name to techno-centric visions of the city of tomorrow.”17 The Smart City does not counteract socio-economic, socio-cultural or ecological injustice in cities. In its present orientation, it even has a counterproductive effect on ecological sustainability (‘rebound effect’), as it causes an enormous expenditure of resources and externalizes its costs to the future and the global community. As Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika argue, ‘sustainability’ became the empty signifier that referred generically to the phantasmagoric vision of a world in which people, the economy and the environment could happily and lovingly interact in mutually supportive,

15 Marvin, Luque-Ayala, and McFarlane, eds., Smart Urbanism. 16 Söderström, Paasche, and Klauser, “Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling,” 309. 17 Alberto Vanolo, “Smartmentality. The Smart City as Disciplinary Strategy,” Urban

Studies 51, no. 5 (2014): 883–898 (894).

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cohesive, and historically reproducible manners, mediated by increasingly ‘smart’ technologies that would benignly micro-engineer the delicate balance between humans and nature. The term ‘sustainability’ (which has neither intellectual coherence nor political substance) has now become hegemonically engrained and consensually accepted as the normative ideal that, with the proper techno-managerial devices in place, might not only render our urban ecological predicament bearable but also permit civilization as we know it to continue a while longer without engendering significant socio-political change.18

A Critique of Entrepreneurial Urbanization Digitalization has been accompanied by concurrent changes in urban policy. Most urban governments nowadays manage “their” cities like corporations. In the global competition to win over the largest companies, cities try to attract attention through stories of innovation or progress. With this strategy, neoliberal government interests meet the monopoly and profit-oriented interests of ICT companies. Since the 1990s, many city governments in the Global North have supported financialized urban development and followed corporate management principles.19 The development of digital infrastructures linked to entrepreneurial urban policy promotes the privatization of public tasks, and thus supports the outsourcing to private actors of activities previously carried out by public authorities. The infrastructure and services offered by ICT corporations specifically address the competitive model of the entrepreneurial city20 : efficient management of basic services (waste, mobility), resource efficiency concerning electricity and water, reduced emissions (transport) as well as high quality of life for urban residents (clean, safe, and healthy) and low-threshold access to city administration (e-governance). Moreover, the same four large management consultancies (Ernst & Young, Deloitte, PwC and KPMG) are almost always involved in the outsourcing of state-regulated functions and thus tell a rather monotonous story about

18 Swyngedouw and Kaika, “Urban Political Ecology,” 467. 19 Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner, “Neoliberal Urbanism. Models,

Moments, Mutations,” SAIS Review of International Affairs 29 (2009): 49–66. 20 Hollands, “Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?”; Evans et al., “Smart and Sustainable Cities?”.

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urban prosperity and success.21 As cities compete for resources, residents, and investments, many city governments rely on steady growth and public-private partnerships. The corresponding visions of progress differ fundamentally from the principles of a pollution-free, healthy city or a social housing policy—such ideas appear as past ideals in comparison to the dominant Smart City Narratives. Currently, city governments leave it to ICT companies such as IBM and Cisco, or even Google/Alphabet, to address social issues as a field of experimentation and turn economic stagnation into growth and progress. These companies offer city governments a low-cost provision of infrastructures and services and expect in return the possibility of data monopolization and profit optimization in the marketing of data and data-generated information. However, digital infrastructures and services do not necessarily have to be controlled by ICT companies. In the 1980s, the hope for social innovation through information technologies was still strong. In 1985, Richard Stallmann founded the Free Software Foundation22 on the basis of his belief that free software was essential to a free society. “Free” in this context does not necessarily mean free of charge, but rather the freedom to access, use, and change software (“Open Source”). Access to the source code of any software program, which enables users to further develop it, is regarded by Open-Source proponents as a common good. This idea is central to the “right to the city” movement, which demands that all goods and services—including data and data-generated knowledge—acquired through taxes be made freely available to all citizens. This would require local authorities to end their dependency on private companies. The socalled “free use of data” is often misleadingly applied by ICT companies in everyday software use. “Data within smart city initiatives are portrayed as benign and lacking in political ideology.”23 But “free” here means only free of charge, like the free bicycle navigator app which, however, asks the user to grant the service provider full control over the data generated by her/his usage, without receiving any information about how it will later be processed and used. 21 Evgeny Morozov and Francesca Bria, Die Smarte Stadt neu denken, 2017, https:// www.rosalux.de/publikation/id/38134/die-smarte-stadt-neu-denken (accessed August 2, 2019). 22 Hill, On the Smart City. 23 R. Kitchin, “The Real-Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism,” GeoJournal 79,

no. 1 (2014): 1–14 (8).

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A Critique of the Influence of Platform Economies on Smart Urbanism The majority of the world’s urban population now benefits from the use of digital urban infrastructures, especially smartphone apps and internet platforms that facilitate orientation (Google Maps, Open Street Map etc.) and mobility (Uber, Car2go, Call a bike, E-Scooter-Sharing, etc.), provide overnight accommodation (booking.com, Airbnb, etc.), offer online shopping (Amazon, Zalando, etc.) or help in the search for social contacts and communication (Parship, Grindr, Facebook, etc.)—apps that have changed the use of urban space significantly. Most users have integrated these ICT services into their everyday life via their smartphones and permanent internet access. However, criticism has also been leveled against the negative effects of online trade on the business structure in city centers and the traffic related to individual deliveries, as well as against the displacement of residents from inner-city quarters by private room rentals to tourists.24 Although social platforms can also be used as instruments of democratization and in order to connect collective intelligence,25 this digital communication technology is dominated by a few global ICT companies.26 Alternative platform economies can be based on sharing community data and support both the commons movement and a “digital right to the city.”27

Narrating Smart Cities: The Production of Space The following discussion focuses on how digitalization influences the production of urban space, and on forms of “smart urbanism”28 as active urban interventions along four thematic strands.

24 On Airbnb gentrification, see Kritische Geographie Berlin, “Tourismus,” in Handbuch kritische Stadtgeographie, ed. Bernd Belina, Matthias Naumann, and Anke Strüver (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2018), 312–317. 25 See the example of Barcelona in Morozov and Bria, Die Smarte Stadt neu denken; Exner et al. 2018. 26 On platform capitalism, see Thomas Waitz, “Gig-Economy, unsichtbare Arbeit und Plattformkapitalismus,” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaften 16 (2017): 178–183. 27 Shaw and Graham, eds., Our Digital Rights to the City, following Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 [orig. 1970]). 28 Marvin, Luque-Ayala, and McFarlane, eds., Smart Urbanism.

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Biopolitics and “Environmentalities”29 Digital infrastructures facilitate many things in urban daily life. Young people in particular (so-called digital natives ) cannot imagine everyday life without smartphones, constant connectivity, and extensive digital networking. Digitalization, however, also produces new forms of unjust social structures. After all, neither technologies nor algorithms are socially neutral; they respond to social norms, and they influence the way of life of individuals and communities. Used for political, social, and economic decision-making, they also reproduce dominant power relations. Foucault30 has identified biopolitical power—including selfdiscipline and self-responsibility—as an agent of population control and an essential element of capitalism. It aims to control and discipline human bodies, which is considered imperative for economic growth, and thus generates conformist behavior in a “productive” way. In the digital age, people are controlled and disciplined primarily through sensors and data. On the one hand, this can be analyzed by assessing intelligent environmental technologies31 with regard to (1) how urban processes and spaces are produced by smart city technologies in interaction with the practices of citizens, and (2) how those “environmentalities” address the individual and collective practices of citizens (“Biopolitics 2.0”32 ). On the other hand, digital self-tracking is a prime example of Foucault’s selftechnologization and self-responsibilization to optimize oneself, including “monitoring and managing one’s relations to environments.”33 Fitness wearables and smartwatches are the most obvious examples of this effect, as they can be used to record physical (in)activities and (un)healthy practices in spatial settings and compare the results with others. This data is correlated by hardware and software providers, partly aggregated automatically, and comparatively rationalized. The data of digital self-logging

29 Jennifer Gabrys, “Programming Environments. Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City,” Environment and Planning D 32 (2014): 30–48. 30 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978); The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (London: Picador, 2010). 31 On sensors and responsive spaces as ‘environmentalities,’ see Gabrys, “Programming Environments.” 32 Gabrys, “Programming environments,” 35, 42. 33 Gabrys, “Programming Environments,” 38.

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can thus easily be translated into social expectations: socially contextualizing descriptive data transforms it into normative data—and normative data produces social expectations.34 Re-Acting, Governing and Participation Ongoing digital data production and processing result in desirable and undesirable monitoring and control effects on various scales—from the human body to urban society and beyond. Nevertheless, the increasing data sovereignty of urban residents can also facilitate participation in various urban affairs. The mere existence of data and its further processing by algorithms and artificial intelligence theoretically offer solutions that increase efficiency and participation; in practice, however, urban citizens and their interactions are largely excluded from these scenarios.35 The active and genuinely participatory use of digital networks, the experiences of smart urban spaces beyond e-governance, traffic control, and digital lifestyle, are still in their infancy as compared to the usage models and experiences that can be found in hegemonic narratives.36 Despite these limitations, the GeoWeb2.0 applications of “Neogeography”37 have made mobile digital mapping directly available to individuals on their smartphones for several years now. Neogeography also refers to the changed understanding of practices, since these no longer emanate only from smart citizens, but also from digital devices, smart sensors, apps, and algorithmic data processing. The use and production of digital maps as part of urban, social, and digital everyday practices, for example, can be affirmative as well as participatory and emancipative. On the one hand, the possibilities of GeoWeb2.0 merge map production, use and

34 Anke Strüver, “Am laufenden (Fitness-)Band,” in Kritische Perspektiven auf die Digitalisierung in Städten, ed. Sybille Bauriedl and Anke Strüver (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018), 139–153; see also Vanolo’s “smartmentality” (Vanolo, “Smartmentality”). 35 Adam Greenfield, Against the Smart City (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013). 36 See Hill, On the smart city; Shannon Mattern, “Interfacing Urban Intelligence,”

Places Online Journal, 2014. https://placesjournal.org/article/interfacing-urban-intell igence (accessed June 2, 2018); and Hollands, “Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?”; Vanolo, “Is There Anybody Out There?”. 37 Mark Graham, “Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place. Web 2.0 and the Construction of a Virtual Earth,” Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 101, no. 4 (2010): 422–436.

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consumption, such that in addition to their role as consumers and participants, produsers now also assume the role of producing spatial “reality.” Elwood, Goodchild, and Sui frame the voluntary nature of participation in such mapping projects (“Volunteered Geographic Information”) as an opportunity for participation, but also for building resilience.38 Finally, an active (geo-)web2.0-based Citizen Science can be used to achieve various smart, bottom-up forms of participation, which as “Extreme Citizen Science”39 range from the definition of relevant urban problems to data collection and analysis to the collaborative development of proposed solutions and their implementation.40 Höffken has described the “smartphone as emancipator” in participative (urban) planning processes, as citizens document their observations in the geoweb or in geobased social media within the framework of inductive monitoring processes—and as they add new themes (and new spaces) to the variety of perspectives on pre-defined topics (or locations).41 These practices of urban producers can be understood as “grassroots efforts to reshape cities […] to change the ways things work at a local level […] to create new (healthier, greener) systems. They are about change and reform, not just aggregation.”42 An actual approach to urban resistance movements in this context is the concept of “citizen ownership,” in which citizens are actively involved in urban fabrications with the help of digital media, “to look at how cities are made and remade with the help of digital media.”43 A city can thus also be a materialized place of digital intervention strategies. The most obvious examples of citizens’ proactive involvement with technology in this sense can be found in their use of social media and self-programmed apps for social networking and

38 Sarah Elwood, Michael F. Goodchild, and Daniel Z. Sui, “Researching Volunteered Geographic Information: Spatial Data, Geographic Research, and New Social Practice,” Annals of the AAG 102, no. 3 (2012): 571–590, https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608. 2011.595657 (accessed November 13, 2019). 39 Muki Haklay, “Citizen Science and Volunteered Geographic Information: Overview and Typology of Participation,” in Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge, ed. Daniel Z Sui, Sarah Elwood and Michael F. Goodchild (Berlin: Springer, 2013), 105–122. 40 See, e.g., http://www.solidarityeconomy.eu/susy-map. 41 Stefan Höffken, Mobile Partizipation. Wie B¨ urger mit dem Smartphone Stadtplanung

mitgestalten (Lemgo: Rohn, 2015). 42 Townsend, Smart Cities, 25. 43 De Lange and de Waal, “Owning the City,” 4.

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spatial intervention, and in the development of alternative intelligent cities by hackers and digitally-savvy citizens. HackerSpaces and FabLabs can now be classified as hybrid forms of digital intervention, since some of their initially non-commercial and self-organized spaces have now professionalized themselves to such a degree that they no longer engage only emancipatively, but also affirmatively. Such initiatives sometimes have been too easily classified as “glimpses of another kind of smartness,”44 which, however, need to be discussed in terms of emancipative-affirmative hybridity. Digital Divide Different forms of “smartness” in cities and urban spaces are evident not only when comparing cities; they also manifest themselves as local digital divides. Contrary to its promise, digitalization does not create countless new jobs in former industrial cities or for former industrial workers, but rather intensifies social marginalization on the urban labor market.45 In addition, the implementation of smart city strategies in burgeoning neighborhoods can result in increasing social segregation and increasing social injustice, as the cost of acquiring and implementing smart city technologies is predominantly financed from public funds of the local state. When the funds for smart technologies are taken from other budget areas supporting basic services (such as housing, health care, mobility or education), social injustice increases rather than decreases. The local digital divide is also a consequence of income disparities, as the initial cost of smart home appliances or smart meters must be paid by private households. Economically disadvantaged people are affected much more than their richer counterparts, since the initial cost of such technology cannot be absorbed simply by consuming less. Smart technologies—especially in smart homes—are thus affordable only for those in high-income groups; they exacerbate existing inequalities in socio-cultural and socio-economic integration. The digital divide is also a consequence of the unequal availability of the Internet in urban versus rural areas, as well as the differing digital

44 Hollands, “Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?” 62. 45 Alan Wiig, “The Empty Rhetoric of the Smart City: From Digital Inclusion to

Economic Promotion in Philadelphia,” Urban Geography 37, no. 4 (2016): 535–553.

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skill levels associated with different generations. The resulting unevenness in the opportunities for different populations to participate different populations’ opportunities to participate in the positive potential of digitalization are not only socially, but also spatially unjust. Although it is scarcely addressed in the debate on digitalization, this social and spatial digital divide is increasing rather than decreasing in response to digital acceleration and connectivity. The development of digital infrastructures is an urban phenomenon. Since the expansion of smart homes and smart mobility is concentrated exclusively in metropolitan centers, it privileges already advantaged areas and citizens. Although urban environments certainly present a wide range of housing and mobility services, the urgent infrastructural needs of rural and suburban regions are currently not being met by the potentials of digitalization. Moreover, the link between social and digital exclusion is also evident in citizen’s restricted access to public digital infrastructures. Participation in smart citizenship is not founded on digital competences, but impeded by materialized technological forms of exclusion of groups of persons who, for example, lack an EU passport or cannot legitimize themselves in accordance with specified parameters (credit card, registration address or ID number) that have become ubiquitous in today’s personalized system of IT communication or digital infrastructures.

Smart Urbanism and Digital Urban Cultures As Söderstrom argues, “IBM’s smarter city discourse is […] utopian storytelling,” is a univocal “model of urban management, not a collective project assembling different worldviews and interest”.46 In order to advance a debate that deconstructs this universal smart city storytelling, we first of all have to be sensitive to the “diverse histories, cultures and political economies and variegated forms of capitalism that shape patterns of urban and economic development and the relationship between state, market and society.”47 The comprehensive and dazzling Smart City Narratives are held together by their urban context, rather than their smartness. Since cities

46 Söderström, Paasche, and Klauser, “Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling,” 315. 47 Rob Kitchin, “Making Sense of Smart Cities. Addressing Present Shortcomings,”

Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8, no. 1 (2015): 131–136 (133).

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play a central role in the promotion of certain neoliberal interventions, a term like Smart City is extremely useful in bringing together otherwise disparate efforts.48 We thus need to focus less on the “smartness” of cities than on forward-looking considerations of the “urban” in smart urbanism. Smart urbanism reduces the quality of urban life to quantitative data (such as population structure, resource consumption) and measurable factors of urban infrastructures (such as energy flows, mobility data, crime rates, etc.). Urban problems are mainly addressed one-sidedly as the improvement of technical infrastructure systems; in this context, smart urbanism reduces the urban to the economic. The technological rationalization of everyday urban life (intelligent traffic light circuits, digital administrative processes and intelligent power grids) is intended to deliver efficient, sustainable, and carefree optimization promises. However, smart sustainability monitoring by urban infrastructure technologies is a greening by numbers, as the technologies collect and process data for environmental monitoring, but change nothing— neither in terms of material outcomes (for example, air quality), nor in terms of unsustainable practices or socially unjust structures. “The smart city is understood to be the technological version of a sequence of neoliberal-infused new urban visions, including competitive cities, creative cities, sustainable cities, resilient cities and green cities.”49 Moreover, Smart City Narratives seem to leave out the political and social aspects of urbanity such as diversity and democracy—aspects which determine the quality of the urban experience. Based on Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city,50 Joe Shaw and Mark Graham have proclaimed the right to a digital city and an informational right to the city respectively, laying crucial groundwork for the effort to achieve technological sovereignty of urban citizens and to develop alternatives to the capitalist use of digital technologies and digital data.51 Achieving this requires citizens’ participation—interactive, integrative,

48 Morozov and Bria, Die Smarte Stadt neu denken, 10. 49 Kitchin, “Making Sense of Smart Cities,” 133; see also Kaika, “‘Don’t Call Me

Resilient Again!’”. 50 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution. 51 Shaw and Graham, eds., Our Digital Rights to the City; Joe Shaw and Mark Graham,

“An Informational Right to the City? Code, Content, Control, and the Urbanization of Information,” Antipode 49, no. 4 (2017): 907–927.

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and democratic—in the development and implementation of digital technologies, and the public disclosure of all components, codes and processes that are important for this.52 Barcelona is currently regarded as a European role model in this sense, with its slogan “internet for citizens instead of internet of things,” and its endeavor to strengthen the technological sovereignty of its citizens rather than optimize the city’s technology. What is more, in times of “planetary urban digitalization,” the right to a digital city goes beyond urban centers and includes an informational right that relies on data commons and on open platforms for the administration and analysis of urban data.

References Bauriedl, Sybille, and Anke Strüver, eds. Smart City—Kritische Perspektiven auf die Digitalisierung in Städten. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018. Datta, Ayona. “A 100 Smart Cities, a 100 Utopias.” Dialogues in Human Geography 5, no. 1 (2015): 49–53. de Lange, Michiel, and Martijn De Waal. “Owning the City. New Media and Citizen Engagement in Urban Design.” First Monday 18, no. 11 (2013): 1–15. Elwood, Sarah, Michael F. Goodchild, and Daniel Z. Sui. “Researching Volunteered Geographic Information: Spatial Data, Geographic Research, and New Social Practice.” Annals of the AAG 102, no. 3 (2012): 571–590. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.595657. Evans, James et al. “Smart and Sustainable Cities? Pipedreams, Practicalities and Possibilities.” Local Environment 24, no. 7 (2019): 557–564. Exner, Andreas, Livia Cepoiu, and Carla Weinzierl. “Smart City Policies in Wien, Berlin und Barcelona.” Kritische Perspektiven auf die Digitalisierung in Städten, edited by Sybille Bauriedl and Anke Strüver. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018. 333–344. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon, 1978. ———. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. London: Picador, 2010.

52 Colin McFarlane, “Towards More Inclusive Smart Cities?” in Beware of Smart People. Redefining the Smart City Paradigm Towards Inclusive Urbanism, ed. Jörg Stollmann et al. (Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, 2016), 89–94; Morozov and Bria, Die Smarte Stadt neu denken; David Harvey, Rebel Cities. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013).

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Gabrys, Jennifer. “Programming Environments. Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City.” Environment and Planning D 32 (2014): 30–48. Gandy, Matthew. “Cyborg Urbanization. Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 1 (2005): 26–49. Graham, Mark. “Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place. Web 2.0 and the Construction of a Virtual Earth.” Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 101, no. 4 (2010): 422–436. Greenfield, Adam. Against the Smart City. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013. Haklay, Muki. “Citizen Science and Volunteered Geographic Information: Overview and Typology of Participation.” In Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge, edited by Daniel Z Sui, Sarah Elwood, and Michael F. Goodchild. Berlin: Springer, 2013. 105–122. Harvey, David. Rebel Cities. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013. Hill, Dan. On the Smart City; or, a ‘Manifesto’ for Smart Citizens Instead. 2013. www.cityofsound.com/blog/2013/02/on-the-smart-city-acall-for-smart-citizens-instead.html. Hollands, Richard G. “Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?” City 12, no. 3 (2008): 303–320. ———. “Critical Interventions into the Corporate Smart City.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8, no. 1 (2015): 61–77. Höffken, Stefan. Mobile Partizipation. Wie B¨urger mit dem Smartphone Stadtplanung mitgestalten. Lemgo: Rohn, 2015. Ishida, Toru, and Kathrine Isbister, eds. Digital Cities: Experiences, Technologies and Future Perspectives. Heidelberg: Springer, 2000. Kaika, Maria. “‘Don’t Call Me Resilient Again!’: The New Urban Agenda as Immunology … or … What Happens When Communities Refuse to Be Vaccinated with ‘Smart Cities’ and Indicators.” Environment and Urbanization 29, no. 1 (2017): 89–102. Kitchin, Rob. “The Real-Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism.” GeoJournal 79, no. 1 (2014): 1–14. Kitchin, Rob. “Making Sense of Smart Cities. Addressing Present Shortcomings.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8, no. 1 (2015): 131–136. Kritische Geographie Berlin. “Tourismus.” In Handbuch kritische Stadtgeographie, edited by Bernd Belina, Matthias Naumann and Anke Strüver. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2018. 312–317. Lefebvre, Henri. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 (orig. 1970). Marvin, Simon, and Andrés Luque-Ayala. “Urban Operating Systems. Diagramming the City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41, no. 1 (2017): 84–103.

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Marvin, Simon, Andrés Luque-Ayala, and Colin McFarlane, eds. Smart Urbanism. Utopian Vision or False dawn? London: Routledge, 2016. Mattern, Shannon. “Interfacing Urban Intelligence.” Places Online Journal. 2014. https://placesjournal.org/article/interfacing-urban-intelligence. McFarlane, Colin. “Towards More Inclusive Smart Cities?” In Beware of Smart People. Redefining the Smart City Paradigm towards Inclusive Urbanism, edited by Jörg Stollmann et al. Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, 2016. 89–94. McFarlane, Colin, and Ola Söderström. “On Alternative Smart Cities.” City 21, nos. 3–4 (2017): 312–328. McNeill, Donald. “Global Firms and Smart Technologies: IBM and the Reduction of Cities.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40, no. 4 (2015): 562–574. Morozov, Evgeny, and Francesca Bria. Die Smarte Stadt neu denken. 2017. https://www.rosalux.de/publikation/id/38134/die-smarte-stadt-neudenken. Peck, Jamie, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner. “Neoliberal Urbanism. Models, Moments, Mutations.” SAIS Review of International Affairs 29 (2009): 49– 66. Rauth, Elke. Smart Tales of the City. 2015. https://www.eurozine.com/smarttales-of-the-city. Rosol, Marit, Gwendolyn Blue, and Victoria Fast. “Social Justice in the Digital Age: Re-thinking the Smart City with Nancy Fraser.” UCCities Working Paper 1. 2019. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/wkqy2. Shaw, Joe, and Mark Graham, eds. Our Digital Rights to the City. London: Meatspace Press, 2017. ———. “An Informational Right to the City? Code, Content, Control, and the Urbanization of Information.” Antipode 49, no. 4 (2017): 907–927. Söderström, Ola, Till Paasche, and Francisco Klauser. “Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling.” City 18, no. 3 (2014): 307–320. Strüver, Anke. “Am laufenden (Fitness-)Band.” In Kritische Perspektiven auf die Digitalisierung in Städten, edited by Sybille Bauriedl and Anke Strüver. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018. 139–153. Swyngedouw, Erik, and Maria Kaika. “Urban Political Ecology. Great Promises, Deadlock… and New Beginnings?” Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica 60, no. 3 (2014): 459–481. Townsend, Anthony M. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. Vanolo, Alberto. “Smartmentality. The Smart City as Disciplinary Strategy.” Urban Studies 51, no. 5 (2014): 883–898. ———. “Is There Anybody Out There? The Place and Role of Citizens in Tomorrow’s Smart Cities.” Futures 82 (2016): 26–36.

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Waitz, Thomas. “Gig-Economy, unsichtbare Arbeit und Plattformkapitalismus.” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaften 16 (2017): 178–183. Wiig, Alan. “The Empty Rhetoric of the Smart City: From Digital Inclusion to Economic Promotion in Philadelphia.” Urban Geography 37, no. 4 (2016): 535–553.

PART IV

Contesting the City I: Women on the Streets of London

CHAPTER 11

Poetic Mobility and the Location of an Anglo-Jewish Self: Amy Levy’s and Elaine Feinstein’s Cityscapes Martin Kindermann

Along with the formation of the modern industrialized metropolis profound changes in the constitution of urban subjectivity have taken place. The rapid changes in and the fluidity of urban surroundings have put mobility at the center of processes of self-construction.1 Therefore it does not come as a surprise that the poetic representation of urbanity has been described as central to Amy Levy’s work. Even more so as Levy is one of the first female Jewish voices engaging with the urban network and, in addition, claiming space within the city’s texts as well as spaces and places; “the first of my kind” (AL, 5) as Elaine Feinstein puts it in her poem “Amy Levy” more than hundred years later. The interconnection of the city and various modes of performing gender identities as 1 Tobias Wachinger, “Stadträume / Stadttexte unter der Oberfläche. Schichtung als Paradigma des zeitgenössischen britischen ‘Großstadtromans’,” Poetica 31, nos. 1–2 (1999): 263–301 (270).

M. Kindermann (B) Joseph Carlebach School Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_11

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well as of articulating sexual desire from a marginalized speaker-position in Levy’s work have been foregrounded by Alex Goody and Deborah Epstein Nord.2 Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman describe the growing public presence of women in Victorian London as a challenge to “the centrality of the urban male stroller in discourses of modernity.”3 Modes of moving through urban space and questions of accessibility take up an increasingly prominent position in the negotiation of identity and in representations of space in general. The interest of literary scholars and social scientists in such representational modes within discourses of urbanity already hints at the fact that modes of representation and the interpretation of space have been reconsidered in various disciplines. No longer can space be understood as a mere stage or setting; rather, both the space we experience every day and literary space have to be characterized as a multi-facetted network of relations, which is endowed with multiple polyvalent semantic layers. Elaine Feinstein’s poetic representation of urbanity foregrounds the female Jewish outlook on the city as well. Yet, waves of migration in the twentieth century bring about a shift that calls for a broader and more dynamic understanding of urban mobility as new layers within London’s spatial and semantic framework evolve. At the same time, the text calls for a change in perspective regarding migration, so that re-locating selfhood is discussed in connection with embracing hybridity within urban space. Therefore, it is particularly interesting to take a closer look at the urban representations of these two Jewish women writers, as they negotiate female mobility within the urban network from a distinctly Anglo-Jewish perspective. My aim here is to read Amy Levy’s “Ballade of an Omnibus” (1889) and Elaine Feinstein’s “Migrations” (2010) with a special focus on strategies of locating the speaker within the relational network of London, as well as on modes of mobility within this network. Thus I will describe movement as a crucial strategy of relating the self to space through 2 Alex Goody, “Passing in the City: The Liminal Spaces of Amy Levy’s Late Work,” in Amy Levy: Critical Essays, ed. Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 157–179; Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets. Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 183–184. 3 Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman, “Introduction,” in Amy Levy: Critical Essays, ed. Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 1–24 (15).

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processes of forming as well as of interpreting the city. It will become clear that both poems, although written more than a hundred years apart, construct an experience of space from an extremely mobile point of view. Therefore I will take a close look at the speaker’s location as well as the poetic perspective employed throughout the texts. Consequently, mobility of the poetic subject and the location of the self as well as the choice of poetic objects will be of interest to my reading of the texts. These operations must be seen as closely connected to the construction of hybrid identities and their location in urban space, both of which are negotiated by the texts through relating the self to spatial structures. Here perspective is of crucial importance: not only do both texts use the point of view from which the city is experienced to portray the ever-changing relational network of urban space, but they also utilize perspective to capture processes of polyvalent self-constructions, performative strategies of staging identity, and modes of interpreting the city.

Constructing Urban Relations As my reading of the poems is based on a relativistic notion of space, it is necessary to provide some brief remarks on my approach to space: this approach understands the spatial network as characterized by relationality, polyvalence, and fluidity. Herein I use Doreen Massey’s three basic propositions as a starting point for my analysis: space must be conceived of as a relational network constituted through various interactions; it is constituted by multiple heterogeneous relations; and, finally, it is not a static entity, but “is always in the process of being made.”4 Actions of locating objects and bodies within the network thus constitute space through processes of constant re-arrangement. In addition, space must be seen as being constructed historically and socially alike, as outlined by Michel de Certeau. He emphasizes the importance of social relations in the construction of urban space and outlines how space is produced through performative acts and is thus strongly intertwined with time.5 London, therefore, does not just provide the setting for individuals to

4 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 9. 5 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles,

CA/London: University of California Press, 1988), 177.

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construct their identities but the very process of self-manifestation takes place in relation to space and is inscribed into the relational network.6 As I already mentioned above, ever since the formation of the industrial metropolis questions of movement and mobility have been characterized as crucial to the system of urban space. For example, in the nineteenth century securing the circulation of goods in densely populated areas became one of the fundamental problems urban planners were faced with. The city was often described as a body with arteries and veins and the danger of blockage was ever-present, as Richard Sennett outlines: “[…] if motion through the city becomes blocked anywhere, the collective body suffers a crisis of circulation like that an individual body suffers during a stroke when an artery becomes blocked.”7 Preventing such a crisis was regarded as vital to the urban body. Herein the individual resident or pedestrian became a small part of a complex system that depended on mobility, which at the same time posed a threat if movement did not adhere to a strict set of rules established by urban planning. Furthermore, the enormous increase of London’s population brought in its wake a destabilization of order as the number of elements that the system of circulation had to deal with rocketed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Urban living conditions put different social classes and cultural backgrounds into immediate contact. The motif of contagion, i.e., the spreading of diseases and of social unrest thus became central to the urban experience, as novels such as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House impressively show. Overcrowding in neighborhoods like the Whitechapel District meant that contiguity in an urban surrounding connoted an immediate danger of infection:

6 In fact space plays a crucial role in constructing identity, especially in relation to how past narratives of the self are related to the urban network. For a detailed analysis of contemporary representations of memory and space in the context of the Anglo-Jewish novel see Martin Kindermann, Zuhause im Text: Raumkonstitution und Erinnerungskonstruktion im zeitgenössischen anglo-jüdischen Roman (Berlin: Neofelis, 2014). 7 Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (London/New York, NY: Norton, 1996), 264.

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The spread of contagious diseases—most notoriously, cholera—associated with overcrowding and poor sanitation made the filth of urban slums still more terrifying, both for their inhabitants and for middle-class observers.8

The social and cultural other was located in immediate proximity, as William Cohen stresses above. Crowded conditions imply cultural hybridization and thus the interaction of semantic spheres undermines an understanding of British identity and culture that first and foremost sees Britishness in terms of a white, male, Anglican identity design. But simultaneously the questioning of seemingly coherent identities in urban space opens up new possibilities for polyvalent self-locations in the public space of the city, so that, e.g., the presence of women on the top deck of omnibuses in Victorian London articulates a deviant construction of urban identity. This blurring of social and semantic borders can be understood as central to urban experience. Anonymous masses constantly question attempts at establishing order in urban space and thus the city becomes the location of the stranger, who is neither friend nor enemy, but undecidable. Through refusing to adhere to systems of exclusion and inclusion, the stranger therefore destabilizes bipolar categorizations as well as coherent ascriptions of meaning, as he, according to Zygmunt Bauman, articulates polyvalence: Undecidables brutally expose the artifice, the fragility, the sham of the most vital of separations. They bring the outside into the inside, and poison the comfort of order with suspicion of chaos. This is exactly what the strangers do.9

Interaction between different semantic spheres can thus be seen as one of the core processes of urban experience, and the implicit mobility within the semantic framework questions seemingly coherent interpretations of the city and identity alike. In literature, space is by no means a mere replica of the extra-textual world as every representation of space constructs a unique network of

8 William A. Cohen, “Introduction: Locating Filth,” in Filth. Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (London/Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), VII–XXXVII (XIX). 9 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 56.

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relations. Aesthetic representation constitutes additional semantic layers that enrich the spatial framework. Jurij M. Lotman stresses the importance of mobility with regard to the semantic framework of a text: in his model of the semiosphere he sees movement between semantic spheres as a vital constituent to processes of meaning making. Literary space is a complex network of semantic spheres, a system that depends on being open and limited at the same time, as it, on the one hand, relies on firmly set boundaries and, on the other, allows for mobility, which can be understood as communication and translation of semantic content. The border is thus a space of interpenetration and therewith a polyvalent space of multiple meanings, belonging simultaneously to both the inside and the outside: “Just as in mathematics the border represents a multiplicity of points, belonging simultaneously to both the internal and external space […].”10 Therefore, mobility is of crucial importance to the location of identity: characters may or may not be able to cross semantic and/or spatial boundaries; they may even be located within the boundary itself, which is the location of heightened semiotic dynamics. Being thus located within a space of multiple meanings and hybridization, such a character “belongs to two worlds, operates as a kind of interpreter.”11 As I aim to outline with regard to the poems under discussion here, this mode of enhanced spatial competence and mobility is central to the negotiation of hybrid identities in the works of both authors.

Deviant Mobility The city is of great relevance to Levy’s poetry, especially in her later works. Her poem “Ballade of an Omnibus” was published 1889 in the collection A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse, a collection which can be described as “a veritable love letter to London.”12 Herein she stresses above all the mobility of perception and constructs space by means of the experience of moving through the city. The city as such is characterized as a space in constant flux, which is linked to the swift movements of

10 Jurij M. Lotman, “On the Semiosphere,” Sign System Studies 33, no. 1 (2005): 205–229 (208). 11 Lotman, “On the Semiosphere,” 211. 12 Rosie Miles, Victorian Poetry in Context (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 124.

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the perceiving self in the streets. Levy’s texts model the city as a space within which, because of its fluid character, options of deviant behavior are always immanent, as Goody argues. Therefore, Levy’s city is a place of constant passing, of being endowed with the possibility to pass for something you are not. “Her poems construct view points […] that enable her to use the transient city without being fixed and/or recognized as a transgressive woman […].”13 Public transport hence opens up the opportunity to locate female mobility within the urban network and thus provides the basis for the speaker to employ strategies of passing. As Ana Perjo Vadillo argues, Levy’s poetic representation of female mobility as a passenger in public transport additionally questions interpretations of urban semantics that are associated with masculinity and have been located in a central position of spatial discourses so far: […] for Levy, the figure of the passenger had important social and political implications because it was as passengers, she argued, that women poets could become spectators of modern life, challenging masculinist representations of women in the modern metropolis, and transgressing the incarcerating ideology of the private/public spheres.14

Urban mass transportation becomes a motif, and can be described as a reference point in relating identity to the city, not only with regard to gender identities but also to locating hybrid formations of identity. The first stanza of “Ballade of an Omnibus” establishes the speaker’s position in opposition to various modes of transportation, all of which are associated with male mobility: Some men to carriages aspire; On some the costly hansoms wait; Some seek a fly, on job or hire; Some mount the trotting steed, elate. I envy not the rich and great, A wandering minstrel, poor and free, I am contented with my fate— An omnibus suffices me. (BO, 1–8)

13 Goody, “Passing in the City,” 166. 14 Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism. Passengers of Modernity

(New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 40.

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The speaker locates herself in the context of modern mass transportation, which not only articulates new options of female mobility but, in addition, stresses the aimless character of the speaker’s movement. Ilona Dobosiewicz outlines that the poem “celebrates the pleasures of the city: the speaker—the omnibus passenger—appreciates her freedom to move across urban spaces.”15 This new form of mobility is linked to a form of freedom which does not depend on gender, class, or income. The speaker has to be perceived in the context of the flâneur who, as outlined by Walter Benjamin, is located within the urban crowd; and it is through the veil of the urban masses that the flâneur is able to perceive and construct an image of the floating, phantasmagorical city,16 which becomes central to aesthetic perception with regard to representations of urban space. But as the flâneur remains a distanced observer, drifting through urban space, mobility in Levy’s poem develops a destabilizing potential with regard to identity. Goody observes that in her later work, Levy focuses on “celebrating the joys of the city while undermining the traditional gendering of the urban observer and challenging the authority of the flaneur.”17 It becomes obvious that the text should not be seen as a mere celebration of urban space. Rather, the speaker openly rejects the marginalized location ascribed to femininity through the gaze of male urban authority and, at the same time, strives for a performative location of female mobility. Further, the bus itself is employed as a means for experiencing space and is linked to the poetic formation of the city: Levy uses means of public transport “as optical devices, as cameras, with which to chronicle city life.”18 But the positioning of the speaker as a mere “chronicler” that Vadillo argues for cannot do justice to Levy’s complex intertwinement of performative and interpretative operations in urban space: motorized movement through the city in the context of locating a female and Jewish identity in London articulates a shift in poetic focus and strives for a mobile point of view and multiple perspectives. Means of mass transportation can be understood as hybrid spaces per se, as they carry people of various social and cultural backgrounds to 15 Ilona Dobosiewicz, Borderland. Jewishness and Gender in the Works of Amy Levy (Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego, 2016), 178. 16 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, vol. I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), 54. 17 Goody, “Passing in the City,” 166. 18 Vadillo, Women Poets, 40.

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their respective destinations. Levy’s poem uses this hybrid space to locate female Jewish identity in passing. The crowd enables the individual to go unnoticed and thus the speaker can move through the city without being construed in terms of otherness. That Jews at the end of the nineteenth century have become a representation of the other, is clarified by Todd Endelman with regard to the Jewish East End: The inhabitants of immigrant districts seemed to be dark, alien, illmannered creatures. Their speech, gestures, dress, comportment, shop signs, and wall posters (in Yiddish) revealed their foreign origins. Even the smells encountered there were un-English […].19

The omnibus thus provides an opportunity to blend in with a hybrid crowd. Simultaneously the process of passing is inevitably linked to a blurring of seemingly clear-cut boundaries and categorizations and thus articulates polyvalence, as Goody outlines with regard to Jewish as well as homosexual self-location in urban space: “‘Passing’ as a (non-Jewish) urban woman, or desiring the passing woman, produces an instability or uncertainty that, while unfixing identity, also threatens its destruction […].”20 The destabilizing effect of Bauman’s stranger is hinted at as Goody stresses the ambivalence of the process of urban passing: its liberating as well as its destructive effects. In the second stanza the speaker characterizes herself as a frequent passenger in terms of familiarity and thus again stresses her own mobility through self-location in public transport while simultaneously intertwining public mobility with poetic articulation: “The ’busmen know me and my lyre” (BO, 11). On a route “From Brompton to the Bull-andGate” (BO, 12) the speaker positions herself in an elevated viewpoint, ascending to the top of the bus and simultaneously claiming (narrative) authority in the interpretation of the urban network: When summer comes, I mount in state The topmost summit, whence I see Croesus look up, compassionate— An omnibus suffices me. (BO, 13–16)

19 Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles, CA/London: University of California Press, 2002), 145. 20 Goody, “Passing in the City,” 171.

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The text establishes a new perspective on urban space, which is in itself polyvalent. Focusing on our experience of the spatial network, de Certeau describes two distinct modes of perception which are relevant to literary space as well: vertical and horizontal perception. Whereas, the first is linked to the distanced but powerful point of view of the omniscient creator or planner perceiving the spatial framework from a bird’s-eye view, the horizontal perceptual mode is located on the street level. Here the urban subject performs and at the same time creates space through movement. Nevertheless, perception on the horizontal level is strictly limited and lacks options to derive from it a meaningful understanding of the spatial structure. The top of the bus here is linked to distanced heights from where the speaking subject assumes a twofold perspective on space: on the one hand, the speaker is still located on the horizontal level of perception, as the bus moves through the streets and, thus, performs space through movement. But on the other hand, the perceptual reference point is lifted onto a higher level and is therefore, though not located within, at least associated with vertical perception of the creator and planner. Through this, the speaker is closely linked to the poet as a spaceforming power. Through locating Jewish femininity in such an elevated and publicly visible position, the speaker—through adopting strategies of passing—destabilizes readings of urban space which strive for coherence. From the top of the bus London is perceived in a panoramic notion, which aims at covering the diversity of urban space through portraying diverse movements. The scene whereof I cannot tire, The human tale of love and hate, The city pageant, early and late Unfolds itself, rolls by, to be A pleasure deep and delicate. An omnibus suffices me. (BO, 19–24)

The city is a spectacle that is at the same time perceived and created through the individual movements of its inhabitants. And it is only through mobility that the whole of human diversity can be observed. The hybrid formation of the modern metropolis is thus depicted from a mobile point of view, which locates the speaker as a constantly moving self and thus links her to the floating condition of space as such. Herein means of transport become means of poetics: mobility as experiencing

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and performing hybridity is central to Levy’s representation of urbanity. Therefore the text’s refrain—“an omnibus suffices me”—also voices the poet’s interest in the complex dynamics of the spatial network. Levy’s aesthetic approach does not focus on the representation of wellknown architectural reference points, but on day-to-day urban subjects and objects. It does not come as a surprise that mass transportation figures as a poetic object, as does, e.g., in other works, the straw on London’s muddy streets (“Straw in the Street”), which provides a foothold for hurrying people who “Pause and jostle and pass and greet” (STS, 9). It is in this hybrid diversity that Levy locates the speaking subject and designs the city as a polyvalent space in which transgressive locations of identity are rendered possible through strategies of passing and of merging with the crowd, which further open up possibilities for mobility that are closely linked to spatial freedom and semantic polyvalence. Riding a bus therefore becomes a means of self-empowerment by employing spatial practices, as the speaker engages in the reading as well as the constitution of the relational network of urban space.

Exploring Hybridity Elaine Feinstein, on whose poem “Migrations” I will focus in the second part of my analysis, figures Levy as a precursor of Anglo-Jewish woman poets.21 Feinstein’s poem “Amy Levy” positions the poet in a context of otherness and thus stresses the polyvalent position of Levy as an educated woman of Sephardic descent in Britain: “Listen, I am the first of my kind, and not without friends or recognition, but my name belongs with my family in Bayswater, where the ghosts of wealthy Sephardim line the walls, and there I am alien because I sing. Here, it is my name that makes me strange. A hundred years on, is it still the same?” (AL, 5–12)

In making Levy herself the speaker of these two stanzas, the poem locates the Anglo-Jewish woman poet in a polyvalent position, which is 21 Hetherington and Valman, “Introduction,” 1.

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neither the one nor the other: on the one hand, Levy is a Jewish woman in Britain and, on the other, she is an educated woman and poet in the rather traditional and conservative Anglo-Jewish community. Additionally, the text projects the questioning of belonging and otherness onto the future and thus establishes a direct link to Feinstein’s own self-location in contemporary London. “Migrations,” in similar manner to Levy’s “Ballade of an Omnibus,” uses mobility of the speaker to negotiate as well as locate identities in urban space. Yet, Feinstein “strongly affiliates herself with the continuity of Jewish culture and its exilically imagined displacements”22 and thus writes as well as performs urbanity from an explicitly Jewish perspective before the background of Diaspora-discourses. Written more than a hundred years after Levy’s text, Feinstein’s poem, too, focuses on means of transportation, the processual movements of the speaker, and the hybrid formation of the relational network to capture the complex relationships in the constitution of an urban identity. Yet, in contrast to Levy’s poem, “Migration” explores the diversity of the city drawing on its historic layers as well as the speaker’s family history to interpret space and construct meaning within the urban network. The first part of the three-part poem establishes mobility through exploring the semantic field of migrating birds. Thus, the poem as a whole intertwines the sub-spaces of nature and city as human and animal movement are associated with each other. Moreover, space is extremely widened as the migration of birds links Gambia to the Arctic, and two traditions of thought—Greek and Hebrew—are incorporated into the birds’ mobility: […] All arrive using the stars, along flyways old as Homer and Jeremiah. (MI 1, 5–7)

Homer, connoting the Odyssey, and Jeremiah, with the Book of Lamentations and the Babylonian Exile, provide the background for questions of mobility. Furthermore, the poem’s title is contextualized with regard to its cultural implications, and inter-textual relations to 22 Peter Lawson, “Otherness and Transcendence. The Poetry of Ruth Fainlight and Elaine Feinstein,” in Jewish Women Writers in Britain, ed. Nadia Valman (Detroit, MI: Wayne state University Press, 2014), 136.

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well-known pretexts are highlighted in the context of two seemingly opposed traditions. Mobility is thus presented as movement into exile and questions of belonging are implicitly raised. The second part of the poem relocates the migration-motif in presentday London: migration is understood as the spatial practice of people who arrive in London as they flee poverty and persecution. Mobility is in this case motivated by traumatic experiences, which the poem articulates through experiences of murder and destruction (“remembering / the shock of being hunted in the streets, / the pain at leaving their dead / in broken cemeteries,” MI 2, 8–11). These are contrasted with the depiction of the hybrid city space in the third and last stanza of this part. On the Jubilee line, a black woman has the profile of a wood carving from Benin. In Willesden Green, Polski delikatesy, or a grocer piling up African vegetables. An English woman buys hot ginger and white radish: the filigree of migration, symbiosis, assimilation. (MI 2, 13–18)

Similar to Levy’s bus, the London underground becomes the location as well as the means of poetic mobility, as the speaker rides the Jubilee Line to Willesden Green, where spatial polyvalence assumes shape in shops and customers. The spatial link to Benin establishes a thematic relation to the diversity of the neighborhood, and, at the same time, contextualizes mass transportation as location of hybrid identity. Willesden Green itself is characterized by Polish and African shops and the text incorporates hybridity into its own structure by quoting the shop front. Semantic spheres of England, Poland, and Benin are thus intertwined in the relational network of urban space. But the question who is assimilating to who remains ambivalent, as it is an English woman who is directly linked to symbiosis and assimilation. Therefore the text hints at hybridization rather than acculturation: a fragmented, fluid identity design that constitutes itself through constantly ongoing processes of self-formation as well as self-location.23 Seemingly coherent notions of assimilation processes are questioned in the third part of the poem in which the speaker locates identity in 23 Homi K. Bhabha uses the image of the “split screen” to characterize the relation of self and “its doubling, the hybrid.” Homi K. Bhabha: The Location of Culture (London/New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 162.

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the context of collective memory. Therein the poetic design broadens the concept of mobility even more, employing the intertwinement of spatial and temporal layers to construct a polyvalent representation of urban space. In this third and final part the poem locates the speaking subject as an Anglo-Jewish self: All my grandparents came from Odessa a century ago, spoke little English, and were doubtless suspect as foreigners —probably anarchist or Bolshevik— very likely to be dreaming of bombs. (MI3, 1–5)

The speaker positions herself within the relations of family memory: Odessa, the grandparents’ former location, is contrasted with London, the new location, where the immigrants once again find themselves in a marginalized, precarious, and polyvalent position. The depictions of violence and persecution in the second part of the poem provide the background to the ancestors’ flight from the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia. But after having re-located themselves, they are still perceived as a suspect other. London thus becomes a polyvalent space with regard to semantic positioning: although the immigrant family is again construed in terms of mistrust and not-belonging, the city nevertheless also represents a safe haven from violent persecution. The speaker uses the individual location of mobility and semantic polyvalence in family memory to relate to present-day immigrant experiences: These people come from desperate countries where flies walk over the faces of sick children, and even here in Britain the luckless will find gangmasters to arrange work in mudflats as cockle pickers. (MI 3, 13–17)

The alleged linearity of the migration movement is put into contrast to the cyclical sameness of the immigrant experience, as the cultural other is mistrusted and remains vulnerable to exploitation as well as discrimination. Thus, the last of the four stanzas of this part highlights semantic relations between marginalized subjects, which is even further stressed through the extension of a sentence from the third into the fourth stanza, which thus crosses a structural border within the text.

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Why should they care my ancestors had a long history of crossing borders, when I am settled now after all those journeys? And why do I want to make common cause with them anyway? Only because I remember how easily the civil world turns brutal. If it does, we shall have the same enemies. (MI3, 18–24)

The alleged self-location of the speaker as settled in London is already questioned through the portrayal of collective memory and is further rendered polyvalent on the level of poetic construction, as it is presented in a question that seems to remain unanswered. The speaker not only locates herself within polyvalent urban space but, furthermore, in a semantic field which is strongly characterized by the uncertainty and fragmentation inherent to the formation of hybrid identities. Thus, she is not settled, since the semantic layers of the grandparents’ migration are still clearly perceivable in the way the mobile point of view strives to locate itself in relation to the polyvalent spatial network of the city. London, hence, is a location of otherness in space: on the one hand, construed and enforced as attribution, and, on the other, part of self-location in relation to a common experience, which even transcends the borders between generations. Again the city is the location of semantic, social, and historical polyvalence and diversity.

Poetic Mobility and Urban Polyvalence The diversity and polyvalence of London as well as a focus on mobility within the spatial and semantic framework have to be regarded as crucial to the work of both writers. Means of mass transportation are incorporated into the poetic outline of the texts and at the same time stress the hybrid character of urban space, where processes of interpenetration give rise to fragmented and polyvalent semantic locations. Through this the poems foreground the vital importance of mobility with regard to the constitution of urban space. The city is accentuated as a location of processes of othering, and, at the same time, as Levy’s text has shown, enables transgressive practices of identity construction. But, whereas, Levy’s text emphasizes mobility in the crowd as enabling a transgression of boundaries and, thus, a practice of empowerment and self-location, Feinstein’s poem stresses the cultural hybridity of the relational network,

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which adds to the city’s polyvalent formation and redefines spatial semantics. Urban identity therefore is depicted in terms of negotiating hybridity with regard to the poetic object as well as the speaking subject. The “Ballade of an Omnibus” illustrates that the hybrid and polyvalent network of relations, because of its constant flux, provides options for locating fragmented and poly-semantic attempts at constructing identity. Both poems make excessive use of mobility when it comes to the perceptual point of view. Movement through urban space not only has to be regarded as crucial to perception but it is a poetic means of representing the highly mobile and dynamic processes in which space is constantly shaped and re-shaped. The poetic representation, therefore, focuses not so much on the architectural design of the city, but more so on experiencing it in movement. Street sceneries, various modes of transport, the London underground, and locations of trade constitute poetic objects wherein questions of hybridity and polyvalence with regard to the spatial network as well as to options for locating identity-designs are outlined, questioned, and re-phrased. So, traveling on the Jubilee line or riding a bus not only implies spatial freedom of movement, but it is also an attempt at depicting the constant flux and immense diversity immanent to the relational network of urban space.

Works Cited Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity, 1993. Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen-Werk, Bd. I&II, edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London/New York, NY: Routledge, 2004. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles, CA/London: University of California Press, 1988. Cohen, William A. “Introduction: Locating Filth.” In Filth. Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life, edited by William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson. London/Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. VII– XXXVII. Dobosiewicz, Ilona. Borderland. Jewishness and Gender in the Works of Amy Levy. Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego, 2016. Endelman, Todd M. The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles, CA/London: University of California Press, 2002. Epstein Nord, Deborah. Walking the Victorian Streets. Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 1995.

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Feinstein, Elaine. “Migrations.” In Cities. Manchester: Carcanet, 2010. 9–11. ———. “Amy Levy.” In Amy Levy: Critical Essays, edited by Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010. 1. Goody, Alex. “Passing in the City: The Liminal Spaces of Amy Levy’s Late Work.” In Amy Levy: Critical Essays, edited by Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010. 157–179. Hetherington, Naomi and Nadia Valman. “Introduction.” In Amy Levy: Critical Essays, edited by Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010. 1–24. Kindermann, Martin. Zuhause im Text: Raumkonstitution und Erninnerungskonstruktion im zeitgenössischen anglo-jüdischen Roman. Berlin: Neofelis, 2014. Lawson, Peter. “Otherness and Transcendence: The Poetry of Ruth Fainlight and Elaine Feinstein.” In Jewish Women Writers in Britain, edited by Nadia Valman. Detroit, MI: Wayne state University Press, 2014. 135–155. Levy, Amy. “Ballade of an Omnibus.” In The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy: 1861–1889, edited by Melvyn New. Gainesville, FL: University of California Press, 1993. 386–387. ———. “Straw in the Streets.” In A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse, and Xantippe and Other Verse. Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2008. 6. Lotman, Jurij M. “On the Semiosphere.” Sign System Studies 33, no. 1 (2005): 205–229. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Miles, Rosie. Victorian Poetry in Context. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Sennett, Richard. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. London/New York, NY: Norton, 1996. Vadillo, Ana Parejo. Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism. Passengers of Modernity. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Wachinger, Tobias. “Stadträume / Stadttexte unter der Oberfläche. Schichtung als Paradigma des zeitgenössischen britischen ‘Großstadtromans’.” Poetica 31, no. 1–2 (1999): 263–301.

CHAPTER 12

Gender and the City: Virginia Woolf’s London Between Promise of Freedom and Structural Confinement Claudia Heuer

Given Virginia Woolf’s interest in the social roles of men and women, it comes as no surprise that, like many other concepts in her work, her notion of the city of London is also gendered. This can be explained using Jurij Lotman’s theory of narrative fiction, according to which the spatial organization of narrated worlds is a model of the semantics of narratives and therefore representative of abstract notions forming the ideological basis of fictional texts.1 The spatial construction of Woolf’s gender-political concerns is visible at the surface level of her writing already. After all, her central feminist proposition, which also informs the title of her main lasting contribution to feminist theory, is that women need some space which is theirs and which they do not have to share with 1 Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 217.

C. Heuer (B) Independent Researcher, Hamburg, Germany

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_12

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others. A Room of One’s Own also demonstrates the exclusion of women from higher education in a very clearly spatial image of the speaker who is denied access, first to a college lawn and then a library. In a Lotmanian sense, these boundaries2 stay insurmountable for her. These images exemplify what can be described as the exclusion of women from the “male monopoly on every aspect of cultural authority.”3 What is probably more curious is that the city of London, that is, a space which is not just shared with some family members but with millions of other humans, is precisely the place for female liberation in Woolf. It is quite logical, though, that it serves that purpose, because, as Gan rightly points out, there is no equivalent to the male private sphere for women, as the home provided no space women could retreat to in order to shield themselves “from the demands of convention and society.”4 The home is rather the space in which femininity was first and foremost constructed. Therefore, confinement within the family home is associated with the Victorian family, but also—for Woolf—with living in the countryside. Her optimism regarding urban life, which is inherent in this distinction, sets Woolf apart from her fellow modernists. But this optimism does not go unchallenged either: the city is liberating and at the same time threatening for women. In order to approach this ambiguity, I am going to examine more closely a part of Woolf’s work written around the time of the final success of the suffrage movement in England: I am going to look at Night and Day as representative of her early works, but mainly at Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway as well as A Room of One’s Own and Orlando, the latter two of which have to be read as “companion pieces.”5 I am going to examine the reasons for women’s fear and experience of liberation in the city on the textual level in order to contribute to the picture of both Woolf’s conceptualisation of the city and her relation with the women’s movement. My study will therefore elaborate on an observation which Rachel Bowlby

2 Lotman, Structure, 229–230. 3 Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf. Feminist Destinations (Oxford and New York, NY:

Basil Blackwell, 1988), 20f. 4 Wendy Gan, Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing (Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4. 5 Dorothy Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1960), 55, 67.

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has already made: that “the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century is not so direct or progressive as it may first have seemed.”6 It will also further develop a connection which Dorothy Brewster has established: she points out various connections between the depictions of London in Night and Day, Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway and claims that “[p]art of the pleasure in following Virginia Woolf’s London pattern comes from noting how in one book a scene is a mere sketch, in another a fully pictured background, and in another that same street or square or garden is a major influence in the solution of human problems.”7 Because of the limited space of this collection, I will concentrate on two central aspects of this construction of London: the overall metaphorical structure of the city and the movement of characters through this space. To begin with, in Night and Day Mary Datchet sees London as a “wonderful maze”8 and enjoys being at its center. Mary’s dominant emotion here is her sense of merging into it as an anonymous person among similarly anonymous people9 and she especially enjoys being part of the “clockwork” of city life. What might easily be a threatening lack of individuality is here a pleasurable experience. This pleasure is conveyed through the contrast between an oppressive (Victorian) domestic space and the liberties of the city, which is introduced in a prominent position right at the beginning: Ralph Denham feels the oppression of the Hilbery family sitting-room10 in sharp contrast with his extensive walks through the city11 on which he pursues his own thoughts freely. In Mary, the political activist, this new freedom is most obvious and constructed around the opposition between country and city: She thought of her clerical father in his country parsonage, and of her mother’s death, and of her own determination to obtain education, and of her college life, which had merged, not so very long ago, in the wonderful maze of London, which still seemed to her […] like a vast electric light, casting radiance upon the myriads of men and women who crowded round

6 Bowlby, Virginia Woolf , 86. 7 Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 39. 8 Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 46. 9 Woolf, Night and Day, 76. 10 Woolf, Night and Day, 4. 11 Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 34.

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it. And here she was at the very centre of it all, that centre which was constantly in the minds of people in remote Canadian forests and on the plains of India […].12

As Squier points out, Mary’s centrality here “bespeaks a control over and distance from the routine familial turmoil.”13 Brewster, on the other hand, argues that the fact that Mary finds herself indistinguishable from the rest constitutes a loss of her exhilaration at being in the center of London.14 In the text, there is nothing to support this interpretation. On the contrary: the narrator explicitly states that Mary “likes” to feel like this.15 On the other hand, the heart of the empire is, as Brewster also points out, not an entirely positive notion for Woolf.16 For Mary, however, the overall emotion regarding London life is still one of empowerment, precisely because she is free from the demands of the family home, and even Brewster admits that Mary finally succeeds in building a future for herself “with the aid of the London streets and the thoughts that are stirred by her walks.”17 This reaction is also highlighted by the contrast of Mary with Katharine Hilbery, who remains attached to the traditional social order. At first sight her experience seems to be quite similar to Mary’s: she feels exhilarated in the streets18 and enjoys a bus ride through the city center19 and Brewster points out that “[b]us riding seems to promote understanding between Ralph and Katharine.”20 However, especially toward the end of the novel, Katharine finds walking through the streets of South Kensington dreary and confusing and can settle on no legitimate line of argument for the solution of her problems other than inaction by which, she feels, she will 12 Woolf, Night and Day, 46. 13 Susan Merrill Squier, “Tradition and Revision: The Classic City Novel and Virginia

Woolf’s Night and Day,” in Women Writers and the City. Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Susan Merrill Squier (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press 1984), 114–133 (125). 14 Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 35. 15 Woolf, Night and Day, 76. 16 Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 28. 17 Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 36. 18 Woolf, Night and Day, 93. 19 Woolf, Night and Day, 93f. 20 Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 32.

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loved.”21 The contrast between the two is in which Katharine and Rodney visit Mary outside of her own domestic environment, control over the proceedings:

Katharine might have been seated in her own drawing-room, controlling a situation which presented no sort of difficulty to her trained mind. Rather to her surprise, Mary found herself making conversation with William about old Italian pictures, while Katharine poured out tea, cut cake, kept William’s plate supplied, without joining more than was necessary in the conversation. She seemed to have taken possession of Mary’s room, and to handle the cups as if they belonged to her.22

The text here echoes Mary’s surprise (“Mary found herself”) at being deprived of the power over her own sitting room. Mary as the politically active and progressive character transgresses the Victorian separation of domestic and public spheres, which is still present in London in the novel, highlighted by the contrast with the relatively immobile Katharine. Woolf already uses some of the prominent images recurring later, such as the bus ride through town and the motif of being part of the machine that is city life (see below). In contrast to Woolf’s later writings, neither Mary’s nor Katharine’s excursions into public urban life are accompanied by fear. In Night and Day it is rather the family home which is not dangerous per se, but which tends to eliminate individual identity for the benefit of the collective identity of the family, for instance when Katharine feels the weight of the family possessions which she is obliged to show to visitors.23 As far as the organization of urban space is concerned, it is striking that Mary’s thoughts and movement are connected: Once or twice lately, it is true, she had started, broad awake, before turning into Russell Square, and denounced herself rather sharply for being already in a groove, capable, that is, of thinking the same thoughts every morning at the same hour, so that the chestnut-coloured brick of the Russell Square houses had some curious connection with her thoughts about office economy, and served also as a sign that she should get into trim

21 Woolf, Night and Day, 329f. 22 Woolf, Night and Day, 178f. 23 Woolf, Night and Day, 9ff.

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for meeting Mr. Clacton, or Mrs. Seal, or whoever might be beforehand with her at the office.24

The city with its capacity to shape thoughts through movement tends to overwhelm Mary’s individuality. She has to be careful not to fall too much in line with its patriarchal structure. Still, the overall experience of London is positive: Mary feels liberated and perhaps even empowered by city life. The public/private separation takes different forms in the other texts discussed here. In Jacob’s Room in particular, Woolf does not so much give up on depicting the urban liberation of women as evade the question because of the close focus of this novel on the (interior) room. Here, London is only one of Jacob’s many places and he also interacts with Scarborough, Cambridge, Cornwall, Paris, and Greece.25 However, Woolf also uses her focus on the interior for the presentation of gendered role expectations. The room is still situated within the city of London and in the references to the city, there is an interesting parallel to Night and Day, namely that the narrator depicts London as a honeycomb, when he or she muses about the inhabitants’ perception of the city.26 The sense of belonging, which Mary Datchet in Night and Day feels, can here be experienced only in that part of the city which the individual calls their home: “Only at one point—it may be Acton, Holloway, Kensal Rise, Caledonian Road—does the name mean shops where you buy things, and houses, in one of which, down to the right, where the pollard trees grow out of the paving stones, there is a square curtained window, and a bedroom.”27 Here, individuality is possible through connections with a personal domestic space. Quite appropriately, the room belonging to the individual is their most important contribution to the structure of city life. As is to a certain extent already inherent in the honeycomb-metaphor, we have an even more intense focus on the contrast between interior and exterior spaces. This is evident when we trace the motif of the window through the text. Standing at a window serves as a metaphor for the interaction between the

24 Woolf, Night and Day, 77. 25 Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 40. 26 Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (London: Penguin Classics, 1992), 34. 27 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 55f.

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individual and the community. This constellation turns the image of Ralph Denham negotiating his own identity while standing outside a window and observing the people inside28 upside down and is therefore appropriate for the changing metaphors: characters step up to windows when they have to face problems regarding their place in society. The following is just one example of many similar moments in the novel: The stroke of the clock even was muffled […] as if generations of learned men heard the last hour go rolling through their ranks and issued it, already smooth and time-worn, with their blessing, for the use of the living. Was it to receive this gift from the past that the young man came to the window and stood there, looking out across the court?29

In reflections like this one, it is apparent that characters connect themselves with the comings and goings of the city, but also with larger social or, as in this case, historical contexts. Characters are actively engaged in identity formation through defining their relations with others. On the other hand, the genders make different use of the position at the window. For example, when Mrs Flanders looks outside, she is interested in nothing in particular, but rather just speaking about her sons and their progress: “She looked out of the window. Little windows, and the lilac and green of the garden were reflected in her eyes. ‘Archer is doing very well,’ she said. ‘I have a very nice report from Captain Maxwell.’”30 The person at the window is literally reduced to reflecting the outside. There is no action here apart from referring to what happens outside. It is interesting to note the relative violence which is necessary to break up this pattern: When Charlotte Wilding tries to communicate with Jacob, who is outside, she literally bursts through her bedroom window while saying goodbye to him.31 Accordingly, London is a space in which male characters move and negotiate their relations with others. They are the bees in the metaphorical honeycomb returning to the hive in the evening after a day’s work.32 This metaphor also implies another aspect of identity formation: the cells 28 Woolf, Night and Day, 415f. 29 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 36. 30 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 22. 31 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 52. 32 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 34.

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must be identical in shape and size in order to form such a structure in the first place. The neat separation of domestic from exterior space in this depiction of London is in tune with this part of the image and it makes obvious how important the notion of communal city life is for the development of a textual representation of female subjectivity, for the possibility of telling women’s stories within the urban structure. It is significant in this context that Fanny boards an omnibus in Jacob’s Room and then disappears completely from the story,33 because Woolf uses the bus ride through town in the texts analyzed here as a narrative vehicle for negotiating individual identity. The motif of moving through London by means of public transport is used differently in this text than in the others: it does not facilitate negotiations of possible identities here, but it is a means to express the difficulty of describing an identity in the first place: The proximity of the omnibuses gave the outside passengers an opportunity to stare into each other’s faces. Yet few took advantage of it. Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all—save ‘a man with a red moustache,’ ‘a young man in grey smoking a pipe.’34

Bowlby rightly points out that people here do not only have trouble to put in a nutshell what others may be like, but also have to read themselves.35 They are defined by their past which is here compared to a text. That they know this text by heart still implies that there is no natural connection between the individual and their sense of self, but that it has to be acquired and maintained with an effort. Men therefore also seem to have no individual identity in Jacob’s Room, but the process of identity formation is made explicit whereas the function of female characters lies mainly in mirroring male characters’ actions, thoughts and emotions. Quite in keeping with the other aspects discussed so far, Jacob’s Room also constructs an analogy between narrative characterization and 33 Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 47, who, however, only states the fact without interpreting it. 34 Woolf, Jacob’s Room 53. 35 Bowlby, Virginia Woolf , 100.

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mapping a place.36 However, the narrator stresses in this context that there is no decipherable relation between the mapping of streets and character. The question “The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?”37 remains unanswered and the narrator returns to the real topography of London instead. He or she even concludes: “As frequent as street corners in Holborn are these chasms in the continuity of our ways. Yet we keep straight on.”38 One can therefore conclude that, in this novel, Woolf eliminates the relative freedom of urban life from her picture of society. Her (male) bees can claim individuality only as the product of having a home within the urban environment, her city-metaphor implies that even the men do not really have separate identities. One might even suggest that the implication of a lack of individuality bears similarities with the alienation of the modern subject in an urban environment we find in Woolf’s modernist contemporaries. This would make Jacob’s Room an exception among Woolf’s novels in which there is if not optimism then at least ambiguity regarding the individual’s experience of urban life. In contrast to this alienation, Clarissa Dalloway is everywhere and enjoys being part of city life.39 In Mrs Dalloway, then, the pattern is reminiscent of both Night and Day and Jacob’s Room, but more intricate and it already contains different layers of social fabric, a feature which will be discussed below with regard to A Room of One’s Own. That the official London, metonymically represented by the toll of Big Ben, functions as a kind of connective tissue between the characters, has often been said40 and it is one of the aspects of London which keep recurring in the texts discussed here. In Jacob’s Room the narrator also already explains how Nelson receives the salute of Big Ben,41 thus foreshadowing the construction in Mrs Dalloway. In addition to this perception on the diegetic level, Woolf has noted in her diary that the structure of Mrs Dalloway is spatial, namely that behind the characters there is a network

36 Bowlby, Virginia Woolf , 107. 37 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 82. 38 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 82. 39 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Penguin, 1992), 167. 40 Jeremy Tambling, “Repression in Mrs Dalloway’s London,” Essays in Criticism 39,

no. 2 (1989): 137–155 (138). 41 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 151.

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of interconnected caves.42 Therefore, the principal metaphor informing the narrative structure of the novel replaces discernible individuality with the spatial organization of emotions and perceptions. This principle of spatial construction manifests itself in similar perceptions of urban life by different characters. Different reactions to the same events in the city make the differences between characters discernible to the reader, for instance, in the different reactions of Septimus and Clarissa to a sky-writing airplane, the strokes of Big Ben, or the same car backfiring in the street.43 Here, characters relate individually and directly to urban space, which at the same time unifies and differentiates their experience: on the one hand there seems to be an empirical reality on the level of the narrated events which is the same for all characters and which serves to create the image of London in the novel. On the other hand, the psychological level, i.e., the different reactions and experiences of these events, creates a relational, more relative image of the city depending on its inhabitants. In this sense, the network of caves is not an entirely new image, but rather a refinement, a more precise representation of the tension between individuality and uniformity in an urban environment. The realization that “it is no use trying to sum people up”44 as the narrator declares in Jacob’s Room, takes the form of individual emotional and intellectual responses to a uniform experience in Mrs Dalloway. Jacob’s Room explains how the individual is at best defined rather loosely by individual actions and activities and not by a stable essence of their personality.45 This notion of identity construction is put into fictional practice in Mrs Dalloway. The result is dissolution of individual agency and identity. Woolf uses a variation of this metaphor in A Room of One’s Own, when she writes about Mary Carmichael that she knows how to describe the relationships of female characters to each other and not just to men: “she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. It is all half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where

42 Kristina Groover, “Taking the Doors off the Hinges: Liminal Space in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway,” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 6, no. 1 (2008) http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march2008/ index.html (accessed May 28, 2012): n.p. 43 Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 48f. 44 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 135. 45 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 24.

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one goes with a candle peering up and down, not knowing where one is stepping.”46 If identity is fluid, gender is necessarily also a fluid concept. Reading the novel, however, it is clear that both are not quite true. The characters’ thoughts and concerns may be connected, but there is also an outside fictional world, in which identities are still fixed and actions meaningful. Brewster argues in this respect that the novel perfects Woolf’s technique of combining the streams of consciousness of her characters with a stream of events.47 Although she is undoubtedly right when she says that there is this combination of inward and outward reality, this statement alone is no sufficient description of Woolf’s narrative technique. I would rather argue that the metaphorical spatialization of narration and character in Mrs Dalloway does not directly affect the fictional construction of city space. Rather, the city is to be re-constructed by the reader, relying on the perception of the characters. This opens up, as Groover says, a subversive space, a subtext in which characters can be connected “who ordinarily inhabit disparate landscapes,”48 although I do not follow Groover here when she claims that Clarissa’s party serves as such a subversive “liminal space.”49 As far as movement through the city is concerned, Clarissa’s love of life is striking right at the beginning of the novel: “Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved.”50 She feels a vital connection with the city: “she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that.”51 This sensation, the individual being part of the whole that is the city, that individual identity is dissolved in the city, is central for the construction of characters and (gendered) identity in this novel. With this and Clarissa’s role as hostess, Woolf can be said to give up the clear separation between women of the private and those of the public sphere, which she presents 46 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 83f. 47 Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 48. 48 Groover, “Liminal Space.” 49 Groover, “Liminal Space.” 50 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 7. 51 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 167.

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with the contrast between Katharine Hilberry and Mary Datchet in Night and Day. Clarissa’s enjoyment of city life and the fact that she belongs to the parent generation blur the line between the spheres. However, Clarissa’s ambiguity in this respect may be attributed to the fact that her enjoyment of London itself is “tinged by regret and a sense of all that has been lost” which can be associated with her idyllic youth in the countryside.52 Therefore, it is the daughters’ generation whose experience of movement through London must contain an actual potential of liberation. Elizabeth’s bus ride triggers thoughts of independent life and the choice of a profession. She even identifies to a certain extent with the possibility of taking up a profession similar to that of her father53 : Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most competently boarded the omnibus, in front of everybody. She took a seat on top. […] 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. She might own a thousand acres and have people under her. She would go and see them in their cottages. […] 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.54

Although this independence from the family is accompanied by a real possibility of an identity beyond the contrast between the Victorian public and private spheres,55 the project is unsuccessful, because Elizabeth meets resistance in the form of the male-dominated establishment. Bowlby rightly argues that at the end of the novel Richard Dalloway sees his daughter as a beautiful young woman, which does not make her an equal, but returns her to male objectification.56 Although there is a certain

52 Anne Collett, “Sex and the City: Eliot and Woolf’s Vision of Post-WWI London,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 75 (2009): 10–13 (12). 53 Bowlby, Virginia Woolf , 83. 54 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 148ff. 55 Bowlby, Virginia Woolf , 98. 56 Bowlby, Virginia Woolf , 87.

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naiveté inherent in Elizabeth’s thoughts, it is questionable whether, as Bowlby argues further, the novel dismisses her ideas as childish.57 Rather, it is interesting to note that, while Elizabeth feels the emergence of an identity independent from the family (the Strand is where Dalloways normally do not go),58 Clarissa is consumed by communal life on the bus: “She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places.”59 Clarissa’s bear similarities also with Mary Datchet’s emotions in Night and Day (see above). In Mrs Dalloway, however, individual consciousness and also identity are in constant danger to dissolve in the communal identity that is London, but they are no longer consumed by the collective identity of the family home. As an MP, Richard Dalloway can be read as representative of the hegemonic structure which unifies the experience of all inhabitants of the city. The novel here implies a rather harsh critique of the dominant male culture. Still, all characters, male and female, have to negotiate their individual identity in relation to urban space. London facilitates women’s stories as well as men’s and threatens both male and female identity. Woolf therefore not only makes use of a “standpoint of alienation” as Sizemore argues.60 Brewster describes this aspect of the novel as follows: “The city, its sights and its crowds, has played its part in the intricate interweaving of past and present, the individual and general life, the transitory and the permanent.”61 She does not elaborate any further, but maybe it is helpful to look at the two later texts for clarification. In A Room of One’s Own Woolf seems to explain this new state of urban affairs, when she states that, when Aphra Behn enters the literary historical scene, “we turn a very important corner on the road. We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies […] We come to town and rub shoulders with ordinary people

57 Bowlby, Virginia Woolf , 97. 58 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 151. 59 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 167. 60 Christine W. Sizemore, “The ‘Outsider-Within’: Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing

as Urban Novelists in Mrs Dalloway and The Four-Gated City,” in Woolf and Lessing. Breaking the Mold, ed. Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 59–72 passim. 61 Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 53.

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in the streets.”62 The situation of women in the city is therefore associated with modernization and democratization. The significance of this particular part of the text can hardly be overestimated, because, as Bowlby notes, with the arrival of middle-class women in the realm of literature, the rewriting of literary history as it is aimed at in A Room of One’s Own, becomes a possibility.63 The speaker in A Room of One’s Own, however, calls London a machine that produces a beautiful fabric.64 This metaphor seems to replicate the loss of identity of the maze and honeycomb metaphors. If the lives of the inhabitants are part of this fabric, the person, of whichever sex, entering the city will inevitably become part of its narrative texture. It says here: “London was like a workshop. London was like a machine. We were all being shot backward and forward on this plain foundation to make some pattern.”65 In this image it is also obvious that the city-text(ure) is independent of the actual topography of the city which is only the “plain foundation” on which the city rests. The real-life city and the literary historical narrative are therefore inseparably connected within the texture that is city life. On the other hand, they create an aesthetic object, something (the “tawny monster”66 ) which is sublime even. Here, the city itself, with the help of all its inhabitants, turns into a work of art. London as a machine therefore works as a metaphor for literary creativity on more than one level. There has been a development in the novels discussed here, in which London becomes more and more abstract: when Woolf writes in Jacob’s Room that “[t]he cross alone shines rosy-guilt. But what century have we reached? That old man has been crossing the Bridge these six hundred years, with the rabble of little boys at his heels […],”67 the city takes on a timeless quality. Brewster acknowledges this quality when she says that Woolf’s London is one which endures throughout history.68

62 Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 64. 63 Bowlby, Virginia Woolf , 35. 64 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 41. 65 Woolf, Room of One’s Own 28. 66 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 41. 67 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 98. 68 Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 43.

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Looking at how Woolf conceives of the history of literary creativity in A Room of One’s Own, one also has to take into account how Orlando as personification of this history experiences the city.69 He/She exemplifies the different scopes of individual agency for men and women throughout several centuries. The most interesting scenes in this respect are perhaps those in which Orlando, the woman disguised as a man, meets a street prostitute who takes “him” with her to her quarters and whose story can be told only after the secure domestic female space has been established by Orlando revealing her own “true” gender.70 The eighteenth-century prostitute and the eighteenth-century Orlando have to limit their occupation of city space. This is made even more clear when one takes into account that her sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that she reaped twofold harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were increased and its experiences multiplied. For the probity of breeches she exchanged the seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally.71

I think it is no coincidence that Orlando observes the clouds announcing the darkness, doubt and confusion of the nineteenth century72 from her window as she is just enjoying the orderliness of the eighteenth-century cityscape in comparison with the Elizabethan London of her youth. By contrast, the twentieth-century Orlando even drives her own car through the city. But this is not without danger. In the course of that drive [n]othing could be seen whole or read from start to finish. […] After twenty minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so

69 Brewster expresses a similar sentiment when she writes that Orlando “is both himself and the long tradition he inherits” 56. 70 Virginia Woolf, Orlando. A Biography (London: Penguin Red Classics, 2006), 192f. 71 Woolf, Orlando, 194f. 72 Woolf, Orlando, 199.

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much resembles the chopping up of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself that it is an open question in what sense Orlando can be said to have existed at the present moment.73

As in the other texts, movement through urban space is a severe threat to individual integrity and subjectivity. Still, even this is not altogether negative: “For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for […] a person may well have as many as thousand.”74 When Bowlby argues for a lack of identity in the present-day Orlando and regret for the rural simplicity and unity of her/his past,75 one has to add that Orlando’s experience of two genderidentities is described as empowering and liberating earlier in the novel.76 Orlando as an individual who has undergone a change in sexual and gender identity several times is, to a certain extent at least, in control of her identity. In accordance with the idea of literary history presented in Orlando, the twentieth-century speaker is part of the textual fabric of contemporary London. That a sensation like this is possible at all is the direct consequence of women’s arrival in the city after Aphra Behn. Connecting this with the notion of the city as a machine producing fabric, we get the image which is central for Woolf’s construction of contemporary urban space in the companion texts: hegemonic and subversive layers are interwoven. In their London, Behn, in a tomb alongside other great writers in Westminster Abbey, and also Judith Shakespeare lie buried, the latter, however, after suicide, at “some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.”77 On the one hand, this part of Judith’s fate of course symbolizes the lack of respectability of her life and death in the eyes of society. On the other, it is these very streets which carry the almost utopian potential of city life. While Behn has become part of a hegemonic, official London, Judith Shakespeare is part of the flow of street life, where Woolf’s creative

73 Woolf, Orlando, 272. 74 Woolf, Orlando, 273. 75 Bowlby, Virginia Woolf , 142f. 76 Woolf Orlando, 160f. 77 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 50.

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ideal, the androgyny of the mind, is metaphorically located.78 The taxicab scene, in which the speaker observes from her window how a woman and a man meet at a street-corner and continue their way through the city in a taxi, has often been quoted as a representation of Woolf’s notion of the androgynous mind.79 To add to that, at the crossroads Judith Shakespeare is also going to be reborn through the “common life which is the real life and not the little separate lives which we live as individuals.”80 The city, therefore, holds the possibility of a communal life outside of the hegemonic narrative of the separate spheres and also the official London of parliament and war memorials. The construction of urban space here appears almost as a synthesis of the notions of the earlier texts. To contribute further to the hopeful—in order to avoid the fraught term utopian—attitude with which the speaker addresses city life, there is again the recurring motif of the omnibus ride across town: according to A Room of One’s Own, an omnibus ride is one of the things lacking from Jane Austen’s life and therefore harmful to the quality of her writing81 and intellectual development. It is also on a bus ride on which the mind can be overcome with a sudden realization of reality, which the writer must then separate from the extraneous matter of day-to-day experience. This notion of the city is more tangible, especially because it is explicitly named and as both metaphors, the machine and fabric, are quite common images for the city and the text. They carry with them the fear of the city of the industrialization, which de-individualizes and alienates humans. But as the product is a work of art, it lacks the pessimism of the modernist representation of the city. With the reference to the sublime it even echoes Romanticism. It remains unclear, however, how individuals become part of the urban machinery and how they get assigned their particular tasks. To sum up the function of London for A Room of One’s Own, one must acknowledge that there is indeed a system in place, which excludes the narratives of women. There is a perceptible separation between the official texture and the flow of street life. The incompatibilities between these two layers of urban fabric do not prevent the creation of the beautiful pattern the

78 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 95. 79 Bowlby, Virginia Woolf , 41f; Brewster, Virginia Woolf’s London, 70. 80 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 112. 81 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 68f.

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city produces. And the literary tradition which already has the power to include women is not the product of official governmental London. It is the product of the urban flow of life. This flow of life also has the advantage of being dynamic in contrast with the official structure which is rather static and with that it echoes Orlando’s perception of her identities. The future will probably be shaped by the unofficial flow of life rather than hegemonic forces. With the exception of Jacob’s Room, which evades the question, the city facilitates the—mainly intellectual and creative—liberation of women in all these texts. In them, modernity and women’s liberation are urban phenomena. The town itself is then described in metaphors which bear significant similarities with each other: They all have a spatial aspect and they emphasize the order or structure of the city. However, the level of involvement of the individual in the creation of these structures varies, as does the amount of control they have over the relation between their individual subjectivity and communal urban life. As a preliminary conclusion one might say that all texts imagine the relation between the individual and the city as a spatial structure, albeit one which is independent of the actual topographic organization of London. Their concern is a communal life of the mind which is facilitated by the inclusion of the individual in the city. In short, Mrs Dalloway connects the concern for the gender-political dimension of the distribution of urban space visible in Night and Day with the concern for individual subjectivity and agency we have seen in Jacob’s Room. Therefore, women’s stories in Mrs Dalloway are at the same time made possible and excluded from the text(ure) of urban life. This movement is reversed to a certain extent in the companion pieces A Room of One’s Own and Orlando. Their London broadens the notion of identity which was so restricted in Night and Day and so fragile in Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway. The text here conceives of identity not just as individuality but also as a public role. Women’s lives become relevant in and for the public sphere. One might also conclude that the novels before A Room of One’s Own have been building up to this quasi-utopian notion of London as a space in which competing narratives are woven together: although the spatial organization of London in Woolf’s writing mirrors the transition from Victorianism to Modernity, it is certainly no whole-hearted embrace of modern times. Woolf is highly skeptical of the success of the women’s movement, a skepticism which shows up again later, when she proposes an alternative society for women in order to

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avoid the dangers of becoming a part of the hegemonic structures in Three Guineas.82 What sets Woolf apart from her fellow modernists, however, is that she does not display the same apocalyptic vision of the city. Rather, her alternative female spaces in Three Guineas are utopian in the literal sense of the term, that is, not located.

Works Cited Bowlby, Rachel. Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations. Oxford and New York, NY: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Brewster, Dorothy. Virginia Woolf’s London. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1960. Collett, Anne. “Sex and the City: Eliot and Woolf’s vision of Post-WWI London.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 75 (2009): 10–13. Gan, Wendy. Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing. Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Groover, Kristina. “Taking the Doors off the Hinges: Liminal Space in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 6, no. 1 (2008). http://www.literarylondon.org/ london-journal/march2008/index.html. Lotman, Jurij. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Translated by Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977. Sizemore, Christine W. “The ‘Outsider-Within’: Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing as Urban Novelists in Mrs Dalloway and The Four-Gated City.” Woolf and Lessing. Breaking the Mold, edited by Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 59–72. Squier, Susan Merrill. “Tradition and Revision: The Classic City Novel and Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day.” In Women Writers and the City. Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Susan Merrill Squier. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984. 114–133. Tambling, Jeremy. “Repression in Mrs Dalloway’s London.” Essays in Criticism 39, no. 2 (1989): 137–155. Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. London: Penguin Classics, 1992. ———. Mrs Dalloway. London: Penguin, 1992. ———. Night and Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. Orlando: A Biography. London: Penguin Red Classics, 2006. ———. A Room of One’s Own. London: Penguin Classics, 2000. ———. Three Guineas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

82 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 309ff.

PART V

Contesting the City II: Berlin, History and Memory

CHAPTER 13

The City Stripped Bare of Its Histories, Even: Crisis and Representation in Two German Trümmerfilme of 1948 Daniel Jonah Wolpert

The inaugural feature production of the post-war German film industry, Wolfgang Staudte’s much vaunted and publicized 1946 film, Die Mörder sind unter uns was a first on many levels. It was the first feature-length film produced by the newly founded DEFA studios as well as being the first German drama to be subsequently shown to an international audience as well as the cinema public of the defeated nation. It also broke new ground in that it was the first film to acquire the, not always positive, label of a Trümmerfilm or “Rubble Film.” Genre questions aside, what Staudte’s film showed the world was a city narrative of Berlin that lay in abject ruin: its protagonists populating stairwells and barely recognizable streets cloaked in proto-expressionist shadows and shot at Dutch angles. The world of Staudte’s Berlin is viewed through shattered glass and desperate drunken impotent rages of the war-damaged male protagonist who seeks vengeance for a crime he can neither bear to remember

D. J. Wolpert (B) University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_13

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nor forget. Ultimately, only the love of an angelic female figure saves him from carrying out his murderous intent and restores him to his public utility as a doctor. Although the film received broadly positive press, there was a reticence among the urban viewing public to be subjected to moralizing dramas set in the ruins they had huddled into the few remaining cinemas to forget, if only for a few hours. By 1948 the backlash against the depiction of urban ruins in German film had made itself felt such that it posed a definite problem for filmmakers. In the following paragraphs I intend to show that the cinema of 1948 in Germany was effectively a cinema in the throes of a crisis of representation. The moral imperative to make films depicting daily life and with it the consequences, in their most evident and dominating visual form, of the defeat of Nazism, ruined cities, became an acute crisis for film makers of the time and yielded novel engagements with the subject. Following a brief discussion of an application of narratological concepts to my analysis I will go on to show how narratives of a ruined city, in this case Berlin, were presented from within a set of re-framing devices which effectively stripped the traumatic potency of the ruined present from the narratives. The means with which the two films under discussion utilized novel narrative techniques will make up the following part of my paper.

Metalepsis and Focalization: Narrativity and Identification Gerard Genette famously defined metalepsis in literary narratives as “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse”.1 In the films I will discuss, both intrusive extra- and intra-diegetic narrations as described in Genette’s definition appear within focalized dramas, adding a level of meta-narrative complexity to the films, which effectively mount a challenge to the spectacle and shock in the visual presence of ruins on screen. Using this working definition of narrative breach it is possible to examine the complex narratological practices, which were employed in the

1 Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane Lewin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 234–235.

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post-war German film, as devices that sought to overcome the problem of the involuntary visual breaches, threatened by the traumatic spectacle of ruins in the Trümmerfilm. As theatrical devices, the uses of metaleptic interventions were a means by which the shock and spectacle of the ruined present could be challenged, ostensibly to displace the dominance of the spectacular image. By disrupting the flow of narrative in the use of direct address or re-framing it within another temporal sphere using focalized meta-narratives was as much a means of transforming a narrative about the Nazi past as it was of recoding the present. In re-contextualizing the present from the standpoint of alternative temporal or even fantastic realities film makers across all zones sought to overwrite the political consequences of the national socialist past as a part of their efforts to displace the traumas of the ruined present. Before examining just how these uses of metaleptic breach Genette describes underwent reorientation for the spectator in the context of cinema narratives, it is useful to trace the historical beginnings of the theatrical concept of metalepsis to illuminate what such a practice meant for audiences of drama in general and what it meant for post-war German cinema audiences in particular. The practice of theatrical meta-narrative and its deployment via metalepsis can be traced to Classical antiquity offering a core theatrical narrative device in the privileging information for the audience which is not known to the play’s cast; this formulation describes one of the key definitions of dramatic tension, and most especially a device used in classical Greek tragedy. Diderot’s description of a well executed play was premised on the construction of a subsequently termed “fourth wall”2 whereby the internal dynamic of a play should take place among the actors such that they should imagine a fourth wall between themselves and the audience watching. This appeal to a sincerity or cohesive immersion by the play’s cast was altered by the advent of cinema where the fourth wall existed by default and cinematographic taboos such as “crossing the line” or looking directly into the camera were to be avoided because it would undermine the core and unique 2 Although not expressly referred to as a ‘fourth wall’ Diderot posits the theatrical device as a part of his Discours in the following passage: “Soit donc que vous composiez, soit que vous jouiez, ne pensez non plus au spectateur que s’il n’existait pas. Imaginez sur le bord du théâtre un grand mur qui vous sépare du parterre: jouez comme si la toile ne se levait pas.” Denis Diderot, Discours de la poésie dramatique (Paris: Demain, 1758), 1309–1310; see also Sergei Eisenstein’s use of Diderot’s idea in the fifth essay of his Le mouvement de l’art (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1986), 86.

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ability of the cinematic form to shift perspective in camera movement as an adopted viewpoint of the cinema spectator. The suspension of disbelief as a core component of the cinema experience lent the medium special narrative powers that could be exploited to great effect; none more so than in the commodified entertainment industry of the 1930s and 1940s in Germany. Siegfried Kracauer’s analysis of the Kalikowelt of mass illusion and ornament as a core experience of urban modernity in the Weimar Republic highlighted the power of such an abandonment of subjectivity and critical engagement as a precursor for the rise of Hitler. The cinema for Kracauer and, to a similar extent, Walter Benjamin was a special place of cultural exchange premised on an interchange of types of experience. The shock of the visual in the cinematic context described by Benjamin was powerful precisely because it located the viewer in an environment where their attention was directed and immersive as well as paradoxically communal and isolated. The commercial successes of cinema in the 1930s both in Europe and in Hollywood had moved from what might be termed the cinema of the spectacular to narrative forms which utilized moving cameras and inter-cutting reverse shots and varying shot lengths in editing to construct a visual narrative that had its own distinct visual narrative language. Tom Gunning’s seminal analysis of early American cinematic practices identified a shift between a so-called “cinema of attractions” and a cinema of narrative integration as being contingent on a coherent diegesis, something a metaleptic breach in direct address to the camera would destroy.3 However, the cinema traditions outside Hollywood, and most importantly for this analysis in the cinema of UFA in the mid-1930s to the 1940s did use direct address for specific narrative purposes. The comedic effect of direct address was used as a trope by UFA comedies as a type of punch line to round off an especially comic sequence, often in the closing scene of the film. Notable examples of this practice appear in a number of Heinz Rühmann vehicles notably, Der Gasmann 4 and Die Feuerzangenbowle.5 The purpose was to explicitly let the audience in on the joke, indeed to remind them what they were seeing on screen was in fact a

3 Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 261. 4 Carl Froelich, Der Gasmann (UFA, 1941). 5 Helmut Weiss, Die Feuerzangenbowle (UFA, 1944).

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fantasy. The use of such metaleptic breaches typically came at the end of comedies to facilitate a type of conclusion to the fantasy, adding an allencompassing punch line: a joke that provided a synthesis between the performance on screen and the laughter in the stalls. Under such conditions the metaleptic breach as punch line did not so much undermine the drama as it brings the audience into it, offering familiarity in a conspiratorial self-awareness of the farce.6 The crucial difference for post-war film is that the intention of the metalepses and direct address is inverted. Instead of reminding us that the onscreen activity is a fantasy, the breaches of the fourth wall in cinema after 1945 dealing with the visual impact of defeat or the unpopular subject of present hardships sought to recover or assuage the fears of the viewing public by using metalepsis as a means of introducing an element of the fantastic to the overbearing presence of the real. In his 1985 work Narrative Discourse, Gerard Genette posited that metaleptic breaches do not just offer a softening of boundaries between narrative levels, but that such breaches are in and of themselves so violent that they drive the narrative into another “universe” such that the newly constituted diegetic realms come to possess a distinct ontological status, dividing the fantastic from the real at a primary level for the reader. I will argue this distinction has an urgent and vital role to play for the German cinema spectator in the immediate post-war era. The undifferentiated and spectacular forms of the ruins persisted on screen in Germany up until 1949 and their presences in films were the subject of inventive and purposeful reconfigurations through focalized standpoints from which to address the present. I wish to focus in on two productions that employed specific narrative tropes to counter the threat of the ruins in the frame and utilize focalization and metaleptic breach for narrative dynamism. By 1948 the political situation in Germany had radically changed from the first months of shock after May 1945 and the further misery of the so-called Hungerwinter of 1947. Berlin had moved into the central stage of global politics once more. However, the problem of representing the ruined city persisted and posed an additional problem for film makers who feared, along with the rest of the population, an imminent return to 6 The classmate who points out that there would be no such classrooms as the ones depicted in Die Feuerzangenbowle is a well-known example, in that it states the obvious to comic effect.

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war. I will show how narrative reconfigurations of the past and of futurity offered a solution to both the representations of a political impasse and a means to re-classify the ruins of Berlin beyond that of a traumatic spectacle of stasis in the ubiquity of destruction.

Palingenesis and Stasis: The City Between History and Futurity R. A Stemmle’s Berliner Ballade was made in 1948 as a film adaptation of Günther Neumann’s satirical, and somewhat reactionary, cabaret Schwarzer Jahrmarkt.7 The film is credited for introducing the character of Otto Normalverbraucher into the German lexical canon as a byword for a hapless everyman. Gustav von Wangenheim, returning from wartime exile in Moscow, directed the DEFA production Und wieder ’48 a film about student life at the Humboldt University in Berlin—both films locate the main narrative in 1948—the present-day Berlin among the ruins. What is striking, however, is the use of other time frames to locate and stabilize the dramas of the present within extradiegetic narrative continuities. The use of narrative re-framing and metaleptic address as a means of subverting the crisis of representation is employed by both films to repopulate meaning and cohesion into narratives of the city that has been denuded of them.

Berliner Ballade: Fatalism and Fantasy The city in R. A. Stemmle’s Tri-Zone production Berliner Ballade is spoken of from a focalized narrative position of an assured futurity; a transcendental ideal—where the conditions for the possibility of a better time beyond the present are set out in the auditory guide of an omnipresent narrator who speaks from the temporal sphere of a Berlin of 2048. This Berlin is everything 1948 is not and therefore the privations of the present can be recast as interplay between nostalgic and satirical forms of address. In so doing, the present is represented as a shared comédie larmoyante where the conflicts of the past—the Nazi past—and a re-imagined present in the portrayal of the division of Berlin—are conflated into a plot devised

7 Günter Neumann et al., Schwarzer Jahrmarkt: Eine Revue der Stunde Null (Berlin: Blanvalet, 1975).

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around a set of theatrical absurdities in which the ordeals of “ordinary Berliners” are played out on screen. The depiction of the hapless Otto Normalverbraucher as a fall guy for his times echoes a prevalent theme in German cinema of the time; the fatalism which is evoked in Otto’s Quixotic efforts to get by in a world set against him serves to absolve him, and by extension the 1948 viewership, of any sense of moral responsibility for the past. The political events concerning the imminent division of Berlin along more permanent lines are robbed of any actual ideological discourse. A scene featuring the meeting of the Allied powers in Potsdam depicts the various representatives speaking, but their speech is overlaid with martial music from their respective countries. In this way their discourse is rendered as equally alien and meaningless. However what is most initially striking about Berliner Ballade is its opening sequence, which traverses the register of address from the future a century hence to a present which explicitly addresses the concerns of the 1948 viewership in a breach of the narrator’s voice in address. The future narrator assures the 1948 audience that this is no “Heimkehrer Film” by pre-empting the complaint: NARRATOR

“Ach, Je!” Hätten sie damals gesagt; “Schon wieder ein Heimkehrer-Film!” 8

The in-joke is in the past conditional, hätte. The understanding being that the real audience had already passed the judgment. This piece of selfreflexivity at the end of the comedic device of focalized fantasy places the film firmly within the crisis of representation precisely because it acknowledges its own narrative deceit. The paradoxical formation reconnects the drama with the audience by exposing the tension between a pedagogical imperative to make films about the present and the popular demands for entertainment that wanted nothing to do with it. This initial metaleptic breach by the extradiegetic narrator in Berliner Ballade ensures that the narrative and the dramatic cohesion of the film is kept at a level of comic de-stabilization such that any discussion of the more unpalatable aspects of the unsure present could be overcome, or 8 “‘Oh my,’ they would have said back then, ‘not another film about returning soldiers!’” Robert A. Stemmle, Berliner Ballade [The Ballad of Berlin] (Comedia-Film GmbH, 1948).

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at least glossed over by a return to metaleptic interventions of a metanarrative from an assured futurity in a utopian Berlin. The return of Otto Normalverbraucher to his ruined Berlin flat, occupied by strangers and swindlers, is less than happy one and his stoic acceptance of absurdity is well practiced. Stemmle’s film places the Everyman, a citizen of the city as a foil for the vicissitudes of history. He swaps a volume by Thomas Mann on his bookshelf for Alfred Rosenberg, placing the Mann work behind it and then replaces the Thomas Mann after the war, hiding the Rosenberg behind it. With this vaguely pointed reference to a sham of “inner emigration,” the past, like the present and all the attendant ideological markers for it, is just a phase before the onset of a happy utopia in 2048. Crucially the city itself takes on this aspect of continuity; Berlin may be in ruins but it is not destroyed. The Berlin of 2048, the world hub, underwrites the transitory nature of the destruction of Berlin, the ruined capital of the least loved people on earth in 1948. To a domestic audience, the ruins under these focalized conditions no longer bear the threat of trauma and stasis nor do they require the audience of 1948 to shoulder any guilt and responsibility for the Third Reich. They and all the events that constituted it are simply part of the rich tapestry and playful absurdity that makes Berlin so special, so well loved and so unique. History in Berliner Ballade, then, is less a narrative than a character-attribute for the city—a transformation accomplished by the process of focalized distance. The use of the cabaret form punctuates Stemmle’s film, offering a further identification with an art form associated with the city’s free spirit. Additionally the musical interludes offer a ‘revue’ atmosphere to such otherwise unpalatable issues as homelessness and destitution. What follows is a narrative where Berlin in ruins becomes a player in a fantasy romance between Otto and the figment of his hungry and fevered imagination made real—the girl in the dream-world cake shop. A ravenous and uncharacteristically thin Gerd Fröbe slips into delirium in his roofless room and into a reverie of pastries and whipped cream served by an angel of comfort and cake. Berlin, like the dream-born love affair in Berliner Ballade, undergoes a transformation from the real to the fantastic. The city whose cosmopolitan exceptionalism will see it through thick and thin appears on screen in ruins as another facet of its charm. The city’s future, much like its past, is safely rewritten for public consumption. The final part of Berliner Ballade

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takes place in a bar, where two identical characters representing past militarism in vulgar caricature clash verbally, escalating the bar room conflict to genocidal proportions. The camera closes in on their mouths gnashing and spitting with a mixture of theatrical sadism and rage. Otto Normalverbraucher, present at the bar, is distraught and tries to stop them, but fails and faints. Declaring him dead, the patrons of the establishment led by his flatmate the black marketeer, the cake shop girlfriend and the warlike twins, now reconciled into a single person, put him in a coffin and lay him out for the funeral. His girlfriend weeps and as the pallbearers pick up his coffin, they leave Otto behind lying on the base. Oblivious to the fact, the funeral party buries the empty coffin. Each member of the symbolically coded aspect of an immoral Germany represented by the cast at the funeral vowing to reform their ways by burying their vices with Otto, a man who they think they had killed with their thoughtlessness and depravity. The black marketeer buries avarice and after much prompting the militaristic figure of war buries hate. Meanwhile, the cake shop brideto-be and the newly awoken Otto escape into the future holding hands. The false sacrifice or misconstrued death at the close of Berliner Ballade splits the narrative between the moral closures of a reified set of characters at a funeral and the elopement from reality of Otto and his fantastical bride. Berliner Ballade is a film that places itself into a self-reflexive narrative device. It is introduced as being a film from the past shown to a future audience, affecting a comic trope which de-centers the narrative at a focalized remove that is itself part of a metaleptic process. The narrator that introduces the film does so to an audience viewing it in 2048 as a special screening, one that requires the future technology of cinema to be turned off in order to view it properly. This introduction both assures the audience that the cinema will “get better” in ways that the 1948 audience understands, in a reference to color film, and also in ways yet to be imagined by it. This fantastical future address directly to the audience of the future is an assurance to the audience of 1948 that the film they are about to see is aware of itself as a part of a cinema that itself has no future, a cinema about the ruined present. The de-centered narrative in this opening sequence, the screen filling with oscillations of sine waves and a test tone, declares its exoticism and archival quality. What follows immediately afterwards is an explication of what the audience of 2048 supposedly already knows about Berlin but the real viewership does not, and transversely the dissolve to the

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ruined present is presented as an alien place—unimaginable by the future audience and all too common for the real one. This switch of narrative perspective not only imbues the focalized narrator with omniscience: it gives him omnipresence. The extradiegetic encounter with the so-called Normalverbrauchers, the hapless inhabitants of Berlin in 1948 becomes fully realized in the encounter with the coal smuggler who is offered a cigarette from without the frame of the screen. The future narrator is not only able to shift into the diegesis of the film; he is able to do so from outside of his temporal location in 2048. InF could not have a pedigree this metaleptic act the omniscient and omnipresent narrator also attained a level of omnipotence, chiefly to assuage the fears of a cinema audience that they might be treated to uncomfortable truths or motifs that could not instantly be removed by a meta-narrative in the hands of a kindly guide.

Und wieder ’48: Repetition, Ruin and Revolution Under the conditions of a crisis of narrative legitimacy in the post-war years, dramas such as Und wieder ’48 and Berliner Ballade attempted to overcome the over-determined spectacular appearance of the ruins by offering a narrative re-framing of them as part of a symbolic order beyond the crises of 1948. However, Gustav von Wangenheim’s Und wieder ’48 could not have a pedigree at a further remove from that of Robert Stemmle’s whimsical Berlin. The Soviet Zone DEFA production sought to make sense of the political crisis facing a divided Germany in 1948 by recourse to a narrative of crisis facing the then divided nation in 1848. The film opens with and features a story of a film production, already affecting a metaleptic conduit of play within the play into the film from the first frame: as the film progresses, the film within the film merges into a narrative synthesis on screen charged with a dynamism of a Marxist dialectic. The historical determinism underwriting von Wangenheim’s film rests crucially on the reconnection of historical narratives to an ideological imperative for the present. The catalyst for this is the city itself. The young history student, Else, who among others has been hired as an extra, is less than flattering in her opinion of the film being made about 1848 in the ruins when asked by the director. For her the Berlin rebellion of 1848 was much more than the puerile comedy the film director and his clueless writer had imagined for the screen. For Else the ruins of

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the city in 1948 pose an imminent question, a question unanswered by the failures of 1848. To make her point she stages a Cabaret show at the University, more in the tradition of Berlin political satire than the fatalistic interludes in Berliner Ballade. During her act, she draws direct parallels from 1848, effectively staging a counter drama to the film being shot in the ruins. As in Berliner Ballade, what is striking is just how little the Berlin of 1948 is presented as anything to do with the Berlin of 1933. The focalized narrative frame in Und wieder ’48 is located a century in the past rather than the future. The love story between the conservative returning soldier embarking on his much-delayed medical career and the younger sprightly history student follows a parallel trajectory to his ideological awakening. The audience is treated to a tour of the present through the lens of the past. The wise fool, Gustav Knetsch-Nante played by Willi Rose, who is introduced in the opening scenes of the film as an actor in the film being shot in the ruins, returns in character but as the same figure in the narrative of 1948. In the 13th sequence in von Wangenheim’s film he crosses over into a role of a historical and ideological tour guide for a group of Berliners, including the young medical student Heinz Althaus. Leading them up through a shattered staircase and onto a balcony overlooking the Schlüterhof in Berlin, where he describes the scene of 1848 looking out into the present of 1948: ¨ Knetsch erkla¨ rt, daß im Jahre 1848 der K onig auf diesem Balkon gestanden habe, als ihm die Berliner ihre Toten und Verwundeten gezeigt haben: KNETSCH: […]dat wat er mit seine Jarde und sein Kartätschen-prinzbruder anjerichtet hat. Sie haben ihn gezwungen seinen Deckel abzunehmen, wie es sich für einen Menschen gehöre. Un nachher ham se sich wieder belatschern lassen. Und nu ham wa den Salat und die Trümmerfrauen. Wissen Se, et is een Leiden det Janze! 9

9 Reprinted in Peter Pleyer, Deutscher Nachkriegsfilm 1946–1948 (Münster: Fahle, 1965), 342. “KNETSCH explains that in 1848, the King stood on this balcony as the Berliners showed him their dead and wounded: KNETSCH: […] what he and his men at arms and his gun-toting brother the Prince had done—They made him take off his hat, like any decent person would do. And later they let themselves be conned again. And now we have the mess and the Rubble women. You know the whole thing is a crying shame!”

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In his working-class Berlin dialect, Knetsch makes the unequivocal connection: “1948,” the Trümmerfrauen and the “mess” is a direct result of the lessons of history, which were not learned in 1848. The movement of the character of Gustav Knetsch-Nante, from the character in the film about 1848 to a voice the revolutionary past in the film we are watching set in the ruined present, not only identifies him as a source of historical continuity, it imbues him with a special narrative legitimacy. The focalized move from an actor playing a character on set and his Brechtian breach into a character from 1848 simultaneously addressing his audience in the film and in the cinema establishes him as a conduit for a special type of meta-narrative. Far from subsuming the narrative of 1948, the breach of narratives is intended as a bridge, one that brings the revolutionary spirit of 1848 into the present, invoking a rightful revolutionary conclusion for the post-war future. The impact of the speech by Gustav Knetsch on the balcony is possible precisely because it references the ruins. In marked contrast to Stemmle’s Berliner Ballade, The focalization of von Wangenheim’s production comes from within. The initial shot of Und wieder ’48 is of a burning barricade from which a tattered flag is plucked by a revolutionary, this opening deliberately temporally as well as spatially ambiguous, the rubble of the barricade is revealed as real remnant of the war, but the flag is a prop for the film. Once the theatrical layers of the opening sequence of the film are differentiated by a pullback revealing a film-crew shooting on an outdoor stage set representing Berlin of 1848, Knetsch appears in a dialogue with an actor playing a flustered traveling tradesman from Hanover who produces a large scroll passport marked with many signatures and seals as proof of his legitimate presence. The wily Knetsch remarks on the absurdity of having to have passports to travel within German lands and informs the distraught tradesman of the struggle in Berlin, pointing to a hole in the lamppost they are standing by as evidence of the strife. The fact that the damage which is described as being from canon shot was almost certainly made by a more advanced weapon of 1945 further advances the film’s ideological point by merging the temporal upheaval of 1848 with the spatial scars of 1948. What is at stake in the film within the film and the dissent voiced by its actors, both principal and periphery is the power of history to shape the present. The truth in history is to be found, in von Wangenheim’s film, not in the Nazi past but in a bridge between centuries, a return of unfinished business in the form of revolutionary dialectical immanence. Heinz Althaus the male protagonist played by the familiar Trümmerfilm face of Ernst

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Borchert has an altercation with his old comrades in arms at his father’s house about his new found obsession with the 1848 revolutionary student leader Gustav Schlöffel.11 His affinity with the core historical character, whose letters and speeches he has been reading, ring true, much to the distaste of his conservative friends. His father wearily contends that it is impossible to know exactly what happened in the past. Heinz counters that it is not necessary to know all the details and particularities, rather the spirit and presence of the conflicts faced by the young revolutionaries of 1848. Heinz stares into the camera, his gaze not alighting on the camera but rather beyond it as he imagines himself as Gustav Schlöffel facing trial in 1848. The fade into the imagined flashback is a return to Heinz in his costume during the filming of the production at the opening of the film, except now the film has transformed into an imagined set of events which are coded as being more true to the facts than their enactment in the film within the film. The visual entry into class-consciousness becomes manifest on screen, stemming from Heinz’s connection between the reactions to hardship in 1848 and whose affinity with the hardships in Weimar Germany as well as the present. The imagined flashback then is a vital step in the recognition of the cyclical nature of class history. The subtext of recognizing the outcomes of the failure to address the crises of the Weimar era is left for the audience to fill in, an invitation to an ideological recognition of the processes of history, similar to those presented for a critique of Capitalism presented at the close of Slatán Dudow’s 1932 film Kuhle Wampe. The lacunas in the explication of events are left deliberately open to be filled in by the audience. Heinz’s gaze, while not explicitly a form of purposeful direct address, insofar as the dialogue remains diegetic, could equally be construed as being extradiegetic. In this way the fourth wall nominally remains intact but nonetheless offers a breach in that its engagement with the audience is an invitation to reinterpret the Nazi past from a revolutionary perspective along with the character of Heinz Althaus as he inhabits the figure of Gustav Schlöffel in his imagination. With von Wangenheim’s film the initial levity and frivolousness of the film production is transformed to a call to arms at the close of the production (both in the film within the film and in the film itself). The lovers meet and reconcile at the historical Wartburg, talking to the audience in a revolutionary duet about the imperatives of 1948—dressed in the 11 Hugh Ridley, “Intellectual Freedom in Germany’s 1848 Revolution: The Trial of Gustav Adolph Schlöffel,” German Life and Letters 32 (1979): 308–317.

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clothes of 1848. The lessons of history, so von Wangenheim would have us believe, are cyclical until resolved. Far from being simply a “lecturedriven film”12 in which Else appears as a “Marxist Nun,” her appearance in the film is more akin to a Marxist guardian angel of history. The fact that she does not appear as an object of sexual desire in the film should not consign her to being a Nun, however figuratively framed. The subtext is clear: Berlin in ruins will be in ruins again unless the marriage of the revolutionary past is consummated in the present. The conflation of narrative frames at the close of Und wieder ’48 present an inverse to the distance in the focalized omnipresence of the narrator in the opening sequence of Berliner Ballade—but the result is effectively the same. The radical emptiness of a Stunde Null, a temporal impasse epitomized on screen by the shocking images of the ruined city, is transformed by being taken out of its time and placed within new contexts. These uses of focalization and metaleptic breach serve to retemporalize the stasis of the present, offering hopes for a future beyond the trauma. Just as Otto Normalverbraucher escapes into the preordained future with his fantasy bride at the close of Berliner Ballade, so too the protagonists join on the path to revolutionary fulfilment in Und wieder ’48; in both films the temporal divisions collapse and the spatial threat of the ruins is overcome. So the city, stripped bare by her histories, redeems her narratives and buries her pasts.

Works Cited Film Dudow, Slatán. Kuhle Wampe Oder: Wem Gehört Die Welt? Prometheus, 1932. Froelich, Carl. Der Gasmann. UFA, 1941. Staudte, Wolfgang. Die Mörder sind unter uns. DEFA, 1946. Stemmle, Robert A. Berliner Ballade. Comedia-Film GmbH, 1948. Von Wangenheim, Gustav. Und wieder ’48. DEFA, 1948. Weiss, Helmut. Die Feuerzangenbowle. UFA, 1944.

Text Diderot, Denis. Discours de la poésie dramatique. Paris: Demain, 1758.

12 Shandley, Rubble Films, 141–143.

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Eisenstein, Sergei. Le mouvement de l’art [1928]. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1986. Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse. Translated by Jane Lewin. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Gunning, Tom. D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Neumann, Günter, et al. Schwarzer Jahrmarkt: Eine Revue der Stunde Null. Berlin: Blanvalet, 1975. Pleyer, Peter. Deutscher Nachkriegsfilm 1946–1948. Münster: Fahle, 1965. Ridley, Hugh. “Intellectual Freedom in Germany’s 1848 Revolution: The Trial of Gustav Adolph Schlöffel.” German Life and Letters 32 (1979): 308–317. Shandley, Robert R. Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001.

CHAPTER 14

“A ‘Bridgehead’ in the Visible Domain”: Chloe Aridjis’s, J. S. Marcus’s and Theodore Sedgwick Fay’s Tales of Berlin Joshua Parker

Introduction American authors’ readings (and writings) of Berlin, often no less complex and conflicted than those of their German counterparts, have a history nearly as longstanding. The first American fiction set in Berlin—indeed, one of the first in English or any other language—dates back 180 years, to a romance subtitled “A Tale of Berlin” by Theodore Sedgwick Fay, a diplomatic envoy from Washington to the Prussian court, who retired after his diplomatic service in Berlin, where he would spend the rest of his life. Fay is a figure about whom little has been published,1 though he himself published prolifically, not only novels, but a geography handbook,

1 Thomas Robert Price’s Samuel Woodworth and Theodore Sedgwick Fay: Two NineteenthCentury American Literati (ed.D. thesis [Penn State University, 1970]) contains the only known collection of biographical materials.

J. Parker (B) University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_14

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works on German history for American readers, and works on American history for German audiences, often with pointed political subtexts. One of his works, a pamphlet describing discrimination against Americanborn Jews in Switzerland, helped suspend their expulsion from several Swiss cantons in 1860.2 But perhaps as interesting is that his first American fiction set in Berlin portrays a Jewish Berliner as one of its central characters—a simplistic villain drawn along the lines of Shakespeare’s Shylock, who, when not paid for a loan, attempts a murder, and in the end is punished and “transported” from Prussia. The contemporary Jewish-American authors this article will be comparing with Fay’s work would most likely recoil from the naiveté of his plot as much as from his stereotyping, but Fay’s “tale of Berlin” does have something curiously in common with their more recent work—its two volumes, published in 1840, offer a moral tale, set in a city ambiguously straddling the recent past and the present, and playing on postmemory narratized in the form of an individual’s experience of Berlin.

The Countess Ida. A Tale of Berlin Fay’s preface to The Countess Ida. A Tale of Berlin announces his narrative as a moral tale, using a foreign setting to illustrate an issue close to home. Contemporary American novelists like James Fenimore Cooper had already used plots set in European cities to offer Americans moral messages, warning of dangers into which their own young republic might fall, and John Lothrop Motley’s Morton’s Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial (1839), published a year before Fay’s romance, had already mentioned Berlin as the setting for an avoided duel. Though a practice already in decline in the United States by 1840, dueling is a repeated theme in Fay’s work, and one which had touched his own life indirectly. Fay’s father had studied law with Alexander Hamilton, perhaps America’s most prominent duel victim. Three years before Fay’s birth, Hamilton in 1804 reputedly fired into a tree branch in Weehawken, New Jersey to avoid taking his opponent Aaron Burr’s life, in turn receiving a bullet that ended his own.3 Four years later, Burr himself was in Europe

2 Price, Samuel Woodworth and Theodore Sedgwick Fay. 3 Burr had proposed the duel in response to insults to his character reportedly made by

Hamilton, which Hamilton would not specifically deny.

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(1808–1812),4 and his journals from his European tour (1838) were published the year following Fay’s arrival in Berlin, two years before A Tale of Berlin’s publication.5 Fay’s novel might thus in part be read as a response to the publication of Burr’s own journals. Yet it belies even more clearly what Marianne Hirsch has called postmemory, a second generation’s relation to an (often traumatic) event previous to their own birth, transmitted second-hand so powerfully that the subject feels it to be a personal memory.6 As Kitty Klein has suggested, “composing a story [out of a negative memory] reduces the size and complexity of the original experience into a smaller unit that ‘lets memory work less hard’ (Schank and Abelson 1995: 42).” Klein cites a study (Pennebaker and Seagal 1999) suggesting that “the act of converting emotions and images into words actually changes the nature of the memory of the stressful event.”7 Might Fay’s discomfort with an event which surely colored his youth, as it impacted his father’s career,8 have been first conceived as a national issue, then narrativized in a world where its outcome could be changed? Striking similarities can be traced between Alexander Hamilton and the hero of Fay’s novel, Claude Wyndham. Hamilton was born out of wedlock in the British West Indies to the son of a Scottish laird, who

4 Burr had been brought to court for treason by President Thomas Jefferson for attempting to found an independent state by buying 40,000 acres of land in Mexico and bringing armed farmers there to secede from Spain. He left for Europe to escape American creditors. 5 Burr’s journals repeatedly mention plans for a visit to Berlin “to see Humboldt” (Aaron Burr, The Private Journal of Aaron Burr During His Residence of Four Years in Europe; with Selections from His Correspondence, ed. Matthew L. David [New York: Harper & Brothers], 1838, 305)—one of the German acquaintances Fay himself was later most proud to have made. Yet Burr finally never visited Alexander von Humboldt or Berlin, passing instead from Stockholm via Hamburg to Hanover and through Eisenach back to Frankfurt and Paris. Given Hamilton’s struggle against the pro-French faction Burr at times courted, one cannot help but imagine Burr’s aborted flirtation with Prussia before his return to America via Paris, while five times citing an interest in Berlin, mirrored (in Fay’s eyes) his own hero’s flirtation with Paris and erstwhile ensconcement in Berlin. 6 Marianne

Hirsch, Family Frames, Photography, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

Narrative,

and

Postmemory

7 Kitty Klein, “Narrative Construction, Cognitive Processing, and Health,” in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003), 56–84 (65). 8 And presumably his own, as Fay (like Hamilton and his own father), had studied law in New York, while working as a clerk in his father’s practice.

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left Hamilton’s mother during Hamilton’s early childhood in order to save her charges of bigamy during her divorce from her Danish-Jewish husband.9 When Hamilton’s mother died, her estranged husband was to play a villain’s role during Hamilton’s adolescence, suing for family goods. Hamilton, on the strength of his description of a deadly sea storm purportedly written as a letter to his father10 but eventually appearing in a newspaper, was sent over sea via Boston by patrons to be schooled.11 His ship caught fire en route, landing (a “limping,” “blackened hulk”12 ) in Boston Harbor. Wyndham, Fay’s hero, is likewise raised in the British West Indies and is “badly treated”13 there, then shipwrecked in an accident supposedly killing his mother, from which he is brought to Boston, then to England to be schooled.14 Wyndham’s father, like Hamilton’s, is a British nobleman and (though accidentally) a bigamist, having remarried on hearing news of his first wife’s death at sea. Like Hamilton’s mother, he raises a second son, his presumed heir until the story can be set straight. And, much as Wyndham pines for an unknown father in Berlin, the adult Hamilton would make repeated overtures to his father (still in the West Indies) to join him in the U.S.15 Nathan Schachner notes 9 According to traditional twentieth-century biographers (and we are concerned here more with Hamilton’s mythos as received in the late eighteenth century than with historical fact), because of his mother’s husband’s religion, Hamilton was unable to attend Christian school, instead studying at a Jewish school in the West Indies. 10 Alexander Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton: Selections Representing His Life, His Thought, and His Style, ed. Bower Aly (New York: Liberal Arts Press: 1957), 14. 11 In New York. 12 Nathan Schachner, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Appleton-Century Company,

1946), 26. 13 Theodore Sedgwick Fay, The Countess Ida: A Tale of Berlin (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1840), 94. 14 Fay’s fictional narrative thus bypasses New York (the site of Hamilton’s untimely death). 15 Hamilton, His Life, His Thought, and His Style, 7; Schachner, Alexander Hamilton, 11. As Schachner notes, Hamilton was “in later life anxious, nay eager, to avow himself the son of James Hamilton,” and to assert his connection “to the eminently respectable Hamiltons of Scotland” to give himself “a solid footing in the very insecure matter of his birth” and to establish an aristocratic background (Schachner, Alexander Hamilton, 11). His father resisted the sea voyage to the U.S. for fear of a change of climate, though Hamilton was later “pathetically flattered” (13) by direct correspondence from his Scottish relatives, seizing “the opportunity to establish once and for all the essential respectability of his birth and lineage” (13).

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that Hamilton and his half-brother (the previously born son of his mother’s Jewish husband) “must certainly have met, for the narrow limits of Christianstadt [Hamilton’s mother and father had relocated to the same island where her husband lived with Hamilton’s half-brother] precluded complete avoidance. But is it just as certain,” supposes Schachner, “that they passed each other without speech and with resentful looks.”16 Fay’s protagonist Wyndham and his antagonist half-brother Elkington, meanwhile, struggle for title, inheritance and lady-love in the uncomfortably shared space of Berlin. Both Hamilton and Wyndham, of noble parentage on their father’s side, yet without claim to lineage and beset by taunts of bastardhood, apply themselves to politically rewarding, if not financially rewarded causes. Implying a more implicit struggle for political power’s rewards, Fay’s novel can be read as a struggle of different ideologies in an urban space that is, for all its far-flung distance from America, essentially an elongated political gaze at its post-Revolutionary dynamics.17 If in Irving’s “Rip van Winkle” (1819), setting a German folktale in the Catskills “helped to Americanize” it,18 here an unfortunate chapter in American political mythology is Germanized. If the novel’s title “Ida” is broken into its two syllables, it is literally I/da (I/there), the self set at a distance from its own world. As Eudora Welty wrote, “[e]very story would be another story […] if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else,”19 much as Franco Moretti posits “different spaces are not just different landscapes,” but “different narrative matrixes. Each space determines its own kind of actions, its plot—its genre,”20 and Wyndham’s insertion into a strange new city allows a transformation of plot and genre to a story whose events would, under normal circumstances, as they did for Hamilton, render tragedy. Berlin, (because it is) culturally iconic of the duel, provides the space in which dueling’s 16 Schachner, Alexander Hamilton, 17. 17 Further discussion of the novel’s plot, and of the texts treated in the following

section, can be found in Joshua Parker, Tales of Berlin in American Literature up to the 21st Century (Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016). 18 “Rip van Winkle,” in Cyclopedia of Literary Places, ed. R. Kent Rasmussen (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois, 2003), 995–996 (995). 19 Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” in Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, & Memoir (New York: Library of America, 1998), 781–796 (787). 20 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (New York: Verso, 1998),

84.

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results can (and must) be reversed. Gabriel Zoran has noted “the frequent location of fairy tales in distant lands,” implying an “ontological passage from the reader’s world,” dominated “by realistic probability,” to “a world of imagination” located in “a physical remoteness within an indeterminate space,”21 and Simon Schama has noted that the elaborate framing borders of eighteenth-century landscapes, much like Fay’s introduction, act “as a kind of visual prompt to the attentive that the truth of the image was to be thought of as poetic rather than literal.”22 “Through narrative,” as Bradd Shore writes, “the strange and familiar achieve a working relationship,”23 and Fay’s Berlin, with all its elements of a proto-Ruritanian romance set in a “real” place, is a cityscape prompting a poetic reading of (post)Federalist politics. Though set on the eve of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1790, fifty years before its publication, Fay’s romance contains “several unimportant anachronisms” which his preface hastens to justify: The Berlin park, at the time referred to by the story, was not the exquisite promenade it is at present; nor has any attempt been made to paint the local costume or manners of the period. It has been rather the intention of the writer to illustrate a principle, and to record his protest against a useless and barbarous custom; which, to the shame of his own country, exists there in a less modified form than the good sense and good taste of European communities, to say nothing of their moral and religious feeling, would sanction elsewhere.24

Insisting anachronisms in his city’s topography are unimportant, Fay, like many authors who followed him, creates a curiously composite Berlin, a city unmoored from any specific temporality, mingling historic and contemporary elements which could, and perhaps do exist in other times or places, under the guise of different “costume or manners.” A Tale of Berlin is, Fay announces, a tale of anywhere and any time, in which the city models progressive nonviolent peace agreements. Fay’s book is both

21 Gabriel Zoran, “Towards a Theory of Space in Narrative,” Poetics Today 5, no. 2 (1984): 309–335 (332). 22 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Perennial, 1995), 11. 23 Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 58. 24 Fay, Countess Ida, 3.

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a plea for an end to the practice of dueling and, in a sense, a rewriting of an historical tragedy that impacted his own life and American politics, transposed to a foreign city to play out its narrative with a happier ending than it had in America. It is, also, like later works set in the city, a Berlin where mysterious ghostly presences appear to the young protagonist as echoes of his own past and future, and where the protagonist repeatedly muses on architectural elements that “speak to the soul almost with a language.”25

The Captain ’s Fire and Book of Clouds The contemporary American authors I turn to next also encapsulate postmemory narratives in personal stories set in Berlin, though the postmemory they focus on is tragic on a much larger scale. It is for this reason, I will propose, that these novels struggle both for and against changes to the narrative template they employ. Yet in a similar way both J. S. Marcus’s The Captain’s Fire (1996) and Chloe Aridjis’s Book of Clouds (2009) are stories of young Americans coming to Berlin to create new lives with opportunities the city offers—narratives hesitating between the template of the successful urban American bildungsroman’s individual quest for happiness, and that of a collective memory of historical tragedy. In Marcus’s The Captain’s Fire, a Jewish-American narrator attempts to find his place in Berlin soon after the fall of the Wall. His narrative—and its structure—balances his willingness to accept himself as one of many new foreign immigrants to the city, and his specifically Jewish experience of the city. There is a struggle in the overall narrative between telling his story as one of integration, of coming to the city and building a successful business, and of telling his story along the lines of collective memory—a secondary story-template or “city script”26 centered on flight from the city. Marcus’s narrator is overwhelmed by the historical undertones he feels in the city, yet also finds in Berlin’s reunification a way to unify disparate areas of his own life, hinting that the post-Wall city may provide a template for stories of healing the past. Yet at the same time he also seeks to outline his place in a broader, pre-established narrative of the city, and is thus split between finding a connection with what lies under the

25 Fay, Countess Ida, 201. 26 Mahler, in this volume, Chapter 1.

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surface and combating or fleeing from it. Meanwhile, he ponders which of two images of the city to hang on his walls: Piero della Francesca’s Ideal City, or “one of Ludwig Meidner’s apocalyptic landscapes.”27 This disjunction between two opposing images of the city is almost synonymous with the disjunction between two possible narrative outcomes that is central to Marcus’s novel—will it be the story of a young individual’s successful fight for a new life in the city? Or will it adhere to echoes of a collective past to take form as the story of a flight from an apocalyptic landscape? How much is what one feels in Berlin personal to oneself, and how much is it tied to collective and historical images? According to Jan Assmann, though individual memories are conditioned by personal perceptions, they are contextualized in the framework of collective memory discourse, or in what John Clarke called “Landkarten der Bedeutung ” (“maps of meaning”).28 “The degree of assimilation of various ethnic groups is […] considerably influenced precisely by the readiness of this particular group to forget certain parts of its cultural heritage”29 —in this case, the “map of meaning” or “script”30 Berlin traditionally offers writers since the 1930s. Marcus feints a step in this direction, initially describing Berlin as a “superfluous” city: “a capital of dead ideas; a card catalogue for a library that no longer exists,”31 first showing a willingness to admit the past’s irrelevance, though finally adhering to it ever more strongly. Berlin’s ideas and symbols are, in the end, not dead for the narrator: racism (both Berliners’ and his own) and echoes of a police state constantly threaten to resurface, at least in his imagination, finally leaving him literally in flight from the city to the safe space of home. Aridjis’s novel works in much the same way, first refusing the past’s importance

27 J.S. Marcus, The Captain’s Fire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 102. 28 John Clarke et al., Jugendkultur als Widerstand. Milieus, Rituale, Provokationen

(Frankfurt a. M.: Syndikat, 1979), 41; Jan Assmann, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität,” in Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), 9–19 (36), Yuliya Kozyrakis, “Remembering the Future: Ethnic Memory in Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides,” Forum for Inter-American Research 3, no. 1 (2010). http://interamericaonline.org/volume-3-1/kozyrakis (accessed March 2014). 29 Kozyrakis, “Remembering the Future.” 30 Mahler, in this volume, Chapter 1. 31 Marcus, The Captain’s Fire, 188.

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to the individual’s experience of the city, but finally boldly underlining its effects on the present. Aridjis’s Book of Clouds depicts a disaffected young secular Jewish Mexican coming to Berlin seeking freedom from burdensome family ties, and at first finding independence in the city. Berlin’s “Stadtluft ” seemingly offers real freedom for Tatiana, who sees herself as joining “one of the many migrations to Berlin,” to find an apartment “happily free of references, banal or nostalgic.”32 Yet when she begins working for a history professor whose research contrasts sharply with her own initial experiences of the city, Aridjis’s “map of meaning,” too, shifts away from new beginnings toward a more traditional narrative template. “I saw Hitler,” Tatiana begins her tale, under a chapter headed “August 11, 1986.” Berlin is the last stop on her family’s European tour. Joining a protest against the Wall (“No matter where you went—east, west, north, south—before long you hit against the intractable curtain of cement and were able to go no further […] so we figured that we too might as well protest against this seemingly endless structure that limited even our movement”), Tatiana imagines she sees Hitler sitting across from her on the subway afterward, in the form of an old woman, the sight of whom “might have been enough to give anyone a heart attack.”33 Unable in the crowded car to explain what is happening to her family, she is transfixed, and notices a group of SS guards standing around her imagined Hitler. No one believes her when she tells the story, but throughout the novel the fact is never questioned by Tatiana, even as an adult. Years later, Tatiana, having found a book by Stefan Zweig left in her family’s deli, decides to study German and receives a scholarship to study in Berlin, after which she stays on. Her narrative opens in her fifth year, when she has just moved to a new apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. Berlin is an isolating city for Tatiana. She finds, then loses friends, lovers and jobs, ending up with none, but she relishes her isolation, after having grown up in a large family. Riding the S-Bahn for pleasure, she finds its repetitive routes anesthetizing and comforting—its tracks set, there are no decisions to make about its direction as she sees the same views over and over, announced over the train’s loudspeakers. Her treatment of the city is loving, but surface. Its history fails to interest her. While elderly

32 Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds (New York: Black Cat, 2009), 26 and 10. 33 Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 1–2.

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women living below her apartment who watch her in the courtyard from their windows seem to be dying off, one by one, vaguely reminiscent of the female Hitler she saw on the subway, the most interesting events in the city, it seems, are its strange changes of weather. A sudden thunderstorm shakes the neighborhood one afternoon and Tatiana hurries home, expecting to find traces of the storm in her apartment afterwards, but notices only two things—her curtain rod is now crooked, letting in annoying rays of light into her bedroom that keep her awake, and wide lines of dust have risen from the floorboards, knocked up from between them: “something in the building’s very foundation had shifted, revealing new fault lines.”34 Strange noises begin to come from the empty apartment above hers and, along with the street light coming through the cracks in her curtains, keep her up at night. Ever practical, Tatiana buys a “noise machine,” complete with waterfall sounds and bird songs, to cover the building’s mysterious noises. Through family connections at home, Tatiana begins working for a history professor, Doktor Weiss, who is narrating a book on the phenomenology of Berlin’s space. Weiss’s project, for Tatiana, is indeed an oral history and message, not a written one, for he speaks onto cassettes which Tatiana listens to and transcribes. “Spaces cling to their pasts […] and sometimes the present finds a way of accommodating this past and sometimes it doesn’t. At best, a peaceful coexistence is struck up between temporal planes but most of the time it is a constant struggle for domination,” Weiss’s voice proposes.35 Weiss is astonished at Tatiana’s lack of historical schooling on Berlin. “Don’t you read the plaques outside buildings?” he chides her. For him, certain buildings in Berlin are “demon[s] of brick” which “shouldn’t be used for anything new,”36 and he goes on to bemoan that the Wannsee Conference villa was used as a children’s hostel after the war, worrying about the energy the children must have imbibed. Listening to his voice, Tatiana transcribes Berlin’s history, and his ideas on space’s memory. The other recorded voice in her life is that of the S-Bahn, repeatedly recounting the stations the train passes: “I preferred this recorded voice to any other voice I had heard in my life, especially

34 Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 15. 35 Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 33. 36 Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 96.

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on days when I felt disconnected from the city, attached by the thinnest of strings.”37 One of Weiss’s particular obsessions is the subway lines that ran under the walled city from one side of West Berlin to the other, crossing under East Berlin’s “ghost stations.” Soon, he shows her drawings made by East Berlin children in the 1970s—one of ants tunneling under the Berlin Wall. She is asked to interview the now adult Berliner who made the drawing, Jonas, who asks her out to a party, where he muses, “maybe it’s true that Weiss dwells too much on what spaces were … But Berlin can’t just be a museum of horror. There has to be regeneration, don’t you think?”38 Their conversation is interrupted by someone at the party’s offer of a tour of the basement, in which there is a reputed “Gestapo bowling alley.” Tatiana decides to descend with the others to see “Berlin’s underground, a whole topography”—here, one can’t help but remember Berlin’s “Topography of Terror” museum—“that lay, forgotten, twenty or thirty or forty feet down. Bunkers, theaters, disused this and that, countless tunnels, arches, storerooms and other damp, dark cavities: an architectural miscellany in permanent hiding from the sun.”39 Even their guide isn’t sure if it’s really a Nazi bowling alley or a Stasi one: “Nazi, Stasi, what’s the difference” he says, in answer to a query. After seeing the bowling alley, with the last scores of its players still marked on the wall, Tatiana has an overwhelming urge to erase the score: “Nazi, Stasi, whatever they were, why the hell should be they granted this kind of posterity?”40 She stays behind the group to wipe the score from the wall with her fist, but is left behind in the dark when she slips and falls, and is only come back for later. This being left blind in the dark, with her sighting of Hitler, she says, are the most frightening moments of her life. But, once upstairs again, she immediately goes back to dancing at the party. When she tells Weiss of the event, he answers, “Well, yes. Nothing ever vanishes.”41 She decides that “nothing can truly be rubbed away or

37 Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 28. 38 Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 109. 39 Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 112. 40 Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 115. 41 Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 125.

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blotted out, and how the more you try to rub something away the darker it becomes.”42 On a second date, Jonas takes Tatiana to the Holocaust memorial, where he urges her to play hide and seek there with him in the dark. Finally, as they make love, Jonas describes to her the Brocken Specter, the ghostly image of one’s own shadow magnified and projected onto the mist below the mountain by the sun behind one, on this supposedly haunted mountain. This forms a counter-argument to Weiss’s repeated warnings that the past’s energy still haunts the present: here, the ghosts one imagines are simply one’s own shadows. Finally, Jonas invites Tatiana and Weiss to Marzahn, where they are attacked by muggers, just as a mysterious cloud of fog falls over the city, saving them from their attackers, but so thick it leaves them blinded in its descent. Tatiana wanders home through the cloud, her watch stolen, to learn the next morning that untold violence and theft took place during the fog-like cloud—and that the art in museums and the books in libraries were in danger. Sudden touches of magic realism are not uncommon in recent fiction set in Berlin, making the “imaginary” historical subtexts appear as physical characters in the present. A delicate balance of ignorance and remembrance seems required for living in Aridjis’s Berlin. Her narrator’s language and attitude constantly stress her youth, especially as compared with the professor and the men he sends her to interview. Memory, she seems to be saying, is not as important for the young as for the old—not unless it faces them directly. Which it will, if forgotten. Not examining the past is like turning off a light, making oneself blind to the past’s eventual return. The cloud (ignoring history) at first offers protective insulation, but eventually permits a resurgence of violence. Again, a narrative template of escape overrides Tatiana’s intentions to build a new life for herself in the city. After six years there, she suddenly decides to board a plane and return to an uncertain future at home with her family. The conclusion to her tale is both unexplained and oddly satisfying. Both novels, like Fay’s, portray a hybrid city, in which figures from the past flit among present-day citizens, immaterial but not without eventual effect, creating a doubled temporality. In such hybrid fictional worlds, as Lubomír Doležel writes, a basic feature “is the lively traffic between the

42 Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 128.

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contrary and separated domains.” Here, “the invisible world establishes a ‘bridgehead’ in the visible domain,” where “direct contacts between representatives of the invisible domain and selected inhabitants of the visible domain take place.”43 “Lively contacts between the domains” is maintained through “emissaries” and “informers”—the former appearing from the invisible world like Marcus’s visions of apocalypse, the latter attached to the visible world, who “control the flow of information across the boundary”44 like Aridjis’s Doktor Weiss. Meanwhile, in this hybrid city, much as in Kafka’s Das Schloss, as described by Doležel, “the visible-domain inhabitants are under permanent threat of an order, a decree, a decision that originates in the invisible domain and deeply affects their existence.”45 Indeed, in Marcus’s and Aridjis’s novels, this invariable urban “invisible domain” affects the plots’ narrative outcomes, yet remains largely unconnected to the storylines themselves in terms of traditional plotting. Both of these contemporary novels’ conclusions run counter to current trends in actual migration to Berlin. Why these tales of flight from Berlin, when in fact the number of actual North Americans is growing?46 Perhaps because these narratives, for all their postmodern polish, tie themselves very closely to mythic structure. As Doležel writes, “[t]he visible/invisible world of the modern myth has been created as a secularized counterpart of the classical myth.”47 “Mythic narrative,” writes Louis Marin, “picks up a history or past […] and gives it its own rhythm and order. It transforms by relating its symbolic history, and it therefore constitutes the history of the group, itself constituted through and by that mythic narrative.”48

43 Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 192. 44 Doležel, Heterocosmica, 192–193. 45 Doležel, Heterocosmica, 193. 46 There are around 21,000 U.S. citizens currently residing in Berlin. Contemporary Berlin’s Jewish population is estimated at around 30,000 residents. Meanwhile, some 15,000 mainly young, secular Israelis have moved to the city in the last decades (Norman Sklarewitz, “Rebirth of Jewish life in Berlin,” Jewish Journal, June 5, 2012, https://jew ishjournal.com/culture/travel/104791/ [accessed May 2013]). 47 Doležel, Heterocosmica, 196. 48 Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, trans. Robert A.

Vollrath (New York: Humanity Books, 1984), 36.

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If, as Walter Abish once facetiously wrote in describing his own fictional German city, “[t]he past has been forgotten,”49 this seems the reason postmemory is engaged through mythic narrative in these tales of Berlin: in Abish’s novel, much as in Fay’s, forgetting an “invisible” past presents such a grave danger to collective identity that it must be made “visible” through mythic structure even at the expense of the individual’s integration to the contemporary city. We seem to see here a preferencing of what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has called a “meaning culture” over a “presence culture.” If the body is the dominant self-reference in a presence culture, then […] space, that is, that dimension that constitutes itself around bodies, must be the primordial dimension in which the relationship between different humans and the relationship between humans and the things of the world are being negotiated [i.e. presence culture, J.P.]. Time, in contrast, is the primordial dimension for any meaning culture […] because it takes time to carry out those transformative actions through which meaning cultures define the relationship between humans and the world. Now if space is the dominant dimension through which, in a presence culture, the relationship between humans […] is constituted, then this relationship […] can constantly turn (and indeed tends to turn) into violence […]. For meaning cultures, in contrast, it is typical (and perhaps even obligatory) to infinitely defer the moment of actual violence and thus transform violence into power […].50

Much as Fay’s tale of Berlin defers a series of potential duels, ultimately transforming avoided violence into wealth, title and bride for his protagonist, Aridjis’s and Marcus’s novels use echoes of historical violence from the “invisible” world of modern myth to make otherwise ordinary expatriate experiences resonate from an urban space taking on this power through deferment of violence.

49 Walter Abish, How German Is It (New York: New Directions, 1979), 2. 50 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 83.

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Conclusion As Elana Gomel has written, “time travel […] requires the equivalence of the past and the future, just as the three spatial dimensions are equivalent.” All three of these “time traveling” fictions set in Berlin, with their hybrid worlds of past and present mingled in a single mythic urban landscape, seem to fall into what Gomel calls “the postmodern episteme” asserting that “time is space”—and that space is often time.51 “As the sense of historicity collapses,” as it does in these narratives, they initially register “‘a shift in sensibilities from a predominantly temporal and historiographic imagination to one much more concerned with the spatial and the geographic’.”52 One might assume that as “[t]ime, rather than space, shapes such salient features of narrative as directionality, causality, and agency,” time travel, or an urban landscape of hybrid temporality, “enables agency, which is predicated on the ability to choose between several alternatives.”53 And, indeed, in Fay’s hybrid Berlin, in which multiple temporalities are projected onto urban space, such “time travel” allows a protagonist to change what might seem a determined narrative template based on an historical outcome. Yet in these more recent fictions, it seems rather to limit narrative outcomes of their plots. As Gomel writes, ironically, “[t]he chronotope of time travel inscribes the cultural ‘depthlessness,’ historical fatalism, and temporal fragmentation of the postmodern subject. In doing so, it exposes the paradoxical kinship between the postmodern denial of history and the extreme forms of historical determinism.”54 Though both Marcus’s and Aridjis’s novels’ closing scenes show characters boarding planes to flee Berlin after long and largely positive experiences in the city, perhaps there is more to their departures than geographic flight. Their visits to the contemporary city, and their abrupt flights in the wake of what is depicted as a resurgence of its history, represent more a flight from the city’s historical mythos than from the contemporary city and the experiences it offers. Stories ending in physical, geographic flight from Berlin’s “invisible world of modern myth” 51 Elana Gomel, “Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel,” Narrative 17, no. 3 (2009): 334–352 (335). 52 Smethurst, quoted in: Gomel, Shapes, 335. 53 Gomel, Shapes, 335. 54 Gomel, Shapes, 335.

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might be seen working in conjunction with their depictions of experiencing the city in a contemporary context, what Doležel would call its “visible domain.”55 Though these two systems of portraying the city (first as a largely positive contemporary space where one builds a new life, second as an historical nightmare one must flee) would seem to present conflicting messages, they in fact work in conjunction, and only appear to be at odds because of our own expectations that narratives present chronological events as causally related—post hoc ergo propter hoc. In both novels, “flight” from the city is not a “logical” outcome of the plots. Perhaps it is, instead, a reformulated way of restating the trope of migration to the city, which requires that its “invisible” world be set aside (even fled from) to focus on its contemporary “visible domain.” Tales of flight from the city’s “invisible world” are thus not at odds with tales depicting life and adaptation to its “visible domain.” Rather, the two in conjunction illustrate, in both a mythical and non-mythical sense, coming to terms with the past and with the present. Seen this way, Berlin, perhaps like any city, is neither merely “a card catalogue for a library that no longer exists,”56 nor an ongoing “struggle for domination” between various temporal planes,57 but a space, both read and narrated, in which history is constantly held up for comparison with the various stories that thrive in its wake.

Works Cited Abish, Walter. How German Is It. New York: New Directions, 1979. Aridjis, Chloe. Book of Clouds. New York: Black Cat, 2009. Assmann, Jan. “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität.” In Kultur und Gedächtnis, edited by Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988, 9–19. Burr, Aaron. The Private Journal of Aaron Burr During His Residence of Four Years in Europe; with Selections from His Correspondence. Edited by Matthew L. David. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838. Clarke, John, et al. Jugendkultur als Widerstand. Milieus, Rituale, Provokationen. Frankfurt a. M.: Syndikat, 1979.

55 Doležel, Heterocosmica, 192. 56 Marcus, Captain’s Fire, 188. 57 Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 33.

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Doležel, Lubomír. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Fay, Theodore Sedgwick. The Countess Ida: A Tale of Berlin. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1840. Gomel, Elana. “Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel.” Narrative 17, no. 3 (2009): 334–352. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Hamilton, Alexander. Alexander Hamilton: Selections Representing His Life, His Thought, and His Style. Edited by Bower Aly. New York: Liberal Arts Press: 1957. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames, Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Klein, Kitty. “Narrative Construction, Cognitive Processing, and Health.” In Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, edited by David Herman. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003. 56–84. Kozyrakis, Yuliya. “Remembering the Future: Ethnic Memory in Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.” Forum for Inter-American Research 3, no. 1 (2010). http://interamericaonline.org/volume-3-1/kozyrakis. Mahler, Andreas. “City Scripts/City Scapes. On the Intertextuality of Urban Experience.” In Exploring the Spatiality of the City Across Cultural Texts. Cham: Springer, 2020. Chapter 1. Marcus, J.S. The Captain’s Fire. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Marin, Louis. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces. Translated by Robert A. Vollrath. New York: Humanity Books, 1984. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. New York: Verso, 1998. Parker, Joshua. Tales of Berlin in American Literature up to the 21st Century. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016. Price, Thomas Robert. Samuel Woodworth and Theodore Sedgwick Fay: Two Nineteenth-Century American Literati. Ed.D. thesis, Penn State University, 1970. “Rip van Winkle.” In Cyclopedia of Literary Places, edited by R. Kent Rasmussen. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 2003. 995–996. Schachner, Nathan. Alexander Hamilton. New York: Appleton-Century Company, 1946. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. London: Harper Perennial, 1995. Shore, Bradd. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Sklarewitz, Norman. “Rebirth of Jewish life in Berlin.” Jewish Journal. June 5, 2012. https://jewishjournal.com/culture/travel/104791/.

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Welty, Eudora. “Place in Fiction.” In Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, & Memoir. New York: Library of America, 1998. 781–796. Zoran, Gabriel. “Towards a Theory of Space in Narrative.” Poetics Today 5, no. 2 (1984): 309–335.

PART VI

Dis/Continuities

CHAPTER 15

Finding Causes for Events: The City as Normative Narrative Rebekka Rohleder

When a literary text tells stories of a city, it does much more than just situate its plot in the space of its fictional world. Such storytelling acts out conflicts between different urban narratives, and makes the city meaningful in the first place. This much is part of the premise of this volume. What I will explore in this chapter is the way in which such narratives are normative. I assume, first of all, that normative assumptions about society are inherent in all urban narratives. These assumptions are intimately connected to the temporality of these urban narratives, as I intend to show with the help of three examples which tell stories of the city as a (literary) space in time. One is a historical novel: Mary Shelley’s Valperga (1823), in which the narrator contrasts the fourteenth-century condition of the Italian city states in which much of the novel is set with the early nineteenth century when the novel was first published. By contrast, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) superimposes stories of London’s various pasts on each other, up to and including “the present

R. Rohleder (B) University of Flensburg (EUF), Flensburg, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_15

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moment.”1 In addition to Shelley’s early nineteenth-century depiction of an urban past from the perspective of her present and Woolf’s early twentieth-century evocation of the presence of the past in the present-day city, I will look at one twenty-first century dystopian/utopian novel (the author calls it “ustopia,” a term which combines both2 ), namely Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), in which narratives about urban life become true stories within the fictional world of the novel. The timeframe covered by these three novels, wide as it is in terms of literary history, still limits the rather sweeping assumption introduced above. To render it more concrete: at least since Romanticism,3 the temporality of urban narratives is tied to normative assumptions about society. In the following, I want to look at two different forms of temporality and the assumptions called up by them: a static city as opposed to one that is continually transformed through storytelling. Before that, however, I will explain in what way urban narratives are normative in the first place.

Literary Spaces and “Degenerate Inhabitants” To begin with, representations of cities depict spaces that are inscribed with meaning. They are, after all, built environments. As man-made spaces they lend themselves to being read as meaningful spaces, even to being read semiotically—witness Roland Barthes’s proposal for developing an urban semiotics, and Umberto Eco’s comments on the “architectural

1 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (London: Flamingo, 1995), 227. In the following, this edition of the novel will be cited in brackets in the text, as Orlando. 2 Atwood observes that every utopia is also a dystopian world for those who are

unwilling or unable to fit into its version of an ideal society, whereas every dystopia implies a version of a preceding or succeeding or at least imaginable world which is better than the dystopian world described (Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination [London: Virago, 2011], 85–86). In any case, utopian fiction has long been very interested in the city as a model for the community, and dystopian fiction has also become very much invested in the city, a development traced in Raphael Zähringer’s Hidden Topographies: Traces of Urban Reality in Dystopian Fiction (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). 3 Mary Shelley’s participation in or opposition to the Romantic movement is a somewhat contentious issue, but her writings are doubtless part of the same cultural moment as those of the Romantic poets.

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sign.”4 One of the ways in which the city is traditionally inscribed with meaning in literary texts in particular consists in using it as an image of society. Thus, in Shelley’s Valperga, both Venice and Florence are selfconsciously used in such a way when the novel imposes another literary layer on them. In the case of Venice, the narrator is prompted to a digression on the nineteenth-century present by a visit to the city in the novel’s fourteenthcentury plot: [T]hey continued their way to Venice. Who knows not Venice? its streets paved with the eternal ocean, its beautiful domes and majestic palaces? It is not now as it was when Castruccio visited it; now the degenerate inhabitants go “crouching and crab-like through their sapping streets:” then they were at the height of their glory, just before the aristocratical government was fixed, and the people were struggling for what they lost— liberty.5

“Who knows not Venice?” Indeed, who knows not at least of the canals, domes, and palaces, which the narrator invokes here? These are nearly timeless clichés.6 In this context, though, the point of these clichés is that the city itself is anything but timeless. In the fourteenth century, Venice is depicted at a specific historical moment; the nineteenthcentury narrator of the novel describes a different state of the community by quoting Byron’s drastic description of Venice in the early nineteenth century. The “crouching and crab-like” inhabitants come from “Venice. An Ode”—a poem which is decidedly not an ode to the Venice of its present, which stands for “[t]hirteen hundred years/Of wealth and glory turn’d to dust and tears;/And every monument the stranger

4 Roland Barthes, “Semiology and the Urban,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 2004), 166–172; Umberto Eco, “Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 2004), 182–202. 5 Mary Shelley, Valperga: Or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, ed. Nora Crook, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, vol. 3 (London: Pickering, 1996), 29. In the following, this edition of the novel will be cited in brackets in the text, as Valperga. 6 After all, “Venice finds itself, as it were, ‘over-scripted’,” as Andreas Mahler observes (in Chapter 1 in this volume).

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meets,/Church, palace, pillar, as a mourner greets.”7 In the poem, the physical decay of the sinking city stands for its political decay, but the physical integrity of “[c]hurch, palace, pillar” does not fare any better: the buildings become monuments of a past which is irrevocably lost. Decaying or otherwise, the state of the city signifies the state of the nation. After all, in Byron’s poem, like in Shelley’s novel, the city is first of all a political entity. Byron foregrounds Venice’s status as a former republic; Valperga is set in an Italy of independent city states. The city is not a pars pro toto for the wider community: it is the community. The stories which the poem and the novel tell about urban space illustrate the moral which both draw from the history of that community, namely a story of political and urban decline. But the novel uses an intertextual reference in order to tell that story. In fact, the novel quotes Byron’s poem in a—by Mary Shelley’s standards—extraordinarily straightforward manner. Elsewhere, for instance in Frankenstein, in The Last Man, even in her poetry, her quotations tend to go against the grain of the text she quotes by subtly changing the wording, the meaning or the political significance. This principle is applied almost indiscriminately: she does the same with quotations from Edmund Burke, from Wordsworth, and from Percy Shelley’s poetry. Her intertextual references generally register a protest of some sort, or at least a creative appropriation and transformation. Here, though, she reinforces the notion that nothing new can be said about Venice, by affirmatively and unironically repeating Byron’s dictum about the city’s decline. It becomes one of those things that everyone knows about Venice that the city’s physical features stand for the loss of political liberty. For Florence, a city in which this novel is much more interested than in Venice, literary space is superimposed on urban space in a more surprising manner when the novel’s protagonist, Castruccio, witnesses a theatrical representation of a literary text. The “strange and tremendous spectacle” which the fourteen-year-old Castruccio visits Florence to see is a representation of “Hell, such as it had been described in a poem now [in 1304] writing by Dante Alighieri, a part of which had been read, and had given rise to the undertaking” (Valperga, 14). At the sight of “legions of ghastly and distorted shapes, some with horns of fire, and hoofs, and horrible wings; others the naked representatives of the souls in 7 “Venice. An Ode,” in George Gordon Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 201–206 (201, ll. 13 and 15–18).

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torment” on boats on the River Arno, the boy can hardly distinguish between theatrical representation and reality, and sees the river as “a yawning gulph where the earth had opened to display the mysteries of the infernal world” (Valperga, 15). So far, this confusion of reality and theatre seems a rather conventional way of expressing that a spectator is overwhelmed by a performance. But within the same sentence, the confusion between the city and its literary inscription is literalized by a catastrophe, when a bridge collapses, drowning a “countless multitude” of spectators in the river (Valperga, 15). In the spectacle, the city is first theatrically transformed into Dante’s literary version of hell, promising the audience the same opportunity of seeing the afterlife and returning to tell the tale which Dante’s poem also offers its narrator. With the collapse of the bridge, the theatrical illusion is reinforced rather than destroyed: “I am escaped from Hell!” a frightened Castruccio exclaims after witnessing the catastrophe (Valperga, 16). To this spectator at least, the Florentine bridge and river have suddenly really become what they were only meant to appear: a Dantean hell. In this scene, the process of mapping the space of one literary text onto the streets of the city is represented in another literary text, namely the novel. The “fair city of Florence” (Valperga, 15) becomes the fictional world of a poem written by one of the city’s (banished) citizens—and one who had, in his turn, peopled hell with a lot of Italians, many of them Florentines, some of them still alive at the time Dante was writing his poem. In 1304, a Florentine audience watching the “naked representatives of the souls in torment” (Valperga, 15) from the Divine Comedy could conceivably include living persons whom Dante’s narrator encounters in hell. Even before the collapse of the bridge, reality and representation are intertwined in complicated ways in this literary version of an urban space. In both Venice and Florence, intertextual references are thus used in order to introduce the reader to the city, and clarify what this particular city stands for in the novel. In both cases, the city as a literary space is emplotted through these references, to borrow Hayden White’s term. The city is experienced in fragments (a decaying building, a collapsed bridge) of which the observer makes sense by telling stories. The emplotment of history by the historian, according to White, is “the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a

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story of a particular kind.”8 In the case of the city, these stories can, for instance, be stories of progress, or of the rise and fall of a city. Crucially, all these stories are essentially normative narratives: they piece fragments of urban history and experience together in order to judge them in a certain way. Interestingly, in Valperga, narrative logic and urban space are both described as products of the imagination. Thus, when the Florentines celebrate the birth of new whelps to the city’s lions as a good omen, Castruccio ridicules “these wise republicans”—whom he opposes politically—for believing in “childish omens” (Valperga, 122–123). The answer he receives from a Florentine citizen ascribes this belief in omens to narrative logic and aligns both with the act of building a city in the first place: We love to find a cause for every event, believing that, if we can fit but one link to another, we are on the high road for discovering the last secrets of nature. You smile at the celebration of the birth of these lion whelps; yet I own that it pleases me; how innocent, yet how active must the imagination of that people be, who can find cause for universal joy in such an event! It is this same imagination more usefully and capaciously employed, that makes them decree the building of the most extensive and beautiful building of modern times. The men who have conceived the ideas, and contributed their money towards the erection of the Duomo, will never see its completion, but their posterity will, and if they be not degenerate, will glory in the noble spirit of their ancestors. (Valperga, 123)

The Florentines’ belief that the fate of their city is bound up with the fate of their lions is just as much a product of an imagination which tries to make sense of the history and future of the city by storytelling as their building projects. Indeed, the building projects themselves are a form of storytelling. The speaker may agree with Castruccio that a belief in omens is superstition, but she does not therefore agree with him in ridiculing her countrymen and-women for their superstition. Instead, she claims that the act of inscribing urban space with meaning by building a cathedral is essentially the same as that of transforming unrelated fragments of experience into causes and effects and therefore into a story. Building a city is primarily an effort of the imagination. Later generations are imagined 8 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 7.

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as reading the city in the way in which it was meant to be read—“if they be not degenerate” at least, which implies a normative narrative in its own right. But the act of superimposing an imaginary city on the one that really exists is not just a way of constructing a norm by which future generations can be measured. It is also itself something that the novel clearly values. The narratives imposed on a city are even more important than its buildings themselves.

Narratives of a Static City The examples from Valperga all operate with different time frames, providing its real and imagined cities with a history, and implying positive or negative judgments for their past, present, and future. Within such narratives, the city can be imagined as a static space or, conversely, as one that is open to change. Technically, the city is always open to change: the built environment is undoubtedly a man-made space, and all boundaries in urban space are by necessity artificial; any rules of conduct in specific places are conventional rather than natural. There cannot be any natural and therefore permanent frontiers in a city. At least there should not be any. Except for the phenomenon which Pierre Bourdieu, in an essay entitled “Site Effects,” calls the “naturalization effect” of the inscription of the social into physical space. The result of this inscription is, according to Bourdieu, that “historical differences can seem to have arisen from the nature of things”: space naturalizes the social, that is, because the social is symbolized in space.9 From a sociological perspective, this argument itself has been criticized for naturalizing the social by reading it in spatial terms.10 Indeed, in Bourdieu’s essay the fact that the social order is also a spatial order means that it cannot be conceived of as other than static—or rather, and even more disconcertingly: that change is only imaginable in terms of violence, symbolic or otherwise:

9 Pierre Bourdieu, “Site Effects,” in The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Pierre Bourdieu et al. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 123–129 (124). 10 Roland Lippuner and Julia Lossau, “In der Raumfalle: Eine Kritik des Spatial Turn in den Sozialwissenschaften,” in Soziale Räume und kulturelle Paktiken: Über den strategischen Gebrauch von Medien, ed. Georg Mein and Markus Rieder-Jadich (Bielefeld: transcript, 2004), 47–63.

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Part of the inertia of the structures of social space result from the fact that they are inscribed in physical space and cannot be modified except by a work of transplantation, a moving of things and an uprooting or deporting of people, which in itself presupposes extremely difficult and costly social transformations.11

This inertia of physical space can indeed be mistaken for a version of the idea that space is the realm of the static, and that only time and history allow for change to be thought. This in turn is a concept of space which has variously been criticized in other contexts, for instance by Doreen Massey, who argues that it “effectively depoliticize[s] the realm of the spatial.”12 Massey demonstrates that the association of time with becoming and progress, and space with stasis, relies on reductionist definitions of both time and space, which do not take into account that both in physics and—more crucially—in the social sciences, time and space are now regarded as interrelated rather than opposed to each other.13 Moreover, the idea that space is opposed to politics depends on a view of space as a background or container in which the social happens.14 By contrast, Massey argues for a relational concept of space, in which “the social is inexorably also spatial.”15 Nonetheless, the Bourdieuan “naturalization effect” is not itself a way of naturalizing the social by making it spatial. Instead, it describes an effect of the double nature of space as material reality and symbolic system which is perhaps best illustrated by what Henri Lefebvre terms “a double illusion” that conceals the fact that “(social) space is a (social) product”: the illusion of transparency and the realistic illusion. The illusion of transparency means that space seems decipherable, “free of traps or secret places”: a text which can easily be read and understood. The second illusion privileges space as “substantial reality” instead: here, space is not symbolic. It just is, and allows for no further interpretation. Lefebvre argues that these two ways in which space appears to have meaning are not at all opposed to each other. They belong together and reinforce each 11 Bourdieu, “Site Effects,” 124. 12 Doreen Massey, “Politics and Space/Time,” New Left Review 196 (1992): 65–84

(66). 13 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 264. 14 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 262. 15 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 246.

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other.16 After all, both deny the complexities of the symbolic inscriptions of space. They also depend on the absence of change. A space whose meanings are static would indeed be easily decipherable; a space which is thought of as a pre-existing reality which determines what happens in it is not open to change either. Thus, both illusions essentially naturalize the social. In the literary city, too, space may naturalize the social. Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel provides instructive examples of how static the social space of a city can become within a given genre. For instance, in the early nineteenth-century silver fork novel, the real social complexity of London is replaced by a “black-and-white system: west of Regent Street, one city; east of it, a different one.”17 The same is true of non-literary constructions of urban space. Thus, in early nineteenth-century maps and novels alike, the geography of the London West End is conventionally very detailed, whereas to the east it becomes vague and even in maps “roads lose their names.”18 A well-mapped affluent part of the city, which is in itself the site of minute social differences on the one hand; the dark unknown world of the slums on the other hand: this is a world in which everyone knows their place. And as I will demonstrate in the following, such static cities and their naturalized distinctions are not just an issue that concerns the nineteenth century. In Atwood’s Oryx & Crake (2003), set in the same fictional universe with her The Year of the Flood, for example, it is exactly such a view of the city which first brings about what it describes, and then (as it turns out in the prequel, The Year of the Flood), the novel’s catastrophe. In the novel, which takes place in a not-too-distant future, Jimmy, the protagonist, who grows up in the Compounds, a sort of gated community, knows cities only as a medial representation on television, where they consist in endless billboards and neon signs and stretches of buildings, tall and short; endless dingy-looking streets, countless vehicles of all kinds, some of them with clouds of smoke coming out the back; thousands of people, hurrying, cheering, rioting. […] Compound people didn’t go to the cities unless they had to, and then never alone. They called the cities the pleeblands. 16 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden: Blackwell, 1991), 27–30. 17 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 83. 18 Moretti, Atlas, 83.

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Despite the fingerprint identity cards now carried by everyone, public security in the pleeblands was leaky: there were people cruising around in those places who could forge anything and who might be anybody, not to mention the loose change—the addicts, the muggers, the paupers, the crazies. […] Outside the OrganInc [Compound] walls and gates and searchlights, things were unpredictable. Inside, they were the way it used to be when Jimmy’s father was a kid, before things got so serious, or that’s what Jimmy’s father said.19

To someone who has spent all their life in the Compounds, the cities must be frightening because there is no way of telling who their numerous inhabitants might be and what these people might do next. In the media, cities are portrayed as inherently chaotic and dangerous. Crucially, though, this way of representing the city is not far removed from a discourse that is familiar to contemporary readers: the city as an overcrowded, anonymous place with too much traffic and too many dubious persons. The novel is set in a world in which corporations have taken over the state and in which scientists are engineering what they consider the perfect human being, but this fictional world is clearly based on recognizable discourses from the real world in which the novel was published—a point the author stresses in interviews: “[i]t is our world, except with a few twists,” as Atwood states.20 It is a world in which discourses from our world are made into realities, that is. In the case of the city, it is its representations which bring about what they describe in this novel: the city as a lawless place, which accommodates those whom the Compounds are designed to keep out. In The Year of the Flood, which is set in the pleeblands, it becomes clear the cities really are as chaotic and dangerous as the Compound inhabitants believe them to be. In the cities might (and money) is right, and people can easily disappear, intentionally or otherwise. In this novel, the city is a place for crooks, gang members and prostitutes—for anyone who does not have much to lose. Order is kept only within the Compounds; the cities, however, are the outside of this order: a space which seems lawless, but which is not 19 Margaret Atwood, Oryx & Crake (London: Virago, 2013), 31. 20 Brockes, Emma, “Margaret Atwood: ‘I Have a Big Following Among the Biogeeks.

“Finally! Someone Understands Us!”’ The Novelist Talks to Emma Brockes About Zombies, Bees—And Why She Had to Finish Her Latest Novel, MaddAddam, on a Train,” The Guardian August 24 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/ aug/24/margaret-atwood-interview (accessed September 3, 2019).

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a counter-space, but rather the necessary opposite to the order of the Compounds, the knowledge of which keeps their inhabitants in check. The city is also the place of the novel’s one more or less utopian community: the “God’s Gardeners,” an environmentalist and vaguely Christian sect of dropouts who prepare for survival after the breakdown of civilization. The members of this sect do not leave the city in order to go back to whatever they consider the roots, though: they cultivate a rooftop garden within the city. Nonetheless, they, too, much like the Compound inhabitants, see the outside world—the world outside their garden—as alien and dangerous, Compounds and pleeblands alike. They call everything outside their own community the “Exfernal World,”21 a neologism from “external” and “infernal”: an environment on which they clearly depend for their self-definition, but everyday contact with which they keep to a minimum. Once again representation and reality are mutually determined: Glenn/Crake, the scientist who later goes on to create a virus which kills most of the world’s population, is heavily influenced by the Gardeners’ belief that mankind is essentially evil and will be wiped out by a “Waterless Flood, which will be carried on the wings of God’s dark Angels that fly by night,” as one of the Gardeners predicts (YotF , 120). Crake merely literalizes this prediction: the pills containing the virus are first distributed in the pleeblands by sex workers, to whom he gives them under false pretenses. No description of the world is innocent in this fictional universe: there is always the possibility that someone believes in it and has the means to put it into practice. A representation of the city and of society as divided into natural units may well create its own reality, reproducing the spatial and social exclusion first assumed by a discourse about it. The Gardeners are harmless enough, but conceptualizing the rest of the world as “exfernal” is not harmless. People who wax nostalgic about the well-ordered world of their childhood may also be harmless, as long as they do not take to rebuilding this childhood world for themselves and leaving everyone else to fend for themselves in the lawless cities they have imagined and brought about. Then the representation takes on a life of its own, and becomes the reality of the cities.

21 Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (New York: Anchor Books, 2010), 77. In the following, this edition of the novel will be cited in brackets in the text, as YotF .

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Narratives of Urban Transformation Normative narratives of a naturalized and static urban space, with clearly defined areas of danger and safety, stand in contrast to the city’s (no less normative) association with time and change. After all, as David Harvey points out, the possibility to “change and reinvent the city”22 is always already implicit in the built environment. The city is “an object of utopian desire […] within a perpetually shifting spatio-temporal order.”23 Here, the city is inextricably bound up with time. It is a space with a history of change and with a future which is expected to bring further change, both to the city and to society—and to society (as well as to the individual) by means of the city: the city is, among other things, a space of perfectibility. It is therefore a space which invites narrative representation. The city implies stories: stories of the city, stories of society, stories of biographical ways to, through or out of the city. This is for example the case in Woolf’s Orlando, a novel in which reality and representation of the city are bound up with each other when the protagonist, who experiences London in several stages of its development from the sixteenth to the twentieth century during his/her extraordinarily long life, looks out of the window at the end of the eighteenth century. She could see St Paul’s, the Tower, Westminster Abbey, with all the spires and domes of the city churches, the smooth bulk of its banks, the opulent and ample curves of its halls and meeting-places. On the north rose the smooth, shorn heights of Hampstead, and in the west the streets of Mayfair shone out in one clear radiance. Upon this serene and orderly prospect the stars looked down, glittering, positive, hard, from a cloudless sky. (Orlando, 171)

Enlightenment London is enlightened: in addition to the glittering stars it has street lighting as well as representative buildings with clearlyassigned functions. By contrast, Orlando recalls Elizabethan London as crowded, a mere huddle and conglomeration of houses, under her windows at Blackfriars. The stars reflected themselves in deep pits of stagnant water which lay in the middle of the streets. A black shadow at the corner where 22 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), 4. 23 Harvey, Rebel Cities, xvii.

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the wine shop used to stand was, as likely as not, the corpse of a murdered man […]; for danger and insecurity, lust and violence, poetry and filth swarmed over the tortuous Elizabethan highways and buzzed and stank […] in the little rooms and narrow pathways of the city. (Orlando, 171– 172)

Both are essentially literary Londons. Orlando’s remembered version of Elizabethan London with its “danger and insecurity, lust and violence, poetry and filth” recalls Elizabethan drama; her observations on the orderly London of the eighteenth century (and its distance from Elizabethan disorder) match the Enlightenment’s self-description as the age of reason. Everything is open to observation here; no more dubious “black shadow[s] at the corner.” Elizabethan London, however, is at this point a remembered London: the Other of the Enlightenment. The novel’s actual Elizabethan scenes emphasize completely different aspects of the city. These Elizabethan scenes are also narrated with an emphasis on historical difference, though, and this historical difference is that between the time in which the narrator is telling the story (which will later turn out to be the day of the novel’s publication) and the time that is described. Thus, the narrator says about Orlando’s early life that “[t]he age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even,” and that “[t]he withered intricacies and ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age was unknown to [Elizabethan poets]. Violence was all. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went” (Orlando, 21–22). Accordingly, the novel’s Elizabethan London scenes feature only the court and the sailors’ haunts: splendor and squalor. There is nothing in between. The era’s urban space matches its mentality and poetry, as perceived in the 1920s. This matching of city and mentality is a recurring pattern in Orlando. In Victorian London, Orlando, much to her dismay, comes across an assortment, in St James’s Park of “widow’s weeds and bridal veils; […] crystal palaces, bassinettes, military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes, cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants and mathematical instruments” (Orlando, 178). The city becomes a repository for the contents of the Victorian mind with this collection of symbolic objects, many of which can easily be imagined as part of some monument. After all, the objects themselves all suggest either the Victorian family or the Empire,

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exploration and science. In addition to that, the collection is so incongruous—with objects belonging to completely different categories lined up next to each other—that it resembles a very disorderly museum or an encyclopedia, or a novel with a profusion of everyday detail. The pile of objects thus parodies quintessentially Victorian institutions. It has been argued that London in Orlando simply functions as a “verifiable realistic setting for a fictional world,” which forms the solid backdrop to the novel’s more fantastic elements such as the protagonist’s sudden sex change and his/her unexplained longevity.24 To a certain extent this is true, if we take realism in the sense of a Barthesian “reality effect” at least: Orlando’s various historical Londons are convincing in that they do indeed offer the reader recognizably stereotypical images of the city in a given age. But these images are verifiable from literary history rather than history. Elizabethan London in Orlando corresponds to the world as described by Elizabethan poets, as they in turn are characterized by the novel’s narrator; London in the nineteenth century is as full of more or less meaningful detail as a nineteenth-century realist novel. The collection of objects in the park itself, and the cloud over the city which inaugurates the nineteenth century, can hardly count as part of a “verifiable realistic setting” in any other sense. Each historical layer of London in the novel represents a self-consciously literary inscription of the city in the past. Orlando’s urban space is a space of literary history. And it is as a space of literary history that London in Orlando questions the apparent naturalness of the symbolic inscriptions of the city. The Victorian pile of objects, for instance, seems, to the protagonist, to be made to last forever; but when she looks again, in 1928, there is not a trace of it left in St James’s Park (Orlando, 226). Victorian styles of thinking and writing are obsolete by then, and urban space is transformed accordingly, and in ways which appear almost magical. A car is not an everyday object; it is “an absurd truncated carriage without any horses [which] began to glide about on its own accord,” and in the evening, “[a]t a touch, a whole room was lit; hundreds of rooms were lit; and one was precisely the same as the other. […] And the sky was bright all night long; and the pavement was bright; everything was bright” (Orlando, 226–227). Orlando then has the impression that “the very 24 Susan Dick, “Literary Realism in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf , ed. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 50–71 (68).

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fabric of life now […] is magic” (Orlando, 229). London in the 1920s is just about recognizable—with cars and electricity—but at the same time the city is a literary space, too, in which cars and electricity are cast as objects from a fairy tale—carriages move without horses; the city is lit up without any apparent human effort. The novel’s representation of the city in 1928, like its Victorian counterpart, is an integral part of the selfconsciously fictional world of the novel rather than simply providing a realistic backdrop for it. It is still a literary London. Accordingly, the city is constructed by continual storytelling in this novel. Stories of the city are told and re-told and transformed in the telling, depending on the moment when they are told, and continually transforming the city and its meanings. Thus, events which take place much earlier in the novel are recalled in an entirely different context: Orlando stood there hesitating. Through the great glass doors she could see the traffic in Oxford Street. Omnibus seemed to pile itself upon omnibus and then to jerk itself apart. So the ice blocks had pitched and tossed that day on the Thames. An old nobleman in furred slippers had sat astride one of them. There he went—she could see him now—calling down maledictions upon the Irish rebels. He had sunk there, where her car stood. (Orlando, 323)

“That day on the Thames” is over three hundred years before the moment in which Orlando remembers it. Crucially, it also takes place elsewhere. Orlando observes the old nobleman on the ice block in the thawing Thames at Wapping at the end of the frost of 1608 (Orlando, 47–49). When she points to the place in which “[h]e had sunk there, where her car stood,” this is not at all the actual place. The car stands on Oxford Street. The place can only be the same in relation to Orlando herself as the observer of the scene. It is this observer who superimposes the “riot and confusion” (Orlando, 48) on the Thames after the breaking up of the ice onto the traffic on Oxford Street in “the present moment”—that is, the 11th of October, 1928 (Orlando, 227)—which was also the day on which the novel was first published.25 On that day, Oxford Street also reminds Orlando of his/her eighteenth-century adventures in Turkey. London is no longer merely itself to Orlando; it recalls other times and places, a phenomenon which ties in with the fact that 25 Dick, “Literary Realism,” 64.

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“the present moment” is also the date of the novel’s publication. After all, both the end of the frost and Orlando’s adventures in Turkey are crucial moments in the story this “biography” tells. Both are moments in which the continuity of the story is broken as Orlando inexplicably falls asleep for days and awakes a changed person. In Turkey, Orlando falls asleep as a man and wakes up as a woman. After the end of the frost, he is devastated by the betrayal of Sasha, which eventually requires an unnaturally long sleep for him to forget. In both cases, the biographer/narrator is avowedly unable to explain exactly what happens: coherent stories can be made of the before and after, but not of these moments. And these disruptive moments are precisely the memories which come back to Orlando on the day on which her biography is published, in a “present moment” and a city inscribed with memories the past. Thus, this novel intervenes in the emplotment of urban spaces by proposing a proliferation of narratives. It has its own agenda, too.26 The temporality of urban space does not produce only one coherent narrative here, though, with a corresponding set of normative assumptions. Instead, it produces different discourses of the city for different historical periods, destabilizing each one of them in its turn. The intervention of the other two novels is a bit different. In The Year of the Flood the dangers of assuming a static, naturalized space are exposed by showing how such assumptions bring about what is assumed. And in Valperga, the imagination is also invoked as that which creates urban space, but, in accordance with the Romantic celebration of the imagination, in a more positive manner. In all cases, though, norms can be invoked and challenged through descriptions of urban space and its transformations. Every story of the city is itself normative in these texts.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. The Year of the Flood. New York: Anchor Books, 2010. ———. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. London: Virago, 2011. ———. Oryx & Crake. London: Virago, 2013. Barthes, Roland. “Semiology and the Urban.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach. London: Routledge, 2004. 166–172. 26 See Claudia Heuer’s reading in Chapter 12 in this volume.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. “Site Effects.” In The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Pierre Bourdieu et al. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. 123–129. Brockes, Emma. “Margaret Atwood: ‘I Have a Big Following Among the Biogeeks. “Finally! Someone Understands Us!”’ The Novelist Talks to Emma Brockes About Zombies, Bees—And Why She Had to Finish Her Latest Novel, MaddAddam, on a Train.” The Guardian, August 24, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/24/margaretatwood-interview (accessed September 3, 2019). Byron, George Gordon. “Venice. An Ode.” In The Complete Poetical Works, vol. 4, edited by Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. 201–206. Dick, Susan. “Literary Realism in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves.” In The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf , edited by Sue Roe and Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 50–71. Eco, Umberto. “Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach. London: Routledge, 2004. 182–202. Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2012. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Malden: Blackwell, 1991. Lippuner, Roland and Julia Lossau. “In der Raumfalle: Eine Kritik des Spatial Turn in den Sozialwissenschaften.” In Soziale Räume und kulturelle Paktiken: Über den strategischen Gebrauch von Medien, edited by Georg Mein and Markus Rieder-Jadich. Bielefeld: transcript, 2004. 47–63. Massey, Doreen. “Politics and Space/Time.” New Left Review 196 (1992): 65– 84. ———. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1998. Shelley, Mary. Valperga: Or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, edited by Nora Crook. The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley. Vol. 3. London: Pickering, 1996. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. London: Flamingo, 1995. Zähringer, Raphael. Hidden Topographies: Traces of Urban Reality in Dystopian Fiction. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017.

CHAPTER 16

Private Topographies: Visions of T¯ oky¯ o in Modern Japanese Literature Gala Maria Follaco

Cityscapes, Mindscapes, and a Foreign ¯ o¯ Modernity: Edo Becomes Toky In T¯oky¯o, as in many other metropolises, the relationship between “City” and “Literature” has always been significant—and natural, given the similarity between the life of cities and narratives, that allow us to see the city as a text. Urban narratives unfold in space and time, speak their own languages, represent and disguise reality through specific rhetorical systems. The capital of Japan is a multifaceted and multi-layered urban space, a complex code of signs and symbols enshrining histories and stories, memories, lies, and hidden truths. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the 1 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Trade Publishing, 1974), 11.

G. M. Follaco (B) University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Naples, Italy © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_16

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banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.1

Calvino’s insight reminds us that the city is inscribed with its past. Thus, it provides reflections and insights for a critical (and hermeneutic) reread of history. In some cities, the conceptual and political dimensions of time and history have affected space in a particularly problematic way, and one of those is T¯oky¯o, especially between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. T¯oky¯o became the capital of Japan in 1868–1869, when the Emperor moved from Ky¯oto to Edo (subsequently renamed T¯ okei and eventually T¯oky¯o) at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration (1867). This period is considered the onset of Japan’s modernization, which is often associated with “Westernization,” since one of its main features was the cultural exchange with the newly discovered countries of Europe2 and North America. Japan encountered the West and felt the urge to keep up with it, especially in the fields of science and technology. The government promoted Westernization in an effort to present a modern image of Japan with the aim of facilitating treaty revisions with foreign nations—and in particular with the United States.3 “Consequently,” as Tipton notes, “Meiji leaders both outside and inside government encouraged the adoption of Western social customs and cultural styles to reach the goal of ‘civilization and enlightenment’ (bunmei kaika), with no doubt that ‘civilization’ meant Western civilization.”4 To make this “modernization” visible, a modern capital was needed, and the government embraced the construction of a city with its own rules, its own features—even a brand new past. As Henry D. Smith records, an urban planning measure was introduced in 1888, designed to make T¯oky¯o a “grand, permanent, and monumental” 2 Although previously Japan had had interactions with some Europeans, in particular the Portuguese and the Dutch in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively, between the mid-seventeenth century and the 1850s the isolationist foreign policy established by the Tokugawa shogunate limited greatly official associations and exchanges with Western countries. 3 On this topic see chapters II and III of William G. Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese Travellers in America and Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 17–55. 4 Elise K. Tipton, Modern Japan. A Social and Political History, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 47.

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city, as the Haussmann Plan had done in Paris.5 Moreover, Western architects were hired to design new government buildings, especially in those parts of the city most visible to foreign visitors. William Coaldrake wrote that: The western-style buildings of powerful new government ministries and the burgeoning commercial empire of Mitsubishi lined the broad gas-lit avenues in the heart of Tokyo. Together with public facilities like post offices and railway stations, they became the new architecture of authority. Gracious buildings of stone or brick presented to the world the new imperial and commercial order. Their uncompromising vertical façades and strictly symmetrical wings proclaimed their importance with an architectural vocabulary of Greek columns and Renaissance-inspired porticos and pediments.6

The city became an increasingly passive entity, the focal point for many interests. Those who held power considered T¯ oky¯o a “showcase,” supposed to be seen from outside. For newcomers arriving from elsewhere in the country and full of expectations, it was a sort of projection of desire, a space to look at from their particular perspective.7 The real past was now mostly entrusted to the people and the frail construct of memory. This might be the reason why T¯oky¯o, according to Philippe Pons, is “marquée par la prégnance d’une mémoire spatiale,”8 suggesting that space, here, is deeply connected to the intimate dimension of those who inhabit it. T¯ oky¯o is transitory, precarious, the place of a permanent hic et nunc; rather than trying to govern its time it lives “dans une sorte de renoncement à la maîtrise de son destin en tant que ville.”9 As a result, the notions of cityscape (considered here as the architectural, somehow objective, “face” of the city) and mindscape (the city as it is perceived and represented by the people), with their discrepancies and 5 Henry D. Smith, “Tokyo as an Idea: An Exploration of Japanese Urban Thought Until 1945,” Journal of Japanese Studies, 4, no. 1 (1978), 45–80 (55). 6 William H. Coaldrake, Architecture and Authority in Japan (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 209. 7 Smith, “Tokyo as an Idea,” 55–56. 8 “[…] Marked by the pregnancy of a spatial memory.” Philippe Pons, D’Edo à T¯ oky¯ o.

Mémoires et modernités (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 21. 9 “[…] in a sort of renunciation of the control over its destiny as a city.” Pons, D’Edo à T¯ oky¯ o, 136–138.

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mutual conflicts, appear particularly significant when engaging in a critical reading of T¯oky¯o’s urban fabric. Soon after the beginning of the Meiji era, there was much discussion of bunmei kaika among the intellectuals. Some agreed with the government, others did not. But the harshest, most articulate, criticism ¯ came from those—Narushima Ry¯uhoku (1837–1884), Mori Ogai (1862– 1922), Nagai Kaf¯u (1879–1959), to mention just three—who had the opportunity to travel and visit foreign lands, becoming familiar enough with Western cultures to gain the impression that their advancement was built on the solid basis of a cherished past. Many sensed bunmei kaika as nothing but a formal, empty, and superficial Westernization, and it is no coincidence that in these very years the city of T¯oky¯o attracted more and more attention, gradually taking center stage in the Japanese public debate. Some commentators openly criticized the government, others chose to celebrate the old T¯oky¯o—even going as far back as Edo—implying that the new one was something alien, but what they have in common is that each formulated an original vision of the new capital as the landscape of modernity’s paradoxes and contradictions. All these visions are crucial for the interpretation of modern Japanese culture.

¯ Edo’s Fortunes: hanjokimono Since T¯oky¯o is one of the symbols of the so-called modern Japan, one might easily be led to consider its previous version, Edo, as a “pre-modern” or even “un-modern” city. In fact, the Edo period (1600– 1868), also known as the Tokugawa era, is commonly referred to as “early modern Japan,” a definition suggesting that, before the absorption of the “foreign modernity” discussed above, the country had already experienced its own “indigenous” (early) modernity. Edo was an extremely lively city. The sankin-k¯ otai (alternate attendance) policy, which required the daimy¯ o (feudal lords) of each province to move periodically to Edo and spend some months there, had a “tremendous” impact on urban development, “as evidenced by rapid population growth, reaching a figure in excess of one million by the early eighteenth century”10 and making it one of the most populated 10 Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 2.

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cities in the world at the time. The circulation of people through the country rapidly transformed Edo into what Constantine Nomikos Vaporis has called a “cultural nexus”: Rather than a unidirectional model, a more accurate paradigm of cultural change, as revealed by alternate attendance, consists of a number of currents by means of which people, ideas, and material goods and other culture flowed between the roughly 250 domains and the center (Edo), from the domains to the cities of Osaka and Kyoto, and from local area (domain) to local area, sometimes directly and sometimes via the center (Edo). Culture was, in other words, produced and transmitted all along the metaphorical road of alternate attendance. As a result, by the end of the eighteenth century Edo became a cultural nexus—the place where a spectrum of the samurai and other educated and artistic elite came together and interacted in numerous human networks.11

Even in a historical period characterized by almost complete isolation from the rest of the world, Edo proved itself naturally disposed to cultural integration and absorption of external elements. As Kornicki noted, there were eight hundred kashihon’ya (commercial circulating libraries) in Edo by the mid-nineteenth century, whereas strangely enough this number decreased after the Meiji Restoration.12 Open-minded, busy, lively: Edo was by no means an “unmodern” city. Its inhabitants enjoyed every kind of urban leisure, including the so-called mizu sh¯ obai (water trade), a euphemistic expression associated with the nocturnal entertainment business set mainly in the pleasure districts of the city, part of the famous “floating world” (ukiyo) of the geisha, sum¯ o wrestlers and kabuki actors. Emanuel Pastreich observed that “[b]y 1859, when Ry¯uhoku began Ry¯ uky¯ o shinshi, there was already a well-established and sophisticated domestic industry of pleasure-quarter literature influenced by that of China.”13 Ry¯uhoku acknowledged it as he acknowledged his predecessors from the Tokugawa era, in particular Terakado Seiken (1796–1868), 11 Vaporis, Tour of Duty, 205. 12 Peter F. Kornicki, “The Publisher’s Go-Between: Kashihonya in the Meiji Period,”

Modern Asian Studies, 14, no. 2 (1980), 331–344 (331–332). 13 Emanuel Pastreich, “The Pleasure Quarters of Edo and Nanjing as Metaphor. The Records of Yu Huai and Narushima Ry¯uhoku,” Monumenta Nipponica, 55, no. 2 (2000), 199–224 (200).

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author of the well-known Edo hanj¯ oki (A Record of Edo Prosperity), a sort of chronicle describing the urban culture flourishing in Edo at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In fact, such literature of the pleasure quarters prospered during the Edo period, recounting episodes that took place in those districts and re-enacting the exploits of the homines ludentes 14 who frequented them. In Ry¯ uky¯ o shinshi (New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, 1859–1871) Ry¯uhoku described the then-thriving pleasure district of Yanagibashi showing a substantial continuity with the tradition of Edo period hanj¯ okimono (records of prosperity), whose archetype was Edo hanj¯ oki, even if by this time the transition from Edo to T¯oky¯o was in full swing. Ry¯uhoku appears enthusiastic about this buoyant emerging quarter (perhaps, as Matthew Fraleigh has suggested, also because he was romantically involved with a geisha who lived there15 ), especially its “metropolitan” character, as the following passage from Book One of Ry¯ uky¯ o shinshi shows: There are regions “where the nearest wine shop is three miles away and the closest tofu store is two miles away,” but such places exist only out in the desolate periphery. In the great metropolis these days, even in dilapidated districts and cramped alleyways, you will find a shop every ten paces, a tavern every hundred. If you can sit down and feast yourself on sea bass from Songjiang or wine from Hangzhou at one of these establishments, just think what a place as splendid as Yanagibashi can offer. The number of drinking houses is the crown of the whole city.16

And again, introducing his list of famous courtesans from the district:

14 The definition obviously refers to the title of the work Homo ludens (1938) by Johan Huizinga (1872–1945), and has been used by Japanese literary critic Maeda Ai (1931– 1987) to describe the attitude of the Edo pleasure district-goers. Maeda Ai, Narushima Ry¯ uhoku (T¯oky¯o: Asahi shinbunsha, 1976), 7–8. 15 Matthew Fraleigh, “Introduction,” in New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West: Narushima Ry¯ uhoku: Reports from Home and Abroad (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 2010), ix–lvii (xxviii). 16 Fraleigh, “Introduction,” 19–20.

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The splendor of Yanagibashi has now reached its peak. How can it be that there is not a single person whose talents surpass all the others and whose name resounds throughout the metropolis?17

Ry¯uhoku appears proud of what he calls the “metropolis,”18 but it is very likely that the first book of his work was completed by 1859– 60, before the Meiji Restoration. According to the dominant scholarship in the field, once “modernization” set in, those who wrote about the city manifested an increasingly critical attitude. A work worth mentioning in this respect is T¯ oky¯ o shin hanj¯ oki (New Records of T¯ oky¯o Prosperity, 1874–1876), by Hattori Bush¯ o (1842–1908). As Maeda Ai points out, his description of T¯oky¯o is based upon a parallel consisting of the pairing of a thing with a metaphor […]. In each case, the superiority of the various things that serve as symbols of “enlightenment” is affirmed by comparison with objects from the past, using an exaggerated form of personification. This is, on the one hand, an innocent expression of the astonishment and admiration of the Japanese of the Enlightenment era when confronted with the strangeness of the West, but at the same time it signifies a strategy whereby the foreign objects that had so relentlessly invaded their field of vision were familiarized by incorporating them into the world of classical kanbun rhetoric.19

In Hattori’s work modernization is already acknowledged and Tokyoites are described as “people who consume things as symbol of ‘enlightenment’ and people who gaze on the new sights of Tokyo, so that the mode of interaction is rather between people and things,” whereas the atmosphere of Terakado’s Edo hanj¯ oki was, instead, one “of easy communication between people and people.”20 While Maeda’s argument is based upon a binary assumption that equates the representation of Edo with 17 Fraleigh, “Introduction,” 61. 18 Fraleigh, “Introduction,” 61. 19 Maeda Ai, “The Panorama of Enlightenment,” trans. Henry D. Smith II, in Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, ed. James A. Fujii (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 65–90 (68–69). The term ‘kanbun’ refers to a Japanese annotated style of writing and reading Classical Chinese in translation. In premodern and early modern Japan, official government diaries and documents, religious texts, and other texts were written in this literary Chinese. 20 Maeda, “The Panorama of Enlightenment,” 83.

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more “human” patterns of urban life (based on communication), and that of T¯oky¯o with the evidence of a “de-humanization” of the city (the dominance of consumption), downplaying the density and diversity of the urban experience that these writings try to convey, it is undeniable that, generally speaking, hanj¯ oki from the Meiji period tend to present new-born T¯oky¯o as a space of consumption rather than communication, where exchanges and interactions are based less upon “human” premises than before. Maeda’s emphasis on people’s gaze corroborates Smith’s idea of Restoration T¯ oky¯o as an objectified, passive entity: a “showcase”21 in fact.

¯ o¯ of the Water: Koda ¯ Toky Rohan (1867–1947) Among those who rejected such a view was K¯oda Rohan, whose Ikkoku no shuto (One Nation’s Capital, 1899) presents some original proposals. According to Smith, [r]ather than espousing the show-case reforms of the government, he advocated a total rebuilding of the city. His ideal was not a “Teito” but rather a “Taito” (great capital). His emphasis was on high density, both of wealth to make it prosper (reminiscent of “Edo hanj¯ o” […]), and of people and buildings to make it stand apart from the country.22

Rohan’s text reflects, as was also suggested by Schulz, “the difficulty of conceiving the city as an abstract idea. It convincingly shows the problems connected with the use of pre-Meiji vocabulary and its underlying precepts for the explanation of modern urban phenomena.”23 Schulz’s essay, which is the essential reference on the subject of Rohan’s urban thinking, stresses the author’s philosophical background, especially 21 Smith, “Tokyo as an Idea,” 53. 22 Smith, “Tokyo as an Idea,” 56–57. The term ‘Teito’ suggests for Smith “a Tokyo

viewed less as a city than as a symbol of the nation”: “In the 1890s, the dominant idea of Tokyo was as an object, to be viewed from the outside. This sense is best captured by the word ‘Teito’ (imperial capital), an old Nara term which became popular from about the time of the Meiji Constitution” (55). The Nara period lasted from about 710–784. 23 Evelyn Schulz, “The Past in Tokyo’s Future: K¯ oda Rohan’s Thoughts on Urban Reform and the New Citizen in Ikkoku no shuto (One nation’s capital),” in Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective: Place, Power and Memory in Kyoto, Edo and Tokyo, ed. Nicolas Fiévé and Paul Waley (New York: Routledge, 2003), 283–308 (285).

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in terms of his Daoist-inspired image of T¯oky¯o’s modern condition as “chaos.”24 In Ikkoku no shuto Rohan tries to conceive “Tokyo’s future on the basis of concepts from the past,”25 and “[i]n contrast to the image of chaos” mentioned above, “[h]e focuses mainly on the function of the city as a social organism. He perceives the city as a living entity with all of its parts interconnected and dependent on each other as in an organism.”26 Such an interconnected structure is also characteristic of another work by Rohan, Mizu no T¯ oky¯ o (T¯oky¯o and water 1902),27 a collection of essays which celebrates the beauty of the city by focusing on its rivers. T¯oky¯o has a striking skyline, featuring a multitude of impressive sights, and one might fail to notice that it is built on water. Some neighborhoods have been established recently and now occupy a part of the bay (Odaiba and Haneda, for instance). Several rivers flow across the city and some areas are defined by dozens of streams and canals. These were more visible before the modernization, probably explaining why they recur so often in previous Japanese literature, music, and painting. In the opening section of Mizu no T¯ oky¯ o Rohan himself declares his desire to explain the beauty of the city apart from its cherry blossoms and red foliage: he wants everyone to know how fascinating the “T¯ oky¯o of the water” is.28 He talks about the rivers of the city moving from East to West and from North to South. “T¯oky¯o is a city embraced by rivers, and it lies with the sea as pillow,” he says, and lists them starting with the most important: “Let us start with the Sumida, and then all the others will follow by themselves. So now I shall tell you about the Sumida, then go farther to the other rivers, and finally get to the ocean.”29 Rohan develops a narrative of his city through each stream’s physical features, anecdotes and stories, mentioning an incredible number of toponyms (from the Sumida to the Arakawa, from Toshima to the 24 Schulz, “The Past in Tokyo’s Future,” 289. 25 Schulz, “The Past in Tokyo’s Future,” 285. 26 Schulz, “The Past in Tokyo’s Future,” 292. 27 I have already touched upon this writing in my “Mondi d’acqua. Il motivo del fiume

nell’opera di Nagai Kaf¯u,” in «L’acqua non è mai la stessa»: Le acque nella tradizione culturale dell’Asia, ed. Carolina Negri and Giusi Tamburello (Firenze: Olschki, 2009), 184–186. 28 K¯ oda Rohan, “Mizu no T¯oky¯o,” in Rohan zensh¯ u (Collected Works of Rohan), ed. Kagy¯ukai (T¯ oky¯o: Iwanami, 1954), vol. 29, 498. (My translation. G.M.F.) 29 K¯ oda, “Mizu no T¯oky¯o,” 499.

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Ayasegawa, and then the San’ya canal, the Azuma bridge, the Kandagawa, Yanagibashi, Eitaibashi, and so forth) which most likely were familiar to the readers of early modern literature. Mizu no T¯ oky¯ o is an example of the extent to which men who were acquainted with conventional representations of Edo, and whose sensibility was nurtured by such (mainly popular) cultural tradition focused on the old cityscape, considered rivers an important part of urban life, and of how Rohan, a prominent figure of the Japanese world of letters, was determined to provide the city with the artistic dignity it deserved. Further, the river as literary topos has a very old tradition in Japan, which is linked to Buddhism. We may interpret it as a metaphorical representation of human life constantly flowing from stage to stage. Water flows while the banks are firmly rooted in the soil. The river represents both mobility and immobility, the act of moving forward while staying rooted. This was the idea of modernization that Rohan had in mind: looking to the future while still keeping one eye on the past; this would have been the natural path for T¯oky¯o—with its countless rivers—but the government had chosen to ignore it.

Marginalized Spaces: Higuchi Ichiyo¯ (1872–1896) Higuchi Ichiy¯o was born in 1872 and died when she was only twentyfour, yet earned lasting fame with her literary works set mainly in backward neighborhoods and in the pleasure quarters. She moved to Yoshiwara in 1893, after her family’s financial conditions took a turn for the worse, and there she set up a store selling household goods and candies very close to the well-known entertainment district. This occupation gave her the opportunity to closely observe the children living in those surroundings, and this became a major source of inspiration. Indeed, relocation to new quarters would be a constant in her life, and her awareness of the moods and details of space is also evident in the habit of entitling her journals after the neighborhoods she lived in.30 Despite persistent attempts, she only really succeeded in supporting her family by her writing in 1895, when “Takekurabe” (Child’s Play) was published in the January issue of the literary magazine Bungakukai. 30 Seki Ry¯ oichi, “Ichiy¯o nikki no himitsu: sono nij¯u k¯oz¯o ni tsuite,” Kokubungaku: kaishaku to ky¯ ozai no kenky¯ u 9, no. 10 (1964): 20–27 (22). See also Yamane Kenkichi, “Ichiy¯o nikki no sekai,” Kokubungaku: kaishaku to kansh¯ o 11 (1974): 107–113 (108).

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“Takekurabe” tells the story of a group of children from the Daion Temple area, in Yoshiwara, who “are at the moment when they must surrender the privileges of childhood to accept their harsh destinies as adults”31 ; in a word, as Keene put it, the novella “describes the loss of innocence.”32 Her prose is sometimes reminiscent of previous licensed quarters literature, but the peculiar choice of characters—children—gives it a strikingly modern quality. The scholar Yoshida Seiichi recalled that the ¯ literary giant Mori Ogai praised the humanity of Ichiy¯o’s children, and most of all her descriptions of the Yoshiwara district, catching perfectly its local color.33 It’s a long way round to the front of the quarter, where the trailing branches of the willow tree bid farewell to the nighttime revellers and the bawdyhouse lights flicker in the moat, dark as the dye that blackens the smiles of the Yoshiwara beauties. […] They call this part of town beyond the quarter “in front of Daion Temple.” The name may sound a little saintly, but those who live in the area will tell you it’s a lively place. Turn the corner at Mishima Shrine and you don’t find any mansions, just tenements of ten or twenty houses, where eaves have long begun to sag and shutters only close halfway. It is not a spot for trade to flourish.34

The opening section of the story shows Ichiy¯ o’s acquaintance with the territory and its residents. The willow tree bidding “farewell to nighttime revellers” really existed and was one of the main symbols of the Yoshiwara pleasure district, recurring in leisure quarters literature, popular songs, and ukiyo prints. By mentioning it at the very beginning of “Takekurabe,” she makes the setting clear immediately, knowing that her readers will recognize it, even before she speaks of Yoshiwara. Then Ichiy¯o introduces the characters, and again she emphasizes the local color, the peculiarity of the environment:

31 Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era. Vol. 1: Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 180–181. 32 Keene, Dawn to the West, 180. 33 Yoshida Seiichi, Higuchi Ichiy¯ o kenky¯ u (T¯oky¯o: Shinch¯ osha, 1956), 99. 34 Higuchi Ichiy¯ o, Child’s Play (Takekurabe, 1895–96), in In the Shade of Spring Leaves:

The Life and Writings of Higuchi Ichiy¯ o: A Woman of Letters in Meiji Japan, ed. Robert Danly (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 254–287 (254).

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Most of the people here, in fact, have some connection with the quarter. The menfolk do odd jobs at the less dignified houses. […] Wives rub good-luck flints behind them to protect their men from harm. […] Daughters, too, are involved in the quarter: here, a serving girl in one of the great establishments; there, an escort plying back and forth between the teahouse and the brothel. […] But what will become of these girls once they have graduated from their present course of training? […] In such a world, how are the children to escape being influenced? […]35

The author gradually moves from setting to characters, drawing attention to the relation between the two and also suggesting that environment inevitably influences people’s destiny. No matter how carefree Takekurabe’s young protagonists may appear, they are never under any illusion: they know where they are from, and that their fate is inescapable. However, one of the most distinctive features of her writing is the ability to arouse sympathy without being overly dramatic, and this is probably what sets her apart from the previous writers on the licensed quarters. Her greatest achievement is to have taken into the realm of “pure” and “serious” literature something (or, more precisely, somewhere) that was not supposed to be “literary.” This is similar to what Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) did in his heavily censored first novel, Ragazzi di vita (Hustlers, 1956), which features the Roman lumpenproletariat. Pasolini’s language is lowbrow and even obscene, whereas Ichiy¯o’s is refined, reminiscent, at times, of classic court literature; the former sets out to create scandal, while the latter never openly blames or condemns; yet both manage to throw light upon marginalized, forgotten, or neglected realities, and to do so through a literary representation of the urban fabric.

Sensing the City: Nagai Kafu¯ Nagai Kaf¯u is one of the most problematic figures of Japanese modernity, especially with regard to literary representations of the way modernization affected urban space. His trenchant criticism of Meiji urban policies was centered on the opinion that the government deliberately ignored Edo’s modern features and took a foreign—and shallow—path instead. Kaf¯u lived in the United States and France for five years, and his first-hand 35 Higuchi, Child’s Play, 255.

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experience of those cultures persuaded him that the Western-inspired modernization of Japan was systematically humiliating Edo by transforming it into nothing more than a showcase, a space of rhetorical construction based upon unstable and unreliable patterns, empty and serving only political needs.36 The fundamental shallowness of Meiji modernization worried Kaf¯ u, who considered the discrepancy between core and surface an element of risk, the symptom of a crisis that, sooner or later, would catch up with Japanese society. For him, new forms could never convey old contents: Tokyoites were forced to live renouncing their true identity. He probably had the impression of watching his city through a deforming lens, which made him consider urban space as the key to understanding more diverse processes. His poetics was based on this distorted image, using all kinds of textual and extratextual devices to express his estrangement with respect to the new reality. T¯oky¯o serves as a narrative function in his work, a character bearing the weight of history but also the histoire itself; it is such a complex entity that during his career he often felt compelled to call into question his own modes of representation. This explains the co-existence of different registers in a single work, the gradual fragmentation of the gaze, which culminates in the writings of his later years, and even the employment of other media, such as drawing and photography. But his most consistent characteristic is the tendency to look back at the past while occupying his place in the present, letting his memory work as a narration, as if telling now a story that took place then. This feature of Kaf¯u’s writing clearly recalls Walter Benjamin, who, according to Simon Parker, “rejects the idea that the past can be explained only in terms of the past because history is always seen through the eyes of the present.”37 Such an attitude derives from the city itself, inspired by a sensibility that cannot be abstracted from the urban space. The similarity between Benjamin and Kaf¯u has been emphasized by Schulz, who sees

36 For a critical reading on this subject see Carol Gluck’s essay “The Invention of Edo,” whose analysis of so-called “Edo-as-tradition” is based upon Eric Hobsbawm’s theory of tradition. In Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 262–284. 37 Simon Parker, Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City (New York: Routledge, 2004), 19.

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the latter’s writings “as a starting point for the emergence of the flâneur in Japan.”38 The flâneur’s soul merges into the city’s soul: in the innermost depths of memory the individual finds the meaning—albeit incomplete, or ambiguous—of the human experience, and it is the city, the street, that leads him there.39 This kind of representation is a work of emotional sharing, the same sentimental re-narration which leads Kaf¯ u in his wanderings across T¯oky¯o, abandoning himself to the street, in search of that “lost time”40 indispensable to the comprehension of the present. At the beginning of his career, in New York, he was fascinated by the city, and his characters embraced it while looking down on it from atop a hill or a bridge, as often in Amerika monogatari (American Stories, 1908); but as soon as he went back to Japan his modes of representation of the urban fabric started to change. T¯oky¯o’s city center is a symbol of modernization and Kaf¯u turns to the low-lying city, to the wounded and decaying but still beautiful neighborhoods in which traces of the past are still visible: the pleasure quarters. But at some point, these “counterworlds” seem to give in to the pressures of time, and start reflecting the actual “world,” leaving him overwhelmed by despair. This happens at first in 1917 novel Udekurabe (Rivalry), where the glittering world of Shimbashi gradually emerges as the epitome of the modern pleasure district. Komayo, the main character, is a Shimbashi geisha who, when asked by a wealthy man to leave the house and marry him, finds herself at a loss: If she continued to hesitate, she might never be able to return to Shimbashi. But why was she so fond of Shimbashi? Why did she feel so at home there?41

38 Evelyn Schulz, “Walking the City: Spatial and Temporal Configurations of the Urban Spectator in Writings on Tokyo,” in Urban Spaces in Japan. Cultural and Social Perspectives, ed. Christoph Brumann and Evelyn Schulz (New York: Routledge, 2012), 184–202 (187). 39 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (New York: Belknap Press, 1999), 416. 40 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 416. 41 Nagai Kaf¯ u, Rivalry: A Geisha’s Tale, trans. Stephen Snyder (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2007), 41.

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Komayo is an unmistakably modern character, a “new geisha” torn between her career and the chance to live a “normal” life as a wife. She will choose the former, and at the end of the novel she will become the keeper of the geisha house.42 As Isoda pointed out, Shimbashi was for Kaf¯ u what Yanagibashi had been for Ry¯uhoku: the pleasure-quarter par excellence of the time.43 The counterworld had come to mirror the world in terms of social patterns and dynamics, leaving Kaf¯ u disappointed. At this point of his career, his focus on the city starts getting narrower and narrower until, in his mature writings, the street no longer seems able to talk to him with its old vocabulary anymore. He makes up for the rarefaction of words by the density of images: fragments of imagination, memory, and reality that together recreate through writing the collapse of distance and perspective, which is the immediate result of the incommunicability between space and the individual. He questions language’s capacity to represent the real in the essay “Terajima no ki” (Notes from Terajima, 1936), where he observes, about the famous Kaminarimon, the gate (mon) of the Sens¯oji in Asakusa, that “[w]e call it Kaminari Gate, but there is no gate.”44 The gate had burned down in 1865 and would not be rebuilt until 1960, which means that Kaf¯u never had a chance to see it during his lifetime; nevertheless, people kept calling that empty place “Kaminarimon,” a toponym which was also empty.45 In the most representative work of this phase of his career, Bokut¯ o kitan (A Strange Tale from East of the River, 1937), the fragmentation of the (narrator’s) gaze becomes a distinctive feature of the storyline, in which by-plots, memories, and thoughts intertwine against a backdrop of rambling urban sights. Throughout his life, Kaf¯u treated the city as a subject, a living labyrinth where he could lose himself and become a flâneur. In his work the city is a 42 On this subject, see Stephen Snyder, Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kaf¯ u (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), 78 and my A Sense of the City: Modes of Urban Representation in the Works of Nagai Kaf¯ u (1879–1959) (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 134. 43 Isoda K¯ oichi, Nagai Kaf¯ u (T¯oky¯o: K¯odansha, 1989), 132–133. 44 Nagai Kaf¯ u, “Omokage,” Kaf¯ u zensh¯ u (Collected Works of Kaf¯u), ed. Takemori

Ten’y¯u et al. (T¯oky¯o: Iwanami, 1995), vol. 27, 358. (My translation. G.M.F.) 45 Follaco, A Sense of the City, 157.

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threshold, a center of interaction between ways of life, sensibilities, stories, worlds; this is the reason why bridges, gates, portals, and other places of transit—spaces of division and communication at the same time—are recurring images in his writings like in Benjamin’s. Kaf¯u managed to share his idea of modernity by expressing a sense of the urban space which was deeply rooted in his contemporaries’ most intimate memory: his style of writing carried echoes of its Edo and early Meiji predecessors and accretions from the author’s European wanderings. He clearly sensed T¯oky¯o’s high order of imageability 46 and combined old and new forms in order to de-construct and re-construct urban reality, but in his literary expression he never felt restrained by the weight of convention nor compelled to follow the latest trends. In celebrating the city as the ultimate stronghold of a fragmented identity, he translated into words a precious and fragile significance, and thus contributed to keeping it alive.

Private Topographies Kevin Lynch’s fundamental work on the city makes it clear from the very beginning that the relationship between urban spaces and their inhabitants is by no means a neutral one: Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences. […] Every citizen has had long associations with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings.47

Urban space and memory are deeply connected and this is more intensely true in places where the transition to modernity was particularly traumatic. In modern Japanese literature, T¯ oky¯o’s urban fabric is woven of expectations and recollections, images and criticisms. Each of these readings and narrations is an attempt at a personal mapping, a private topography founded on the unquestionable premise that every space is and should be first of all an espace vécu [lived space]. This attitude toward urban narratives has been an essential part of Japanese literature well into the twenty-first century, and it is, of course, 46 As in Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 9. 47 Lynch, Image of the City, 1.

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not limited to the city of T¯oky¯o.48 Literary representation of the Japanese capital, however, provides a particularly striking example of the tense interplay between individual sensibilities and the emergence of a collective sense of the city that is one of the reasons of T¯ oky¯o’s multi-layered and composite image in writing. In the gradual transition toward modernity, thence from an age-old set of structures that provided social stability, to the increasingly variable notion of a society characterized by mobility and constant renovation, the city represented a perfect exemplar of the ongoing transformation. The status of capital itself, acquired by T¯oky¯o only in the last decades of the nineteenth century, posited a number of questions regarding authority and the well-being of citizens, image formulation, and collective memory. If the relationship between urban spaces and their inhabitants is not neutral, as observed by Lynch, André Breton reminds us that mediat(iz)ed images (symbolized by the newspaper in Soluble fish 49 ) can shape our perception of space by covering it while offering a substitute: this perspective shows just to what extent the personal, private, intimate narratives discussed above can provide additional, thus precious pieces of the mosaic of images, associations, and perceptions constituting the modern city.

Bibliography Beasley, William G. Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese Travellers in America and Europe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, edited by Rolf Tiedemann. New York: Belknap Press, 1999. Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1969.

48 Michael Cronin’s work, for instance, challenges the T¯ oky¯o-centric discourse that has always been hegemonic in modern Japanese literature scholarship and provides an overview ¯ and an exhaustive analysis of literary authors and works mapping the city of Osaka in the twentieth century. See Michael Cronin, Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2017). 49 “The ground beneath my feet is nothing but an enormous unfolded newspaper. Sometimes a photograph comes by; it is a nondescript curiosity, and from the flowers there uniformly rises the smell, the good smell, of printers’ ink.” André Breton, “Soluble Fish” (1924), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1969), 60.

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Brumann, Christoph and Evelyn Schulz, eds. Urban Spaces in Japan: Cultural and Social Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2012. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Citie. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Trade Publishing, 1974. Coaldrake, William H. Architecture and Authority in Japan. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Cronin, Michael. Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2017. Fiévé, Nicolas and Paul Waley, eds. Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective. Place, Power and Memory in Kyoto, Edo and Tokyo. New York: Routledge, 2003. Follaco, Gala Maria. A Sense of the City: Modes of Urban Representation in the Works of Nagai Kaf¯ u (1879–1959). Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017. ———. “Mondi d’acqua. Il motivo del fiume nell’opera di Nagai Kaf¯u.” In «L’acqua non è mai la stessa»: Le acque nella tradizione culturale dell’Asia, edited by Carolina Negri and Giusi Tamburello. Firenze: Olschki, 2009. 179–190. Fraleigh, Matthew. New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West: Narushima Ry¯ uhoku: Reports from Home and Abroad. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 2010. Fujii, James A., ed. Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Higuchi, Ichiy¯ o. Child’s Play. In In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life and Writings of Higuchi Ichiy¯ o: A Woman of Letters in Meiji Japan, edited by Robert Danly. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. 254–287. Isoda, K¯ oichi. Nagai Kaf¯ u. T¯ oky¯ o: K¯ odansha, 1989. Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era. Vol. 1: Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. K¯ oda, Rohan. Rohan zensh¯ u. Edited by Kagy¯ ukai. T¯ oky¯ o: Iwanami, 1954. Kornicki, Peter F. “The Publisher’s Go-Between: Kashihonya in the Meiji Period.” Modern Asian Studies. 14, no. 2 (1980): 331–344. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. Maeda, Ai. Narushima Ry¯ uhoku. T¯ oky¯ o: Asahi shinbunsha, 1976. Maruyama, Masao. Nihon no shis¯ o. T¯ oky¯ o: Iwanami shoten, 1961. Nagai, Kaf¯ u. Kaf¯ u zensh¯ u. Edited by Takemori Ten’y¯ u et al. T¯ oky¯ o: Iwanami, 1995. ———. Rivalry: A Geisha’s Tale. Translated by Stephen Snyder. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Parker, Simon. Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City. New York: Routledge, 2004.

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Pastreich, Emanuel. “The Pleasure Quarters of Edo and Nanjing as Metaphor: The Records of Yu Huai and Narushima Ry¯uhoku.” Monumenta Nipponica, 55, no. 2 (2000): 199–224. Pons, Philippe. D’Edo à Tokyo: Mémoires et modernités. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. Seki, Ry¯ oichi. “Ichiy¯ o nikki no himitsu: sono nij¯ u k¯ oz¯ o ni tsuite.” Kokubungaku: kaishaku to ky¯ ozai no kenky¯ u 9, no. 10 (1964): 20–27. Smith, Henry D. “Tokyo as an Idea: An Exploration of Japanese Urban Thought Until 1945.” Journal of Japanese Studies 4, no. 1 (1978): 45–80. Snyder, Stephen. Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kaf¯ u. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000. Tipton, Elise K. Modern Japan: A Social and Political History. 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Vaporis, Constantine Nomikos. Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. Vlastos, Stephen, ed. Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Yamane, Kenkichi. “Ichiy¯o nikki no sekai.” Kokubungaku: kaishaku to kansh¯ o 11 (1974): 107–113. Yoshida, Seiichi. Higuchi Ichiy¯ o kenky¯ u. T¯ oky¯ o: Shinch¯osha, 1956.

CHAPTER 17

Reading Against the Grain: Black Presence in Lower Manhattan, New York City Tazalika M. te Reh

The city can be read through a plethora of approaches. In the pursuit of enlarging the interpretational scope of architecture, this paper suggests a critical reading of the city. More precisely, this paper will bring together architecture and Cultural Studies. In order to uncover the hidden complexity of an urban environment of the West, it is necessary to look beyond the architectural knowledge from the West. Discussing the African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan, as a piece of contemporary architecture, this space dedicated to the Black experience is put into context with the White hegemonic culture of New York City. In the midst of the metropolis of New York City, in a relatively quiet location in Manhattan, the African Burial Ground National Monument contributes to the telling of stories of the African, the African American, and the African diasporic experience in the United States. The encounter with this urban place reveals the narratives of its specific history, its architecture, and race. Moreover, going beyond a purely aesthetic-functional approach to the geographical and built

T. M. te Reh (B) Independent Researcher, Salzburg, Austria © The Author(s) 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_17

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material, this paper addresses three narratives of the non-geographical realm. In confrontation with a White hegemonic reading and use of urban spaces, the title of this paper “Reading Against the Grain: Black Presence in Lower Manhattan, New York City” proposes an alternative conception of so-called Western metropolises, such as New York City.

The Architectural Site There is an area in Lower Manhattan, New York City, situated on a former cemetery. Located off Broadway, not far from the City Hall, and the New York City Supreme Court, the memorial is surrounded by multistory buildings and skyscrapers with the typical setback structure of New York City. There, out of the urban womb of juridical, administrative, financial, and business formations a buried spiritual place came to light, when in 1991 excavation work began for a planned federal building. 419 human remains and a myriad of grave goods were found. This uncovered section of a former cemetery from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became one of the most significant archaeological finds of the twentieth century in the United States of America (Fig. 17.1). The African Burial Ground National Monument by AARRIS Architects from New York City is a joint venture of the architects Rodney Leon and Nicole Hollant-Denis.1 Having submitted their design proposal already in 1998, their architectural concept came off as a winner in 2005.2 In 2006 the site was presidentially proclaimed a National Monument.3 Invited to commemorate the African American presence and contribution to overall American society, the architects came up with a complex architectural site that also addresses the Black diaspora scattered around the world. To this day, the human remains of buried Black American slaves lie only 3 m (10 ft.) under the current street level. The old burial ground,

1 “African Burial Ground Memorial,” aarris.com. n.d., AARRIS ATEPA Architects, https://aarisny.com/african-burial-ground-memorial-national-monument/ (accessed May 31, 2013). 2 “Have Something to Say About African Burial Ground Memorial? Do It Now,” The New York Times, July 27, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/nyregion/havesomething-to-say-about-african-burial-ground-memorial-do-it-now.html (accessed May 31, 2013). 3 “African Burial Ground,” nps.gov. n.d., National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov/ afbg/index.htm (accessed May 31, 2013).

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Fig. 17.1 African Burial Ground National Monument

which has been a National Historic Landmark since 1993, is estimated to stretch across about 27,000 sq m (6.6 acres) east- and northeastwards from Broadway.4 To put this in perspective, this equals approximately three to four soccer fields, according to the FIFA-Standard. Thus, the architectural site this paper discusses covers only 5% of its original size.

The Black Atlantic In his concept of the Black Atlantic the British Cultural Studies scholar Paul Gilroy focuses on the traveling Black body through time and space.5 The passage of Black bodies across the Atlantic Ocean circumscribes the circular movement that the 400 years of Atlantic triangular slave trade 4 National Park Service, “African Burial Ground,” 1. 5 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso,

1993).

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between Africa, the New World and Europe initiated. Using the biographies of Black American intellectuals from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, like W. E. B. DuBois, Gilroy traces “the opposite direction [of travel] to the forced journey undertaken by his [DuBois’] enslaved and traumatized ancestors.” As a “descendant of both slaves and slaveholders” and as a “Harvard history and philosophy student holding a prestigious scholarship to continue his elite education in Berlin,” an intellectual like DuBois exemplifies the Black Atlantic at its best. Gilroy points out the cultural and historical consequences this encounter of “diverse groups of [African] people” has been causing since the beginnings of the New World slavery. Forcing people of diverse African ethnic backgrounds into a shared life on unknown terrain and imposing “the languages of their masters and their mistresses” upon them, led to a complex situation of cultural syncretism. The Black Atlantic is a tool to understand these multifaceted dynamics.6 When Gilroy published The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness in 1993, he opened a new perspective on the Atlantic Ocean symbolizing a space with a fluid, moving, and non-static quality: The concept of the Black Atlantic enables us to recognize the cultural interconnectedness of the modern Black experience across time and space, despite the lack of a singular source or common point of origin.7 Gilroy states that [t]he history of blacks in the West and the social movements that have affirmed and rewritten that history can provide a lesson which is not restricted to blacks. They raise issues of more general significance that have been posed within black politics at a relatively early point.8

With the Black diaspora becoming both an influencer and influencee, two crucial things happened in the humanities: within the field of Diaspora Studies, the group of the Black diaspora could no longer be treated only as marginalized but needed to be seen as empowered. Movements like the Harlem Renaissance (1920s to 1930s), the Négritude (1930s), and hip hop (1970s to today), to name just a few cross-continental 6 Gilroy, Paul, “The Black Atlantic” in Der Black Atlantic (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2004), 12–32 (12, 13). 7 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-colonialism, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2007), 22. 8 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 223.

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cultural influences, demonstrated a Black self-determination and can be seen as predecessors of the Black Atlantic. Secondly the Atlantic Ocean as a space became the dynamic symbol of cultural exchange even beyond the Atlantic border cultures. ∗ ∗ ∗

1. Reading Beyond the Architectural Narrative Reading the intertextuality of this intra-urban space between Architecture and the Black Atlantic, I will scrutinize how the questions of architectural analysis and African American self-empowerment through space are approached in the monument. Negotiating the space of the African Burial Ground National Monument, it becomes clear that the concept of the Black Atlantic has to be incorporated. This approach shifts the Black realm from the architectural into a broader spatial-cultural context. Making use of the historical and aesthetical framework the White hegemonic culture provides, architectural analysis usually makes an effort to deconstruct a building and then re-contextualize it historically, aesthetically, and culturally. Skyscrapers, for instance, have been playing a significant role in the making of Manhattan’s architectural landscape. Rooted historically in the turn of the twentieth century, aesthetically they represent styles such as the Beaux-Arts, the Art Deco as well as Modernist architecture. In a cultural context, they tell several cultural narratives: symbolizing progress, there is the narrative of the technical Frontier, told by inventions such as the elevator and steel frame construction—symbolizing personal progress, there is the narrative addressing the rising from Rags to Riches, supported by the biographies of successful entrepreneurs such as Walter P. Chrysler and visualized in the Art Déco style Chrysler building. At the African Burial Ground National Monument the single physical elements are set out didactically; ready to be deciphered when entering the site. The conceptual design of the monument is subject to seven architectural elements. The elements are: 1. the Wall of Remembrance 2. the Memorial Wall 3. the Ancestral Chamber

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4. the 5. the 6. the 7. the

Circle of the Diaspora Spiral Processional Ramp Ancestral Libation Court Seven Mounds

The walls of the Wall of Remembrance (1) and the Memorial Wall (2) form a three-dimensional figure with cascading water by its sides. The curved Spiral Processional Ramp (5) slopes along the curved wall with engraved symbols (4). This figuration is arranged around the circular Ancestral Libation Court (6). For grasping the spatial relations and dimensions of the place, the movement of the visitor’s body through the architectural site is essential. Assembling water, circularity in setting and movement, the monument reads as a visualization of the spatial concept of the Black Atlantic. AARRIS Architects literally created, designed, and wrote a built statement. The architectural design of the African Burial Ground National Monument will be explained in the following paragraphs. The Wall of Remembrance, which is black, massive, sunken into and rising out of the city ground and dedicated to the memory of the deceased, welcomes the visitor at the entry of the site. On arrival at the site’s Northern entry at Duane Street, the wall appears to be a vertical, massive shape made of dark granite. The engravings on the wall address the dead through the dedication “For all those who were lost / For all those who were stolen / For all those who were left behind / For all those who were not forgotten” and through the West African Adinkra symbol Sankofa. The heart-shaped sign “translates to learn from the past to prepare for the future” and addresses the dead of both the old and the new world9 (Fig. 17.2). Leaning against each other, the Wall of Remembrance and the Memorial Wall, together, form the three-dimensional Ancestral Chamber (3). The Ancestral Chamber is a solid tapering volume of dark granite and it is open at both ends. Entering the chamber, the visitors are made to feel like they should raise their head. With its unroofed habitus, the surrounding walls direct your gaze with a narrowing view into the sky. The chamber’s proportions and its chosen material trigger associations to the hull of a

9 National Park Service, “African Burial Ground,” 1.

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Fig. 17.2 Dedication on the Wall of Remembrance

ship. The reference to a hull, which was the usual means of transportation of enslaved Africans being shipped to the Americas, can be read as a spatial visualization of the Middle Passage. This term stands for the forced Atlantic transfer of the enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. The Middle Passage can also be understood as the first spatial experience of Africans in the African American context. At the monument this hulllike place explicitly invites your body into its drafty inhospitable space with a skylight to heaven. Using this architectural phrase symbolizing the Middle Passage, the visitor is confronted with a traumatic part of African American history. Connecting two areas on two different levels with one another, this Ancestral Chamber takes the visitor to the Ancestral Libation Court on the lower level (Fig. 17.3). Layered on top of each other, on this round dark stone floor of the Ancestral Libation Court, a world map and a spiral together form a cosmogram. Engraved on the granite along the coiling line, grave

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Fig. 17.3 The Ancestral Libation Court

numbers and notes give information on the dead people. This information was garnered by archaeological examinations at Howard University, Washington. The only available biographical data of the anonymous human remains are, for instance: “BURIAL 75—NEWBORN OR STILLLBORN BABY,” “BURIAL 82—WOMAN BETWEEN EIGHTEEN AND TWENTY-FIVE YEARS,” or “BURIAL 189—ADULT OF UNIDENTIFIED AGE AND GENDER.” Encircling the land around the Atlantic Ocean, the spiral coils up in the midpoint of the stony map around Africa’s West Coast. Thus, along this curved storyline the roots of the dead trace back to that midpoint. Right there is where the storyline ends—or, rather—begins? Walking down the Spiral Processional Ramp along the Circle of the Diaspora (4) we can see 20 signs and symbols from the Black diaspora. Visualizing signs of the different cultures with a Black population, this architectural element echoes the cultural interconnectedness through the Black Atlantic. Numerous West African Adrinka symbols like the Akoma

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(signifying endurance, later: love) and the Mate Masie (signifying wisdom, prudence) as well as African Caribbean religious symbols like the Baron and the Manman Brigitte (both cemetery guardians) or the Tanit, representing Islamic faith, are displayed next to each other. Reaching the lower level of the Ancestral Libation Court, the circulating direction of the sloping ramp finds its continuation in the spiral engraved in the granite ground. The dark granite used at the monument is from Africa and North America. In the pursuit of bringing the old and the new world together, the material used on the pavement of the central circular court is from North America, whereas the vertical chamber is made of African stone. Attributing the horizontal pavement to the realm of the profane and secular, and the vertical chamber to the realm of the spiritual and sacred, the design picks up the cross-cultural aesthetics of memorials.

2. Reading the Narrative of Memory The second narrative present at the memorial addresses the history the place itself carries. During the colonial era and beyond, this had been the only graveyard for about 15,000 Africans and African Americans (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). A law issued by the Dutch authorities prohibited African burials within the former Nieuw Amsterdam and later New York City limits (at that time that was the city’s Northern defense wall on today’s Wall Street). Furthermore, the funeral process was extremely hindered by not allowing groups of more than 12 persons to gather or hold burials after sunset. Inspired by the sun path, cultures worldwide have been interpreting the orientation along the east-west axis as sacred. Burying the dead in the African Burial Ground individually and along the east-west-axis, the deceased were to face east when arising to life after death. The National Park Service describes in detail that the [b]urial shrouds were secured with straight pins. Coins covered closed eyes. Other objects that accompanied some burials included reflective objects, buttons, jewelry, and shells. One young child was found with a silver pendant around the neck. A woman with front teeth filed in an hourglass shape had beads placed around her waist. A man’s coffin lid had a heart shaped pattern—perhaps a Sankofa—created with brass tacks and nails […].10 10 National Park Service, “African Burial Ground,” 1.

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The respectful and caring treatment of the dead within the African group contrasts with their miserable living conditions. The comparatively young age of the buried people reveals their poor living and working conditions as well as diseases caused by malnutrition. The archaeological discovery in 1991 was a sensation in the United States. It proved the all-time presence of Africans and later African Americans from the very first moment of the American colonial settlement. In 2003, after an archaeological examination at Howard University in Washington, DC, the remains were brought back to the original cemetery in Lower Manhattan. The only architectural element at the monument that reminds us of the burial history today is the Seven Mounds (7). The mounds, where the human remains were reburied during an African burial ritual, are embedded in grassland and surrounded by a so-called ancestral grove of seven trees. Standing in front of these Seven Mounds we are reminded that this is a cemetery. This re-activated and newly built part of the cemetery we see is only a small-sized section of the original cemetery. The other estimated about 15,000 Africans and African Americans seem hopelessly un-excavatable in the face of pulsating New York City.

3. Reading the Narrative of Oblivion Various publications claim that the historical African Burial Ground was forgotten over the centuries: “From about 1640 to 1795, historians say, perhaps 15,000 slaves were buried there in a forgotten wasteland.”11 This third narrative addresses the issue of oblivion in a city. The question arises, how a space of 27,000 sq m—again: matching the size of three to four soccer fields—can simply be forgotten? In the introduction of The History of Forgetting Norman M. Klein states that forgetting happens through distraction. In the subtle moment in which one image covers the other, oblivion happens. Klein calls these images imagos referring to the psychological term of “unconscious inner images” we carry in ourselves.12 The images of cities superimpose over time, since cities grow. The soil that we walk on in New York City today is a 11 “Site of African Burial Ground Gets Recognition, and Money,” The New York Times, March 6, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/nyregion/06burial.html (accessed May 31, 2013). 12 Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting —Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (London: Verso, 1997), 2.

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Fig. 17.4 Overlay: outline of the historical and the current situation

result of centuries of layering. Buildings and fill material cover past spaces and places. New York City expanded to the north and grew in altitude. The city growth distracted from existing formations. The African Burial Ground was minimized for the benefit of a new defensive wall. Later (in 1794) the graveyard was closed and its land was divided into lots for sale13 (Fig. 17.4). The use of the land in the past and the images connected to it faded away by being covered by and layered with new ones. The layering of images and the layering of soil are analogous with covering the past. The White hegemonic culture, a term the historian Klein repeatedly uses throughout his text, can be addressed as the driving force behind this process of oblivion. Considering the political, economical, and cultural interests that motivated a transformation of the site, forgetting a cemetery

13 National Park Service, “African Burial Ground,” 1.

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of this size can only be located in the sphere of the attempted extinction of the Black presence in American history.

Conclusion: Reading the City Critically To conclude, in the case of the African Burial Ground National Monument, we have to look beyond the architectural knowledge of the West to grasp the complexity of its site, using methods from Cultural Studies. Since we only see what we know, for those not familiar with the concept of the Black Atlantic, the African Burial Ground National Monument remains a place with a memorial and an educational character. Hence, pointing out the narratives that go beyond a plain architectural reading will bring us closer to a complex perspective, a perspective that uncovers deeper layers of meaning. The intentional practice of architecture can be transformed into an instrument of self-empowerment. The narratives’ effects, wrought through the agency of a Black architectural subject, offer a promising turn in the perception of a Black presence in urbanity. With a size of only 5% of the original remaining in-ground historical graveyard, this architectural composition represents the factual African Burial Ground like a visual pars pro toto in geographical terms. Standing at the site trying to realize its multi-dimensionality, it gradually becomes clear: this monument marks a gravesite by far bigger than its edges on Duane and Elk Street suggest. Every step outside this marked area is a step onto the old sacred ground covered with Manhattan’s civic life. As far as the eye can see you are surrounded by administrative places, sidewalks, streets, and parks that can only be accessed by walking on top of this sacred underground still containing about 15,000 human remains. Today, the memory of the dead is shifted aboveground; hence, visitors take the opportunity of laying flowers and lighting candles again, on a piece of land that was originally provided for the sole purpose of burial, mourning, and commemoration. This place of memory has been going through a remarkable transformation throughout the centuries. It represents the interconnectedness of contemporary architecture, American history, spaces of memory, and Black presence. When we encounter urban places, we make a bodily experience with the material of the place. Architecture is a corporeal experience. Placing our body in an architectural or an urban setting, we become part of that context. At its best, we get a conception of the space and place, and our knowledge enables us to go beyond the surrounding

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walls and boundaries. The waters of the East and the Hudson River connect New York City with the Atlantic Ocean. That brings the Black Atlantic both geographically and symbolically close to the African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan. It becomes evident that the perception of spaces and places is formed by the meanings we lay on them and the experiences we have.14 The personal encounter and interaction with this specific architectural place creates a new perspective on the Black presence in the making of New York City’s urbanity.

Bibliography “African Burial Ground.” nps.gov. n.d. National Park Service. http://www.nps. gov/afbg/index.htm. “African Burial Ground Memorial.” aarris.com. n.d. AARRIS ATEPA Architects. https://aarisny.com/african-burial-ground-memorial-national-monument/. “Have Something to Say About African Burial Ground Memorial? Do It Now.” The New York Times. July 27, 2003. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/ 27/nyregion/have-something-to-say-about-african-burial-ground-memorialdo-it-now.html. “Site of African Burial Ground Gets Recognition, and Money.” The New York Times. March 6, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/nyregion/ 06burial.html. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Postcolonialism. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2007. Frers, Lars and Lars Meier. “Encountering Urban Places—Visual and Material Performances in the City.” In Encountering Urban Places—Visual and Material Performances in the City, edited by Lars Frers and Lars Meier. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 1–8. Gilroy, Paul. “The Black Atlantic.” In Der Black Atlantic, edited by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Tina Campt and Paul Gilroy. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2004. 12–32. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting—Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. London: Verso, 1997. National Park Service. “African Burial Ground.” Handout U.S. Department of the Interior, GPO: 2011—365-615/80593. Reprint 2011, 1–2. 14 Lars Frers and Lars Meier, “Encountering Urban Places—Visual and Material Performances in the City,” in Encountering Urban Places —Visual and Material Performances in the City (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 1–8 (1).

Index

A Aizenberg, Mikhail, 72, 73 Alexander, Christopher, 131 Alighieri, Dante, 53, 54, 61, 286, 287 Althusser, Louis, 68, 151 Aridjis, Chloe, 18, 269–278 Atwood, Margaret, 18, 284, 291–293 Augustine of Hippo, 47

B Bachelard, Gaston, 7 Bakhtin, Michail M., 6, 7 Balzac, Honoré de, 31, 32 Barthes, Roland, 7, 284, 285 Baudelaire, Charles, 36, 37, 39, 40, 54 Bauman, Zygmunt, 157, 211, 215 Behrens, Roger, 155 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 36, 151, 214, 250, 313, 314, 316 Blom, Piet, 131

Blumenberg, Hans, 32 Borchert, Ernst, 258–259 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 154, 289, 290 Breton, André, 317 Burns, Ed, 89, 97 Burr, Aaron, 264, 265 Burroughs, William S., 15, 66, 77–79 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 285, 286

C Calvino, Italo, 301, 302 Candilis, Georges, 131 Cassirer, Ernst, 5 Clover, Joshua, 158, 161–163 Coaldrake, William, 303 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 101, 102, 107–113

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5

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INDEX

D De Certeau, Michel, 7, 10, 11, 14, 16, 122, 126–130, 147, 209, 216 Deleuze, Gilles, 124, 134, 153 Derrida, Jacques, 135–137 Deutsche, Rosalyn, 154, 156 Dickens, Charles, 210 Diderot, Denis, 249 Durkheim, Émile, 50–53, 55 E Eco, Umberto, 7, 10, 284, 285 Eisenman, Peter, 16, 122, 132, 133, 135–138 Eliade, Mircea, 49 Eliot, T.S., 15, 45, 46, 48, 50–61, 68 F Fauconnier, Gilles, 67 Fay, Theodore Sedgwick, 18, 263–269, 274, 276, 277 Feinstein, Elaine, 17, 207, 208, 217, 218, 221 Fludernik, Monika, 76 Foucault, Michel, 5, 6, 37, 104, 195 Frank, Joseph, 68, 69, 75 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 13 Fröbe, Gerd, 254 G Gehl, Jan, 131 Genette, Gerard, 7, 9, 27, 248, 249, 251 Geyl, W.F., 175 Gilroy, Paul, 323, 324 Gray, Alasdair, 3, 25, 26, 31 Guattari, Felix, 134, 153

Gunning, Tom, 250 Gysin, Brion, 77, 78

H Habraken, John, 132, 138 Hamilton, Alexander, 264–267 Harvey, David, 8, 156, 163, 201, 294 Hattori, Bush¯o, 307 Hertzberger, Herman, 131 Higuchi, Ichiy¯o, 310–312 Hirsch, Marianne, 265 Hollant-Denis, Nicole, 322

J Jacobs, Jane, 126 Jakobson, Roman, 69 Jameson, Frederic, 66–70 Joyce, James, 26, 68, 123

K Klein, Norman M., 330, 331 Knott, Kim, 49, 50 K¯ oda, Rohan, 308–310 Kracauer, Siegfried, 250 Kristeva, Julia, 153

L Lacan, Jacques, 155 Laclau, Ernesto, 154 Lear, Edward, 29–31, 36 Lefebvre, Henri, 4–6, 8, 15–17, 19, 49, 122, 124–126, 129, 130, 142–147, 153–155, 158, 160, 163, 164, 194, 200, 290, 291 Leon, Rodney, 322 Lerup, Lars, 132

INDEX

Levy, Amy, 17, 207, 208, 212–215, 217–219, 221 Libeskind, Daniel, 16, 122, 132–135, 137, 138 Lotman, Yuri (Jurij) M., 6, 7, 9, 10, 18, 212, 225, 226 Löw, Martina, 10, 154 Lynch, Kevin, 67, 68, 316, 317

M Marchart, Oliver, 156 Marcus, J.S., 18, 269, 270, 275–278 Marx, Karl, 143, 145, 147, 148, 155, 158, 160–162 Massey, Doreen, 154, 209, 290 McEwan, Ian, 34, 35 Moretti, Franco, 267, 291 ¯ 304, 311 Mori, Ogai, Mouffe, Chantal, 154

N Nagai, Kaf¯ u, 304, 309, 312, 314, 315 Narushima, Ry¯uhoku, 304, 305 Neel, Phil A., 159–161

O Otto, Rudolf, 49, 55

P Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 312 Perry, Clarence, 174 Piozzi, Hester Lynch, 27–29

Q Queneau, Raymond, 38–40

337

R Rancière, Jacques, 17, 141–143, 148–153, 155, 157, 158, 160, 162–164 Ricoeur, Paul, 136 Rose, Willi, 257 Roubaud, Jacques, 40 Roussel, Raymond, 134 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 9, 67–69

S Sennett, Richard, 210 Shelley, Mary, 18, 283–286 Shklovsky, Victor, 75 Simon, David, 16, 87–89 Smith, Philip, 50–52 Smithson, Alison, 131 Smithson, Peter, 131 Soja, Edward W., 5, 6, 126, 144 Staudte, Wolfgang, 247 Stemmle, Robert Adolf, 18, 252–253, 256, 258

T Terakado, Seiken, 305, 307 Tschumi, Bernard, 132, 133, 137 Tzara, Tristan, 78

U Ulitin, Pavel, 15, 66, 69–80

V van Aerde, Rogier, 178 van Eyck, Aldo, 131

338

INDEX

W Wangenheim, Gustav von, 18, 252, 256–260 White, Hayden, 12, 287, 288 Wilde, Oscar, 2, 3 Williams, Melvin, 97 Williams, Raymond, 154

Woolf, Virginia, 17, 18, 225–243, 283, 284, 294–298

Z Zinik, Zinovy, 71–73, 77 Žižek, Slavoj, 150, 157