Imagining Spaces and Places 1443849561, 9781443849562

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Plate Images
List of Tables
Introduction
I
Remembered and Sensed Spaces
Memory and Place from the Red Centerof Australia to the Periphery of Paris
Multisensory Memories and the Spacesof Suburban Childhood in the GreaterHelsinki Region in the 1950s and 1960s
II
Urban Spaces
Urban Imagery between Enchantmentand Disenchantment
How Cultural? How Material? Rereadingthe Slums of Early Vict orian London
Making and Taming “Messy Space”
III
National Spaces
Cabins and National Identityin Norwegian Literature
Construct ions of Space
“There In Thousands Of LakesThe Stars Of The Night Glimmer”
IV Locations
Sites of Slavery
The Cranbrook Map
Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays
V Visible and Invisible Spaces
“Let Us Possesse One World”
The Disapp earance of Gravity
Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spacesof a Renaissance Magus
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Imagining Spaces and Places

Imagining Spaces and Places

Edited by

Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Kirsi Saarikangas and Renja Suominen-Kokkonen

Imagining Spaces and Places Edited by Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Kirsi Saarikangas, Renja Suominen-Kokkonen Layout: Jari Käkelä This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Saija Isomaa, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Kirsi Saarikangas, Renja Suominen-Kokkonen and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4956-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4956-2

Table of Contents List of Illustrations .....................................................................................vii Plate Images...............................................................................................viii List of Tables.............................................................................................viii Introduction: Imagining Spaces and Places Pirjo Lyytikäinen and Kirsi Saarikangas...............................................ix

I Remembered and Sensed Spaces Memory and Place from the Red Center of Australia to the Periphery of Paris: To See the Frame that Blinds Us Claire Farago..........................................................................................3 Multisensory Memories and the Spaces of Suburban Childhood in the Greater Helsinki Region in the 1950s and 1960s Kirsi Saarikangas..................................................................................27

II Urban Spaces Urban Imagery between Enchantment and Disenchantment Bart Keunen ..........................................................................................57 How Cultural? How Material? Rereading the Slums of Early Victorian London Jason Finch...........................................................................................85 Making and Taming “Messy Space”: The Contested Nature of Historical Space in Urban China Philipp Demgenski..............................................................................107

III National Spaces Cabins and National Identity in Norwegian Literature Ellen Rees............................................................................................125

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Constructions of Space: The Literary Configuration of “the English Countryside” Angela Locatelli..................................................................................143 “There in Thousands of Lakes the Stars of the Night Glimmer”: Lakescapes in Literature Pirjo Lyytikäinen.................................................................................161

IV Locations Sites of Slavery: Imperial Narratives, Plantation Architecture and the Ideology of the Romance of the South Julia Faisst..........................................................................................185 The Cranbrook Map: Locating Meanings in Textile Art Leena Svinhufvud................................................................................199 Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays: Painted Bodies and Ecclesiastical Space in the Medieval Diocese of Turku Katja Fält............................................................................................227

V Visible and Invisible Spaces “Let Us Possesse One World”: Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love in John Donne’s Poetry Maria Salenius....................................................................................251 The Disappearance of Gravity: Airy Spaces in Contemporary Art Hanna Johansson................................................................................273 Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces of a Renaissance Magus Lauri Ockenström ...............................................................................293 Contributors..............................................................................................319 Index.........................................................................................................322 Plates of Colour Images ...........................................................................327

List of Illustrations 1–2 Honey Ant Mural at Papunya School 1–3 Men’s painting room 1–4 Alice Springs, Australia, Papunya Tula Gallery 1–5 Installation view, first gallery, Musée du Quai Branly 1–7 Installation view, Western Desert paintings from Australia 1–8 Entryway to Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye exhibition 2–1 Kontulankaari 1 – Kaarikuja 2, Kontula, Helsinki 2–2 Suburb under construction in Helsinki 2–3 Kisakylä, Helsinki 2–4 Munkkivuori, Helsinki 6–1 Johannes Flintoe’s Krundalen 9–1 Boone Hall Plantation, Ornamental Gate Leading to the Master’s House 9–2 Boone Hall Plantation, Oak Alley – Main Entryway 9–3 Boone Hall Plantation, Row of Slave Cabins 10–1 Eliel Saarinen’s The Cranbrook Map 10–2 Exhibition of Home Furnishings in the Cranbrook Pavilion 10–3 Interior of Studio Loja Saarinen 10–4 The Studio Loja Saarinen, cover of a printed brochure 1932 10–5 Photograph of the scale model of Cranbrook 11–1 Saint Lawrence, Maaria church 11–2 Armless human, Korppoo church 11–3 A painting of a mermaid, Nousiainen church 11–4 A painting of a mermaid, Pernaja church 11–5 A painting of a mermaid, Nauvo church 11–6 A painting of a mermaid, Korppoo church 11–7 A creature with a halberd, Maaria church 11–8 A creature with two objects, Maaria church 13–5 Lauri Astala’s Gamelan 13–6 Tanja Koponen’s Unsaid II 14–1 Planetary symbols and astrological characters 14–2 Planetary symbols and astrological characters 14–3 The Saturn and Mars on a throne with attributes and symbols

Plate Images 1–1 Western Desert in central Australia, Kintore 1–6 Installation view, interior gallery, Musée du Quai Branly 1–9 Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s Big Yam 1–10 Richard Bell’s Big Brush Stroke 13–1 Axel Antas’s Whiteout (Fence) 13–2 Heli Rekula’s Landscape no. 20 An Tiaracht 13–3 Lauri Astala’s Rome Dérive I 13–4 Lauri Astala’s Rome Dérive II

List of Tables 5–1 The political history of Qingdao since 1898 14–1 The universal correspondences according to Athanasius Kircher 14–2 The seven steps of magic according to Marsilio Ficino

Introduction: Imagining Spaces and Places Pirjo Lyytikäinen and Kirsi Saarikangas You are not in a place; the place is in you. (Angelus Silesius)1

Recently, the idea expressed by Angelus Silesius, the German seventeenthcentury mystic who emphasised “the place in you” instead of “you in the place,” has reactualised. The investigation of the interfaces between the experiencing subject and the places experienced has become an expanding multidisciplinary field. This entwinement is also, in many ways, the focal point of Imagining Spaces and Places. Our volume explores spaces and places presented, represented and created in and by art and literature. It profits from the vigorous new interest in spatial issues in the humanities and social sciences. The refraction of the prism has led to the acknowledgement that a place is not something that exists “out there” independent of those who are experiencing it. Rather place is understood as a lived place that is shaped by the activities and perceptions of its users in the interaction with the spatial or physical aspects of environment. Place is thus dependent on the perspectives and actions of those who use it. Moreover, “space” has been the focus of intense rethinking: recent decades have even been characterised as the years of a “spatial turn.” Instead of space in an abstract or geometric sense— which has been a prominent conception of space all through modernity—the new lines of study underline the experiential and multi-dimensional aspects of spaces. This has meant a more dynamic understanding of both places and spaces. The growing attention to the sensory and lived aspects in the formation of spatial meanings has also directed interest to the places and spaces of ordinary life. This has prepared the way for new approaches to the exploration of spaces and places in our volume, whether these be presented, represented, remembered, sensed and narrated or whether they be fictional, urban or national spaces or locations. We ask what the role of cultural and artistic renderings of space is in relation to the everyday experiences of spaces. We examine from various angles how the experiences of places are mediated in various art forms and other cultural discourses or practices and how art and literature contribute to the understanding of particular places and also to understanding space in more general terms. 1

Quoted in Krohn 2004, 5.

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The interest in questions of space and place has extended beyond the “spatial disciplines.” The exploration of how places are represented and historically have been represented and modified by these representations has become a major preoccupation of cultural analysis. If the representations not only reflect or “imitate” existing conceptions or observed features, but also recreate the places by inventing and imagining new relationships and conceptions, then studying the cultural representations is a key to understanding places. Amongst these representations, those of art and literature figure prominently. As cultural practices, literature and art have crucially mediated and still do mediate the experiences of spaces and places. They not only represent or contemplate the surrounding world and spaces within us, but refashion the sphere of our experience by imagining invisible and alternative spaces. Works of art exemplify with striking clarity the interaction between perception and imagination, which creates what in contemporary discussion is often called “scapes.” The cityscapes, bodyscapes, mindscapes and memoryscapes, like the more familiar landscapes, created by artistic as well as other kinds of cultural practices are part of collective cultural memory. The intertwining of what previously was called “macrocosm” (nature and society) with “microcosm” (body and mind) and the role various art forms and cultural practices play in articulating and negotiating these chiasmic encounters are focal points for the current interest in spatial issues. At the same time, this intertwining is the challenge that has to be met. The fact that the spaces without mix with the spaces within, with what can be called our bodyscapes and mindscapes, requires the mapping of complex and even ambivalent networks of interaction.

Space Space and place are vast and ambivalent concepts that refer both to physical and visual surroundings and to their experiential and cultural aspects. While in recent years “space” and “place” have been the objects of intense rethinking in the humanities and social sciences, in different traditions they have been conceived differently. Although various traditions emphasise either space or place, the notions are closely linked: the one makes the other possible. The meanings of space range from the physical universe to mental space while also referring to an area or expanse defined in terms of height, depth and width. While space indicates mobility and physical boundaries that are not necessarily clear, in everyday parlance place refers

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to a particular location or position. (S.v. “space” in the Oxford English Dictionary.) Since the 1990s, interrelated spatial, affective and material turns along with feminist theories have been essential to the refraction of the prism and created inter- or multidisciplinary terrain for analyses of space and place. Various parallel, overlapping, yet also contradictory intellectual paths have opened up to reconceptualisation. Michel Foucault’s conception of spatial order as a network of power, the phenomenological analysis of spatiality and corporeality initiated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty where these are human modes of being, Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of the social formation of space and spatial meanings and Michel de Certeau’s discussions of spatial practices and the ways of using and perceiving space have had a crucial impact on the current interest in space. In his lecture “Des espaces autres” (“Of Other Spaces”) in 1967 Michel Foucault stated that the “present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space” (Foucault 1986, 22). Throughout his writings Foucault was interested in space not as a void, but as a complex set of relations that explore how space and spatial arrangements maintain and produce bio-power and various cultural meanings in modern society and how they define and regulate social practices. According to him, for example, the new penal practice in the early nineteenth century involved a new spatial order of prisons—the famous Panopticon by Jeremy Bentham—a new matrix of thought and a new strategy in which “stones can make people docile and knowledgeable” (Foucault 1975, 174; quoted from Foucault 1991, 172). Hence, the spatial order itself produces power, meanings, practices and habits instead of merely representing and symbolising power. Foucault pointed out that the monumental work of Gaston Bachelard and the descriptions of phenomenologists “have taught us that we do not live in homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly phantasmatic as well” (Foucault 1986, 23). The contemporary approaches to spaces and places also owe a great deal to phenomenological philosophy. While Foucault approached questions of space in connection with modern normalising efforts and as a network of controlling and regulating social relations, the phenomenological tradition emphasised the perspective of the experiencing subject. The current attention to lived spaces has a major source of inspiration in the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who underlined the reciprocal relationship of the corporeal subject with space. In his view the human mode of being in the world is both corporeal and spatial: for the corporeal subject space is

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his or her first experience of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Hence, the space is not just there before people; rather people as living subjects inhabit the space (habiter) (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 173). Space is never simply a neutral, homogenic physical space, but is always meaningful, lived space to the degree that there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences. Lived space was also a key concept for social scientist Henri Lefebvre, but from the angle of the social production of space. He too emphasised that space is not unambiguously one, but rather several spaces. In his seminal book La production de l’espace (1974) Lefebvre opposed the idea of abstract, absolute space and approached space as socially produced. Lefebvre’s view was that conceiving space as abstract also turns lived spatial experience into something abstract. Spatial meanings, he wrote, are produced only in relation to the social practices of space. Space does not exist outside social relations, and reciprocally space produces social relations. Space therefore is not a container of social processes; it is itself a social process. Lefebvre approached the formation of space through threepart dialectics and distinguished three spatial dimensions that interact with each other in the production of space: the perceived (perçu), the conceived (conçu) and the lived (vécu) dimensions of space. Together they make up “space.” The critical potentialities of the notion of lived space have been taken up by Edward W. Soja in Thirdspace (1996), and both Lefebvre and Soja have emphasised the role of art and literature as “sites” of lived space or “thirdspace.” Whereas Soja seems to value the lived dimension of space most, Lefebvre does not present a clear hierarchy among these three modes, nor does he clearly define the different operations. Without going deeper into Lefebvrean thinking, one can nevertheless observe that Lebfebvre himself points out that spatial practices are not only social and cultural, but also deeply corporeal and sensory. The new interest in spatial meanings and practices has directed attention to the users and meanings emerging in the use of space. Cultural historian Michel de Certeau shares with Foucault the idea of space as a network of power, but also acknowledges the daily acts and meanings that emerge in the various uses of space. According to de Certeau, spatial meanings are formed in the movement and everyday uses of space that transform a physically determined place into a space, or in Merleau-Ponty’s words, transform a “geometrical” space into an “anthropological space” (de Certeau 1984, 117). Moreover, users are not only corporeal objects, but also gendered, sexual subjects. Feminist researchers have pointed out

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gendered and gendering spatial practices. The ideas of users as corporeal and gendered subjects are the unspoken precondition for the built environment. The spatial order both shapes the relations between users and is shaped by them. (Colomina 1991; Saarikangas 2009.)

Place Place, in turn, has been a key focus in the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, an eminent human geographer who follows the phenomenological tradition. His reconceptualisations of the notion of place and his ideas of a “sense of place” have been highly influential in human geography and in other, related fields. His differentiation between the terms space and place has been a common approach in studies that put emphasis on place instead of space. According to Tuan, “what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (Tuan 1977, 6). In his distinction space is more abstract than place, but Tuan also emphasises that the terms require each other for definition: “From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa” (ibid.). In Tuan’s view places and spaces not only engender feelings and are shaped by complex networks of feelings, but place and space are also intimately connected with movement and with restrictions of movement as well. Tuan reminds us that the more abstract notion of “space” usually connects with ideas of movement and freedom, whereas “place” connotes not only security and homeliness, but also closure, pause and even imprisonment. (1977, 3–6.) The concreteness of being-in-place or living in places was also emphasised by one of the pioneers of the new kind of philosophical place studies, Edward S. Casey (1993, xv). As the ancient philosophers knew, “to be is to be in place” (ibid., 14); in light of that idea Casey suggests that it is fruitful to focus on places instead of being or beings and explore how places constitute, modify or influence our being and how our identities are formed in interaction with places. The spaces that every one of us is occupying at every moment range from the room or the street to the city, the country or the planet in a geographical sense and, in the sense of feeling “implaced,” from one’s home to the neighbourhood, home region, nation and perhaps other, even more encompassing places of belonging. These spaces and places are lived and experienced and are not just containers. Even if they serve to “implace you” or “to anchor and orient you, finally becoming an integral part of your identity,” as Casey (1993, 23) argues,

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they are also constituted by you, by your ways of perceiving them and interacting with them. And the relationship between bodies/minds and their spatial environment is not just natural, but also cultural: “Implacement is an ongoing cultural process” that “acculturates whatever ingredients it borrows from the natural world” (Casey 1993, 31). The representations of places, themselves cultural artefacts, build on already culturally-determined meanings given to places and bodies, and at the same time may well change them in the ongoing negotiation between the given and the experimentally imagined. While both Tuan and Casey conceive place as bound to a certain location, place can also be seen as porous. Geographer Doreen Massey, among others, has advocated a more mobile notion of place, one that is open to the interrelations outside it. She emphasises the relation instead of the opposition of space and place. Massey asks “where is here?” and she calls for an “understanding of the world in terms of relationality” and the mutual existence of local and global in the same place. (Massey 2005, 183–184.)

Landscape An important aspect of the power of places, an aspect directly connected to pictorial and textual representations, is conveyed by the notion of landscape. The term landscape has a double meaning. It refers both to the visible features of the land and to the genre of landscape paintings and the representations of demarcated areas. It is hence both the perceived and the lived physical environment and its visual, verbal or aural interpretation (Haila 2006, 23–27). According to art historian W. J. T. Mitchell, landscape is already encoded with cultural values and meanings and is “best understood as a medium of cultural expression” (Mitchell 1994, 14). Landscape is hence both a human and a natural construct. The notion of landscape also brings in the intertwinement of space and place in the representation of places. Casey (1993 and 2002) understands “landscape” as encompassing not only landscape painting or literary descriptions of picturesque places, but also as a general term evoking cityscapes and containing special subgenres such as waterscapes and potentially linked to city-building, imagined communities (such as nations) and to the construction of memorial places. What emerges from the notion of landscape and from landscapes’ various cultural representations can inspire many different approaches to the study of places. It also brings into

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focus both the experiencer (the viewer) and the “limitless extension” in the experience of space or place. A landscape seems to exceed the usual parameters of place by continuing without apparent end; nothing contains it, while it contains everything, including discrete places, in its environing embrace. The body, on the other hand, seems to fall short of place, to be “on this side,” the near edge, of a given place. Nevertheless, body and landscape collude in the generation of what can be called “placescapes,” especially those that human beings experience whenever they venture out beyond the narrow confines of their familiar domiciles and neighbourhoods. (Casey 1993, 25)

Casey refers to the aspect of displacement or movement, which is often connected with landscapes: it is travelling and moving beyond alltoo-familiar surroundings that provoke the attitude of contemplation characteristic of landscape experiences. Jean-François Lyotard (1989, 212) even sees landscape in opposition to a familiar place: it is seeing the countryside with the eyes of a city dweller, seeing as a tourist who retains a memory of what is familiar while viewing what is “exotic” in relation to those familiar frames. Although this is an interesting aspect of placescapes, which in many ways influenced even the formation of so-called national landscapes (a nation-building activity that was attracted to what was deemed “primordial” or even “primitive” places), this aspect restricts the perspectives opened by the notion of landscape. Casey takes the opposite view from Lyotard by defining a landscape as “what encompasses those more determinate places, such as rooms and buildings, designated by the usual idiolocative terms” (1993, 24). Landscapes are perhaps “the bounds of places” (ibid., 29), but represented landscapes are mindscapes imagining places and spaces from the perspective of a viewer, inscribing meanings and perhaps whole ideologies to places. In many ways these insights help to capture aspects of the whole range of represented places or spaces in art and literature.

Contributing Essays By no means does the brief discussion above exhaust the multiple perspectives on spaces, places and landscape currently being used in the vast area of spatial studies. In Imagining Spaces and Places these questions are approached from the perspectives of the visual arts, literature and, in particular, urban space. The volume shows a plethora of fruitful

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and interesting approaches, but it would be pointless to try to summarise them in this general part of the introduction. The following brief view into the contents of the volume will give an idea of the further insights and perspectives into imagining places and spaces offered here. As a whole, the volume produces an interdisciplinary dialogue between art history, literary studies and other fields of cultural analysis. Most of the articles explore how art, literature or urban spaces forge “scapes” by imposing or suggesting aesthetic, evaluative or ideological orderings and perceptual as well as emotive perspectives on the “raw material” or on previous ways of spatial world-making. Furthermore, the articles that address historical places or general cultural practices related to spaces show how spaces and places always make reference to the events and circumstances connected with them and how they are constructed by social relations. The identity of a place is open and constantly reproduced, and the politics of a place involves negotiations and policies of openness and closure. The first section, Remembered and Sensed Spaces, consists of two chapters. In “Memory and Place from the Red Center of Australia to the Periphery of Paris: To See the Frame that Blinds Us” Claire Farago addresses the processes involved in the invention, production and reception of Australian “Aboriginal Art,” processes that raise fundamental epistemological and ethical concerns about the ways of construing place and space and negotiating different cultural understandings across physical and figurative boundaries. The chapter weaves together indigenous Australian beliefs and memoryscapes with the expectations of a globalised art system in which abstract paintings are simultaneously imagined as personal evocations of a specific geography and as manifestations of the timeless, universal and enduring presence of pure artistic form. The second chapter, “Multisensory Memories and the Spaces of Suburban Childhood in the Greater Helsinki Region in the 1950s and 1960s” by Kirsi Saarikangas, examines lived and narrated suburban spaces by analysing the written memories of suburban habitation together with the built suburban space. Her analysis brings out the experiential aspects in the multi-layered sensescapes of suburban space. The focus of the chapter is the reciprocity of the relationship between human beings and the inhabited landscape in the context of everyday life. The second section of this collection, Urban Spaces, begins with Bart Keunen’s analysis of the development and interpretation of urban imagery as an ambivalent space of modernity. “Urban Imagery between Enchantment and Disenchantment” provides an overview of the ideas of modernity essentially connected to urban space and juxtaposes Max Weber and

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Walter Benjamin’s views of modernity and urbanity—and the disenchanted and enchanted representations of urban space. The phantasmagoric and mythical representations of modern urban space that dominate the artistic rendering of cities emphasise the pre-rational and affective aspects in imagining modernity and big cities. The aesthetic experiences are shown to engender a modern counterpart to magic. Relying on Ernst Cassirer’s ideas about mythical thinking and Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, Keunen explores how literature articulates the ambivalences of modernity by creating “other places” where bourgeois rationality is transcended. The other two chapters in the section are case studies of problematic urban spaces. In “How Cultural? How Material? Rereading the Slums of Early Victorian London” Jason Finch focuses on literature that describes the London slums. Finch traces two strands in recent work on nineteenthcentury London slums as imaginative places: the discursive or cultural and the empirical or material. The slum writings of the period 1820–50 which he discusses, by Pierce Egan, G. W. M. Reynolds, Thomas Beames and Charles Dickens, indicate that both the cultural and the material dimensions need to be kept in mind by those working on imaginative place. Philipp Demgenski’s chapter, “Making and Taming ‘Messy Space’: The Contested Nature of Historical Space in Urban China,” looks at the transformation of historical urban space in the old town centre of Qingdao, where rapid processes of change are replacing historical spaces with the “messy spaces” of urban modernity. The case study thus demonstrates how space is constantly produced and reproduced by the people who engage with it. In the third section, National Spaces, three ideologically pregnant spaces and their historical development in the national literary imagination are explored. Ellen Rees writes on “Cabins and National Identity in Norwegian Literature.” The cabin is a central topos of Norwegian life and literature that has been a signifier in strikingly different ways over the course of two centuries. Rees reads the cabin allegorically as a symbolic home for a nation uniquely positioned between nature and civilisation. Building on the work of Michel Foucault, Rees argues that the cabin functions as a heterotopia of compensation, a real yet simultaneously idealised place that helps organise the nation conceptually. In “Constructions of Space: The Literary Configuration of ‘The English Countryside’” Angela Locatelli focuses on several literary texts from the Renaissance to the twentieth century to illustrate how “the English countryside” has been empirically experienced and theoretically framed. She argues that the myth of the English countryside is strongly indebted to its literary conceptualisations. In “‘There in Thousands of Lakes the Stars of the Night Glimmer’:

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Lakescapes in Literature” Pirjo Lyytikäinen analyses Finnish literary lakescapes and their historical development in the context of building national landscapes. The central role of lakes in the Finnish national imagination was largely created through poetry and fictional presentations, although landscape painting and photography assisted and eventually took over this role more and more. The changing literary currents as well as the simultaneously changing historical situations influenced the ways in which the lakes were represented. The three chapters in this section show the parallels and variations in nationalist thinking in the respective literary traditions as well as the formation of different identity constructions that shape both the understanding of real places and the national traditions of imagining connected to the places and spaces analysed. The reverberation of literary topoi and the conservatism of the national cultural memory combine to create the “messy” mindscape often indicative of modern national thinking. To give space to different voices that have been silenced in the course of history, the texts in the fourth section, entitled Locations, focus on different transnational spaces and places. In “Sites of Slavery: Imperial Narratives, Plantation Architecture and the Ideology of the Romance of the South” by Julia Faisst, sites of slavery and their narratives are addressed as transcultural spaces, and the interrelationship of architecture and social order is analysed from alternative angles. In “The Cranbrook Map: Locating Meanings in Textile Art” Leena Svinhufvud examines the built environment by locating meanings in a tapestry called the Cranbrook Map. She investigates the place of textile art and the roles and positions of the textile artist in the Cranbrook art community in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Challenging the conventional system of attribution and single authorship, Svinhufvud explores how textile art and architecture are formed in networks of power. In the third chapter, “Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays: Painted Bodies and Ecclesiastical Space in the Medieval Diocese of Turku” by Katja Fält, the focus is on medieval church spaces and the representation of bodies in medieval wall paintings. Through the examination of the relationship between wall paintings and ecclesiastic space, the article explores the role and function of different kinds of painted bodies in mid-fifteenth century wall paintings. The emphasis is on the representations of bodies regarded as sacred, gendered and ambiguous observed in the context of a medieval parish church in Finland. Finally, the fifth section, Visible and Invisible Spaces, explores mindscapes expressed in poetic metaphors, magical thinking and contemporary visual arts. In Maria Salenius’s contribution, ‘“Let Us

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Possesse One World’: Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love in John Donne’s Poetry,” the extraordinary spatial imagery in Donne’s poems gives rise to an analysis of both extremely constrained spaces and spaces extending to infinity; the intertwining of the microcosmic and the macrocosmic expresses a worldview that connects visible and invisible realms. In “The Disappearance of Gravity: Airy Spaces in Contemporary Art” Hanna Johansson analyses the airy spaces of recent visual art, which problematise the representation of space as stable and substantial and activate the viewers’ affective and reciprocal relationship with their invisible, insubstantial, but fundamentally airy surroundings. The volume closes with a chapter entitled “Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces of a Renaissance Magus” in which Lauri Ockenström focuses on the mindscape of magical and astrological thinking, thereby challenging our rational habits. It sheds light on the various magical beliefs with which learned magicians of the Renaissance constructed their spatial worldview and illustrates the techniques—such as rites and visual symbols—that were used to comprehend, control and manipulate not only the immediate physical surroundings, but also the interplanetary influences in a vast cosmic framework. Imagining Spaces and Places seeks to produce an interdisciplinary dialogue between art history and literature studies and other fields of cultural studies that work with the concepts of space, place and various “scapes.” This is a huge area ranging from visual and textual studies to urban studies, human geography and environmental history. The volume is based on a peerreviewed selection of papers presented at the conference Imagining Spaces/ Places, which was held at the University of Helsinki, 24–26 August 2011. We hope that scholars and teachers working at the intersection of cultural and spatial analyses, as well as their undergraduate and postgraduate students will find value in the perspectives offered here.

Bibliography Casey, Edward S. 1993. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ––——. 2002. Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. de Certeau, Michel. (1980) 1990. L’invention du quotidien 1. arts de faire.

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Paris: Gallimard, folio essais. Colomina, Beatriz, ed. 1991. Sexuality and Space. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (1), 23–27. ———. 1991. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin Books. Haila, Yrjö. 2006. “On the Enactment of Landscape.” In Maisema / Landscape, 18–45. Helsinki: Kiasma. Krohn, Leena. 2004. Tainaron: Mail from Another City. Wildside Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. La production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1989. “Scapeland.” The Lyotard Reader. Edited by Andrew Benjamin. Oxford: Blackwell. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 1994. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. “Imperial Landscape.” In Landscape and Power, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 5–34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Saarikangas, Kirsi. 2009. “From Images to Lived Spaces: Feminist Approaches to the Analysis of Built Space.” In Contemporary Feminist Studies and its Relation to Art History and Visual Studies, edited by Bia Mankell and Alexandra Reiff, 55–75. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

I Remembered and Sensed Spaces

Memory and Place from the Red Center of Australia to the Periphery of Paris: To See the Frame that Blinds Us1 Claire Farago

The epigram by the peripatetic Lutheran-turned-Catholic physician, priest, and poet Johann Scheffler, better known by his literary pseudonym Angelus Silesius, that appeared in the call for papers to the conference Imagining Places/Spaces, which later became the volume you are reading now, is highly appropriate to the discussion of indigenous Australian artists’ entanglement with the global art industry that follows here. Silesius’s one-liner, “[y]ou are not in a place, the place is in you,” is fitting in the first instance because Aboriginal identity is construed in terms of a fluid combination of space and time that is always moving, in which personal identity is tied to a series of places understood as events linking the past with the present. In the desert region at the center of the continent (see plate 1–1), the native Australian cosmology is in keeping with a lifestyle that may entail navigating 4000 square kilometres in a single year in search of food and water. Yet the travelling is not undertaken solely for sustenance, because the journey is the source of the indigenous Australian lifeworld (“Lebenswelt”) where all consciousness and meaning, all sense of place and belonging, as well as all individual historicity, are generated, in the never-ceasing movement through space. In the second instance, Silesius is pertinent to the manner in which Aboriginal representations of the places inside/outside become packaged, commodified, and moved around the world. To begin, given the precarious nature of living off the land especially during the present era of desertification pressed by climate change, there is the question of who controls that space. In the late 1960s, the Australian This paper is an outgrowth of a collaborative book co-authored with Donald Preziosi (2012). Portions of the text here have been adapted from this jointly authored study; I thank my co-author for permission to excerpt my contributions in their present form, which, like the original, benefit substantially from our joint discussion and his critical interventions.

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government removed several groups of indigenous peoples living on cattle lands in the Western Desert region of the Northern Territory to Papunya, a government relocation center established 240 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs. In 1971, Geoffrey Bardon, a school teacher newly arrived to the centre, encouraged his young students to paint using only indigenous patterns and motifs. Bardon was soon approached by a small group of initiated Aboriginal men who proposed creating their own designs based on traditional graphic schemes. This initial exchange resulted in the Honey Ant Dreaming mural (figure 1–2) Tjukurrpa, a Walpiri word that is usually translated as dreamings—and there are many others in the 250 or so native languages of Australia. It designates the creative principle that saturates the world with meaning, as manifested in the topography of the land, its life forms, its law-codes of social behaviour. Tjukurrpa take the form of inherited narratives about the creation of sacred places, land, people, vegetation, and animals, and they comprise a complex network of knowledge informing all aspects of an individual’s life by tying his or her existence to prior events. Upon birth, the child is considered a special custodian of that part of his country where the mother stood when the child first moved in the womb, the place from which his or her spirit came as his or her dreaming. The named landscape features of this geography are said to be created “as the result of the activity of a Dreamtime hero in the distant past” (Langton 2000, 16). The ancient beings are present all around, in this world, and their stories are the Western Desert peoples’ geography.

Figure 1–2. Honey Ant Mural at Papunya School, Papunya, Northern Territory, Australia, June–August 1971 (destroyed). Johnson, 43. Photograph Geoff Bardon, courtesy IAD Press.

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The invention, production, and reception of “Aboriginal Art”—itself a problematic term given its links with notions of cultural “primitivism”— nonetheless raises fundamental epistemological and ethical concerns about ways of construing both place and space, and negotiating different cultural understandings across both physical and figurative boundaries. Such negotiations are the subject of this essay, which weaves together indigenous Australian beliefs with the expectations of a globalized art system in which abstract paintings are simultaneously imagined as personal evocations of a specific geography and as manifestations of the timeless, universal, and enduring presence of pure artistic form. How these apparent contradictions maintain one another in juxtaposition is the focus of my thinking about imagined places/spaces. To approach the problem of imagining places and spaces in such a complex intercultural framework requires considering the entire arc of cultural production, from the paintings’ point of origin in indigenous beliefs (to which I have only partial access), to the paintings’ various points of reception outside the communities in which they are produced. The intersection of cultures now stretches across the entire globe, and reverberates in many directions almost instantaneously. At an art centre located in an impoverished desert community half a day’s journey from the next outpost, the staff work at computers negotiating with high-end galleries in London, Amsterdam, Dubai, and elsewhere to which they will ship unstretched canvases painted by Aboriginal artists instructed by their art teachers on the model established at Papunya in 1971. The Honey Ant Dreaming story belongs to the place of Papunya, not the relocation centre but the place where the dreamings of the Pintupi, Luritja, Walpiri, Arrente, and Anmatyerre peoples who were sent there by the Australian government converge. Painted on the walls of a disused building (and later painted over by government administrators), the Honey Ant Dreaming mural utilised indigenous drawing and painting patterns. According to Bardon’s own recollections, at a time when the first individual interpretations were materializing, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa won the lucrative “Caltex Prize” in 1971 and returned to Papunya with the prize money, there was a clamour for art materials from a number of men. Yet we could equally say that the story began decades before Bardon arrived, with Albert Namatjira (1902–1959), the first Aboriginal person to achieve mainstream recognition as an artist, who spent his last two years at Papunya.2 Namatjira’s first exhibition was held in Melbourne in 1938; he was awarded the Queen’s coronation medal in 1953. His career ended tragically when he was

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In other words, the Western Painting movement was not the outcome of naïve indigenous artists meeting a gifted white art teacher. The formal artmaking skills of the Aboriginal men preexisted Bardon’s arrival and were connected both to their traditional responsibilities as initiated adult males and to an existing cottage industry of making “art” for tourists and the mainstream art market in which Namatjira participated by painting in a western representational style that he himself valued highly. For his part, Bardon promoted a non-representational style that translated what he seems to have understood as his students’ tactile engagement with the world into a fully “visual” form of painting (Carter 2007, xvii–xviii).3 In one sense, his pedagogy reproduced problematic, essentializing distinctions between the mentalities of different people still rooted in nineteenth-century racial ideas.4 On the other hand, he tried to develop an understanding of art free from racial theories of cultural evolution. He practiced a hands-on approach with his adult students, encouraging them to paint visually coherent images that were individual, personal interpretations of the sacred, communally sanctioned designs traditionally appearing on sacred boards (chirungas), as body ornamentation and ground paintings associated with secretsacred ceremonies, as well as the designs that were drawn in the sand to accompany the narration of unrestricted stories.5

arrested and convicted for illegally supplying alcohol to Aboriginals, a victim of the neo-colonial paternalistic government despite his success as an artist. (Johnson 2008, 7–19.) On Albert Namatjira, see Kleinert. 3 As Paul Carter has already emphasized. See Carter (2007, xvii–xviii), which also mentions Bardon’s source in the writings of early twentieth-century Viennese art educator Viktor Lowenfield. See further discussion in Farago (2009). 4 See further, Farago (1995). 5 See Munn (1973), for a groundbreaking contribution to non-native understanding of these representational systems. An extensive body of scholarship now exists, but for a recent contribution with further bibliography, see Ryan and Batty (2011). Their exhibition features approximately 200 of the first paintings produced at Papunya in 1971–72 by the founding artists of the Western Desert art movement. It establishes connections between these paintings and their sources in designs made for use in ceremony. The exhibition will begin with a massing of shields, spear throwers, stone knives, headbands and body ornaments, early drawings collected by anthropologists, historical photographs, and a ground painting. My thanks to Philip Batty for this information in advance of the publication.

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Figure 1–3. Men’s painting room, 1972, with Shorty Tjungurray working on Water Dreaming. Benjamin & Weilogel, 2009.

Composition board, acoustic tiles, tin cans, car bonnets, as well as canvas served as the support for these early paintings. The first paintings were not made for sale. But soon powerful, abstract designs on a much larger scale, still rooted in the land-based belief systems of the first peoples of Australia, were achieving international recognition and commercial success as the most important contribution to High Modernist art in decades. By the late 1980s, the art movement that had begun in 1971 as an educational programme brought new respect for Aboriginal peoples throughout Australia and the world.6 The creation of Aboriginal art for an international market is also poignantly paradigmatic of the modernist commodification of (fine) art in a very specific sense: as the abstraction and extraction—the reification—of particular visual or optical properties of actual multimodal, The historical emergence of Aboriginal painting as a respected art form is far more complex than this brief narrative can suggest: Morphy (1998) and (2007). By the 1960s, in the Northern Territory, bark painting was a well established genre within the art industry: see “A Short History of Yolnu Art,” 27–86, with further references, in Morphy (2007). Personal communication with Philip Batty, 5 February 2009.

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multidimensional, and multifunctional indigenous practices, with the effect of making such abstractions consonant with late Modernist (Western) artistic formalism in its contemporary “globalised” manifestations. The trajectory from an indigenous understanding of identity as performative, immersed in the land, connected to a geography peopled by ancestral spirits, transmitted from generation to generation in communally prescribed ways that not only discourage but ostensibly forbid innovation, to personal interpretations of inherited stories produced as paintings for sale to an audience of outsiders, challenge us to think about place in uncommonly complex ways. The conundrum that Western Desert painting presents at first sight is the possibility of artists unfamiliar with Modernist abstract painting to succeed at making such relevant examples of it. From a position in the middle of the Australian continent, began a fieldwork project that paused many months later in Paris. My ex-centric route from what was historically a periphery to a center of the contemporary art world intentionally plays with, upon, and against center-periphery models of artistic and cultural development. Center-periphery explanations of cultural interaction have inevitably placed Europe in relation to artistic peripheries elsewhere and generally replicate a colonialist, ethnocentric worldview. While the scale of explanation varies—the center could be Rome, the periphery Florence, or England, the Americas, Australia, and so on—the systemic or structural principle would remain the same if the center were Botswana, Bogota, or Beijing. Inverting the center/periphery model, that is, utilizing it in order to recognize the dynamically active conditions of reception, is an important corrective but does not alter the structural principle. Alternatively, a network of distributed knowledge practices offers a less Eurocentric (or Sino- or Afro-centric) way to write a “global” history of art. Even in this case, however, even if no centre is more important than another in the network of modules, first there would still have to be general agreement that the problematic notion “art” is a universal, pan-human phenomenon and activity. Yet that raises other troubling questions—such as, who is at the table to draw up the agreement? Many First World and indigenous peoples in numerous locations around the globe refuse the label “art” for their cultural productions and object to public cultural institutions such as museums collecting, preserving, or displaying their esoteric cultural artifacts because they are not meant to be viewed in this manner or seen by the uninitiated or even preserved. I am more than willing to jettison the category of “art” conceived as universal and timeless in favor of articulating how the Western ideal of (fine) art came to be applied to cultural

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productions of any origin whatsoever—and, specifically, how that now contested but no less globally-disseminated product of European thought operates in the world today. My metamorphic itinerary moving backwards through the center-periphery hierarchy questions and complicates the assumption that the West is central. Can this realignment of hierarchies expose the theoretical underpinnings of an art system that ties identity to place and then circulates the fabrication globally for consumption as an exotic, virtual reality? The first question. The Aboriginal art movement that began in the early 1970s, rapidly assumed international artistic and commercial prestige. How did indigenous Australians without formal artistic training in any conventional sense or even knowledge of art-making practices and their histories elsewhere come to be inserted into the canon of High Modernism? Disjunctions between communities of collecting and communities of production—an effect of this recent “art historicization” of Aboriginal cultural praxis—foreground aspects of what was forgotten, erased or occluded in European modernity’s own invention of what subsequently became the “idea” of (fine) art as itself an abstraction of certain (visual or optical) properties out of cultural behaviour: the abstraction of visuality as such in the service of that modernity. A first observation. Although their visual appeal is primary to their aesthetic and commercial success, the Western Desert acrylic paintings are also widely valued by collectors for the cosmological significance of designs that are very rarely understood at all by those outside the secret and sacred traditions from which the designs are partly derived. Over time, marketing strategies for these acrylic paintings—the issues of origin and nomenclature are complex and fraught, as I will discuss more fully—have come to incorporate reference to their content in ways that simulate copyright. By including the artist’s “dreaming”—told in simple terms that do not violate the community’s integrity to control the dissemination of knowledge—the noumenal content of the work is verified, its enigma authenticated along with more prosaic signs of authorship, such as the artist’s “skin name,” place of origin, the work’s exhibition history, and so on. A second observation. At the art centres I visited in the desert regions of the central parts of the Northern Territory and the eastern edges of Western Australia, art production potentially offers economic relief for impoverished and in many respects severely dysfunctional communities. The mostly government-run operations function in settings without adequate health care, educational opportunities, and with little or no economic infrastructure such as retail businesses. Yet for all the hope that

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the production and sale of “Aboriginal art” in an international market may represent for these art centers—it is the reason for their existence, even when they are unprofitable—the artworks themselves have no other intrinsic functions in their own communities. They might be a point of pride, but they are also a mark of indentured servitude to a global market; in any case, “Aboriginal paintings” do not furnish indigenous houses with objects of individual contemplation or family décor and acrylic paintings as such serve no function in indigenous ceremonies or other traditionbased collective practices. On the other hand, other objects initially made for sale, such as dancing boards and clapsticks traditionally used in ceremonies, are sometimes taken out of the commercial art centre setting and used in those ceremonies today.7 There is, in other words, nothing that intrinsically prevents objects made as art from having a functional value in their indigenous context. But the acrylic paintings of dreamings have no such use value. Aboriginal art-making communities use their livelihood to negotiate their divided identities between two worlds. Subtle and profound ways of worldmaking and negotiating difference are involved, homologous to traditional ways of negotiating space and time in a harsh desert environment. A brilliant way of coping with catastrophic change that is neither assimilation to nor a rejection of the dominant culture, but a strategic form of survival in a subaltern position. Resistance under the wire —“managing the interstices with a measure of creativity,” as Nestor Garcia Canclini once put it regarding the intersections of tradition and modernity in Latin America (García Canclini 1995, 204). To appreciate the conundrums that contemporary Aboriginal art presents for consideration of the art system, it is important to bear in mind how sudden the transition has been from the traditional itinerant camping lifestyle of hunting and gathering to a sedentary way of life. As recently as 1984, a group of nine Pintupi people who had never seen white outsiders emerged from the Western Desert. Within three years of first contact, some of them produced museum-quality acrylic paintings for the commercial market.8 Acrylic paintings mark the arrival of the “genius artist” model of individual artistic production and its attendant manifestation, the celebrity artist. As observed in both West and East Arnhem Land, by art historian Susan Lowish and anthropologist Howard Morphy. Personal communication with Susan Lowish, 10 February 2011. 8 For example, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Two Boys Dreaming at Marruwa, 1987, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; see Kimber (2006, 28) for a reproduction of this painting. 7

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Figure 1–4. Alice Springs, Australia. Papunya Tula Gallery, installation view, July 2009. Photograph Claire Farago.

The jarring effects of a changed lifestyle are furthermore due to the change of federal policy from assimilation to self-determination. Initiated by the Whitlam government in 1972, such programs enabled a greater degree of self-governance and allowed some (such as many of those living in Papunya) to return to traditional lands, but did not eliminate the social problems they were intended to address. To the contrary, domestic violence and alcoholism worsened conditions for many indigenous settlements and communities once the government refused to be directly involved at the local level. With these preliminary considerations of contemporary artistic practices originating in the Australian desert in mind, journey with me to one of its most celebrated points of reception, located in urban Paris, the Musée du Quai Branly, the recently opened centerpiece of Parisian museology. As I made my way up a broad winding ramp in the increasingly darkened entry to the gallery, a flood of words projected onto the floor silently rushed under me,— dancing bright lights weaving hypnotically, beckoning, enticing, teasing. A seductive roadway of words, creating a moving walkway spilling from an unknown source, piling up, moving too fast to read, marking spiraling trajectories that ricocheted in a virtual jitterbug of disco lights under my advancing footsteps, drawing me upward. While I immediately recognized the signature style of artist Charles Sandison (who now resides in Finland,

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by the way), there were no obvious labels of any kind. So this was not meant as Art with a capital A, but as stagecraft, a literally moving entrance.

Figure 1–5. Installation view, first gallery, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, July 2010. Photograph Claire Farago.

And what a mystifying space I found at the top of the ramp! An even darker space, with high ceilings hung with bright spotlights trained on amazing, even unimaginable objects, suspended in enormous glass cases without frames so that everything appeared to be floating in a liquid glittering darkness above the glowing, seamless red vinyl floor that wound through the long, deep space. The combination of darkness and reflected light on so much glass facing in many directions absorbed the spectator. We—spectators and displayed artifacts—all became ghostly. Instantly (see plate 1–6). The objects on display, looming material presences from a museological spirit world, were raffia and wood masks, long snaky totems, a spectacular gigantic wooden drum with animated details, abstract figures intricately carved or dramatically painted with geometric patterns, grinning and grimacing faces assembled in groups for no apparent reason other than theatrical effect. Enormous creatures in lively poses gestured in some

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universal but not quite comprehensible sign language, palpable and mute. Truly stunning. Deeply moving. Absolutely gorgeous. Yet the initial giddiness gave way to museological sobriety, soon dampening delight. What does “Oceania” mean? Or “funeral mask?” There was little to learn (where were the extended labels? the informative text panels?). Virtually nothing to read; only beautifully staged things to see. Here was the most lavish, most unapologetically formalistic display of ethnographic objectsas-art I had ever witnessed. Well into the display space were two sections of Australian Indigenous art. After studying hundreds of historical objects from a wide variety of Oceanic and African cultures, without a blink came contemporary bark paintings from Arnhem Land and contemporary acrylic paintings from the Western Desert. Another day, in another place, they would have been displayed as “contemporary art” in a canonical white cubed gallery, but here they were being offered in direct juxtaposition and thus comparison to funerary masks and sacrificial offerings. Enveloped by the darkness, they glowed with the same eerie warm light as everything else on display: the old familiar commensurability of modernist museology and marketing.

Figure 1–7. Installation view, Western Desert paintings from Australia, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, July 2010. Photograph Claire Farago.

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One of the only educational panels in the display focused on the Swiss surrealist artist/ethnographer Karel Kupka, highighting his prescient interest in the indigenous material beginning in the late 1950s, thus confirming that the objects on display might be considered Art of an unorthodox modernist variety. Kupka went on a series of expeditions to Arnhem Land in northern Australia in 1950s and 1960s collecting for the Ethnographic Museum in Basel and the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie in Paris, the predecessor to the Quai Branly along with the Musée du l’Homme. There was nothing in the museum wall text about the Romantic labeling in Kupka’s book Dawn of Art (1965), and certainly no discussion of the way that his late-blooming evolutionist paradigm had deeply offended and antagonized Australian anthropologists. Nor was there discussion of the continuous contact of Australians with Europeans, documented since 1803 in the case of the Yolngu of Arnhem Land whose recent and historical objects were installed nearby without distinguishing labels.9 The uncanny assemblages of contemporary paintings and sculpted objects—some of which had been made purely for the art market, others of which were more traditional objects such as hollow log coffins that had had actual funerary functions—were set next to a bank of windows painted to look like a rainforest, serving as the setting for functionally fake ethnographic objects that had been made within the last two decades for the commercial art market by contemporary artists, many of whom were well known names to collectors of Aboriginal art.10 When the museum first opened in 2006, at least one Australian curator had called the display a stunning example of “regressive museology.”11 On the documentation of Yolngu contact with Europeans, see Morphy (2007, 56). Swiss artist Kupka presented his research for a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Paris—essentially a documented catalogue and ethnographic contextualization of Yolngu works. Anthropologists who objected to his book positioning Aboriginal art at the dawn of human history include Ronald Brendt, W. E. H. Stanner, and A. P. Elkin. Morphy writes that all of these believed in the visual power of Aboriginal art, all were interested in the role of the individual artist and concerned to attribute works to particular artists. This was (and still is) the revisionist antidote to treating ethnographic objects as the (timeless) production of collectivities. 10 The building, designed by internationally celebrated architect Jean Nouvel, had included a “living wall” on the other side of those windows, but an inadequate support system for the plant roots, irrigation, and drainage problems compromised some of the vegetation. This is presumably the reason why what remained for everyone to see on the inside was a fake painted forest. 11 Bernice Murphy, co-founder of the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art and 9

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Yet what I experienced was much more complex than mere museological regression, though it certainly was that too. These contemporary Australian paintings and other objects were made to be regarded as art, whereas the rest of the museum’s exhibited collection was filled with more or less historical objects that were not made as art in the Western sense.12 Yet everything was on display for its formal qualities, therefore treated as artful—valued for its timeless artistry. The theatrical display—the spectacle that had captured me in the entry hall—was quite unlike any art museum display of contemporary art. That is, unless it was an installation by an artist, or by a curator working in conjunction with an artist, to interrogate conventional museum practices. The exhibition at the MQB was neither: what I had been witnessing was the presentation of objects as if they were imbued with embodied spiritual presence according to a Western taxonomy that had traditionally classified such objects as artifacts. The contemporary process of exoticizing consisted in manipulating the dichotomy between art and ethnographic object in a mode of presentation that oscillated between art and artifact, the central term of which was “the spiritual.” By including contemporary “Aboriginal art,” the Museum not only framed its holdings in this area as if still imbued with “spiritual presence,” it also gave voice to what I had observed about the framing of contemporary Indigenous Aboriginal art in art gallery settings—namely, the claim that these abstract designs have an enigmatic but indisputably “spiritual” dimension. In fact, many of the objects participating in the hyper-drama were once considered as idols or fetishes. The Musée du Quai Branly’s reinvention of these objects as art perpetuates an essentially western, Christian distinction between matter and spirit and the “link” purported to be between them, namely made things that stand in for or re-present the beliefs of the people who made them. The indigenous Australian sense of place implies a very different ontology in which the Tjukurrpa is an omnipotent force that permeates everything (Hetti Perkins, Icons). The art system imposes a very limited perspective and a reductive ideology on how things mean. Place in the form of geographic distance was an important vehicle for instantiating this discourse at the MQB: there were no cultural displays of anything comparably European. In fact, a comparison was made to European art of a certain different kind, part of an explicit program to justify the reduction of the world to one-part rational, producing naturalistic art, versus three-parts currently National Director of the Museums of Australia, cited by Eccles (2007). 12 With the notable exception of a display of European art, and slippages between traditional cultural practices and those made for the market in the displays of Native American art.

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irrational, producing symbolic, abstract, and/or fetishistic art.13 This purportedly scientific, anthropological model was no doubt intended to avoid direct connections between the mentality of a people and their cultural productions based on inherited identity and geographical location. The underlying assumptions of an earlier racial model remained entirely intact, however: the viewer was instructed to read intentionality directly out of visible form as if the formal elements of a made object (its stylistic vocabulary and its syntax, or system of relationships) had a certain indexical value. Missing from the equation was any historical or cultural understanding of the forms themselves—such as the conventional meanings attributed to them by their cultures of origin, their context of production and use. The scheme itself was essentially unchanged from Enlightenment claims about the origins of culture: early peoples lacked the power of reasoning (ratiocination) but possessed a robust and vigorous imagination. On these grounds, “primitive” humans, in contrast to Europeans, were deeply immersed in their immediate sensory experiences without the mediation of abstract reasoning. Their immersion in the world they inhabited was understood as an inability to abstract from experience and this was thought to explain the “absence” of European artistic styles of representation based on techniques of chiaroscuro and linear perspective such as those associated with academic artistic instruction.14

Staging the spiritual By focusing on the formal qualities of its vast collection, did the Musée du Quai Branly overcome the oppressive weight of historical taxonomies that divided the world’s cultural productions into discrete categories of art and artifact? Hardly. The MQB is an exceptional place, but it is the exception that proves a rule. Allying the primitive with modern abstraction has been a ubiquitous modern trope, one that is also replayed from the other side of the equation, in exhibitions of contemporary Aboriginal art. Recounting his first encounter with Western Desert painting in the early days before it became a commercial success, Philip Batty, a former teacher at Papunya Anthropologist Philippe Descola, Chair of Anthropology at the Collège de France, was responsible for the pedagoical framing and is cited frequently within the exhibiiton, for example, in a sign that reads: “PAINTING IS MENTAL.” 14 Giambattista Vico, in his widely read La Scienza nuova (1725), set the terms of discussion; see further, Connolly (1995). 13

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and now Senior Curator of Central Australian Collections at the Museum Victoria in Melbourne, poses one-half of the question I want to pursue: Certainly, the detached kind of art I had studied at the National Art School stood in stark contrast to the work of the painters. In depicting their dreamings, they were depicting their personal ancestors and therefore, supernatural beings to whom they owed their physical existence and identity. This was made particularly apparent when I attended the men’s secret-sacred rituals in which the recreation of the dreaming— encompassing similar iconographic symbolism seen in their paintings— was, for the Aboriginal participants, a serious and potentially dangerous business. How then was this serious religious business converted into a saleable commodity called “art”? (Batty 2007)15

The other half of the question is equally important: How is it still possible in 2011 for this saleable commodity called “art,” to be reinserted into a context of “spiritual” expression? The questions are actually just two sides of the same coin. The link between “the primitive” and “high modern abstraction” construed as a positive value is the issue around which the cultural construction of the indigenous Australian artist as a High Modernist genius takes place. To understand the theoretical underpinnings of the system requires paying attention to the performative aspects of meaningmaking. Framing Aboriginal art as the product of individual genius is only superficially different from suppressing the individual intentionality of the artist in a collective display when it comes to staging “spiritual presence.” For the museum is a place, too, of course—an uncanny, heterotopic space partitioned off from the rest of the world, creating second, third, and fourth worlds. Creating particular inflections of the inherently openended relationship that exists between people and places is never a straightforward matter. What makes the museum especially dangerous is its presentation of a fabricated world as though it were real. The museological presentation generates the desired effect of “spiritual presence” by erasing itself as a framing effect in the very act of mediation (cf. Eisenlohr; cited in Birgit Meyer 2011). At the Musée du Quai Branly, object and environment merge. The apparent understatement of the white cube art gallery is another Batty (2007). For one American writer, looking at Central Desert aboriginal painting is like watching American basketball: “…an immemorial vocabulary of forms, all highly ambiguous in significance, that can be pursued in an infinite variety of modulations and innovations—sometimes subtle, sometimes startling and dramatic.” Mitchell, “Abstraction and Intimacy,” written originally in the 1990s and published in Mitchell (2003, citing 241–42). 15

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staging platform that shapes and manipulates its captive audience. In 2008, when the National Museum in Canberra opened its retrospective exhibition of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, indisputably the most famous Australian woman of any ethnicity who ever painted, the show extolled her originality as on a par with Kandinsky, Klee, and de Kooning, despite her humble origins and subsequent life at a remote cattle station named “Utopia” in the Australian outback. Kngwarreye had neither formal artistic training as a painter nor any familiarity with European Modernism. Yet her brief and unbelievably prolific career (she is estimated to have painted an average of one canvas per day amounting to some 3,000 works in an eight-year span), was described in the catalogue and on the exhibition walls as unfolding in developmental stages comparable to the careers of equally long-living European artists such as Rembrandt, Titian, and Michelangelo (Neale 2008, 33–47). “Emily,” as the catalogue explained and the installation performed, worked through the issues of Modernism entirely on her own.

Figure 1–8. Entryway to Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye exhibition, Canberra, National Museum of Australia, November 2008. Photograph Claire Farago.

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Despite the claim that Emily is a unique phenomenon—and who would doubt that she is a force of nature?—isn’t she enacting the normative ideals of modern creative agency? Are we not witnessing what Foucault called the recasting of prior representations in new forms? In yoking material things to another domain, museology creates the bonds that it claims merely to document: a virtual sense of meaning, direction, time, and place. In the present context, it is important to remember that “Aboriginal art” succeeded commercially in the 1990s, when High Modernism was critically waning. From the standpoint of art as a high-end commodity form, Kngwarreye’s paintings became a new product on an old shelf as her career skyrocketed —her work offered a novel variant of an existing genre that invigorated a tired market. Moreover, the same move that elevated the Aboriginal artist to the status of European modernists of an earlier generation re-inscribed the hegemonic Eurocentric discourse in which the Aboriginal artist still occupies the lower rung of the traditional hierarchy between civilized/ primitive, European/Other. By the time Western Desert acrylic painting became an artistic sensation and economic goldmine in the Australian and international art industry, the symbolic markings characteristic of the “style” were viewed reductively within the framework of high modernist abstraction, and indeed bore little resemblance to the first wave of Western Desert painting. Kngwarreye and many other Aboriginal artists whose styles developed on the model of Western Desert painting and whose careers were shaped and steered by government art advisors and powerful institutions found themselves promoted in a self-defeating position. From an institutional standpoint, Kngwarreye was held hostage by an art system colonized by the interests of the elite collectors who craved her work for its unadulterated, uncanny recapitulation of formal modernism —and painted seemingly straight from the desert inhabited by Aboriginal people still in touch with their ancestral way of life.16 As the catalogue emphasized, Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s traditional concern was with the pencil yam (anwelarr) (see plate 1–9). Her name “kame” is given to seeds of the pencil yam plant and she repeatedly painted the underground network of its roots and tubers (Green 2005). Her paintings, however, were the product of an unacknowledged collaboration with the curators and collectors who packaged her as a modernist—and not only rhetorically but to the extent of providing her with preformatted, stretched canvases And indeed apart from Aboriginal curator Margo Neale’s apparent passion for Kngwarreye’s art. 16

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like the ones lined up to create the serial paintings known as the Utopia panels, originally commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery in 1996.17 The artist’s agency is certainly not negligible, but distinctions between anthropological or curatorial agency and the artist’s intentionality are enduringly indeterminate. One has to ask how the references to Kngwarreye’s native country function in the reception of her work. It is the dynamic structure of the matrix of the art system that needs explicating: what creates the celebrity artist, who occupies a certain cultural place, a heterotopic identity in a twilight zone, apart from the rest? What keeps seemingly outmoded notions of the “individual genius”—which in Kngewarreye’s case, as in the case of Western Desert painting in general, are cast in a dual role as genius loci—in play? The underlying problem is that single authorship and high art media determine the values of the art industry. So the simple answer is profitability. This is also the reason that artists working within the system can be made into celebrity artists overnight. Two years after she was “discovered,” Kngwarreye had her first solo exhibitions in the state capitals of Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. In 1997, she posthumously represented Australia in the 47th Venice Biennale. Not bad for an artist (and a woman) without formal artistic training who started painting at the age of eighty. In the final analysis, when indigenous Australian artists making “art” for the market adapt their work to suit the expectations and tastes of their buyers, what goes by the label of “Aboriginal art” is quite literally a mirror image of European desires (Batty 2007). Specific cultural memory is evacuated and recast as abstract design (its indexical relationship to an actual place no longer based on inherited iconography, but on the artist’s original invention). The gestural painting is a visual signifier of noumenal presence in the viewer’s phenomenal experience.

Imagined Places in the Twenty-First Century The compromised agency of Aboriginal artists is thus itself emblematic of the complexities that “place” entails as a signifier in the contemporary Emily Kngwarraye-Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia (1998). The retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra was based partly on research conducted for this earlier exhibition, organized immediately after the artist’s death (much to the consternation of many who hold to traditional views for respecting the spirit of the deceased). 17

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Lebenswelt of the art system. Once they enter the art system, objects in which the artists adapt imagery from actual ceremonial practices of their own culture may signify no differently from art that imitates the ceremonial objects of other places—or abstract art in general for that matter. The alleged “spiritual value” attributed to the object depends greatly on the collector or other spectator who, in the paradigmatic case of “Aboriginal art,” does not have easy access to much of that meaning. The enigmatic nature of the abstraction enhances its noumenal value in the marketplace, where its actual economic value is determined and maintained according to a system far removed from the artist’s intentions. And even farther removed from the conditions in which Kngwarreye, her many needy relatives, and the majority of artists dependent upon and feeding the thriving art market in “Aboriginal art” live out their lives. Let’s examine another sense in which “place” and space operate in the art system. Kngwarreye was never in a position to mount a sophisticated, selfaware resistance to the cultural status quo. Instead, she ran the risk of being perceived in the position of the “primitive” in an evolutionary trajectory of cultural progress because her appearance as an “abstract expressionist” at the cutting edge of the avant-garde is a belated modernism. The cutting edge is always moving on. The systemic challenge, then, is to make art that is perceived to be at the front line of this movement. This is a questionable requirement, however, because what constitutes originality and for whom is neither stable nor independent of social context—a conundrum that “liberation artist” Richard Bell in fact clearly articulates: I am an Aboriginal man living and working in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. I make a living from painting pictures. Because I am from the closely settled east coast of Australia I am not allowed to paint what is popularly called “Aboriginal art.” Nor can I use the symbols and styles of Aboriginal people from the remote, sparsely settled areas of northern Australia. Apparently, this would make my work derivative and hence diminished in importance, relevance and quality. However, in western art, which appears to be almost entirely and increasingly derivative, no such restrictions apply. Quoting, citing, sampling or appropriating pre-existing works even has its own movement: appropriationism. There is even a belief that “everything has been done before.” (Which makes it cool to appropriate). Consequently, I have chosen to quote, cite and sample the works of many artists from around the world… .” (Bell 2007, 59)18 18

Citing Richard Bell in Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial (2007,

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Bell’s ironic appropriation of Roy Lichtenstein’s art (see plate 1–10) makes its strongest point within another system of reference than that of 1960s Pop Art: the dots are no longer just references to the reproduction process of cheap newspaper print (Ben-day dots), hence to discourses on the originality of the artist; they are now, primarily, considered in the social context of Australian art marketing, references to the so-called “dot style” distinctive of Western Desert acrylic painting, where dots were purportedly used at first to mask secret-sacred imagery, a bone of fierce contention within the indigenous communities.19 The ricochets playing out in Richard Bell’s laconic text are deeply and almost deliciously ironic. With this irony, he situates himself along the moving front line of conceptual art, at least that is the strategy. In gaming the system, Bell demonstrates that there is no stationary ground zero—rather, “ground zero” is a moving target, a constantly renegotiated set of relations. Contemporary Aboriginal art in its diverse manifestations of space, place, situatedness, location, ground, foundation, and so on, is in many ways paradigmatic of the position of art and of artists in contemporary EuroAmerican society, and this is not due to the demands of the marketplace alone. The opportunity seized by Emily and by the Aboriginal men of Papunya definitely raised their sense of self-worth and created an important new painting movement, among other things, but the retrospective narrative of these events is still subject to the biographical framework and the privileging of white agency associated with the most conventional garden variety of (implicitly or explicitly racist) art history. In reframing “Emily” as a (belated) Abstract Expressionist, institutional authority denied her both the possibility of participating in the deconstructive discourse about the Western idea of art and the possibility of acknowledging her communal working methods even where they continued to exist. Complex agencies were involved in Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s success as a painter. She practiced collaborative working methods during her entire career, as did many of the Western Desert artists, but conventional accounts suppress these aspects of their personal histories. And the young art teacher Geoff Bardon remains the hero of the Western Desert Painting movement in 59). Bell won the 2003 Telstra National Aboriginal Art Award with a work entitled Scienta e Metaphysica (Bell’s Theorem), or Aboriginal Art, It’s a White Thing. 19 As of this writing, the reasons for incorporating secret-sacred imagery in the early acrylic paintings, which may not have been intended for sale, and later, less sensitive imagery in paintings made for the market is unresolved. The main arguments are reviewed by Bonyhandy, originally appearing as “Sacred Sights” in the Sydney Morning Herald, 9 December 2000. See further, Ryan and Batty (2011).

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the current telling, portrayed as dating from the moment of his arrival to Papunya, even though there would be many other ways to narrate the story. I am not suggesting that either she or he deserves to be deposed so that someone else can be inserted into the same hagiographical template. Rather, there is an obvious need to examine how what we commonly refer to as art has served as the site par excellence for the production of the phantasms that make up the fabric of our modernities and postmodernities —the chimeras of identity, ethnicity, race, gender, nationality, geography, sexuality, culture, indigeneity, and otherness. The key metaphorical conundrum of post-Enlightenment modernity has been that the form of your work should be legible as the figure or physiognomy of your personal truth, nailing down your place in the world, establishing your permanent address: the emblem, symbol, echo, reflection, expression, or re-presentation of who and what you essentially “are” or claim to be. We still search for ways to tell the stories with the nuance and force that prolonged contact between the various agents in a field split since the colonial era along ethnic lines demands. The pressing issue is how history is told: what sources are used, who tells it, who benefits, and who doesn’t? Framing strategies invisibly organize our perception and thinking about what is presented as evidence. Discussing the widely circulated photographs of prisoners being tortured by American serviceman and women at Abu Graib, Judith Butler examined the framing effects of camera angle, posed subjects, points of view, suggesting that those who took the photographs were actively involved in the stagecraft of war. As the case of translating Western Desert painting from its point of production to its many points of reception further suggests, framing effects are not limited to the visual register or the manipulation of the medium. Furthermore, interpretation is never simply a subjective act at the level of the individual viewer because the structuring constraints also have agency: they have the power to elicit empathy or antipathy, action or inaction—depending not just on the representation, but on what is representable: what is included is constituted by what is occluded. As Butler aptly put it: “To learn to see the frame that blinds us to what we see is no easy matter.” Butler described the relentless logic of indexicality at work in contemporary life, determining which of us are capable of being seen as fully human subjects, and which of us are subjectified, dehumanized others. Along with many other public intellectuals, she calls for a different ontology, one that stresses our global interdependency and recognizes the interlocking networks of power that maintain differential positions in everyday life for what they are. The future ontology, she writes, needs to

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recognize that my life “refers to some indexical you without whom I cannot be.” (Butler 2009, 44.)20 The fundamental issues at stake in imagining [abstract] spaces as [inhabited] places hinge on the recognition that connecting “this with that” is inevitably an active, ongoing process of seeing similarities in dissimilarities. Metaphors are instruments for reckoning with the world, dynamic tools for constructing dynamic worlds. Thinking about “art” as the medium that binds together persons and places beyond identity politics, beyond the commodity form, Australian cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiadis has called attention to the body of work produced by Western Desert painters as “rais[ing] questions of authorship, community involvement, historical retrieval, and political affirmation…(by) allow[ing] for a horizontal model of storytelling to emerge through the collaborative practice of a community” (Papastergiadis 2008). As another Australian, Paul Carter, once put it, describing the unprecedented events at Papunya, “another space was opened in and round the painting room, another ground of exchange. To look at the paintings made there . . . is also to ponder the terms of a non-assimilationist political future” (Carter 2007, 356). That is to say, the intercultural and communal art-making situation that Geoffrey Bardon, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Emily Kame Kngawarreye, and many others utilized—a mode of practice that was and often still is marginalized in accounts of Aboriginal artmaking because it does not conform to the “genius-artist” model of the art industry—also generated other, incommensurable perspectives. In these circumstances, Aboriginal artists and their white teacher/advisors set out together to create a different place from what had existed before, a “third space” in which some level of exchange could flow, a dynamic place of enunciation, identification, and negotiation that neither assumed nor aimed to create a homogeneous community.21 A question I would leave with the reader, then, is whether communal artmaking on this order of exchange, in a “third space” that no one owns, might serve as an effective model for re-imagining social space in a heterogeneous world? While there is no doubt that the turn towards collaborative and community-based art practices is now a global movement that is still gaining momentum, what I want to stress are the paradoxical tensions operating between location, on the one hand, and mobility and displacement, on the other.

20 21

Butler (2009, 44), responding to Sontag (2003). Communication with Judith Ryan, 23 November 2008.

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References Batty, Philip. 2007. “Selling Emily: Confessions of a White Art Advisor.” Artlink Magazine 27/2 (June 2007): 68–71. Bonyhandy, Tim. 2000. “Papunya Aboriginal Art and Artists – Papunya Stories.” http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/resources/articles4.php. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso. Carter, Paul. 2004. “Introduction: The Interpretation of Dreams.” In Papunya: A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, edited by G. Bardon and J. Bardon, xiv– xxi. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Miegunyah Press. Connolly, Frances. 1995. The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725–1907. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial. 2007. Curated by Brenda Croft. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia. Eccles, Jeremy. 2007. Australian Art Market Report, 23 (Autumn 2007): 32­–34. Emily Kngwarraye-Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia. 1998. Edited by Margo Neale. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery. Farago, Claire. 1995. “‘Vision Itself Has Its History’: ‘Race,’ Nation, and Renaissance Art History.” In Reframing the Renaissance: Art and Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450–1650, edited by Claire Farago, 67–88. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2009. “Redemptive Acts of Seeing: Riegl’s Australian Legacy.” In Acts of Seeing: Artists, Scientists, and the History of the Visual. A volume dedicated to Martin Kemp, edited by Assimina Kaniari and Marina Wallace, 61–77. London: Zidane Press. García Canclini, Nestor. 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Green, Jenny. 2005. “The Enigma of Emily Kngwarray.” In Aboriginal Religions in Australia: An Anthology of Recent Writings, edited by Max Charlesworth, Francoise Dussart, and Howard Morphy, 185–192. Aldershot: Ashgate. Johnson, Vivien. 2008. Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists. Alice Springs: IAD Press.

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Kimber, Dick. 2006. “Kapi! Contact Experiences in the Western Desert 1873–1984.” In Colliding Worlds: First Contact in the Western Desert 1932-1984. Edited by Philip Batty, 4–28. Melbourne: Museum Victoria. Exhibition catalogue. Kleinert, S. “Namatjira, Albert (Elea) (1902–1959).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian National University. http://www.adb.online. anu.edu.au/biogs. Langton, Marcia. 2000. “Religion and Art from Colonial Conquest to Postcolonial Resistance.” In The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, edited by Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, 16–24. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2003. What Do Pictures Want? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morphy, Howard. 1998. Aboriginal Art. London: Phaidon. ———. 2007. Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-cultural Categories. Oxford & New York: Berg. Munn, Nancy D. 1973. Walpiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press. Neale, Margo. 2008. “Marks of Meaning: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye.” In Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Edited by Margo Neale, 33–47. Canberra: National Museum of Australia. Exhibition catalogue. Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2008. “The Global Need for Collaboration.” http://collabarts.org/?p=201. Preziosi, Donald and Claire Farago. 2012. Art Is Not What You Think It Is. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Ryan, Judith and Philip Batty. 2011. Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art. Melbourne: Museum Victoria and the National Gallery of Victoria. Exhibition catalogue. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.

Multisensory Memories and the Spaces of Suburban Childhood in the Greater Helsinki Region in the 1950s and 1960s Kirsi Saarikangas

The summer suburb was printed on my memory in certain scenes, atmospheres, and scents. Heat and dust! Dirty, sweating boys playing football. The urban scent of wet asphalt after the rain, when we got back from the countryside. Cellars, doorways, flat roofs, staircases, parking places, concrete. But also parks, lawns and thick forest, which was not yet turned into park, and which we at the age of seven called rainforest. Every now and then we slipped out of the woods directly in the middle of the scaffolding, stacks of timber and the dust raised by concrete mixers. Incomplete buildings and a fascinating amount of building materials occupy a central place in my childhood imagery. . . . The smell of timber and cement told of thrilling abundance. There was always something new to discover.1 (LS 79)

A man who moved to the Kontula suburb in eastern Helsinki at the age of six in the mid-1960s gives a multisensory and vivid picture of his childhood suburban milieu. He wrote down his reminiscences thirty years later, in 1995–1996, for an essay competition arranged by the major Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. “Kesäinen lähiö piirtyi mieleen joissain näkymissä, tunnelmissa ja hajuissa. Kuumuutta ja pölyä. Likaisia ja hikisiä poikia pelaamassa jalkapalloa. Sateen jälkeen kostean asfaltin kaupunkilainen tuoksu, kun tultiin maalta kotiin. Kellareita, porttikäytäviä, tasakattoja, rappukäytäviä, parkkitasanteita, betonia. Mutta myöskin puistikoita, nurmikoita ja tiheä metsä, jota ei ollut vielä muutettu puistoksi ja, jota kutsuimme seitsenvuotiaina naskaleina sademetsäksi. . . . Välillä puikahdettiin ulos metsästä suoraan rakennustelineiden ja lautakasojen keskelle, betonimyllyjen nostattamaan pölyyn. Lapsuudenkuvien keskellä on oma paikkansa keskeneräisillä rakennuksilla ja kiehtovalla määrällä rakennustarpeita. . . . Puutavaran ja sementin tuoksu kertoivat jännästä runsaudesta, josta aina löysi jotain uutta.” Unless otherwise mentioned all translations are my own. On the writing competition see footnote 3.

1

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Kontula, constructed mainly between 1964 and the early 1970s, was one of the new housing areas built in the Helsinki region from the 1950s to the 1970s. The construction of new suburbs fundamentally changed the Finnish landscape, the character of housing and the details of daily life. The suburban locale with relatively few houses situated amidst the natural backdrop of forests and fields, the so-called forest suburbs, rapidly became the main landscape for many people living in Finland. During that period, hundreds of thousands of new apartments were built in new areas outside Finnish town centres. This development was at its most rapid between 1965 and 1975, the years of the so-called great migration, both within Finland and abroad, primarily to Sweden. In this period, 500,000 new apartments were built, and 200,000 people were moving into new homes each year. By 1975, half a million people lived in the new suburbs in the greater Helsinki region alone. Finland was thus urbanised and modernised by becoming suburbanised.

Figure 2–1. Kontulankaari 1 – Kaarikuja 2, Kontula, Helsinki. Photograph Jalmari Aarnio 1968. Helsinki City Museum.

The long passage quoted at the beginning is remarkable because it incorporates several features frequently mentioned in written accounts

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of suburban living, features that were characteristic of the then new suburban landscape. Besides the visual elements the passage brings out the interconnected sensory, physical and visual perceptions of built space. The narrator attaches his remembrances of the suburban childhood milieu to sensuous, atmospheric glimpses. The suburban neighbourhood emerges as a multilayered, lived space through the uses of the environment and through movements, acts, gestures, postures and sensations. Moreover, the passage highlights the importance of suburban social life and playgrounds, the juxtaposition of new buildings with undeveloped forest land and the incomplete and continuously changing nature of the suburban setting. Architecture, or built space, is a form of visual and material culture that is experienced in both a visible and a sensory way. Inhabitants use and sense their environment in a random and absent-minded way rather than observing it attentively. In addition to looking thoughtfully, perceiving and experiencing the environment is also both unconscious and corporeal. It happens in the interaction of all the senses. In recent years there has been an increased interest in tactile visuality and the sensory and emotive aspects of built space. However, awareness of the sensory features of architecture is not a recent phenomenon. In his influential essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) Walter Benjamin drew attention to the tactile dimensions of architecture. In his view, architecture represents “the prototype of a work of art that is received in a state of distraction and by the collective” (Benjamin 2008, 34). Buildings are utilised in two ways: through use and by being viewed, or in other words, by tactile and by optical means of observation. What determines each perception is habit and custom rather than contemplation (Benjamin 2008, 33–35). Below, I discuss the visible and sensory features of built space and their relation to memory through written recollections of suburban life in the greater Helsinki region. I approach the suburbs as stratified, relational spaces and dynamic processes that change over time.2 My particular interest is in the remembrances of childhood spaces and sensescape. To what kinds of spaces and places do suburbanites attach their childhood memories? An exceptionally large body of written personal recollections of suburban life I am basing my discussion on my broader study of the lived suburban spaces in the Helsinki region. In order to obtain a multi-faceted picture of the suburbs, I have combined an examination of the visual and physical appearances of the suburbs with an analysis of media representations of them and with memoirs of suburban living.

2

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in the Helsinki region from the 1950s to the 1970s was collected between 1995 and 2000, thanks to essay competitions organised by such institutions as the Helsingin Sanomat (1995–96) and the Finnish Literature Society (1999–2000), which attracted almost 300 entrants.3 In this material a new type of urban space lives and breathes in a compelling manner. The suburbanites depicted both the common features of suburban habitation that they shared with other writers and the distinct qualities of their own suburbs. They told stories that are both collective and deeply personal with sensuous individual and generational memories and corporeal experiences. The written accounts focus on daily experiences and intimate aspects of the lived suburban space along with culturally coded meanings. In addition to the particular, located meanings of suburban living in the greater Helsinki region in the latter half of the twentieth century, the accounts offer a means of approaching the sensory and experiential aspects of built space and the ways in which the environment emerges as meaningful, lived space in general.4 However, there is a split between the lived and the narrated experiences: the lived spatial experiences are always already past and mediated, and only traces of them can be retrieved. The narratives support the notion of the sensory nature of built space by drawing attention to mobility, the inhabitants’ activities and the tactile, aural and olfactory dimensions of spatial experience. The contributors depicted their environment largely through its use, their doings and various activities, thereby bringing out the relationship between the sensory and the visual observations of built space, as well as the meanings that emerge in the mobility and use of the environment. Voices, scents, movements, surface textures, motion and the feel of the air on the skin shape the meanings of the The competition organised by the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society (SKS) concentrated on particular areas in the greater Helsinki region (Kontula and Siilitie), drawing a total of 82 entrants, while the Helsingin Sanomat competition covered the entire greater region of Helsinki. The result was over 200 stories from more than 40 different suburbs. The collections have been partly published in Astikainen et al., 1997, Kokkonen 2002 and Kesänen 2002. Quotations from the Life in the Suburbs collection is referred to as LS plus a collection number, while quotations from the Kontula and Siilitie collections are cited as SKS, Kontula or SKS, Siilitie respectively with a page number. 4 However, it is important to note that built spaces are also complex networks of power and closely related to social and cultural ideals, norms and practices. The order of space is affected by historical, political and societal issues and in turn affects them. 3

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landscape along with its visual features—as if the landscape were inscribed on the bodies of the narrators as physical remembrances. Having grown up in the Haukilahti suburb in Espoo in the mid-1960s, I share my memories with generations who moved into the new suburbs as children during the 1950s to the 1970s. The suburban environment significantly shaped my relations to spaces, places and landscapes. While my experiences and “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1991) may help me to perceive some features of suburban habitation, they veil others. Therefore, along with writing about inhabitants’ recollections, I am writing and remembering along with them (Rogoff 2003, 133–34).

Suburbs: Lived Spaces and Inhabited Landscapes Over the last two or three decades, the understanding of the notion of building and the focus of architectural research have undergone notable shifts due to the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences. The “spatialisation” of the idea of building has involved a shift of focus from an analysis of buildings as images or static, inert structures and in terms of visual representation to an analysis of built spaces as produced, represented and experienced spaces. When buildings are approached primarily in terms of the visual appearance that is given shape and meaning on designers’ drawing boards, they are flattened to two-dimensional images or threedimensional constructions, and their material, sensory, emotive and social dimensions are dismissed. Yet the sensescape of (sub)urban space has been an underdeveloped area of architectural and urban studies despite the intense rethinking of built and sensory environment (e.g. Corbin 1994). The formation of the meanings of the inhabited landscape is a stratified process in which looking at, sensing and experiencing the environment and the corporeality of perceptions and sensations are crucial besides and beyond its visual meanings. Space, place and landscape—all of which are focused on here—are loaded notions. In various approaches there are parallel, overlapping and even contradictory understandings of these concepts. For my purposes, the idea in which three-dimensional geometrical space or a particular location becomes multidimensional, lived space through use is helpful. According to Michel de Certeau, “space is a practised place” composed of mobile elements. The physical, moving subject—or inhabitant—spatialises a place by acting and moving in it, through perceptions, sensations, bodily

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movements and gestures (de Certeau 1980, 173; 1984, 117). The idea of lived space puts the emphasis on mobility, parallel lived spaces and moving, porous boundaries. The lived space is formed in the reciprocity of the inhabitants and their environment, in the located encounters between inhabitants, architecture, landscape and things, in the constant cycle of production and reproduction of space and the meanings in its everyday use (de Certeau 1980, 173–74; Lefebvre 1974, 42–55; Soja 1996, 65). According to de Certeau, users actualise the meanings by using a space rather than by distant visual perception. He emphasises practices of pedestrians and the meanings that emerge in their everyday practices. Sensations and random, casual observations are crucial for those practices (de Certeau 1980, 139–40). Place in turn is attached to the concrete materiality and personal meanings of a particular location. In contrast to the more neutral “area,” place is an experiential and subjective notion (Relph 1976; Tuan 1977). The emphasis on the experiential and existential meanings of place, however, has often implied the stability of place. The geographer Doreen Massey has therefore suggested the reconceptualisation of place in a vein similar to space. While space is layered and mobile, ranging “from the intimacy of the household to the wide space of transglobal connections,” the meaning of place is porous as well. According to Massey, “a place is formed out of the particular set of social relations which interact at a particular location” (Massey 1994, 168). Hence, while place is bound to a unique location, it too is open and expands outside its physical borders. In suburbanites’ written memories, for example, the yard was part of the dwelling space through windows and balconies; furthermore, the idea of homeplace extended outward, to the inhabited suburban landscape. Inhabited landscape is a third spatial concept important here. The term landscape refers both to the visible features of a vast area of land and to its representations and hence is strongly connected to the sense of sight. However, landscape is also an inhabited and meaningfully experienced locality. It is both a perceived and a lived physical environment. a particular mode of apprehending the environment (Haila 2006, 23–27; Johansson 2006, 48). It is therefore possible to suggest that meaningful, lived spaces and inhabited landscapes emerge through use—within a wider web of cultural and societal ideals and values—as much as in deliberately looking at the physical environment as an object to be appreciated by the viewers (Mitchell 1994, 14).

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Suburban Childhood Revisited The suburban environment with its buildings and topography crucially shaped the narrators’ relations to and perceptions of landscape. This environment was an elemental part of their lived, multisensory experiences of space marked by affective memories. In their writings, the majority of narrators returned to the important and formative years of their lives: more than half of them recollected their childhood and youth, while the rest—with a very few exceptions—recalled their lives as young mothers or fathers. Three-quarters of the narrators were women. The suburbanites wrote their life stories in answer to competitions that called for memories of personal experiences and inhabitants’ viewpoints on the suburbs or how it was to live “on the remotest edges of a city,” a phrase that referred to a series of articles on suburban habitation in the Helsingin Sanomat in 1975.5 The writing guidelines—although relatively loose— and the writing process itself inevitably directed the approaches of the contributors and guided their memories. Whereas memory is discontinuous, the recollections of the suburbanites often formed coherent retrospective narratives. Narration is thick, with a whole life history often told in a few pages. The style and length of the depictions vary: most of them are two to four pages, a few are as many as twenty pages, and some of them were even more ambitious (Pöysä 2003, 228–32; Saarikangas 2009, 137–40). The recollections provide a counter-narrative of multilayered suburban space to the uniform critique of “dormitory suburbs,” which was still prevalent in the media at the time the suburbanites wrote their life stories. As Irene Roivainen pointed out in a study (1999) in which she analysed the discourse on the suburbs from 1955 to 1993 based on articles in the Helsingin Sanomat, the idea of the suburb as a locus of social opportunity shifted in the mid-1960s to the rhetoric of “bare housing.” Since then, suburbs have been discussed as failures of modern social planning and identified as sites of social alienation (Roivainen 1999, 60). In striking contrast to the critical discourse on suburbs, the contributors described suburbs as complex living environments and localities that could also incorporate mutually contradictory meanings. They underlined the social networks, personal experiences and active aspects of living in suburbs. The series consisted of three articles: “Mitä on elää pääkaupunkiseudun äärimmäisissä nurkissa?” (What is it like to live on the remotest edges of a city?, 26 October 1975), “Puolen miljoonan suomalaisen koko elämä” (Life for half a million Finns, 1 November 1975) and “Olen kuullut on kaupunki tuolla” (I have heard of a city over there, 9 November 1975).

5

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The picture of life in the suburbs provided by their residents is radically different from the perspective of either outside observers or architectural analyses. Indeed, in their general visual appearance different suburbs reminded of each other—as much as different cities from the same epoch reminded of each other—and their planning and construction was defined by the uniform principles of modern town planning and the ideal of living close to nature. When suburbs have been studied primarily as architecture and on the level of planning principles, their homogeneity has been stressed (Kervanto Nevanlinna 2005, 23), but the inhabitants’ accounts bring out distinct, heterogeneous features and spatial discontinuities. The scenery of suburban childhood—a time when sensory experiences are markedly acute—is recalled with particular emotions and sensuousness. Childhood spatial experiences affect later perceptions of space, as the humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has emphasised in his influential discussion on the formation of a sense of place. Knowing a place is a long process: it happens over the span of years and occurs subconsciously, corporeally and modestly in repetitive activities and multisensory experiences (Tuan 1977, 183). According to Tuan, the spatial sensations of the childhood environment accentuate later relations to space, place and landscape, forming a kind of basic landscape and primordial sense of home. These early perceptions of home resonate in all later homes: “home” often means a childhood home (Tuan 2004). Habitation takes place in mundane, repetitive routines. The feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young has underlined the activities of inhabitants in the emergence of spatial meanings. Dwellings are made into homes through active and affective “homework” embedded in the concrete materiality of rooms, objects, habits, gestures and personal histories, through “performing basic activities of life” (Young 1991, 162). Applying Young’s ideas more broadly to the inhabited environment, it is possible to suggest that the meanings of environment are formed in daily activities, practices and movements. With its spatial layout, objects and things, the environment—natural or built—supports or interferes with routines by providing pathways for inhabitants’ practices, movements and bodily habits (Young 1991, 149–51). Meanings are attached to surroundings, itineraries and things as well as to the memories, emotions and social relations assigned to them. In the narratives, the contributors revisited the important sites of their personal histories and suburban childhoods. Moreover, by locating their remembrances in suburban places, the writers created places of memory that

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are both personal and generational. The following themes are continuously repeated in the recollections of suburban childhood: the wonders of a new apartment; the unfinished nature of suburban settings and the kind of pioneering spirit of habitation; the importance of outdoor life in the yards and playgrounds; the significance of social networks and particularly the role of women and children in creating them; the importance of the surrounding nature and unplanned land that lay idle. A particularly striking connective feature is the emphasis on the sensory aspects of the built space besides the visual spaces. The contributors depicted the environment as perceived not only with their eyes, ears, noses, hands or feet, but also with their whole bodies. Below, I focus on three aspects of suburban childhood spaces: first, the transforming environment; second, the suburban yards; and third, the encounter between the new architecture and its surroundings. Thereafter, I move on to discuss the sensitive and emotive memories of suburban space and conclude by proposing the entanglement of senses in acquiring the spatial meanings.

Landscape and People in Motion New homes with their modern conveniences were a precondition for the processes in which the suburbs emerged as home regions. The narrators repeatedly referred to feelings of joy and happiness that were aroused, even physically, by the heavenly new apartments with their spaciousness and all modern conveniences. Young mothers in particular praised the new amenities, and those contributors who moved to the suburbs during their childhood enthusiastically recalled the bathtubs in their new homes to the degree that this population has been called the “bathtub generation” (Kesänen 2002, 12–13). It is therefore all the more interesting to observe that most of their attention was paid to outdoor life. The inhabited environment is experienced and depicted in a multisensory manner, and as an experience both visual and physical, it defined in a profound sense the feeling of home and belonging to a place. In the narratives, the sense of home stretches beyond the physical borders of dwelling, to the yards, forests, social relations and landscape (Massey 1994, 171). The transforming environment and the coexistence of new buildings, the remains of earlier settlement and the unbuilt nature form the mental landscape of suburban childhood.

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Figure 2–2. Suburb under construction in Helsinki. Photograph K. G. Roos, late 1950s. Finnish Museum of Photography.

Although in the 1950s and 1960s the aim of town planning and housing policy was to design and construct an entire suburb all at once, in reality, the setting remained incomplete for a long time and included remnants of earlier habitation. Numerous contributors stressed the feeling of moving onto a building site. A woman who moved to Kontula in the year 1966 at the age of seven recalled: When we moved in the spring, the neighbourhood was muddy and everything was unfinished. It hardly bothered us, at least us children. In the early years we went for long walks with my father all over Kontula, exploring new houses and streets. In the plot next door there had previously been a prefabrication factory; now it was an appealing place for children for play. . . . The best play areas, the remains of old fortifications, were on the other side of the road.6 (LS 75, my emphasis) “Muuttaessamme keväällä ympäristö oli vielä kurainen ja kaikki keskeneräistä. Se ei juuri haitannut, ainakaan meitä lapsia. Isän kanssa teimme alkuvuosina kävelylenkkejä ympäri Kontulaa tutkien uusia taloja ja katuja. Naapuritontilla oli aiemmin ollut elementtitehdas, nyt siinä oli kaiken romun keskellä lapsille houkutteleva leikkipaikka. . . . Tien toisella puolella olivat parhaat leikkipaikat, kalliot vanhoine juoksuhautoineen.” Some of the 6

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The writer defined the important places in her suburban childhood in relation to each other. She mapped out the environment and its different locations through the trajectories and relations between here and there in a series of spatialising actions. The unfinished nature of the surroundings was indeed a distinctive feature of suburban habitation. The landscape outside the apartments was in a continuous state of flux, and new buildings sprouted before the residents’ eyes. The moving suburban space, its sounds, smells and flavours, evoked particularly strong memories among the contributors, bringing past spatial experiences momentarily to mind. Affective, sensory memories are ascribed to physical places and details in the childhood landscape. A woman who moved to the Soukka suburb in Espoo in 1969 at the age of nine wrote: I always recall how the apartment house smelled in the different phase of its construction. First, there was a watery hole blasted through rock, where the shuttering and cement casting were done. Then the concrete elements were brought onto the place, and they had their own particular cellar-like scent during the rain. In the last phase there were different paint odours. And in the yard the new soil and the asphalt smelt.7 (LS Espoo 42)

Asphalt was an important seasonal smell and also an environmental element of the new suburban surroundings. The contributors often recalled suburban scenery through scents and sounds. “There was a lot of asphalt in the new suburb. It was put down in the spring, and again a new urban smell spread into the home. The asphalt machines were great big monsters full of sun-tanned men,” wrote a woman who moved to Pihlajamäki in 1965 at the age of eight (LS 40)8. Although a human-made artefact, asphalt and its smell became almost a natural element of the suburban sensescape. The connections between memory and suburban sensescape are apparent in the narratives.The reader can almost smell the new, warm asphalt and freshly cut grass, hear the sounds of construction and yard life and sense the movement in the incomplete environment in her or his body and muscles. The scents and flavours especially carried the writers through the layers of suburbs included the remains of fortifications built by the Russian Army around Helsinki during the First World War, when Finland was still part of the Russian Empire. 7 “Muistan aina miltä rakenteilla oleva kerrostalo ‘tuoksui’ eri vaiheissaan. Ensin oli kallioon räjäytetty vetinen kuoppa johon tehtiin laudoituksia ja sementtivalut, sitten paikalle tuotiin elementit joista sateessa lähti aivan oma ‘kellarimainen’ hajunsa, ja viimeisessä vaiheessa olivat erilaiset maalinkäryt. Pihalla tuoksuivat lisäksi uusi multa ja asfaltti.” 8 “Lähiössä oli paljon asfalttia. Keväällä sitä tehtiin ja taas yksi uusi kaupunkihaju levisi kotiin. Asfalttikoneet olivat suuria petoja, täynnä ruskeaksipaahtuneita miehiä.”

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time into previously lived-in spaces. The corporeal memories of earlier spatial experiences were actualised in the process of writing down the memories. In a similar fashion, film director Kaisa Rastimo explained her return to her childhood neighbourhood in Tapiola in an interview: “The perfume of roses persuaded me to return. Scents and smells are inscribed on the subconscious, and in my childhood, the roses smelled so divine” (Rastimo 2003).9 A walking pace was crucial in the appropriation of the suburban landscape. In the 1950s and early 1960s Finnish suburbs were characteristically designed with pedestrians in mind. Schools, shopping centres and areas designated for sports were all located within walking distance of homes (Meurman 1947). In the narratives the environment opens up as an operational locus of activities. The suburban landscape, its topography and its architecture take shape through use and mobility, in pathways and in routes (see also Jokinen, Asikainen and Mäkinen 2010). Walking and doing, “pedestrian utterings” and their “ways of doing” things, are important in being aware of the topography of place and the formation of lived spatial meanings, as de Certeau emphasised (1980, 148–59; 1984, 97–99). Contributors mapped out their childhood suburban environment through various comings and goings, itineraries and activities. The environment was observed and learned by walking and wandering around rather than from a single vantage point, in the same manner as the anthropologist Tim Ingold has pointed out (Ingold 2011, 43–45). In Ingold’is view, walking affects what and how the environment is perceived and seen; movement, postures and gestures are crucial means of experiencing, observing and piecing together the environment. Kaja Silverman writes about “postural function;” she refers to the psychologist Henri Wallon in her discussion of the kinaesthetic perception and experience of the “self” of the moving body and the “sensational” or “proprioceptive ego.” The subject senses itself physically in space through postures, gestures and movement (Silverman 1996, 16).

The Suburban Yard: A Child’s Paradise The main meeting places in the new suburbs were situated outside homes and often outdoors. Yards and playgrounds were important locations for daily encounters. Social relationships, whether close or somewhat distant, “Ruusun tuoksu minut tänne houkutteli. Hajut painuvat alitajuntaan, ja minun lapsuudessani tuoksuivat ruusut.”

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were formed among those who shared the same yard. For children, the playground was a known, homelike heart from which to map out the surrounding environment and expand their territory. A woman who grew up in the Soukka suburb in Espoo in the 1970s recalled: As a child, I never wanted to leave our yard. There was everything one could want: rocks, trees, bushes, crocuses, sandboxes, swings, playhouse, slide and “green things.” The green things were a jungle gym. . . . Soukka, our building and its yard are still my childhood home with all their wistful memories. And even now I like crushed rock more than a lawn.10 (LS 38)

Figure 2–3. Suburban yard life in Kisakylä, Helsinki. Photograph Heikki Havas, late 1950s. Museum of Finnish Architecture. “Lapsena minä en koskaan halunnut lähteä pois meidän pihalta. Siellä oli kaikkea mitä voi kaivata: kallioita, puita, pensaita, krookuksia, hiekkalaatikoita, keinuja, leikkimökkejä, liukumäki ja vihreät. Vihreät olivat kiipeilytelineet. . . . Soukka, meidän talo ja piha ovat minulle yhä lapsuuden koti, kaikkine haikeine muistoineen, ja vieläkin minä pidän enemmän sepelistä kuin nurmikosta.” 10

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Suburban outdoor life with its abundance of children emerges as a child’s paradise. “You never felt lonely. When you went outside into the yard, somebody always saw you from the window and came out,” wrote a woman who was born in the Puotinharju suburb in 1966 (LS 52).11 Especially from the children’s point of view, the social life outside the family apartment was important. The newly-built suburbs had a uniform age make-up: a population of children, young adults and some adolescents. Both children and adults had a lot of company their own age. The yards around the housing were key places of suburban childhood and for socialising. “Our yard” or playground structured suburban life and formed a world of its own. Expressions such as “our yard” and “our building” repeatedly show up in the narratives. The distinction between “our yard” and the rest of the outdoor space, “us” and “others,” was crucial. However, as a woman who moved to Karakallio in 1968 at the age of five wrote, the borders of the yards were rarely physically and visually marked, but instead were negotiated and invisible: “Territories were firm from the beginning. Who cared about strict plot boundaries? Fine rocky hills and the crags nearby belonged to our building and were out of bounds to the children of the building next door” (LS Espoo 7).12 The audible landscape of the suburban playgrounds can be heard in the narratives, just as the scent of freshly mown lawns can be sniffed. The voices on the playground created a familiar suburban soundscape, evoking a flood of warm memories among the narrators and transporting them almost directly and tangibly back to the yards of their childhood. The cornerstones for designing suburban areas were families with children and the best interests of children. The planners thus had small children in mind, and most yards were furnished with sandboxes, benches, swing sets and climbing nets. The importance of the mother-child relationship is visible in the placement of different rooms inside the dwelling and in the carefully thought-out relationship between home and yard. The apartments were designed in such a way that the balconies and windows of the living rooms and kitchens faced the yard, creating a continuum between indoors and outdoors. The goings-on in the yard could be followed from within, and parents could keep an eye on the children from inside the apartment. “Koskaan ei tarvinnut olla yksin. Aina kun meni pihalle, näki joku kaveri ikkunasta ja tuli ulos.” 12 “Reviirit olivat alusta saakka tiukat. Viis tarkoista tonttirajoista: meidän taloomme kuuluivat hienot kalliot ja louhikot, eikä sinne ollut naapuritalon lapsilla juurikaan asiaa.” 11

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Through the open windows and balconies the sounds and scents of the yard became part of the interior of the home. “If we had something to say [to our mothers], we would shout ‘Mum, come to the window, this is so-andso’ to get the right mother to the balcony,” recalled a woman who moved to Vuosaari in 1961 at the age of one (LS 94.) The cries of children calling their mothers to the window were an element that structured suburban space. The intimate space of home and the semi-public space of the yard became extensions of one another. Home and yard created a porous social and sensory space that was larger than the physical borders of either. In addition to the children’s calls from outside, noises from construction sites shaped the suburban soundscape. “We lived practically at the construction site, but it didn’t bother us, at least us children. . . . The frequent sound of warning sirens has been imprinted on my mind,” wrote a woman who moved from the Tapiola suburb to the Iivisniemi suburb in 1968 at the age of nine (LS Espoo 1). Along with human sounds, the contributors referred nostalgically to the sounds of nature, such as a spring brook, the forest and different birds. However, the sounds were not always comforting. For some residents the whole suburban soundscape was unfamiliar and new, beginning with the voices of the neighbours: I was scared of sounds and voices, which could be heard through the walls. Bumps, dragging, mumbling. Somebody was walking overhead. In the staircases, doors were closing. Worst of all were the sounds of drilling, which went everywhere, through the walls. . . . From the yard urban sounds and smells infiltrated the home. Cars started right under your window.13 (LS 41)

This was written by a woman who moved from a wooden courtyard cottage on the outskirts of Helsinki to Pihlajamäki at the age of eight.13 She emphasised the strangeness of (sub)urban living and habitation in an apartment where neighbours came close, unlike rural-type habitation in a separate house. While the suburbs might be characterised as a kind of paradise for children, for many youngsters the suburbs were boring. The most negative recollections of living in the suburbs were written by contributors who 13 “Minua pelottivat äänet, joita kuului seinien takaa. Kolahduksia, laahausta, mutinaa. Yläpuolella käveli joku. Rapussa kävi ovi. Pahinta olivat porausäänet, jotka kulkivat seinien sisällä kaikkialle. . . . Pihalta tunkivat kaupungin hajut ja äänet sisään. Autoja käynnistettiin aamuisin ikkunan alla.”

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moved there as teenagers. Even for those who grew up in the suburbs, the setting became boring over time. A woman who grew up in Vuosaari in the late 1960s wrote: Life in the suburbs became dull in adolescence. . . . Of my suburban background, what I recall most fondly is my childhood. I remember that it was an incredibly full time when it came to activities, playing, friends, inventiveness, joy, excitement, hope. (LS 87)14

Forest and Wasteland With the exception of schools, shopping centres and churches, places for social gatherings and communal activities were rarely planned for the suburbs. There were, however, large natural surroundings, which were supposed to serve as places for the inhabitants’ leisure time activities. The environment remained incomplete for a long time, and the opening of a local shopping centre or the dedication of a church was a major social event. Moreover, the planning of the suburbs was based on a kind of static and frozen model of the presumed inhabitants: a nuclear family with small children who would never age. Other combinations and age groups were ignored in the planning. A man who moved to Pihlajamäki in 1962 as a child wrote: By the 1970s, childhood was a thing of the past. Pihlajamäki could not offer much for its teenagers. During the warm season, the lack of space didn’t bother us much. The sun drew young people out of the stairways and basements to enjoy summer on the rocky hill of the shopping centre, in the parks, in the sheltered forests or on the jumping hill, where we were left alone away from the watchful eyes of parents or authorities. (LS 46)15

Cellars and stairways, shopping centres and hot-dog stands and their surroundings, above all the forests and wastelands, provided teenagers with “Elämä lähiössä muuttui kurjaksi murrosiässä . . . Ja lähiötaustastani mieluiten muistan juuri aikaa 0-12-vuotiaana. Muistan sen olleen käsittämättömän runsasta aikaa, mitä tulee touhuun, leikkeihin, kavereihin, kekseliäisyyteen, iloon, jännitykseen, toivoon…” 15 “Lapsuus jäi taakse tullessamme 70-luvulle. Pihlajamäki ei pystynyt tarjoamaan nuorilleen paljoakaan. . . . Lämpimään vuodenaikaan ei tilojen puute paljoakaan haitannut. Aurinko kutsui nuoret ulos rappukäytävistä ja kellareista nauttimaan kesästä ostarin kallioilla, puistossa, suojaisissa metsiköissä tai hyppyrimäellä, jossa sai olla aivan rauhassa ilman vanhempien tai viranomaisten valvovia silmiä.” 14

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spaces to gather and pursue their own activities. Forests and vacant lots were important for all suburban inhabitants, regardless of age, gender or social class. Nature was omnipresent in the suburban habitat. The new architecture was combined with natural surroundings, stands of forest, wasteland, old fields, farmsteads, manor houses and the remains of earlier communities. In the new suburbs, apartments were concentrated in smaller or larger units with large green areas in between and on the fringes of the inhabited localities. In the 1950s the buildings were carefully adapted to the landscape in order to preserve the beauties of nature in the immediate vicinity as much as possible. By contrast, in the 1960s, vegetation was often cleared from a construction site. Large numbers of buildings often stood in contrast to large plots of undeveloped land. For the generations who grew up in the suburbs, the meanings of the environment were essentially shaped by the relationships and encounters between the built and unbuilt, the homes and the forest and the constant moving back and forth between them. On the basis of the narratives, it was the forest and the woods, situated on the fringes of the built space, that became crucial in the actual experiences of suburban living. The juxtaposition of the new architecture with undeveloped forest land and the traces of earlier inhabitants became a characteristic of the new suburbs and fundamentally shaped the mental landscape and the environmental experiences of those who grew up in these areas (Lukkarinen 2007, 8). A woman who moved to Pihlajamäki in 1964 at the age of two contrasted the white modern architecture of her childhood environment with the surrounding forest. She summarised the feelings of many contributors: Our apartment was in a long white building in the shape of a right angle. Its front yard was asphalt and bedrock, but the forest began at the backyard. This forest, which is now the Pihlajisto suburb, is one of the most important places in my childhood memories. It had endlessly interesting and exciting places where we could play. . . . For us urban children, the forest meant a connection with nature, in contrast to the desert of asphalt and concrete apartment blocks on the other side of the building. (LS 44)16

“Asuntomme oli pitkässä, valkoisessa suorakulman muotoisessa talossa, jonka etupiha oli asfalttia ja kalliota, mutta takapihalta alkoi metsä. Se metsä, jossa nykyisin on Pihlajisto, onkin lapsuusmuistojeni keskeisimpiä paikkoja. Siellä oli loputtomasti mielenkiintoisia ja jännittäviä leikkipaikkoja. . . . Metsä merkitsi meille kaupunkilaisnuorille yhteyttä luontoon, vastakohtana talon toisella puolella olevalle asfaltti- ja kivitaloerämaalle.” 16

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The forests and wasteland near the apartment buildings were oases that softened the severity, bareness and anonymity of the new architecture. This contributor associated the surrounding forest with home and its inhabited qualities in contrast to the “desert” of buildings and asphalt. Forests and wasteland were unfinished settings that remained outside the all-encompassing process of planning and design. Nature can therefore be seen as the reverse of what is required by architecture. It broke down the uniformity of architectural design and provided secret hiding places and spaces to make one’s own.

Figure 2–4. Munkkivuori, Helsinki. Photograph C. Grünberg 1960. Helsinki City Museum.

Living close to nature was the leitmotiv of modern Finnish housing planning after the Second World War. The natural surroundings and outdoor recreation areas were thought to provide inhabitants of different ages with opportunities for healthy activities. Nature was valued primarily for its role in healing and leisure time, as a healthy and static surrounding, and less as the place of inhabitants’ activities. While nature in the immediate vicinity of buildings was more or less shaped, the nature on the fringes of habitation was mostly left as it was. Planning was governed by an aestheticizing attitude towards nature, which was understood as a visual backdrop to

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human action. Paradoxically, however, nature remained beyond the domain of active planning, design and control. One could say that this was for the benefit of the local residents, for specifically unplanned and “uncontrolled” nature with its various meanings emerges repeatedly in their narratives. They understood nature in a broad sense, loosely ranging from the landscape and trees that could be seen from childhood windows to brooks, the sea nearby, jogging paths, skiing tracks, wasteland, birdsongs and flora and fauna. The interplay between buildings, the trimmed hedges nearby and the more or less untreated nature on the fringes of their surroundings brought diversity to their environment and to the experiences of habitation. Nature as well as the relationship between modern architecture and the unbuilt land was crucial to feeling at home. For suburbanites, having nature close by meant having space for secrets and for comfort, for safety and soothing. Nature also had comforting features: inhabitants felt at home in the midst of the woods, while settings with new buildings were depicted as an uninviting desert. The narratives express a sense of belonging to a place that was deeply informed by the lived experiences of the inhabited landscape. Inhabitants not only used the landscape, but inhabited it. Contributors attached their sense of a home district to the geography of the suburban landscape, sensescape and social relations. Their sense of place—a homeplace—is profoundly tied to the land and was inscribed in their bodies, minds and souls, as feminist cultural critic bell hooks has expressed the experience in writing about her native Kentucky (hooks 2007, 24). It is therefore the mobile landscape, constantly changing before their eyes, in combination with modern architecture, the forest landscape and strata of earlier inhabitants that for suburban generations became a basic mental landscape loaded with affective memories. Buildings, planned green areas and “untouched” nature created continuities, discontinuities and diversity in the landscape.

Multisensory memories The memories of suburbanites are closely tied to corporeal reminiscences of lived spaces. Contributors repeatedly recalled “what used to be there,” thereby underlining the connection between memory and space. Although suburban spaces and landscapes have been changed and earlier places have disappeared or been transformed, traces of previous spatial experiences and sensations are embedded in the suburban landscape as “accumulated times that can be unfolded,” to quote de Certeau (1980, 163; 1984, 108).

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Affective recollections of past spaces resonate in the current landscape: “I remember that in the place of the current Itäkeskus shopping centre, there was a large field and a pasture, where cattle grazed during the summer. The smell of manure is a vivid memory of those times,” recalled a woman who lived in Puotinharju as a child in the mid-1960s (LS 48).17 The absent becomes temporarily present and almost tangible when the writer re-lives her previous spatial experiences. Suburban space is depicted as a palimpsest of invisible things that are no longer there. Even the places that have changed almost beyond recognition carry memories of previous spaces, things and buildings, while simultaneously reminding of the disappearance of the past. The suburban scenery includes—and included already at the time the suburbs were built—visible, invisible and gradually disappearing historical sediment and fragments. The meanings of landscape emerge and in due course are transformed in the use of the environment, but also in writing about it. A woman who moved to Mellunmäki in 1968 at the age of six recalled the landscape of her suburban childhood: We moved from Mellunmäki to Puistola in 1973, and for many years I felt a flood of warm memories in my heart whenever I visited Mellunmäki. But now I don’t feel anything, as my childhood Mellunmäki doesn’t exist anymore. All the forest area has been built up, rocks have been moved and the old school demolished. (LS 119)18

For the writer, the current landscape became meaningful though previous spatial sensations and perceptions. The depiction combines past and present and oscillates between them. Even the landscape of the past is not “finished” and static, but open and moving. Henri Bergson has pointed out the co-existence of past and present. In the act of remembering, past and present are born simultaneously, at the moment when the past accumulated in the memory becomes a part of the present in the form of recollections. The past might be grasped only in the form of remembrances, or habitmemory, but those recollections and the past are conditions of perception “Muistan, että nykyisen Itäkeskuksen kohdalla aukenivat pellot ja laidun, jolle suuri karja kevään tultua päästettiin. Lannan haju tulee myös noista ajoista elävästi mieleen.” 18 “Muutimme Mellunmäestä Puistolaan 1973 ja monta vuotta sen jälkeen kaipasin Mellunmäkeen ja tunsin läikähdyksen sydämessäni käydessäni siellä. Enää en ole tuntenut aikoihin mitään, koska lapsuuteni Mellunmäkeä ei ole enää. Kaikki metsät on rakennettu täyteen, kivet viety pois ja vanha koulu purettu. Lapsuuteni Mellunmäkeä ei ole enää. Kaikki metsät on rakennettu täyteen, kivet viety pois ja vanha koulu purettu.” 17

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and each moment of the present (Bergson 2004, 88–96, 147–48; Grosz 2005, 101–4). Thus, rather than a point of fixed meanings, suburbs, like built spaces in general, are spatial intersections and interactive relationships among the surroundings, the buildings, planners, inhabitants, previous spatial experiences and the past and present cultural contexts, to paraphrase the notion of intertextuality introduced by the literary critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (through the work of Mikhail Bakhtin) in the late 1960s (Kristeva 1969, 83). The close relationship between space, sensations and memory has often been pointed out. Memory is orientated towards space and place, or at least supported by them (Casey 1987, 186–87). Scents, sounds, flavours and colours organise the memory and can momentarily evoke or revoke sensations of previous experiences of spaces and places. These sensations have the capacity to transport us through space and time, as in Marcel Proust’s involuntary memory. While Proust emphasised a present that was influenced by the past, in the Finnish accounts spatial memories reactivated the past suburban sensescape (A. Assmann 2011, 8). The contributors went back in time to their personal places of memory and moved from one affective location and scenery to another. Their narratives pointed out the topographical nature of memory by repeating expressions such as “this is where” and “here was” The dimensions of space and time, personal history and topography thereby coalesced into a landscape of generational and local memory (A. Assmann 2011, 48). Spaces are powerful sources of memories (Hayden 1995, 18). However, they are not immobile and passive containers, but rather they interact with the present to open and unfold recollections of the past. Memory is selective: for the functioning of memory, “forgetting is just as vital as remembering” (J. Assmann 2006, 3). Hence, memory is both what we have and what we forget. Suburbanites recorded their memories of suburban living in the context of a wider network of cultural meanings, often looking thirty or forty years back to the time when the suburbs were newly built. The writers commented on the meta-narratives of “bare habitation” and “healthy living near nature,” framing the suburbs and constructing and reconstructing their own historical pasts. Their remembrances were mediated by and interpreted through the present. Insiders’ and outsiders’ perspectives overlap. Besides the past, the writers depicted the contemporary situation as much—or even more (A. Assmann 2011, 19). An optimistic and bright-eyed spirit dominates the accounts. Contributors revisited retrospectively their personal places of memory

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when they looked towards a future by evoking a sense of “the future in the past.” In most cases their recollections focused on summer or winter, with playing and joining in games in the yard and the sounds of a skating rink. “Why is everything viewed through romantic lenses?” asked a woman who, as child in the 1960s, lived in Kannelmäki (LS 30). She recalled especially the social life of the suburban yards and the presence of her mother. While the accounts represent a kind of nostalgic homecoming to the childhood environment and a rehabilitation of the suburbs, they also depicted the suburbs as ordinary living environments. Moreover, these contributors had inhabited the suburbs and they depicted them as home places—a feature rarely connected with the suburbs in public discussions. The classical “art of memory” combined places and images, and made use of the relations between spatial and visual memory. The classical orator remembered his speech by locating it in the concrete places of memory, loci memoriae. In his speech, he would re-enter a building and move from room to room, dwelling upon objects and details while following a particular route in a particular order (Yates 1966, 2–4; Nora 1989, 9; A. Assmann 2011, 17). The Finnish accounts often follow the same pattern of moving in the suburban space, beginning with the relocation and the landscape under construction and then unfolding memories of particular sites and locations. In the following passage, a woman literally walks into her childhood scenery in the 1960s: I moved back to Pihlajamäki. It was a self-evident solution after I was shipwrecked. I walked into the landscape of my childhood. “Here is the spruce under which I dug a pit in the snow and imagined that I was lost at the North Pole. In that brook I floated my dolls. From that rock we slid down the icy slope into deep snow.” But I saw that the landscape had changed. “In that forest we went skiing during the Winter Olympics, ate rye bread and kale from a jacket pocket—now there is the Pihlajisto suburb.”19 (LS 41)

She writes tangibly and affectively, interweaving visual and sensuous meanings and memories—as if the landscape were stratified in her body, movements and muscles as physical remembrances forming a kind of “Minä muutin takaisin Pihlajamäkeen viisi vuotta sitten. Se oli itsestään selvä ratkaisu haaksirikkouduttuani. Kävelin lapsuuteni maisemaan. Tuossa on se kuusi, jonka alle tein lumikuopan ja kuvittelin eksyneeni Pohjoisnavalle. Tuossa purossa uitin nukkeja. Tuolta kalliolta liu’uttiin jäätä pitkin pystysuoraan syvään hankeen.’ . . . Mutta näin maiseman muuttuneen. ‘Tuossa metsässä hiihdeltiin talviolympialaisten aikaa, syötiin ruisleipää ja kaalia anorakin etutaskusta—nyt siinä on Pihlajisto.’” 19

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“cartography of body” (Kristeva 1980, 87) or a “muscular unconscious” (Bachelard 1964). Through the completely transformed landscape, she felt and saw the previous layers of her inhabited childhood landscape, now partly invisible, gone. The writer went back in space and time and walked into old, familiar landscapes and the way things used to be, but now both the landscape and the narrator had been changed. In her narrative, looking at the landscape and acting and moving in it overlapped and worked together. Landscape was depicted both through itineraries walked and sceneries viewed. Throughout there are passages back and forth between the two modes of observation (de Certeau 1980, 175–78). While the passage underlines the importance of walking and doing in the formation of spatial meanings, it also, as Doreen Massey writes, shows that “you can never simply ‘go back,’ to home or to anywhere else.” People and places move on and change (Massey 2005, 124). Tuan underlined the stability of place: places store memories and traces of different sediments of time (Tuan 1977, 6). However, places are also fluid and moving. They are open and dynamic processes that are constructed of interrelations elsewhere, outside their physical boundaries Even “home” is an ambiguous notion that can be approached both as a place-bound anchor and a spatially open structure that changes over time (Massey 1994, 167– 71). In the inhabitants’ accounts, suburban places and the whole inhabited suburban landscape is in motion. Places are not just inertly there; instead, the contributors depicted them through their later spatial observations and experiences.

Sensuous and Visible Space in the Suburbs Suburban space is above all a sensuously experienced and practised, inhabited environment. Inhabitants live and use their environment by sensing it and going about the inhabited landscape, hearing its voices, smelling its scents, touching its grounds and moving in it rather than merely observing it. Even the enthusiastically depicted stunning vistas and panoramas seen from the windows and balconies of upper floor apartments were experienced physically. In good weather it was possible to see the centre of Helsinki or to the other edge of town from the upper floor windows: “You really felt it in your stomach when you went to the balcony for the first time. You could see really far from there, even as far as the tower blocks with V-shaped wings in Tapiola,” wrote a young mother who

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moved to Kontula in 1967, recalling the view from east to west (LS 77).20 Along with the spacious views opening out before them, inhabitants perceived landscape from nearby and from within, and paid attention to its details. The landscape was therefore not only looked at from a particular angle, but also experienced in close corporeal and mindful contact. As in the excerpt above, seeing is also sensory and tactile: the writer felt the broad view in the pit of her stomach. The random observation and multisensory experiencing of the environment underlines a feeling of being inside the landscape and receiving it by means of the tactile or haptic modes of perception, identified by Alois Riegl. Riegl distinguished the haptic or near mode of vision, analogous to touching, from the distant or optic view, analogous to the synoptic survey of objects in space without privileging one over the other (Riegl 1901; Iversen 1993, 9). The Finnish accounts point to a double movement or an entanglement of sensing and looking, closeness and distance in the formation of suburban space and its meanings. Whereas the studies of haptic perception have mostly focused on manual touch (Ingold 2011, 45), in the Finnish memories observing and familiarising oneself with the environment as a pedestrian is an important mode of haptic perception. The recollections pointed out the importance of touching the ground, the rhythm of walking and the connections between vision and the feet in forming spatial meanings, knowing the surroundings and piecing together the connections between various places. Walking is a way to experience and know one’s environment. Besides the entanglement of the senses in experiencing an environment, the accounts emphasised the role of inhabitants and the interplay of various actors in the formation of meaningful suburban space. The inhabitants, the interplay of treated or untreated environment, individual and shared experiences and cultural ideals made the suburbs stratified and complex lived spaces. Space, time and inhabitants, stable and moving elements of the environment—whether human or non-human, tangible or intangible— acted together and shaped the built environment (Latour 2007, 32–33). Built and lived spaces are therefore not fixed or contained, but open to various uses and different kinds of habitation. Spaces, their meanings and the recollections of them constantly emerge and change over time, which “Kyllähän se vatsasta vähän kouraisikin, kun parvekkeella kävi ensimmäisiä kertoja, mutta näkihän sieltä tosi kauas, aina Tapiolan tornitaloille, joissa olivat nuo V-muotoiset siivekkeet.” Indeed, in the 1960s architects laid out some of the suburbs as gigantic graphic figures that spread out over the landscape. The layout as a whole could only have been perceived from a watchtower or an airplane. 20

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means that they are also open to the future (Grosz 2001, 9). Accounts of suburbanites in the 2010s will inevitably differ from those written fifteen years earlier. Suburbanites were not only users who availed themselves of the complete environment, but also they were the producers and creators of the suburban space. Hence, there is no independent existence of the suburbs without the dwellers who inhabit them (see von Bonsdorff 1998; Syrjämaa 2006, 246). While the Finnish accounts revealed shared aspects of suburban sensescape and the formation of meaningful lived spaces, suburban spaces were not singular and uniform, but plural and local. Suburbs were located inhabited landscapes with the emotive meanings attached to particular locations and also fluid, moving and multidimensional spaces. Rather than “living in the suburbs” in the most general sense, inhabitants lived in specific suburbs with names such as Kannelmäki, Kontula, Pihlajamäki, Puotinharju, Soukka and so on. Moreover, spaces were discontinuous; the “same” suburban space took on different meanings for different inhabitants, and even for the same inhabitants, depending on their life situations or the time of the day, for example. The suburbs thus consisted of overlapping, interdependent and parallel sensory spaces—narrated, lived and culturally coded.

Bibliography Sources Folklore Archives, Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki. Kontula collection. Siilitie collection. Helsinki City Archives, Helsinki. Elämää lähiöissä (Life in the Suburbs), Helsingin Sanomat collection. Literature Assmann, Aleida. 2011. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Assmann, Jan. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Astikainen, Riitta, Heiskanen, Riitta and Kaikkonen, Raija. 1997. Elämää lähiöissä. Helsinki: Helsingin Sanomat. Bachelard, Gaston. (1964) 1984. La poétique de l’espace. Paris: PUF. Benjamin, Walter. (1936) 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by J.A. Underwood. London: Penguin. Bergson, Henri. (1939). 2004 Matière et mémoire. Paris: Quadrige, PUF. von Bonsdorff, Pauline. 1998. The Human Habitat: Aesthetic and Axiological Perspective. Lahti: International Institute of Applied Aesthetics. Casey, Edward. S. 1987. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. de Certeau, Michel. (1980) 1990. L’invention du quotidien 1. Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard. ––——. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Citations refer to the English edition. Corbin, Alain. 1994. Les cloches de la terre. Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes aux XIXe si`cle. Paris: Flammarion. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2001. Architecture from the Outside. Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ––——. 2005. Time Travels. Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke University Press. Haila, Yrjö. 2006. “On the Enactment of Landscape.” In Maisema / Landscape, 18–45. Helsinki: Kiasma. Haraway, Donna. 1991.“Situated Knowledge.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, by Donna Haraway, 183–201. London: Free Association Books. Hayden, Dolores. 1995. The Power of Place: Urban Landscape as Public History. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hooks, Bell 2007. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge. Ingold, Toim. 2011. Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge. Iversen, Margaret. 1993. Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johansson, Hanna. 2006.”Touches of the Object: Contemporary Art and Landscape.” In Maisema / Landscape, 46–83. Helsinki: Kiasma. Jokinen, Ari, Asikainen, Eveliina, and Mäkinen, Kirsi. 2010. “Kävelyhaastattelu tapaustutkimuksen menetelmänä.” Sosiologia 4, 1–15. Kervanto Nevanlinna. Anja 2005. Näköaloja kadunkulmalta.

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Kaupunkihistorian kirjoituksia. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Kesänen, Juha, ed.. 2002. Siilitien tarinat. Kirjoituksia kaupunkielämästä. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Kokkonen, Jouko, ed. 2002. Kontula. Elämää lähiössä. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Kristeva, Julia. 1969. Semeiotike. Recherches pour une sémanalyse. Paris: Seuil. ––——. 1980. Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essais sur l’abjection. Paris: Gallimard, folio essays. Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. La production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos. Lukkarinen, Ville. 2008. “Tuokiokuvia 60-luvun Pihlajamäestä.” Pihlajamäen lähiölehti 3/2007, 8. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. ––——. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Meurman, Otto-Iivari. 1947. Asemakaavaoppi. Helsinki: Otava. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. “Imperial Landscape.” In Landscape and Power, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 5–34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and history: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26, 7–25. Pöysä, Jyrki. 2006. “Kilpakirjoitukset muistitietotutkimuksessa.” In Muistitietotutkimus. Metodologisia kysymyksiä, edited by Outi Fingerroos, Riina Haanpää, Anne Heimo and Ulla-Maija Peltonen, 221–244. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Rastimo, Kaisa. 2003. Helsingin Sanomat 25 September 2003. Relph, Edward. 1976. Place and Placeness. London: Pion. Riegl, Alois. (1901). 1985. Late Roman Art Industry. Translated by Rolf Winkes. Rome: Bretschneider. Rogoff, Irit. 2003. “No Longer Required. From Emphathic Viewers to Participants.” In Devil-may-care. The Nordic Pavillion at the 50th Venice Biennial 2003, pp. 126–136. Roivainen, Irene. 1999. Sokeripala metsän keskellä. Lähiö sanomalehden konstruktiona. Helsinki: Helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus. Saarikangas, Kirsi. 2009. “’Life in the Suburbs is mere Residing.’ Home, Moving and Belonging in the Suburbs of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area from the 1950s to the 1970s.” In Homes in Transformation. Dwelling, Moving, Belonging, edited by Hanna Johansson and Kirsi Saarikangas,

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129–161. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Silverman, Kaja. 1996. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Syrjämaa, Taina. 2006. Constructing Unity, Living in Diversity: A Roman Decade. Helsinki: Annales Acadamiae Scientiarum Fennica. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. ––——. 2004. “Sense of Place: Its Relationship to Self and Time.” In Reanimating Places: A Geography of Rhythms, edited by Tom Mels. 45–56. Aldershot: Ashgate. Yates, Frances A. (1966) 1984. The Art of Memory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1997. Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

II Urban Spaces

Urban Imagery between Enchantment and Disenchantment Bart Keunen

In his introduction to The Colossus of New York, published in 2003, the American poet Colson Whitehead wrote: [Y]ou are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet café plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now. (Whitehead 2003, 3–4)

Living in a big city, Whitehead suggests, is living with change and with the fascination and fears that come with the ever-changing character of a modern environment. Because space in a modern world is continually changing, we are forced to construct an imaginary space mentally in order to cope with the chaos of impressions and transformations that make up a modern environment. Literary (as well as other artistic) images help to show us what this experience of chaos is like; moreover, the task of writers seems what Whitehead had in mind: to help us, the readers, to survive, and to make modernity livable by constructing alternative and compensatory spaces through memory and imagination. In a sense, artists who set themselves this task become heirs to Charles Baudelaire. In his essay The Painter of Modern Life, written in 1859, the French poet famously defined the concept of modernity, pointing out that “Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable” (Baudelaire 1981, 420). By evoking the transient and fleeting nature of the modern world, writers show to what extent modernity ensures that “all that is solid melts into air,” as Marx wrote in his Communist Manifesto (see Berman [1981] 1983). At the same time, works of art are more than diagnostic tools for understanding the modern world. They are also “eternal and the immovable” constructions that attempt to confer stability on the modern, as well as “reality,” to use Colson Whitehead’s word. They are instruments

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for diminishing complexity and as such have become indispensable to modern man. As I will show in the second part of this essay, works of art attempt to compensate for the psychological threat posed by the modern world (a threat that will be the subject of the essay’s first part). They do this by way of operations of aestheticization, which transform space into an agreeable, affectively charged place. In addition, works of art bear witness to the desire to create a comprehensible and controllable world through the construction of more stable places, as I will show in the last part.1

The Janus Face of Modern Urban Space: Enchantment and Disenchantment One useful way of confining the study of the “chaotic” modern experience and of the compensatory imaginary constructions is to focus on the most variable of all modern spaces—the city. Throughout history metropoles have been a symbol of specific collective experiences. Earlier, as well as now, urban representations enabled cities to function as symbols and allowed for a particular identity to be attributed to an urban community. The religious identity of a nation, for example, was symbolised by the heavenly city, Jerusalem. Similarly, the splendour and glory of the first civilisations were symbolised by the pyramids or the city of Babylon, and the formidable colonising power on a political or religious level was symbolised by the city of Rome. However, it was a different symbolism than that which is active in our time. Indeed, we cannot claim that it was the sociological structure of these ancient cities that gave rise to a specifically urban cultural identity. In a sense, the urban was of secondary importance. Rather what was at stake was the incidental fact that political and religious power were concentrated in the city and that the city contained buildings that could easily become symbols of that power. When, in modern times, the city functions as a symbol for a broader social condition, it does so with a shift I use the distinction space-place in the sense attributed to it by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan: “In experience, the meaning of space often merges with that of place. ‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.... The ideas ‘space’ and ‘place’ require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place” (Tuan 1977, 6).

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in emphasis; apart from associating the cultural identity of a community with the city, we have actually become urban in our everyday practices. The city has become an essential component of our social condition. That is why urban images, in our time, have an even more intense effect than was once the case. Since the modern era, the urban bourgeois trading community has become increasingly dominant, leaving its marks on the western way of life. Initially, the urban identity stood side by side with civilisation types arising in other forms of society. Consider, for example, the agrarian order in rural societies and the social behaviour emanating from this order or the aristocratic habitus of the European courts or the ascetic lifestyle of monks. But these non-modern types of society gradually lost their hegemonic role. Their function as an identity-constituting factor for the elites in the western world also declined. From the nineteenth century on, most westerners have gained the insight that the city is the place where mankind has discovered a new social condition: modernity. They have realised that a new form of society and new forms of social conduct arose in England and the Netherlands beginning in the seventeenth century, in France from the eighteenth century and in Germany and the Nordic countries as late as the nineteenth century, and that these societies and modes of conduct thoroughly shook economic and cultural life.

Weber and King Vidor on Rationalisation There is no doubt that the western way of life and—at the same time—the essence of the urban condition are identical with “modernity.” In the urban space, everything is subject to change, says Georg Simmel, arguably the most important sociologist of urban modernity (Simmel [1903] 2002; see also Frisby 1986). Because of the profusion of stimuli in the urban space and the increased interaction between people, the urban personality is at risk of losing control. Still, a spontaneous counter-reaction occurs, which attempts the restoration of the mental equilibrium. Through a reserved attitude and through a comforting cynical individualism, the individual manages to keep his or her ground, developing a rational and instrumental view on his or her chaotic environment. One of Simmel’s pupils, Max Weber, examined the consequences of this change in lifestyle and formulated the hypothesis that the modern implies a process of rationalisation. Apart from detecting the essence of modernity in spatial complexity or in multiple social interaction, Weber also found it residing in the propensity to organise all aspects of life rationally.

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In The Crowd, director King Vidor paints a picture of Manhattan that mirrors the analysis offered by Max Weber. This classic film of modern metropolitan life, released in 1928, deals with the individual’s ambition to stand up to the crowd and to rise to such heights that he is finally noticed and becomes visible. Early in the film, there is a famous sequence in which Vidor introduces New York to the spectator: he zooms in on the mighty port of New York, on the intense business traffic guaranteed by a railroad and automobile network, on the headquarters of big corporations listed on the Wall Street stock exchange, on the hectic hustle and bustle in the streets, where city-dwellers appear to be perpetually on their way to the office. The sequence ends with an evocation of an office building in which the camera gradually loses itself. As the image dissolves, the camera slides through the window of a skyscraper to reveal a gigantic office space, where hundreds of clerks are hard at work at identical desks. When the camera zooms in on the film’s protagonist, a frustrated social climber or careerist who gets lost in an anonymous crowd, a name-board becomes visible: John Sims 137. Behind the powerful economic machinery of a hypermodern metropolis, Vidor seems to suggest, hides the many-headed monster of bureaucracy. The images of transport systems and business activities in Manhattan, and both the image of a monstrous bureaucratic institution and that of a lonely figure working with countless others in enormous office spaces, are fine examples of what Weber called die Entzauberung der Welt (“the disenchantment of the world”). By staging the contrast between the economic, institutional and architectural power of New York with the alienating isolation of the protagonist, King Vidor illustrates the two aspects of our disenchanted world.2 In the 1930s, Max Weber concluded that modernity had destroyed traditions, that it had questioned the values and the emotional “warmth” of these traditions and put a world of cool calculation and technocraticallyminded citizens in its place. In the name of rationality, here and now, truths Both aspects, the wealth-producing capitalist machinery and the bureaucratic system, are central to Zygmunt Bauman’s characterisation of the modern individual’s new urban lifestyle: “Modernity came up with two great institutions meant to… assure the prevalence of morality through following rules. One was bureaucracy, the other was business. The two institutions differ from each other in many respects, and are often at loggerheads with each other, but they agree on one quite seminal thing: they are both bent on the eradication of emotions or at least keeping them off limit. Since they are enemies of affection, they have both been hailed since their inception as incarnations of rationality and instruments of rationalization” (Bauman 1996, 4­–5).

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that have been passed down from generation to generation are questioned. Many of these handed-down truths date back to customs that were experienced as “natural” or to observations that corresponded to nature. In modernity tradition and nature are opposed to rational thought and are connoted by concepts such as “primitive” or “mythical.” Our rationalised and individualised world offers fewer places for the collective experience of rituals, for the magic of natural phenomena and for the enchanting charm of a harmonious and slowly progressing community life. In earlier days, Weber says, a collective view of the social was dominant; a society left its mark on individual life by way of traditional customs and highly ritualised symbolic systems. From this, the individual drew a certain sense of security, while myths and rituals enabled him or her to contemplate the difficulties and pleasures of daily life from a perspective that superseded time and the world. The fact that the individual abdicated his or her autonomy and resigned himself to a self-imposed mental captivity posed no real problem because an alternative simply did not exist. In the context of capitalism, however, this completely changes. Thanks to rising material prosperity and the more complex social order that went along with it, opportunities for individual self-fulfilment increased exponentially. Individuals liberate themselves from old thought patterns and preferably see themselves as the measure of the world. Symbolic systems are grafted onto individual values. Even in religious affairs, the tendency to confront the world in an individualised manner becomes dominant—think, for example, of Weber’s interpretation of Protestantism. Modern citizens are inclined to “rationalise” their own behaviour, to strive for self-realisation and streamline their external appearance. Thanks to the work of Norbert Elias and, later, Michel Foucault, this urge for selfcontrol has become known as the civilisation process. The urban lifestyle is nothing more than this form of civilised behaviour. Together with technological rationality (underlying the capitalist economic machinery and the bureaucratisation of society), it is this hyper-individual, disciplined lifestyle that turns us into city-dwellers, that allows our behaviour to be characterised, to a high degree, as urban.

Benjamin and Alfred Stieglitz on the Magic of Urban Places Early sociologies of modernity claim that in the course of the modernisation process all traces of traditional societies, and especially all references to magical and suprapersonal forces, were banned from the world. What

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seemed to remain was an empty and infertile universe of asphalt and neon light. Weberian sociology holds that modern rationality strips the idyllic closed character of the village, the sacred warmth of the place for prayers, the security of blood ties from its splendour, in short, of everything natural.3 And yet King Vidor’s The Crowd also proves that this experience is not the only aspect of modernity. The film offers an outspoken visualisation of John Sims’s enthusiastic view, as he is standing on the Manhattan transfer, the ferry between Staten Island and Manhattan. The shot is followed by an intertitle in which Sims expresses his desire “to make it in this city.” As viewed by both protagonist and spectator, the skyscrapers, the dockside and the steam above the skyline gradually move closer; this travelling shot shows the city as it may be observed by a traveller arriving in New York. The protagonist, who somewhat resembles Jimmy Herf in Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos’s novel created in the same period, is submitted to an ostensibly enchanting spectacle. He is carried away by admiration for this monument of civilisation and the longing for a better life. The same kind of awe and implicit enthusiasm is found in Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph The City of Ambition. The cityscape captured by the iconic American photographer is indeed a clear example of the alternative way in which modernity was evoked around the dawn of the twentieth century. The spectacle introduces a kind of magic in the image, as the steam clouds hovering above the city appear to transform it into one of the mysterious castles that often rise up before the eyes of the wandering knights in the work of Chrétien de Troyes. In addition, the skyline—the product of rich investors and stock jobbers, suggesting a life of comfort and luxurious entertainment—evokes dreams of prosperity, injecting the spectator with the adrenalin of ambition. Modern man’s propensity to gaze out in an enchanted way—his ability to experience new forms of magic—is precisely what most fascinated Walter Benjamin during his career as a philosopher of culture. Unlike Weber, Benjamin believed the magical interaction with the world was far from gone. He proposed a correction to Weber, one that draws on the irrational, mythical affects he considered essential to the urban lifestyle. Now, however, the object of enchantment is no longer “nature” and the The modern world appears to us a wasteland of technological or consumptiontargeting artefacts and oppressive crowds, thus resembling more and more the universe of T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same title: “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.”

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natural, but the cradle of modern lifestyle—urban modernity. In his posthumous magnum opus, The Arcades Project, Benjamin shows that the industrialisation brought about by the capitalist economic system rendered the world so complex that modern man was forced to start developing aesthetic strategies of resistance. Modern man casts an aesthetic glance at the most modern aspects of his daily environment. As is generally known, Benjamin called the result of this operation of aestheticization “phantasmagoria.”4 In a prospectus for the book Das Passagen-Werk, which he wrote for a French publisher at the end of his life, Benjamin emphasised that especially the new lifestyle and the new economic and technological realisations had become the object of a dream world—a shadow play, the form of storytelling and entertainment fashionable in eighteenth-century popular culture. Modernity, Benjamin says, is not only the progressive introduction of rationality and individualism, but also the reintroduction of mythical forms of thought; it is “the world dominated by its phantasmagorias” (Benjamin 1999, 77; see also Cohen 1989, 107). Modernity is a culture that introduces a kind of surreal aesthetics; what Louis Aragon did with the Parisian arcades and the Parc de ButtesChaumont (as I will argue below) is in fact the very essence of the modern attitude to urban space. But by contrast with Aragon, Benjamin explicitly linked this urban space to the economic conditions of our society. In his view, the phantasmagorical enchantment boils down to a reactivation of the mythical forces: “Der Kapitalismus war eine Naturerscheinung, mit der ein neuer Traumschlaf über Europa kam und in ihm eine Reaktivierung der mythischen Kräfte” (“Capitalism was a natural phenomenon, which engulfed Europe in a new dream sleep and triggered a reactivation of the mythical forces,” Benjamin 1982, 494; my translation). From this it is clear that we should consider modernity as a paradoxical social condition in which seemingly contradictory phenomena do indeed exist side by side. The stability created in the “maelstrom of modern life” is not only that of a rational individualism and its disenchanting side effects, but also that of an emotional individualism that goes along with new forms of enchantment. Because the city epitomises modern ambivalence, “One could say that the dynamics of capitalist industrialism had caused a curious reversal in which ‘reality’ and ‘art’ switched places. Reality becomes artificial, a phantasmagoria of commodities and architectural construction made possible by the new industrial processes. The modern city was nothing but the proliferation of such objects, the density of which created an artificial landscape of buildings and consumer items as totally encompassing as the earlier, natural one” (Buck-Morss 1989, 213).

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the paradox is also found in artistic representations of the city: in urban representations, traces of both mythical magic and cool, rational lifestyle are present. To the historian of literature, art and culture, it is especially the magical aspect that warrants interest. This is because it shows that, in the context of modernity, aestheticization stops being a mere matter of works of art, and instead becomes a matter of everyday life. By placing this aestheticization at the centre of research, the literary historian can make an important contribution to bringing modernity´s cultural mechanisms to light. The study of urban space in terms of phantasmagoria teaches us something about the way modern man tries to cope with the complexity of the modern world. The next two parts of this article discuss two ways in which this is done: by way of an aestheticization that confers an affective charge on things, and by way of an aestheticization that involves strategies of spatial containment.

Phantasmagoria: Mythical Affects in the Space of Modernity The direct, sensory experience of modernity is at the centre of Walter Benjamin’s work. In Benjamin’s view, images of the modern dream world (i.e. of cultural creations originating from the capitalist economy and modern technology) are not the result of a rational, ideological reflection; on the contrary, it is in the immediate, affective interaction with his environment that modern man tries to get a grip on modernity: “These creations undergo this ‘illumination’ not only in a theoretical manner, by way of an ideological transposition, but in the immediateness of the perceptible presence” (Benjamin 1982, 60). Through his conception of phantasmagoria as a sensory, direct reaction and his labelling of this reaction as “mythical,” Benjamin proves himself a competent reader of his contemporary, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Although it is far from certain that Benjamin had read all of the Neo-Kantian philosopher’s works,5 there is no doubt that he had acquainted himself with the basic tenets Cassirer developed on the subject of mythical thinking. According to Cassirer, The only indication of his reading of Cassirer is found in a letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Benjamin 1995, 104–6), on 28 December 1925. Benjamin wrote that he had read with great interest Cassirer’s “Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken,” a long lecture published in 1922 in the well-known series Studien der Bibliothek Warburg. 5

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mythical man attributes meaning to his perceptions without any form of reflection whatsoever: “meaning attaches to perception itself, in which it is apprehended and immediately experienced” (Cassirer [1925] 1955, 68). Here, Cassirer even uses the same words as Benjamin, speaking explicitly about a sensory “illumination”: the objects in the mythical experience “assume a new meaning, one which they do not simply have from the very beginning but which they acquire in this form of contemplation, one might say in this mythical ‘illumination’” (Cassirer [1925] 1955, 75; see also 49). Because Benjamin chose a basic principle that is also held by Cassirer, the terms “phantasmagorical” and “mythical” become almost synonymous in his work. My analysis of the modern experience as an experience heavily coloured by the mythical in itself is far from new. Benjamin scholars such as Graeme Gilloch (“The metropolis is the principal site of the phantasmagoria of modernity, the new manifestation of myth”; 1996, 11) and David Frisby (“The reality of the nineteenth century was presented to itself as a phantasmagoria, as a dream world, as a world of illusions, a mythical world”; 1986, 230) also emphasise the mythical nature of modern culture. Yet they do not specify where we may find the similarities between old and modern forms of mythical thinking. By taking a step back and orientating ourselves towards Ernst Cassirer, it becomes possible to lay bare these similarities and to interpret the modern experience as something pre-rational, affective.

Mythical Affect in Cassirer’s Philosophy According to Cassirer, the essence of mythical imagination is affectivity. Seen through the filter of mythical imagination, our surroundings appear to us as emotionally-charged phenomena, as entities that are somehow “animated” or “spirited.” At the same time, we perceive them as entities that evoke emotions—as if the entities were human beings, because this is exactly how we, as human beings, interact with each other: we respond to the intentions and emotions of others through our own intentions and emotions. From a mythical perspective, the world is not so much “a reality of things, of mere objects” as it is “a kind of presence of living subjects” (Cassirer [1929] 1965, 62). Cassirer refers to this phenomenon as the perception of a “thou” rather than an “it,” an animated, rather than an objective, reality (Cassirer [1929] 1965, 63). The basis for this mythical way of thinking, Cassirer explains in the second volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, is that mythical

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man assumes the existence of causal connections between spiritual forces and the material world.6 This becomes clear when we try to understand shamanistic religions. To a shaman, Cassirer says ([1925] 1965, 49), the logic of the world is not governed by objective laws (i.e. scientific causality), but rather by spirit forces inhabiting the concrete material world (mythical causality). When a shaman pours out water as a libation during the rain dance, this water is not just a symbolic representation of real rain (as it is in modern religions), nor is it a material cause that can exert an influence on rain clouds (as in scientific thought). Rather it is indissolubly connected with actual rain, since both are inhabited by the same force or spirit. To the mythical mind, the world is nothing more than a collection of material phenomena that are tied up with personalised, spiritual forces; in its perception, souls and ghosts are ubiquitous and the presence of “persons” is sensed through their own intentions, feelings and thoughts. That is why trees, amulets and other fetish-like objects are considered truly animate entities.7 In this context it is crucial to interpret objects and situations (e.g. places) in a correct manner; it is necessary to learn to read the world as an ever-changing set of “physiognomic characters” (Cassirer [1929] 1965, 68),8 to interpret the environment as a set of facial expressions. Mythical thinking is nothing more than the assessment of the emotional power that emanates from a spatial situation, an object or a person. As such, this is an everyday and thoroughly unpremeditated mental operation: in a smiling face, we read a character trait, a positive force. In a photo of a beloved, we “read” a good character, good feelings or good intentions. Similarly, when we experience fear, we see objects or people around us as radiating a negative force. According to Cassirer, this type of imagination constitutes the most elementary layer of human knowledge. “There is as yet no separation between fundamentally different factors, between ‘material’ and ‘spiritual,’ between ‘physical’ and ‘psychic.’ There is only a single undivided sphere of efficacy, within which a continuous exchange takes place between the two spheres that we usually distinguish as the world of the soul and the world of the matter” (Cassirer [1925] 1955, 158). 7 “All ‘image magic’ rests on the presupposition that in the image the magician is not dealing with a dead imitation of the object; rather, in the image, he possesses the essence, the soul, of the object” (Cassirer [1929] 1965, 69). 8 Physiognomy, or the assessment of characteristics through the general outward appearance of a person, object or situation, was a very fashionable word in Cassirer’s day (e.g. the concept was also dear to Walter Benjamin); it involves a kind of pseudo-scientific knowledge; character traits and the condition of the soul are read by analysing the physical properties of a given person, object or situation. 6

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Regardless of whether one lives in a pre-modern tribal community or in the hypermodern twenty-first century, it is the direct experience in which our surroundings appear to us as “characters of expression”—in which we sense our surroundings—that comes first. Cassirer points out that in the largely disenchanted context of “rationalised” societies, aesthetic experiences in particular are highly expressive and seem to have adopted the role that magic used to play (see O’Toole 1996, 128): today, beauty still enchants. In our perception of space, for instance, we continue to confer animate characteristics on objects, unwillingly so: we assume that there is something similar to a soul in what is nothing more than dead matter. When, in a state of euphoria, we lose ourselves in a situation or when, in a state of anxiety, we get carried away by a situation, we tend to think in a mythical way. The fact is that we attribute a soul to objects; the object of euphoria, for instance, may be viewed as a seductive mistress, the object of fear as an animated forest that is speaking to us. A charming landscape, for example (or to use an English expression that speaks for itself, a “smiling” landscape) is “read” by us as the expression of an inherent kindness, as if by nature it had a friendly soul. Responding to this, we feel safe in the landscape, just as we would in the presence of a smiling face. In other words, the atmosphere seems to emanate from the place itself. A peculiar subjectivization or fetishization of the landscape is taking place. When a dark forest oozes menace or a charming house exudes conviviality and safety, this divergence is to be situated on the level of “affective” space.

Benjamin and Zola: The Auratic Experience of Urban Places Cassirer’s theme of mythical logic, of reasoning in terms of physiognomic traits, corresponds to an important topic of Walter Benjamin’s work: the theory of the aura. In the work of writers, architects and artists of the nineteenth century, Benjamin perceived an aesthetic competence that resembled older ways of mythical thinking. This competence is manifested in the way in which individuals put forward the enchanting, expressive force of things in the modern world. For example, wrote Benjamin, artists believed things possessed a soul, and this soul was manifested in the aura of things. In an enigmatic definition of the concept of aura, formulated in the 1930s, Benjamin borrowed the words of Cassirer to explain how the magical-mythical attitude towards things functions. In his study of Baudelaire, he noted that

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Like Cassirer, Benjamin believed that the affective-mythical interaction with reality can best be described as the “reading” of the physiognomic properties; a soul is ascribed to objects or situations so as to enable them to look back. It is this definition of the aura which also seems to be used by Benjamin in developing his concept of “phantasmagoria.” I would like to draw upon this concept to interpret urban spaces as spaces that possess an affective-mythical charge.9 As phantasmagoric spaces, they are to a great extent emotionally charged, and they “speak to us” on a pre-rational level. Artists—as well as ordinary mortals in their everyday aesthetic experience, for that matter—are submitted to powerful aesthetic stimuli, which seem to cast a spell and create extraordinary spaces that are set apart from a banal and disenchanted world of functionalism and cold, utilitarian rationality. Sometimes this involves emotions that are summoned by a threatening situation and that cause the space to be experienced as unheimlich (scary or sinister); sometimes it involves affects of fascination and admiration that confer a sublime quality on the modern space. The above can be demonstrated by means of some examples drawn from urban literature. Writers such as Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Alfred Döblin or Emile Zola were not just expressing their opinions on the modern spaces in their urban novels; they also succeeded in embodying the experience of modernity in their city descriptions. Their portrayals of the urban condition incarnated the experience of the modern in both its fascinating and frightening aspects. They showed how concrete consciousnesses stand in awe of these mysterious modern phenomena, much like the sacred is experienced as a mysterium tremendum et fascinosum. In other words, they rendered consciousness mythical. In his Rougon-Macquart cycle, Zola often made use of what could be called a 9 From the classic definition of the aura concept—in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)—we learn that Benjamin was inclined, as I am in this text, to link the auratic experience with the perception of space. “What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts a shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch” (Benjamin 2002, 104–105).

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“physiognomic method” to report on the experience of hypermodern (for that time, at least) spaces and objects: he describes the forces that modern phenomena “express” and the affective imprint they leave on observers’ consciousnesses. In La bête humaine (1890), for instance, a railroad yard gradually comes to life and develops into an almost “gothic” setting. By anthropomorphising the trains in the railroad yard, Zola manages to render palpable the almost mythical fascination of modern man for this new technology.10 In Au bonheur des dames (1883), Zola describes a similar experience. Department stores, which came into being in the second half of the century, were also emotionally charged phenomena. In them, commodities, the masses and imposing architecture joined forces to create a spectacle that acquired an almost sacral connotation for a visitor coming from the provinces.11 In Zola’s animated descriptions of modernist spaces, we can clearly see how phantasmagoric imagination interacts with concrete places. As in mythical thinking, space is not composed of discrete objects, but rather of the diverse forces that animate these objects. Since one and the same force can inhabit several objects (that is, since this force can transform itself), the boundaries between these objects blur: they melt into each other.12 Zola offers a fine “A cause d’un encombrement, on n’avait pu loger ce train sous la marquise des grandes lignes. Il attendait au plein air, contre le quai qui se prolongeait en une sorte de jetée étroite, dans les ténèbres d’un ciel d’encre, où la file des quelques becs de gaz, plantés le long du trottoir, n’alignait que des étoiles fumeuses.… Cela était immense et triste, noyé d’eau, çà et là piqué d’un feu sanglant, confusément peuplé de masses opaques, les machines et les wagons solitaires, les tronçons de trains dormant sur les voies de garage; et, du fond de ce lac d’ombre, des bruits arrivaient, des respirations géantes, haletantes de fièvre, des coups de sifflet pareils à des cris aigus de femmes qu’on violente, des trompes lointaines sonnant, lamentables, au milieu du grondement des rues voisines. Il y eut des ordres à voix haute, pour qu’on ajoutât une voiture. Immobile, la machine de l’express perdait par une soupape un grand jet de vapeur qui montait dans tout ce noir, où elle s’effiloquait en petites fumées, semant de larmes blanches le deuil sans bornes tendu au ciel” (Zola 1890). 11 “Alors, Denise eut la sensation d’une machine, fonctionnant à haute pression, et dont le branle aurait gagné jusqu’aux étalages. Ce n’étaient plus les vitrines froides de la matinée; maintenant, elles paraissaient comme chauffées et vibrantes de la trépidation intérieure. Du monde les regardait, des femmes arrêtées s’écrasaient devant les glaces, toute une foule brutale de convoitise” (Zola 1883). 12 “Whereas empirical thinking is essentially directed toward establishing an unequivocal relation between specific ‘causes’ and specific ‘effects,’ mythical thinking, even where it raises the question of origins as such, has a free selection of causes at its disposal. Anything can come from anything. Whereas empirical 10

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example of this when he describes a market hall as transforming into a steam engine in The Fat and the Thin (Le Ventre de Paris, 1873). This architectonic construction of nineteenth-century Paris becomes the carrier of the quasi-mythical commercial power of capitalist modernity. In the span of three sentences, this force shape-shifts from a building into an animated machine, into “a ghost in the machine”. And Florent gazed at the vast markets now gradually emerging from the gloom…. Greenish-grey in hue, they looked more solid now, and even more colossal with their prodigious masting of columns upholding an endless expanse of roofs. They rose up in geometrically shaped masses; and when all the inner lights had been extinguished and the square uniform buildings were steeped in the rising dawn, they seemed typical of some gigantic modern machine, some engine, some caldron for the supply of a whole people, some colossal belly, bolted and riveted, built up of wood and glass and iron, and endowed with all the elegance and power of some mechanical motive appliance working there with flaring furnaces, and wild, bewildering revolutions of wheels. (Zola 1873)

The way in which the modern space is charged with meanings of an affective-mythical nature clearly emerges from literary texts such as Zola’s. These texts also bring into the open how the seemingly rational world of modernity is countered by these meanings. The projection of human qualities onto complex empirical situations brings order to chaos and renders the unknown familiar—the apparently uncontrollable space is transformed into an animated and controllable place. The fact that anthropomorphic aestheticizations of this kind possess a magical aspect does not pose a real problem for literary man, since the world acquires renewed meaning through the re-enchantment of space.

Fictional Heterotopias: Enchanted Places in the Disenchanted Space of Modernity Anthropomorphizing the modern space, and the physiognomic reading this entails, constitutes a purely aesthetic strategy, one of unconsciously reacting to the chaotic experience of modernity. However, the history of art and literature has revealed other artistic strategies that expressly broach thinking speaks of ‘change’ and seeks to understand it on the basis of a universal rule, mythical thinking knows only a simple metamorphosis” (Cassirer [1925] 1955, 46).

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the matter of the opposition between enchantment and disenchantment. The most prominent among these strategies can be found in works of art that focus on the mental (re)construction of enchanted situations/places. Works of art are eager to evoke enchanting alternative spaces because these are able to criticise the everyday routine space, whether implicitly or explicitly. For a better understanding of this strategy, I would like to go back to a number of passages in Cassirer’s Mythical Thought that discuss the mythical propensity of dividing up the world in positive and negative zones. Next, I will connect these observations to Michel Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia,” which also attempts to define the relationship between alternative and routine spaces. Finally, I will single out some telling examples from literary history.

Cassirer and Foucault: Enchanting Places in a Disenchanted Space According to Cassirer, the mythical view of spatiality is the most elementary form of spatial consciousness found among human beings. Because mythical thought constantly involves thinking in terms of good and evil forces and thereby charges the space with emotional associations of meaning, a specific way of representing spaces emerges. At the heart of this mode of representation lies the relationship of tension between the sacral space, dominated by good forces, and the profane space, in which evil forces have free play.13 Because the sacred and the profane are radically sealed off from one another, reality is made up entirely of dialectical relations. In these relations, the sacred constitutes a protective space that is to be safeguarded against demonic forces from the outside world, which may infiltrate it. Cassirer writes that “hallowing begins when a specific zone is detached from space as a whole, when it is distinguished from other zones and . . . religiously hedged around” (Cassirer [1925] 1955, 99). The safe “inside” of the home base should be protected from the inhospitable “outside”: “Every mythically significant content, every circumstance of life that is raised out of the sphere of the indifferent and “Myth ... begins by introducing certain differentiations into indistinct, ‘indifferent reality,’ by dividing it into different spheres of meaning. . . . All reality and all events are projected into the fundamental opposition of the sacred and the profane, and in this projection they assume a new meaning, one which they do not simply have from the very beginning but which they acquire in this form of contemplation, one might say in this mythical ‘illumination’” (Cassirer [1925] 1955, 75; see also 49). 13

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commonplace, forms its own ring of existence, a walled-in zone separated from its surroundings by fixed limits” (ibid., 103). Mythical perception, in other words, is characterised by a logic of containment that differentiates between spaces of “inside and outside,” “inward and outward” (ibid., 99).14 Although it may appear that sacred places are no longer relevant to a modern society, it suffices to call upon the work of Michel Foucault to demonstrate that in every culture and every era, spaces are being demarcated that are of vital importance to the survival of a society: “There are also, and this probably in all culture, in all civilization, real places, effective places, places that are written into the institution of society itself, and that are a sort of counter-emplacements, a sort of effectively realized utopias” (Foucault [1967] 2008, 17). At first glance, the examples of such “places that are outside all places” offered by Foucault may seem very diverse. They all share one property, however: they are enclosed places that procure an affective charge different from all external spaces. Examples are the places where people, in primitive cultures, live through personal ”crises” (such as going through menstruation in isolated places or retreating with a group of youngsters in anticipation of an initiation rite), churchyards (because here, human culture is governed by the afterlife or by the transition from the corporeal to the spiritual), the cinema (where the fourth wall transports a group of people into a fictional reality that is subsequently experienced collectively), a library (where all the worlds of cultural history flow together to be experienced), holiday villages (which offer a refuge from the hectic chaos of the city in an everlasting and rippling present), prisons, purification spaces such as saunas, rendezvous rooms in American motels, seventeenth-century colonial cities and cruise ships. At the end of the1960s, Foucault coined a term which would allow him “Myth arrives at spatial determinations and differentiations only by lending a peculiar mythical accent to each ‘region’ in space, to the ‘here’ and ‘there,’ the rising and setting of the sun, the ‘above’ and ‘below.’ Space is now divided into definitive zones and directions. . . not yet a homogeneous whole, within which the particular determinations are equivalent and interchangeable. The near and far, the high and low, the right and left—all have their uniqueness, their special mode of magical significance. Not only is the basic opposition of sacred and profane interwoven with all these spatial oppositions; it actually constitutes and produces them. . . . The different directions in mythical space are not conceptual or intuitive relations—they are independent entities, endowed with demonic powers. One must immerse oneself in the artistic representations of the gods and the demons of the directions… in order wholly to feel this expressive meaning, this physiognomic character which all spatial determinations possess for the mythical consciousness” (Cassirer [1929] 1965, 150). 14

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to reflect upon and interpret these spaces and which became very popular in Urban Studies, as well as among philosophers of culture (partly thanks to Edward Soja):15 heterotopias. The concept of heterotopia was intended to designate those spaces “that make the difference,” spaces that elevate themselves above the indifferent places with which we are confronted on a daily basis and which hold a strong affective appeal for members of the culture in question. Such places “are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault [1967] 2008, 17). Foucault makes it clear that he considers such places to be related to the lived spaces that form the object of inquiry of phenomenological philosophy. Pioneering work in this field was carried out by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and especially by Gaston Bachelard.16 Yet Foucault is not so interested in spaces that create individual moments of experience. It is the spaces that are collectively experienced that draw his attention. The heterotopic space comes close to the sacral places that Cassirer viewed as typical of mythically-thinking cultures. Foucault himself, who mentions “a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live,” hints at this relation. Furthermore, in the relations of tension between the heterotopic and the everyday, he observes a certain dynamic that he calls “sacral.” He points to the tensions “between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work” and concludes that, apart from considering these as “simple givens,” modern man also believes that they “are animated by an unspoken sacralization” (Foucault [1967] 2008, 16). Finally, Foucault’s description of a heterotopia demonstrates the same logic of containment found in Cassirer’s analysis of the myth. It is this logic in which I am especially interested. A heterotopic place originates All these places share a deviating structure of experience, which is connected with the functioning of human imagination. Some places generate an experience in which, apart from the empirical, imagination also leaves its mark. Heterotopias bring out differences between empirical reality (or constructions of this reality) and spaces charged with imagination. It is no accident that Soja (1996) dedicated an entire chapter to heterotopia in Thirdspace, because it is in this book that he goes in search of real-and-imagined places. 16 “Bachelard’s monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well” (Foucault [1967] 2008, 16). 15

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because the spatial setting is partly closed, upon which the enclosed place starts to communicate in a peculiar way with the space that lies outside. The difference mainly resides in the fact that the individual behaves in a deviating manner inside the created “inner space”: a different temporal regime (called heterochrony)17 is obtained, and certain conditions need to be met in order to be able to participate in the activities within this space (as such, it is a semi-public space that mildly restricts the private sphere). Within this enclosed space material things acquire a different meaning, one which possesses a powerful affective charge. Some writers commenting on Foucault are therefore right to associate the heterotopic space with affects of a mythical-religious nature.18 Like religious, sacral spaces, heterotopic places are fascinating and enchanting; they constitute places in which the individual is able to rise temporarily above the empirical world through affects that are experienced as singular or exceptional. The connection between the mythical experience and Foucault’s heterotopias is all the more interesting because it enables us to view the mythical experience as a deviating experience that is highly relevant to modern man; heterotopic spaces function as a critical or compensatory tool for countering a surplus of modernity. It is no accident that modern literary men have a predilection for heterotopias in the sense attributed to them by Foucault; they are in fact searching for “strong” representations in order to gain control over the complexity of the modern world and single out “enchanted” zones from the ordinary world to evoke a direct affect of the 17 Time constitutes an essential component of this epistemic construction: “The heterotopia begins to function fully when people find themselves in a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” (Foucault [1967] 2008, 20). Because this essentially involves spatio-temporal constructions, a comparison with Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope becomes a logical next step. On the relation between phantasmagoria, heterotopia and chronotopy, see Keunen 2011 and Keunen and Verraest 2012. 18 “The English word holiday has kept this reference to the ‘holy’ origin of free time, rest and repose. Similarly to the way in which heterotopia interrupts the continuity of space, the holiday interrupts the continuity of time. Holidays, being extraordinary as opposed to the mundane, ordinary character of the everyday, are the permanent markers of the discontinuous moments on the calendar, pacing the continuous flow of everyday experience. Heterotopia is the counterpart of what an event is in time, an eruption, an apparition, an absolute discontinuity, taking on its heterotopian character at those times when the event in question is made permanent and translated into a specific architecture.... Thus, heterotopia can be said to be ‘holyday space’. Most of Foucault’s examples have this quality” (De Cauter and Dehaene 2008, 92).

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extraordinary and, with it, an inside/outside contrast. Whoever believes that only scientific knowledge is capable of making complexity controllable should realise that many complex situations cannot—or can barely—be solved by means of numerical thought. In many cases, and especially in situations that bear a strong affective charge, only myth and art can bring “illumination.” They enable us to react to fictional places much as we would react to real places in lived experience. The simulated experience of heterotopian places, in particular, generates a reaction that seems to have a surplus value for coping with modernity.

Spatial Containment Strategies in the History of Urban Literature In literature, the logic of containment of a heterotopic space assumes two shapes, corresponding to what, in Foucault’s view, constitutes the function of a heterotopia.19 In accordance with the first function, the enclosed space operates as a place where everyday norms and habits are temporarily suspended; for this reason, the heterotopic space can function as a symbol of illusions. It shows that everyday spaces in the outside world entail the same illusory representations as those staged in the heterotopia. Such spaces are the opposite of normalisation, the opposite of the rationalised behaviour that Weber and Simmel considered essential to modern culture. Here we should think of “extraordinary” places, such as cinemas, theatres and brothels—“places of wish fulfilment that offer possibilities for subversion, heterogeneity and excess.”20 In a lucid comment, Boyer says that these places contest “by creating an illusory space that dissipates and denounces 19 “The last trait of heterotopias is that they have, in relation to the rest of space, a function. The latter unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes all real space, all the emplacements in the interior of which human life is enclosed and partitioned, as even more illusory. Perhaps that is the role played for a long time by those famous brothels of which we are now deprived. Or else, on the contrary, creating another space, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is disorderly, ill construed and sketchy. This would be the heterotopia not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not somewhat functioned in this manner” (Foucault [1967] 2008, 21). 20 The notion of the carnivalesque in Bakhtin’s oeuvre has the same connotations; see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais study ([1965] 1984) and the study by Stallybrass and White on places of transgression (1986).

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bourgeois reality by showing it to be the real illusion” (Boyer 2008, 54). When the heterotopia exercises its second function, it will appear as a place where compensatory activities are made possible; in this case, the place accommodates activities that are no longer possible in the outside world. Such a heterotopia of compensation constructs another space that functions as a contesting counter-site; it constructs a different and at the same time perfect space, which serves ersatz for the “normal” space (experienced as chaotic). In the past, colonial cities were experienced in this manner; they demonstrated a desire to make a clean sweep with the past and to create, in a systematic way and more in keeping with authentic values, a new place to live. The classic example of a fictionalised heterotopia of illusion can be found in Aragon’s Le paysan de Paris (see Keunen 2000). In this chefd’oeuvre of surrealist prose, which Benjamin called the best illustration of his concept of phantasmagoria, the author uses two Parisian places that fit the definition of heterotopia: the arcades of le passage de l’Opéra and the late nineteenth-century example of English garden architecture in the northeast of Paris, le Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Both places function as heterotopias of illusion. The narrator explicitly calls these des lieux sacrés (holy places); he is an oneiric stroller who embarks upon a flamboyant quest for the “sacral places” of modernity. Religious vocabulary (holiness, rites, cult, temple) dominates Aragon’s text. The places are sacral to the surrealist because in them the experience of le merveilleux (the marvellous) can occur; they assist him in overcoming the limitations and are “un moyen d’accéder au-delà de mes forces à un domaine encore interdit” (“a means of going beyond the limits of my power and gaining access to a still-forbidden domain,” Aragon [1926] 1966, 109, my translation). In this respect, we are positively concerned with places of illusion, places where bourgeois rationality is transcended in an aesthetic, in this case a surrealist, experience. The first holy place, the arcaded passage to the Opéra Le Peletier, is compared by the narrator to an undersea world and to aquariums humains, in which a lueur glauque (a bleak light) reigns, because the light is filtered through the glass ceiling (ibid., 21). The passage is a dusky place in which light and darkness are both present. Hence, the passage’s condition is compared to a state of dreaming: “le passage onirique” (the dreamy passage). The second part of Le paysan explores a second sacral space, the Buttes-Chaumont park. This public space is also a source of surreality: “parc, parc, et parc. Voici l’appartement des rêves” (“park, park, and park. This is the apartment of dreams,” ibid., 222). It is clear from the description of the park that it is a holy site in which the ambiguous state

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of dreaming is stimulated. In the nocturnal park, even though lighted by the city of Paris’s electrical light network, light and darkness maintain an ambiguous relationship; the park is a “lieu de confusion” (“a place of confusion,” ibid., 179). Moreover, the boundary between the park and the urban surroundings is ambiguous. The boundary between the everyday and the holy becomes blurred: “le sujet est continué dans le cadre, qui est la ville de Paris” (“the subject is extended in the framework, that is, in the city of Paris,” ibid., 221). The narrator judges this ambiguous environment to be an ideal place for surrealist activity; the park transforms the stroller into the plaything of chance and the marvelous: “dans les plis du terrain où tout les sollicite, ils sont les jouets de la nuit, ils sont les marins de cette voilure en lambeaux, et voici que déjà tout un peu d’eux-même naufrage” (“in the folds of the terrain, where everything draws their attention, they are the playthings of the night, they are the sailors of this tattered vessel, and look! already of themselves somewhat a shipwreck,” ibid., 177). Both spaces conform to Foucault’s definition of “spaces of illusion”; they create a game of reality and dream and therefore can be deployed as a transgressive strategy, as a subversive instrument for abdicating the bourgeois experience of the everyday as a false illusion—each of these is “a space . . . that denounces all real space, all real emplacements within which human life is partitioned off, as even more illusory” (Foucault [1967] 2008, 21). The heterotopia of illusion that Aragon has in mind is by no means a utopian, unreal space. On the contrary, as is true of surrealism as a whole, these spaces are as real as the disenchanted, rationalised places of the bourgeois city: “Surrealism is not to be confused with the unreal,” writes the novelist Michel Carrouges, also an expert on Surrealism; “it is a lively synthesis of the real and the unreal, of the immediate and the virtual, of the banal and the fantastic” (Carrouges 1950, 24). The surrealist heterotopias are certainly not the only literary places in which these sublime illusions play a major role. There are many other examples. The works of the historical avant-garde movements offer plenty. Many places in the world of avant-garde literature are not a reflection of common sense reality, but tend to construct a collection of reality fragments into an artificial collage. Through this process, the writer manages to create a sense of speed (futurism), intoxication (dadaism, unanimism), pathos (expressionism) or dreaming (surrealism), which makes the world of montage a realm of extraordinary, yet at the same time quotidian, experience, a world of hyper-real perception.21 Along with the 21

In Simulations (1983), Baudrillard describes how the perception of the postmodern

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heterotopias of the early twentieth century, modern literary history is rich with other sacral spaces. Nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, for instance, show a clear focus on spaces that reflect the illusions of a group or of a whole community. Zola specialised in just this sort of space. Examples that come to mind are the temple of wealth erected in the centre of Paris by the middle class (the central market halls, which play a leading part Le Ventre de Paris), the holy spaces of modern transport (the railroad station in La bête humaine), the church of consumerist society (the department store in Au bonheur de dames) and the temple of financial speculation (the stock exchange in L’Argent). Such spaces also constitute heterotopias of illusion, because they condense the forces of the process of modernisation in their enclosed world. For this reason, they can be mobilised as tools for contesting the illusions of modernity. Let us now turn to the second mode of fictional world creation, the construction of a heterotopia of compensation, which can be theoretically analysed by studying the construction of the highly aestheticized places found in impressionist and symbolist literary works. Central to this form of world construction is the processing of subjective impressions. Although “impressionistic” cityscapes are found in the work of Balzac, it is actually from the late 1860s on that descriptions of shifting modes of visual perception become dominant (Caramaschi 1977, 59). This period initiates an explosion of urban representations depicting a sensory environment that seems permeated with powerful emotions. The urban places appear to be chosen because of their compensatory function. By depicting an intensely aestheticized environment, the authors attempted to find an equilibrium for the alienating, disenchanted world of modernity. This heterotopia of compensation finds its strongest expression in George Rodenbach’s Bruges la morte (1892), in which the moribund, foggy city (with its deserted streets, squares and parks and its lonely figures against a dark background) displays a medieval stillness that correlates with the suffering, the confusion and sometimes the redemption of the main character. In Rodenbach’s novel, the lived experience of the fictional city is used to evoke a contrast with the world beyond the heterotopian environment. The same kind of subject is determined by hyper-real transformations of everyday situations. He starts from the observation that hyper-reality is no longer an artistic construct or an extraordinary experience linked to special circumstances and to gifted observers (aesthetes such as Aragon and Breton, who turn the Parisian shopping arcades into oneiric spaces). In the view of Baudrillard, the hyper-real has now become part of quotidian reality. My use of the term “hyper-reality” refers to its original, historical meaning.

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spatial construction is also found in symbolist poetry and lyrical prose (Baudelaire), in the aestheticist novel (Wilde, Huysmans, Rodenbach) and in impressionist prose (the Goncourts). Aestheticist authors like to represent the urban places as a simulacrum: they construct an environment filtered through an aesthetic sensibility and through a quasi-mythical belief in the correspondence between individual affects and the expressivity of a place. The interest of this world, therefore, lies not just in its aesthetic qualities per se, but also in the fact that aestheticist images allow for the expression of correspondences. The aestheticist hero takes on the guise of an aesthetic observer, whose observations symbolically correspond to subjective moods, often in the course of an existential crisis that could be read as an illustration of the syndrome of depersonalisation described by Simmel. As a result, the space in the work of art functions as a compensation for the mal du siècle—modernity. The creation of a hyperaesthetic place is only one of many ways in which a heterotopia of compensation can be constructed. The most pronounced examples date from further back in literary history. Idyllic spaces (found in romanticism, pre-romanticism, the rococo and works that are indebted to the generic conventions of the renaissance, such as the pastoral novel) provide the best examples. Idylls create oases within a world that is increasingly subject to the process of modernisation. They compensate, furthermore, for the detrimental consequences of this process: rationalisation, indifference and cynicism. In novels of the second half of the eighteenth century, for instance, the development of the protagonist is closely tied to a world model dominated by an idyllic setting. Central to these narratives are the intimacies of life in small rural communities or non-urbanised cultures. A recurrent theme is the flight from the city to the country home (Isernhagen 1983, 81; Weisgerber 1978, 233; Watt [1957] 1963, 111; Williams [1973] 1985, 117). Even if at first sight the early eighteenth-century predilection for harmonious places which contradict modern space has nothing to do with the later debate on urbanism and modernity, the heterotopian structure is nonetheless highly symptomatic of the way in which modern man tries to create spatial environments that preserve the magical or mythical aspects of everyday experience. It proves, for instance, that particular urban spaces can also embody the idyllic “heterotopia of compensation,” provided that they are urban environments in which regeneration takes place: intimate enclaves such as middle-class houses, suburban villas, parks and historical monuments (Isernhagen 1983, 82; Watt [1957] 1963, 181 ff.). Suburbia and the bourgeois residence offered an opportunity for escape, as is apparent from the novels of Samuel Richardson, and, to a lesser extent, those of

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Daniel Defoe; they are places that provide an answer to the all-too-complex spaces of modernity. Typical of suburban life is the mainly female ideal of quiet hominess and exclusive personal relations. Such restricted, yet intense and introverted personal contacts are portrayed by Richardson in his novels, as Watt ([1957] 1963, 194) points out. For Watt, Richardson was “something of a propagandist for this new forcing-house of the feminine sensibility” (ibid., 195). In his work, the suburban heterotopia of compensation functions as an antidote for (morally or physically) dangerous places in the big city. Modern English writers tend to associate urban modernisation processes with decay. In chapter 31 of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, Margaret Schlegel pithily summarises a dominant view of modernity: “London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilisation which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before” (Watt [1957] 1963, 192). In this context it should not come as a surprise that heterotopic places acquire great importance; they become the ideal means with which to withdraw from a society “plagued” by modernisation.

Conclusion I would like to conclude that the problem of “enchanting modernity” opens up some interesting perspectives for contemporary cultural theory. Provided one is fully alive to the affectively charged worlds, the study of literary imagination may become an important tool in our understanding of western culture. Through literature, for example, and specifically through the spatial symbols found in literature, we can illustrate modern man’s affective investment in his world. Literary imagination shows us what is at work in modern man’s perception and experience. The relevance of the study of magical experiences evoked by modern myths, and of illusory or compensatory heterotopic spaces, is not limited to the objective of understanding literary history or of gaining insight into the relationship between modernity and experience in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Quite the contrary. The historical examples exhibit numerous analogies with the way in which late-modern man in the twentyfirst century deals with place and space. In a world in which “space appears to shrink to a ‘global village’ of telecommunications and a ‘spaceship earth’ of economic and ecological interdependencies,” in which “time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is” and in which “we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our

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spatial and temporal worlds” (Harvey 1989, 240), modern man needs to build a new relationship with place. The creation of “real places,” of spaces of experience that render everyday life intelligible again, is essential. Perhaps there is still another advantage to the study of mythical forms of our spatial experience, namely an advantage for political philosophy. The study of irrational aspects of our culture may enable us to understand the political problems of our age. Many contemporary problems—feelings of insecurity, economic crisis, the growing gap between citizens and politics—involve irrational fears. Although Cassirer is mainly known as a true thinker of the Enlightenment, one of his most interesting ideas is that he considered the influence of mythological thought patterns to be an anthropological constant. Whatever degree of sophistication our knowledge in times of hi-tech and high specialisation has reached, to a certain extent we continue to think in a mythological manner. In one of his final works, in which he analysed the rise of fascism, which caused him serious hardships, Cassirer offered proof of this idea: in The Myth of the State (1946) he showed that our analysis of the political situation is heavily infused with our affective imagination. Walter Benjamin shared this view. Benjamin was not in the least surprised by the fact that there was so much fear of modernity. A culture in which enjoyable places and seductive objects are perceived in an anthropomorphic fashion, a culture in which commodities appear to have a soul, is a culture that places great value on a mythical perception of the world. In such a culture, the other side of the coin automatically gains equal importance. That which fascinates in a mythical construction of knowledge possesses an equal element of terror. The fear of losing our freedom and prosperity goes hand-in-hand with our dreams of progress and wealth. Walter Benjamin was right to be greatly concerned about the irrational tendency in our secularised and rationalised world. In the prospectus for his book, from which I quoted above, he says that modernity will be subject to a mythical fear as long as phantasmagoria—the mythical—plays a leading part. It goes without saying that this statement can serve as a guideline for every observer of the swing to the right in western European politics. Whether it involves seeking a cultural identity that is actually pre-modern or embracing new myths, it is invariably a matter of irrational processes born from a refusal to accept reality as it really is: modern and therefore hyper-complex. Translated by Jo Smets.

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References Aragon, Louis. (1926) 1966. Le paysan de Paris. Paris: Gallimard. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics.” In The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 84–254. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. (1965) 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Baudelaire Charles. 1981. Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists. Translated by P. E. Charvet. Cambridge University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e). Bauman, Zygmunt. 1996. Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty. Demos. Benjamin, Walter. 1974. Gesammelte Schriften I (3 vol.). Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1982. Das Passagenwerk. Gesammelte Schriften V. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1995. Gesammelte Briefe, Band 3: 1925–1930. Edited by Christoph Godde and Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. ———. 2002. Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938. Edited by Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berman, Marshall. (1981) 1983. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso. Boyer, Christine M. 2008. “The many mirrors of Foucault and their architectural reflections.” In Heterotopia and the City. Public Space in a postcivil society, edited by Lieven De Cauter and Michiel Dehaene, 53–74. London: Routledge. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Caramaschi, Enzo. 1977. “Paysages impressionnistes chez Balzac.” Neohelicon 5(1): 33–60. Carrouges, Michel. 1950. André Breton et les données fondamentales du Surréalisme. Paris: Gallimard. Cassirer, Ernst. (1925) 1955. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol. 2: Mythical Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. (1929) 1965. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol. 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1946. The Myth of the State. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Cohen, Margaret. 1989. “Walter Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria.” New German Critique 48: 87–107. De Cauter, Lieven and Michiel Dehaene. 2008. “The Space of Play: Towards a General Theory of Heterotopia.” In Heterotopia and the City. Public Space in a postcivil society, edited by Lieven De Cauter and Michiel Dehaene, 87–102. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. (1967) 2008. “Of Other Spaces.” In Heterotopia and the City. Public Space in a postcivil society, edited by Lieven De Cauter and Michiel Dehaene, 13–30. London: Routledge. Frisby, David. 1986. Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Gilloch, Graeme. 1996. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Isernhagen, Hartwig. 1983. “Die Bewußtseinskrise der Moderne und die Erfahrung der Stadt als Labyrinth.” In Die Stadt in der Literatur, edited by Cord Meckseper and Elisabeth Schraut, 81–104. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Keunen, Bart. 2000. De verbeelding van de grootstad: stads- en wereldbeelden in het proza van de moderniteit. Brussel: VUB Press. ———. 2011. Time and Imagination: Chronotopes in Western Narrative Culture. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Keunen, Bart and Sofie Verraest. 2012. “Landscapes and Mythical Chronotopes in Urban Designs for Twenty-first Century Paris.” In New Work on Landscape and its Narration, edited by Sofie Verraest, Bart Keunen, and Katrien Bollen. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.3. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol14/iss3/4. O’Toole, Roger. 1996. “Salvation, Redemption, and Community: Reflections on the Aesthetic Cosmos.” Sociology of Religion 57(2): 127–48. Simmel, Georg. (1903) 2002. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Blackwell City Reader, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 11– 19. Malden: Blackwell. Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Realand-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience.

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Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press. Watt, Ian. (1957) 1963. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. London: The Hogarth Press. Weisgerber, Jean. 1978. L’Espace Romanesque. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme. Whitehead, Colson. 2003. “City Limits.” In The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts, 3–11. London: Fourth Estate. Williams, Raymond. (1973) 1985. The Country and the City. London: Hogarth Press. Zola, Émile. 1873. The Fat and the Thin (Le Ventre de Paris). Translated by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly. Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg. org/files/5744/5744-h/5744-h.htm. ———. 1883. Au bonheur des dames. Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16852/pg16852.html. ———. 1890. La bête humaine. Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg. org/cache/epub/5154/pg5154.html.

How Cultural? How Material? Rereading the Slums of Early Victorian London Jason Finch Introduction In approaching the spatial zone which in 1800–50 began to be known as the “London slums”—home to the very poorest and increasingly shocking to more prosperous outsiders—literary scholars face a choice between cultural and material approaches. Since the 1980s, the influence of Michel Foucault has led to an emphasis on discursive constructions of place. And this has meant that the relationships between the places that appear in texts and those which can or could be visited and experienced have, for a while, been ignored. Historians of Victorian London, countering an earlier tendency to downplay the supposedly unreliable perceptions of individuals in favour of the harder evidence provided by official records, have in the meantime taken a cultural turn, paying attention to the way that zones such as slums were discursively constructed (see e.g. Dyos and Reeder 1973; Wohl 1977; Rodger 1989; Koven 2004). In another twist, historical geographer Alastair Owens (2010), together with allied workers in the industrial-era archaeology of London such as Nigel Jeffries, has argued that evidence of material human practices is still missing from historical accounts, and that attention to discursive constructions of the lives of the poorer classes in Victorian London risks simply reproducing the prejudices and blindnesses of middle-class observers in those times. Where polemicists, reformers and sensationalist writers presented horrors, ordinary lives—by no means always desperate ones—went on. Since new historicism, literary studies workers such as Bill Brown (2003) and Elaine Freedgood (2006) have pioneered a neo-metonymic, even materialist criticism based on notions such as “things” and “objects.” But despite this interesting new trend, literary scholars still seem unaware of the potential that archaeological studies have for inspiring a more radically material approach to the literature of the nineteenth-century London slums. In this chapter, various London slum writings produced between the late 1790s and the late 1840s are compared and put into a historical narrative,

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the goal being to adjudicate between the claims of the cultural and the material in understanding a period of spectacular, seemingly uncontrollable urban expansion. These texts, by Jane Austen, Douglas Jerrold, Pierce Egan, G. W. M. Reynolds, Charles Dickens and Thomas Beames, have on the whole been divorced by literary scholars from the specifics of their material context in particular districts of London capable of being mapped, for example the notorious St Giles, districts themselves also in some sense inventions. Examples from texts by these disparate writers enable intersections between metaphorical, imaginative cultural construction, and the response to or recording of material realities in the London slum writing of the early nineteenth century, to be charted. The chapter begins by looking into different ways of understanding the slum of now and of the past. Next comes an outline of how writing actually set far from the city (Austen) and in the city (Egan) could mediate fears of urban disorder in the first decades of the century. An important literary mode in representing the seemingly darkest portions of the rapidly growing city was the Gothic and this comes under consideration next. In all of these representations there is a combination of cultural and material factors and the same is true when we turn to Dickens, whose material and cultural sides have in turn been overvalued by scholars. As a counter to a prevailing culturalism some components of a possible new-materialist reading are then sketched, and in particular the use of visits to and topographic understandings of actual, non-textual places.

Discursive Construction and Material Particularity: Approaches to the “London Slum” of the Long Victorian Era, 1820­–1960 Today, according to Mike Davis (2006), we live on a Planet of Slums. In 2011, it was estimated that a sixth of the world’s population, some 954 million people, were living in slums (Greenemeier 2011). The importance of the slum as an object of study has to be apparent. And it was in London, during the early nineteenth century that the word slum and the very concept of the slum that we have today emerged (OED 2012; see also Dyos 1982, 130–32). Between then and the era of the British Empire’s break-up after the Second World War, the slum as a concept shifted from being seen until approximately 1860 as an inseparable part of a city, to a shamefully large series of zones frequently explained through metaphors of disease

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(a widespread view between about 1860 and 1910), to something which seemed to have been eliminated by the actions of government, as gradually became the dominant view after 1910. Literary scholarship has so far failed to grasp this narrative, being hampered by its use of periodisations developed on aesthetic grounds or according to the needs of undergraduate teaching. More helpful to a socially-oriented criticism than the well-worn division between “Victorian” and “modernist” studies might be the notion of a “Long Victorian Era” starting in the discord that followed 1815 and ending with the break-up of the British Empire after the Second World War. What were the London slums of the “Long Victorian Age,” this 140year span from 1820 to 1960? Kate Flint (1987, 131) identifies them as “those central London areas which contained the worst housing.” Steven L. J. Denford (1995, 12) is more precise: Slums were usually found in low-lying and poorly drained areas, and were isolated, cut off physically, with no through traffic. The barrier effect of railways also helped to foster slum development, as did proximity to factories, gasworks, open sewers and other source of noxious smells. And lastly there were structural features, such as buildings skimped or built on inadequately settled “made ground” and repairs ignored.

Denford’s subject is Agar Town, wiped out during the 1860s to make way for the yards and tracks connected to Saint Pancras railway station. Denford describes one of the two main sorts of slum district which existed in nineteenth-century London, one which unlike its counterpart largely disappeared from London by 1900: the informally-built settlement on the fringes of the fast-growing city, built by and for immigrant workers. This bears comparison with the favela or shanty-town districts of fast-growing cities in Africa, Asia and South America today. In nineteenth- and twentiethcentury London the other main type of slum district was that brought into being by the subdivision and multiple occupation, sometimes to the point of extreme overcrowding, of older housing stock within walking distance of the city’s core. This was most often housing stock built eighty to 150 years before its deterioration to the level which could be described as that of a slum. The boundary between what is a slum and what is not is a shifting and porous one. By the mid-twentieth century it was the discursive definition of some house, or street, or group of streets, as a slum, which was used by municipal and national government in Britain as the chief means of determining which areas of older housing should be compulsorily purchased and demolished, or, from the point of view put powerfully in 2012 by the BBC television programme The Secret History of Our Streets

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(see Bullman 2012), for government to justify its sometimes destructive and inhumane invasion of working-class districts. London has a peculiar and unique importance in the history of the concept of the slum. First of all, throughout the century from 1825 to 1925, it was by any measure the largest city on earth (Wikipedia 2012b). Secondly, in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, it was the metropolitan hub of the British Empire, which in 1921 had the greatest territorial extent of any empire in history so far. And thirdly, the 1851 Census revealed that, differently from ever before, the majority of the United Kingdom’s population lived not in the countryside but in cities. Excepting city states, this was a world first. Temporality matters. This fact is obscured in some influential readings of London’s imaginative geography, notably the “psychogeography” of Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and others. In work distantly echoing that of French writers such as Michel de Certeau, Guy Debord and Georges Perec, Ackroyd (2003, 188–206, especially 197) juxtaposes photographs and anecdotes to suggest that poverty shadows London in the early twentyfirst century precisely as it did 200 years previously. It is certainly tempting to compare the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, say, with the violent events of 1985 at the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham, north London, and Ackroyd (2000, 484–96) does just this. They share things: London today is a gigantic, confusing metropolis and it was already that in 1780. Legitimate grievances and deeply-held beliefs merge on these occasions with blood-lust, avarice, and sheer destructiveness. Those responsible are often the most disadvantaged in society, but seen as a mass can appear a terrifying bunch of criminals. And there is at times a disturbing power to predict latent in Ackroyd’s words: [i]n a city based upon money and power, those who are moneyless and powerless are peculiarly oppressed. In London, of all cities, they are literally degraded, stripped of all human decency by the operations of a city that has no other purpose except greed. (Ackroyd 2003, 189)

These words were written in the late 1990s. A decade and more on, they seem to anticipate the death in 2009 of the homeless newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson at the hands of a policeman trained to deal ferociously with urban disorder (see BBC 2011). Evocative words, but they blur temporal distinctions. Has London always been “based upon money and power” in precisely the same way it is said to be now? Moreover there is a problem with a phrase like “of all cities”: it plays into the hands of Londoners overly satisfied by notions of their city’s exceptionality. Ackroyd attributes to

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London a mystical, trans-historical unity and needs handling with care. Understanding the discursive history of the London slums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as precisely that, a history, involves relations of literary influence. George Gissing and Arthur Morrison, writing in the 1880s and 90s, were actually unable to describe the slums without in some sense being Dickensian (on Gissing’s London in relation to Dickens’s see Tambling 2009, 259–73). But the writing of such a history also involves an appreciation of changes that often come from far outside the literary realm.

From Northanger Abbey to the Rookery: The City as Source of Fear, 1790–1850 By the end of the 1840s, the living conditions of the urban poor had come to be understood by the more progressive sections of the English political classes as a scandal. Improvement became a mainstream goal. Newspapers such as The Times and literary writers such as Charles Dickens after 1835 frequently drew attention to the squalid lives of the urban poor (Flint 1987, 148–54). The statements to be found in such sources are rhetorical. They were designed to move an audience and so lead to changes in attitude and policy. Here, it is worth recalling the scepticism of the geographer Owens and the archaeologist Jeffries, taking their cue from the urban historian Alan Mayne (2011) with his materialist, anti-culturalist stance. All three of these researchers argue that rhetorical statements of the sort just described, such as those of Dickens or the leader writers of The Times, are likely to be extremely unreliable when it comes to grasping what the living conditions of the poor in early Victorian London were actually like. For literary scholars the most rhetorically powerful statements made in any given time and place are always likely to be heard the most clearly, and there is therefore an especial need for literary scholars to exercise caution here. As Denford (1995, 2) points out, later writers on the Victorian slum frequently merely recycle the words of Victorian commentators. Between the period of the French Revolutionary Wars and the middle of the nineteenth century, fears that disease and disorder might come from the slums and affect the rest of the city increased. Epidemics of cholera and typhus periodically struck London, and in the first half of the nineteenth century they were thought to be emanating from the poorest, most overcrowded and least hygienic districts, the so-called “fever-nests” (Hardy 1993, 221). Alongside fears of pestilence came the fear of political disorder and violence exploding out of the same districts into not just the

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city but even, potentially, the country beyond. Such fears are well embodied in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, written in the late 1790s and then revised in 1809, but not published until after Austen’s death in 1817 (Butler 1995, xi–xv). There, Miss Tilney hears Catherine Morland’s excited statement that “something very shocking indeed will soon come out in London” and leaps to the conclusion that a “dreadful riot” is about to begin in the capital (Austen [1817] 1995, 107–8). In fact, Catherine is looking forward to the next shocking literary productions to be published in the metropolis then distributed in the provinces. No direct connection is drawn in Northanger Abbey between social unrest and the very poorest districts, but there is an association between Gothic fiction, the genre with which Catherine gets so carried away in Austen’s novel—what Miss Tilney’s brother Henry calls “the riot . . . in your own brain”—and the at least potentially terrifying disorder and violence of the metropolis. The conversation in Northanger Abbey, which takes place in a county far from London, shows how ideas of the slum could be culturally constructed far from material realities, and it is not hard to imagine how such constructions could then come to influence the actions of policy-makers and so return to affect actual locations. By the 1840s, London slums were embodied as a zone for newspapers and their readers then by the notorious Rookery of St Giles. Areas like this could seem to be beyond description. The Times in July 1849 referred to Carrier Street in St Giles as “perhaps the most disgustingly filthy spot that exists anywhere in London,” describing the entrance to one staircase in a court there as “so offensive, so repulsive to every sense, as to render it impossible to give any idea of it” (quoted in Flint 1987, 151). The Rookery occupied a site today just south of the British Museum and Bloomsbury, on the northern fringes of today’s West End of London. Respectable local resident Joseph Banks Durham wrote in 1850 that: “it is quite impossible for any description, however full, to give to any one an adequate idea of its filth and misery, and the moral degradation of its inhabitants” (Flint 1987, 155). Durham was a successful cutler on a broad new street which occupied part of the former site of the Rookery. There, he produced elaborate and ornamental metalwork items including a chatelaine exhibited at the 1851 Great Exhibition (see Victoria and Albert Museum 2011). He seems to have been genuinely concerned about the plight of his more impoverished and desperate neighbours, but he also depended for his income on wealthy clients including members of the aristocracy and landed gentry. Landowning wealth in Victorian England relied “increasingly” on “urban revenues” (Dyos and Reeder 1973, 370), but those who profited from the

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slums also had a great fear of what Durham called “moral degradation,” something felt increasingly after about 1820 to emanate from the most over-crowded and rack-rented inner-city zones. St Giles was proverbially opposed to fashionable St James’. In the mid-1840s Douglas Jerrold wrote The History of St Giles and St James (James 2006, 124–25; Flint 1987, 131). The two parishes were conceived as the opposite poles in what was called, in opposition to the mercantile City of London, “the town”: lowest and highest. An 1824 map of the Russell family’s London estate shows the radical contrast between the crooked, cramped streets of St Giles, and the spacious squares and avenues of its neighbouring parish of St George’s, better known as Bloomsbury (reproduced in Whitfield 2006, 138). Middle-class Londoners’ perceptions of the St Giles Rookery (in fact a tiny knot of streets within a diverse if not especially well-favoured parish) were tied to moral panics about the supposed barbarism and over-breeding of the Catholic Irish who were said to be its main inhabitants. “Nine-tenths of the inhabitants are Irish” wrote the unsensational and sympathetic clergyman observer Thomas Beames in 1850 (Flint 1987, 143). Material realities affected cultural constructions: clothes if nothing else made the St Giles dweller visible the moment he or she stepped into Bloomsbury. Today’s study of material culture, meanwhile, can call into question the apparent certainties constructed culturally. Between 2006 and 2008, archaeological excavations complicated the picture of St Giles provided by nineteenth-century texts. The digs indicated just how varied the lives lived in St Giles were, even in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when it was most stigmatised (Anthony 2011). Archaeology and the arts are going in directions not so far taken by literary studies. A fascinating 2011 collaborative exhibition by the artist Jane Palm-Gold and the archaeologist Jeffries combines empirical and imaginative means of grasping the actual life of the slums, the minds and hearts inside the three-dimensional obscenities (Palm-Gold 2011). Allied work at Spitalfields supports the point that districts which could be notorious among outsiders were home as well to real people who smoked pipes, drank tea, nursed babies and had hobbies (Veder 2009; Owens 2010).

Pierce Egan: Callousness and Vigour One representative of the earlier phase of nineteenth-century London slum writing is Pierce Egan, author of Life in London ([1821] 2007). Egan is

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perhaps best-known for juxtaposing high life and low life, with the latter not the homes and streets of the poorest, but the lively pits of vice— gambling dens, boxing matches—in which Regency London males of different classes mixed (for a recent account see Sen 2008, 93–96). As the century went on, writers on the slums moved further and further away from the callous merriness about urban violence, starvation and substance abuse to be encountered in Egan. Like most successors in the field Egan, as well as setting out to inform and entertain, had a moral and social agenda. This involved, in the words of a biographer, “setting the misery of low life against the prodigal waste and folly of high society” (Brailsford 2004). But Egan’s work differs radically in tone from that of Dickens and other successors. The first chapters of Life in London concentrate on London places in which finery rather than rags are seen: places such as Hyde Park and Bond Street, which are devoted to fashion and the display or pretence of high social position. Fashion, Egan writes, makes one adventurer forget that the clothes in which he hopes to obtain respect and attention, are more than likely to be paid for in Newgate; another for a time forgets that John Doe and Richard Roe have expelled him from his lodgings; and a third that all his worldly possessions are not equal to the cost of a dinner. (Egan [1821] 2007, Vol. I, Ch. VII)

Massive numbers of people, an unprecedented proportion of the country’s population, were indeed trying out the move to London during the period when Egan was writing (Dyos 1982, 143). Unlike most of the later writers on the London slums, Egan highlights not the differences but the similarities between high and low in society, presenting lords and dandies side by side with pugilists and prostitutes. They coexist. For Sambudha Sen (2008, 96), Egan’s “juxtapositional impulse,” his depiction of the proximity of wildly different sorts of people in London, places him square in a tradition connecting Hogarth and Dickens. But Egan’s is not at all the sort of connectedness argued for by Dickens in Bleak House thirty years after Life in London, in which the presence of the low (Jo the crossing sweeper) undercuts and questions the authority of the high (Sir Leicester Dedlock). Dickensian connectedness might be described as a sort of Bakhtinian relativisation. Jo and Sir Leicester make readers, in the words of Bakhtin’s editor Michael Holquist (1981, 427), “aware of competing definitions of the same things,” in this case that of a person in modern English society. Egan, instead, emphasises not the obscene distance separating rich and poor, but their closeness: that the man

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of fashion is only a few steps from the gutter. A warning is being issued, in fact. But Egan’s tone, again unlike that of his successors in the London slum writing tradition, seems likely to reduce rather than increase readers’ sympathy for the urban poor. The suggestion is that those who live by the sword also die by it. To go to London is to become an adventurer, and an adventure might turn out well or badly, this being the risk that adventurers take. You could, instead, stay in the country and forgo both the glamour and the horrors of the city. It seems a practical warning rather than a moral one. Egan does not only draw on topical detail. Louis James (2010) has recently shown that his writing develops from an older tradition stretching beyond Hogarth at least as far back as to Daniel Defoe and John Gay at the beginning of the eighteenth century. This London underworld writing combined vivid, lowlife insights into the gamblers, prostitutes, cutpurses and conmen of the city with detailed topographic information largely aimed at visitors and newcomers to London, but also at armchair travellers happy to view the thrills and horrors of the metropolis from elsewhere. Egan’s Life in London, indeed, is a precise and fulsome guidebook to the main streets and monuments of the metropolis, a sort of rough guide to 1820s London. Unlike Dickens, who would leap to fame fifteen years later, Egan stays largely on the highways of the city and rarely ventures into the byways. Explanations, both “culturalist” and “materialist,” suggest themselves. By 1821, London had already been extremely well mapped. John Rocque’s map ([1746] 2001) presents in precise detail the knot of courts and dead-end streets between Saffron Hill and West Smithfield, by the early nineteenth century a notoriously dangerous area. Overly simplistic distinctions should not be drawn between a pre-Victorian age in which the labyrinthine back streets of the city were largely out of bounds for middle-class strollers, and a Victorian period (in any case, most people associate the inaccessibility of the slums with the Victorian age, not with times before or since) characterised by the building of avenues and railways through slums, and the retreat of the middle classes towards hilltop suburbs. But then again, a few years before the appearance of Egan’s book, a German gas engineer named Frederick Albert Winsor had demonstrated gas lighting in precisely the glamorous West End streets where Egan’s characters stroll (Williams 2008). Perhaps, as we shall see, this created new contrasts between light and darkness in the 1820s experience of the city. The first slum character to appear in Life in London is “an Irishman” who passes the main characters sophisticated man-about-town Tom Dashall and his country cousin Bob Tallyho. Tom is showing Bob round the town

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pointing out tourist sights while also explaining urban manners, notably various sorts of trickery. The setting is Waterloo Place, the most spectacular, public and open space of post-Napoleonic London (see Whitfield 2006, 117), physically located in the parish of St James’, proverbial for high life, and forming a connection between the entertainment district around Piccadilly and the royal zone of the Mall leading to Buckingham Palace. Waterloo Place is the ultimate anti-slum, we might say. The Irishman is a stranger to Tom and Bob, a member of a different class and a foreigner to boot, encountered by chance in the street, in a distinctively modern urban mode. Here are his words: “Blood an owns, boderation and barney,” (said an Irishman, at that moment passing them with a hod of mortar on his shoulder, towards the new buildings, and leaving an ornamental patch as he went along on Bob’s shoulder) “but I’ll be a’ter tipping turnups to any b____dy rogue that’s tip to saying—Black’s the white of the blue part of Pat Murphy’s eye; and for that there matter,” dropping the hod of mortar almost on their toes at the same time, and turning round to Bob—“By the powers! I ax the Jontleman’s pardon—tho he’s not the first Jontleman has had carried mortar—where is that big, bully-faced blackguard that I’m looking after?” During this he brushed the mortar off Tallyho’s coat with a snap of his fingers, regardless of where or on whom he distributed it. (Egan [1821] 2007, Vol. I, Ch. VII; italics in original)

A culturalist reading might concentrate on the Irishman’s manner of speaking, which recalls the merry if somewhat racist “Irish bull” style of humour to be found in writers such as Sterne and Edgeworth. This way cultural stereotyping lies, the argument would run: representations such as this pigeon-hole other Irish people. Egan’s view of this particular immigrant, however, resembles one widespread in London today. The hod-carrier is not monstrously threatening but an invigorating newcomer whose very presence and work indicates the dynamism and success of the expanding, transforming city. The admirable self-confidence of Egan’s Irish labourer makes him unlike literary slum-dwellers of the second half of the nineteenth century, characters such as Dickens’s Jo and Dickie Perrott, Morrison’s Child of the Jago, both of whom seem created to arouse pathos. But culturalist readings would tend to conceal this.

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Slum Gothic Among those who used the Gothic in an attempt to grasp the monstrous, mysterious London of the second quarter of the century, writers such as Dickens and Harrison Ainsworth drew on French writing set in a preHaussmann Paris: the Mysteries of Paris of Eugène Sue; what Ian Duncan (2011, 160–62) has labelled Victor Hugo’s “radical re-Gothicisation” of a past Paris. G.W.M. Reynolds, author of The Mysteries of London (1844–48), aimed at a cash-strapped audience and used the Gothic even more boldly— crudely, one might instead say—to delineate the slums of London. The Mysteries of London, Louis James (2006, 136–37; 159; see also James 2008) writes, “was published, in weekly numbers with sensational woodcuts, by George Vickers, a publisher specializing in pornographic and radical works” and may have been the “most popular single Victorian work of fiction.” We are certainly on less respectable ground here than we are with Dickens, instalments of whose novels cost a shilling, twelve times as much as the penny needed for a chunk of Reynolds. In the opening chapters of The Mysteries of London Reynolds ([1844–48] 2012) plunges a sixteen-year-old youth notable for “the extreme effeminacy and juvenile loveliness of his countenance” into “that labyrinth of narrow and dirty streets which lies in the immediate vicinity of the north-western angle of Smithfield market.” So far, so Dickensian. In Oliver Twist, to take only a few examples, we hear of the “intricate and dirty ways” between “Grays Inn Lane and Smithfield,” and the “dark and winding ways” between Saffron Hill, precisely the district into which Reynolds takes his readers in the opening chapter of The Mysteries of London, and Bow Street, the base of law enforcement, situated very close to the St Giles Rookery and the other most infamous slums of northern and western central London then (Dickens [1837–39] 1966, 42.378, 43.393, hereafter OT, first number chapter number and second number page number). Reynolds seems to be following even more closely the moment when Oliver is seized by Fagin’s gang after leaving Mr Brownlow’s house on an errand. At that point, Oliver is taken by the gang along the precise spatial reverse of the route taken by Reynolds’s effeminate adolescent, as they move from “a labyrinth of dark narrow courts” (OT 15.158) in the Saffron Hill district, into “a large open space” (OT 16.158) which turns out to be West Smithfield (site of London’s great livestock market). Descriptions of this sort in Dickens derive not only from textual influence but also, vitally, from physical engagement with, to recall Bill Brown (2003), the city and its individual districts as “object matter.”

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“I thought I knew something of the town but after a little talk with Dickens I realised I knew nothing,” a colleague, George Lear, wrote in the 1830s: “[h]e knew it all from Bow to Brentford” (quoted in Slater 2011). Dickens’s claims to know the massive city inside out are well-known to Dickens scholars. But contexts, for today’s post-Derridean culturalist Dickens critics (see e.g. Ledger and Furneaux 2011), continue predominantly to be textual ones, and even if this includes statistics and the reports written by contemporaries on social conditions, precious little attempt is made to reproduce the experiential nature of the world inhabited by Dickens and his contemporaries. Reynolds gets closer than Dickens does to the tone and techniques of earlier Gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe. His teenage character’s experience in the Saffron Hill slums is described as a “terrible waking dream”: Meantime the lightning flashed, and the thunder rolled; and at length the rain poured down in torrents. Obeying a mechanical impulse, the youth rushed up the steps of a house at the end of one of those dark, narrow and dirty streets the ominous appearance of which was every now and then revealed to him by a light streaming from a narrow window, or the glare of the lightning. (Reynolds [1844–48] 2012, Vol. 1, Ch. 1)

Radcliffe’s heroines have their nightmarish experiences in settings reminiscent of Salvator Rosa paintings: ruined castles and monasteries in mountainous parts of southern Europe during the seventeenth century, the moonlight and lightning illuminating the woods outside. We could consider the first few paragraphs of Chapter 4 in Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, first published in 1794: “she turned her attention to the heavens, where the vivid lightnings darted from cloud to cloud, and flashed silently on the woods below.” Reynolds’s text, as its title announces, offers both a contrast and a comparison with Radcliffe, stating that the things her heroines experience can be experienced right here in London, and right now as well. The use of Gothic fiction in the construction of an image of the London slums during the 1840s by Reynolds and others welcomes a culturalist reading, since Gothic novels described, with extensive use of hyperbole, places that their authors and readers alike had never visited. Yet think once more of gas street lighting, pioneered in London during these decades. It must have created a shocking experience of chiaroscuro in which contrasts between areas of light and darkness were exaggerated. There may have been material reasons why the 1840s city seemed so hospitable to portrayal in the Gothic mode.

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Two Dickenses Readers of Dickens once tended to exaggerate his materiality, or in other words the direct link between his texts and the non-textual world: what was understood as his realism. More recently, Dickens criticism has done the opposite and overvalued the textual-cultural at the expense of the material. As Michael Slater (2004) writes, “[t]he general concept of Victorian London derives in great measure from Dickens’s elaborate, haunting descriptions of labyrinthine courts and alleyways, quaint old buildings, fogs, gaslight, and teeming street life.” An iconic notion of the slum is so constructed, and the poor housing of other cities at other times can be compared with this standard or pattern. While they may question understandings of ordinary people’s lives in nineteenth-century London which are reliant on the “narrative conventions” of the time, Alastair Owens and geographer and archaeologist collaborators (2010, 212, 222– 23) nevertheless find themselves turning back to Dickens in their attempt to capture the atmosphere of Limehouse in riverside east London. Recent Dickens criticism has not ignored the seamier urban settings and characters of his novels (Sasaki 2011, 56), but it has tended to be more oriented towards constructions, for instance of sexuality, than actual sociallyembedded lives. Holly Furneaux and Anne Schwan have argued that Dickens needs to be seen as less respectable, more subversive—queerer— than he has tended to be seen in Britain at least where, they claim (2005, 1), “the diversity of this alleged champion of ‘respectable’ fiction” has gone largely unnoticed. The sort of criticism practised by Furneaux and Schwan emphasises that the slums are places where children are sexualised, places of hidden desires and illicit commerce. An example is Chapter 6 of Dickens’s Dombey and Son, first published in instalments between October 1846 and April 1848. Here, Florence Dombey, aged eight or so, is tricked into a slum which seems not to be a collection of crumbling old houses rammed with shortterm tenants, but instead a favela-type development, and is certainly further north, further from central London than St Giles, somewhere—as Jeremy Tambling (2009, 113) has recently pointed out—that resembles Agar Town: “[t]hey had not gone very far, but had gone by some very uncomfortable places, such as brick-fields and tile-yards, when the old woman turned down a dirty lane, where the mud lay in deep black ruts in the middle of the road” (Dickens [1846–48] 1974, 6.73, hereafter D&S, first number chapter number and second number page number; see also the 1851 account of Agar Town in Dickens’s periodical Household Words, Flint 1987, 218–22).

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Florence is led there by an old woman calling herself “Good Mrs Brown” and who Kristina Aikens (2005, 79) rightly identifies as “witch-like.” A witch lives in a cottage, of course, and a curious aspect of the shanty-town is that it combines rural or village-like characteristics with features of the industrial city such as a transient population and proximity to industry. Aikens, following an influential Foucauldian reading by Joss Lutz Marsh ([1991] 1995), is primarily concerned with the sexualisation of the child as a motif in this episode. But attention could instead be redirected to a material where: the location of this episode. It is somewhere both on and off the map. There are no directions we can follow to place the slums of Dombey and Son with anything like the level of precision that is available to readers of Oliver Twist and The Mysteries of London; even Mr Dombey’s house is placed in a curiously broad zone, a mile from east to west, when it is described as lying in “the region between Portland-place and Bryanstonesquare” (D&S, 3.24). Furneaux and Schwan’s view of the history of Dickens’s reception makes a fair amount of sense, though. Writing in 1858, Walter Bagehot (quoted by Tillotson 1954, 68) claimed that unlike Thackeray, Dickens stays well back from “the border that separates the world which may be described in books from the world which it is prohibited so to describe.” An “instinctive purity of genius,” Bagehot claims, ensures that Dickens “not only observes the conventional rules, but makes excursions into topics which no other novelist could safely handle, and, by a felicitous instinct, deprives them of all impropriety.” Humphry House, in 1941, thought much the same but instead of praising Dickens for his delicacy, blamed him for being mealy-mouthed. For House, Dickens was guilty of self-censorship: His descriptions of the filth of the slums are quite inadequate to the truth; when Oliver first goes to Saffron Hill the Great, for instance, he says that “the air was impregnated with filthy odours” and that “drunken men and women were positively wallowing in filth”, and so fails to make it clear that the street was full of the emptyings of pots and privies. Even Tom-AllAlone’s is not described in its full horror. (House 1941, 217)

Of course, conventions change: House, writing for Oxford University Press in the 1940s, could hardly have written the word shit, although it may have entered his head. Approaches such as House’s would forty years on be chastised by Terry Eagleton (1985, i) as naively “realist.” For Eagleton, House erred by treating Dickens’s texts not as text in the post-structuralist sense but as “windows on the Victorian world.” Eagleton rejected both such realist

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approaches and the other main trend he identified (1985, ii) in Dickens studies between the 1950s and the 1980s, the formalist habit of treating the texts as “structures of organic meaning.” Eagleton’s position, which since 1985 has become the orthodox one, exposes cultural tensions latent in Dickens’s writings, but risks losing sight of earlier scholars’ more material insights. Classic works of the 1950s and 1960s Kathleen Tillotson (1954) and Philip Collins (1963) should not be forgotten. Theory-age critics can get sloppy. Writing on London in a recent book for Cambridge University Press, Anne Humpherys (2011, 228–29) makes errors concerning character names, fictional names and the nonfictional originals of fictional places in Dombey and Son and Bleak House. Tambling (2009, 113, 356) includes Agar Town in his chapter on Dombey and Son and Camden Town, but in a seeming slip omits it from his “Index of London Sites.” Tillotson, for her part, “deplored error and unclear thought” (Hawes 2008). A brilliant passage in her 1954 book Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (91–115), for instance, concerns the view of time and the use of period details in Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. In it, Tillotson tracks the details of dress and contemporary reference which indicate precisely where in the recent past each of these novels is set, accepting that the author is sometimes more precise and consistent about temporal setting than at other times. This enables her to compare and distinguish the writers and texts: does the past, as in Wuthering Heights, have “some positive point” or is it merely a means of “detemporalising the action” so as to please a Victorian audience longing to be reminded of the flavour of the age before the railways (Tillotson 1954, 97). It would be hard to write such a passage without reading a vast quantity of novels from the 1830s and 1840s, as Tillotson had clearly done. Grasping Victorian slum fiction calls for an even greater range of reading. Tillotson, after all, confined herself to less than two decades. The reading of multiple texts from a period could, like treating places as in Brown’s sense objects, lead to a grasp of that period’s materiality. It is possible for Tillotson to enter the mindset of nineteenth-century England in a way that culturalist Dickens critics since Eagleton in the 1980s cannot. And reading materially involves returns to the criticism of an earlier age which was unafraid of discussing the relationship between texts and the world inhabited by their readers and writers.

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In Search of Saffron Hill and Staggs’s Gardens A spatialist reader concerned to recover the materiality of the early Victorian London slums could take a cue from Tillotson and journey not just textually but also physically into the details of particular literary slums, trying to be as precise about them as Tillotson is about temporal details, and to do justice to the complicated relations of real and imaginary place to be found in them. Two such slums are Saffron Hill in Oliver Twist and Staggs’s Gardens in Dombey and Son. They are representations of the two main types of Victorian slum I mentioned earlier, the rack-rented central district and the self-built suburb on the periphery. Saffron Hill can be walked up today. It lies to the west of the City of London in a neighbourhood where few people have lived since the end of the Victorian period. You could go there, but you wouldn’t find the “emporium of petty larceny” in which masses of stolen pocket handkerchiefs “hang dangling from pegs outside the windows or flaunting from the doorposts” which is summoned up by Dickens in Oliver Twist (26.235). To Oliver himself, fresh from the workhouse and a hundred mile walk to London it seems the dirtiest and most wretched place he has ever seen (OT, 8.103). Today, reconnoitring it via Google StreetView, no building on Saffron Hill appears to have been built before the late nineteenth century, and most seem to be offices. Of course it is hard to divine even with the aid of Google how respectable each office is. Staggs’s Gardens, on the other hand, figures on no map. For one thing, self-built working-class districts like it were all destroyed by about 1875, often by the railway companies. In 1866 the Midland Railway Company asked for and swiftly got from Parliament permission to seize and destroy Agar Town, “leaving the inhabitants to find other accommodation wherever they could,” Denford (1995, 2) writes, implying that like the dislodged Irish immigrants of St Giles surveyed by Beames in 1850, their fate would likely be unpleasant. Denford, vitally, rejects the textual construction of Agar Town in the mid-Victorian press as “a foul slum housing a depraved population.” He seeks to restore to its inhabitants what David Harvey (2008), writing of cities in developing countries of the twenty-first century, has called “The Right to the City.” Visited by Florence and Paul Dombey in Chapter 6 of Dombey and Son, by Chapter 15 Staggs’s Gardens has “vanished from the earth” and on its site (the arch at the entrance to Euston station, built in 1837, is indicated) “granite columns of gigantic girth opened a vista to the Railway world beyond” (Dickens [D&S, 15.217–18). Yet Staggs’s Gardens keeps a place in the plot of Dombey and Son, since its obliteration results in

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the spatial dislodgement of the Toodle family, who are actually moving up in the world, moving towards the working-class aristocracy of labour thanks to Mr Toodle’s skill and industry as a railwayman. Slums such as Staggs’s Gardens are to their inhabitants normal places, and not uniform but varied. To complicate things still further, Staggs’s Gardens does not appear on the map for two further reasons. Favela-type districts are almost by definition beyond the scope of map-makers, or rather when they begin to be mapped, tarmacked, plumbed in, they stop being shanty towns. How precise about the Rookery could a mapmaker such as Henitt, surveying St George’s Bloomsbury and St Giles in 1824 on behalf of the Russell estate, possibly be, if there is any truth at all in a claim by The Times’s reporter in 1849 that he would only enter the area “having secured the assistance of a police sergeant well acquainted with the street” (Whitfield 2006, 138; Flint 1987, 149)? What, in any case, would a local resident’s mental map of the area have looked like in comparison to Henitt’s? It is near impossible to know. Some things do not change. Kibera, in Nairobi, is the largest slum in Africa and home, according to various sources, to between 170,000 and two million people (Wikipedia 2012b). On Google Maps it appears as a grey absence. Finally, you cannot visit Staggs’s Gardens now and nor could you ever for another reason: Dickens made it up, while Saffron Hill existed before he was born.

Conclusion It may be, as Owens (2010, 212) claims, that recent research by historians into Victorian London has exaggerated “the immaterial . . . the poetics and politics of representations.” But workers in literary studies overvalue the cultural at the expense of the material much more than do historians. Owens and his co-workers investigate material evidence about people’s lives via the contents of their privies or home rubbish dumps, and assertions of a new materiality in literary studies associated with names such as Brown (2003) and Freedgood (2006) can hardly hope to be quite as material as this, nor can literary scholars convincingly claim to wish for the abolition of text-based study. Instead, what is needed to illuminate the still-murky slums of Victorian London is a dialogue between culturally- and materially-oriented work. As a starting point, we could hardly do better than the great urban historian H. J. Dyos’s description (1982, 132) of the slums of Victorian London as “three-dimensional obscenities”: things that were visible and tangible, but into which intangibles, feelings of horror and offence, were always woven.

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by Michael Hollington, 3.59–77. Mountfield, East Sussex: Croom Helm. Mayne, Alan. 2011. [list of interests and publications, University of South Australia]. www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/staff/homepage. asp?Name=alan.mayne. ODNB. 2004-2012. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition. Edited by Lawrence Goldman. www.oxforddnb.com. OED. 2012. “slum, n.1.” Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Owens, Alistair, Nigel Jeffries, Karen Wehner and Rupert Featherby. 2010. “Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London.” Journal of Victorian Culture 15.2: 212–25. Palm-Gold, Jane. 2011. [personal website]. http://janepalmgold.com. Radcliffe, Ann (1794) 2009. The Mysteries of Udolpho. www.gutenberg. org/files/3268/3268-h/3268-h.htm. Reynolds, G.W.M. (1844-1848) 2012. The Mysteries of London. www.victorianlondon.org/mysteries/mysteries-00-chapters.htm. Rocque, John. (1746) 2001. London, Westminster and Southwark. http://www.motco.com/map/81002. Rodger, Richard. 1989. Housing in Urban Britain, 1780–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sasaki, Toru. 2011. “Major Twentieth-Century Critical Responses.” In Ledger and Furneaux 2011, 51–7. Sen, Sambudha. 2008. “Hogarth, Egan, Dickens, and the Making of an Urban Aesthetic.” Representations 103: 84–106. Slater, Michael. 2011. “Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870).” In ODNB. www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7599. Steadman, Philip. 2009. [review of Jeremy Tambling, Going Astray: Dickens and London]. Journal of Architecture 14.6: 742–744. Tambling, Jeremy. 2009. Going Astray: Dickens and London. Harlow: Pearson. Tillotson, Kathleen. 1954. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Victoria and Albert Museum. 2011. “Hidden Treasures: Explore Selected Objects from the William and Judith Bollinger Gallery.” www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/hidden-treasures/html/HT_23. html. Veder, Robin. 2009. “Flowers in the Slums: Weavers’ Floristry in the Age of Spitalfields’ Decline.” Journal of Victorian Culture 14.2: 261–81.

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Making and Taming “Messy Space”: The Contested Nature of Historical Space in Urban China Philipp Demgenski

In this chapter, I investigate urban development and spatial restructuring in the Chinese coastal city of Qingdao (Shandong Province). I specifically look at the transformation of historical urban space in the city’s old, postcolonial town centre. As the title reveals, this article revolves around what I call “messy space.” “Messy space” is simultaneously an attribute, a discourse and a process. It is an attribute because different people from different sections of society label some of the historical space found in the old town centre as “messy” (luan 乱). This can, on the one hand, refer to a general state of disrepair and neglect of historical buildings as well as unfavourable living conditions; but on the other hand, it can also signify the opposite of “being modern” and as such, the stigma of “messiness” is also a discourse. In the context of China’s rapid urbanisation—certainly one of the key characteristics of post-Mao China—the rhetoric of modernisation has created various discourses that determine and distinguish between what is considered modern and progressive and what is backwards and outmoded. In this dichotomy, referring to the historical space in Qingdao’s old town centre as “messy” implies that it exists in a state of backwardness. It does not mean that historical space is in itself directly opposed to modernity but it suggests the need for various large-scale urban planning projects that are directed at “taming” this “messiness” in order to “modernise” historical space through processes of “monumentalisation” and commercialisation, similar to what Harvey (2001) calls “heritagisation.” But as I aim to demonstrate in this paper, “messy space” is not merely a condition, it is also, perhaps above all, a process. This is because space, as many scholars have argued (e.g. Lefebvre 1991; Massey 2005), is not simply a static container for human activity but, in fact, produced and reproduced by such activity. Humans and their physical environment are dialectically intertwined; people produce space and are concurrently shaped by it—a kind of “spatial habitus” (Bourdieu 1977). With this in mind, I argue that

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Qingdao’s old town centre’s “messiness” is not simply a state of affairs that negatively affects the people that live and work in it but is directly linked to these people who, through their social and cultural activity, produce “messy space.” One must not, however, infer that local residents are “messy” by nature; rather, historical circumstances and, in particular, government policies have created the conditions that have led these people to act and behave in the ways they do. Hence, the “making of messy space” is referring to a multidimensional process that links and brings together all those actors that, through their activities, engage in the production of urban space, including local residents, different government agents as well as any other people that display an interest in the spaces of Qingdao’s old town centre. The idea of “messy space” thus serves as a useful lens through which to understand the different dimensions and the processual nature of space and it also helps us to make sense of the spatial transformations that are currently happening in urban China, in particular the transformations of historical urban space. Below, I first provide an introduction to the city of Qingdao, including a brief historical overview and an outlook on the various spaces that we find in the city, specifically drawing attention to how the old town centre has evolved and how its current state has come about. I pay particular attention to one type of building that is known as liyuan (里院) and that is considered unique to Qingdao. Then I specifically look at the different groups that foster an interest in the historical spaces. I elaborate on who these different actors are, what their interests are and how they talk about, label and produce “messy space.” By considering how “messy space” exists simultaneously as an attribute, a discourse and a process, in the final section, I also touch upon the issue of the contested meaning of history and the question of authenticity and draw a link between historical urban space and state-society relations in contemporary urban China.

The Making of Qingdao: A Historical Overview The city of Qingdao, administratively at the sub-provincial level, is an economically flourishing seaport, a naval base, and an industrial centre. Its advantageous location on the Chinese east coast, about 600 kilometres south of Beijing, has made it a major tourist destination in China that is not only famous for its eponymous beer brand (Tsingtao Beer) but has also been rated China’s most liveable city in 2009 and 2011 and is commonly referred to as a city with an “international,” “modern,” “exotic,” “foreign,”

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and “worldly” flair (Qingdao Government 2010). This favourable image is closely related to the city’s multifaceted and complex colonial past. It was Germany that, driven by the rivalry with England and by its mission to become a world (colonial) power, seized the Jiaozhou Bay (where today’s Qingdao is located) in 1898 and founded and built up the city of Qingdao. The Germans were keen to emulate what the British had achieved in Hong Kong and establish a so-called “model colony” (Shekarloo 2010); but for various reasons, most notably perhaps Japan’s expansionist activities and specific interests in the same region, Germany’s influence in the area only lasted for 16 years (1898–1914); with the beginning of the First World War, bowing to the increasing pressure of the allied forces (mainly England and Japan), Germany surrendered and passed Qingdao over to the Japanese. China, hoping to reclaim the city, allied against the Germans but had not anticipated the fact that at the end of the First World War, the Versaille Peace Conference strengthened Japan’s position in the region. It was not until 1922 that the Japanese, although reluctantly, agreed to return Qingdao to the Chinese, only to occupy it once more in 1938. The city was finally returned to China after Japan was defeated at the end of the Second World War. The political history of Qingdao since 1898 can broadly be divided into the following periods: Year

Event

1898–1914

Founding and development of the city of Qingdao by German colonisers.

1914–1922

Further industrialisation of the city under first Japanese rule

1922–1937

The development of the city as a so-called “special city” under the Beiyang (1922–28) and Guomindang (1929–37) governments

1938–1945

Second Japanese occupation

1945–1949

Civil war and the last phase of the Guomindang government

1949–Today

CCP rule

Table 5–1. The Political History of Qingdao since 1898

Owing to this multifaceted colonial history, today’s Qingdao is home to a diverse range of spatial settings and architectural artefacts that embody a multitude of historical and cultural meanings. When the Germans first

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designed and built Qingdao, they determined a clear spatial segregation between the European and the local Chinese areas (Schrecker 1971; Steinmetz 2007). This racial and spatial segregation also remained the underlying morphological basis upon which Qingdao developed over the course of the last century. Japanese rulers but also the Chinese themselves upheld the city’s overall composition and the initially impoverished Chinese areas that emerged during the early colonial years remained poor until late into the 1990s. In the mid-1990s, however, the city structure changed when the city government decided to move out of the old town centre and establish a brand new centre eastwards along the coastline. This new and modern centre, characterised by an accumulation of skyscrapers and clinical-looking “open spaces,” was further developed after Qingdao became a partner city to Beijing in the 2008 Olympic Games (W. Wang and Theodoraki 2007) and has led to a new kind of spatial segregation between the old town and the newly established modern city centre. It is against the backdrop of this large-scale spatial restructuring— this ultimate quest for modernity—that the developments in the old town centre need to be understood. Today, this part of Qingdao features an eclectic conglomeration of European-style houses, Chinese-style courtyard dwellings, concrete-blocks reminiscent of the “true” socialist years and also twenty-first century-style multi-storey units. Once the most flourishing and bustling part of town, it is hardly considered a popular destination for visitors anymore. On one of my trips to Qingdao, in a taxi from the bus station to my hostel, the driver seemed intrigued by the fact that I wanted to visit, let alone live in that part of town: “there is nothing there, it’s just a mess” he repeatedly said. Indeed, the atmosphere in this area exudes a sense of transition, characterised by the hustle and bustle of everyday economic and private life that takes place in the midst of large-scale urban construction sites. It is true that some of the European-style architectural artefacts are considered “monuments” and symbols of Qingdao (e.g. the Catholic Church, the newly renovated Train Station, the former Government Building, etc.) that are relatively well-preserved and regularly frequented by newly weds who come to take their wedding pictures in front of one of the several colonial-style mansions or churches. Most of the Chinese-style buildings, in contrast, are regarded as “poor” and “messy,” contributing to the overall perception of that part of town. Among them, there is one type of building that is worth examining in more detail. It is the so-called liyuan that can be regarded as architecturally unique to Qingdao. These liyuan are Chinese-style courtyard houses that somewhat resemble Beijing’s siheyuan (四合院) but differ in that they

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are commonly two or three storeys high and also in that they clearly show European architectural features, such as leak-proof red tiles instead of Chinese-style black ones, glass instead of paper windows and steal latticed gates and staircases. They vary significantly in size and shape with some covering an area of the size of two football fields (Murphy 2010). Most liyuan were built in the 1920s and 30s (Qingdao Shinan Political Council 2008). Today, however, many of them are in very poor conditions and are also often referred to as “shack-dwellings.” None of the apartments have any separate bathroom facilities; toilets are communal and normally located in the centre of the courtyard. Staircases and narrow walkways connect the apartments with each other. Many of the courtyards are quite dirty, residents often throw their garbage from the top floors, only loosely aiming at the rubbish bins located below. It is also extremely damp and wet and it is common that during hot summer months, the walls and outside facades get covered in weed and moss. As an architectural artefact that is historical, culturally unique to the city, but that exists in a state of significant disrepair, the liyuan serve as a case in point illustrating the production of urban space in contemporary China.

Speaking of “Messy Space”: Perceptions of Qingdao’s Old Town Centre As proposed in the introduction, I view the “messiness” of the old town centre and especially the liyuan as simultaneously being an attribute, a discourse and a process. I begin by looking at how and why different socioeconomic groups of urban society label the old town centre as “messy.” The majority of people living in the liyuan belong to the lower stratums of society. They are a mix of local Qingdaoese (bendiren 本地人) who have lived in the area for several decades as well as migrant workers. Liyuan are attractive to this latter group for their highly affordable rent (in some cases as little as RMB 200 per month, which is about €22). What makes the migrant workers community interesting is the fact that here we find migrants living in dwellings that are considered as buildings of “historical value” and not in what is usually understood as typical Chinese “migrant housing,” which Zhang Li (2010, 109) describes in her most recent book as consisting “of mostly matchbox-like apartment buildings that are poorly constructed and maintained.” Yet, for most of these people, the historical or cultural value of their residences and neighbourhoods are of minor importance and they are likely to jump at the chance of moving somewhere

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else. As such, the migrant workers represent one of the reasons why many local Qingdaoese who have been living in the old town for a considerably longer period of time, in some cases for several decades, speak of their own neighbourhood as being “messy.” A long-term resident who has been living in the same liyuan that is known as jiuruli (九如里) since 1964, complained that the migrants do not care much about the specific Qingdao culture and community spirit of the liyuan and that their behaviour has led to the decay and “messiness” of the entire area. This very much reflects the opinion of many long-term residents, for many of whom there exists a sense of attachment and community spirit. Many of them showed their concern about the changes and transformations that have already occurred to some liyuan; one informant said that “the liyuan have their own culture that should be preserved.” Yet, at the same time he acknowledged that change was also natural and that “liyuan have never been static in history and need to change with time.” Labelling their own surroundings as “messy” was not, however, only linked to the presence of migrant workers, it was also related to their living conditions. Many of the local long-term residents seemed to be very aware of the fact that they were living at the margins of society, that there existed newly built middle-class compounds somewhere out there and that their own living conditions were quite poor in comparison. Thus, not few people quite vigorously voiced their wish to just tear down the whole area, “these buildings are of no use,” they said. Interestingly, a common opinion was that the government should do something about the area, that the government was not interested in and neglected this part of town and that everything was just left in chaos. “It is so dirty and messy here” was a common remark. A similar view was held by yet a different group of people. I call them “hobby historians.” These people are mostly local but come from middle class backgrounds, pursue a variety of unrelated careers and do not actually live in the old town but mainly in residential compounds somewhere in the newly developed areas of Qingdao. I refer to them as “hobby historians” because they foster a specific interest in the “real” history of Qingdao’s old town; their main concern is “authenticity.” They commonly communicate on the Internet, in chat forums or on Chinese Twitter; they exchange photos, discuss Qingdao’s history and debate about the “real” origins of certain buildings. In Harvey (2006) and Lefebvre’s (1991) sense, they can be understood as trying to search for the “absolute” or “material” spaces of Qingdao’s old town, which, according to them, have been deprived of their authenticity and are being artificially created or recreated by external

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forces (i.e. the government). An interesting case to illustrate the “hobby historian’s” concern is Guantao Road (馆陶路), a street that is currently being turned into a so-called “German Style Street” (Deguo fengqing jie 德国风情街). On this street, references to German “culture” are ubiquitous, including antique-looking street signs, small booths carrying German writing, as well as bars and restaurants selling “authentic German beer.” What is intriguing, however, is the fact that the street is largely deserted, one sees the odd resident crossing the street, some construction work takes place on some buildings and many shops and bars are shut. The staff in a travel agency called “German Street Travel Agent” looked bewildered when I asked them whether they could recommend any sights here and instead tried to suggest me to visit some tourist attraction far away in the new town. Later on, I found out that none of the buildings on this street have anything to do with the German period but were, in fact, mainly built by the Japanese (Lu 2010). In a conversation with one of the “hobby historians” I mentioned this case and my informant was outraged by the apparent ignorance of the government with regards to the Japanese origins of the buildings found there, “they simply have no clue,” she complained. With regards to the liyuan, the “hobby historians” entertained a somewhat schizophrenic view. On the one hand, they romanticised them, treating them as symbols of “true” Qingdao culture but on the other hand, some of them also complained about the “messiness” of the area and specifically of some of the liyuan. They linked this “messiness” to the fact that local residents did not sufficiently care about the historical value of these buildings but merely lived there because it was cheap. Unlike local residents, however, these “hobby historians” did not make a clear distinction between migrant workers and local Qingdaoese. Also, their understanding of “messy space” was less about physical chaos or poor living conditions than referring to a lack of preservation of the historicity of the spaces in question. What this reveals is that the attribute “messiness” can refer to a wide variety of circumstances. It can refer to the presence of non-local people who do not sufficiently cherish local culture and community spirit; it can refer to unfavourable living conditions; and it can also refer to the failure to preserve history. In order to make sense of these different meanings of “messiness,” it is necessary to move on to consider how “messy space” exists as a discourse and following that, also the processual dimension of “messy space.” For this, it is essential to take a look at government policies and the processes of urbanisation in China over the past two decades.

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Taming “Messy Space”: The Politics of Chinese Urbanism In “Western” public discourse the Chinese state is often portrayed as an omnipotent and powerful single entity that ruthlessly torments its own citizens. This simplified depiction is, however, problematic. Various studies on urban China have revealed with considerable skill how the Chinese state is in fact a complex and multi-layered body within which there exist many different interest groups and opinions (e.g. Zhang 2001). It is often the case that the central government entertains quite different interests vis-à-vis the provincial, city or district governments. Studies on the notion of scale, to be understood as politically defined territories (Cartier 2005), illustrate how after the beginning of the reform period (1978 onwards) and the prudent but persistent processes of decentralisation, the bureaucratic hierarchies within the state have become a great deal more complex. In this context, we also need to take into account urban developers and real estate firms that, often hand in hand with local-level government agents, take the lead and run amok in expanding, upgrading, and restructuring already existing urban space in search of the most suitable scales of activity for maximising capital accumulation (McGee et al. 2007; J. Wang 2005). The decentralisation and privatisation processes paired with a still centralised political power have resulted in a distinct and complex administrative system whose workings and internal dynamics are highly intricate and even though it would go beyond the scope of this paper to comprehensively discuss them, it is useful and necessary to briefly review the spatial transformations that the Chinese urban sphere has been undergoing over the past decade and the effects they have had upon the population. Most of us are well-acquainted with the images of China’s scintillating urban modernity that have increasingly been travelling around the globe, showcasing the country’s exceptional economic development, especially during mega events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics or the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. The changes that urban China has been subject to are without doubt exceptional and have become particularly visible in terms of spatial restructuring. Ma and Wu (2005) have identified the following newly emerged city spaces in contemporary China: spaces of globalization, referring to large-scale constructions of spaces that make Chinese cities appear in a more international light; spaces of elitist consumption, referring to the establishment of glittering shopping centres, malls, highend restaurants, chain stores, expensice hotels and si ib; and spaces of differentiation and marginalization, which refer to the increasing amount of gated communities for the emerging middle and upper classes that stand

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in rather stark contrast to migrant workers’ enclaves. The latter are also creating spaces of illegality and irregularity (suburbanization) when the socalled “floating population” (liudongrenkou 流动人口) engages in illegal construction work. These newly emerging urban spaces have replaced the previously highly regulated, secularised and politicised urban spaces of the danwei (work-unit) community (Bray 2005), in which the authoritarian state naturally appropriated public and also private space so that individuals, as Davis (1995, 3) puts it, “enjoy[ed] only a modicum of social autonomy.” One driving force behind this spatial restructuring has been economic development; another one has been the country’s quest for a kind of “world city” modernity, one that is perhaps less determined by economic and financial factors as put forward by Friedmann (1986) and Sassen (2001), but more by cultural factors. As cities aspire to modernise, they try to generate the ingredients that cater to a particular form of life, a particular “world city culture” (Hannerz 1996). It is clear that in the Chinese case, the hardware (i.e. financial institutions and service industries) is not developed enough to be on the same level with cities like Tokyo, London, New York or even Hong Kong, but this does not prevent them from developing the necessary software (i.e., the cultural and maybe also spatial attributes of a world city) that makes them appear in a more “modern” light and that produce these spaces of modernity (Lu 2006). This relates to what I suggested at the outset, namely that “messy space” exists as a discourse that stands in direct opposition to the just-outlined quest for modernity. Hence, one of the outcomes of this fast-paced spatial restructuring has been the destruction and negligence of many vernacular places that have emerged and evolved over a longer period of time but that are now regarded as “messy” and backwards. We can, in this context, speak of “taming space,” a term that, as Massey (2005, 65) puts it, refers to “a particular form of ordering and organising space which refused (refuses) to acknowledge its multiplicities, its fractures and its dynamisms.” Indeed, urbanisation in today’s China has to a large extent been about reducing urban space to a one-dimensional spatial plane of what I call “urban sterility” or what Augé (1995, 77–78) famously called “non-places.” Much that appears to be “messy” is being tamed and replaced by something sterile and regulated. This is particularly apparent in terms of so-called historical space in contemporary urban China (Liang 2000; Pan 2005; Pan 2011; Marinelli 2010). The development of the old town centre of Qingdao and the fate of the liyuan reflect this. Liyuan are interesting for the fact that they have long

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been considered as a symbol of poverty and deficiency and as Zhan Erpeng’s (2002) findings show, many of them were ruthlessly knocked down as part of extensive restoration schemes initiated by the government in the 1980s and 1990s; out of the over 500 liyuan built between 1898 and 1940, it is estimated that only about 50 or so remain today (Afei 2006). This trend has, however, changed over the past two or three years. Since 2008, as an influx in articles on the Internet, in newspapers as well as Chinese academic journals indicates, the local government has increasingly acknowledged and recognised, as the Qingdao Financial Daily puts it, the “cultural value” (Hassa 2008) of the liyuan and has refrained from subjecting these old constructions to any further development or transformation. On the contrary, liyuan are increasingly being propagated as distinct artefacts of Qingdao culture, in some cases leading to their monumentalisation. One such example would be Pichaiyuan (劈柴院), which is a collection of liyuan that have been nicely decorated, whose “messiness” has been quite literally tamed. A recently opened liyuan museum further illustrates this trend. It becomes obvious that these “shack-dwellings” are undergoing a transformation in terms of their spatial meaning: from a useless, redundant and “messy” construction for the poor and unprivileged, they are in the process of transforming into an architectural artefact that connotes cultural value. The same is true for the old colonial town in general. While in the 1980s, the government still regarded the old centre as an architectural “disease” and not “modern enough” (Zhan 2002), today, it heavily capitalises on this image, selling the exoticism of the city (see, for example, “romantic travel in Qingdao,” Anon. 2009). In fact, plans to transform the entire old town centre into a kind of “cultural recreational area” have existed for quite some time (Liu 2006). These modernity discourses naturally also influence residents’ and other socio-economic groups’ opinions and perceptions of the old town centre. While the “hobby historians” may be dissatisfied about the processes of monumentalisation that, according to them, ignore the “true” meaning of history, residents—long-term residents in particular—are constantly reminded that they are living in a place that is essentially antonymous to modernity. This dilemma generated a set of questions that all groups of urban society struggled to find an answer to: what should be done to historical buildings? Should the liyuan just be torn down and then perhaps rebuilt? Should they be refurbished and then turned into a kind of tourist attraction or should they just be left to nature to inflict its changes upon them? I argue that these questions ignore two crucial constituent facts of space, namely people and their spatial practices. As outlined above, space

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in general and “messy space” in this specific case is not merely a state of affairs, it is a process of production, which I turn to in the final section.

Making “Messy Space”: Moving and Being in the City During one of my fieldwork trips to Qingdao, I had the opportunity to follow around a film crew that was shooting a documentary introducing different aspects of Qingdao. They came to the old town to film the liyuan and capture what they considered “some moments of authenticity and originality of Qingdao culture.” Of course, the filming attracted crowds of people and especially when the crew was filming on a bustling but rundown and poor market street, the members of the crew were overly excited about the “atmosphere” and the sense of “real street life spirit.” As an observer, I had time to pay attention to what some of the onlookers and passersby were saying to each other. I overheard quite a few people making comments about the group of foreigners filming, saying things like “why film China’s poorest and most run-down areas?” “It’s just a mess here, what’s there to film?” This firstly illustrates once more how “messy space” is a situational concept and perceived differently by different people. In that particular moment, the local people showed their discontent about the film crew, expressing a feeling of embarrassment that “the most messy places in town” were being recorded. But it was precisely this “messiness,” produced by the same people who complained about it, that made the setting attractive to the film crew and gave it a sense of “originality” and perhaps “authenticity.” So, secondly, this example also illustrates the inseparability of space and time. This scene demonstrates how it is people who constantly engage in the production of space, as Massey (2005, 118) quite rightly points out: “you are not just travelling through space, you are altering it a little.” This also serves as an example of the processual nature of space (including historical space) and shows how space is always a product of ongoing interrelations. This then requires us to rethink the concept of historical space. From this example, it becomes clear that what the film crew regarded as “authentic” or perhaps “traditional” Qingdao culture was to a large extent created by the “messiness” of the setting. The liyuan were not being filmed for their historicity per se, or at least not purely for that reason, but more because of the people that were present and who, through their simple presence and actions, created the spaces that then became meaningful to the film crew. Moreover, this also illustrates that what the “hobby historians” are calling

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for, namely the preservation of “real” historical urban space, is, in fact, also a kind of, albeit different, “taming” of space; it is the attempt to fix space in terms of its historical meaning. The “hobby historians” perceive the historical space as “absolute” (authentic) place that is being erased by destructive external forces. However, the creation of a historically meaningful artefact is in itself very much a process that takes place in the present; in line with this, Ashworth (2011, 11) illustrates that the meaning of historical space is always catering to the specific needs in the present, “new presents will constantly imagine new pasts to satisfy changing needs,” which has led some to argue that the past is merely imagined and that “there is no such thing as ‘heritage’” (Smith 2006, 13). While I agree with the idea that historical space is a product of specific narratives in the present (see also Appadurai 1981; Walsh 1992; Ashworth and Tunbridge 2000), we must be cautious not to deny the existence of a physical/absolute dimension of historical space entirely; Massey’s (2005, 117–118) account of a journey from London to Milton Keynes on which one passes the remains of a Norman Castle underlines this; according to her, this journey reminds us that the “presentness” of “horizontal space” is in fact “a product of a multitude of histories whose resonances are still there, if we would but see them, and which sometimes catch us with full force….” Indeed, all new meanings that are assigned to an artefact will always to some degree be constrained by the already existing ones, which in turn makes complete fabrication tremendously difficult, if not impossible to achieve. In other words, while there is no absolute historical spatial truth, historical space is still real. Finally, it is necessary to once more consider the various state agents that, as illustrated earlier, are trying to tame “messy space” in order to create a clean environment and convey an image of modernity. How do actions by the government and its agents affect the local population? Even though it is true that local residents’ own behaviour, as just outlined, creates the “messiness” of the old town that they themselves but also other groups of urban society complain about, but local residents are by no means inherently “messy.” Instead, as I argued at the beginning, it is evidently government policies that have created the conditions for people’s behaviour. The transferral of land-use rights to local government agents that have created immense prosperity but also severe destitution and led to increasing social stratification in contemporary China’s urban society (also in spatial terms) as well as the formation of a modernity discourse, which has determined China’s path towards urbanisation that was to a large extent made possible through millions of migrant workers flooding into

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the cities, have all nurtured the existence of “messy space” and “messy” spatial practices that are now ironically being stigmatised and fought against. What thus becomes apparent is that the changing of the external manifestation of space (turning physically chaotic into ordered and clean space) is not merely about restructuring space, rebuilding or tearing down an old building, it is also, perhaps above all, an attempt to transform people, to transform the residents of the old town centre. This fact hints at the quite repressive nature of China’s urban development, in which the marginalised and poor appear to have little or no agency. Nevertheless, there are strategies that can be adopted by those affected by urban restructuring. Considering the idea that historical space is to a large extent a product that becomes meaningful in the present and also in view of the increasing attempts to “monumentalise” and gentrify historical artefacts, residents who want to protect “their spaces” from being transformed may be able to capitalise on this trend and significantly improve their bargaining power vis-à-vis the state and its agents by stressing the specific historical value of the spaces they live in. “Historical space” thus has the potential to become, to use Scott’s (1986) words, “a weapon of the weak.”

Conclusion In this paper I have discussed how “messy space” in Qingdao’s old and former colonial town centre is simultaneously an attribute, a discourse, and a process. By looking at how “messy space” is labelled by different socioeconomic groups, including local long-term residents, “hobby historians” and other members of society, by looking at how the government and its agents have tried to “tame messy space” in an attempt to make Qingdao appear in a more modern light as well as by looking at how “messy space” is constantly being produced and reproduced by the people who live and move in it, I have shown how space is never inseparable from time and that its meaning is produced through processes of ongoing interrelations. This means that in order for state agents to transform space, they must also transform the people who engage in the production of the spaces that are subject to “taming.” Furthermore, I have argued that the historical dimension of space never ceases to exist but that, at the same time, it is never absolute, static or fixed. As a result, different pasts can be selectively used for various goals in the present, which means that the modernity discourse that exists in today’s urban China can potentially be utilised by local residents to improve their bargaining power vis-à-vis the state.

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References Afei. 2006. “Guanyu Qingdao Liyuan de Xingcheng Yiji Dangshi de Lishi you yixie Wenti Wang Dajia Bangmang Jiean” (Helping everybody to answer some of the questions regarding Qingdao’s liyuan and their history). Qingdao News, March 07. Anon. 2009. “2009 Qi Yue, Langman Qingdao Xing.” (July 2009, a romantic trip through Qingdao.) http://qingdao.cncn.com/article/123733/. Appadurai, Arjun. 1981. “The Past as a Scarce Resource.” Man 16 (2). New Series: 201–19. Ashworth, G. J. 2011. “Preservation, Conservation and Heritage: Approaches to the Past in the Present Through the Built Environment.” Asian Anthropology 10: 1–18. Ashworth, G. J, and J. E Tunbridge. 2000. The Tourist-Historic City: Retrospect and Prospect of Managing the Heritage City. Amsterdam: Pergamon. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London and New York: Verso. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bray, David. 2005. Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cartier, Carolyn. 2005. “City-space: Scale Relations and China’s Spatial Administrative Hierarchy.” In Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space, edited by Laurence J.C. Ma and Fulong Wu, 21–38. London: Routledge. Davis, Deborah S., ed. 1995. Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Friedmann, John. 1986. “The World City Hypothesis.” Development and Change 17 (1): 69–83. Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections. London: Routledge. Harvey, David. 2001. “Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 7: 319–38. Hassa. 2008. “Qingdao de Liyuan” (Qingdao’s liyuan). Qingdao Caijing Ribao (Qingdao Financial Daily), August 29. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Liang, Sicheng. 2000. Zhongguo Jianzhushi (Architectural History of China). Hong Kong: Joint Publishing HK. Liu, Chong. 2006. “The Contemporary Development of Qingdao’s Urban Space: The Perspective of Civil Society’s Participation in Chinese Urban Planning.” Ph.D. thesis, Weimar: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Lu, Duanfang. 2006. Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, 1949-2005. London: Routledge. Lu, Hai. 2010. Lao Jie Gushi (Stories of Ancient Streets). 3rd ed. Qingdao: Qingdao Publishers. Ma, Laurence J.C., and Fulong Wu, eds. 2005. Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space. London: Routledge. Marinelli, Maurizio. 2010a. “Tianjin, a Permanent Expo of World Architecture.” http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/ editorial.php?issue=021. ———. 2010b. “Internal and External Spaces: The Emotional Capital of Tianjin’s Italian Concession.” Emotion, Space and Society 3 (1): 62– 70. Massey, Doreen B. 2005. For Space. London: SAGE. McGee, T. G, George C.S. Lin, Andrew M. Marton, Mark Y. L. Wang, and Jiaping Wu. 2007. China’s Urban Space: Development Under Market Socialism. London: Routledge. Murphy, Marcus. 2010. “Liyuan Lost.” http://www.qingdaonese.com/ liyuan-lost/. Pan, Tianshu. 2005. “Historical Memory, Community-building and Placemaking in Neighbourhood Shanghai.” In Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space, edited by Fulong Wu and Laurence J. C. Ma. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2011. “Place Attachment, Communal Memory, and the Moral Underpinnings of Gentrification in Postreform Shanghai.” In Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person: What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us About China Today, edited by Arthur Kleinman, 152–176. Berkeley: University of California Press. Qingdao Government. 2010. Government Website. Qingdao Affairs Online. http://english.qingdao.gov.cn/n2043295/index.html. Qingdao Shinan Political Council, ed. 2008. Liyuan: Qingdao Pingming Shengtai Yangben (Liyuan: An example of Qingdao’s common people’s way of life). Qingdao: Qingdao Publishers. Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. 2nd edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schrecker, John E. 1971. Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism: Germany

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in Shantung. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scott, James C. 1986. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shekarloo, Pouyan. 2010. “Musterkolonie Kiaotschou: The Expansion of the German Empire into China” (seminar paper, Norderstedt, Germany). Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Steinmetz, George. 2007. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walsh, Kevin. 1992. The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Postmodern World. London: Routledge. Wang, Jing. 2005. “Introduction: The Politics and Production of Scales in China: How Does Geography Matter to Studies of Local, Popular Culture?” In Locating China: Space, Place, and Popular Culture, edited by Jing Wang. New York: Routledge. Wang, Weiming, and Eleni Theodoraki. 2007. “Mass Sport Policy Development in the Olympic City: the Case of Qingdao — Host to the 2008 Sailing Regatta.” Perspectives in Public Health 127 (3): 125– 132. Zhan, Erpeng. 2002. Enstehung, Wandlung Und Sanierung Der “Hüttenviertel” in Qingdao (Tsingtau). Berlin: Logos Verlag. Zhang, Li. 2001. Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China’s Floating Population. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2010. In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

III National Spaces

Cabins and National Identity in Norwegian Literature Ellen Rees

There is probably no category of building today that is more directly associated with Norwegian identity than the “hytte” or cabin. Roughly half the population has direct access to a secondary vacation dwelling, either in the mountains, by the sea, or in the woods (Vittersø 2007, 266). Yet these quintessentially and iconically Norwegian dwellings have a surprisingly short history, and the way that cabins signified in the nineteenth century was significantly different than the ways they signify today. In this analysis I will examine three prose texts from the beginning, middle, and end of a period of roughly two hundred years in Norwegian literary history in order to illustrate how the cabin has functioned as a space for working out questions of national identity. These texts are Maurits C. Hansen’s short story “Luren” (“The Lur”)1 from 1819, Knut Hamsun’s novel Markens Grøde (Growth of the Soil) from 1917, and Per Petterson’s 2003 novel, Ut og stjæle hester (Out Stealing Horses). What I will present in the following is a very small part of a much larger project that examines how cabins and other temporary seasonal dwellings signify in Norwegian identity construction. I focus primarily on literary representations because literature is a discursive practice that allows for extensive reflection upon the phenomenological experience of place, and upon the symbolic and allegorical meaning with which place can be imbued.2 The central hypothesis for this study is that the cabin in Norway serves as what Michel Foucault called the “heterotopia,” a particular type of social space that functions on numerous registers simultaneously, and Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. A “lur” is a wind instrument used widely in traditional Norwegian folk music. “Luren” first appeared in the newspaper Morgenbladet, and was later published along with six other stories under the subheading Skizzerede nationale Fortællinger (“Sketched national tales”) in the 1825 edition of his Digtninger (“Works”). 2 Here I follow Yurij M. Lotman’s suggestions that texts can reflect an entire cultural programme (Lotman et al. 1975, 20). 1

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that has far more social significance that it would appear to warrant on the surface. Foucault outlined the concept in a 1967 lecture, “On Other Spaces,” which was first published in 1984. Here he provides a description of how a heterotopia differs from a purely abstract utopia: There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places— places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society— which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. (Foucault 1986, 24)

The crucial distinction here is that the heterotopia actually exists in the real world. It can be a market place, a circus tent, a brothel, a graveyard, a hotel—in short any number of constructed places in society where we gain a momentary critical distance from the everyday, and perform (or temporarily escape from) our identities more consciously. I see the cabin as perhaps the single most important heterotopia in Norwegian society, both because of how cabins function today in the lives of so many people, but also because of the important role they have played historically as a representation of national ideals and as a meeting point between nature and civilization.

Historical Overview The process of “nation building,” which got underway in Norway during the nineteenth century, was a remarkably self-conscious and literary endeavor. Subject as it was to the vagaries of continental warfare and politics, Norway appears to have quite literally written itself into existence while under Swedish dominion starting in 1814.3 Like many peripheral cultures, Norway sought to construct an identity that would distinguish it from other nations. Norway is a country of vast wilderness; only four percent of its land mass is arable, and with a population today of only just over five million, a quarter of whom are concentrated around the metropolitan center Norway was the lesser party in a union under the Danish monarch from 1380 to 1814, and under the Swedish monarch from 1814 to 1905. Before 1380 Norway had been an independent kingdom.

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of Oslo, it has always been very sparsely populated. Centuries of Danish political and cultural domination meant that most of the typical European cultural institutions were not established on Norwegian soil until well into the nineteenth century. Quite early on in the process of nation-building the physical landscape was identified as the primary source for marking Norwegian difference, as scholars such as Gudleiv Bø and Nina Witoszek have argued. Without an established urban culture, Norwegian intellectuals turned to the most readily available alternative, namely idealized nature, a strategy that continues to resonate even today in Norway’s relations to Europe and the world. In my reading of nineteenth-century Norwegian literature, however, I find that the “place” of the burgeoning Norwegian nation is not, as Bø (2001, 112) and Witoszek (1998, 96) suggest, in the untamed wilderness of fjord and mountain itself, but rather in a far more liminal and paradoxically transgressive space, namely the cabin. What I have observed in examining both real-life cabin practices and literary representations of cabins, is that cabins in contemporary Norway have become a primary locus for the performance of Norwegian identity; they have become the place where Norwegians retreat from the pressures of everyday life, where they are at their most private and most relaxed, but also most in step with a nationally-inflected mythos. During the second half of the twentieth century, a very strict ethos of cabin practices was established. These cultural codes are today widely assumed to have been passed down for generations, yet, as I have observed in my study, they developed and consolidated over a very short span of time historically speaking, and it is already to a growing extent becoming obsolete. Clearly, then, nostalgia and a sense of atavistic longing, a longing for an imagined past that never was, is a key feature of Norwegian conceptualizations of the cabin. Broadly speaking, cabins started out as nothing more than the homes of the poor; they had little or no symbolic capital. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what references we find to cabins are typically either part of topographical descriptions of the landscape and agricultural practices of Norway, or part of the moral didactic literature that posited the humble cabin as a trope of moderation. We see an example of the latter in Poul Juel’s 1721 poem, A Happy Life Reconsidered When Delusion and Experience Debated About It,4 where personified “Experience” praises the simple life of the farmer: “A farmer’s cabin / shall be like a king’s castle” (Juel 1721, 59).5 The rural cabin, along with the peasant farmer who 4 5

Et Lycksaligt Liv Eftertænckt Da Indbilding og Forfarenhed Derom Disputerede. “En Bonde-Hyte / som et Konge-Slot skal blive.”

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occupied it, was held up by Enlightenment thinkers like Juel an ideal of moderation intended as a model, both for the ruling class itself, and for the peasants they administered. During the late 1800s under the direction of the Norwegian Tourist Association, a network of cabins and marked trails spread across the wilderness as a means of providing access. Privately owned cabins occupy a transitional space between wilderness areas (which in many cases have been incorporated into strictly regulated national parks) and rural, agricultural communities. During the early twentieth century, as traditional agricultural practices such as transhumance were replaced by more modern technologies, many agrarian structures were repurposed as vacation dwellings. At the same time that the population relocated in massive numbers to urban centres, many families maintained a strong connection to their rural roots and traditions through such repurposed vacation cabins. While traditional practices, such as cheese making, were most often abandoned, the places themselves still served as links to tradition and contributed to a sense of cultural identity. Cabins became increasingly associated with leisure and recreation, rather than poverty. They also became marked as predominantly masculine spaces, largely because of the growing popularity of hunting and outdoorsmanship as a leisure activity. This was mirrored in the explosion of hunting narratives that dominated the Norwegian literary market from about 1850 onward. The most prominent real-world cabin from this period is perhaps the shelter built by arctic explorers Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen during their attempt to reach the North Pole, as described by Nansen in 1896. Nansen was the embodiment of late-nineteenth century masculine ideals. The hunting cabin thus becomes codified as a masculine counterpart to the feminine and erotic space of the summer dairy or seter. The establishment of an independent national state in 1905, and a social democratic Labor party that dominated Norwegian politics starting in 1935 introduced a new set of concerns linked to cabin culture.6 In literary representations of cabins, they became increasingly linked to the urban elite who had the economic wherewithal to own second homes and the leisure time to enjoy them. The cabin literature of the period from about 1930 to 1960 turns inward, reflecting a fascination with psychoanalysis and contemplation that we see manifested in the real world in philosopher Arne Næss’ lifelong experimentation with extreme isolation and deprivation During the period 1935–2013 the prime minister of Norway has come from the Labour party for all but sixteen years.

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at his high elevation cabin, “Tvergastein.” During this phase, cabins are conceptually linked to masculinity, albeit often a masculinity in crisis, to psychoanalysis and therapy, and to individual rather than national identity. One might argue that in this phase the cabin motif is pushed to its conceptual and aesthetic limits, and with the work of André Bjerke starting in the 1940s, the cabin becomes a cliché setting for crime fiction rather than the productive high literary trope it once was. With only a few exceptions, cabins more or less disappear from the Norwegian literary cabin for a number of decades, only to reappear with a vengeance in the period around the turn of the millennium. It is possible to trace varieties of the cabin motif—the mountain dairy, the hunter’s cabin, the logging hut, etc.—throughout most of the Norwegian literary canon. In this paper I examine Hansen’s “The Lur” as an early national romance that activates the cabin as a literary trope. In this short story Hansen employs the space of the cabin as an allegory for the nation. As I will demonstrate, it is the liminal or transgressive nature of the space of the cabin itself that makes Hansen’s vision of a culturally distinct Norwegian nation possible. I then argue that Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil represents one of the latest attempts to harness the cabin trope for specifically nationalist purposes, but that by 1917 this had become a reactionary and anti-modern position. Finally, I turn to Out Stealing Horses as a contemporary work that reconceptualizes the cabin as a therapeutic space, a retreat from the traumas that the national romance and the national family inflicts on the individual.

Hansen’s “The Lur” Writing only five years after the ratification of the Norwegian constitution, Hansen posits a peasant cabin as the explicit symbolic home for a new nation. He attempts to negotiate class hierarchies and create a united national identity that, at the time of writing, was not at all a given. In “The Lur” the cabin in question is built so that people representing different social spheres can construct a new kind of family life together. In my view this simple romance functions as a model for conceptualizing what the nation of Norway might become. I thus reject the conclusion of Knut Johansen, who argues that “The Lur” is not at all programmatically nationalistic (Johansen 1970, 55). The focus on a specific national geography in the frame narration (Hansen 1825, 83), and the numerous references to overtly national symbols in the narrative clearly indicate that the setting of “The

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Lur” is not merely “new and picturesque,” as Johansen suggests, but instead functions as part of an overtly nationalist project in which the author hoped to unite the various social classes in a common nation building project. Bjørn Tysdahl has argued that, despite the many scholars who suggest the opposite, Hansen was in fact an author deeply concerned with class identity (Tysdal 1988, 120). The analysis I offer here can be understood as a continuation of this line of reasoning. And, like Jan Sjåvik, I view “The Lur” as a very carefully constructed rhetorical exercise, although I will argue that Hansen’s rhetorical strategies serve an explicitly nationalistic purpose that supersedes the interpersonal positioning that Sjåvik points out. Whereas Sjåvik interprets the sexual economy within the text metafictionally as an expression of the author’s rhetorical positioning (Sjåvik 1994, 522), I read the interpersonal relationships allegorically as an expression of the author’s utopian vision. In this I follow in the footsteps of Doris Sommer’s groundbreaking work on national romances; Sommer argues that in the nineteenth century “European foundational fictions sought to overcome political and historical fragmentation through love” (Sommer 1990, 84). This is clearly the case in “The Lur” as well, where each major character signifies a distinct social class. In “The Lur,” Ragnhild, the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, represents the independent land-owning farmer class that distinguishes early modern Norwegian society from most of the rest of Europe. These independent farmers play a key symbolic role in the conceptualization of Norwegian national identity. Ragnhild’s lover Guttorm, on the other hand, is a man of the landless tenant farmer class. In “The Lur,” a third and equally important group, the urban civil servant class, which is here represented by the narrator Carl Mølmann, provides necessary mediation between these two groups. Because Norway had no aristocracy and no political sovereignty, the civil servant class functioned as the de facto ruling class and arbiters of taste. Yet this elite group remained perpetual outsiders, since traditionally they were either Danes or Norwegians educated in Denmark. Thus, in a sense, Mølmann has as much of a stake in the identity politics that take place in Hansen’s text as the two lovers do, because he needs to establish a legitimate role in the new nation for the “foreign” class to which he belongs. In Hansen’s vision of Norway, all three groups are—with Mølmann’s intervention—united by the common goal of creating a new, modern society free from the yoke of Danish and Swedish cultural and political domination. In “The Lur” the specific space of the cabin itself functions as the meeting place where these social negotiations are worked out. Note that

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here the cabin is emphatically a proper family space, rather than an illicit lovers’ hideaway. Guttorm builds it in the wilderness midway between Ragnhild’s family farm and the farm where he works, intending it as a new home for their illegitimate infant daughter. It would have been far more conventional within the Norwegian literary context for Hansen to hide his lovers away at one of the many mountain dairies that were a standard annex to any sizeable farm. Such dairies have a long-standing tradition as erotic places in the landscape, which finds expression in both folklore and literature starting in the eighteenth century under the influence of the pastoral tradition. For example, although it is not immediately apparent to a modern viewer, in Johannes Flintoe’s 1822 painting Krundalen (figure 6–1) the image of a dairymaid and her suitor would have been understood as an overtly erotic scene in the eyes of nineteenth-century viewers. Thus, the simple and wholesome shelter that Hansen depicts goes against the predominant literary conventions, and is clearly an attempt to claim new conceptual territory.

Figure 6–1. Johannes Flintoe, Krundalen (1822).

The narrator Carl Mølmann’s journey through Norway functions on two registers; on the level of plot his professional duties necessitate an extended journey, while thematically speaking that journey awakens his national pride and acquaints him with his homeland. Hansen builds on the literary tradition established by The Norwegian Society in Cophenhagen, in which

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an emerging sense of national identity was expressed through epideictic verses praising the Norwegian landscape.7 His unique contribution—a contribution that takes on a life of its own during the ensuing nationbuilding process—is the insertion of the cabin as a symbolic national home within the wilderness represented by the uninhabited cliffs, fjords and mountains that up until Hansen had dominated literary representations of Norway. The narrator is clearly a tourist in his native land, and in the opening lines of “The Lur” he compares Norway to Switzerland, which became a major tourist destination toward the end of the eighteenth century. Mølmann’s comparison is favorable: “But why are we always admiring those Helvetican Prospects? Why not decorate our walls with views of the fatherland! This parish seems to me to be the equal of even the most beautiful Swiss landscape” (Hansen 1825, 83).8 Switzerland remained for much of the nineteenth century the primary model and competitor for Norway’s attempt to commodify itself as a tourist destination. In the early twentieth century, novelist Knut Hamsun wrote critically of Norway’s efforts to sell itself as the new Switzerland. But whereas the mountain tourism of Switzerland was based on access to inns and hostels whose locations were determined by the settlement patterns developed in valley villages and mountain passes, in Norway isolated cabins played a much more dominant role. This is because the Norwegian population is concentated mostly along the coastline, with a long tradition of seasonal access to the interior that relied on temporary dwellings as bases for herding and foraging. Mølmann sees the potential of Norway as a tourist commodity, and the beauty of the landscape awakens a specifically national sense of pride in him. The valley in question appears almost as a vision in Mølmann’s travel narrative: “After a rather difficult journey by foot I stood at sunset on a hill, from which with surprising tenderness the valley suddenly opened its arms to my gaze” (Hansen 1825, 84).9 Sjåvik interprets this passage metafictionally as an expression of Hansen’s narrative desire (Sjåvik 1994, 531), but it functions equally convincingly as a patriotic discourse For a discussion of the use of landscape imagery in the budding nationalism of the writers of The Norwegian Society, see Bliksrud 1999. 8 “Hvorfor skulle vi dog evig beundre hine Helvetiens Prospecter? Hvorfor aldrig pryde våre Vægge med fædrelandske Udsigter! Denne Egn forekommer mig at staa ved Siden av det skjønneste Schweizerlandskab.” 9 “Efter en temmelig besværlig Fodreise stod jeg ved Solens Nedgang paa Høiden, hvorfra med overraskende Ynde Dalen pludselig aabnede sin Favn for mit Blik.” 7

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designed to elicit pride and curiosity about the nation in relation to other more hegemonic locations, such as the urban centres of Copenhagen and Stockholm, or even the larger towns of Norway such as Bergen and Christiania (today Oslo). The description of Ragnhild’s family of origin is a veritable encyclopedia of national symbolism: her father, appropriately named Thor (a reference to Old Norse origins) greets Mølmann as his “countryman,” he wears a “national costume,” he speaks a distinct local dialect, and his home is distinguished by “tidy simplicity and decent prosperity” (Hansen 1825, 84–85). Thor combines the modern and the ancient: according to Mølmann he looks like one of “the antique wood prints of our Norwegian kings,” he has a copy of Snorri Sturlason’s sagas and claims kinship with “Harald Fairhair,” but he also asks questions about current events in parliament (Hansen 1825, 85–86). Ragnhild is the female inheritor of this proud tradition, and thus there is, traditionally speaking, literally no place in this social context for her love of Guttorm, a man of lower social status. If Ragnhild’s family represents Norway’s imagined glorious past, Guttorm represents its utopian future. Guttorm is “a handsome young man with an unusually well-bred demeanour” according to Mølmann (Hansen 1825, 88),10 and he is a complex figure. He pursues an education in order to better himself and win the hand of Ragnhild, but when denied by Thor he reverts to the role of hired hand. Guttorm’s failed education is an odd detail that hints at social mobility and egalitarianism, but Hansen falls short of conceptualizing a new society completely free of traditional class distinctions. Mølmann sees Thor’s tradition-bound family pride as misguided and harmful, and takes it upon himself to bring the couple and their illegitimate daughter back into the family fold. This process gets underway upon Mølmann’s discovery of the secret cabin on his return journey through the valley. Once he discovers its existence and the love story that it conceals, Mølmann places himself in the position of mediator. That the couple had managed to hide both Ragnhild’s pregnancy and the first six months of the child’s life by concealing her in the cabin is an example of the kind of improbable plot element that typically detracts from Hansen’s literary reputation. I would argue, however, that such details do not matter in what is clearly a national allegory rather than a realist narrative. The point is that two disparate groups that traditionally have viewed each other with suspicion are here united in a national romance that is symbolically 10

“en vakker, ung Mand af et usædvanlig dannet Væsen.”

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officiated by a third group. The cabin itself takes up a relatively small space in the narrative. Mølmann first sees it in an evocatively romantic scene: “Just then the moon appeared, and I caught a glimpse in a rocky crevice of a small cabin and outside of it a person” (Hansen 1825, 89).11 The structure itself is very simple and rather impermanent; Mølmann describes it as “small and made of woven fir branches” (Hansen 1825, 89).12 Its only interior feature is the little bed in which the couple’s baby daughter lies. The provisional nature of the dwelling, built as it is only of branches, necessitates a change, since the little family cannot continue to stay there once winter comes. Hansen uses the term “barhytte” (branch hut) rather than hytte to distinguish it from the far more permanent buildings associated with mountain dairy production and other agrarian work practices. Its temporary status echoes the civil status of Ragnhild and Guttorm who, although they have the sympathy of both Mølmann and (presumably) the reader, remain outside established social norms because they are not married. Their family needs the sanction of marriage just as they need a more permanent sanctuary to shelter them. Nonetheless, the existence of even so impermanent a structure as the cabin built by Guttorm creates an actual place in which the three social classes are united together for the first time as constituents of a new imagined community. Mølmann uses his cultural capital and access to the European intellectual tradition to warm Thor to the idea of a union between his daughter and a poor worker. Through a series of literary references, Mølmann builds a case against Thor’s family pride and in favour of a new union: As if by chance I directed the conversation toward the cruelty of parents— and told Thor and his wife about Philip of Spain, and of d’Aguesseau and others. I concluded by telling about Eginhard and Emma. Once their interest was awakened, I went closer—and made up a story of my own, which in nearly every detail resembled Ragnhild’s. Thor became clearly attentive. I then took Snorri and the Bible down from the shelf, laid them on the table and said: “There, Thor, is the book that teaches about your royal lineage; but here lies the word of the Lord, which teaches that we are all the same before God.” (Hansen 1825, 90–91)13 “Netop gik Maanen op, og jeg skimtede i Bjergkløften en liden hytte og udenfor den et Menneske.” 12 “[L]iden og sammenflettet af Granbar.” 13 “Som af en Hændelse førte jeg Samtalen paa Forældres Haardhed—og fortalte Thor og hans Kone om Philip af Spanien, og d’Agasseau [sic] og Flere. Jeg sluttede med at fortælle om Eginhard og Emma. Da deres Deeltagelse var vækket, gik 11

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Note that in a metafictive move Hansen has Mølmann insert his own narrative between continental stories of cruel parents and the two foundational texts of Norwegian culture, Snorri and the Bible. It is an irresistible logic, and metafictionally speaking the cabin and Mølmann’s narrative parallel each other. And indeed, his story could not have taken place at all without the sanctuary of the cabin that Guttorm built. The rural society described by Hansen had no common ground where members of the various classes could meet on equal footing. Mølmann is a member of an urban social and political elite that is actively engaged in envisioning a Norwegian nation for the future, and though he respects and admires Thor’s connection to the ancient past, Mølmann recognizes the need for members of an ambitious and talented lower class such as Guttorm, whose ingenuity and drive will help build Mølmann’s vision of the Norwegian nation. In having Guttorm construct a new in-between locus in the landscape, Hansen creates a hybrid place—an effectively enacted utopia, in Foucault’s terminology—for the protagonists’ socially hybrid offspring. In fixing upon the liminal, heteropian space of the cabin as a conceptual home for the new allegorical national family, I see Hansen’s “The Lur” as the starting point for what would in the decades that followed develop into Norway’s most important cultural locus. Hansen identified the predominant characteristic of Norwegian society as something in between nature and civilization, and this insight was further developed in many of the most important works in the Norwegian canon.

Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil Nearly a century after Hansen, Knut Hamsun activated the cabin motif in his anti-modern, atavistic fantasy of a return to the primitive, Growth of the Soil. Although the relationship between Isak and Inger Sellanraa that Hamsun depicts in the novel is instinctual and primitive rather than sentimental or romantic, it is still possible to read the novel as perhaps the last major national romance in the Norwegian canon. In writing in opposition to the enormous social changes taking place in Norway around the turn of the century, Hamsun’s overt aim in Growth of the Soil is to jeg nærmere—og sammensatte selv en Historie, som næsten i Eet og Alt lignede Ragnhilds. Thor blev høiligen opmærksom. Da tog jeg Snorro og Bibelen ned af Hylden, lagde dem paa Bordet og sagde: “Der, Thor, er Bogen, som lærer om din Kongeslægt; men her ligger Herrens Ord, som lærer, at vi ere Alle lige for Gud.”

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revitalize Norway by bringing the nation back to its primitive, agrarian roots. The work was hailed as a masterpiece upon publication, garnering Hamsun the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. The work was widely viewed as an antedote to the evils of modernity. We might read Growth of the Soil as a masculinist romance; Isak, a man with no known past, sets out alone into the wilderness to establish a farmstead, and the sexually available and unindividuated Inger comes uncalled to breed with him. They build a family while Isak tames the wilderness that surrounds the modest structure that he built with his own hands. Although rhetorically disguised as a paeon to the simple life, Growth of the Soil is a novel preoccupied with mastery and the aquisition of economic power. Hamsun cleverly activates the inherited Enlightenment trope of the simple farmer in his simple cabin, and most readers have interpreted the book as a celebration of living in tune with nature; yet, read more carefully, it is quite clear that Isak does not intend to make a harmonious home in the wilderness. Instead, his project is to master the wilderness, and indeed by the end of the novel the once pristine area around Sellanraa has become almost unrecognizable because of the massive development than Isak’s initial homestead sparked. In the opening chapter of the novel, Hamsun presents Isak’s first efforts to establish a homestead. Upon arriving at a promising spot miles from the nearest settlement, Isak commences to build a “gamme,” which is a specific type of cabin or hut made out of turf supported by a structure constructed with birch poles and associated with Scandinavia’s indigenous Sámi population. And indeed the novel is populated by marginal Sámi characters, all of whom provide a problematic ethnic foil to the “pure” primitivism of Isak. Isak’s “gamme” is larger, more permanent, and more robust than the “barhytte” built by Hansen’s Guttorm, but it is stereotypically considered to be more “primitive” than a cabin built entirely of timber, in part because of its association with the Sámi. Hamsun famously activates biblical language in the opening chapter of Growth of the Soil, giving the building of Isak’s turf hut a special iconic status. Hamsun writes: By the autumn he had built a house for himself, a hut of turf, sound and strong and warm; storms could not shake it and nothing could burn it down. Here was a home he could go inside and shut the door, and stay there; he could stand outside on the door-slab, the owner of that house, if any should pass by. There were two rooms in the hut; for himself at the one end, and for his beasts at the other. (10)14 14

“Om høsten fikk han en bolig opp, en gamme av torv, den var tett og varm, det

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Similarly, Inger’s arrival at the hut in the middle of nowhere and out of nowhere also creates a powerful iconic event in the novel. The man, the hut, and the woman are all that are needed to establish a primitivist national romance, which serves as Hamsun’s fantasy solution to the ills of modernity. The mystical nature of the union between Isak and Inger is underscored by the suggestion that it is a passing Sámi who spreads the word that Isak is in need of a woman to tend his goats. Whereas Hansen’s cabin idyll brought together disparate groups in an attempt to forge a vision of a new nation, Hamsun constructs his narrative in an idealized locus that is largely beyond the reach of established class structures. Hamsun makes no attempt to unite groups that are in conflict; rather he posits a clean slate where those who have questionable origins can start new lives and build a new society, where hierarchy is established by one’s ability to work and aquire wealth. It is of course ironic that this is also the way the existing society that Hamsun implicitly critiques in his novel is organized. And as Kikki Jernsletten has pointed out, Isak’s new society rises up on the backs of the indigenous Sámi population (Jernsletten 2004, 83). If we as readers refuse to let Hamsun’s powerful rhetoric dominate our reading, and if we instead examine the rest of the novel closely, we see that in fact this fantasy constellation of man-hut-woman is very quickly rejected by the characters themselves. As soon as he possibly can, Isak starts expanding and by the end of the novel Isak is a powerful landowner who has built something like ten separate structures on his farmstead. One such building, the house that Isak builds for himself and Inger for their retirement years, reveals how Hamsun simultaneously activates and “rebuilds” the cabin motif. Isak and his son plan the building in a comically indirect dialogue sequence. Isak, evasive as ever, starts out by suggesting that they build a small house for visitors, but Sivert quickly understands that his father intends to build a home for himself so that Sivert can take over the farm. Through the course of their brief conversation the plans transform from a simple, one-room cabin to a far more elaborate structure. (Hamsun 1934, 191; 2011, 313.) This scene is in my view emblematic of what is really going on in the novel. The building Isak initially describes reflects the Enlightenment tradition of simplicity and moderation, but he and his son quickly reject that in favor of a large, modern home with all the amenities. knaket ikkei den i storm, den kunne ikke brenne opp. Han kunne gå inn i dette hjem og lukke døren og være der, han kunne stå utenfor på dørhellen og eie hele bygningen hvis noen kom forbi. Gammen var delt i to, i den ene ende bodde han selv, i den annen dyrene” (Hamsun 2011, 9).

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This vacilation between the cabin ideal and the dream of wealth and comfort becomes increasingly prominent through the twentieth century, when cabins are ever more associated with leisure and wealth, rather than with poverty. Perhaps paradoxically, at the exact historical juncture when more and more people were able to aquire cabins of their own, the cabin motif almost disappears from canonical Norwegian literature after the Second World War, only reappearing as a significant and widespread trope in the 1990s.

The Post-National Cabin Toward the turn of the millennium, Norway like the rest of the world entered a period of dramatic social change that has been termed late modernity. This is a period marked by a number of factors, including increasing globalization and individualism, as well as a questioning of the role of the nation that has given rise to the term postnationalism. Given Norway’s fraught history of foreign domination, it is not surprising that the country has struggled with how to position itself in relation to globalization, particularly as this is manifested in an increasingly diverse population. The idea of the cabin as a locus for a specifically national romance has been called into question, and instead we increasingly see writers instead activating the cabin as a retreat from (national) family trauma. One of the most popular and illustrative examples of this shift from the allegorical national romance to what might be called the national divorce can be found in Per Petterson’s 2003 novel Ut og stjæle hester (Out Stealing Horses). Out Stealing Horses is a profoundly melancholic and nostalgic exploration of loss. Petterson constructs multiple layers of time in the novel, with the main character, Trond Sander, reflecting back from the narrative present of 1999 on both the loss of his wife and sister three years earlier and on the summer of 1948, when his father abandoned his family. In the 1999 narrative, Trond is perhaps unconsciously mimicking his father; he buys a cabin in an isolated rural community near the Swedish border to fix up and live in, much as his father in the 1940s acquired a cabin near the border to fix up as a cover for his trafficking for the resistance in occupied Norway. The cabin in the 1948 narrative in Out Stealing Horses performs and activates a number of functions and emotional registers simultaneously. It is an heroic place becuase of its association with the resistance movement; it is an erotic locus because of its previous history as a seter dwelling, and because of the romance that develops between

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Trond’s father and a local woman; it is a masculine idyll because of the outdoor adventure and manual labor that takes place there; and, finally, it activates the Enlightenment ideal of moderation in that it is marked in the text as a peasant home through the presence of a local “overlord” of sorts— Barkald, the wealthy landowner whom Trond vaguely hates without really even knowing why. If read allegorically, both Trond’s cabin and his father’s cabin function as an escape from the national family into an ambiguous private world. Although he initially purchases the cabin for its unique location within walking distance of the Swedish border, other characters in the novel recognize that Trond’s father simply enjoyed being there: “He had not intended his stays to be long. . . . But every time he had been to Sweden . . . and came back across the border under cover of night, he found several more things he could put in order or improve on before he went back to Oslo” (Petterson 2007, 139–140).15 Trond’s father betrays his family through an adulterous affair with a married woman at the same time that he works to preserve the symbolic national family through his resistance to the Nazi occupation of his country. Moreover, Trond’s feeling of intense closeness with his father during the summer of 1948 is betrayed at the end by his father’s inexplicable disappearance—he sends Trond home at the end of the summer, but never returns himself. Similarly Trond buys his cabin near the border without informing his adult daughter, who has to resort to detective work to track him down (Petterson 2007, 207; 198 in Norwegian version). Other contemporary Norwegian novels, such as Merethe Lindstrøm’s Steinsamlere (Rock collectors, 1996) and Britt Karin Larsen’s Munnen i gresset (The mouth in the grass, 1996) also represent the cabin as a retreat from (national) family trauma, rather than as a refuge for (national) romance. In all of these works, the desire to be alone—to be unfettered by family and romantic bonds—drives the characters to visit an isolated cabin where they can gain perspective on their interpersonal relationships and rebuild their lives after trauma and loss. These novels reflect the ubiquitousness of cabins in contemporary Norway, where nearly everyone has the time and resources necessary to step outside of everyday life in this way. Petterson’s Trond Sander is newly retired and makes it clear that he has more than enough money; Larsen’s Elisabeth rents a summer house 15 “Det var ikke meninga han skulle være der så lenge av gangen . . . . Men hver gang han hadde vært i Sverige og kom tilbake over grensa i ly av natta . . . fant han ut at det var flere enn én ting han måtte få orden på eller utbedre før han dro inn til Oslo igjen” (Petterson 2003, 135).

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on her own while her abusive husband spends his summer vacation in the mountains at a friend’s cabin; and Hammer, the privileged protagonist of Rock collectors retreats to various cabins and summer houses throughout his long life. His final journey to the site of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s now-demolished cabin is a commentary upon absence and the commodification of contemporary culture; Wittgenstein’s retreat has been reduced in the novel to nothing but road signs for tourists, indicating the locus of something that has now been lost.

Conclusion The cabin was a phenomenally productive trope in Norway’s nineteenthcentury nation-building process because it made it possible to imagine a unique Norwegian culture despite two seemingly overwhelming conceptual difficulties. On the one hand there was the impossibility of having an entirely wild national culture associated exclusively with nature. On the other hand, there was the almost total lack of established cultural institutions in the first decades of the nineteenth century, which made Norway appear uncivilized and even barbaric in comparison with other European nations. The cabin represents a distinct position that is neither untamed wilderness nor urban civilization, and that can be used productively in the construction of an independent national identity. Nevertheless, it took about a hundred years, and the establishment of tourism as an industry, before the cabin truly became a quintessentially Norwegian heterotopia. The cabin as a conceptual space first had to shake its longstanding associations with poverty. With the Norwegian Tourist Association’s creation of a network of leisure cabins intended to give the urban elite access to the wilderness, a new type of social space that connected nature and civilization arose. Once identified and delineated, the cabin meme went, as they say, viral, and within only a few decades it has become the single most important locus for precisely the kind of heterotopian cultural contestations that Foucault describes. In contemporary literature, the cabin has become a personal retreat from which one is able both to gain critical distance on the national project, and turn inward to heal one’s own emotional wounds.

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References Bliksrud, Liv. 1999. Den smilende makten: Norske Selskab i København og Johan Herman Wessel. Oslo: Aschehoug. Bø, Gudleiv. 2001. “‘Land og lynne’ – norske diktere om nasjonal identitet.” In Jakten på det norske: Perspektiver på utviklingen av en norsk nasjonal identitet på 1800-tallet, edited by Øystein Sørensen, 112–124. Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Hansen, Maurits C. 1825. “Luren.” In Digtninger: Samlede 1825, Vol. 2, edited by Nicolai Conrad Schwach. Trondheim. Hamsun, Knut. 1934. Growth of the Soil. Translated by W.W. Worster. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 2011. Markens grøde. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag. Jernsletten, Kikki. 2004. “The Sámi in Growth of the Soil. Depictions, Desire, Denial.” Nordlit 15: 73–89. Johansen, Knut. 1970. “‘Retfærdigheden i Virksomhed’. Maurits Hansens Fortællinger.” In Knut Johansen, Willy Dahl: Konfrontasjoner. Essays om litteratur og politikk, 51–76. Oslo: Ny Dag. Juel, Poul. 1721. Et Lycksaligt Liv Eftertænckt Da Indbilding og Forfarenhed Derom Disputerede. Copenhagen: J. Grammius. Larsen, Britt Karin. 1996. Munnen i gresset. Oslo: Tiden. Lindstrøm, Merethe. 1996. Steinsamlere. Oslo: Aschehoug moderne. Lotman, Jurij M., Boris A. Uspenskij, Vjaceslav V. Ivanov, V.N Toporov and A.M. Pjatigorskij. 1975. “Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures (as Applied to Slavic Texts).” In The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of Semiotics, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, 57–83. Lisse: Peter de Ridder. Petterson, Per. 2007. Out Stealing Horses. Translated by Anne Born. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press. ———. 2003. Ut og stjæle hester. Oslo: Forlaget Oktober. Sjåvik, Jan. 1994. “Rhetorical Manipulation in Maurits Hansen’s ‘Luren.’” Scandinavian Studies 66 (4): 521–532. Sommer, Doris. 1990. “Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America.” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha, 71–98. London: Routledge. Tysdahl, Bjørn. 1988. Maurits Hansens fortellerkunst. Oslo: Aschehoug.

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Vittersø, Gunnar. 2007. “Norwegian Cabin Life in Transition.” Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism 7 (3): 266–280. Witozsek, Nina. 1998. Norske naturmytologier: Fra Edda til økofilosofi. Oslo: Pax Forlag.

Constructions of Space: The Literary Configuration of “The English Countryside” Angela Locatelli Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Semiotic and Symbolic Construction of Space Urbanisation is a global phenomenon, and mobility has become its central epistemic category, particularly if one considers the changes in urban modes of communication and the urban organisation of consumption. Marc Augé has recently suggested (2007) that globalised urban expansion is clearly visible in the formerly rural villages of the Ivory Coast, now part of Abidjan; in Latin American cities, prevalently connoted by a spatial polarisation of an affluent centre and derelict peripheries; and in the case of Paris and its banlieue, a city where mobility spells all kinds of cultural dynamics and social contradictions. A similar point has been made, with pertinent differences, by Edward W. Soja (1996), with reference to the “fractal metropolis” of Los Angeles. Both Augé and Soja have changed the way in which urban spatiality is configured. Their approach to the discussion of cities and the postmodern urban restructuring of these spaces provides useful suggestions for a fresh perception of other spaces, including rural spaces, which—they agree—are no longer the abode for most of humanity. In the wake of what Paul Virilio has called “virtual metacities” (2000) the debate has by now clearly shifted from “the country and the city” (Williams 1973) to discussions of urban and regional spaces (where regional, as Soja explains in his Postmetropolis (2000), certainly does not correspond to rural). Therefore, one could say that the country was “once upon a time,” in the double sense of its chronological existence in the past, and/or in a putatively purely mythical and fable-like dimension in the present, but this would be too reductive and unconvincing for reasons that will emerge in the following discussion. The topic of “the country” is not irrelevant in postmodern globalised culture, not least because of its indisputable historical significance. The

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question of how the country has been, and still is “empirically perceived, theoretically conceptualized and experientially lived”1 (Soja 2000, xiv) remains a “tale” worth telling, like most tales beginning with “once upon a time.” My contribution will therefore address this issue, with special reference to Great Britain where social history has had a strong voice in shaping the concept of “country.” Social history in this context was concerned with the dramatically transformative vicissitudes of an old and primarily agricultural economy changing into a postmodern economy via the various phases of a mercantile economy; it is also concerned with the rise of colonial imperialism, as well as industrial and post-industrial finance. In The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams has convincingly dealt with the social and historical implications involved in the definitions and understanding of “the country and the city” up to the first decades of the twentieth century. In line with some earlier studies my discussion of the notion of “country” will be interdisciplinary. In his aforementioned study (1973), Williams sees English history as a crucial chapter in the history of Western capitalism, and he explains the vicissitudes and roles of “the country” in terms of this macro-narrative. My understanding of the definition of “rural spaces” makes use of Williams’s observations, but I take a more interdisciplinary approach by combining social history, semiotics and cultural theory. In fact, I will consider other influential contributions that include the seminal works of Henri Lefebvre (1974, 2006) on “the production of space” and Guy Debord’s unconventional, avant-garde definition of “psychogeography” (1954). Williams, Lefebvre and Debord are often mentioned in various disciplines or quoted as starting points on the subject of urban development and rural/urban relationships. Their views have inspired several studies, most of which seem to share a belief in the undeniable interdependence of social, economic and cultural forces. The interdisciplinary trend was further developed in the strong culturalist perspective of James G. Turner and what he aptly called “The Politics of Landscape” (1979). More recent studies, such as that by Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry and Joseph P. Ward, The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850 (1999), and the already mentioned works of Marc Augé and Edward W. Soja have brought further innovations to classical social history and new insights to the culturalist arena. My approach is shaped largely by the findings of literature and aesthetics, but it also connects to the above premises in social and cultural 1

I am borrowing Edward W. Soja’s terminology. See Soja 2000 and Soja 1989.

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theory. I will argue that the concept of “country” is strongly indebted to its literary conceptualisations and that, among various social and cultural forces, literature has largely fostered “the myth of the English countryside” worldwide. This is not to deny that “an English countryside” existed and still exists as a concrete geographical space in the British Isles. Such material space and its transformations are obviously the proper object of the hard sciences, such as geography, geology, zoology and botany. However, cultural critics and cultural geography theorists have taught us that the symbolic configurations of “the country.” in other words, what has ultimately contributed to making it a myth, are also a highly respectable and intriguing object of investigation in the human sciences. I believe that an understanding of space which is mindful of the literary forces that have contributed to defining the concepts of town, city and country has been insufficiently elaborated. I therefore wish to contribute to filling this lacuna with this chapter. The problem is above all methodological: in fact, genuine interdisciplinarity is more often advocated than practised, and seldom have sociologists and cultural critics felt that literary texts could have special significance for understanding or explaining urban and rural realities. This is a curious blind spot for theorists, particularly ethnologists and anthropologists, who otherwise have dealt extensively with symbolic practices in various cultures, yet have usually downplayed or even ignored the symbolic dimensions of literature and its socio-cultural role in specific historical conjunctures. A sense of place is undoubtedly a complex phenomenon, one that registers the effects of multiple cultural and material forces. It is an effect of what, in a nutshell, I would call “semiotization.” Before I start my discussion of specific literary “materials,” I wish to propose that the relationship between urban and rural settings, far from being one of linear contrast, is not simply the result of economic and technological forces. My aim is to show that the myth of “rural England” is a story fraught with paradoxes and intricacies, including the perception that “urban” does not invariably correspond to central and that rural does not per se mean peripheral, and vice versa. I wish to argue that, just like any other myth, the myth of “the country” is highly controversial, yet at the same time it is a cultural cliché. It is clearly a commonplace, widely disseminated and popularly held: simply recall the role of the tourist guides and of the National Trust in the “creation” and preservation of popular “tourist spots,” as well as the central and widely-known “icons” of the village church, the thatched cottage, the village green, the English garden and the country house or manor (such as Knole, Penshurst, Chatworth, Longleat,

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and so on). This goes to show that “the myth of the country” is created and perpetuated through the use of various techniques, usually aiming at concealing certain “facts,” while highlighting others, and usually in the interest of some specific political or social strategy. When dealing with “the country,” we should note that whenever the representation of landscape in English literature has been interpreted as a mere setting (as has often been the case), priority has been given to scenery over the description or discussion of the real-life conditions of the working class. In most instances in which the country people have been the object of literary representation (Wordsworth immediately comes to mind), this population has seldom been depicted with sufficient realism or complexity. Romantic images in both poetry and prose generally convey the picture of innocent and happy peasants whose primaeval contact with nature is idealised, while their true desires and aspirations, hardship and toil are either omitted or sentimentalised. Moreover, with certain exceptions, the country has mostly been construed as a garden of Eden, above all, by those who were not the permanent dwellers in rural spaces. The hard work, exploitation and sense of insignificance of the working people has not figured in most of the pastoral, Romantic and Victorian literature and iconography.2 The peasants were sentimentalised, yet mostly pictured as marginal to the destiny of the nation, and they remained outsiders in the realm of ideologically relevant socio-economic events and national history.

Literary Constructions of “the Country” as “Country” and the Complex Configuration of Space in Literature My exploration of the English rural myth is based, as I have said, on the understanding that perceptions of both the country and the city are an effect of semiotization, i.e. of cultural processes. In fact, I am primarily concerned with forms of imaginative representation, produced either by literary discourse or recorded in literary discourse, mainly between 1550 and the first half of the twentieth century, although mostly during Romantic and post-Romantic times when English literature was seen as a carrier of social as well as aesthetic values. Central to the myth of rural England perhaps more than anything else is the role traditionally played by literature in the identification of fields, woods, meadows and pastures as the very matrix of the nation. Literature, 2

A similar view is proposed for the visual arts in Barrell 1995.

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up to the second half of the twentieth century, is responsible for the creation and ideological reinforcement of the perfect correspondence of the country with “The Country.” One of the earliest and most frequent strategies with which this cultural equivalence was built is the classical tradition of both pastoral and georgic poetry, which celebrated nature respectively as a Locus Amoenus (in contrast to urban strife) and as modified and improved by literally fruitful rural activities. In English literature this encomiastic tradition extends from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and shows an amazing adaptability to Augustan, Romantic, Victorian modernist and postmodern aesthetic codes. The tradition extends from Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calendar (1579) and Shakespeare’s As You Like It to Vita Sackville West’s The Land (1926), from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1581) to A. E. Housman’s poems (1939), from Andrew Marvell (1621–78) (famously, in his bucolic poem “The Garden”) to Alexander Pope (1688– 1744), from William Collins (1721–59) and Thomas Gray (“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, 1742) to Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), from D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) and the “War Poets” (of World War I) to Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993), with its typical postmodern ironic twist on the theme and on tradition. But the pastoral is by no means the dominant genre extolling the virtues of the country in English literature, and this is why the texts I have chosen (passages from Mary Russell Mitford, Robert Francis Kilvert, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Carlyle, Sir Herbert Read and Thomas Babington Macaulay) should be discussed in detail, as examples of a highly influential literary pattern. I open my investigation with Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1824), not only for its chronological priority, but also because it is a uniquely comprehensive and influential representation of village life. Mitford’s multifaceted attention to character, relationships and landscape vividly depicts “from the inside” the experience of living in the country as a felicitous condition: Of all situations for a constant residence, that which appears to me the most delightful is a little village far in the country; a small neighbourhood, not of fine mansions finely peopled, but of cottages and cottage-like houses, “messuages or tenements,” as a friend of mine calls such ignoble and nondescript dwellings, with inhabitants whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold, or nuns in a convent, or sailors in a ship; where we know every one, are known to every one, interested in every one, and authorized to hope that every one feels an interest in us (Mitford [1824] 1936, 3).

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Metaphors are crucial here, not just as quintessentially ornamental literary devices, but also for their potential to pack in information much more economically (and suggestively) than merely diagnostic, “scientific” descriptions. The village is metaphorically an anthill, a beehive, a sheepfold, a convent, a ship, thus suggesting the close physical proximity of its dwellers, as well as a regulated form of living that provides intrinsic social harmony. The sentence on social relations—“we know every one, are known to every one, interested in every one, and authorized to hope that every one feels an interest in us”—seems almost directly taken from Shaftsbury’s irenic philosophy. By contrast, Elizabeth Gaskell’s ladies in Cranford “know all each other’s proceedings,” but they are “exceedingly indifferent to each other’s opinions.” Mitford’s rural characters essentially differ from Gaskell’s in being generally sympathetic to each other. More importantly for my argument on the literary configuration of space, Mary Russell Mitford’s celebration of the rural village and rural living is accompanied by a remarkable meta-literary dimension. She seems to be consciously acknowledging the strong ties between “the great tradition” of the English novel and village life and seems to corroborate the notion that literature is a major factor in the meaningful configuration of space: “Even in books I like a confined locality, and so do the critics when they talk of the unities” (Mitford [1824] 1936, 3). The secluded rural space is thus immensely dignified by its metaphorical association with the classical Aristotelian unities. Nothing of the sort happens in most nineteenth-century novels, where a “confined locality” usually spells claustrophobia. Cranford again comes to mind as the epitome of such perception. The contrast between Mitford and Gaskell’s novels is evident and furthered in other narrative elements, which make their descriptions and diverging evaluations curiously complementary. Mitford’s literary “psychogeography” is mostly grounded in her appreciation for locality and rootedness: Nothing is so tiresome as to be whirled half over Europe at the chariotwheels of a hero, to get to sleep at Vienna and awaken in Madrid; it produces a real fatigue, a weariness of spirit. On the other hand, nothing is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss Austen’s delicious novels, quite sure before we leave it to become intimate with every spot and every person it contains; or to ramble with Mr. White over his own parish of Selborne, and form a friendship with the fields and coppices, as well as with the birds, mice, and squirrels who inhabit them; or to sail with Robinson Crusoe to his island, and live there with him, and his

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goats, and his man Friday – how much we dread any new-comers, any fresh importation of savage or sailor. . . . or to be shipwrecked with Ferdinand on that other, lovelier island. (Mitford [1824] 1936, 3–4)

Mitford’s tender, sympathetic, yet sometimes unsparingly ironic attitude to this world can be associated with the well-known harsher comments on the pettiness of rural life in Cranford (1853). Elizabeth Gaskell’s humorous treatment of the Cheshire village ultimately defines it metaphorically as a “cage,” where wit is the only antidote to the daily routine. Gaskell highlights the gender divide between her characters, seeing it as a decisive force in rural life. The paradigm of the social irrelevance of the “Amazons” who own the houses and spend their energies in organising futile evening parties and paying reverential attention to fashion is set against “the gentlemen’s” important business of commerce, war, social progress and mobility. The men’s disappearance into the country is subtly counterbalanced by their significant role in “the Country” and its destiny, symbolically represented by the railway and ships: If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. (Gaskell [1853] 1972, 3–4)

Frivolity, gossip and irrelevance are the fate of women in rural spaces. The men have no access to such things, but they obviously do not seem to regret it. Mitford prefers the lower-middle classes over the inhabitants of “fine mansions,” and therefore “cottages” and even “‘miniature houses” and their gardens become the paradigmatic icons of her early nineteenth-century conceptualisation: Divided from the shop by a narrow yard, and opposite the shoemaker’s, is a habitation of whose inmates I shall say nothing. A cottage – no- a miniature house, with many additions, little odds and ends of places, pantries, and what not; all angles, and of a charming in-and-outness; a little bricked court before one half, and a little flower-yard before the other; the walls, old and weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks, roses, honeysuckles, and a great apricot-tree; the casements full of geraniums (ah, there is our superb white cat peeping out from amongst them!); the closets (our landlord has the assurance to call them rooms) full of contrivances and corner cupboards; and the little garden behind full of common flowers, tulips, pinks, lark-

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The last sentence, probably written with irony, on the nascent ideology of happy pauperism conveys Mitford’s keen awareness of social conditions. So does the allusion to the landlord as well as the references in another passage to revolutionary ideas circulating from the city to the putatively isolated country. Given Mitford’s special view of the individual elements of this particular place, and the corresponding usual effectiveness of her ekphrasis, one cannot help but picture the narrator as she traverses this space, a feeling corroborated by her explicit invitation to the reader to join in the exploration: “Will you walk with me through our village, courteous reader?” The homodiegetic focalisation of this narrative means that this space is seen “from the inside,” and idiosyncratically through her gaze, but the passage also suggests that the narrator’s friendly invitation to the reader seems to grow out of the peaceful, cordial and well-meaning habits of country folks. The aporetic image of village life that ensues from reading Gaskell and Mitford side by side spells out village life as “a stifling comfort.” Both Gaskell and Mitford’s descriptions and carefully nuanced observations, their highly individualised portraits and their language are a tribute to the unique sense of comfort and discomfort for which the English countryside is famous worldwide. Such aporia in framing the same space (and time) is the product of a quintessentially “literary” configuration that allows for complexity and even contradiction in the perception and creation of space and character, where non-fiction provided a one-sided, diagnostic image, a reified and ideologically inflected “document.” It is hard to find mainstream descriptions of the English countryside that dispense with Mitford’s propositions. Her evaluative description has in fact become a commonplace, including her benevolent, but never complacent perspective on rural village life. Her literary skills and original view of (and ear for) the people, the scenery and the language around her save her prose from the banality of most later accounts and ideologically tendentious descriptions of country life, not least because her enthusiasm for the village is candid and good-humoured. Another and even more “inspired” praise of the country comes from Robert Francis Kilvert (1840–79). The vicar of Bredwardine is remembered for his Diaries (a hybrid literary genre between fiction and non-fiction),

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which provide a description of the beautiful region of the Welsh border where he lived and worked. His admiration for the landscape surrounding him echoes a mainstream perspective among Romantic writers, a form of discourse that would prove highly influential in shaping modern perceptions of the English countryside. In the following short passage dated May 1875 Kilvert wrote: As I came down from the hill into the valley across the golden meadows and along the flower-scented hedges a great wave of emotion and happiness stirred and rose up within me. I know not why I was so happy, nor what I was expecting, but I was in a delirium of joy, it was one of the supreme few moments of existence, a deep delicious draft from the strong sweet cup of life. (Cited in Gross 1998, 558)

The country is here perceived as the ideal setting for a unique and magical moment of emotional fullness. It provides an almost intoxicating experience, yet invigorating (metaphorically “a deep delicious draft from the strong sweet cup of life”), fuelling a “great wave of emotion” (the equivalent of what William Wordsworth, the Romantic bard par excellence, called “powerful feelings”). Significantly, hyperbole is the central rhetorical figure of this (apparently) uncontrolled emotional utterance, in which happiness escalates to a “delirium of joy,” thanks to the unspoilt perfection of a rustic place. Moreover, the suggestion that among the “scented hedges” delirium is natural implies that, in this context, excess becomes a form of virtue, and hence the intrinsic moral goodness of the countryside is posited as self-evident. The experience of the country as bliss does not emphasise the realistic element of the enclosures, which, however, is clear from the quotation, specifically in the hedges dividing the fields. These hedges seem as natural as the land itself, and the memory of the mediaeval open field is totally obliterated in such naturalisation of the constructed sixteenth-century rural space. We should, however, recall the Diggers’ dissent regarding enclosures, which were implemented to meet the needs of wool manufacturers and merchants, regardless of the fact that turning arable lands into pastures meant stark poverty and vagrancy for most farm labourers. Literature, more specifically its Romantic codes, produces a particular construction of space in Kilvert’s passage, which hinges on the “naturalisation” of a specific historical economic policy. This policy, however, is also inscribed in literary prose, albeit sous rature, in the dominant outburst of emotion. In other words, the rural landscape is offered here purely as a source of emotion rather than as a sign of the ongoing cultural and political strife

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that has marked English history and that more or less occasionally has surfaced openly, from the sixteenth century to the present, in pamphlets, sermons, poems and novels. The specificity of the literary articulation of space and the ensuing “psycho-geographies” need the close attention of critical readings to register what is conveyed beyond the critical, but linear statement of social theory texts on the very same spaces. Imaginative and material forces are actually captured very well in literature, and in the subtleties of literary art they are often shown to be simultaneously at work, “making a point” obliquely, but often more effectively than any straightforward ideological statement. For example, together with the already mentioned allusion to enclosures in Kilvert’s Diaries, we as readers should notice that his description is not detailed or particularised, but that the setting to which it apparently refers as an external object is created (either unconsciously or deliberately, it does not matter which) through the description itself, which is ahistorical and aspires to the abstraction of a universal symbol. This, as I have said, is a recurrent Romantic attitude towards the idea of nature, which I have taken into consideration because it is important, and indeed surprising, to see how far such a concept has shaped the myth of rural England right down to the present. More examples and quotations will, I hope, illustrate the complexity of such a paradigm and its many ramifications in English literature. I have already mentioned William Wordsworth, probably the most influential and widely admired source of all subsequent Romantic versions of the countryside. Wordsworth’s Description of the Country of the Lakes (1822) is certainly less well known than the Prelude or his poems in Lyrical Ballads, and yet the Description is somehow consistent with the stratified, and hence even contradictory, poetical theory that his more familiar works embody. In the Description we read an interesting passage on the Lake District, a distant province, which Wordsworth’s own work was to turn into a special place (today this disregion is a popular tourist attraction and holiday resort): Of this class of miniature lakes Loughrigg Tarn, near Grasmere, is the most beautiful example. It has a margin of firm meadows, of rocks, and rocky woods, a few reeds here, and a little company of water-lilies there, with beds of gravel or stone beyond; a tiny stream issuing neither briskly nor sluggishly out of it; but its feeding rills, from the shortness of their course, so small as to be scarcely visible. (Cited in Gross, 1998, 308)

Here the landscape obeys the aesthetic rules of the Picturesque, rather than those of the Romantic Sublime: in fact, the lakes are “miniature lakes,”

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the stream is “tiny.” Natural elements are carefully itemised: rocks, woods, reeds, water lilies, the stream, its gravel bed and rills—all of them beautiful and even diminutively pretty rather than awesome. Above all, the natural objects convey the impression of something made rather than found. Human intervention in nature thus seems to be far greater in this context than the mere gaze of the contemplative writer would suggest. The “few reeds here” and the “little company of water lilies there” foreground an impression of human presence and a wilful sense of balance, reinforced by the “tiny stream” that runs “neither briskly nor sluggishly.” The natural landscape is thus in a way translated into an amazing and beautiful English garden, which, in turn, generally strives for a natural appearance, rather than an elaborate and self-conscious fashioning. But, of course, the Picturesque is not Wordsworth’s last word; traces of the Sublime appear in the lines that follow: Five or six cottages are reflected in its peaceful bosom; rocky and barren steps rise up above the hanging enclosures; and the solemn pikes of Langdale overlook, from a distance, the low cultivated ridge of land that forms the northern boundary of this small, quiet, fertile domain. (Cited in Gross 1998, 308)

In this passage the cottages belong to a “small, quiet, fertile domain.” Nature is peaceful, its dwellers content, all is well. The situation is, of course, the precise opposite of the French Revolution, which was keeping the capital, London, and consequently the whole nation in a state of constant tension (a situation which also figures in Wordsworth’s poetry). In this light we can reasonably appreciate the above quotation as a typical ideological statement. In fact, the “solemn pikes” and even the “rocky and barren steps” that “rise above” the enclosures celebrate nature’s power over human affairs and create the ideology of a natural course of events, which coincides with perennial seasonal rhythms, the ones supposedly experienced by peasants as something eternal, invariable and thus superior to the mutable times of history and nation, remote from the fret and tumult of war and city life. This will become one of the recurring themes of English poetry and one of the main reasons for the praise of rural England. The trend reaches its apogee in one of Thomas Hardy’s best-known and often anthologised poems, “In time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’”:

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The relationship between the two space-time entities (i.e. the battlefield and the field, the timeless rural rhythms and “war’s annals”) is one of both opposition and complementarity, in the sense that, while seasonal rhythms supposedly remain untouched and unspoiled by political events, the life of the Country is expanding somewhere else, yet one can rely on the natural, internal stability of the countryside to project itself towards the external and mutable world, the whole world indeed, in the colonial and imperialist enterprise. Alan Shelston has discussed the theme of “The Significance of the Insignificant” in relation both to this poem and to Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (Shelston 1995, 95–121.) His comments on Hardy seem to corroborate my view of a pervasive Victorian strategy of valorising the marginal (i.e. rural life), while proclaiming its intrinsic insignificance on the political stage. Another facet of the complex relationship between the province and the centre of national life is explored in Hardy’s densely metaphorical description of Casterbridge in The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which the interdependence of a provincial town and the surrounding countryside is expressed in richly nuanced terms of spatial proximity: Casterbridge was the complement of the rural life around; not its urban opposite. Bees and butterflies in the cornfields at the top of the town, who desired to get to the meads at the bottom, took no circuitous course, but flew straight down High Street without any apparent consciousness that they were traversing strange latitudes. And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains;

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and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people’s door-ways into their passages, with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors. (Cited in Gross 1998, 554)

Nature still romantically wins over the town: it penetrates High Street and even town houses. Bees, butterflies, yellow leaves and thistledown are the protagonists in cornfields, village rooms and shops. The protagonists traverse “strange latitudes,” which suggests that the rural town is a microcosm, despite being neither a real city nor a country village. Casterbridge signals a threshold and a mutual dependence of town and country; it is almost the quintessence of what the province has become over the decades of industrial revolution and mercantile capitalism: a meeting-point and limen of urban and rural worlds. But just as in the poem’s discourse on the significance of the insignificant, I believe that this quotation (and, of course, the whole novel) is not a straightforward and univocal message. Notice, for example, that the leaves are compared to the country people in town, and thus remain “timid visitors” whose “hesitation” is not fully explored, but could easily be perceived as the wistful and dismayed expressions of the peasants’ first encounter with industrialisation and urbanisation. This hesitant encounter may also suggest the fixed roles of authority and subordination within the dynamics of aristocratic leisure and peasant toil on the country estate, obviously another threshold between town and country. The time of Hardy’s description is also significant: while he is writing the rural saga that will make him one of the country’s literary classics, turn Dorset into one of England’s poetic spots and make his own family cottage a National Trust shrine, his country was engrossed in a worldwide imperial enterprise. Since its beginnings, colonial power had required an image onto which to fix the nation’s stable identity. What could be more reassuring than a supposedly primitive, genuine, archaic and timeless region that could also be posited as a complement to bustling urban interests rather than as its opposite? Hardy’s work primarily functions (perhaps unintentionally on the part of its author) to support mainstream colonial ideology at a time when literature was still clearly expected to be an expression of the country’s dominant moral and political values. Such a function is repeatedly invoked in English literature, from the texts of Renaissance humanists to Matthew Arnold and well into the first half of the twentieth century. A classic Arnoldian and elitist attitude clearly survives, for example, in Sir Herbert Read’s works, and seems to be his defensive response to his personal experience in World War I. The following passage from The Innocent Eye (1933) clearly celebrates the country as the source of English solidity and honesty:

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Locatelli On the south side of the Green were two familiar shrines, each with its sacred fire. The first was the saddle-room, with its pungent clean smell of saddle-soap. It was a small white-washed room hung with bright bits and stirrups and long loops of leather reins; the saddles were in a loft above, reached by a ladder and trap door. . . . The blacksmith shop was a still more magical shrine. . . . In his dusky cave the bellows roared, the fire was blown to a white intensity, and then suddenly the bellows-shaft was released and the soft glowing iron drawn from the heart of the fire. Then clang, clang, clang on the anvil, the heavenly shower of ruby and golden sparks, and our precipitate flight to a place of safety. . . . In these two shrines I first experienced the joy of making things. (Cited in Gross, 1998, 778)

Childhood memories, and their timeless sense of wonder, give an aura of authenticity to an otherwise rather rhetorical sketch of familiar shrines: i.e. the saddle room and the blacksmith shop. The “magic” is conveyed through a metaphorical phantasmagoria that metamorphoses these rural spots into a treasure (notice the blacksmith’s “ruby and golden sparks”).The symbolic and ideological implications of realistic details are almost obvious: cleanliness (“pungent clean smell of saddle-soap,” “the white-washed room”), manual labour (“the joy of making things”), productivity and order are among the homely values that a boy “naturally” absorbs through a country-village upbringing. Less obviously, but no less compellingly, the village symbolically corresponds to infancy and to what is lost in the writer’s adult and urban life. Lingering memories of a magical past may also signify a nostalgic celebration of what is perceived as an inevitably dissolving rural world, which is destined to disintegrate under the advance of technological innovation. Just a few years after 1933, technology and the growing industrialisation of agricultural areas turned saddle rooms and blacksmith’s shops into quaint, poetic relics of the past. The Innocent Eye can be interpreted as the writer’s last cry against the very real threat of a no longer innocent post-war world. Similar gestures abound in English literature, whenever domestic identity is undergoing a dramatic re-definition. The fundamental ambivalence of celebrating what is lost seems to be a recurring cultural pattern in Western civilisation. The “country” as a retreat and a recourse for healing is thus repeatedly celebrated against the actual background of political conflict and social battle, from Thomas Hardy to the post-World War II poets. But the country is not, of course, immune to change, and writers have also registered the disruptive forces of industrialisation in provincial towns, even on the moors. During the Victorian Age, in many ways the forerunner of both modern

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achievements and contradictions, Thomas Carlyle’s suggestive prose in Past and Present (1843) depicts the dramatic effect of the then recent urban and industrial revolution, featuring some of the ongoing transformations in modern life. Carlyle’s focus is no longer a rural or provincial space; it is the inevitable post-industrial and metropolitan new reality: The Ribble and Aire roll down, as yet unpolluted by dyers’ chemistry; tenanted by merry trouts and piscatory otters; the sunbeam and the vacant wind’s-blasts alone traversing these moors. Side by side sleep the coalstrata and the iron-strata for so many ages; no Steam-Demon has yet risen smoking into being. Saint Mungo rules in Glasgow; James Watt still slumbering in the deep of Time. Mancunium, Manceaster, what we now call Manchester spins no cotton,—if it be not wool “cottons,” clipped from the backs of mountain sheep. (Cited in Gross 1998, 372)

“Merry trouts” and “piscatory otters” are powerless when faced with “chemistry.” Carlyle is also suggesting that while scientists and technocrats are moulding England’s powerful industrial destiny, technology eloquently and ruthlessly is exacting its price. Victorian perplexity over the violent and abrupt transformations of industrialism may recall aspects of contemporary ecological discourse. Both nostalgia and apocalyptic fears mark the writer’s perception of the destiny of the no-longer-livable provincial towns. Again significantly, at this moment in history, great country houses need to be celebrated, and are celebrated, on behalf of the privileged minority, who can turn to the past for comfort and find it in their aristocratic roots and/or in a landed estate, most likely acquired through colonial commerce and even the slave trade. The “national” voice is Thomas Babington Macaulay’s, who actually speaks only for a minority, but pretends to embody a universal truth when he extols the elitist paradise and cultural sophistication of comfort and taste. In The History of England (1861) Macaulay writes: There is perhaps no class of dwelling so pleasing as the rural seats of the English gentry. In the parks and pleasure grounds, nature, dressed yet not disguised by art, wears her most alluring form. In the buildings good sense and good taste combine to produce a happy union of the comfortable and the graceful. (Cited in Gross, 1998, 381)

Macaulay’s words echo a strong literary tradition, which includes Fielding, Defoe and Jane Austen, traverses the eighteenth-century novel and reaches down to the twentieth century. It is an important cultural and literary paradigm, one that fascinated Henry James with its reiterated topoi of “taste” and the “English gentry,” who often commuted from the busy

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capital to their beautiful and comfortable country houses. However, my exploration of the literary articulations of rural spaces must return, happily, to the candid appreciation of rural village life, elegantly expressed by Mary Russell Mitford, because it is this attitude which in a sense has prevailed and has done so, not by obfuscating social contradictions and ambiguities, but by moving beyond any detractor’s apocalyptic tone and singing a paean to the English country and its cordial (almost in a Habermasian sense) inhabitants. Moreover, in Mitford’s narrative the “intimate” relations involving consumption and social transactions stand in stark contrast to what Augé and Soja describe as the circulation of information, money and commodities in today’s globalised world. We appreciate the incommensurable difference between “the village as a world” versus “the world as a village” in the following passage: Then comes the village shop, like other village shops multifarious as a bazaar; a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape, ribbons, and bacon; for everything, in short, except the one particular thing which you happen to want at the moment, and will be sure not to find. The people are civil and thriving, and frugal withal: they have let the upper part of their house to two young women (one of them is a pretty blue-eyed girl) who teach little children their A B C, and make caps and gowns for their mammas – parcel school-mistresses, parcel mantua-maker. I believe they find adorning the body a more profitable vocation than adorning the mind. (Mitford [1824] 1936, 6)

This quotation was chosen as a kind of concluding statement, because it demonstrates once more the role of literature in shaping “psychogeographies” of enjoyment and surprise in the “small world” of the English countryside.

“Protected Spaces” Beyond the “Museification” of the Countryside Historical research and literary texts show that the creation of a rural myth, more often than not, has found fresh impetus whenever the interests and daily lives of working people were being threatened and destroyed in order to meet the needs of rampant industrialisation and capital interests. Celebrating what is being destroyed, what has been destroyed and what will predictably soon be destroyed has been the intrinsic ambivalence in the rural myth ever since the inception of industrialism. This trend is

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obviously confirmed in our hyper-technological world of global capitalism. Dolly, GMOs and Mad Cow disease have dominated our television screens as well as our imaginations. These and other matters have variously alarmed a growing number of ecologically-concerned individuals and consumers’ associations, whose opposition has resulted in public advocacy of constructive agricultural and ecological policies together with an unprecedented reassessment of some of the most canonical images of the nation’s foundational myth. The ecologists’ apocalyptic tone may sometimes be reminiscent of the Diggers’ dissent or the Luddites’ protest, and popular belief in the “Country” as “country” indeed seems to be challenged by recent developments. The uncertainties for human health where the risks of genetically modified produce and cloned animals are concerned, and the Mad Cow experience have challenged our idea of England (and more broadly, of highly industrialised countries in general) as the immutable and perennial Arcadia celebrated by poets. However, the idea of Arcadia has persisted beyond nostalgia and lies behind new attempts to develop regenerating strategies for the ecosystem. There is an ongoing planetary challenge: while on the one hand, mass consumption of foods seems to require GMOs and industrial farming, on the other hand, global access to images and information has alerted both rural and city residents to the problematic realities of intensive industrial farming technologies. I will conclude on a hopeful, if not euphoric note, by pointing out that, in the case of England, the still large rural areas there and the cult of elegant village life make “the Country” a rural paradise even now, especially when compared to other, much more exhaustively depleted and polluted countries in Europe. The country/Country remains quaint and picturesque in protected spaces that are the precious signs of what is to be defended beyond the museification of fields, streams and moors. These spaces should indeed be protected and continue to be culturally construed as indispensable, not only as icons of national identity, but also as spaces necessary for survival. Moreover, ecological concerns are fostering a mentality worldwide that opposes the indiscriminate exploitation of the land and suggests ways in which humans can collaborate with nature’s own healing force in a mutually regenerating process.

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References Augé, Marc. 2007. Tra i confini. Città, luoghi, integrazioni. Milano: Bruno Mondadori. Barrell, John. 1995. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Debord, Guy. 1954. “Exercise in psychogeography.” In Potlatch, n. 2, June 1954. ———. 1955. “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” In Les Lèvres Nues 6. ———. 1967. La société du spectacle. Paris: Buchet/Chastel. Gaskell, Elizabeth. (1853) 1972. Cranford. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gross, John, ed. 1998. The New Oxford Book of English Prose. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lefebvre, Henry. 1974. La production de l’éspace. Paris: Anthropos. Lefebvre, Henry. 2006. Writings on Cities, selected, translated and introduced by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Malden: Blackwell. MacLean, Gerald, and Donna Landry, Joseph Ward, eds. 1999. The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitford, Mary Russell. (1824) 1936. Our Village. Edited by Sir John Squire. London: Dent & Sons. Shelston, Alan. 1995. “The Return of the Native: The Significance of the Insignificant.” In Thomas Hardy, edited by Francesco Marroni and Norman Page. Pescara: Edizioni Tracce. Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London and New York: Verso. ———. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places. Oxford : Blackwell. ———. 2000. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell. Turner, James G. 1979. The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630-1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Virilio, Paul. 2000. La bomba informatica. Milano: Raffaello Cortina. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. Oxford: Blackwell.

“There In Thousands Of Lakes The Stars Of The Night Glimmer”: Lakescapes In Literature Pirjo Lyytikäinen

Evoking the “thousands of lakes” where “the stars of the night glimmer,” the Finnish poet Aleksis Kivi (1834–72) expressed his national romantic spirit: the poem was entitled “Finland.”1 This poem—in Finnish—was an answer to “Our Country”2 (1848), verses by the then famous national poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804–77), who wrote in Swedish—the standard language of the educated in nineteenth-century Finland. Although Kivi used more vivid and emotionally-laden images to describe his homeland, both poems describe the country as a land of “thousands of lakes.” Beginning with Runeberg and throughout this period, the image of Finland as the land of thousands of lakes—now a cliché in tourist literature—was forged. It is based on the geographical reality that the country has over 180,000 lakes, but this fact acquired cultural significance only through the construction work of the national romantic authors and landscape painters, that is, through a nationalist ideological and emotional perspective.3 The original title was “Suomenmaa.” The lines in Finnish read “siell’ tuhansissa järvissä / yön tähdet kimmeltää.” The poem by Kivi, the first important author writing in Finnish, remained unpublished during his lifetime. Its final version is probably from 1867. (Kivi 1984, 141–42, and comments, 230.) Compare the image of “a thousand stars” that “kiss” the sleeping waves in Zacharias Topelius’s poem “Metaren” (“The Angler,” 1846) (Topelius 2010, 131–33). 2 The original title was “Vårt land,” Runeberg 1931, 13–15. 3 Here, we are dealing with cultural nationalism and the invention of the nation (what Hobsbawm [1992, 12] called phases A and B of nationalism), the imagining of a nation and the construction of an “imagined community” (if we understand Benedict Anderson’s term to refer to the result or desired end-product of the cultural and political activity that took place in Finland from about 1830 to 1917 (when the country, previously an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire from 1808–1809, became independent). On the role of landscapes, see Haila (1997, 131–33) and Thiesse (1999, 185−90). Häyrynen (2008, 483–84 and 507–8 also 1

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Literary lakescapes or representations of lakes in the literature of national romanticism developed as an integral part of defining the national landscape of Finland.4 The imagery of national romantic poetry haunted later realistnaturalist lake descriptions and symbolist or modernist lake poems, even though new symbolic meanings emerged. In this chapter, I explore a selection of lakescapes in Finnish literature by focusing on the imagery constructed by national romantics, which became an integral part of the national cultural memory. First, I concentrate on the central early texts, which created the lakescapes, and then I analyse examples of their reverberation in naturalist and symbolist texts.5 In this tradition Kivi’s poem is unique in evoking a mirroring of stars, but lakes are frequently described as reflecting surfaces. These texts foreground the representations of summer lakes that mirror the blue sky of a summer day or the lingering light of a Nordic summer night—so bright that no stars are visible in the sky. Following the idyllic convention established in the early national romantic lake poems, the lake as a waterscape is readily associated not only with summer, but also with calmness and clarity, especially by contrast to stormy seas and turbulent rivers. The exaltation of the brief Nordic summer and the nostalgic ideal of mirror-like lakes surrounded by forests and strewn with idyllic islands which this convention initiated remain very much a national idée fixe, not only in travel guides, but also in the national cultural imagination.6 It is an idea that resists modern or urban realities, as well as the more sinister aspects of lakes.

points out recent uses of the concept of “national landscapes” in the debates about protecting “nationally” valued sites. 4 The parallel development in landscape painting has been thoroughly analysed, especially by Ville Lukkarinen (2004) in Suomi-kuvasta mielenmaisemaan. (Finland: From picture to mindscape). This book also illuminates parallel developments in literary imagining and has been a source of inspiration for my chapter. For other instances of this endeavour characteristic of nineteenth-century cultural nationalism, see e.g. Olwig (2008, 12–14 and 21–24) and Cabanel (2006, 31–36). 5 This is not to say that lakescapes are not important later in literature (in many respects they are); but nationally, the highly charged early periods seem to me to be the most interesting. This interest together with the practical matter of limited space informed the choice of my theme here. 6 Nikula (2006, 253–56) emphasises the role of lakescapes in “marketing” Finnish modernist architecture and design from the 1950s.

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Lakescapes Enhancing Patriotism In the nineteenth century defining and describing national landscapes was purported to enhance patriotic feelings by evoking the beauty of the “national” territory. The land and its nature initially played crucial roles in Finland, where the educated Swedish-speaking promoters of Finnish nationalism did not speak the “national” language (most of them were “Finns not speaking Finnish”).7 Downplaying the role of language (central to German Herderian nationalism, which influenced them) and exalting national landscapes were strategies used to connect the Swedish-speaking intellectuals with the homeland, where the working people spoke only Finnish. This activity relied on the geographical realities of an area seen as one’s own, but the selection of the particular landscapes or types of landscapes that were deemed appropriate was not a matter of course— it was not “natural,” even if it was claimed as such by the nationalists themselves.8 Even amongst waterscapes the preference for lakes was not selfevident.9 Most of the Swedish-speaking educated people whose role was crucial in the early stages of nationalism lived near the sea, where the dominant waterscape is the Baltic; in these areas even rivers could rival lakes, which are scarce on the coast. The lakes are a conspicuous part of the scenery only in some parts of the country, mainly the middle and eastern regions, where the hilly and thickly forested but (still) scarcely populated territory is strewn with small ponds and relatively small lakes. These regions are nevertheless notable for some large, winding bodies of water whose numerous islands and waterways had opened the inner “heart” of the country to the early hunter tribes. In a sense lakes were “exotic” to the coast-dwellers. Yet most important, the exotic appeal of the lakes was fed by the desire for “authenticity,” a core value of the nationalist ideology. The longing for something genuinely Finnish turned the attention of the educated pioneers of the nationalist cause to the inland regions with their Finnish-speaking inhabitants who still lived traditional agrarian (or premodern) lives. The Swedish-speaking elite could not easily identify with the Finnish language and folklore, but Finnish nature and its “spirit,” which characteristically encompassed both the rural people and their environment, See Hobsbawm 1992, 97. See e.g. Cabanel 2006, 38–39. 9 It is necessary to mention that I am dealing only with one portion of the nationally significant landscapes, although perhaps the most important. 7 8

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was accessible to the nationalists’ imaginative efforts. The appropriation of what was in some sense “the other,” ideologically transformed to be the innermost essence of “the self,” is at the core of this kind of emotionallyladen nationalism.10 Johan Ludvig Runeberg, the first “national” poet and the poet still most often referred to by that title, played a decisive role in turning the focus to inland lakescapes. He himself was born on the northwestern coast, but “learned to love” the lake district of middle Finland, when he worked as a tutor for a wealthy family in Saarijärvi and Ruovesi, two communes reputed ever since for their beauty.11 In the lake district he found the “authentic” Finnish folk whom he idealised, as well as the lakes and forests that seemed to reflect the Finnish national spirit, particularly its calmness. His epic poem Hanna (1836), an idyllic love story set in a country parsonage situated by a beautiful lake, seems to convey the poet’s own experience. Here, the son of the parson presents the scenery to a friend who is born and lives in a coastal town by emphasising how even the rosy shimmer of a summer evening on the lake is different from the sea “over there”; he goes on: Here is greenery and colours and liveliness. Countless islands rise from the waves . . . and if you approach this cape, which seems to touch the land, larger waters open and cosy villages on the strands you discern, the church shining far away.12 (SA II, 119–20)

The implication is that somehow all this beauty is lacking in the coastal region from which both young men have just come to the speaker’s parental home. The beautiful, continuously calm lakescape in Hanna is the setting for the story of first love between the parson’s daughter Hanna and the friend See e.g. Tiitta 1994, 44–45; Haila 1997, 132; and Lukkarinen 2004, 70. The option to “become Finns” was also a political choice after the separation of Finland from Sweden, articulated by one of the first nationalists: “We are not Swedes, we cannot become Russians, let us be Finns” (attributed to A. I. Arwidsson). The Russian government was particularly suspicious of any Finnish connections to Sweden, of which Finland was formerly a part, but saw the moderate development of Finnish cultural nationalism more or less as a way to distance the Finns from Swedish political influence. 11 Runeberg spent his summers there between 1823 and 1826. 12 The author’s free translation (the original Swedish text is in hexameter): “Här är grönska och färger och lif. Otaliga holmar/ skjuta ur vågorna opp, och svajande vinka från alla/ lummiga trän, som bjuda den tröttade roddaren skugga./ Nalkas du udden, som nu tycks träffa det mötande landet, öppnas en vidare rymd af vatten, och trefliga byar/ skynta på stränderna fram, och kyrkan lyser I fjerran.” The description goes on, depicting fields and forests. 10

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of her brother, unfolding with an ease only possible in a summer night idyll. The three young people climb the local hill where the midsummer bonfires are to be lighted later in the evening; they admire the panorama, “the endless tableau of forests, lakes and fields,” in the rosy shimmer of the evening. The young people of the village also are gathering, arriving at the foot of the hill. There is no wind; only a love song, cowbells and a cowherd’s horn are heard. The atmosphere of a pastoral idyll combines with the magical midsummer night in a suggestive way.13 The nationalist agenda is not very conspicuous or self-conscious in all this: it was only in light of subsequent developments that Hanna became one of the icons of national romanticism and a source of inspiration for further representations of lake settings. Runeberg’s role in creating outright patriotic lakescapes was balanced by his attempt to take the whole country into account,14 but he established a prototype of a strongly patriotic lakescape in the poem “The Fifth of July,”15 part of his second collection of patriotic war poems called Tales of Ensign Ståhl (1860),16 his most important contribution to Finnish nationalism. In “The Fifth of July,” Runeberg has old Lieutenant Ståhl lead the young student, who functions as his intratextual audience, to the shore of a blue lake glimmering in the summer morning. The lieutenant asks the student if he would be willing to die for this country, which is exemplified by the beautiful lakescape. The student does not reply in words, but his looks betray an emotion that satisfies the lieutenant, who goes on to explain that the beautiful scenery is part of what the student calls his “homeland.” In the above-mentioned poem “Our Country,” intentionally written to be Finland’s national anthem, Runeberg enumerates the country’s natural But the classical and Weimar models (central to his poetics) seemed to force Runeberg to move the culmination point of the love story to a nearby spring, a locus amoenus, where the lovers can see each other in the mirroring water and recognise their mutual love (the scene echoes not only the classical topos but also, more specifically, Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea). 14 Describing one’s country by listing all of its notable places and landscapes was another fashion of nationalism, both in poetry and in travel literature, as well as in other kinds of non-fictional works. See Tiitta, 280–313, especially on the role of Topelius in this endeavour. 15 “Den femte juli,” SA III, 137–141. 16 This is the usual translation of the title, but the English title of Clement B. Shaw’s translation is The Songs of Ensign Stål. The original title was Fänrik Ståls sägner. The first part was published in 1848 and immediately became a breviary of Finnish nationalism; the second part was also a long-awaited event; see Lyytikäinen 2012, 140–142. 13

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features such as hills and dales and strands without really describing detailed sceneries,17 coining the expression “land of a thousand lakes” and reminiscent, in a way, of “The Fifth of July” with references to what “our eye sees” and how “we can stretch our hand / and happily show the lake and strand / and say: this land there / our homeland is.”18 In “The Fifth of July” the tendency to inventory gains ground: the beautiful lake scenery, which is geographically situated in Virrat in the middle of Finland, gives rise to an enumeration of other beautiful places that are important sites of patriotic love. In addition to the shores of Lake Saimaa (the biggest lake in Finland), a river (the Vuoksi) and the internationally-known rapids of Imatra are mentioned. But the lieutenant also lists the hills of Lapland and the seashore at the Gulf of Bothnia (where Runeberg was born). The diversity of the country is briefly given its due, even if the characters are experiencing the beauty of the country on the lake in Virrat. All this frames the story of the brave soldier (Duncker), who was mortally wounded in a battle on 5 July 1809 defending his country in the war against Russia, the anniversary being the occasion of telling the story and testing the patriotism of the student. The message is clear: Finland is worth sacrificing one’s life—because it is so beautiful! The idyllic lakescape sets up the patriotic lesson.19 Furthermore, a lake metaphor is used to describe the everlasting fame of the self-sacrifice: to die like Duncker means to defy the “lake of oblivion,” to rise “like a green-dressed island” out of the lake’s waves, “to die and not to die” (SA III, 141). Runeberg’s example of glorifying the inland lake districts was followed by others. The most important nationalist poem to concentrate on describing lakes is “Summer day in Kangasala” (1853/1860) by Zacharias Topelius’s (1818–98).20 Topelius was one of the prominent “Fennomans” Runeberg’s classical training and the influence of Weimar classicism attenuated the romantic elements in his poetry. The whole idea of describing particular sceneries is itself romantic, and Runeberg is not quite free from universalising tendencies, even when he gives in to romantic tendencies. 18 Author’s translation from the Swedish original, SA III, 14–15. I have used my own translation instead of the English metrical translation of The Songs of Ensign Stål (1925, 6) to convey the exact content of the original. Still, Shaw’s translations have been helpful background. 19 On the ideological tendencies of the war poetry in Ensign Stål, see Lyytikäinen 2012, 143–46. 20 “En sommardag i Kangasala.” Originally the poem had a different title; this title dates from 1860 (Lassila 2011, 107). Although Runeberg “was there” before Topelius and one of his epic poems “Zigenaren” (“The Gypsy”) mentions the ridge in Kangasala and its lakes, the verses do not develop the description. Some of 17

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and “Finns not speaking Finnish”; he created a national history for Finland, glorified Finnish scenery and described the various people and landscapes in different parts of the country.21 His achievements in the field of lyric poetry have remained in the shadow of Runeberg’s, but this poem, in which the supposed speaker is the bird Sylvia (from the family of warblers, which sing so beautifully), was a success. Composed into song by Gabriel Linsén in1864 and translated into Finnish by P. J. Hannikainen, the poem lives on. Although Runeberg’s idyllic panoramic scene in Hanna could serve as a partial model, Topelius’s verse is the first openly patriotic poem to focus on a lake panorama. The bird Sylvia views the scene from the highest branch of a tree on the highest ridge of Harjula, a name invented by Topelius, which means “The Place of Ridges.” The designation refers to the characteristic landscape of Kangasala, an inland parish in a lake district. What the bird sees is how “broadly shine the blue waters, / as far as the eye can see” (Topelius 2010, 204, my translation).22 The poem names the (real) lakes seen by the bird, briefly mentions their graceful waves or their silver and golden glimmer and compares one of them to the eyes of a beloved and to a childhood home: “And blue like a loved one’s eyes / And bright like a childhood home / The swaying Vesijärvi / quietly joining them all. / And hundreds of islands swim / In its vast lap, / Nature’s green thoughts / In a haven of blue waves” (my translation).23 The numerous islands characteristic of many Finnish lakes are mentioned and elevated to “nature’s green thoughts.” The surrounding forests are described with a reference to fields and meadows, obligatory in these picturesque panoramas.24 The last three stanzas of the poem then develop a theme of patriotism inspired by the scenery. The message is Topelius’s other poems with waterscapes connect closely with Runeberg’s idyllic lakescapes. 21 Topelius’s role in defining the variety of “national” landscapes and a great number of particular lakescapes in his non-fiction was enormous. In Finland framstäldt i teckningar (Finland Presented in Drawings) (1845–52) for which he wrote the text, he describes several famous lakescapes and also repeats the idea that islands are “green thoughts” (Tiitta 1994, 282–283). 22 “Vidt skina de blåa vatten, / Så långt de af ögat nås.” 23 “Och blå som en älskling’s öga, / Och klar som ett barndomshem, / Den gungande Wesijärvi / Sig stilla smyger till dem. / Och hundrade öar simma / Allt uti dess vida famn, / Naturens gröna tankar / I blåa vågornas hamn.” 24 Runeberg’s example is only the immediate context; both authors follow more international conventions of panoramas (with or without lakes), although the adaptations to the local nature in each case provide variety.

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given: “O how poor Finland / yet is rich with beauty!”25 The poem also emphasises how Finnish traditional songs (or poems) imitate the undulation of the waves, thus combining Finnish folklore with the lakes. The poem ends with the bird’s wish to be like the eagle, able to fly to the throne of God and beseech him to make “us” (the Finns) love “our” country: “O God, teach us how to love, / o teach us to love our country!”26 Topelius’s poem contributed to the vogue of national romantic pilgrimages to sites where lake panoramas were at their best. Topelius himself, fleeing a cholera outbreak in Helsinki in 1853, ended up in Kangasala, a region famous for its healthy waters, as well as for its picturesque scenery. His poem invested the place with patriotic significance. The discovery and redefinition of many other lake panoramas followed, and the topos of the high place, a ridge or rocky hill with a lake panorama, which permits the viewer to see an infinite continuum of glimmering lakes and dark forests disappearing into a blue haze, established itself in literature, in the fine arts, in travel writing, and in the national cultural memory.27 This literature also promoted early tourism: the summer time pilgrimages to the lake districts in Finland became almost a duty of patriotic youth, who had the leisure time to travel and could afford to do so. At the same time realist novels often gave descriptions of these pilgrimages, thereby spreading the idea of patriotic tourism, even if “mass” pilgrimages became a fashion and possibility only much later, after the Second World War.28 Thus, the experiences of real spaces were transformed by imagining the places and through the literary creation of what became nationally significant psychic spaces.29 The ritual of admiring these lake panoramas and enacting the psychic spaces was facilitated by the building of towers commanding the best lake panoramas. Topelius had to imagine a bird at the top of a tree to provide the reader with the kind of view available from these towers. During the heyday of national development at the end of the nineteenth “O hur den fattiga Finland / är rikt på skönhet ändå!” (Topelius 2010, 204). “O Herre, lär oss att älska, / o lär oss älska vårt land!” (1860 version; see Topelius 2010, 465). 27 Its role in Finnish literature has been emphasised by Laitinen (1984, 32–41). 28 Scholars have called attention to the urban background of exalting nature. Lukkarinen, for example, who discusses Nicholas Green’s and Griselda Pollock’s views (2004, 71), points out that Finnish nature tourism initially promoted wilderness spots instead of existing tourist destinations. 29 Edward S. Casey’s (2002, 50–51) description of the sublimation of place seems to fit both the processes involved in literary and artistic representation of the national sublime and the experiences brought forth by these representations. 25 26

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century, the pictorial arts played a decisive role in spreading ideal lakescapes, often inspired by the literary tradition. The lake panorama, now heavily laden with national meaning, was depicted in countless paintings and drawings (and, increasingly in photographs), especially in the 1880s and 1890s. Sometimes it was used to illustrate nationally important literature. Albert Edelfelt’s illustrations for the jubilee edition of Runeberg’s Tales of Ensign Ståhl (1898–1900) portrayed lake panoramas instead of war panoramas (which are completely lacking ) and illustrated “Our Country” as well as “The Fifth of July” with lakescapes, thus emphasising the patriotic role of nature and landscape presentations.30 Connecting lakescapes and war at the end of the century when the achievements of cultural nationalism were under threat indicated how nature painting and literary descriptions of nature began to function as political allegories under Russian censorship.31 As representations of the country, the lake panoramas became increasingly nostalgic: the period of intensive veneration of the lake panoramas in painting coincides with the great expansion of the forest industry, which used the lakes as waterways for transporting logs from the forests to the factories and sawmills.32 In naturalist literature the tension between the nationalist lore that seemed to define the national in terms of primordial traditions and untouched nature and the modernisation processes that rapidly changed the country and served to fortify the nation economically become apparent, even if the tension—in itself very modern—between the cherished archaic ideals and the modern industrial development remained unresolved.33

Lakes and the Paradoxes of “National Naturalism” In Finland lake settings figure prominently in important naturalist novels, which describe life in the countryside or in small towns rather than city life. In these texts the scenes where lakes have symbolic value are often See Lukkarinen 2004, 35–36, 38–43. Lukkarinen 2004, 26–34, Konttinen 2001, 220–36. 32 Lukkarinen 2004, 52–60. 33 Gellner’s view of nationalism (adopted in many contemporary studies) emphasises the “modernity” of nationalism (see also John Breuilly’s introduction [Gellner 2006, xx–xxi]), but the nationalists themselves often searched for national roots in primordial times and pre-modern conditions. In nineteenth-century thinking, modernity, urbanity and tehnological development were often seen as “cosmopolitism” issues that threatened national values. 30 31

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connected to the erotic dimensions of the plots, but, as we will see, the role of national allegories is also important. The national romantic tradition resonates there, although the authors’ roots in the lake districts often contributed to the prominence of lakes as settings for their stories. The most important author in this respect is Juhani Aho (1861–1921), who brought French-style naturalism to Finnish literature while at the same time emphasising Finnishness through scenery and characters.34 Aho, a parson’s son from the eastern lake district, adopted the lake setting and the lake panorama, making continuous references to Runeberg’s idyllic epic poem Hanna, but reinterpreted its elements in his naturalist novel Papin rouva (The parson’s wife), 1893, which can also be seen as a national “transformation” of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary with its triangle drama.35 Like Hanna, Papin rouva combines national imagery with an erotic plot, but constructs a counter-image to Runeberg’s love idyll. This relationship is prepared right from the beginning of the novel, where the text introduces the lakeside setting. It describes the calm and idyllic outward impression imparted by the parsonage, where the Charles Bovary-like parson lives with his wife, when seen from the lake. The name of the place, situated on a picturesque bay of a great lake, confirms this impression: Tyynelä (the place of calm).36 The parallel to Runeberg’s parsonage, which is also mirrored in the calm waters of the “home bay,” is clear, but the tone of the description is altered. The tranquillity of Aho’s lake reveals its sinister side. His naturalist drama is essentially an inner tragedy with a deadly calm on the surface. The references to Runeberg accentuate the theme of disillusion: the parson’s wife Elli dreams of a perfect love, but her hopes are never fulfilled. The novel’s triangle involves the dull and comical parson, an appealing summer visitor to the parsonage with French elegance and womanising habits (Olavi) and the parson’s attractive, romance-hungry wife, Elli, who has never loved her husband, but pressured by her parents, agreed to marry him. Yet she loves Olavi, whom she had met briefly before marrying the Rossi (2007) shows Aho’s intimate connections to French naturalism (on Aho’s French connections, see also Nummi 2002). Niemi 1985 has highlighted some central elements that foreground Finnishness. The anthology Pariisista Iisalmeen 2011 is also devoted to Aho’s national vs. international influences, themes and ideas. 35 In 1943, the novel was translated into French by Jean Perrin d’Agnel as La femme du pasteur. 36 The reader may also discern an allusion to Tuonela, the place of death in Finnish mythology. 34

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pastor.37 The first lake scene shows Elli gazing at the open lake, immersed in memories of dreaming by the lakeshore. She is waiting for her “saviour” to arrive from across the lake when she notices waves stirring the calm water. They are caused by a steamer, which is bringing not only goods and summer travellers to the villages and towns on the lake’s shores, but also modern influences. Steamboats functioned as a sign of modern development and had a role comparable to railways in naturalist literature.38 In this scene the steamship brings Olavi, who represents modern decadence, to the parsonage, where he upsets the deadly calm of the parson’s wife. Aho’s novel presents the heroine Elli in the situation of Emma Bovary before her love affairs, but he gives Elli a distinctively Finnish background by comparing her to the maiden Aino from the national epic, the Kalevala: Aino drowned herself to avoid an unwelcome suitor, the old Väinämöinen. This interfigurality as well as the intertextual background in Hanna emphasises the fall from the ideal: Elli is a more passive counterpart to Aino; she has accepted the repulsive suitor and languishes in a dull and unsatisfying marriage and even sometimes longs for death. Her habit of dreaming by the lake recalls Aino’s last moments before drowning, but Elli lives. The arrival of Olavi revives her, but he is not the same enthusiastic student whom she had known and with whom she had fallen in love. His visits to Paris, which signifies a place of decadence in the Finnish literature of the period, have changed him, and it becomes clear to the reader, if not to Elli, that Olavi has not thought about her at all during those years. This blasé young man who is writing a dissertation on “women in contemporary French novels” thinks of women only in terms of conquests. Thus representing modernity, decadence and inauthenticity, he arrives at the calm Finnish lake setting, which stands for tradition and Finnishness. This setting is, however, an ambivalent one: it has lost its idyllic quality and has become a breeding ground for unfulfilled desires.39 The lake itself seems to take on this symbolism and become a mirror image of the heroine. An important lake scene, which also has some resonance of the This part of Elli’s story is told in the novel Papin tytär (The parson’s daughter), which Aho had published in 1885 and which is a naturalist counter-story to Hanna. There the young Elli falls in love with Olavi, but he leaves her to travel abroad. 38 Aho himself alternately used both locomotives and steamships to symbolise the confrontation between tradition oblivious to the feelings of the modest parson’s daughter. and modernity (see e.g. Rossi 2007, 100 and 105–6). 39 An allusion to Hanna, in which the parson’s daughter is first tempted by an old suitor, but is saved from “unfulfilled desires” by the arrival of the right paramour, accentuates the differences in Elli’s situation. 37

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Kalevala, marks the development of the love affair between Elli and Olavi. The pair go rowing and fishing on the lake, a place strongly connected to the heroine: it is her area, the site of her private life and her most intimate thoughts. Elli had the habit of staying out on the lake for long periods, fishing or just rowing around, in order to avoid the company of her husband. This is the first time she accepts company—the company that she desires and has dreamed of. Here, as all along, the novel carefully shows the discrepancy between what the characters say and what they think. The fishing and the conversation simultaneously hide and reveal the emotional background behind the playful remarks. Olavi’s talk reflects his intention to seduce Elli and break down her bourgeois resistance, but he misinterprets the situation. While ultimately Elli remains trapped in her bourgeois existence, it is she, in fact, who has the most passionate feelings and the more noble character. Olavi’s pretended passion is a product of ennui, selfdeception and the possibilities of the moment. Once the couple stops fishing they remain on the lake, and Olavi paddles along with one oar as the sun is setting. He gives his interpretation of what is, in fact, his idea of Elli’s feelings: in these monotonous surroundings, where there is no life except in the sun and agony when the sun goes away, the desire for happiness, for that reason, bursts out unbridled, and nothing keeps it from growing and growing … it grows like a shadow in the night, but is accompanied by the knowledge that happiness is short, like a summer night, this knowledge exiling happiness. (Aho 1954, II, 243)

The monotonous calm attached to a nationally significant lakescape hides strong passions. But the hero now lacks the exaltation and authenticity of feeling required of harmonious love—either in erotic terms or in national scale. Runeberg’s and the national romantics’ three-fold sublimation of love—from erotic to patriotic and, ultimately, to love of God—is completely broken. Still, Olavi lets loose in his poetic mood (though he feels that he is exaggerating) and refers to an important intertext, the poem “Svanen” (The Swan) by Runeberg. This poem, a glorification of the beauty of the North and its summer, and also of true love “on the streams of the North,” idealises the scene, and Olavi gives a platonic interpretation of the feeling it describes, which is a feeling of friendship, not erotic love. Evoking this image of ideal love by referring to the national lore fascinates Elli, who believes that Olavi’s fleeting poetic vision sincerely reflects his thoughts, but, at the same time, it shows how alien to the modern decadent sensibility

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this image has become. Aho uses the nationalistic lake panorama in the culmination of the love story. The couple’s excursion to an elevated place where Elli’s favourite panorama of the lakes can be seen not only alludes to Runeberg’s idyll, but also reinvents the tradition. She has named the spot her Temple Roof, and this biblical allusion to the place where Satan tempted Christ determines its function in Aho’s novel. But the national romantic background is also present, as the panorama alludes as well to the nationally determined scenario initiated by Topelius. Even Elli’s dress—she has put on Finnish national costume, something she does not usually wear—emphasises that the scene and the whole excursion have significance by juxtaposing modernity with Finnishness, as well as juxtaposing two individual sensibilities. The insistence on its Finnish setting modifies the scene of temptation, otherwise comparable to the scene in Madame Bovary in which Emma Bovary willingly lets Rodolphe seduce her. Aho’s scene presents a Finnish transformation of the theme of adultery. Elli’s amorous feelings, which she has suppressed for years, burst out in a moment of passionate embrace: almost desperately, she clutches Olavi, but before he even realises what is happening, she turns away, saying that this was the first and the last time. The seducer is left in a merely passive role, and the tepid nature of his own feelings as well as his reluctance to get involved form a stark contrast to Elli’s passion, which, in the end, remains controlled by the ideal of platonic friendship, an ideal that Olavi himself had pretended to entertain. In these nationally-imbued surroundings Aho seems to pay tribute to the moral superiority of his heroine by comparison with Emma Bovary, depicting Elli’s naïve innocence in the face of Olavi’s decadent manners learned in Paris. But it is not Elli’s bourgeois virtue which is praised: she might have broken her marriage vows had Olavi really been the passionate and noble lover she imagined him to be. Though Elli is weak and passive and a perfect naturalist heroine in this respect, she is still capable of true feelings, something that is lost on Olavi and non-existent in Emma Bovary. Even in the throws of conservative patriarchal rule—something that Aho personally opposed—the Finnish national spirit represented by the “maiden in captivity” of bourgeois conventionality retains some of its authenticity. The temptation of the Temple Roof does not end with a fall, but rather with a melancholy acknowledgement that authentic feelings or national romantic idealism clashes with modern mentality. Naturalist psychology casts an ironic shadow on romantic enthusiasm and targets the older idealistic literature, but national nostalgia and allusions

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to authentic, pre-modern life reflect the contradictions and ambiguities of the author’s situation and the national situation of the time. Even the fact that the novel presents its naturalist drama by constantly referring to the beauty of the surrounding natural setting and its national romantic connotations creates an ambivalent, nostalgic mood, which reflects the recognition of the inevitable process of modernisation shaping the national landscape as well as the national mentality and, at the same time, regrets the losses. The naturalist drama is an allegorical drama of modernisation, depicting everything that is bound to be lost or lose its purity. But at the same time the désillusion concerns only middle-class protagonists: Aho’s novel still depicts a hardworking tenant farmer family in idyllic terms and constructs a counter-image to Elli’s and Olavi’s story. While nineteenth-century naturalism did not seriously question the central icons of national memory, the landscape or the ideal of the Finnish folk incarnated in the rural people, the beginning of the twentieth century and the advent of the socialist workers’ movement and, finally, the bitter Civil War (1918), which contaminated Finland’s newly-won independence, changed the picture. In an important neo-naturalist novel by Joel Lehtonen (1881–1934) the changing image of the Finnish people is connected to an allegorical lakescape. In his great Putkinotko (1919) the author uses his description of Saimaa, Finland’s largest lake, to create an image of the national scene. Although the novel was written after the Civil War, it is set in the pre-war years and describes the growing social tensions. Lake Saimaa with its open waters symbolises Finland, which has contact with the wider world and wider views. The lake is the great waterway to the outside world, even to Saint Petersburg and the Baltic Sea, via a canal. It permits echoes of the modern world to enter the novel’s world as well. The text, however, distinguishes between two different parts and two different images of the lake; these differences function as allegorical references to the social division within the country. There are Saimaa’s great open waters, but these do not reach the area of Putkinotko, the main setting for the novel’s action, where the primitive tenant family lives who is the focus of the narrative. There the lake narrows to a maze of slender straits and passages strewn with small rocky islands and rugged capes. The description of this part of the lake, while seemingly realistic, also symbolises the primitive life of the Oblomovian family, who live in ignorance and poverty. They have only the faintest ideas of modern developments, and most of those ideas are flawed, despite the fact that the nearest town, Savonlinna, situated on the more open waters of the lake, is not far away. In the straits surrounded by rocks and wilderness, where there

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are no roads, but only barren land and small stony fields and where even the trees grow crooked, twisted and stunted, human life imitates nature—or rather the nature Lehtonen describes is constructed to mirror the primitive life he finds or places there. The primitive life of the Finnish rural people is now described without any idealisation. The “authentic” ordinary people of the countryside are compared to American Indians and the romantic image of hard-working and humble Finns is turned upside down.40 To emphasise the latent dark forces that move these people now contaminated by corrupting modernity (with vague echoes of socialist ideas and the clandestine traffic of homedistilled alcohol), but who are also inherently “barbaric,” the text refers to a dark pond situated on the other side of the tenant house. The image is that of a family living between the crooked part of the lake and a mysterious pond that hides dark secrets in its black waters. The “national” lakescape of Saimaa, the beauty of which is cited amongst the landscapes worth dying for in Runeberg’s “The Fifth of July” is thus used to chart a new image of Finland and Finnishness. Nevertheless, the beauty of the lake is retained, and the sunny summer day in this one-day novel actually paints a kind of nostalgic pastoral idyll that conceals sinister forces at work underneath. Lehtonen, himself born on the “crooked side,” was divided in his sympathies to the characters (the lazy tenant of the novel is a portrayal of his own half-brother) and the people like them versus the national tradition. As to Saimaa, it was the lake where Lehtonen tried to establish his own summer paradise.

From Lakescapes to Mindscapes The traditional national imagery was often reinterpreted by fin-de-siècle symbolists, who assigned “universal” significance to “local” images as well as to national myths. In symbolist poetics the mimetically-rendered objects and sceneries were supposed to “suggest” ideas and states of mind (états d’âme).41 Any object, figure or place functioned metaphorically to Rossi (2011, 95−110) emphasises the connection as well as the differences in the then fashionable ideas about “primitive” people. The comparison with American indians follows the usage of the time; see Lukkarinen 2004, 77. 41 According to Mallarmé’s famous dictum in “Sur l’évolution littéraire” (1891). In this process of symbolisation, the heroes and stories of the national mythology (in Finland, the Kalevala) became the archetypes of human imagination (e.g. the universal “mythology” tracing the archetypical figures of humankind propagated 40

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evoke spiritual realities. Consequently, lakescapes became mindscapes: while mimetically still anchored in natural spaces, although not particular places, they evoked states of mind. Thus, lakescapes either lost their national significance or retained it primarily as an echo of the past and a nostalgic reminiscence. In symbolist imagery waterscapes often function as a metaphor for the mind itself: the surface of a lake (consciousness) is seen as the limit or the interface between the engulfing depth of the underwater world populated by strange monsters (the unconscious) and the unreachable silent heavens, where empty space has replaced divine benevolence (the lost or unknown ideal). The most prominent Finnish symbolist poet to write important lake poems was Otto Manninen (1872–1950), who was born in Finland’s eastern lake district. His waterscapes survey the poet’s (or the lyrical subject’s) mind in several works, some of which evoke the glimmering stars mirrored by lakes, which Aleksis Kivi turned into a national image, but which, with Manninen, signify the speaker’s mindscape. Manninen’s most suggestive lake poem, however, is “Joutsenet” (The swans),42 an ecstatic vision reminiscent of W. B. Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole,”43 yet also evoking Finland’s national tradition, especially Runeberg’s poetry.44 The speaker’s mindscape is presented as the reflective surface of a lake on which swans, like dreams and ideas, swim and are mirrored. Manninen’s symbolism owes little to the older romantic strand of making lakes the scenes of epiphany, represented by Runeberg’s poem “The Church” (1842),45 although the idea of nature as a church or a holy place as expressed by Runeberg and the church bells from afar as heard in both poems lends Manninen’s verses part of their magical atmosphere, which connote the revelation of an ideal world. But Runeberg’s religious epiphany is replaced by symbolist ideas connected to the image of the swan. The reference above to Runeberg’s “The Swan” with its theme of faithful by Edouard Schuré). See Lyytikäinen 2004, 201–2 and Lyytikäinen 1997, 44−46 and 65. 42 The final poem was published in the collection Säkeitä (Verses), 1905, but it was first published in a periodical (1903) and written even earlier. 43 For the frequent swan imagery of the fin-the-siècle and its back-ground in tradition see also Goss 2009, 213–23. 44 Manninen translated a large number of Runeberg’s works into Finnish, and his poems often reflect what he translated (see Karhu 2012, 154–59 and 173–200). 45 “Kyrkan” in Dikter III (Poems III). Runeberg’s poem makes the lake and an island on it a place of communion with God, thereby implying that these are even more appropriate places of worship than a church.

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love complements the symbolism: Manninen’s “The Swans,” depicting swans on a summer lake, uses the lake scenery to convey a nostalgic vision of ideal beauty and express the ecstatic love inspired by the swans. The magic of Manninen’s poem emerges from a combination of detailed and seemingly realistic description with suggestive symbolism to refer to phenomena of the mind. Although the title gives away the “protagonists” who swim on the lake at sunrise in spring or early summer, the swans are never mentioned in the poem: they are referred to only as “they” and with metaphorical expressions such as “snowynecks” and “the white dreams of the waves.”46 These expressions with their connotations of beauty and the mind of the visionary speaker suggest the mindscape constructed by the imagery. The swans also blend with the white water lilies, the flowers preferred in symbolist poetry.47 These flowers, which have their roots in the muddy lake bottoms, but raise their pure white blooms on the surface, symbolise the roots of human ideas in the darkness of the unconscious and the intertwining of the dark side of the human psyche with its highest spiritual desires and achievements. In Manninen’s poem the swans seem, however, to be relatively free of this intertwinement; they swim freely on the lake’s surface, the surface of the poet’s mind. Manninen’s swans are ideas or mental pictures, dream visions. They symbolise the beauty and the sublime desired by dreaming consciousness or the limpid surface of the mind, which, like the lake that is the mind’s image in the poem, hides the depths and only mirrors the beauty of the swans and the serenity of the summer morning. The Platonic theme of Eros, which emerges from a vision of earthly beauty to become a vision of the Ideal and often found in Manninen’s poems, is doubly pertinent: it suggests the motif of earthly love evoked by the Runeberg intertext “The Swan,” which is sublimated into a more general vision. Manninen’s swans are not the mute swans (who, in symbolist poetry, only sing at the moment of their death), but singing swans (the whooper swan, Cygnus cygnus), who sing when they are happy (Manninen uses the word joikua, which lends assonance to the poem and Topelius’s islands as “nature’s green thoughts” are here replaced by snow-white dreams, but the waves are connected to singing and poetry in a way that is also reminiscent of Topelius’s lake panorama. 47 For example, in his “Le Nénuphar blanc” Mallarmé evokes the water lilies, which envelop in their whiteness “a nothing, made of intact dreams,” a paradox of emptiness and fullness, ideal beauty rooted in the muddy depths (Levine 1994, 132–33). The image was much used in Finnish symbolism as well (see Lyytikäinen 1997, 64–72). 46

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is a covert version of the suppressed name of the birds (joutsen).48 But then the sound is compared to the bells of a remote chapel and, consequently, set in a context of holiness or the sacred. The sounds are carried by the waves, until finally the swans themselves are assimilated into the waves as well as into the rhythmic flow of the poem. Thus, the mental images generate the poem; the poem is the song of the swans or the product of the poet’s dreaming mind. The symbolist tendency to evoke the artistic process and the metalyrical dimension complement the complex fields of significance that can be attached to the poem. The end of the poem, however, transforms the exalted vision into a memory—the speaker who seemed to dwell securely in the presence of the vision describes how the swans fly away when the summer is over. But their glowing wings leave a lasting image on the water, which has begun to freeze: the ice symbolises the speaker’s inconsolable state of mind. The striking metaphor, which refers to the ice as kaihi (cataract), parallels the lake with the eye (of the mind) and the ice, which covers the lake’s mirror, with a sickness that veils the eye. The troubled vision is retained only as an afterimage left by the birds’ glowing wings. Once again the meaning is doubled: both a memory of a lost dream of happiness and the necessary condition of human life in the world of shadows in Platonic terms seem to be simultaneously evoked. Not even national connotations are ruled out: around the year 1900 when the poem was written, the ideals of the Finnish nationalists to whom Manninen belonged, as did practically all prominent writers and artists of the time, were endangered. The shattered hopes, in a situation in which the imagined community of Finland was already on its way to becoming a unifying bond of larger circles, loomed large in the atmosphere of those years. The “Saimaa eye” of the country—an expression coined by Runeberg in “The Fifth of July,” where the lake-eye was to lift its gaze to the sky (of high hopes)—was freezing. The new Russification policies of the Russian government,49 which were gradually ruining Finnish autonomy, were reflected in many poems. Although like many of his fellow poets, Manninen was not active in writing political allegories of the situation, “The swans,” with its evocation of Runeberg’s patriotic swans and the now politically-laden lakescapes,50 could function as an indirect contribution to As widely used, joiku refers to a style of singing used by the Sámi people of Lapland and can be associated with the real voices of the singing swan, Cygnus cygnus. 49 This change in Russian politics is briefly explained in Anderson 2006, 87. 50 In fact, a whole culture of reading political allegory into every nature description 48

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the national mourning. Lakescapes did not play a central role in (allegorical) political resistance but one short prose text illustrates how a lake description, which is an inversion of the nationally-valued topos of a beautiful lakescape, served to take a stand against the oppressive power politics of the Russian Empire. In “Kurjalan rannalla” (On the shore of Kurjala), a kind of short story called shavings or chips, Juhani Aho deconstructed the very scenery most valued in the national imagery. Aho’s shaving describes the impressions of a wanderer in the Finnish backwoods. The title of the piece tells us that we are “on a miserable lakeside,” and the description confirms the expectations awakened by this title: we are led to a miserable hole, a God-forsaken country. A wanderer arrives at a lakeside on a rainy autumn day. The lake is shallow, with a muddy bottom fed by dirty, black waters from the swamps, the water almost overrun by reeds. It is raining; the sky is grey and dirty. A tenant farm with its shabby buildings, showing overall decadence and neglect, stands by the lake. Briefly put: the whole scene is rotten and cheerless, and the wanderer who sees it all is himself wet, tired and miserable. The description exudes a profound pessimism and fatigue. All the naturalistic details, which in themselves are vivid and realistic in the sense of being anchored in verisimilitude, suggest utter hopelessness: the whole thing turns into an allegory of absolute melancholy but, at the same time, it is something else. Aho, in fact, does not betray his nationalist ideals with his depiction of the muddy lake fed by swamps, although this description would fit perfectly into the naturalist dogma. In its cultural context, and with the help of an open allusion at the end of the text to the desperate situation of Finland after the February Manifesto of 1899, which appeared to revoke Finland’s autonomous position within the Russian Empire, Aho’s small story works as an allegory of Finland in the grip of Russification. Even if the description contains no overt references to anything political, Aho’s readers were able to read into this deconstruction of the national imagery the political message intimated at the end of the text. The narrator, trying to find tobacco in his pocket, draws out a clipping of a newspaper, evidently by accident, where a beginning of a news article says: “Nowadays times are miserable in Finland” (Aho, 61, my translation). This is sufficient to connect the miserable scenery with the national misery.

and landscape painting spread at the time; see e.g. Konttinen 2001, 220–24; Lukkarinen 2004, 31–34.

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Conclusions Lakescapes continued and still continue to play a role in Finnish literature. In the 1930s, for example, they functioned as scenes of erotic tension, but also as scenes of death for Frans Eemil Sillanpää, the Finnish author awarded the Nobel prize in 1939. In many of his texts and in most modernist or late modernist representations, lakes rarely have any national message to tell—unless in satire. The parody novel Kreisland (1996) by Rosa Liksom (b. 1958) makes a lake setting prominent in the creation of the place called Kreisland (an allegory of Finland) and the primitive protagonist who represents Finnish Man. The place name is a Finnish distortion of the English word “crazy,” but it also relates to Elvis Presley’s Graceland. A parody of the opening words of Genesis begins by evoking a lake: “In the beginning there was a lake with clear water and dark night moving on it. On the first morning a starry sky rose from the water with unending bogs around the hills.” The work of the creation continues in a rather haphazard way, but everything surges up from the lake: a bright light, starving reindeer, a swarm of mosquitoes, snowdrifts, thick ice and the nightless night. On the lake shore there is a cabin and a gloomy man, “whose yelling filled the horizon from lake to lake.”(Liksom, 7) The parody itself shows the vitality of the tradition of lakescapes as part of the national cultural memory, but this vitality is double-edged. By laughing at the tradition, the postmodern parody shows that the old ways of imagining lakes nationally, while still an integral part of the “patrimony,” are also either “museum objects” or in need of rewriting. While lakescapes survive in literary works as casual settings with multiple possible meanings, their national career as literary objects seems to be over. They might have a future and they do have significance in environmental imagery, but this cultural imagery has seemed to proliferate—at least heretofore—mainly outside the field of literature.

References Aho, Juhani. 1954. Kootut teokset. Porvoo: WSOY. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. London: Verso. Cabanel, Patrick. 2006. “Paysages de la nation,” in Idée nationale et architecture en Europe 1860–1919. Finlande, Hongrie, Roumanie, Catalogne. Jean-Yves Andrieux, Fabienne Chevallier and Anja

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Kervanto-Nevanlinna, 29–41. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Casey, Edward S. 2002. Representing Place. Landscape Painting and Maps. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Gellner, Ernest. 2006. Nations and Nationalism, 2nd ed., introduction by John Breuilly. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Goss, Glenda Dawn. 2009. Sibelius. A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Haila, Yrjö. 1997. “‘Wilderness’ and the Multiple Layers of Environmental Thought.” In Environment and History 3, 129–47. Hobsbawm, E. J. 1992. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Häyrynen, Maunu. 2008. “A Kaleidoscopic Nation: The Finnish National Landscape Imagery.” In Nordic Landscapes. Region and Belonging on the Northern Edge of Europe, edited by Michael Jones and Kenneth R. Olwig, 483–510. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Karhu, Hanna. 2012. Geneettinen tutkimus Otto Mannisen runokäsikirjoituksista. Helsinki: Yliopistopaino. Kivi, Aleksis. 1984. Kootut teokset IV. Helsinki: SKS. Konttinen, Riitta. 2001. Sammon takojat. Nuoren Suomen taiteilijat ja suomalaisuuden kuvat. Helsinki: Otava. Laitinen, Kai. 1984. Metsästä kaupunkiin. Helsinki: Otava. Lassila, Pertti. 2011. Metsän autuus. Luonto suomalaisessa kirjallisuudessa 1700–1950. Helsinki: SKS. Lehtonen, Joel. 1982. Valitut teokset III. Edited by Pekka Tarkka. Helsinki: Otava. Levine, Steven Z. 1994. Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection. The Modernist Myth of the Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Liksom, Rosa. 1996. Kreisland. Helsinki: WSOY. Lukkarinen, Ville. 2004. “Kansallisen maiseman vertauskuvallisuus ja ympäristön tila.” In Suomi-kuvasta mielenmaisemaan by Ville Lukkarinen and Annika Waenerberg, 20–91. Helsinki: SKS. Lyytikäinen, Pirjo. 2012. “How to Forge a Victory out of a Defeat: Uses of War in Finnish Nation Building.” In Plots of War. Modern Narratives of Conflict, edited by Isabel Capeloa Gil and Adriana Martens, 139–56. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 2004. “Joutsenunelmia. Symbolismin poetiikkaa: Otto Mannisen ‘Joutsenet’.” In Runosta runoon, edited by Sakari Katajamäki and Johanna Pentikäinen, 200–19. Helsinki: WSOY. ———. 1997 Narkissos ja Sfinksi. Helsinki: SKS.

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Manninen, Otto. 1979. Runot. Helsinki: WSOY. Niemi, Juhani. 1985. Juhani Aho. Helsinki: SKS. Nikula, Riitta. 2006. “On the Finnishness of Modern Finnish Architecture.” In Idée nationale et architecture en Europe 1860–1919. Finlande, Hongrie, Roumanie, Catalogne, edited by Jean-Yves Andrieux, Fabienne Chevallier and Anja Kervanto-Nevanlinna, 251–57. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Nummi, Jyrki. 2002. Aika Pariisissa. Juhani Ahon ranskalainen kausi 1889–1890. Helsinki: SKS. Nummi, Jyrki, Rossi, Riikka and Isomaa, Saija (eds.) 2011. Pariisista Iisalmeen. Kansainvälinen ja kansallinen Juhani Aho. Helsinki: SKS. Olwig; Kenneth R. 2008. “The Jutland Cipher: Unlocking the Meaning and Power of a Contested Landscape.” In Nordic Landscapes. Region and Belonging on the Northern Edge of Europe, edited by Michael Jones and Kenneth R. Olwig, 12–49. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Rossi, Riikka. 2011. “Aito suomalainen—vai naturalistinen ihmispeto. Primitiivisyyden tulkintoja Juhassa.” In Pariisista Iisalmeen. Kansainvälinen ja kansallinen Juhani Aho, edited by Jyrki Nummi, Riikka Rossi and Saija Isomaa. 92–122. Helsinki: SKS. ———. 2007. Le naturalisme finlandais. Une conception entropique du quotidian. Helsinki: SKS. Runeberg, Johan Ludvig. 1931. Samlade Arbeten I–III. Helsingfors: Holger Schildts. ———. 1925. The Songs of Ensign Stål. Translated from Swedish by Clement Burbank Shaw. New York: G. E. Stechert. Thiesse, Anne-Marie. 1999. La creation des identités nationales. Europe XVIIIe–XXe siècle. Paris: Seuil. Tiitta, Allan. 1994. Harmaakiven maa. Zacharias Topelius ja Suomen maantiede. Helsinki: Suomen tiedeseura. Topelius, Zacharias. 2010. Ljungblommor. Skrifter I. Edited by Carola Herberts and Clas Zilliacus. Helsingfors and Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland

IV Locations

Sites of Slavery: Imperial Narratives, Plantation Architecture and the Ideology of the Romance of the South Julia Faisst

Introduction: Sites of Slavery as Literary Topos and Material Places Domestic sites of slavery—namely plantation homes with their strict division between slave quarters and master’s house—are most commonly read as narratives of controlled labour, abuse of power and harm done to body and mind.1 The same holds true for fictional depictions of the spaces and places of slavery. The prototype for the plantation as a space of unequal power relations can be found in many African American slave narratives, mostly autobiographical, albeit somewhat fictionalised accounts written by former slaves after the end of the American Civil War.2 Both non-fiction and fiction of the twentieth century continue to make us familiar or even confront us with these sites of slavery, such as William Faulkner’s modernist writings, which chronicle life in the South before the Civil War. In particular, his novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936) revolves around the story of a plantation, Sutpen’s Hundred, complete with an ostentatious mansion “the size of a courthouse” (Faulkner 1990, 10). Sutpen’s Hundred is built on one hundred square miles of land On the architectural settings of plantation slavery generally, see Vlach 1993. A succinct summary of the social history of plantation architecture can be found in Wright 1981. Dennis J. Pogue (2002) uses Mount Vernon, George Washington’s eighteenth-century plantation, as an example of various types of slave housing, and Jeffrey E. Klee (2007) provides insight into slavery architecture in the urban environment of Savannah, Georgia. 2 See, for example, Jacobs (2000) and Frederick Douglass’s three autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, My Bondage and My Freedom, and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, all collected in Douglass 1994. 1

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appropriated “from a tribe of ignorant Indians, nobody knows how,” by a man who “came out of nowhere,” with the help of a French architect (Faulkner 1990, 10).33 In its structure the house mirrors the rise and fall of the Sutpen family’s fortunes and moral degeneration, brought about by the fate of its involuntary inhabitants, namely the domestic and field slaves. The fate of the house mirrors the fate of the nation. As Marilyn Chandler puts it, it provides “a story of expropriation, settlement, empire-building, destruction, and dubious hope of reconstruction on questionable terms” (Chandler 1991, 249). This article addresses the interrelation between plantation architecture and social order from an alternative angle by asking the following questions: Could the plantation, beyond being considered a site of imperialism and colonialism, also be described as a locale of transcultural and transracial contact—and give rise to a distinctly modern form of cosmopolitanism that emerges among the members of the various races inhabiting it? To start with, I look at representations of the so-called “plantation complex” in novels from the past forty years, including Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976) and Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982), and especially Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008). A Mercy probably provides the least familiar view of colonial servitude in early America. Here, seventeenth-century America functions as a space where the “racial divide unfolded” gradually, “one colony at a time,” and as a space that, significantly, united rather than separated persons of disparate nationalities and races (Jennings 2009, 645). But the novels by Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson and Toni Morrison all depict plantation homes as spaces of transcultural permeability. Thereby these authors approach the plantation complex from a decidedly present(ist) perspective, acknowledging how this space haunts the national psyche to this day. They show how the imagination of architectural cosmopolitanism is used as an aesthetic and political strategy, and they rethink the infamous spatial metaphor of the W. E. B. Du Boisian colour line as a mobile and transformative site of multi-racialism, where voices from various continents are given more equal space—both physically and stylistically. 44 What is more, these recent authors present homeplaces as what bell hooks describes as “site[s] For extended discussions of architecture in Faulkner, see Chandler 1991, Ruzicka 1987 and Sundquist 1985. 4 Here I am referring to Samira Kawash’s statement (2001, 67) that “the metaphor of the color line itself is not biological, but spatial… [marking] architectural or geographical boundaries and social distinctions and divisions”—wherein the colour line is understood primarily as a geographical marker of division. 3

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of resistance and liberation struggle” (hooks 1990, 43). “Historically,” hooks writes, African American people believed that the construction of a homeplace, however fragile and tenuous (the slave hut, the wooden shack), had a radical political dimension. Despite the brutal reality of racial apartheid, of domination, one’s homeplace was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist. (hooks 1990, 42)

Significantly, a book such as Morrison’s A Mercy expanded on this perspective and included all those engaged in the struggle for liberation within or in the immediate vicinity of home sites, regardless of their particular race, thereby turning the home into a place surpassing resistance—a site of integrity for a whole variety of races. This decidedly optimistic take on the possibility of more equal racial interaction is in need of exploration, especially from the perspective of contemporary depictions of race relations and the persistence of various forms of enslavement. The latter may include, for instance, the commodification of personhood brought about by a consumer culture intent on sensations derived from bodies degraded to objects and means of entertainment. As Stephen Best asserts, “slavery is not simply an antebellum institution that the United States has surpassed but a particular historical form of an ongoing crisis involving the subjection of personhood to property” (Best 2004, 16). Precisely because not only “the concept of race in the post-slavery context,” but also the notion of slavery itself is a “persistent traveler,” as Jessica Adams aptly puts it, I will end this essay by examining contemporary forms of post-slavery and the ideology of the so-called “romance of the Old South” (Adams 2007, 14). This romance is enacted and propagated to this day by reimagined plantation economies, for example, in tours of former slave plantations. Frequently doubling as fully functioning farms, popular wedding destinations or family vacation spots, these plantations turn into sites of separation and forgetting rather than places of unification and memory. I will thus show that the question of slavery sites cannot simply be safely relegated to history, but is a modern issue that not only scholars of African American literature and culture must continue to grapple with.

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Literary Representations of Plantation Architecture Let me begin by explaining the set-up of slavery sites as presented in literature. Both Ishmael Reed’s and Charles Johnson’s novels are comic reinterpretations of traditional slave narratives, and the authors depict alternative types of architectures in order to overstep the boundaries between master and slave. Johnson’s Oxherding Tale is narrated by Andrew Hawkins, the son of a slave, who tells the story of the South Carolina plantation on which his father George worked in the antebellum South. Ironically named Cripplegate, the plantation is a “distant place,” a “ruin now, mere parable” (Johnson 1995, 3)—a parable also because, at Cripplegate, George becomes an integral part of the master’s house and takes over its most intimate space, the bedroom. After getting drunk with his master on the front porch, George “stayed clear of his cabin” (Johnson 1995, 3) and his wife. Instead, he and the master switch places in each other’s bed. George’s literal and metaphorical journey on his way up is marked by his careful climb up the staircase. In racial, social and architectural terms, he moves upward to the refined, neo-classical European style that was all the rage in masters’ houses at the time: His Master’s house was solid and rich; it was established, quiet, and so different from the squalid quarters, with vases, a vast library, and great rooms of imported furniture . . . a house of such heavily upholstered luxuriance that George now took small, mincing steps for fear of breaking something. (Johnson 1995, 5–6)5

On reaching the bedroom, George fathers the son who becomes the narrator of this rather hilarious tale. Literally turning hierarchies on their head, the novel not only blurs the strict borderline between slave and master, but also engages in quite the remarkable gender reversal: instead of a master begetting a child with a slave woman, a frequent event on plantations, in Oxherding Tale we encounter a male slave fathering a son with the white mistress of the house. If the memory of the Big House is transmitted through the son’s narrative in Johnson’s novel, the plantation home in Ishmael Reed’s satirical slave eye’s view of the Civil War, Flight to Canada, from 1976, is “just something on display at the [Toronto] Museum” (Reed 1976, 90)—at least On how the Greek as well as the Gothic Revival mirrored the political ideology of plantation architecture by constructing “a paternalistic ideology in defense of slavery,” see Ellis and Haney 2007, 10.

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in Canada, to which slave and poet Raven Quickskill flees. Like Andrew Hawkins in Oxherding Tale, the slave with the revealing name inherits his master’s house, this time through a combination of literacy and cunning: Swille [Quickskill’s master] had something called dyslexia. Words came to him scrambled and jumbled. I became his reading and writing. Like a computer, only this computer left itself Swille’s whole estate. Property [human property] joining forces with property. I left me his whole estate. I’m it, too. Me and it got more it. (Reed 1976, 171)

Here, Reed mixes history, fantasy and high comedy. A man turns into a machine only to become a free human being. A human object, as much a piece of property as the plantation he belongs to, becomes a subject. Mistress Swille, on the other hand, is offered a job in the aforementioned Toronto Museum “as part of a super-rich rehabilitation program” (Reed 1976, 172). Her job there is “[c]reating a replica of a Virginia plantation”— another object of nothing more than exhibition value (Reed 1976, 172). But what happens if the Southern plantation and, by extension, slavery, cannot be safely relegated to a museum, or to the nation’s past, as happens in both novels, but must still be imagined as a future yet to come? This is where Toni Morrison’s immigrant novel A Mercy, published in 2008, steps in. A Mercy is an especially interesting work in connection with sites of slavery and power relations since it demarcates a threshold at a time when the racial divide had not yet fully claimed the national psyche, namely the colony of Virginia in the 1680s and 1690s. The subaltern migrants of African, European, Caribbean and Native American origin who populate the novel are indentured servants, not because they are raced, but because they are owned. Once again we see how early colonial servitude, rather than acting as a race-based divider, united instead of separated the underclass of multiple nationalities. As Morrison put it in a National Public Radio interview shortly before the novel’s publication, she “wanted to separate race from slavery to see what it was like, what it might have been like, to be a slave without being raced; where your status was being enslaved but there was no application of racial inferiority” (Morrison 2008b). In other words, A Mercy asks what slavery looked like in its infancy, before it was coupled with racism—“when what we now call America was fluid, ad hoc,” and when the nation’s origin was not yet equated with whiteness (Morrison 2008b). The main locus in which racial belonging emerges step-by-step in Morrison’s novel is the plantation home with its mansion, gates and sheds. The central ethical conflict—whether or not Dutch trader Jacob Vaark will

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become a slave owner—is negotiated through multiple reconstructions of his home. But while his decline goes hand-in-hand with his desire for ever more ornate and neo-classical architecture, his servants are carving out a space for a cosmopolitan community. Like Johnson’s and Reed’s novels, Morrison’s is a narrative of origins: the beginning of a trader’s new life in the early colonial system and the origins of the American empire. The pre-national landscape through which Vaark journeys to take up life on an inherited farm is characterised as a disorderly world, a place that is “still a mess” (Morrison 2008a, 12). Only half a dozen years earlier, the people’s war had united an ethnically diverse set of people: “an army of blacks, natives, whites, mulattoes—freedmen, slaves and indentured—had waged war against local gentry led by members of that very class” (Morrison 2008a, 11). A Mercy marks a time when racial categories were still in flux. It redacts history by countering the idea that the beginning of America was coupled only with whiteness. Morrison shows us with allusions to historical events and the legal documents that derived from them that an early-white America was no more than a legally constructed myth. Vaark recalls how, after the people’s war was lost, it brought about “a thicket of new laws authorizing chaos in defense of order. By eliminating gatherings, travel and bearing arms for black people only [and] by granting license to any white to kill any black for any reason, they separated and protected all whites from all others forever” (Morrison 2008a, 11-12). Thus, while early America provided a space of experimentation in which race was, as of yet, divided from slavery, we find ourselves, throughout the reading process, on the cusp of the invention of black and white, of the genesis of white privilege over black slaves, of the “order” of a new world to come and of racism. We are called to imagine, in the words of Maxine L. Montgomery, a “fuller, more nuanced reading of America’s national history and its diverse citizenry,” and thus an alternative history of American origins (Montgomery 2011, 635). Ironically, the New World order can only come about through slave labour. When Vaark tours the Jublio plantation, the estate of slave owner Senhor D’Ortega, a Portuguese Maryland planter who offers to pay off outstanding debts with human beings, the Dutch trader finds a place that is clean and well-kept. Its productivity, however, depends upon slave labour: The mist had cleared and [Vaark] was able to see in detail the workmanship and care of the tobacco sheds, wagons, row after row of barrels—orderly and nicely kept—the well-made meat house, milk house, laundry, cookhouse. All but the last, whitewashed plaster, a jot smaller than the slave quarters but, unlike them, in excellent repair. (Morrison 2008a, 24)

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Initially, D’Ortega’s property and corporeal offer disgust Vaark: “Flesh was not his commodity,” he states (Morrison 2008a, 25). Yet the “empire” Vaark sees resting on the curve of D’Ortega’s eyebrow makes him, almost despite himself, envy “the house, the gate, the fence” (Morrison 2008a, 27, 31). This newly acquired perspective stimulates the Dutchman’s desire for a similar kind of control: “So mighten it be nice to have such a fence, a fence to include the headstones in his own meadow? And one day, not too far away, to build a house that size on his own property?” (Morrison 2008a, 31). Blinded by his desire to become the architect of a similarly grandiose home, Vaark accepts a little girl named Florens as payment. This barter marks the beginning of his gradual corruption. Nonetheless, the diverse personnel Vaark collects on his farm forms a “transnational assembly of outcasts . . . whose complex subjectivity defies reductive attempts at racial categorization” (Montgomery 2011, 627–628). The members of this group, including Vaark, are united in that all are either orphaned and/or displaced. They include a Native American mother figure, Portuguese and African slave girls, white indentured servants, an African blacksmith who is free and becomes the fellow builder of Vaark’s house (and thus eludes racial classification particularly well) and, last but not least, a European immigrant, Rebekka, who has come over from Britain to become Vaark’s wife. Each of these characters gets to speak in the various chapters. A variety of traditionally unheard voices and disregarded perspectives thus populates the plantation, a transnational space that functions as a kind of extended, if not unambivalent, family configuration. As Valerie Babb puts it, “the novel’s narrative structure privileges no one voice over another” (Babb 2011, 149). In fact, it is hard to tell initially who is speaking in each chapter. Throughout the reading process, the reader only slowly learns to find his or her way through the multifarious and often rather idiosyncratic speaking styles (which often deviate from what is generally considered standard English) of the respective characters. In the space given to the various characters to speak in his or her voice, each character assumes the role of the narrator of his or her own story, including the slave girl Florens. What makes her stand out, however, is that eventually she also takes on the role of the writer—literally inscribing the architectural space of the plantation with her own words—and she appeals to the reader to engage directly with these words. Otherwise, these words, like her story, will remain unread, as if they had never existed. After Vaark’s untimely death, Florens scribbles her story all over the wooden floor of the grand house, which has remained unfinished. As Florens puts it, “There is no more room in this room. These words cover the floor . . . If you [the reader]

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never read this, no one will” (Morrison 2008a, 188). Her words have finally taken over those of her master and point to newly gained forms of agency and empowerment, and, once more, to the “necessity for augmented origins stories,” which validate the stories located “on the margins” and thereby acknowledge the diversity of early America (Babb 2011, 159).

The Ideology of the Romance of the Old South on the Postslavery Plantation What do these stories look like when we consider former sites of slavery today? Problematically, white dominance and the legacy of racism are, at times, written in the way plantation tourism is advertised and function in subtle and not so subtle ways: through guided tours, advertising materials, vacation and leisure opportunities. As Tara McPherson observes, slavery exercises a persistent lure on the popular imagination of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while a blind eye is turned to plantations as actual sites of subjection: in many ways, Americans can’t seem to get enough of the horrors of slavery, and yet we remain unable to connect this past to the romanticized image of the plantation, unable or unwilling to process the emotional registers still echoing from the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. The brutalities of those periods remain dissociated from our representations of the material site of those atrocities, the plantation home. (McPherson 2003, 3)

Boone Hall Plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, one of the oldest and most visited plantations in the United States, is one such example of the disassociation of the atrocious circumstances of slavery from the site where these atrocities took place. On its website Boone Hall entices potential visitors with a slogan that presents the plantation as an attractive place of discovery: “America’s most photographed plantation—come see why” (http://boonehallplantation.com/). Tellingly, the aesthetic appeal of the architecture—both the buildings and the landscape of which the buildings are a part—and images of romance take precedence over the facts of slavery.

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Figure 9–1. Boone Hall Plantation, Ornamental Gate Leading to the Master’s House. Photograph Julia Faisst.

The visitor is free to enjoy, for instance, the ornamental beauty of a handcrafted gate, not unlike the one in A Mercy, as can be seen in figure 9–1. The gate literally frames the pathway to the master’s house, where the official tour of the plantation begins. To be sure, both the guided tour and the website appeal to the workings of a collective memory captured in an array of photographic snapshots. But they do so by stressing the plantation’s aesthetic qualities, such as the beauty of its orderly oak treelined drives and the spectacle it holds in store for its visitors today: In 1743, the son of Major John Boone planted live oak trees, arranging them in two evenly spaced rows. This spectacular approach to his home symbolizes southern heritage and will take root in your memory for many years to come. (Boone Hall Plantation 2011)

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Figure 9–2. Boone Hall Plantation, Oak Alley—Main Entryway. Photograph Julia Faisst.

What is most likely to take root in memory, however, is the beauty of the surroundings, rather than the collective history of slavery. Strolling down this admittedly gorgeous canopied road, one may well be so absorbed by the luscious crowns of these impressively tall trees that the row of brick houses on the left go unnoticed. Alternatively, if one allows the small and seemingly innocent homes to come into view, one might integrate them mentally into a line of sight lining up neatly with the trees—in other words, a vista of a perfect example of a well-balanced and harmonious landscape architecture. Along with advertising and parading its aesthetic charms, the plantation markets itself as a place for entertainment. Whether you take part in a “funfilled family festival,” make Boone Hall your wedding destination or spend a “Plantation Christmas” there, the estate will provide “good ole Southern holiday hospitality”—in other words, it will invoke the lost glamour of the Old South in a romanticised manner (Boone Hall Plantation 2011). A wedding party is sure to enjoy walking down the “¾ mile of 268 year old giant live oaks draped with Spanish moss . . . [which] leads the way to over 300 years of history and beauty . . . creating a setting that is absolutely breathtaking . . . and incomparable” (Boone Hall Plantation 2011). It seems no accident that the excited couples to be married and featured in the promotional video of Boone Hall are all white (“The Perfect Moment – The Perfect Place – Boone Hall Plantation”). To be accurate, Boone is a plantation on which the substantial brick

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slave quarters are prominently featured, whereas other plantations tend to erase the presence of black life altogether. But even if the quarters are extant, they are not part of the official guided tour. So-called “Slave Street” can be discovered only on a self-guided tour, but even then, its eight cabins, a selection of which are shown in figure 9–3, are identified as exhibition spaces presenting different themes in “telling the black history story,” rather than as actual slave accommodations (Boone Hall Plantation 2011).

Figure 9–3. Boone Hall Plantation, Row of Slave Cabins. Photograph Julia Faisst.

Adjacent to the big house, the cabins are represented as mere appendages to the dwellings of the white people, designed to “complement the orderly, aesthetic appeal of the master’s house” (Mooney 2004, 59). Segregation, both of the architecture and the ways in which it is presented, is, as Barbara Burlison Mooney puts it, fully at work in this “interpretive division” (Mooney 2004, 52). What remains entirely unaddressed is the exploitative labour that underlies the ornamental refinement of the white architecture. As can be seen in figure 9–3, Boone Hall’s slave cabins have been prettified, giving the impression that slave housing was, architecturally speaking, well-kept and attractive. The quaint bench under the shady tree adds to the sense that this is an environment marked by tranquillity. In fact, this type of slave housing has always been the exception, not least because it was built for only a minuscule number of slaves, namely those who

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oversaw the labour of other slaves. The habitats of the countless numbers of field slaves, far away from the master’s house, were not built to last. Other plantations go further than Boone Hall in their display of white dominance. While masters’ houses function today as upscale summer resorts with gourmet dining options, former slave quarters are reused as bed-and-breakfast cottages, gift shops, even public toilets. But the problematic writing of this peculiar kind of black-and-white history, as well as of its architectural institutions today will be the topic of another article. What I hope has become clear is that the story of slavery—both in its fictional and its material representations—continues to be written. Its material sites are the most visible evidence of slavery in existence today. They are places that not only must be visited, but also must be critically and persistently evaluated.

References Adams, Jessica. 2007. Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Babb, Valerie. 2011. “E Pluribus Unum? The American Origins Narrative in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 36 (2): 147–164. Best, Stephen. 2004. The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boone Hall Plantation. 2011. http://boonehallplantation.com. Accessed 10 August. Boone Hall Plantation. 2011. “The Perfect Moment – The Perfect Place – Boone Hall Plantation.” http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=iK4AOyaeLys. Accessed 10 August 2011. Chandler, Marilyn. 1991. Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Douglass, Frederick. 1994. Autobiographies. New York: Library of America. Ellis, Clifton and Gina Haney. 2007. “Visual Culture and Ideology: The Gothic Revival in the Backlot of Antebellum Charleston.” Southern Quarterly 44 (4): 9–40. Faulkner, William. 1990. Absalom, Absalom!. New York: Vintage. hooks, bell. 1990. “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance.” In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 41–49. Boston: South End Press.

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Jacobs, Harriet. 2000. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Signet. Jennings, La Vinia Delois. 2009. “A Mercy: Toni Morrison Plots the Formation of Racial Slavery in Seventeenth-Century America.” Callaloo 32 (2): 645–703. Johnson, Charles. 1995. Oxherding Tale. New York: Scribner. Kawash, Samira. 2001. “Haunted Houses, Sinking Ships: Race, Architecture, and Identity in Beloved and Middle Passage.” CR: The New Centennial Review 1 (3): 67–86. Klee, Jeffrey E. 2007. “Letter From America: Service Space in Savannah.” Vernacular Architecture 38: 70–74. McPherson, Tara. 2003. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Montgomery, Maxine L. 2011. “Got On My Traveling Shoes: Migration, Exile, and Home in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.” Journal of Black Studies 42 (4): 627–37. Mooney, Barbara Burlison. 2004. “Looking for History’s Huts.” Winterthur Portfolio 39 (1): 43–68. Morrison, Toni. 2008a. A Mercy. New York: Vintage. ———. 2008b. “Toni Morrison Discusses A Mercy.” Interview with Lynn Neary. NPR.org. NPR, 27 October 2008. http://www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyld=95961382. Pogue, Dennis J. 2002. “The Domestic Architecture of Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.” Winterthur Portfolio 37 (1): 3–22. Reed, Ishmael. 1976. Flight to Canada. New York: Scribner. Ruzicka, William T. 1987. Faulkner’s Fictive Architecture: The Meaning of Place in the Yoknapatawpha Novels. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Sundquist, Eric J. 1985. Faulkner: A House Divided. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Vlach, John Michael. 1993. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Wright, Gwendolyn. 1981. “The ‘Big House’ and the Slave Quarters.” Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America, 41–57. New York: Pantheon Books.

The Cranbrook Map: Locating Meanings in Textile Art Leena Svinhufvud

The Cranbrook Map is a wall hanging representing a map of the site that is now the Cranbrook Educational Community in Bloomfield Hills near the city of Detroit, Michigan, in the United States. The map was hand-woven in 1935 at Studio Loja Saarinen, the weaving studio of the Finnish-born artist Loja Saarinen (1879–1968). This large wall hanging, which measures over nine square metres (300 x 330 cm), carries on the tradition of European tapestries, representative pictorial wall hangings symbolising the power of a court or a merchant’s wealth. The textile is preserved in the collection of the Cranbrook Art Museum.1 Cranbrook was founded and built during the first half of the twentieth century by the wealthy newspaper publisher George Gough Booth (1864– 1949) and his wife Ellen Scripps Booth (1863–1948). George Booth was a founding member of the Detroit Arts and Crafts Society in 1906. By the early 1920s, the Booths were amongst the principal patrons of the American Arts and Crafts movement, commissioning tapestries, furniture, metal and glass works and other decorative items from American and European workshops (Pound 1964; Taragin 1983). In 1922 Eliel Saarinen (1873–1950), then fifty years old and already a recognised architect in Europe, won the second prize in an international competition organised by the Chicago Tribune. While visiting the United States on this occasion, he was invited to teach at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. On meeting George Booth there, Saarinen was invited to develop a plan for an art academy in Cranbrook. He was appointed resident This article is part of my postdoctoral research project on hand weaving in modern art and design in the first half of the twentieth century, with Loja Saarinen as my central case study. The idea for this article developed during my research trips to Cranbrook in December 2010 and September 2011. I wish to thank the staff of the Cranbrook Archives and the Cranbrook Art Museum for their knowledgeable help and inspiring exchange of ideas. My thanks especially to the Head Archivist, Leslie S. Edwards, and Gregory Wittkopp, the director of the Cranbrook Art Museum.

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architect, and when the Cranbrook Academy of Art was founded in 1932, Saarinen became its first president. The Saarinen family lived and worked in Cranbrook from 1925. Saarinen’s wife Loja founded her weaving studio there in 1928 and was the head of the Weaving Department from 1932 to 1942, when her studio closed (Thurman 1983; Gerard 1980). The couple’s son Eero Saarinen (1910–61) started his career there as architect, and their daughter, Pipsan (Eva-Liisa) Saarinen Swanson (1905–79), began her career as an interior designer.2 My art history research project addresses the economic systems and gendered settings that framed modern textile art in the early twentieth century. I want to challenge the traditional hierarchies of the built environment, which are formed in the systems of production. In this article I will locate meanings of textile art in the Cranbrook art community using a piece of textile art as a platform or map. I will question the kind of document a textile represents in the project studied here. The textile known as the Cranbrook Map was created in the critical years of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, at a time when the new institution became a reality and right after the years of the deepest economic depression. I read this textile as a symbol of ownership by the Cranbrook project at one of its peak moments. Also the problematic place of the woman designer and artist who participated in this project may be examined through an historical investigation of this textile.

Reading the Cranbrook Map For someone who does not know the motif of the Cranbrook Map it may appear to be an abstract work in the sense of being a non-representational or decorative wall hanging (figure 10–1). The hanging is framed by a stepped border ornament reminiscent of traditional decorative weaves. As a map, however, this textile is an abstraction of the geography and the built environment of Cranbrook.

On Saarinen family, especially Eliel and Eero Saarinen, see Westbrook and Yarowsky 1983; Hausen et al. 1990; Pelkonen and Albrecht 2006; Tuomi 2007.

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Figure 10–1. The Cranbrook Map, 1935 (CAM 1935.7). Designed by Eliel Saarinen. Woven at Studio Loja Saarinen, work attributed to Lillian Holm and Ruth Ingvarson. Copyright Cranbrook Archives.

John Gerard, the former curator of the Cranbrook Art Museum, has “translated” the textile by comparing it to other documents from this site. According to a description by Gerard, dated February 1982, all of the Cranbrook institutions designed by Saarinen are depicted here, meaning the buildings which even today form the nucleus of Cranbrook: the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the Cranbrook Institute of Science, the Cranbrook School and the Kingswood School (Cranbrook Art Museum, Object files: Cranbrook Map CAM 1935.7; see also Thurman 1983, 187 and VanderBeke Mager 2004). The hanging is sectioned into two boulevards lined with trees, with Lone Pine Road lying horizontally at the bottom and Academy Way rising vertically from the centre. Academy Way ends at a square with the initials CA (for the Cranbrook Academy of Art); these initials were woven into many rugs made at Studio Loja Saarinen (Gerard 1980). On both sides of Academy Way stand faculty buildings from the late 1920s and the early 1930s. At the entrance to the right from Lone Pine Road is the extensive complex of the Arts and Crafts Building and the Art Club. To the north appear the houses for the resident architect and the resident sculptor,

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later known as Saarinen House and Milles House. Adjoining to the north are the sculpture studios, and finally, around a rectangular courtyard are the other buildings that make up the Academy of Art. While Eliel Saarinen’s architecture forms the principal structure for this “map,” the sculptures of Carl Milles (1875–1955) also feature prominently. Recommended to Booth by Saarinen, the Swedish artist was invited to be Cranbook’s resident sculptor and moved to Michigan with his Austrian wife Olga in 1931 (Marter 1983, 245–52). One of Milles’s first works at Cranbrook was the fountain Jonah (1932), which decorates the end of the main vertical axis at the top centre of the hanging. Triton figures surround an artificial stepped pool, which creates the second vertical axis from the Lone Pine Road gate to the courtyard of the museum and library. In 1935 Milles finished a replica of Europa and the Bull in his Cranbrook studio— the original is from 1926; on the map it is located in the courtyard of the museum building in the middle of the hanging. In the genre of maps, the composition respects the points of the compass, and some of its elements have been reduced to symbols. The water in the artificial lakes and the river is depicted with a blue and white zigzag pattern. The simplified green treetops and lines indicating the hedges are also distinct. The colour of the buildings and sculptures is based on the actual colours: red brick roofs for the Cranbrook School, green copper or slate roofs for the Academy buildings, green for the patinated bronze sculptures. However, the overall colouring of the ground is light grey and brown, which does not reflect the verdant Cranbrook landscape, but does provide a useful background for the architecture. Compared with a geographic map, this representation is not accurate. The distances and scales do not correspond to the measurable landscape, nor do the positions of some of the constructions. For example, the huge Kingswood Girls School complex, which in reality almost exceeds the entire Academy of Art campus in size and lies further northeast, is squeezed into one corner of the textile. Looking at the hanging as a map, one is struck by the variation in depicting the buildings. The two schools are shown in plan format: the Cranbrook School on the left of Academy Way and the Kingswood Girls School at the top right corner by the swan lake, both distinguished merely as orange (or brick-coloured) rectangular shapes. By contrast, the Cranbrook Institute of Science at the top centre is shown in elevation. Furthermore, the façade has been marked with stars, and there are two observer figures indicating the function of this building (on the interpretation of these figures, see Gerard 1982). Finally, the buildings in the middle of the textile

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are depicted through a flattened perspective. These are the Academy buildings that already existed together with a considerable number of new structures growing towards the north and east on the map. Some of the buildings were still being planned and some were never realised. (Compare the site map in Westbrook and Yarowsky 1983, 53 and 351, as well as Eckert 2001.) The intrusive three dimensionality of these constructions is further highlighted by their central position in the composition. In modern woven textiles stylisation is often expected, but here the variation in the presentation seems to contain a message. It thus seems that topicality is the key to understanding the variation of architectural representation here. World economic depression caused a halt to construction activities at Cranbrook. In 1935 Saarinen was negotiating with George Booth on a plan for a museum and a library, studio buildings and other facilities to complete the Academy of Art complex; i.e. the complex highlighted in the hanging. Outdoor sculptures were also topical. In the same year, all 66 pieces by Milles were acquired to decorate the Cranbrook premises. As president of the Art Academy at the time, Eliel Saarinen said of the acquisition: “It will make Cranbrook one of the great beauty spots in this country and will add greatly to its importance as an art center” (Baulch 1999). Thus, rather than a map, this hanging represents a layout of Eliel Saarinen’s total plan. Cranbrook Layout was, in fact, the textile’s original title (Gerard 1982). Moreover, my reading suggests an active role for the modern woven hanging at the time the development of Cranbrook was being negotiated. There are two other buildings that stand out by their elevated depiction. One is the above-mentioned Institute of Science. It was originally designed by George Booth, and around 1935 it was being redesigned by Saarinen. (De Long 1983, 65n69.) Also shown in elevation is a temple-like building at the bottom right corner of the textile. It is the Cranbrook Pavilion designed by Albert Kahn in 1924, a large hall with columns, which was used for theatre performances. The Pavilion was built beside the socalled Greek Temple, where arts and crafts pageantries were performed outdoors. In the early 1930s the Pavilion was renovated to provide a lecture and performance space and exhibition hall (Taragin 1983, 38–39). On its roof is a setting that, according to John Gerard, shows the subtle humour of Eliel Saarinen (Gerard 1982). A male figure on the left carrying a painter’s palette presents a miniature house for a penguin-like creature on the right and wearing black boots. Amongst the variety of interpretations, the representation of the architect Saarinen and the patron Booth seems incontestable (see also VanderBeke Mager 2004; Thurman 1983, 187).

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The third figure between the two men, a Triton, may well represent the third actor in this setting, the sculptor Milles. The image within an image alludes to medieval ecclesiastical art wherein votive images were used to memorialise the donor and the act of donating. This pictorial tradition was followed in the Arts and Crafts movement, and in fact, examples of votive symbolism are found both in Eliel Saarinen’s and George Booth’s earlier architectural projects (Amberg 1998; Eckert 2001, 27; Pound 1964, 292– 293). The votive image of central figures further underlines the symbolic value of the hanging as representing an imaginary map of the Cranbrook project and invites a more profound investigation of this textile and its history.

The Cranbrook Vision When it was finished in May 1935, the Cranbrook Map was placed in the very Pavilion depicted in the textile–with Eliel Saarinen and George Booth at the top. The hanging was first displayed there as part of the Exhibition of Home Furnishings. Among a broad array of interior textiles produced by Studio Loja Saarinen, the hanging was presented in a special way, flanked by stepped, flared columns (figure 10–2). This “telescope motif” was the main pattern used throughout the Kingswood school and was seen on chimneys, leaded windows and rugs (De Long 1983, 59, 61; Thurman 1983, 188–189 and image 153).3 Judging from the surviving black and white photographs, the columns were constructed of plants or other organic material. Standing beside the flat hanging, the “living” columns with their identifiable architectural reference emphasise the realistic content of the abstract textile: this is a map consisting of buildings, sculpture and landscape.

I want to thank Leslie S. Edwards for pointing out the “Kingswood columns” in a photograph. 3

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Figure 10–2. Exhibition of Home Furnishings in the Cranbrook Pavilion in May 1935. Copyright Cranbrook Archives. Photograph Richard G. Askew (CEC 2761).

It was George Booth himself who purchased the tapestry for the Cranbrook Pavilion.4 In the previous section I illustrated the Cranbrook Map hanging as a tool in negotiation. Besides showing a commitment to the Arts and Crafts tradition, the votive image reveals the symbiotic relationship between patron and architect. The ceremony between two men woven into this map brings to mind another theatrical scene: the ceremony at the University of Michigan in which Eliel Saarinen was formally introduced into the community of American architects and in which George Booth also played a role. In December of 1923 a welcoming celebration was arranged in Ann Arbor, consisting of an exhibition of “Professor Saarinen’s work,” a “Pageant of Arts and Crafts” organised by George Booth’s son Henry (Harry) Scripps Booth (1897–1988) and a dinner with Booth père as one of According to Leslie S. Edwards, George Booth then donated the textile to the Cranbrook Foundation; it was later transferred into the Art Museum’s collection. The hanging with “Kingswood columns” was moved to a permanent installation on the end wall of the Pavilion some time after the exhibition. Already in 1936 the Cranbrook Pavilion was turned over to the theatre group of Henry S. Booth, St Dunstan’s Guild, and the hanging was used to decorate the dining hall of the Cranbrook School. It is not quite clear when the textile was moved from there. Possibly this took place in 1942 when the new art museum and library were opened. E-mail communication from Leslie S. Edwards to the writer, 2 March 2011. 4

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the speakers. A narration of this event describes the stately reception given for the Finnish architect: There the noted Finn was honored by an arts-and-crafts pageant put on by ninety students before an audience of Michigan architects from all parts of the state, with Harry Booth as author, director and principal actor. The reader will recall the old Cranbrook habit of staging plays and pageants at Cranbrook. On this occasion at Ann Arbor, father George Booth was chief speaker to members of the American Institute and Michigan Society of Architects, and discussed with the guest of honor a program to accelerate expansion at Cranbrook. This contact gave prompt direction and zest to the hitherto leisurely thoughts of George and Ellen Booth on Cranbrook developments.5 (Pound 1964, 277, 305–6)

Henry S. Booth and Saarinen’s future son-in-law, J. Robert F. Swanson (1900–81), were then studying architecture in Ann Arbor under Eliel Saarinen. The mediating role of the family members in creating the connection between Saarinen and Cranbrook is brought out in the biographies of Booth and Saarinen (Pound 1964; Christ-Janer 1948; Tuomi 2007, 113–14). However, as the Saarinen scholar Gregory Wittkopp has shown, George Booth had already learned about Eliel Saarinen in April of 1923 from Emil Lorch, the director of the Department of Architecture at the University of Michigan (see the discussion on claiming the credit for the introduction in Wittkopp 1994, 23–24). The following year, while committed to a development project on the Detroit River Front sponsored by George Booth, Eliel Saarinen started to work on the idea of an academy of art in Cranbrook. Saarinen worked on the plan intensively while living in Ann Arbor, and in October of 1924, the first master plan for the Cranbrook Academy of Art was ready.6 At this stage Henry Booth and J. Robert F. Swanson, having now graduated as architects, were responsible for the construction of the first completed buildings for the educational community under the tutelage of Saarinen. The Saarinen family moved to Cranbrook in the fall of 1925, and Eliel Saarinen started his work there now tutoring his former students Henry Booth and J. Robert F. Swanson in building the Cranbrook Architectural Office. The office opened in June of 1926, and the next year Saarinen was officially appointed chief architectural officer. Other projects followed, There is a printed program of this event in Saarinen Family Papers, Box 1:13. On Eliel Saarinen’s first projects in America see De Long 1983, 50, 52; Pound 1964, 306, 402; Christ-Janer 1948, 135; Details of Saarinen’s projects were also published in Finnish newspapers; see for example Standertskjöld 2010, 30. 5 6

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including a school for boys (the Cranbrook School, 1927–29), residences and craft studios (the Arts and Crafts Buildings, 1928–29), Residences #1 and #2 for the resident architect and resident sculptor (Saarinen House and Milles House, 1928–30), a school for girls (the Kingswood Girls School, 1929–32), the Cranbrook Academy of Art (1930–38), the Cranbrook Institute of Science (1935–38), and the Museum and Library building for the Academy of Art (1938–42). (Wittkopp 1994, 24–26; Westbrook and Yarowsky 1983, 351.) While the existing institutions and buildings in Cranbrook testify to the collaboration between George Booth and Eliel Saarinen, the initial phase remains somewhat unclear. J. Robert F. Swanson recalled that Booth and Saarinen started to work together intensively in the fall of 1926 (Wittkopp 1994, 25). However, the first two master plans had already been drafted in Ann Arbor. There is an unpublished manuscript on the Academy of Art project by Eliel Saarinen, dated 1925 and thus probably written in Ann Arbor. (Saarinen 1925) I suggest that this manuscript was, in fact, part of Saarinen’s initial plan submitted to George Booth.7 A scale model was made, based on Saarinen’s master plan from 1925. It was crafted by Loja Saarinen and presented to Booth in May of 1925 (De Long 1983, 52, 54 and n30). George Booth’s idealism is often emphasised: his religious background, his social and educational aims and his commitment to art reform (Harris 1983). Indeed, the media first presented Cranbrook to the public as a philanthropic educational project. This was demonstrated for example in newspaper articles published in 1928 with titles The Cranbrook Foundation to Help Youth Develop its Talents and Publisher Dedicates Fortune to Make Youth better Citizens (Scrapbook Collection, 1927–32).8 Perspective drawings by Eliel Saarinen and publicity photos taken of the scale model illustrated newspaper articles. Over the following decades the Finnish architect and his family played an important role in articles and news about The original typescript written in English is preserved at the library of the Museum of Finnish Architecture in Helsinki. It is part of the material donated by Loja Saarinen in 1952 to the Finnish Association of Architects. On the first page is a pencil marking in Loja Saarinen’s handwriting: “BY ELIEL SAARINEN. 1925.” In a letter to Johannes Öhquist dated 12 March 1926 she mentions that Eliel is writing about architectural pedagogy for the Academy’s brochure (Collection Johannes Öhquist). Timo Tuomi refers to a contemporary newspaper article, which tells about Eliel Saarinen working on a book (Tuomi 2007, 114 and n118). 8 These articles were published in Washington Post, 24 January 1928 and in The Detroit News, 8 January 1928. 7

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Cranbrook. As a newspaper man, Booth understood the power of publicity, but Saarinen was no innocent to the media, either. I will return to this issue at the end of this article. This collaboration between patron and architect can be interpreted in the context of the specialised capitalist systems of a modernising bourgeois culture. The idea of “bourgeois modernism,” used by the historian Maiken Umbach in her study of the Deutscher Werkbund of Germany, connects networks of reformist designers and architects to conservative industry and business. A bourgeois lifestyle was defined, not as an ideology, but rather in and through constant performance, “a theatrical stage of bourgeois identity performances” (Umbach 2009, 15). The idea of performance lends itself to the Cranbrook Map as a manifestation of the collaboration between George Booth and Eliel Saarinen. Notwithstanding their economic differences and positions in the Cranbrook hierarchy, Booth and Saarinen shared a bourgeois identity, visible in their lifestyle with its many social rituals, such as reciprocal visits and academic events (see, for example, Wittkopp 1994). Commitment to their mutual project in times of uncertainty seems to have brought these men and their families close in the early 1930s (For an inspiring discussion on the relationship between patron and architect see Suominen-Kokkonen 2007). In a letter to Johannes Öhquist dated 24 May 1935, Loja Saarinen stated that George and Ellen Booth even planned a trip to Hvitträsk, the Saarinens’ home in Finland, in the summer of 1935, just after the Cranbrook Map was created (Collection Johannes Öhquist). The visit took place in 1938, and George Booth describes their friendship in a letter to the clergyman Samuel Marquis, dated 11 September 1938: We had a very enjoyable time in the north beginning with Finland where Mr. & Mrs. Saarinen looked after us in a very fine way . . . . we were there a week and returned to Stockholm for a ten day stay and on their way to Italy Mr. & Mrs. Saarinen joined us at Stockholm for two days . . . . (Samuel Simpson Marquis Papers (1983-07), 1:11)9

Textile Art at Cranbrook Cranbrook is part of the history of modern textile art. In hindsight, it seems obvious that training in weaving would be established at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and that interior textiles for the Cranbrook buildings Samuel Marquis was the Rector of Christ Church Cranbrook. I want to thank Leslie S. Edwards for apprising me of this valuable source of the Rector’s papers. 9

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would be produced locally. However, given the scale and complexity of the project, this question needs to be reassessed. According to his biography, George Booth’s vision of his Academy of Art embraced the unity of the arts under the umbrella of architecture: “Architecture not only employs other arts; it houses them. If an inclusive art is sometime to verge on perfection, all of its contributory arts must be equally developed” (Quoted in Pound 1964, 380). For Eliel Saarinen too, architecture was “the all-embracing mother-art” (Saarinen 1925, [Ch.] XXII: 3). In his unpublished manuscript from around 1925 Saarinen elaborates on his idea of a modern art academy (see also Tuomi 2007, 114–23; Chudoba 2011, 70–72, 128–31). Opposed to traditional academic art education, Saarinen identified the medieval workshop with its masters and apprentices as the ideal training ground: “The building site itself and the stone-yard previously directed the executing of the structure. Today, the architect’s office directs the works” (Saarinen 1925, [Ch.] XXVI, “The Architectural Office”). As there would be a great deal of work for painters, sculptors and craftsmen at Cranbrook, workshops and studios attached to the architectural office were expected to spring up. In Saarinen’s plan the Academy of Art was to be divided into five departments: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Artcraft and Landscape Gardening. The “Artcraft” department included work in metal, wood, glass, ceramics and textiles. Its educational scope would include all art forms directly connected to architecture, from sculpture in stone and wood and mural painting to pure painting and sculpture, “and especially all the artcraft in different materials, beginning with metalwork and ending with textiles, which has its practical application in home-furnishing etc” (Saarinen 1925, [Ch.] XXVIII, “The Arts Allied to Architecture in connection with the Activity of the Office”). Thus, textiles—though not specifically weaving—were part of Saarinen’s initial plan, whereas some other arts initially suggested in the plan were not included in the Academy of Art curriculum (regarding the landscape architecture, see Balmori 1994). There is a much-repeated story about the founding of Studio Loja Saarinen based on an interview with the artist in a contemporary newspaper article. According to this account, George Booth had proposed that she design textiles for Eliel Saarinen’s buildings in Cranbrook and suggested that they could be manufactured in Finland. Loja Saarinen’s response was, why not weave them in Cranbrook? (Thurman 1983, 175) This story emphasises her initiative as an artist. George Booth was well aware of contemporary European textile art through his travels and his activities with the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts. He also had considerable knowledge

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of textile history as a collector (Thurman 1983, 173–75; on the Society, see Colby 1956). His collections included European tapestries, and, as an admirer of William Morris, in the 1920s Booth supported the continuation of Morris’s tapestry workshop in Merton Abbey, Surrey, in the UK (Parry 1983). As the textile historian Christa C. Mayer Thurman has pointed out, Booth even wanted to hire English tapestry weavers at Cranbrook (Thurman 1983, 173). Although Booth did not include textiles in his initial plan for the Cranbrook Academy of Art (Clark 1983, 29), his concern with the place of textiles in the practice of Arts and Crafts was very serious, as Thurman (ibid., 174) asserts. The place and status of textile art in Cranbrook can be observed in the physical environment. Spatial practices reflect the hierarchies and dynamics of society, and built space can be observed as a network of power (see e.g. Saarikangas 2010). The spaces reserved for textile production can be studied in photographs, architectural drawings and other archival documents, as well as by exploring the existing physical site. Studio Loja Saarinen was established in the brand-new Arts and Crafts Building, which lies at the main entrance to Cranbrook from Academy Road, one building away from the Saarinen residence and next to the Art Club building, where some of Loja Saarinen’s staff resided. Although there are no annotations in the original drawings on the planned use of the building, from the very beginning the premises were used by the weaving studio. The studio had its own entrance right next to the gate to Cranbrook. The main space is a large vaulted hall, clearly visible from the exterior of the building. Large looms for weaving rugs were placed in the basement. The first-floor studio accommodated working space for looms and, by the gable window, a reception space with a table and benches. A photograph from ca. 1930 shows that the first floor of the studio was beautifully furnished (figure 10–3). The furniture and textiles were mainly from the Cranbrook studios. The decorative paintings in the wooden ceiling were by the Detroit artist and craftswoman Katherine McEwen (1875–1945), a founding member of the Detroit Society for Arts and Crafts whom George Booth had commissioned to create mural paintings for Cranbrook. Here the visual programme relates to textile production, which indicates the original purpose of these premises (Cranbrook Foundation Records, Box 19: Cranbrook Academy of Arts Craft Shops Inventory; cf. Eckert 2001, 105; today, this impressive first-floor studio is used by one of Cranbrook’s resident artists). Clearly, this space also had a representational function, and for this, we turn our attention to the public character of the workshop.

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Figure 10–3. Interior of Studio Loja Saarinen ca. 1929. Copyright Cranbrook Archives (CEC 1424).

Studio Loja Saarinen was not a closed workshop for production, but rather a commercial studio. In fact, all the arts and crafts studios at Cranbrook worked the same way. The original function of the craft studios was to produce artwork for the Cranbrook premises and sell their products outside, to private clients and to other architectural projects (Thurman 1983, 189–92; Wittkopp 1995, 31).10 Loja Saarinen was one of the resident craftspeople at Cranbrook and the only woman in this position. Her studio got off to a flying start, thanks to large commissions for Cranbrook, but there were also other clients, one of the most notable being the perfumer and businessman Richard Hudnut and his stylish Fifth Avenue showroom in New York which Loja Saarinen mentions in her letter to Johannes Öhquist dated 8 June 1930 (Collection Johannes Öhquist; on Richard Hudnut’s commission see Miller 1983, 101–2). In 1933, when the Great Depression was forcing the closing of other crafts studios, the weaving studio remained open. It is interesting that considerable effort was now put in to promoting Loja Saarinen’s Studio. An elegantly furnished showroom—“my new, beautiful atelier,” as Loja described it in a letter—was opened in another Cranbrook building, separate from the weaving activities. In December of On the commercial function of Cranbrook workshops, see also Taragin 1983, 40–42 and Marter 1983, 239. 10

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1933 Loja Saarinen held a joint exhibition with her daughter Pipsan. Four hundred people were invited to the opening, which featured a fashion show of Pipsan’s designs. Loja’s “atelier” was also kept open, but sales were poor, as Loja Saarinen commented in another letter, dated 17 December 1933 (Collection Johannes Öhquist). Studio Loja Saarinen thus appealed to clients from outside the Cranbrook art community. A brochure of Studio Loja Saarinen, printed around 1932 advertised “Handwoven Art Fabrics, Rugs and Window Hangings, Special Commissions Only. All work undertaken from original designs and of selected materials. The rugs and curtains produced stress the suitability of design and color for the place with exceptional durability” (Saarinen Family Papers, Box 4:9). The leaflet printed for the Exhibition of Home Furnishings in 1935 also stated that the objects were for sale and “special orders will be executed” (Cranbrook Foundation Records, Box 26:20). Perhaps the craft-based production of interior textiles was expected to thrive during times that were difficult for industries (see my discussion on the depression and the craft-based industries in Finland in Svinhufvud 2009). Although no great economic success, the weaving studio survived. In any case Studio Loja Saarinen realised the vision of Eliel Saarinen and George Booth for crafts workshops as commercial enterprises. The exhibition of 1935 showing the Cranbrook Map and the “group arrangements” by Eliel Saarinen, Loja Saarinen, Pipsan Saarinen Swanson and J. Robert F. Swanson is interesting from yet another perspective. It was a “Saarinen family exhibition” (Christ-Janer 1948, 110, 129). According to the printed brochure there were two interiors: “A Room for a Lady,” designed for the 1935 Industrial Art Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a living room ensemble designed by the Saarinen Swanson couple. The rest of the exhibition consisted of “Formal and Informal Table Arrangements designed by Loja Saarinen and woven on the Cranbrook Looms” and finally, “Tapestries Runners Rugs Handbags by Loja Saarinen” (Cranbrook Foundation Records, Box 26:20). It is puzzling that Studio Loja Saarinen is not named as the manufacturer of the textiles here (although it was) and that some of the woven items are identified as “by” Loja Saarinen—i.e. the design was not markedly differentiated from the execution. By contrast, a gown from the “Room for a Lady” arrangement was, according to the text, “designed and executed” by Pipsan Saarinen Swanson. The ambiguous expression in this document raises questions about the roles of Loja Saarinen, which for the time being remain unanswered.

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The Imaginary Weaver On the cover of the brochure for Studio Loja Saarinen is a drawing of a woman weaving at a loom (figure 10–4). Is this a “portrait” of Loja Saarinen, a document of the artist at work? It was, after all, to Loja Saarinen that George Booth paid $355.30 for a “Tapestry for Pavilion” (Invoice from Loja Saarinen to George Booth, 22 May 1935, Saarinen Family Papers 3:15). There was a tag attached to the hanging with the text: “Tapestry 10’ x 11’, value $375. Cranbrook Layout. Design: Eliel Saarinen. Studio of Loja Saarinen, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan” (Cranbrook Art Museum, Object files: Cranbrook Map (CAM 1935.7). The design, or in other words the picture in the textile, is here attributed to Eliel Saarinen.

Figure 10–4. The Studio Loja Saarinen, cover of a printed brochure dated in 1932. Copyright Cranbrook Archives, Saarinen Family Papers (1990-08).

In Finland Loja Saarinen, who was educated as a sculptor, assisted her husband in his architectural projects, in making sculptures and in fashioning architectural scale models. She was not trained in textile art, yet at the age of 49 she stepped onto the scene in Cranbrook as an independent textile designer and founded a rather large weaving studio which bears her name. Loja Saarinen was also the founder and head of the textile department at the Cranbrook Art Academy. However, unlike other artists and craftspeople on the faculty, she never taught weaving herself. This is highly unusual,

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given the master-apprentice ideal expressed in Eliel Saarinen’s visions for the academy mentioned above. In fact, Loja Saarinen’s identity as a weaver is quite problematic. In the literature on Eliel Saarinen, his wife Loja has been described as specialising in textile craft. As the landscape designer and historian Diana Balmori has stated, this traditional women’s work has provided a suitable compartment for Loja vis-à-vis her husband’s oeuvre (Balmori 1994). The wife of the architect was remembered as a maker of textiles and even as a weaver. Relatives have recalled that in the 1910s, Loja was weaving on the loom at Hvitträsk (Thurman 1983, 176). She was assumed to have woven the large bench rug called a ryijy, which Eliel designed for their home, until the work was attributed to a professional weaving studio in Helsinki called Friends of Finnish Handicraft (Finnish: Suomen Käsityön Ystävät; Saarinen in Finland 1984, 24, caption 1; cf. Amberg 1987, 93). According to her own statement, given in a Finnish newspaper interview, Loja Saarinen took a short course in weaving in Helsinki in order to start her own studio in America (Kuoppamäki 1932). This statement is supported by a Cranbrook memoir, which states that Loja Saarinen “perfected her skill in weaving” at Cranbrook (Thurman 1983, 187n62). Loja Saarinen thus knew how to weave, but she had not specialised as a weaver. It is highly unlikely that Loja Saarinen participated in weaving the Cranbrook Map, although she may have contributed to the process as she did with other hangings (Thurman 1983, 192). In her studio she had other experts carrying out the practical work. Loja Saarinen reports in a letter dated 4 November 1928, that to start production, she had hired a Swedish immigrant woman from Chicago as a weaver (Collection Johannes Öhquist). In 1929 Maja Andersson Wirde (1873–1952), a textile artist in the Swedish Association for Textile Art (Handarbetets Vänner) in Stockholm, was invited to give instruction in weaving at the Academy of Art (Thurman 1983, 181–88). According to the Annual Reports of the Association Wirde was a recognised expert in woven textiles who also had experience as a teacher (Årsberättelse för Föreningen Handarbetets Vänner, 1907–29). She worked for Studio Loja Saarinen as a designer and technical expert, and her fee was actually paid jointly by Loja Saarinen and the Cranbrook Foundation. In the studio Wirde supervised the weavers, many of whom were of Swedish-immigrant origin. The Cranbrook Map may have been woven by two weavers who came to Cranbrook with Wirde and who received further training in Sweden around this time, Lillian Holm (1896– 1979) and Ruth Ingvarson (1897–1969) (Thurman 1983, 187–88). Thus, a hierarchy existed in the weaving studio (see my discussion on hierarchy in

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the studio of the Friends of Finnish Handicraft in the 1920s and 1930s in Svinhufvud 2009). In the case of the Cranbrook Map, most of the production costs came from weaving and mounting, the work of craftswomen. According to the contract between Loja Saarinen and the Cranbrook Foundation, Saarinen received a 10 per cent supplement on the actual production costs for “design and supervision.” Regarding the attribution of the design (the picture), we have to rely on the information written on the tag because no sketches survive. In her personal letters dated 3 March 1930 and 9 September 1932 Loja Saarinen wrote that she “realised” (her word in Swedish is utarbeta) Eliel’s designs for textiles (Collection Johannes Öhquist). Lacking comprehensive documentation, knowledge about her work as a designer is limited and contradictory. However, some documents do remain to tell about her communication with clients and how she took charge of financial matters. They in fact reveal her considerable organisational skills. Loja Saarinen was the manager of her weaving studio and also the person in the Saarinen artist family who “kept the strings in the house.” This was the description given by the Saarinen family’s maid, Anna Danielson, who also worked as a weaver for Loja Saarinen (Balmori 1995, 152). The identity of a designer-organiser fits the profile of an entrepreneur. Indeed, the idea of entrepreneurship shifts the focus from the artist’s individual creativity to the collective processes of design, networks and production systems. Other scholars have shown examples of European and American women artists who made their careers and earned their livelihoods in their own studios on the basis of traditional hand weaving. Textile historians Mary Schoeser and Whitney Blausen have labeled textile design as “well-paying self-support.” They cite as examples the successful businesses of Loja Saarinen’s contemporaries Maria Kipp (1900–88) and Dorothy Liebes (1897–1972), who as studio owners organised the work of craftspeople and sometimes employed other artists as designers. (Schoeser and Blausen 2000; see also Musicant 2000, Winton 2009 and Boydell 1995.) Schoeser and Blausen point out that in the studios of well-known artist-designers, the so-called in-house designers remained relatively anonymous. Brand recognition and the name of the studio—the name of the central figure—became important when competition was fierce. Thus, while the logic of producing textiles in a modern weaving studio followed corporate strategies and the logic of industry, the modernist myth of a singular artist genius was still useful to mark the ownership of the products. (See the discussion of the designers for the Finnish Artek design company in Suominen-Kokkonen 1997.)

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In 1939 the Cranbrook Map was shown in the San Francisco Golden Gate international exhibition. There it was presented unambiguously as a tapestry by the Finnish artist Loja Saarinen: “Loja Saarinen. Finland. Tapestry” (Decorative Arts… 1939). Given the other documentation presented here, the attribution might seem puzzling. However, in the context of textile art of the period, it makes sense. The textile was produced at Loja Saarinen’s studio and was, so to speak, “her art.” Women designers who worked with woven textiles were called “weavers” as they often are still today. The title refers to the practical work of weaving, and it is problematic in the case of Loja Saarinen and her designer-entrepreneur colleagues. Moreover, there was a socio-cultural distinction between these so-called “weavers” and the women who actually wove the textiles. However, images of women by the loom were used effectively in media publicity and marketing, as in the brochure for Studio Loja Saarinen. Images of female artists sitting at their looms popularised the modern profession of specialised textile designers (Svinhufvud 2009). Presenting themselves as specialists in hand weaving, these women and their art were linked to a gendered craft tradition. Yet embracing the traditional tool was important as a way of establishing their position in relation to consumers of modern crafted textiles.

Textile and Scale Model as Imagined Architecture In historical records such as the exhibition catalogue quoted above, the Cranbrook Map is consistently called a tapestry. However, the technique of this hanging is quite different from that of a tapestry. It was woven with a plain weave with discontinuous wefts, a technique connected to Swedish textile art. This was a signature technique of the Swedish Association for Textile Art, also called HV-teknik, which was developed to produce modern decorative interior textiles (Thurman 1983, 177; see also, for example, Handarbetets Vänner 1907, 4–5, 8). At Cranbrook the technique was developed for transparent curtains and decorative wall hangings. There, skilful weaving resulted in astonishingly detailed forms, such as the recognisable sculptures in the Cranbrook Map. There was indeed a great deal of work in the technical execution, while the design process demanded a great deal of specialist attention as well. The figures are based on geometric stylisation. Imitating routes and paths, the background is divided into rectangular forms, and although this is an aesthetic solution, it is also relevant technically, balancing the structure of the delicate, translucent

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fabric. The weavers needed a 1:1 scale pattern drawing for their work. The yarns also had to be selected before the actual weaving process. Yarns of varying materials and colours were mixed to create a lively surface; on close observation the texture, woven with linen, wool and rayon, is extremely variegated. There is, however, little improvisation in the actual weaving where the contours of figures have to be followed carefully. Two other large hangings were woven at Studio Loja Saarinen using this technique: The Festival of the May Queen (1932) for the Kingswood Girls School at Cranbrook and The Sermon on the Mount (1941) created for the First Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana. Compared with the other hangings, the untapestry-like motif (a map) and the references to architectural representation techniques make the Cranbrook Map special. Christa C. Mayer Thurman cites the Cranbrook Map as a prime example of Eliel Saarinen’s use of architectural motifs as his central design concept in textiles (Thurman 1983, 187, 181–183; see also Elliott 2008). With its variety of presentation methods—plan, elevation and aerial perspective— the hanging can also be interpreted as a visualisation of architectural design techniques. In fact, the Cranbrook Map materialises the idea of perspectival or three-dimensional understanding of architecture articulated in Eliel Saarinen’s manuscript of 1925: “A building never in reality appears as shown on the drawing or as it is measured and erected, but it is always a perspectivic [sic] apparition with the relation of masses and proportions perspectivically [sic] foreshortened” (Saarinen 1925, [Ch.] XIV, “The Development of Three Dimensional Imagination”). Saarinen argues that “perspectivic feeling” should be applied to the design process and that most of the designing should be done using perspective drawings and threedimensional models. This ideal was applied to the training of architects at Cranbrook by using three-dimensional models. As a joint project of Eliel and Loja Saarinen, the Cranbrook Map is reminiscent of another form of craft that connected their creative work: architectural scale models. Eliel Saarinen used scale models in his architectural projects. They were key elements in large town planning projects in which he demonstrated his skills in “performing” architecture. For the city development project of Munkkiniemi-Haaga in Helsinki, executed between 1910 and 1915, it was Loja Saarinen who crafted the scale model. The Munkkiniemi-Haaga model, measuring more than 5 metres by 2.5 metres and preserved in the collections of the Helsinki City Museum, bears witness to the Saarinens’ commitment to this massive project. In 1915 the model was presented in an exhibition in Helsinki displaying this ambitious development project sponsored by Helsinki

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businessmen (Mikkola 1990, 202–211). Photographs of the model were used to illustrate the project publication, including scientific articles and detailed city plans in colour (Saarinen 1915). As mentioned above, a scale model was also included in Eliel Saarinen’s first plan for Cranbrook. According to a letter dated 26 December 1926, Loja Saarinen worked six hours a day in Eliel’s office starting at the end of 1926, possibly continuing with the original model or making new ones (Collection Johannes Öhquist). In 1928 she was receiving a dollar an hour from the Cranbrook Foundation for making models. (Balmori 1994, 55). The photographs of the impressive Cranbrook model (figure 10–5) were used extensively in publicity when George Booth launched the Cranbrook project in 1928. (Scrapbook Collection 1927–32). A model of the Kingswood Girls School, also made by Loja Saarinen, was similarly used. In fact, photos of scale models were a very effective medium for presenting architectural plans. Published in newspapers, the carefully illuminated and cropped, close-up images of the model resemble aerial photography, a popular documentary genre of the time. The “perspectivicality” shown in these staged photos is strongly reminiscent of Eliel Saarinen’s most skilful architectural drawings of the site (Westbrook and Yarowsky 1983, 34; on representations of modern textiles in photographs, see Svinhufvud 2010).

Figure 10–5. Photograph of the scale model of Cranbrook taken in 1928 for publicity purposes. The model was made by Loja Saarinen ca. 1925 after Eliel Saarinen’s original plan drawings. Copyright Cranbrook Archives. Photograph Harvey Croze (FD227).

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George Booth later had the scale model for Cranbrook destroyed (Pound 1964, 379, 387), but surviving photographs show its fine craftsmanship. Loja Saarinen’s skill and meticulous construction of architectural scale models were noted by Eliel Saarinen’s biographer, former director of Cranbrook Museum Albert Christ-Janer, who also described the fidelity and detail of the Cranbrook model (Christ-Janer 1948, 39, 67). According to George Booth, the model was the result of “months of work by Loja Saarinen following long discussions” (Pound 1964, 379, 387). Making the scale model was certainly a great technical effort. However, Booth’s comment indicates the presence of Loja Saarinen and even her participation in the planning process. She worked physically with the architects, and her work was part of the process. In the description of Loja Saarinen’s contribution to the Cranbrook project, the picture of an imaginary weaver will now be challenged by the (missing) image of this artist working with the staff of the Cranbrook Architecture Office. If the Cranbrook Map was indeed used as a medium in the negotiations between Saarinen and Booth as I suggest, then the scale model can also be interpreted as a skilfully crafted argument aimed at a wider audience. These works, which illustrate the architectural idea in a highly evocative way, could be described as “imagined architecture.” We do not know who initiated either of these objects—the textile or the scale model­. What we do know is that Loja Saarinen played a central role in the execution of both.

Conclusion In conjunction with a large international exhibition in 1983–84, the monograph entitled Design in America: The Cranbrook Vision 1925– 1950 published a major research project, which mapped the history of the Cranbrook art community for the first time. The Cranbrook Map appears on the title page of this book. Re-reading it in the historical context of its production, I have interpreted this textile here as a document of the Cranbrook project. The Cranbrook Map positions modern textile art within the prestigious tradition of European tapestries. The form, motif, naming and placement of this wall hanging, as well as the system of production as a commissioned object respond to that tradition. However, if we look at the textile as merely a product or an object, we will miss the production of the meanings attached to it. I have shown that this “tapestry” is not merely proof of its commissioner’s commitment to the Arts and Crafts movement.

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It is also a document of Eliel Saarinen’s oeuvre at Cranbrook and the total architectural plan, including Carl Milles’s sculptures. George Booth is also portrayed as the patron of Cranbrook and the person who commissioned this textile. Loja Saarinen, however, does not figure on this map unless one is aware of its production history. This essay deals with the age-old question of attribution: who gets the credit? The Cranbrook Vision project celebrated Eliel Saarinen as the central figure in Cranbrook’s history. The task that Saarinen took upon himself was enormous, and the results are spectacularly evident, even today, but there were also other actors. One of the most interesting is the patron, George Booth, whose activities in the social and economic networks of architecture and design await reappraisal. Booth was a strong patron for whom Cranbrook was not just an economic investment. He participated in Cranbrook’s design on many levels, including quite concretely. While I was writing this article, I visited the exhibition Vision and Interpretation: Building Cranbrook 1904–2012 at the Cranbrook Art Museum and was thrilled to see George Booth’s sketches for buildings and spaces that have become known as “Eliel Saarinen’s” and “Albert Kahn’s” architecture. Loja Saarinen is best known today for modern decorative rugs and figurative hangings for the Cranbrook interiors. The technically challenging and time-consuming pictorial weaves were major projects for her studio. The public exposure of her “tapestry” in the Golden Gate international exhibition and elsewhere was certainly significant to her recognition as a textile artist. However, there are facets to her work and career that still await exploration. I have used the idea of entrepreneurship to clarify the problematic role of Loja Saarinen in regard to the textiles produced in her studio. I argue that emphasising the input of the designer disguises the processes of a studio collective—the work of weavers, technical experts, artists and managers. It is important to identify all of the contributors and give them recognition. Authorship, however, is a complex issue and does not necessarily follow the art historical convention of attribution by the artist-maker. In the case of the Cranbrook Map, who gets credit in public depends on the context of representation and is subordinate to “corporate strategy,” whether that of Studio Loja Saarinen, that of the architect Eliel Saarinen, or that of George Booth’s Cranbrook. In Studio Loja Saarinen and at the Weaving Department of the Cranbrook Academy of Art traditional hand looms were introduced into a modern environment. Looms also appeared in the new Kingswood School for girls, where weaving was a central part of the arts curriculum from the

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very start. Rows of hand looms were placed in two large weaving halls by the school’s main entrance. They were visible through the big windows and are still seen today. As the users of looms were predominantly, if not exclusively, girls and women—professional weavers and designers, academy students and pupils at the girls’ school—weaving was promoted at Cranbrook as a feminine craft. In discussing Loja Saarinen as a weaver and textile artist, I have proposed the concept of the “imaginary weaver.” At Cranbrook weaving was represented as a natural profession for women. For Loja Saarinen, however, taking up textiles as a means of expression was not a “natural” development; it was a choice and a strategy. Studio Loja Saarinen was not a medieval tapestry workshop, but a modern weaving studio, which produced textiles using women’s craftsmanship and leadership and in which the hand loom was a symbol of power.

References Amberg, Anna-Lisa. 1984. Saarinen’s Interior Design 1896–1923, Publications of the Museum of Applied Art 10. Helsinki: Museum of Applied Art. ———. 1987. “Catalogue of the Interiors in Eliel Saarinen’s Home.” In Hvitträsk – koti taideteoksena. Hvitträsk – The home as a work of art, edited by Juhani Pallasmaa, 79–109. Helsinki: Otava. ———. 1998. “Esoteeristen aiheiden etsintää Suur-Merijoen kartanon kuvastosta.” In Taide ja okkultismi. Kirjoituksia taidehistorian rajamailta, edited by Ville Lukkarinen and Mirva Mattila. Taidehistoriallisia tutkimuksia 18, 145–57. Helsinki: Taidehistorian seura. ———. 2003. “‘Kotini on linnani’: Kartano ylemmän porvariston omanakuvana. Esimerkkinä Geselliuksen, Lindgrenin ja Saarisen Suur-Merijoki vuodelta 1904.” Suomen muinaismuistoyhdistyksen aikakauskirja 111. Helsinki: Suomen muinaismuistoyhdistys. Balmori, Diana. 1994. “Cranbrook: The Invisible Landscape.” JSAH 53, March 1994: 30–60. ———. 1995. “Saarinen House Garden.” In Saarinen House and Garden. A Total Work of Art, edited by Gregory Wittkopp and Diana Balmori, 145–57. Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum. New York: Abrams. Baulch, Vivian M. 1999. “Carl Milles, Cranbrook’s Favorite Sculptor.” The Detroit News, September 6, 1999. http://apps.detnews.com/apps/ history/index.php?id=39#ixzz1VJi4v6DJ.

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Boydell, Christine. 1995. “Free-lance Textile Design in the 1930s: An Improving Prospect?” Journal of Design History 8 (1): 27–41. Elliott, Bridget. 2008. “‘The Figure in the Carpet’: Saarinen House and the Crafting of Space.” In Craft, Space and Interior Design, 1855–2005, edited by Sandra Alfoldy and Janice Helland, 105–122. Aldershot: Ashgate. Choduba, Minna. 2011. Kaupunkia etsimässä. Eliel Saarinen Amerikassa 1922–1950. Tampereen teknillisen yliopiston arkkitehtuurin laitoksen julkaisu 6. Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto. Clark, Robert Judson. 1983. “Cranbrook and the Search for TwentiethCentury Form.” In Design in America. The Cranbrook Vision 1925– 1950, edited by Adele Westbrook and Anne Yarowsky, 21–33. New York: The Detroit Institute of Arts and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Christ-Janer, Albert. 1948. Eliel Saarinen. Ann Arbor: The University of Chicago Press. Colby, Joy Hakanson. 1956. Art and a City: A History of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Collection Johannes Öhquist. The Manuscript Collection. The National Library of Finland, Helsinki. Cranbrook Art Museum. Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, USA. Cranbrook Foundation Records. Cranbrook Archives. The Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, USA. Decorative Arts: Official Catalog Department of Fine Arts Division of Decorative Arts Golden Gate International Exposition San Francisco. 1939. San Francisco: San Francisco Bay Exposition Company. De Long, David G. 1983. “Eliel Saarinen and the Cranbrook Tradition in Architecture and Urban Design.” In Design in America: The Cranbrook Vision 1925–1950, edited by Adele Westbrook and Anne Yarowsky, 47–89. New York: The Detroit Institute of Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Eckert, Kathryn Bishop. 2001. Cranbrook: The Campus Guide. An Architectural tour by Kathryn Bishop Eckert. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Gerard, John. 1980. Studio Loja Saarinen. 9 November 1980 – 11 January 1981. Bloomfield Hills, MI: Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum. Handarbetets Vänner. 1907. Årsberättelse för Föreningen Handarbetets Vänner 1907–1929. Stockholm: Föreningen. Harris, Neil. 1983. “North by Midwest.” In Design in America: The

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Cranbrook Vision 1925–1950, edited by Adele Westbrook and Anne Yarowsky, 15–19. New York: The Detroit Institute of Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hausen, Marika, Kirmo Mikkola, Anna-Lisa Amberg and Tytti Valto. 1990. Eliel Saarinen Projects 1896–1923. Translated by Desmond O’Rourke and Michael Wynne-Ellis. The Museum of Finnish Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kuoppamäki, Lauri. 1932. “Hvitträskistä Cranbrookiin. Eliel Saarinen uudelleen unelmakoteja luomassa.” Helsingin Sanomat Viikkoliite, Aug 14, 1932. Marter, Joan 1983. “Sculpture and Painting.” In Design in America: The Cranbrook Vision 1925–1950, edited by Adele Westbrook and Anne Yarowsky, 237–262. New York: The Detroit Institute of Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mikkola, Kirmo. 1990. “Eliel Saarinen and town planning.” In Eliel Saarinen Projects 1896–1923 by Marika Hausen, Kirmo Mikkola, Anna-Lisa Amberg and Tytti Valto. Translated by Desmond O’Rourke and Michael Wynne-Ellis, 187–220. The Museum of Finnish Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Miller, R. Graig 1983. “Interior Design and Furniture.” In Design in America: The Cranbrook Vision 1925–1950, edited by Adele Westbrook and Anne Yarowsky, 91–143. New York: The Detroit Institute of Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Musicant, Marilyn R. 2000. “Maria Kipp: Autobiography of a Hand Weaver.” Studies in the Decorative Arts 8: 92–107. Parry, Linda. 1983. “The revival of the Merton Abbey Tapestry Works.” JWMS 5.3 (Summer 1983): 16–22. Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa and Donald Albrecht, eds. 2006. Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future. In association with The Finnish Cultural Institute in New York. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pound, Arthur. 1964. The Only Thing Worth Finding: The Life and Legacies of George Gough Booth. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Saarikangas, Kirsi. 2010. “From Images to Lived Places: Feminist Approaches to the Analysis of Built Space.” In Contemporary Feminist Studies and its Relation to Art History and Visual Studies. Proceedings from a Conference in Gothenburg March 28–29, 2007, edited by Bia Mankell and Alexandra Reiff, 55–75. Gothenburg: Art History and Visual Studies at University of Gothenburg. Saarinen, Eliel. 1915. Munkkiniemi-Haaga ja Suur-Helsinki. Tutkimuksia ja ehdotuksia kaupunkijärjestelyn alalta. Helsinki: M. G. Stenius.

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———. 1925. Unpublished manuscript. Archive of Eliel Saarinen. The Library of the Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki. Saarinen Suomessa = Saarinen in Finland: Gesellius, Lindgren, Saarinen 1896–1907, Saarinen 1907–1923. 1984. Exhibition catalogue. Exhibition and catalogue design: Markku Komonen, Kimmo Friman. Experts: Marika Hausen, Kirmo Mikkola, Anna-Lisa Amberg. [Helsinki]: Museum of Finnish Architecture. Saarinen Family Papers. Cranbrook Archives. The Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, USA. Samuel Simpson Marquis Papers. Cranbrook Archives. The Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, USA. Schoeser, Mary and Whitney Blausen. 2000. “‘Wellpaying Self Support’: Women Textile Designers in the USA.” In Women Designers in the USA, 1900-2000: Diversity and Difference, edited by Pat Kirkham, 145–65. New York: Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts and Yale University Press. Scrapbook Collection 1927–32. Cranbrook Archives. The Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, USA. Standertskjöld, Elina. 2010. The Dream of the New World: American Influence on Finnish Architecture from the Turn of the 20th Century to the Second World War. Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture. Suominen-Kokkonen, Renja. 1997. “The Architect Aino Marsio-Aalto and Artek.” Scandinavian Journal of Design History 7: 29–40. ———. 2007. “Library of Art? The Villa Mairea and Notes on the Gender of the Art Collector.” In Aino and Alvar Aalto – A Shared Journey: Interpretations of an Everyday Modernism by Renja SuominenKokkonen, 169–194. Jyväskylä: Alvar Aalto Foundation and Alvar Aalto Museum. Svinhufvud, Leena. 2009. Moderneja ryijyjä, metritavaraa ja käsityötä. Tekstiilitaide ja nykyaikaistuva taideteollisuus Suomessa maailmansotien välisenä aikana. Helsinki: Designmuseo. ———. 2010. “Textiles in Modern Spaces: Limitations and CounterImages.” In Modernism: Essays on Finnish Modernism, edited by Marianne Aav and Jukka Savolainen, 7–37. Helsinki: Designmuseo. ———. 2012. “Hand-woven Fabrics by the Yard: Unveiling Modern Industry of the Interwar Period.” In Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories, edited by Kjetil Fallan, 48–64. London: Berg. Taragin, Davida S. 1983. “The History of the Cranbrook Community.” In

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Hybrids, Saints and Phallic Displays: Painted Bodies and Ecclesiastical Space in the Medieval Diocese of Turku Katja Fält

Wall Paintings and Ecclesiastical Space A medieval parish church was an ecclesiastical, ritual space in the service of liturgical practice. This space was sacred and thus highly significant, a sphere where it was possible to experience the visible and the invisible at the same time, as well as to feel the presence of the holy. Here, human experience could come into contact with the divine. Derek A. Rivard (2008) has described the area as a place where human beings can experience two worlds, the visible and the hidden, within material confines. Such a space allowed individuals and the community to position themselves within the world (Rivard 2008, 45–46). A space prescribes the behaviour of those who occupy it (Hanawalt and Kobialka 2000, xi). A space may also be delineated or defined by behaviour. In medieval churches the Elevation of the Host or the use of other liturgical, movable objects at certain times or during certain events staged, timed or structured the space. But behaviour or a physical act was needed to delineate the place to be sanctified. In some instances the use of movement and physical objects was essential to the creation of a sacred space. According to Rivard (2008, 90, 98), in purification, consecration or blessing rituals the sanctification of a specific place was of importance; it was something that connected the concrete, spatial area with the divine by means of a ritual process, such as consecration. In the consecration ritual the bishop walked around in the church blessing the space with holy water. Later, consecration crosses were painted on places where the water had been applied as reminders of this ritual (Hiekkanen 2003). The ritual activated the church as a sacred space. The consecration crosses made the ritual circuit and the sprinkling of holy water visible; they were tangible reminders of the “activation.”

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All the elements inside the activated ritual space worked together to strengthen the fully operational status of the church. Paul Crossley (1998, 165–72) has tried to trace the “programmatic meanings” of the interiors and to establish how images and objects were conceived as integrated statements and appreciated as part of a spatial sequence. The imagery in a church, which was set out in a more or less prescribed order, was closely connected to the exercise of meditation, intellection or memory. Thus, within the matrix of altars and altarpieces, relics and images, permanent “centres of meaning” were formed. The altars generated meditation centres or “sequential patterns of thought, triggers for the ordered exercise of intellection and memory.” Thus, the arrangement of different visual elements inside the church formed a sort of apparatus of devotion in which each of the parts was connected and closely integrated into the others (ibid.). Mary Carruthers (1998, 155, 263–64) has offered a similar notion, namely, that a church building works as an “engine of prayer.” In the devotional machinery activated by ritual, images were equally active cogs that could invite the viewer to “seek the sight of the holy as the highest experience of the divine” (Hahn 1999, 187). Wall paintings constituted one part of the visual surroundings of the ritual space and functioned in direct relation to a specific space. Images can work as a visual link between building and spectator, communicating the function of the building. Images thus played an integral part in the viewer’s experience of the space (Mathews 2000, 3–12; Olsen 2004, 105–9). According to Barbara Maria Stafford (2004, 332), images “act” in the context of ritual. They delineate space as well as behaviour and are meaningful in the context of the place in which they have been painted. In this article I explore the kind of ritual space described above together with representations of the body amongst the wall paintings attributed to the work of church builders in the Diocese of Turku, Finland, and then examine the relationship between the space and the paintings. The body is not just a representation of a physical body consisting of flesh and blood; it is, to cite Nicholas Mirzoeff (1995), a “bodyscape.” A “bodyscape” extends beyond its boundaries, but for Mirzoeff (ibid., 3, 19–21) it is also a “complex of signs,” conceived as an area or a space where ideas, idealisations, concepts and the like are located or dislocated. Representations of bodies can thus be used to observe some of the concepts, concerns and ideas that are articulated and negotiated in and through these representations. The body is not just a natural entity; it is also a cultural entity. As argued by Michael Camille (1994, 4), bodies could construct both communal and individual identity. Here an attempt is made to examine some of the above-mentioned

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notions about ecclesiastical space and the role of bodily representations therein as part of the ritual machinery of the church and of cultural practices and articulations. The focus is mainly on those representations that might appear “out of place” in a church context and to provide interpretative possibilities for such images from the perspective of space and place. Conceptions of bodies fluctuate between the whole, perfect and ideal body and the fragmented body and how these could be perceived in the context of an ecclesiastical space. Although in the Middle Ages there was a notion of the ideal human body, the idea of a single body in an allinclusive sense did not really exist (and could not have existed). The body was always fragmented in one way or another. My examples focus on the conceptual interactions between the fragmentation and the wholeness of the body, between the body’s perfection and imperfection, and how the bodies could be understood in the religious space in which they are found. These bodily states are not treated as opposed to each other; rather they are seen as being interwoven. In conceptual and visual formulations the notions of the fragment and the whole are often inseparably intertwined. The examples of bodies presented in this article were mainly painted around the mid-fifteenth century in Finland, in churches located in Korppoo, Maaria, Nauvo, Nousiainen, and Pernaja, and were based on similar visual practices and cultural mediations. They are all expressions of the visual idiom of church builders who were working in the Diocese of Turku in south and southwestern Finland in the mid-fifteenth century. Most of the representations were painted in completed ecclesiastical buildings, which might indicate that the paintings were the last phase of the construction process. There are fewer paintings in churches that were left unfinished for some reason, and these too were the work of the builders. (Hiekkanen 2003, 71–72). Today, paintings are still visible in about thirty medieval stone churches in the Diocese of Turku (Hiekkanen 2007, 34; Stigell 1974, 56–57; Edgren 2003, 301–2). The simple appearance and the seeming obscurity of many of the portrayals have led to the idea that the paintings were largely detached from traditional Christian religious imagery and iconography, which has made it more difficult to situate them successfully in medieval imagemaking (Wennervirta 1930, 78–79; Riska 1987, 137–44). The simple form of many of the images has often deceived researchers into thinking that the paintings manifest a simplicity of content and subject matter. The subjects have generally been thought to express and relate to some obscure and unidentified beliefs of people in the countryside, and thus mainly devoid of Christian religious meaning (Riska 1987, 144; Edgren 2003, 318–22).

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The images have therefore been treated almost as visual oddities randomly strewn in a ritual space. However, as the paintings were part of that space, as well as part of the visual culture of the local churches and parishes and the wider image-making in the Diocese, they should be considered as part of the visual and cultural formulations of the time.

Sacred Bodies and Sacred Space The church was a lived public and social space imbued with different bodily figures—(corpo)real, sculpted and painted. The moving bodies of living people encountered and confronted still, visualised bodies, all of which were physically present in the ecclesiastical space. The relationships between the actual, living and breathing bodies and the represented bodies could be concrete, tangible and even intense in the late Middle Ages. In some devotional practices the body was regarded as more important than the eyes, and visual adoration could require a physical act, such as prostration before the image. The body could have been a means of religious access and a locus of the sacred (Walker Bunym 1991, 183–84). Thus, bodies had an important and integral role in ritual space. Sacred bodies—those of Christ and the saints—have a tradition of legitimacy in a sacred space. The sacramental body of Christ was a focal point for devotion in a sacred space. His body was perfect and holy, yet at the same time he was frequently depicted as physically imperfect, bent, tortured and bleeding. Other holy bodies were those of the saints, who attained salvation and holiness specifically through their bodies. They suffered as Christ had suffered and in so doing, bore witness to the presence of God. Even though the saints had to endure physical torture and suffering, their bodies were ultimately left intact and unharmed. In the Maaria Church in what is today the northern part of Turku an image of St Lawrence holding the instrument of his torture, a gridiron, was painted on the north wall. The saint is depicted with a perfect and unharmed body, the post-torture phase of the body after death (figure 11–1). The image represents the end-point of the torture, which is visually absent from the bodily image, as are all physical marks of persecution. The only thing denoting the act of torture is the gridiron.

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Figure 11–1. Saint Lawrence. Maaria church, north wall, late 1440s or early 1450s. Photograph Katja Fält.

Perfect, saintly bodies were stereotypical and thus models for human imitation. By meditating before a saint, parishioners were able to learn prayer, patience, courage and humility, whereas through viewing, they were given the opportunity to learn courage from the saint’s physical body. According to Peter the Venerable, the saint “teaches us to know from his body, and he shows by his own body what you ought to hope for yours” (“Sermo cuius supra in honore sancti illius cuius reliquiae sunt in presenti,” Hahn 1999, 186n). Worshippers could experience perfection and divine examples by imitating the saints who in turn followed the greatest example of all, Christ himself. This intersubjective relationship between the worshipper and the saint aided the affective side of the viewing process. An image of a saint thus makes a sacred figure accessible to prayers, petitions and offerings and creates a place and a space for private devotional activity. Saintly images were generally placed on altars, both the high and the side altars. There is no information on whether the painting of St Lawrence was placed in the proximity of an altar dedicated to him as no excavations have been carried out at the Maaria Church (Hiekkanen 2007, 93). If there had been such an altar, it would most likely have functioned as a side altar and mainly served the extra-liturgical devotions of lay people. There, the image would have worked in collaboration with the altar, forming

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a meditational “hotspot” in the church. The image also served as a visual reminder of the constant presence of supernatural power (Baschet 1997, 108). The placement of saintly images close to altars also structured the liturgical space. The image of St Lawrence in connection with such an altar could have worked as a devotional aid, since on the north wall, the image was visible to the congregation. Parishioners were expected to cultivate relations of intimacy with and dependence on the saints and to honour their images (Duffy 1992, 163). Visiting the altars of saints and praying there was also encouraged by the episcopal authorities. Bishop Magnus II Tavast granted indulgences for prayers to be given in specific churches or at particular altars; one such prayer singled out the chapel of the Holy Ghost in Räntämäki (as Maaria was known earlier) in 1435 (FMU 2154, FMU 2393, FMU 2415). Also amongst the prayers was the Ave Maria, which was to be recited along with the Pater Noster before the images of Christ’s grave and St Helena in the Cathedral of Uppsala (in Sweden). This indulgence letter was issued in 1448 along with endorsements by other bishops, including Johannes of Uppsala, Nicolaus of Linköping, Eric of Strängnäs and Friar Acho of Västerås (FMU 2775). Although there is no information about whether such activity and prayer before the image of St Lawrence was encouraged by indulgences, these two examples seem to indicate that individual devotional activity was encouraged by the episcopal authorities. Directing attention to specific altars would have created pressure for people to visit and honour these altars through prayer, gifts and other commemorative acts. The community’s devotional activities within the church were manipulated to a degree, although manipulation invoking physical movement also delineates, constructs and shapes liturgical space. The image of the body of a saint thus functioned both as a locus of the sacred and a means of religious access. It was used in personal contemplation and devotion while at the same time serving in a communal context to structure the liturgical space. Depictions of saints also operated in two realms: as mediators between the material, human world and the immaterial, divine world. The image of a saint was always a reminder of the divine realm, even though its physical presence was in earthly surroundings. Thus, the saint’s image connected different bodies and spaces: the corporeal and the spiritual, the human and the divine. The painted body united the human body with the celestial sphere. The physical image of St Lawrence may have embodied this divine, extra-terrestrial realm. Although there are few medieval paintings in Turku that can be interpreted as indicating a sacred space other than a church, close to the St Lawrence painting in the Maaria Church are a rosette as well as two nearby stars, which might

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have had some kind of cosmic significance. If these patterns are interpreted as having meanings in connection with other symbols, then they might denote the celestial realm to which the saint belonged. The rosette and the stars might emphasise the saint’s ultimate status as an otherworldly, divine being. Images of saints could serve as a means of devotional appropriation in which an image was used as “a platform” for concrete pious activity. In such an appropriation the image worked as the contact zone between the beholder and the divine, opening a concrete space for interaction (Plesch 2002, 168–69, 188). A mysterious painting in the Korppoo Church might signify something like this. A human figure above the pillar between the church’s second and third vaults has been painted with very little detail, although there are two different marks on the body as well as a series of small circles painted around the head, suggesting a halo (figure 11–2). This halo-like composition would seem to indicate a saintly rank. Yet the arms are missing. Their absence fragments the whole and obscures the notion of a functioning body, thereby raising several questions. Are the limbs missing for a reason or because of a technical blunder? Was the identity and function of the human figure clear, even without the limbs? It seems unlikely that the painter “forgot” to paint the arms or ran out of time. Occasionally, armless humans do appear in medieval sources, such as manuscripts, and thus the Korppoo human does not represent a unique case of the medieval understanding of the body.

Figure 11–2. Armless human. Korppoo church, second south pillar, 1440s–50s. Photograph Katja Fält.

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The cult of saints celebrated the completeness of a saint’s body, but also its brutal fragmentation. A saint’s body could be broken, torn to pieces or dismembered. One method of torture was tearing off the limbs of saints, including those of Lawrence, Cyriacus and Hadrian. However, it seems unlikely that the armless human in Korppoo represents a saint in a mid- or post-torture phase. Perhaps the missing limbs do not conceptually fracture the notion of the body; rather here, the body functions and performs without arms. As Caroline Walker Bunym (1991) has demonstrated, the medieval attitudes to physical partition and fragmentation were two-fold. The fragmentation of the body was not necessarily seen as irreversible, as God has the power to reassemble each body at the Resurrection. From this perspective the limbs missing from the Korppoo human are missing only visually. Nevertheless, the missing limbs pose a problem of interpretation, since bodies and body parts were deemed integral to a person and were regarded as “places” where persons could be punished or rewarded after death, as argued by Walker Bunym. Certain body parts of remarkably pious people could remain uncorrupted and intact after death. And even the cult of relics reveals the importance attached to pieces of saintly bodies: the bodily fragments were treated as if they were the saints themselves. On the other hand, physical partition caused deep unease, and the intact condition of the body after death was of serious concern. Dismemberment was regarded as horrible, but saints were regarded as whole even if they had been dismembered or otherwise mutilated (Walker Bunym 1991, 229–34, 265–97). As Walker Bunym (ibid., 272) has noted, “the practice of bodily partition was fraught with ambivalence, controversy and profound inconsistency.” The image in Korppoo could be seen either as a “place” or as Walker Bunym’s locus for the sacred, which opened a space for devotional contact. Private devotion tended to aim at physical participation, and devotional tools often required concrete handling. Perhaps the marks here could indicate that the painter, or painters, had a specific relationship with the human depicted, someone perhaps to be understood as a saint. Certainly, the marks on the saint’s body seem highly intentional and significant. They could perhaps be likened to some form of writing. Bodies, fragmentation and dismembered body parts were essential in medieval devotional practices, but different forms of marking are also deeply connected to the notions of bodies. According to Miri Rubin, writing is bound up with the power of authority, authorship, mastery and production, qualities linked with masculine principles in medieval culture. The female body especially was likened to something that had to be made and written upon, and to

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be adorned and made to carry marks offered by others (Rubin 1996, 23). Christ’s body could be seen as a book in which the wounds were the writing. Bill Burgwinkle and Cary Howie have noted how the bodies of Christ and the saints have become metaphorical pieces of vellum onto which the terms of mankind’s salvation have been inscribed (Burgwinkle and Howie 2010, 35). A privileged type of marking was the stigmata, which proclaimed perfection (Walker Bunym 1991, 183; Rubin 1994, 110–11; Liepe 2003, 48–49). Making these marks could thus be regarded as ritually structured. In a way the marks could be seen as operating in a “contact zone” between the maker and the saint, as a form of dialogue or interaction between the beholder and the beheld (Plesch 2002, 168–69, 188). This interaction was devotional in nature, for it bore the hope that through the marks, the holy figure would be reached. The painted body can also operate as a “place” through which its devotees will be spiritually rewarded in the hereafter. If the marks are understood as a kind of signature, then they reveal a need to show the identity bound up with the saint. The individuals who made the marks thus exist in the same divine sphere as the saint. It cannot be said for certain whether the significance of these marks is based on individual or communal aspirations. Both aspects can come into play in the process of meaning-making, as do aspects of public and private spheres. As the marks could imply some form of personal devotion, they were visible in a public space to everyone. The marks could be seen as a form of selfcommemoration that communicated the status and devout ambitions of the makers to the rest of the community by visual means. According to Sarah Stanbury (2008, 181), a concrete (visual) relationship exists between the members of a congregation and the material structure of their church. The marks in connection with the Korppoo human could operate as visual links between the parishioners, the physical space of worship (the church) and the larger church community.

Bodies, Space and Gender The ecclesiastical space was thus filled with sacred bodies functioning as an integral part of the liturgy and devotion. But sacred spaces were also filled with other kinds of bodies—gendered, grotesque, hybrid or ambiguous. What function did they serve in ecclesiastical surroundings? Gendered bodies in a church can cause a feeling of unease; in fact, explicit depictions are relatively rare. On first examination, the bodies amongst the paintings attributed to the church builders seem to be relatively gender-neutral and

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unsexed; the “maleness” or “femaleness” of the bodily representations is seldom evident. There are few cases in which gender can be regarded as apparent in one way or another, and in each of them gender is made explicit in a different way. The depiction of a mermaid, painted in the coastal churches of Nauvo, Korppoo, Nousiainen, and Pernaja in the 1440s and 1450s, is based on the concept of the mermaid’s feminine sex rather than her feminine attributes. Mermaids have conventionally been depicted as beautiful, long-haired women holding a comb and a mirror, with the mirror representing human vanity, especially female pride, and more generally, sin and spiritual danger. The mirror represented women’s interest in “vanities,” which was of concern to Catholic ecclesiastics, who frequently criticised the feminine fascination with adornments. Only in the churches at Nousiainen and Pernaja does the mermaid’s pose echo somewhat the conventional image (figures 11–3 and 11–4). In both of these the mermaid is recognisably feminine by her long hair, her hands either temptingly clasping her waist or held up to her hair. In Nousiainen, the sexual connotations of the mermaid appear to be emphasised by the position of the painting, which has been placed above a depiction of a unicorn (Liepe 2003, 86).

Figure 11–3. A painting of a mermaid. Nousiainen church, fourth south pillar, c. 1430s. Photograph Katja Fält.

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Figure 11–4. A painting of a mermaid. Pernaja church, second vault of the south aisle vault, c. 1440s. Photograph Katja Fält.

Various monsters and fabulous creatures have a long visual pedigree, as does the mermaid, and frequently inhabited the mental and visual landscapes of the medieval era. The mermaid, or siren, is a mythical aquatic creature with an iconography that was already relatively stable in the Middle Ages. The principal literary source involving mermaids and passed down to the Middle Ages was The Physiologus, a didactic text in Greek compiled by an unknown author in Alexandria and traditionally dated to the second century CE. It contained descriptions of animals, birds and fantastic creatures, had moral content and included different scriptural and patristic texts. Early Christian writers combined mythological and Vulgate texts and “created” a siren that “caused eternal death by luring men into the false pleasures of lust” (Travis 2002, 39). The Christian church found these creatures useful. In the moralistic sense the mermaid, as half animal, half human, embodied spiritual transgression. From the theologians’ point of view the semi-human mermaid could be interpreted as having the capacity for advanced reasoning because of its human head. The half-animal nature of the mermaid, on the other hand, could suggest that the behaviour of these beings was ultimately governed by their baser physical instincts. (Travis 2002, 39; Brown 1999, 55–60; Hassig 1999, 79–82). This physicality was naturally what made mermaids—and women—so dangerous. Women were associated with the

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body, as well as lust, weakness and irrationality. Medieval clerics saw the female body as quintessentially “grotesque” because women’s bodies were seen as the cause of lust in men. Feminist scholarship has argued that in the Middle Ages women were assimilated into the image of the monstrous, and different monsters were clearly gendered in visual imagery. Dragons slain (penetrated) by the male hero were occasionally depicted with breasts, which represented the temptations of lust and the sins of the flesh and were associated with bestiality. The notion of the animal-like nature of women’s reproductive organs stretched back to antiquity (Schiebinger 1993, 53–55). The mermaid’s hybrid body was thus seen as grotesque and monstrous. Feminist scholarship has tended to see the mermaid as an example of mulier mala, a strongly misogynous discourse about the figure of an adulterous seductress. The medieval conceptions that connected women and bodies were by nature complex, and the images of mermaids should not be seen merely from the point of view of the misogynist discourse. Nevertheless, the mermaid as a figure can be understood as an example of a visual strategy that defined and made present the “nature” of mermaids, and therefore the nature of women. Hybridisation, combining animal and human forms to create completely new bodily combinations, can be perceived as a visual device contributing to a grotesque presentation (Miles 1989, 120, 155). In the Nauvo and Korppoo churches the mermaid is quite creaturelike, more a monster than a beautiful woman, and these depictions seem to emphasise the mermaid’s bestial nature over her womanly aspects (figures 11–5 and 11–6). In Pernaja, however, the mermaid has been painted so that the body, itself a part of nature, is part of the surrounding foliage and thus of nature, as if to place a double emphasis on this natural aspect. The body of the mermaid in Pernaja could well be described by Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of the “bodyscape”: in this painting the mermaid does not merely act against the background, but rather seems to challenge what is here regarded as the body. In the medieval treatment of space the garland often served as a background against which things, scenes and actions took place. In Pernaja it is as if the garlands are extensions of the mermaid’s body. In a way this whole composition constitutes a vibrant, vegetating bodyscape in which the mermaid’s body has lost its boundaries. The mermaid’s body is also a localisation or space that offers multiple entries into various cultural, conceptual, ideological, social and spiritual mediations, condensed into the form of a mermaid.

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Figure 11–5. A painting of a mermaid. Nauvo church, second vault of the south aisle, c. 1450s. Photograph Katja Fält.

Figure 11–6. A painting of a mermaid. Korppoo church, west wall, c. 1450s. Photograph Katja Fält.

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In an ecclesiastical context mermaids have often been interpreted as images of morality denoting sin (Viholainen 2009, 12–13; Hernfjäll 1993, 137– 39). It is difficult to establish whether the mermaid images in the Diocese of Turku were used to impart a moral lesson by ultimately pointing to the weakness of man. It is possible that the mermaid was a convenient image for a priest to exploit and parishioners to understand, as they were often people who depended on the sea for their livelihood, but any connections between sermons and paintings are extremely difficult to verify. In all four churches the placement of the mermaid is more or less readily visible; in Pernaja and Nauvo the image was painted on the second vault of the south aisle; in Nousiainen it is found on the north side of the fourth south pillar; and in Korppoo it appears above the window in the west wall. That would indicate that the mermaid was meant to be readily seen. It has been a subject of speculation as to how men and women placed themselves during mass in parish churches. The north side of the church has often been regarded as the “women’s side,” as it was associated with the Virgin Mary, but in reality, the seating seems to have varied a great deal (Hiekkanen 2007, 439; French 2005, 141–43). Examples from England show that in some churches, men were placed at the front of the church and women at the back (French 2005, 141). Hiekkanen (2003, 146–48) has suggested that in the Diocese of Turku, seating might have been arranged by social status. If men tended to be on the south side of the nave in Pernaja, then perhaps the “moralising” image of the mermaid was intended for their eyes. In Nauvo and Nousiainen the mermaid is also on the south side of the nave, although in Nousiainen she is facing the central aisle and thus north; in this position the painting would have been visible to a wider audience. These mermaids could have functioned as a means of social control, warning parishioners, both men and women, about the proper behaviour expected of them in church and also outside the church, as they went about their daily lives. The message would thus have differed for men and women. To men, the mermaid might have served as a warning of the sexual power and dangers of women’s depravity. For women, whose sins were often connected especially to their gender and their bodies, the mermaid might have warned of the dangers of female sexuality if not controlled. The mermaid could thus be seen as suggesting behaviour that was dependent on the group to which a viewer belonged. The church provided a site for social control, and an image of a mermaid provided a “place” for articulating gender. Other examples of the “gendered” body reveal one of the problems connected to the paintings that are attributed to the church builders: the

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ambiguous nature of many of the designs and the further exploration of how such images ultimately functioned in the ecclesiastical space. In most of the human or human-like representations in the Turku diocese, gender is not explicit. In the Maaria Church two figures have been depicted in a way that suggests male gender, their sexual organs visible. The figure painted on the third vault of the central aisle is bellicose in appearance: he appears to be wearing a helmet with a nose-guard and is holding a halberd. The upper lip has been decorated with small strokes, perhaps indicating a moustache. He also has a large beard and something that might be his tongue sticking out. The body is curiously truncated, with the head slightly detached. A simple decoration runs vertically through the body, and the central straight line belonging to this decoration continues over the edge of the body between the legs, almost like a small phallus. The feet are mere stylised lines (figure 11–7). This figure has usually been considered a devil, a pagan or a giant (Frankenhaeuser 1910, 13; Wennervirta 1937, 62; Riska 1964, 72; Riska 1987, 137; Edgren 2003, 308). The other figure depicted on the third vault of the north aisle represents a human or human-like creature who may be naked. He is holding two objects in his hand, which have generally been interpreted as a whip and a purse (Edgren 2003, 319). The creature has a unique headdress with a narrow extension flowing down its left side. It resembles a chaperon turban with liripipe or other turbanlike headgear, which was fashionable in fifteenth-century Europe. His eyes are large and bulging, and his small mouth is closed. Two lines along each side of the body have been painted down from the shoulders and may signify some sort of vestment. He seems to be wearing peculiar footwear. He also seems to have a penis between his legs (figure 11–8). Usually, the figure has been interpreted as some kind of monster or a devil (Riska 1964, 73; Edgren 2003, 319; Wennervirta 1930, 75–76; Wennervirta 1937, 62). There are visual similarities in the compositions of these two bodies in the Maaria Church, mainly in the pose and in the relatively clear display of the male sexual organs. With the figure on the third vault of the central aisle this is quite subtle: the bodily exposure is only suggested by a line that seems to be an extension of the decoration of the chest area. The degree of exposure is more explicit in the other figure. In the early twentieth century this painting was actually covered because it was considered “obscene” (Frankenhaeuser 1910, 13).

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Figure 11–7. A creature with a halberd. Maaria church, third vault of the central aisle, late 1440s or early 1450s. Photograph Katja Fält.

Figure 11–8. A creature with two objects. Maaria church, third vault of the north aisle, late 1440s or early 1450s. Photograph Katja Fält.

Bodies that appear simultaneously ambiguous and explicit seem to elude interpretative categories. They have often been placed in the indeterminate category of the “monstrous,” which operates as a pigeonhole for the indefinable. These paintings have also been assigned a moral function, as representations of devils or the embodiment of some social vice. The tendency in Finnish scholarship to view the paintings as devils reduces

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their visual and conceptual complexity. The figure on the north aisle has been interpreted as a warning of the temptations in the male world: excessive craving for money and sexual pleasure (Edgren 2003, 319). Perhaps such implications are not completely out of the question, and the figure is to be understood as embodying a social vice. In the medieval era money was often depicted in a negative form; the worship of money was the target of satirical attacks on the ugliness of worldly wealth and was even seen as a form of idolatry. In visual culture Avarice (lat. Avaritia) as the personification of the sin of greed was represented from the fourteenth century onwards amongst the seven deadly sins as the root of all evil (Camille 1989, 258–59). Michael Camille (ibid., 262) has remarked that as soon as money became an every-day object instead of an object of status and luxury, it also became the “shit of monkeys,” depicted as spewing from the mouths of monsters’ heads in the margins of manuscripts. There is indeed something slightly menacing and monstrous in the appearance of the human-like character in the Maaria Church; given the widespread moralistic and damning accounts of the vileness of riches, depicting money in connection with a monster-like being would have driven home the point. The figure on the central aisle might serve as a martial metaphor for doing spiritual battle whereby the helmet was to protect and the halberd was to defend the faithful in their daily fight against evil. Fighting the devil and sin were of special concern to the ecclesiastics. Nevertheless, the figure’s appearance is relatively menacing, and the grimace with the tongue sticking out has implications that are not exactly instructive. The tongue especially has been regarded as expressing derision or as an obscene or blasphemous gesture, similar to mouth-pulling and other such gesticulations. According to Sarah Stanbury (2008), the tongue can imply both the sacred and the profane. When the tongue is stuck out, a person is insulting others. At the same time the tongue is sacred because it is the producer of language (ibid., 154). The tongue sticking out might suggest the evils caused by the tongue, such as blasphemy and gossip, which the faithful should avoid (Camille 2002, 81). Perhaps the gesture and thus the whole image could be understood as acting in an apotropaic sense, a form of contempt for the devil. The image could thus function to protect the sacred space. Are these two idiosyncratic figures to be understood as serving a similar function? Both have been depicted with male sexual organs, although in the case of the figure on the third vault of the central aisle, these are reduced to a mere line. Even if the sexual organs seem to be visible, the figures cannot be seen as sexual or erotic bodies in the modern sense. Madeline H. Caviness (1998, 165–66) has noted how displays of male potency were

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meant to ward off the enemy and thus function as apotropaic gestures. Consequently, the “soldier’s” aggressive grimace, display of sexual organs and belligerent appearance were all designed to ward off the enemy, the devil. According to Camille (2000), obscene and scatological images may have operated in this way: The distorted body of fantasy, the gargoyle and the chimera, thus could serve to protect the house, just as it did the cathedral. Similarly one finds obscene or scatological images on houses or boundary markings. A wooden carving of a man “mooning” passers-by did not give his name to the house in Angers where he performs his rude self-display, but he was part of the erotic dynamic of urban life that was also visible in Paris. (Camille 2000, 16)

Camille’s example is situated in a different context, mainly in the streets of the cities, but it could very well apply to the ecclesiastical setting. Thus, the body, seen by some as monstrous and thereby negative, could in fact be protective, a body with a positive function. Instead of representing the devil, the figures could be repelling the devil from the confines of the ritual and sacred space. The figures may thus partly function in a talismanic way to protect the place while simultaneously defining a ritual space. The paintings in the Maaria Church perhaps work the same way as street signs, as suggested by Camille: they present “an alternative, protective population to those on altars and chapels” found in churches (Camille 2000, 14). The paintings thus protect the building just like the other ecclesiastical paraphernalia found in altars and niches. These images too would form part of Crossley’s apparatus—not necessarily the apparatus of devotion, but the apparatus that is subject to ritual. Instead of dismissing the detail of exposed genitalia as somehow “obscene,” we might observe this specific body part as opening a new level of interpretation in connection with the place the image inhabits. Here, an attempt has been made to take a few representations of the body and examine how these could be understood in the context of ecclesiastical space, specifically, in medieval parish churches in the Diocese of Turku, Finland. The interpretations given here are not meant to suggest that these are the only way the images function. Rather, the paintings seem to operate in a spacious interpretative framework in which the meanings attached to them can be multiple, overlapping, even antithetical. Thus, the interpretations are not and should not be final. The bodies presented here all have something in common: they clearly operate in and between two realms. They combine the mundane and the divine, human and deity, inside and outside. Sacred bodies articulate a sacred space and connect

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the worldly to the otherworldly. Gendered bodies with moral aspects can serve to control behaviour both inside and outside ecclesiastical space. Gendered but ambiguous bodies can operate to protect the physical place of worship and also the sacred space it contains. With the help of these images individuals can define space, themselves, their community and their own position in the universe.

References Baschet, Jérôme. 1997. “Les images: des objets pour l’historien?” In Le Moyen Age aujourd’hui. Actes de la rencontre de Cerisy-la-Salle 1991, edited by J. Le Goff and G. Lobrichon, 101–133. Paris: Le Léopard d’or. Brown, Carmen. 1999. “Bestiary Lessons on Bride and Lust.” In The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature, edited by Debra Hassig, 53–67. New York: Garland. Burgwinkle, Bill and Cary Howie. 2010. Sanctity and Pornography in Medieval Culture: On the Verge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Camille, Michael. 1989. The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Gothic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1994. “The Image and the Self: Unwriting Late Medieval Bodies.” In Framing Medieval Bodies, edited by Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, 62– 99. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 2000. “Signs of the City: Place, Power, and Public Fantasy in Medieval Paris.” In Medieval Practices of Space, edited by Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, 1–36. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2002. “‘Seeing and Lecturing’: Disputation in a Twelfth-Century Tympanum from Reims.” In Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object, edited by Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas, 75–87. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Carruthers, Mary. 1998. The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caviness, Madeline H. 1998. “Obscenity and Alterity: Images that Shock and Offend Us/Them, Now/Then?” In Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, 155–75. Cultures, Beliefs, and Traditions: Medieval and Early Modern People, Volume 4,

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edited by Jan M. Ziolkowski. Leiden: Brill. Crossley, Paul. 1998. “The Man from Inner Space. Architecture and Meditation in the Choir of  St Lawrence in Nuremberg.” In Medieval Art: Recent Perspectives. A Memorial Tribute to C. R. Dodwell, edited by Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Timothy Graham, 165–82. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Duffy, Eamon. 1992. The Stripping of Altars. Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580. New Haven: Yale University Press. Edgren, Helena. 2003. “‘Primitive’ Paintings: the Visual World of Populus Rusticus.” In History and Images. Towards a New Iconology, edited by Axel Bolvig and Philip Lindley, 301–22. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 5. Turnhout: Brepols. Finlands Medeltidsurkunder III, 1431–1450 (FMU). 1921. Samlade och i tryck utgifna af Finlands Statsarkiv genom Reinh. Hausen. Helsingfors. Frankenhaeuser, Carl. 1910. “Räntämäen kirkko II. Maalaukset.” Suomen Museo – Finskt Museum, 9–15. Helsinki: Suomen Muinaismuistoyhdistys. French, Katherine L. 2005. “The Seat under Our Lady: Gender and Seating in Late Medieval Ensglish Parish Churches.” In Women’s Space. Patronage, Place and Gender in the Medieval Chuch, edited by Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury, 141–59. New York: State University Press of New York. Hahn, Cynthia. 1999. “Narrative on the Golden Altar of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan: Presentation and Reception.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 53: 167–87. Hanawalt, Barbara and Michael Kobialka. 2000. “Introduction.” In Medieval Practices of Space, edited by Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, ix–xviii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hassig, Debra. 1999. “Sex in the Bestiaries.” In The Mark of the Beast. The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature, edited by Debra Hassig, 71–93. New York: Garland. Hernfjäll, Viola. 1993. Medeltida kyrkmålningar i gamla Skara stift, Skrifter från Skaraborgs Länsmuseum, nr 16. Skara: Skaraborgs länsmuseum. Hiekkanen, Markus. 2003. Suomen kivikirkot keskiajalla. Helsinki: Otava. ———. 2007. Suomen keskiajan kivikirkot, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran toimituksia 1117. Helsinki: Suomen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Liepe, Lena. 2003. Den medeltida kroppe: Kroppens och könets ikonografi

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i nordisk medeltid. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Mathews, Karen Rose 2000. “Reading Romanesque Sculpture: The Iconography and Reception of the South Portal Sculpture of Santiago de Compostela.” Gesta 39 (1): 3–12. Miles, Margaret R. 1989. Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West. Boston: Beacon Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 1995. Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure. London: Routledge. Olsen, Vibeke. 2004. “Late Medieval Pilgrimage Architecture in Northern Europe, c. 1250-1520: A Summary of Recent Research and New Perspectives.” Peregrinations: International Society for the Study of Pilgrimage Art, 1: 105–9. Plesch, Véronique. 2002. “Memory on the Wall: Graffiti on Religious Wall Paintings.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32 (1): 167–97. Riska, Tove. 1964. Suomen kirkot – Finlands kyrkor 3. Turun tuomiorovastikunta I: Turun arkkihiippakunta III. Helsinki: Suomen Muinaismuistoyhdistys. ———. 1987. “Keskiajan maalaustaide”: ARS Suomen taide 1, 116–81. Keuruu: Otava. Rivard, Derek A. 2008. Ritual and Lay Piety in Medieval Religion. Baltimore: Catholic University of America Press. Rubin, Miri. 1994. “The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily Order.” In Framing Medieval Bodies, edited by Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, 100–22. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 1996. “The Body, Whole and Vulnerable, in Fifteenth-Century England.” In Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, 19–28. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schiebinger, Londa. 1993. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston: Beacon Press. Stafford, Barbara Maria. 2004. “Romantic Systematics and the Genealogy of Thought: The Formal Roots of a Cognitive History of Images.” Configurations 12: 315–48. Stanbury, Sarah. 2008. The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stigell, Anna-Lisa. 1974. Kyrkans tecken och årets gang: Tideräkningen och Finlands primitiva medeltidsmålningar. Hagalund: Suomen muinaismuistoyhdistys.

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Travis, William J. 2002. “Of Sirens and Onocentaurs: A Romanesque Apocalypse at Montceaux-l’Etoile.” Artibus et Historiae, 45: 29–62. Viholainen, Aila. 2009. ”Vellamon kanssa ongelle – eli kuinka merenneitoa kansalliseksi kuvitellaan.” Elore, 16 (2): 1–33. Suomen Kansantietouden Tutkijain Seura. Walker Bunym, Caroline. 1991. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone. Wennervirta, Ludvig. 1930. Goottilaista monumentaalimaalausta LänsiSuomen ja Ahvenanmaan kirkoissa. Helsinki: SMYA – FFT. ———. 1937. Suomen keskiaikainen kirkkomaalaus. Porvoo: WSOY.

V Visible and Invisible Spaces

“Let Us Possesse One World”: Spatial Images of Temporal and Celestial Love in John Donne’s Poetry Maria Salenius

The English poet and preacher John Donne (1572–1631), was born into a prominent Catholic family, and later in life converted to the Church of England. He was an admired poet, a respected preacher for King James I and finally even Dean of St Paul’s, one of the most important positions in the Church.1 Within the canon of English literature, John Donne is known primarily for his poetry, both secular and religious. His prose texts, especially his sermons and the meditative collection Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), are central spiritual writings of the Early Modern period. His poetry was later especially admired by the Modernists of the early twentieth century. The present article will concentrate on Donne’s poetry, and it will show how Donne uses images of space to illustrate different categories of love. The article will demonstrate how Donne employs astronomical and/or geographical metaphors (i.e. metaphors of stars and planets, spheres and the universe as well as images of maps, continents and seafaring) in the temporal and celestial representations of love in his poetry and thus declares his understanding of the different nature of the sweet comprehensiveness of the love of a man and a woman and the immense magnitude of divine love. This article will further show how, with Donne, the secular form of love shows a tendency to expand from a worldly space into the spheres above, whereas divine love, itself infinite in range, is concentrated into a small and restricted space. Some critics have emphasised the contrast between Donne’s worldly verse and his divine poetry, while others have highlighted the similarities between the writings of Jack Donne and Dr Donne—the young Catholic The timing and nature of Donne’s conversion has been the subject of much debate and will not be pursued further in this context. For a discussion on the topic, see e.g. Salenius 2001.

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poet and the Protestant preacher (see e.g. Masselink 1992, 89). The similarities have been emphasised especially when considering the secular (and even sexual) imagery in his Holy Sonnets (see e.g. Docherty 1986, 131 ff.; Lindley 1998). Donne indeed makes use of similar linguistic devices throughout his writing (in both poetry and prose), but there are also important differences in the ways he uses language within the different subgenres of the sacred and the profane. The present article will discuss these differences. In Donne’s time the perception of the form and dimensions of the world and the universe—in which man loved and experienced God’s love—was in a state of change, and there was at the time considerable debate about cosmological issues (Gorton 1999, 68). Exploration and travel as well as cosmological revolutions were changing the ways in which the world was viewed—and especially how (Christian) man saw his role and place in the universe. This restructuring of the worldview gave a poet like John Donne ample material to apply to his descriptions of abstract ideas.

The Concept of Love in the Early Modern Era The idea and/or concept of love—both secular and divine—is a theme well-known and much reflected upon by Donne, the daring love-poet who became a man of the Church, and he eventually discussed the theme also in his prose, especially in his marriage sermons.2 Achsah Guibbory (1986, 87) points out that, in his sermons, Donne makes several connections between man’s Fall and his love for a woman (i.e. his supposed falling in love) (see e.g. Donne’s Sermons, vol. 5, no. 5, ll. 68–9 and vol. 6, no. 2, ll. 284– 85). In this context Guibbory notes that Donne, although he was “strongly attracted by the possibility that love might be able to counter the decay that resulted from the Fall,” was apprehensive about temporal love as a remedy against the passage of time; rather he saw man’s love for woman as being “yet another example of the self-destructive tendency of man and indeed the entire created universe” (1986, 88). The evidence in the present article will show that Donne addresses the same problem in his secular love poetry. Donne seems to seek a form of love that would conquer the entire universe, but temporal love does not achieve this goal.3 See e.g. Sermons, vol. 2, no. 17 (1619–20) and vol. 8, no. 3 (1627). Terry Sherwood (1984, 12) has noted that the time span of Creation “establishes the design for developing time” and that the Fall “requires a realignment of that

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Furthermore, M. Thomas Hester (1987, 62) has noted that the poet’s attempt to create a poem about divine love can only be “an image” of the real love of God, or “an enigmatic re-signing” of that love, because of the poet’s (man’s) “fallen condition.” Hester (ibid.) also talks about “man’s fall into language” as his “gradual separation from the Word”; with his language, man seeks, and fails, to recreate divine significance. The present article will show, however, that Donne stretches his eloquence to conceptualise the divine influence in what one of his contemporaries, the rhetorician George Puttenham (c. 1528–90) calls “a manner of utterance and language of extraordinary phrase” through which “the high mysteries of the gods should be revealed and taught” ([1589] 1999, 196). By using the framework of the new worldview, Donne is able to make a distinction between the incomprehensiveness of secular love and the comprehensiveness of divine love. These issues are relevant from the point of view of reading the different sub-genres of the poetry and the different nature of the different types of love. Furthermore, although Donne’s religious lyric as a whole has been placed “in a plane somewhere between the spiritual and the temporal” (Summers and Pebworth 1987, x), taking into account the strong element of subjective human experience expressed in them, it is still relevant to see the sub-genres of secular and religious poetry as having different aims and purposes. M. Thomas Hester (1987, 62) has defined the distinction between secular and religious lyric in that “the speaker of a [secular] love sonnet aims to express his love for a beloved, to initiate an exchange of vows or to ‘obtain grace’ by the rhetoric of his words,” whereas “the speaker of the religious lyric is not the lover but the beloved who must respond to the ‘signs’ of God’s love that have already been expressed in, and given significance to, human history.”4 Similarly, in the context of the present article, secular love is defined as the love between lovers, whereas in divine

design through the Word.” Thus, the Fall, closely linked to man’s love for woman, implies a shift in time as created by God for the perfect world (before the Fall). Heli Tissari (2003, 345) has found that in Early Modern English, “love” tends to be presented in the time-related concept of endlessness. This link between the concepts of love and time appears appropriate to the shifts in man’s religious experience, especially in the context of a religious convert such as Donne. The Reformation presented man with a new framework for conceptualising faith in an historical context. 4 In this context Hester specifically discusses Donne’s sonnet “As due by many titles.”

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love the mortal lover is primarily the object of God’s love.5

Love as Space Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 60) discuss the spatialization of the concept of love, and define “love” as a container metaphor, seeing the state of love conceptualised as a container (ibid., 29–32), and when discussing cognitive metaphors, Heli Tissari has noted that “most of the metaphors of love [in the English language] have a spatial source domain” (2003, 428, emphasis added). These are significant observations when applied to Donne’s poetry. It becomes evident that, for Donne too, love is first and foremost a space, a container, a room. Donne presents love as more than merely an abstract feeling; he shows it as a controlled form of existence, defined within the constraints of a given space. The most striking example is the poem “The Sunne Rising,” addressing the “[b]usie old foole, unruly Sunne,” who imposes upon the lovers (in a bedroom, perhaps) “[t]hrough windowes, and through curtaines,” while schoolboys and hunters move outside this restricted space of love-making.6 Although the present article will not address the biographical dimensions of Donne’s poetry, there is the question of the object of John Donne’s secular love, as well as his sincerity when discussing divine love. A number of scholars have emphasised the importance of reading Donne’s texts within the context of biographical facts (see e.g. Flynn 1995), and many have made strong connections between Donne’s poetry and his life, and especially his relationship with his wife, Ann More (see e.g. Hester 1997; Bell 2000; Radzinowicz 1987, 57–58). If we accept this link, then it grants the poems a stronger personal commitment and depth of emotion than seeing the poetry merely as “a courtly accomplishment” (Carey [1981] 1990, 56) of a poet writing his (secular) love poetry with little dedication or someone who writes his divine poetry merely “as a preparation for taking holy orders” (Radzinowicz 1987, 43) and “with no interest in strengthening his readers’ faith” (Oliver 1997, 9). The present article indeed considers Donne’s love (and faith) genuine and sustained, and thus it is of even greater interest to read his poems as a continuum of images and themes. 6 “Busie old foole, unruly Sunne, Why dost thou thus, Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run? Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices, Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride, 5

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Here temporal love(-making), although perhaps imaginary when imagined for the purpose of the poem, is contained within the walls of the room. The sun disturbs this act, invading the space that the poet deems belongs to the lovers alone. Somewhat more abstractly, in the poem “The Flea” the love (in the form of mixing the two lovers’ blood) is constrained in the space formed by the body of the insect: It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee; (ll. 3–4)

In the form of this blood sucked from both lovers, then, the meeting is “cloystered” within walls, which thus metaphorically come to represent the “mariage bed” and the “mariage temple” (see below). Here the insect becomes a metaphor for each lover as well as for the bed and the lovemaking. The lovers can consummate their love metaphorically within the body of the insect when they cannot do so in real intercourse: This flea is you and I, and this Our mariage bed, and mariage temple is; Though parents grudge, and you, w’are met, And cloystered in these living walls of Jet. (ll. 12–15)

The secular love in these two poems is represented by a space, the room in which the love(-making) takes place, or even the space of the body, the container of man’s seed. The reference to the sexual act makes this form of love a concrete act rather than an abstract feeling. Moreover, this form of love, made tangible by the space, becomes an active process: instead of (or maybe, in addition to) being an emotion, love is a (metaphorical) motion, first conquering and then taking place in a restricted space.

Call countrey ants to harvest offices; Love, all alike, no season knowes nor clyme, Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.” (ll. 1–10) (For those poems not quoted in full in the text but whose context seems especially relevant, a larger excerpt is given in the notes. All quotations from the poems follow the 1967 edition by John T. Shawcross.)

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The Concept of Divine Love In discussing Milton’s view of God’s love, Gale Carrithers and James Hardy (1994, 41) see this love primarily through lumen naturale rationis; on the one hand, in “the generative creativity of the natural world” and, on the other hand, in grace towards man or humanity. Furthermore, Carrithers and Hardy claim that this grace is “the poetic and theological link between God’s love and human efforts at love” (ibid.). This is an essential point in reading Donne’s concept of God’s love. Within the theme of love in his divine poetry, Donne is much more subtle than in his secular poems: rarely, with the exception of the copious mentions in “A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last going into Germany” (to be discussed in more detail below), where Donne, for example, presents God as “th’Eternall root of true Love,” does he use the actual word “love” (nor does he refer to the near-synonyms, like “charity”). Yet it is in the grace of God towards man that His love is manifested. Mostly, then, love in Donne’s divine poetry must be approached from a functional point of view, from the act of love, from how God shows His love to man. The Gospel of John provides the starting-point here, stating that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16; emphasis added). Thus, it is mainly the descriptions of God’s grace, His mercy and salvation, of His giving Christ to the world, that show instances of divine love in the world. This leaves man the more passive receiver of the “signs” of God’s active love, as opposed to being the more active initiator of secular love (see Hester 1987, 62 discussed above). In Donne’s religious verse this act of love is performed in, or in relation to, a space. Frances M. Malpezzi (1995, 141) has particularly considered how “Donne’s religious imagination transcends the particularities and limits of his time and place.” In the poem “A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last going into Germany,” Donne opens the first stanza in one of his most powerful analogies, defining the space of God’s love as the ship and the sea: In what torne ship soever I embarke, That ship shall be my embleme of thy Arke; What sea soever swallow mee, that flood Shall be to mee an embleme of thy bloode; (ll. 1–4)

Here the ship (the container, the space) is an emblem, a metaphor for God’s sacrifice for man. God’s love is epitomised within the sides of the vessel,

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carrying man (Noah) to safety—and, on a further level, even the Law of God for posterity—or in the curb of the seabed, containing the flood of sin—and ultimately the blood of Christ for man’s salvation. The Ark of Noah becomes the Ark of the Covenant and, finally, the Holy Grail, a cup containing (according to some of the legends) the blood of the crucified Christ. The theme of sacrifice is elaborated upon in a further image of seafaring in the second stanza of the poem as the speaker of the poem, in turn, “sacrifice[s] this Iland,” his country, to God. This sacrifice contains the speaker’s earthly love: I sacrifice this Iland unto thee, And all whom I lov’d there, and who lov’d mee; When I have put our seas twixt them and mee, Put thou thy sea betwixt my sinnes and thee. (ll. 8–11)

Although Donne’s sacrifice here primarily is the sacrifice of departure, the mirror-image gains depth in meaning from the aspect of love: the speaker gives up his secular love, but wishes to gain (or experience) divine love, in the form of absolution and grace. When the speaker makes the geographical sacrifice (or bargain even), he turns geographical distance into a metaphor for God’s ability to separate man’s sins from his hope of salvation.7 Furthermore, it is not only the seas, but also the heavens that distance man from his love—and especially from God’s love. Earlier in “A Hymne to Christ” Donne places the metaphor of distance within the context of heaven and earth, in the second part of the first stanza: Though thou with clouds of anger do disguise Thy face; yet through that maske I know those eyes, Which, though they turne away sometimes, they never will despise. (ll. 5–7)

Here Donne places God in the metaphorical heavens, behind clouds—or in Heaven behind His anger—thus separating man from God. The metaphor shows that God has the ability to hide His face from man and even turn His eyes away, to create even more distance between God and man. Here the imagery of the heavens, of heaven and earth, space and the universe, provides a powerful metaphorical framework for discussing various aspects of divine and temporal love. The poetic language of Donne’s time made ample use Heli Tissari (2003, 343) has observed that, especially in Early Modern English, love seems to be predominantly expressed through the concept of distance.

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of both the medieval imagery and the heliocentric worldview. These gain strength from the paradoxes they present by creating metaphors outside their conventional conceptual systems (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 139 ff.). In a similar way in his poem “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” Donne uses further planetary imagery in his favoured metaphor when referring to the setting (dying) and rising sun (Son). As the sun must set in order for a new day to dawn, likewise must the Son (of God) die in order for “endlesse day” to evolve: Hence is’t, that I am carryed towards the West This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East. There I should see a Sunne, by rising set, And by that setting endlesse day beget; (ll. 9–12)

The speaker here goes towards the geographical west as well as, more metaphorically, towards his own death (West), but he wishes his soul to reach Christ and resurrection (East). Later in this poem Donne refers to how the death of Christ made “the Sunne winke” (l. 20; cf. Matt. 27:458), perhaps suggesting (as in “A Hymne to Christ”) that with this planetary eclipse God turns away from man.9 Likewise, in the poem “Resurrection, imperfect,” Donne elaborates on his metaphor of (the planet) sun vs. the Son (of God), suggesting that the sun setting, or the Son dying (by being raised on the cross, like in “Goodfriday, 1613”), although being wounded, is a “better Sun.” Sleep sleep old Sun, thou canst not have repast As yet, the wound thou took’st on friday last; Sleepe then, and rest; The world may beare thy stay, A better Sun rose before thee to day, (ll. 1–4)

Donne develops his metaphor further by associating the wounds of Christ to those of the eclipse of the sun, and the death-sleep of Christ to the suppression of light from the planet. The three poems above all include the metaphors of (geographical) space, especially in the form of creating or resisting distance, as well as of cartographic encountering, linked to astronomical (planetary) space. Divine “And now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour.” 9 This particular aspect of the poem has elsewhere been linked to Donne’s notions about God and the concept of sight (Salenius 1998, 150). 8

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love (here partly contrasted to secular love, and like secular love above) is presented within the conceptual framework of space. Furthermore, God’s love also needs the space of time to operate: in the Holy Sonnet “At the round earths imagin’d corners” the poet asks God for “a space” to repent his sins and receive absolution before the final judgement.10 This is a further instance of creating a metaphor outside its conventional conceptual sphere for depth (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 139, referred to above), as the expression clearly refers to an element of time, while at the same time creating a spatial illusion.

Secular Love and Cosmology From the point of view of cosmological experience, it is relevant to note that secular love, starting in the room, always seems to expand, explode even, beyond its worldly limits or limitations. L. M. Gorton (1999, 61) has noted how Donne’s “lovers call upon images of the cosmos” and how they use space as the “imaginative language” to “describe love’s privacy, and its power.” In “The Sunne Rising” (referred to above) the poem starts in a small room with the two lovers, in itself a very restricted scene. In the second stanza, however, Donne employs the same planetary image as in the two divine poems discussed above, and he first presents the image of the sun being disguised from the mortal eye: Thy beames, so reverend, and strong Why shouldst thou thinke? I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke, But that I would not lose her sight so long: (ll. 11–14)

The metaphor here is secular, however, and the speaker himself (not God) is the one hiding the sun from view. Just as God could “turn away” from man, or “winke” (in “A Hymne to Christ” and “Goodfriday, 1613” respectively), here the lover, too, can—or could—now “winke” and lose sight of the “But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space, For, if above all these, my sinnes abound, ‘Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace, When wee are there; here on this lowly ground, Teach mee how to repent; for that’s as good As if thou’hadst seal’d my pardon, with thy blood.” (ll. 9–14)

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woman, but he chooses not to do so, he does not want to stop looking at her. Later in the same stanza in “The Sunne Rising” the poet parallels the action (of his love, or of love-making) with phenomena from the realm of exploration and world trade as well as a multitude of kingships: If her eyes have not blinded thine, Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee, Whether both the’India’s of spice and Myne Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee. Aske for those Kings whom thou saw’st yesterday, And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay. (ll. 14–20)

Here the whole world can be seen in the lovers’ bed.11 The image is extended by the geographical stretch of referring to “both the’India’s”— India in the East as well as the West Indies, the latter having rather recently shown up on European maps. The following stanza elaborates on the image of the expanded world: She’is all States, and all Princes, I, Nothing else is. Princes doe but play us . . . . (ll. 21–23)

The microcosm is absolute as “[n]othing else is.” The lovers and their love-bed are the whole world. A little later, the sun, initially chided for waking the lovers, can concentrate on them and still be everywhere, and by warming the lovers the sun can warm the world: Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee To warme the world, that’s done in warming us. Shine here to us, and thou art every where; This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare. (ll. 27–30)

The image as such is medieval: the earth (here: the bed) is the centre of the universe, and the walls of the room are the sphere of the sun. By likening the room and bed to the whole universe, (secular) love can eventually reach beyond the limits of the given space, stretch beyond the known world, 11 L. M. Gorton has also noted how Donne’s perspective “shrinks harvest workers into scurrying ants” (1999, 62; see l. 8 of the poem: “Call countrey ants to harvest offices,” quoted in n6 above).

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and be “every where.” In Donne’s image secular love expands in order to embrace the universe. Likewise, in the poem “The Good-Morrow,” a similar expansion takes place. In the second stanza “love . . . makes one little roome, an every where,” and thus the image extends geographically to include “new worlds”: For love, all love of other sights controules, And makes one little roome, an every where. Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, Let Maps to others, worlds on worlds have showne, Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one. (ll. 10–14)

The image of the “sea-discoverers” and maps is important: with the help of maps and exploration man took possession of the earth in the times of discoveries. For Donne, then, secular love is empowering, dominant, and even authoritarian, presented in images of worldly conquest and triumph. Donne’s speaker is very much the dominating, ravishing male, drawing his language from the domain of government and control. The poet/lover conquers the space by taking (possession of) the body. Finally, in the third stanza in “The Good-Morrow,” the circle originally formed by (the gaze of) the two lovers encompasses the universe: My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares, And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest, Where can we finde two better hemispheares Without sharpe North, without declining West? (ll. 15–18)

The lovers, first presented in the context of their “countrey pleasures” (in stanza one), see each other (and their hearts) in each other’s eyes and can make their little room an “every where”; they can possess the world. Finally, they create “two hemispheares,” and thus, just by holding on to one another, their love creates a universe—and, at least for the moment of love(-making), this world has no death or decay. Similarly, in stanza 4 of “The Canonization,” where love, and the lovers’ legend, is “unfit for tombes and hearse,” the lovers will “build in sonnets pretty roomes” to define their love in a space.12 Here too “the whole 12 “Wee can dye by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombes and hearse Our legend bee, it will be fit for verse; And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,

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worlds soule” is then seen in the lover’s eyes (final stanza): Who did the whole worlds soule extract, and drove Into the glasses of your eyes So made such mirrors, and such spies, That they did all to you epitomize, Countries, Townes, Courts: Beg from above A patterne of your love! (ll. 40–45)

As in “The Good-Morrow” above, here too the eyes are made into a kind of microcosm: the lover sees countries, towns and courts—the whole world— epitomised in the eyes of the beloved. The universe is represented in a miniature image in order for (secular) love to conquer the world and reach “every where.”

Divine Cosmology Donne’s divine poetry—and thus his approach to divine love—works in the opposite direction: here love originates in the endlessness of God’s being, but is then condensed, crystallised even, into a small space. In the second sonnet (entitled “Annunciation”) in the sonnet cycle “La Corona” the immensity of God’s ultimate love notably begins in the “every where” to which profane love aspires, but is then confined in a little room, “cloysterd” in the womb of the Virgin: That All, which alwayes is All every where, Which cannot sinne, and yet all sinnes must beare, Which cannot die, yet cannot chuse but die, Loe, faithfull Virgin, yeelds himselfe to lye In prison, in thy wombe . . . ....................... Thou’hast light in darke, and shutst in little roome, Immensity, cloystered in thy deare wombe. (ll. 16–20; 27–28) We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes, And by these hymnes, all shall approve Us Canoniz’d for Love.” (ll. 28–36)

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Here Donne uses the same metaphor of cloistering as in the poem “The Flea,” but the image is crucially different. In “The Flea” the restricted space of the insect’s body becomes the scene of the meeting (and of the metaphorical love-making) of the lovers. From within the insect the tiny drops of blood finally expand metaphorically to represent full-blown intercourse, whereas in “Annunciation” the immense love itself is expressly contracted and enclosed in a markedly small space. The paradox is that, by being consummated within the insect, temporal love can expand, defeat the “grudging parents,” and eventually even multiply and be “every where.” Significantly, God’s love does not expand or explode. It is defined in a space, and this space is condensed and focused. Terry Sherwood (1984, 13) has indicated how the prophesy of Christ is fulfilled in the womb of the Virgin. He elaborates upon the point further by referring to St Paul’s words about all fullness dwelling in Christ,13 noting that time is thus “literally filled full” (ibid.). In Donne’s terms, then, the contraction of the love simultaneously here also creates a whole, a completion. Patricia G. Pinka (1987, 172) has noted how, by “commemorat[ing] the historical birth of Christ in its return on the spiritual calendar,” nativity poems by Milton and Herbert “move outside of time themselves into the spiritual present of eternity.” Similarly, echoing Psalm 139, in this sonnet by Donne the womb of the Virgin is a place referred to by God at a time “[e]re by the spheares time was created” (l. 23).14 Thus also the starting point for the love of God is beyond the scope of the known world and of time; it is found in the endlessness of eternity and space. Later in the same sonnet cycle (in the seventh sonnet, “Ascention”),15 “For it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell” (Col. 1:19). “Ere by the spheares time was created, thou Wast in his minde . . .” (ll. 23–24) 15 “Salute the last and everlasting day, Joy at the’uprising of this Sunne, and Sonne,  Yee whose true teares, or tribulation  Have purely washt, or burnt your drossie clay;  Behold the Highest, parting hence away,  Lightens the darke clouds, which hee treads upon, Nor doth hee by ascending, show alone, But first hee, and hee first enters the way.  O strong Ramme, which has batter’d heaven for mee,  Mild lambe, which with thy blood, hast mark’d the path;  Bright Torch, which shin’st, that I the way may see,  Oh, with thy owne blood quench thy owne just wrath,  13 14

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Donne presents his frequently used pun saluting the “uprising of this Sunne, and Sonne” (l. 86). Within the framework of spatial definitions, and in relation to “Goodfriday, 1613” (discussed above), it is significant to see that the immensity of God, the creator of all the universe (and thus perhaps predestined to reach beyond the spheres), is metaphorically condensed into a planet (albeit the largest in our solar system) and eventually (theologically) into a man, the mortal son of God.  A similar phenomenon is further elaborated upon in Donne’s poem “Hymne to God my God, in my sickness.” In this poem God’s ultimate love, evident in Christ’s sacrifice and God’s grace (cf. John 3:16, quoted above), is reflected in the space of a good death (i.e. death leading to salvation), which Donne presents as a holy room (stanza one): Since I am comming to that Holy roome, Where, with thy Quire of Saints for evermore, I shall be made thy Musique; As I come I tune the Instrument here at the dore, And what I must doe then, thinke here before. (ll. 1–5)

This space, the room, is the ultimate goal of man, the focus of his existence. Coming from the world, man enters a space of God’s love; having lived in the vastness of earth, man arrives at a restricted space. Yet for this journey from the world to God’s restricted room Donne needs directions, and he evokes the image of the “sea-discoverers” and “new worlds” (cf. “The good-morrow” above): in “Hymne to God my God,” man himself in his illness16 is a map for his physicians, the “Cosmographers,” to explore. In the second and third stanzas Donne presents images of discoveries as well as of straits and currents that take seafarers to new lands: Whilst my Physitians by their love are growne Cosmographers, and I their Mapp, who lie Flat on this bed, that by them may be showne That this is my South-west discoverie Per fretum febris, by these streights to die, And if thy holy Spirit, my Muse did raise, Deigne at my hands this crowne of prayer and praise.” (ll. 85–98) 16 This poem most likely refers to Donne’s near-fatal illness in 1623–24, or, alternatively (and as suggested by Donne’s first biographer, Izaak Walton), to his final illness before his death in 1631.

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I joy, that in these straits, I see my West; For, those theire currants yeeld returne to none, What shall my West hurt me?  As West and East In all flatt Maps (and I am one) are one, So death doth touch the Resurrection. (ll. 6–15)

In this map, the flat representation of earth, whereby Donne presents the “spatial paradox [as] a spiritual mystery” (Gorton 1999, 68) by stating that east and west “are one,” death leads to Resurrection—i.e. only through Christ’s (and eventually man’s own) death can man receive God’s love, enter the holy room, and gain everlasting life. Furthermore, this map also leads to the focal point of the first created man as well as of Christ (the man)—to the Fall as well as to salvation. Donne refers to the image of the garden of Eden having been located at the site of the cross (fifth stanza): We thinke that Paradise and Calvarie, Christs Crosse, and Adams tree, stood in one place; Looke Lord, and finde both Adams met in me; As the first Adams sweat surrounds my face, May the last Adams blood my soule embrace. (ll. 21–25)

The first Adam represents the Fall, whereas the last Adam (i.e. Christ) grants man the means to salvation: only through Christ’s (“purple”) blood can man enter the holy room (l. 26, final stanza).17 As Christ’s cross and Adam’s tree stand in one place and both Adams are thus found in man, who is embraced by their sweat and blood, eventually all of God’s love for man is focussed on one point on the map. The “map” gives the physicians directions for finding the root of the illness, but on a further metaphorical level, it is also the map for man’s soul to find the holy room. In the fourth stanza Donne seeks his (soul’s) true home on the map, making geographical explorations throughout the new world: “So, in his purple wrapp’d receive mee Lord, By these his thornes give me his other Crowne; And as to others soules I preach’d thy word, Be this my Text, my Sermon to mine owne, Therefore that He may raise the Lord throws down.” (ll. 26–30) 17

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Salenius Is the Pacifique Sea my home? Or are The Easterne riches? Is Jerusalem? Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltare, All streights, and none but streights are wayes to them, Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Sem. (ll. 16–20)

While perhaps seeking the true home of his soul in the body, in these images Donne presents a world conquered by man. Simultaneously, however, the vastness of the globe is made redundant: any of these locations can be man’s home on earth, Donne claims; yet only the holy room is the ultimate goal, the ultimate space that man must reach. This, what can be seen as Donne’s “infatuation with maps” (McLeod 1999, 87), can also be linked to the larger question of re-structuring the world from the point of view of rising English imperialism. Bruce McLeod describes maps (perhaps specifically Early Modern maps) as “an attempt to fix space under a particular code” (ibid.)—and the image can certainly be extended from geographical maps to include cosmological and astronomical depictions. In the Early Modern world, the shifting and changing worldview requires a new perspective from which “the individual views his place in a world of imperial struggle where old certainties have been destroyed” and where “the new world is not just America but a global condition” (ibid., 99). The sense of self, although not necessarily mirroring the new world, is thus related to the experience of subjectivity in the expanding world and space. Similarly, with concepts such as fulfilment, wholeness and completion, the subjective experience of expansion is reflected in the structures of the metaphorical framework. In the poem “Goodfriday, 1613” (discussed above) man also stretches in two directions as his ride takes him to the (geographical) west and life carries him towards death, whereas his soul reaches to the (metaphorical) east. This spatial tension is emphasised by the image of the rising versus the setting sun/Son. Furthermore, although opening with the wish, “Let mans Soule be a Spheare” that makes other spheres lose their motion,18 in this poem it is eventually Christ’s (and thus God the creator’s) hands “which “Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this, The’intelligence that moves, devotion is, And as the other Spheares, by being growne Subject to forraigne motions, lose their owne, And being by others hurried every day, Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:” (ll. 1–6) 18

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span the Poles, / And turne all spheares at once” (ll. 21–22), and which thus define the scene. It is the death of Christ that shocks the natural order of things, on a temporal level with earthquakes and solar eclipses, and on an existential/ontological level by conquering death. Here God’s ultimate sacrifice reaches from the heavens to man and is finally fixed between the two bleeding hands of Christ: It made His own Lieutenant Nature shrinke, It made His footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke. Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, And turne all spheares at once pierc’d with those holes? Could I behold that endlesse height which is Zenith to us, and to’our Antipodes, Humbled below us? . . . . (ll. 19–25)

In the three last lines above, God’s love, in the form of the sacrifice, is humbled from “endlesse height” down to man’s world to die for him. This concentrates God’s love into a restricted space on earth—and eventually to a mortal man, Christ dying on the cross. In the Holy Sonnet “I am a little world” Donne presents the universe as a metaphor for man, like a “world made cunningly / Of Elements”— not unlike the metaphorical universes in “The Sun Rising” and “The goodmorrow” discussed above. Yet in “I am a little world” the metaphorical world (like the map in “Hymne to God my God”) is a creation of God’s hands, not an expansion of man’s world. Here “both parts” (both hemispheres) of this old world (i.e. body and spirit) must die on earth in order for man to gain salvation: I am a little world made cunningly Of Elements, and an Angelike spright, But black sinne hath betraid to endlesse night My worlds both parts, and (oh) both parts must die. (ll. 1–4)

The deliverance (God’s love and mercy) comes in the form of new lands and spheres (i.e. metaphors depicting the new worldview), which thus also imply “new seas” to provide new tears. This, however, is God’s, not man’s, new world: You which beyond that heaven which was most high Have found new sphears, and of new lands can write, Powre new seas in mine eyes, that so I might

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In this image the new (temporal) lands are diminished in relation to God’s heaven, which is “most high,” and they are controlled by God. God’s love and mercy is brought down from the spheres onto the map of the temporal world. Here the condensed form is related to (alchemical) purification, which is presented in the Lord’s “fiery zeale” (ll. 13).19 Similarly, in “Resurrection, imperfect” Donne elaborates upon the same image, stating that Christ entered the grave already in a (metaphorically) noble form, but the resurrection transmuted Him even further and enabled Him to turn imperfection into perfection (here: salvation): Hee was all gold when he lay downe, but rose All tincture, and doth not alone dispose Leaden and iron wills to good, but is Of power to make even sinfull flesh like his. (ll. 13–16)

The alchemical procedure includes the condensation of matter into a purer form, practised by the alchemists as part of their pursuit to turn base metal into gold. The process of refinement implies the reduction of matter. The procedure that Donne here presents as metaphorical of Christ’s resurrection is the ultimate alchemical accomplishment of creating a tincture that can ennoble worldly matter, here carrying the allusion to the focusing of divine love into the person of Christ.

Conclusions: Temporal versus Celestial Love In Donne’s poetry the idea of love is largely discussed in terms of metaphors of geographical and cosmological space. Donne is indeed known to have been fascinated and inspired by the phenomena of the changing world, and much of his work contains references to geographical “But oh it must be burnt; alas the fire Of lust and envie’have burnt it heretofore, And made it fouler; Let their flames retire, And burne me ô Lord, with a fiery zeale Of thee’and thy house, which doth in eating heale.” (ll. 10–14) 19

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as well as cosmological events of his time.20 Furthermore, the declaration and description of the idea of love within this framework also suggests that love, both temporal and celestial, was for Donne one of the greatest mysteries of the world—and of the human mind. As suggested above, what seems to be happening in Donne’s representation of temporal and sacred love is that secular love expands from a room into the universe—or the love-bed becomes representative of the universe—whereas divine love, itself infinite, is condensed into a restricted space. This expansion and condensation are opposite, but at the same time parallel movements: both include the rhetorical procedure of transferring meaning, or “transmuting” a word (Wilson [1560] 1994, 200), from one level of perception to another—of seeing the eyes as the world, the room as a sphere, the womb as a space, and so on. However, there is a distinct difference in the direction of the movement. In the instances of temporal love the pursuit seems to be to expand the motion (and the emotion): by loving the lover, we love the world; by shining on the lovers, the sun shines “every where”; by seeing each other’s eyes, the lovers possess the world. Then again, divine love moves in the opposite direction: the immensity of God’s love is fixed in the womb, on the cross, or in (Christ) the man. God’s love, somehow, is so vast that it cannot be defined unless the space provided is condensed for man’s understanding. The theological definition of love is given as “nos ergo diligamus quoniam Deus prior dilexit nos” (Vulgate, 1 John 4:19; literally: “we love because God first loved us”). From this point of view, it is reasonable to define the concept of love firstly from the point of view of the love of God. Within the larger frame of things, it is God’s love that makes temporal love possible, and thus temporal love can be seen as an extension of divine love. This definition also provides a clue to the choice of metaphorical framework: divine love is defined in the sacrifice God made for man’s salvation, ultimately the death of Christ on the cross. Temporal love implies the redistribution of this love. As demonstrated in Donne’s poems, then, God first directs his love to man, and man then extends beyond given (natural) limits to reproduce God’s love, in the form of secular love. Although Achsah Guibbory (1986, 88, discussed above) has suggested that Donne would have seen secular love as an example of self-destructiveness rather than as a remedy for See e.g. Post 2006, 5. Also, Donne’s Ignatius his Conclave (1611) carries ample reference and allusion to the new world and especially to the works of Galileo, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and Kepler (see p. 7 ff. and e.g. Armitage 1966, 173; Lear 1965, 15n36).

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decay, the metaphorical framework discussed here challenges this notion: rather than showing temporal love as destructive, Donne here seems to be mirroring its celestial source, and stretching temporal love to encompass as much of the created, albeit now decaying, universe as possible, in order to make this love as enduring and as close an imitation of divine love as possible. Yet Donne knows that he (or temporal love) cannot conquer time or achieve everlasting life; being only “an image” of divine love (see Hester 1987, 62, referred to above), this secular love cannot reach completion. In expressing love, temporal as well as celestial, Donne sought to take possession of the world and the universe. In his metaphors illustrating secular love he expands into, or beyond, the limits of the known world. However, at the time of his life and writing, new knowledge about the geography, cosmology and astronomy of the world and universe had presented man with a new set of facts about his world: no longer could the world, or the universe, be wholly controlled by man. For Donne, and for a long time after Donne, the new world remained “more imaginary than real” (Scanlan 1999, 122), and Donne reserved this unconquerable unknown as a metaphor for the emotion of temporal love—it simply cannot be conquered.21 The expansion, the outward movement, of secular love can never reach completion, be fulfilled or exhausted in full, but it continues its passage in space; there are still new continents to explore, new galaxies to be found. Conversely, the contraction bringing divine love into focus simultaneously also creates a whole, defines a distinct space—and reaches completion. Thus, the only form of love that can achieve its ultimate goal of fulfilment, enter the “Holy roome,” is divine love, God’s love towards man.

References Armitage, Angus. 1966. John Kepler. London: Faber. Bell, Ilona. 2000. “Courting Anne More.” John Donne Journal 19:59– 86. Biblia Sacra. 1969. Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft. Carey, John. (1981) 1990. John Donne: Life, Mind and Art. New Edition. London: Faber. Encountering the unknown in Early Modern English texts, including Donne, has also been discussed in Salenius 2007. 21

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Carrithers, Gale H. Jr. and James D. Hardy, Jr. 1994. Milton and the Hermeneutic Journey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Docherty, Thomas. 1986. John Donne, Undone. London: Methuen. Donne, John. 1967. The Complete Poetry of John Donne. Edited by John T. Shawcross. New York: Anchor Books. ———. (1959) 2000. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. (1611) 1969. Ignatius his Conclave. Edited by T. S. Healy, S.J. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1953–62. Sermons. Edited by George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson. 10 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. Flynn, Dennis. 1995. John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gorton, L. M. 1999. “Philosophy and the City: Space in Donne.” John Donne Journal 18:61–71. Guibbory, Achsah. 1986. The Map of Time. Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hester, M. Thomas, ed. 1997. John Donne’s “Desire of More”: The Subject of Anne Donne in His Poetry. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. ———. 1987. “Re-Signing that Text of the Self: Donne’s ‘As due by Many Titles’.” In “Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse”: The SeventeethCentury Religious Lyric, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, 59–71. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. The Holy Bible. s.a. The Authorized King James Version (1611). London: British and Foreign Bible Society. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lear, John. 1965. Kepler’s Dream. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lindley, Arthur. 1998. “John Donne, ‘Batter my Heart,’ and English Rape Law.” John Donne Journal 17:75–88. Malpezzi, Frances M. 1995. “Donne’s Transcendent Imagination: The Divine Poems as Hierophantic Experience.” In John Donne’s Religious Imagination, edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi, 141–61. Conway: UCA Press. Masselink, Noralyn. 1992. “A Matter of Interpretation: Example and Donne’s Role as Preacher and Poet.” John Donne Journal 11:85–98. McLeod, Bruce. 1999. The Geography of Empire in English Literature.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oliver, P. M. 1997. Donne’s Religious Writing. A Discourse in Feigned Devotion. London: Longman. Pinka, Patricia G. 1987. “Timely Timelessness in Two Nativity Poems.” In “Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse”: The Seventeeth-Century Religious Lyric, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, 162–72. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Post, Jonathan F. S. 2006. ‘Donne’s life: a Sketch’. In The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, edited by Achsah Guibbory, 1–22. Cambridge University Press. Puttenham, George. (1589) 1999. “English Poetics and Rhetoric.” In English Renaissance Literary Criticism, edited by Brian Vickers, 190– 296. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Radzinowicz, Mary Ann. 1987. “’Anima Mea’ Psalms and John Donne’s Religious Poetry.” In “Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse”: The Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, 40–58. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Salenius, Maria. 1998. The Dean and his God. John Donne’s Doctrine of the Divine. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. ———. 2001. “The Circle and the Line: Two Metaphors of God and His Works in John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.” Neuphilologishe Mitteilungen, second series 102: 201–210. ———. 2007. “Textual Voyages Beyond the Pillars of Hercules: English Early Modern Literary Encounters with the Unknown.” In Illuminating Darkness.  Approaches to obscurity and nothingness in literature, edited by Päivi Mehtonen, 47–63. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. Scanlan, Thomas. 1999. Colonial Writing and the New World 1583–1671. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sherwood, Terry G. 1984. Fulfilling the Circle: A Study of Donne’s Thought. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Summers, Claude J. and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds. 1987. “Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse”: The Seventeeth-Century Religious Lyric. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Tissari, Heli. 2003. LOVEscapes. Changes in prototypical senses and cognitive metaphors since 1500. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Wilson, Thomas. (1560) 1994. The Art of Rhetoric (1560). Edited by Peter E. Medine. The Pennsylvania State University Press.

The Disappearance of Gravity: Airy Spaces in Contemporary Art Hanna Johansson

In 2012 visitors to dOCUMENTA (13), the most important regular contemporary art exhibition in the world and held in Kassel, experienced an odd phenomenon in the entrance hall of the main exhibition venue, the Fridericianum. This hall and the adjacent exhibition spaces on the ground floor were empty. Because the exhibition leaflet said that there was an artwork in these rooms, curious viewers moved inquiringly around the big empty spaces. Every now and then, they noticed a gust of air, slightly stronger than that produced by a normal fan. The artwork in fact was a work of moving air that gently pushed and pulled the visitor though the clean, white rooms. The work in question, I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise (The Invisible Pull), by the British artist Ryan Gander raised some important themes to which I wish to draw attention: on the one hand, how to make invisible non-human actors and forces visible, and on the other hand, the fragile and problematic relationships between art and life, between the natural and the technological. The second of these topics stems from the art of the 1970s, when artists developed strategies to overcome the chasm between art and life (Kaprow 1996; Johansson 2005, 36–39). Gander’s work gives a fresh interpretation of this relationship. First of all, the breeze in the museum was not life as such, in the form of bare bios, i.e. biological life. A breeze is a natural phenomenon, but in this context, it was anything but natural. Instead, it was technologically produced, the result of a long-planned process. Further, the work was connected to life outside the art world in the sense that it alluded to the air conditioning, which, on a hot summer day, is present and tangible in many public and private interior spaces all over the world. In Kassel in this case the point was not air conditioning, but an installation artwork that disturbed the border between the natural and the artificial as well as the border between art and non-art. The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on recent visual works of art that have as their main subject the element of air. I am interested in

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why such a fragile and almost invisible element, which emphasises the act of breathing, has become so prevalent in contemporary art in the last decade, both in video and photographic images and in installation art. Although air has been depicted in various ways in the history of landscape representations, contemporary works give air a central position not seen before. These works emphasise the empirical and realistic side of air and discard the symbolic tradition of atmosphere. Below, after a short historical overview, I will take up some contemporary works and theoretical viewpoints and analyse them with the help of notions of “the third nature” and the “hybrid” sublime, Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of spheres and his critique of gravity, Gaston Bachelard’s idea of a phenomenology of roundness and Bruno Latour’s concepts of second empiricism and matters of concern. Combining analysis of artworks with concepts from these theoretical sources, I will argue that contemporary works signal a turn to how space is lived and how the world is conceived.

Breeze: The External Cause of the Work Ryan Gander’s work was hard to represent. The work was neither visual nor visible. The only way to catch the work in a visual representation was to look at the viewers’ hair or clothes moving. The source of the air current in the exhibition space was also invisible and unknown, and visitors were seen searching for the source of the breeze, but without success. Because it seemed clear that there was an external cause for the breeze in the exhibition hall, the moving air became a sort of a fantasy or technological mystery. In this regard Gander’s work evoked many art historical associations. Wind or breeze has been a subject of art at least since the early Renaissance.1 Yet according to Georges Didi-Huberman, this subject was not seen until the 1890s when Aby Warburg made it into an art historical subject. Warburg re-invented our way of seeing Renaissance art by placing “bodily motion and the displacement of affects at the centre of our perception” (DidiHuberman 2003, 277). One of these inventive considerations concerned 1 “Imaginary breeze” was a topic of painting earlier than Didi-Huberman states. Renaissance art draws on a long tradition, which stretches back to antiquity and continued uninterrupted through the Middle Ages. See Raff 1978–79, 71–218 and Didi-Huberman 2003, 279.

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the meaning of wind and air in Renaissance paintings through which the fluidity of bodies was visualised. In Quattrocento paintings “draperies are in the wind as the wind is in the draperies, in the hair and all around the body” (ibid., 275). Warburg made us see that the wind does not just pass over things in the painting, but profoundly touches the things it passes over so that they are transformed and metamorphosed. Warburg spoke about wind as an “imaginary breeze” and an external cause of or force on the image. The power of the wind gave paintings forms that touched the viewers. Warburg called this the Pathosformel, a form that evokes pathos.2 In Renaissance art wind was a supernatural phenomenon, and when it appeared in an image, it did not necessarily involve the whole scene of a painting, but only certain figures or a part of the whole. This spatial incoherence was characteristic of early Renaissance paintings, such as Botticelli’s Primavera, where wind has a functional meaning. It sways and shakes and touches. Mobilising air became a vehicle for mediating pathos (feeling), but air in the form of wind also causes movement through time and permeates and induces pathos in the depicted bodies (DidiHuberman 2003, 277). Air was not understood as a natural element that everyone breathes and that is necessary for life, but rather as an individual style, fantasy and spirit, anima. This indicates a correspondence between an inner and an outer mood, or temper, which culminates in a connection between weather and a state of mind. This tradition was long-lasting; still at the beginning of the nineteenth century Carl Gustav Carus was defining the main task of landscape art as representing a certain mood through the depiction of a corresponding mood in the life of nature (Wamberg 2010, 173). Air also alluded to the atmosphere in the sense of the “spirit” of a place; thus, Vasari could attribute the revival and success of the arts and artists in Florence to the influence of “air” on the spirit of paintings and painters (Summers 1987, 121). Although in Renaissance Florence wind was recognised as “an external cause of the image” (Didi-Huberman 2003, 275–77),3 it was not regarded as an element or an important part of life outside art. Still, I would argue that there are common denominators between the understanding of air in the Renaissance and its understanding in contemporary art. Air has a power over visible things. In the art of the Quattrocento, air revealed nudity, motion and the intimacy of bodies. In Ryan Gander’s contemporary 2 Pathosformel is one of the key concepts of Warburg’s theory. On Pathosformel, see Hurttig 2012. 3 “Die äußere Veranlassung der Bilder” (Warburg 1998, 45–55, quoted in DidiHuberman 2003, 277).

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installation, the breezy air made viewers pay attention to other viewers so that at some moments, the work created a sudden, accidental community in the Fridericianum exhibition halls. The breath of wind affected the viewers and their relationship to each other. Air and its phenomena in the sky have been used in art both as a release—at least somewhat—from gravity, and from the laws of perspective. Didi-Huberman (2003) recognised that in Botticelli’s Primavera form and intensity combine in the gestures of the Graces and the subtle elevations of the aere. This “corporeal velocity” (prestezza corporale) falls under the category of “phantoms” (fantasmata) as defined by Italian choreographers: in suspending immobility and motion, the dancer must suddenly become a “phantasmal shadow” (ombra phantasmatica). It means that dancers escape gravity and their earthly conditions (Didi-Huberman 2003, 286).4 Since the Renaissance, air has appeared in several ways in the visual arts. Romantic airy landscape paintings are one example (Didi-Huberman 2003; Fermor 1992, 46–47; Castelli 1987, 35–57). Heavenly bodies and clouds have been used to depict invisible things and states of mind, such as love and religious feelings, which are rarely visible. Air in the form of clouds has also disturbed the coherent visual experience in theories of perspective. As Hubert Damisch (2002, 123) has shown, clouds did not fit into Brunelleschi’s first perspective image of the baptistery at Florence. Brunelleschi did not attempt to depict the sky; he merely showed it. In order to fit a perspective image, things must occupy a place and have a contour that can be defined by lines. The problem with the sky is that it has no such definition nor does it occupy a place. The sky does not even have a shape to be explored in terms of a surface. Owing to its fluid characteristic, air reveals the limitations of the perspective code (ibid., 124). To understand how gravity and the laws of perspective are interwoven, we should recall what the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2007) said about perspective: Even if perspective does not “deceive us,” it nevertheless positions the world in an odd way, excluding mysteries or reducing them to non-existence. Explaining the inadequacy or downright deceptiveness of perspective projection, Merleau-Ponty took as an example the moon in the sky, the size of which cannot be calculated by reference to standard measurements corresponding to a coin in the hand. The moon is a so-called “ultra-thing,” which is not part of projective gradation in the For Warburg, dancers without gravity become semblances of the ancient gods, an airy creature of dreams and the afterlife: an embodiment of Nachleben (DidiHuberman 2003, 286). On Warburg’s notion of Nachleben, see Didi-Huberman 2010.

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same way as things that are close, on the ground or in this room. The moon resides in the realm of absolute size just like other “ultra-things”: the sun, the stars, even the clouds. In other words, to fight the man-made laws of perspective, we must turn our attention to things that are not earth-bound, but situated in space, or at least in the atmosphere and the sky, and therefore escape gravity (Merleau-Ponty 2007, 250; 277–78).

Blurred Vistas, Haptic Visuality and the Contemporary Sublime John Constable, the English landscape painter, observed in 1821 that the sky is a source of light in nature and governs everything (Leslie 1995, 73). In landscape art the sky has the characteristic of being a medium; it mediates between the viewer and the topics and objects in the landscape. The Danish art historian Jacob Wamberg (2010) has realised that the sky and the air are important parts of the modern visual process. He takes up Plato’s statement that “distance has the effect of befogging the vision of nearly everybody” and gives two interpretations. The statement can either be read as the fog of the world getting in the way of vision or that vision itself becomes foggy with distance (Wamberg 2010, 177) (see plate 13–1). The photograph called Whiteout (Fence) (2005) by the Finnish artist Axel Antas makes Wamberg’s argument visible. The image seems to have two layers, one on top of the other. A deep layer opens onto a rural landscape view. This landscape view, however, is disturbed and obscured by another layer veiling it. This white, translucent curtain or thick fog, which nearly conceals the landscape, draws the viewers’ attention to the very surface of the image. Whiteout (Fence) starts to matter only because of this double structure. It forces the eye of the beholder to move to the distant landscape and back again to the milky surface. The effect is the same as its title indicates; the white level almost bleaches out the illusionary image, which the viewer can still perceive. Although Axel Antas is known for making landscape photographs ad nauseam that resemble the Rückenfiguren compositions of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, Whiteout (Fence) differs completely from these typical “Friedrich-like” compositions, which have an internal viewer with which the external viewer of the image readily identifies. In my mind Whiteout (Fence) is linked to something else, something other than commentary or mimicry of Romantic imagery and its transcendental nature.

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Antas’s image is connected with two interesting things: it challenges the clear-cut definitions of pictorial space and also of the picture plane. It is hard to determine whether the milky veil is included in the landscape or whether it is situated on a picture plane. The latter case indicates that the white veil is a part of the photograph’s materiality as an abstract, smooth stain on the picture’s surface. In the first case the work functions purely as representation, and the white veil appears to be the misty air floating everywhere. Hence, the white foggy air refers to the natural condition of the landscape, that is, to weather and climate. The same whiteout is recognisable in a much earlier conceptual work by another Finnish artist, Lauri Anttila, entitled Valokuvattua ilmaa (1972, Photographed air). Here Anttila has focused the camera’s lens on the air and not on the cathedral in the background, which has become so blurred that it is hardly visible. These photographs by Antas and Anttila seem to have something in common, namely, the interest in the almost invisible element of air and our technologically-linked relationship (via camera) to air. This was also one of the essential issues in Gander’s installation. It is possible to name many pieces of recent visual art that place stress on blurred landscape views in various ways. A pioneer in this contemporary trend is Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), who made his first blurred landscape paintings in 1968 (Korsica, 1968; Seascape, 1969). He chose a distant point of view, across a wide-open plane looking towards the horizon. The transitions between individual colours are painted with extreme subtlety and delicacy so that ultimately, a transparent veil is laid over the distant landscape motifs, which also cut the viewer off from the landscape scenery. Although Richter’s working methods and processes are highly sophisticated and complicated, his blurred landscape images are often connected to the rhetoric of the sublime manifested in German Romantic painting.5 This is partly because of Richter’s own interest in German Romanticism and in Caspar David Friedrich’s work. Nevertheless, the similarities between the landscapes of these two artists betray important differences. Dietmar Elger (2007) argues that it is the use of mechanical mediums of reproduction that separates Richter from Friedrich’s unobstructed view of nature. Richter has made the mediation of vision his subject matter. Antas has also been immersed in technologicallymediated images. Therefore, images by these artists, which focus on the landscape’s atmosphere, give us the chance to see the landscape, but also make it impossible to see the landscape transparently (Elger 2007, 220–22). 5

Richter painted his landscapes from photographs.

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Today, it has become acceptable to understand the sublime historically and to study how the sublime object has changed over the course of time. The crucial shift in this understanding occurred after the Second World War when the sublime changed from being the power of raw nature, which according to Immanuel Kant overwhelmed our faculty of imagination and rendered it helpless, to the power of man-made disasters, which followed the horrors caused by the two world wars. Gene Ray (2007, 1–2) defines raw nature beyond the human as the “first nature” and society’s self-made disasters as the “second nature.” The cultural theoretician David Nye (1994) has charted the notion of the technological sublime in America. He argues that, during the nineteenth century, technology replaced the Kantian natural sublime defined by the concept of first nature. In the 1960s Theodor W. Adorno insisted that the natural sublime was only a passing phase in European aesthetic thinking (Adorno 2002). Two decades later Fredric Jameson (1991) suggested that the natural sublime should be replaced by the notion of second nature. Gene Ray (2007) takes the idea further to posit a “third nature”: And to bring this right up to date, I would argue that global climate change, rogue storms and tsunamis, and all the other extreme “weather events” and ecological disasters now looming over the horizon hardly change this inescapability of the social. For if these new disasters are the result of cumulative human impacts, then they don’t represent any simple return of the old first nature. They would be the product of a dialectic between first and second nature: in short a third nature. (Ray 2007, 11)

This new “third nature” is a hybrid of nature and culture, and it is encoded with the powers of technology (Ray 2007, 11). In today’s world, which we can call the era of environmental anxiety, nature must be understood as a co-production of the natural and the cultural, yet nature has also been revived as a rampant, uncontrollable force that does not obey man-made rules. Paradoxically, the more nature is occupied by human beings, the clearer it is that man’s control over it is not possible. The three phases of the conception of nature are all related to the concept of the sublime, which refers to an aesthetic response to nature’s capacity to strike terror, fear and awe in us. I argue that the works I have discussed above are examples of today’s sublime and point to the paradoxical, unmanageable and hybrid third nature that we currently encounter everywhere. Contemporary airy works are in their own visual way rethinking the atmosphere and air, not as natural substances, but as a complicated mixture of natural and artificial. These works are not about

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the emotions awakened by infinity and the immensity of nature or about the menace of the breakdown of the subject in the natural world. On the contrary, contemporary works focus our attention on the mundane element of air on which we all depend. Compared to the romantic notion of the immanence of subjectivity and of the sublime arising from inner experience, in these contemporary airy artworks the sublime comes from the surface itself. The works are not about the artists’ emotions. Rather than expressing their creators’ emotions or inner affects, the works are making observations about the world. That is why I call these atmospheric works “empiricist” in the sense that the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour (2004; 2010) uses the notion of second or radical empiricism. Latour separates second empiricism from first empiricism, British empiricism or Logical empiricism on the strength of how the facts are understood and formulated. The problem with first empiricism is that it has restricted experiences to the object without relations or connections (Latour 2010, 82). Second empiricism searches for significant connections between human and non-human things and between the natural and the social and explores the relationships between what is known and what is imparted through experience. Its aim is to uncover the connections between different things instead of ascertaining facts. In other words, second empiricism explores things with a realistic attitude and asks us to approach things not as they are in themselves, namely, as unrelated facts or immanent inwardness, but rather as things act together in an open network (Latour, 2010, 82–83; 2004, 231). In art the empiricist and realistic tendency manifests itself in two ways. First, it appears at the material level of the work, and second, it appears in the spatial conditions of the installations. The material and spatial conditions are realised by activating the haptic vision as occurs in the video installation Landscape no. 20 An Tiaracht (2002) by the Finnish artist Heli Rekula. Rekula’s video is a nineteen-minute long freehand shot, shown as a loop format in the exhibition space.6 The work was filmed with a small digital camera on an island in Ireland. In it, we see the sea, the sky and an adjacent rocky island called An Tiaracht. Sometimes a flock of birds flies across the sky. Now and then the scene fills with a veil of fog. (see plate 13–2) According to Laura U. Marks (2000), haptic visuality is different from optical or normal visuality, where one sees things from a distance Landscape no. 20 An Tiaracht was exhibited at Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, in Helsinki, Finland, in 2012. 6

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to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space. Haptic visuality is based on the intimacy between the viewer and the moving image, and it does not imply mastery over the things seen, as does optical visuality. In haptic vision the pleasurable gaze tends to move across the surface plane of the image (Marks 2000, 162). Rekula’s work partly sustains the optical visuality that plunges into illusionistic depth, but the depiction of sky and heaven disturbs the optical perspective representation. In the video the image of the sky occasionally filled with drifting fog and the abstract and material ground of the image merged (Johansson 2010, 196–213). Both Rekula’s Landscape no. 20 An Tiaracht and Axel Antas’s Whiteout (Fence) generate a movement between the haptic and the optic in the viewing experience. The misty air that moves the vision across the surface of the image catches the eye of the viewer, but every now and again the eye is forced towards the distant landscape, thus offering a kind of movement between haptic and optic visuality (Johansson 2010). As Marks (2000: xii– xvi, 13) argues, in the end haptic visuality identifies the viewer and the object of viewing, which leads to “materialistic death”—a revocation of the differences between things. For that reason optical visuality is needed to create balance and dialogue between surface and depth, haptic and optic. This dialogue is supposed to lead to a new, democratic representation. According to Marks (ibid.), this movement between optic and haptic vision is a pre-condition for an ethical vision that serves life.

The Roundness of Being The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard devoted the last chapter of The Poetics of Space (1994, orig. La Poétique de l’Espace, 1958) to “pure phenomenology” or “maximum phenomenological purity.” In order to attain phenomenological purity we must recognise the primitivism of certain images of being and use them. According to Bachelard (1994, 234), there are “images of full roundness that help us to collect ourselves and to confirm our being intimately, inside.” After this experience of inside, being cannot be anything other than round, he argues. In the works of writers and artists Bachelard found connections with his own thoughts.7 He pursued an experience of roundness, not as a shape of any object or geometrical entity, but as a phenomenologically round experience, and he ascribed many According to the philosopher Karl Jaspers, “every being seems in itself round” while Vincent van Gogh argued that “life is probably round” (Bachelard 1994, 234–35). 7

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characteristics to roundness. For him, roundness was a perfect geometrical form of cosmological dimensions, a space bounded by the contours of the earth, the shape of the skies above and the experience of the interiority of being-in-the-world (Bachelard 1994, 234–5). Many of the images Bachelard used in his texts have a connection to the phenomena in the sky and the atmosphere. The image of a bird is a perfect example (Bachelard 1994, 237–40). This roundness of the atmosphere is emphasised in two short films, Rome Dérive I (2006) and Rome Dérive II (2006) by the Finnish artist Lauri Astala (see plates 13–3 and 13–4). In the first film the camera has captured random views across Rome. Among the recurring themes are shadows and views from the hills over the rooftops of the city and the countless cupolas rising amongst them. The different images are pulled together by repeated views of flocks of birds in the sky. The birds in flight create patterns, coming together and then dispersing again. They provide the core of the film’s roundness and are comparable to the poetic images in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, Anxiousness, which Bachelard takes up in his book. There the cry of the bird opens the orbit of being towards the spheres and turns the sky into a cupola. …This round bird-call Rests in the instant that engenders it Huge as the sky above the withered forest Docilely things take their place in this call In it the entire landscape seems to rest.8 (Bangnis, translated by Maria Jolas) (cited in Bachelard 1994, 238)

Astala’s other film, Rome Dérive II, more minimal than the artist’s previous work, was shot from a single point on Rome’s Janiculum Hill. We see Rome as a skyline glimpsed through a thick veil of fog. The view is obstructed by the fog as if it were teasing the viewer by hiding the eternal city in its misty arms, which one can almost touch. Two large cupolas can be discerned in the haptic image, and in brighter moments the fog lifts and the outlines of houses become visible. Cupolas have often been considered the highest achievement of architecture. A cupola is a combination of spatial roundness and height, thereby bringing the sky into a building. According to Peter Sloterdijk (2005, 237), traditional cupolas had exactly that function—to bring the sky into the Und dennoch ruht der runde Vogelruf in dieser Weile, die ihn schuf, breit wie ein Himmel auf dem welken Walde. Gefügig räumt sich alles in den Schrei: Das ganze Land scheint lautlos drin zu liegen,

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umbrella-shaped interior under the protection of which man could be safe. Astala’s film shows the city as inaccessible, full of light and almost ephemeral, and the viewer becomes enveloped by the sky of Rome—as if by a cupola. The films by Astala and Rekula silently transport the viewer into their landscapes, and consequently, the city and the sea grow toward the atmosphere. But because of the obscured misty surface of the images, the landscapes in these works also make an entrance into the space of the viewer, as Marks’s notion of haptic visuality asserts. In Rome Dérive I and Landscape no. 20 An Tiaracht, the birds in flight open a view onto the sky arching over Rome and over the island of an Tiaracht and the roundness of both. In Rome Dérive II the cupola as one of the purest forms of human structure—associated with heavenly roundness and cosmology—finds a parallel in the viewer’s experience of the roundness of being-in-the-world caused by the thick fog. There is two-folded roundness in these films: the bounded spatial shape of the cupola or island, and the experience of the roundness of being-inthe-world. Astala’s film Gamelan (2010) draws the spatial experimentation further towards an installation space where the landscape of representation and the lived space of the viewers intertwine. The film was shot in northern Italy in the Lagorai Mountains near the Dolomites. The camera moves over an almost pristine mountain landscape, with the sound of bells of grazing animals heard from afar. Here once again a thick fog fills the air, floating everywhere the eye turns.

Figure 13–5. Lauri Astala’s Gamelan (2010). Photograph Lauri Astala.

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Gamelan offers us a complicated spatial structure. The film is exhibited so that the screen stands in the middle of the room; instead of being a window onto the landscape, the screen becomes a thing in itself. The constant sounds of cowbells surrounding us from everywhere at once emphasises the film as a concrete or material part of the exhibition space shared by the viewers. Gamelan takes place in an intimate, shareable microsphere, the presentation space of the film, from where it expands through the images of cloudy landscape into the macrosphere of the world where the spheres overlap and blend into one another. The microsphere of the museum space becomes enlarged and the macrosphere represented by the film appears to be inside this enlarged microspace. Thus, the film’s airy landscape becomes almost a part of the museum space and enables the viewer to experience the air veil that envelopes our shared planet (Johansson 2010).

Installations against Gravity Another empiricist tendency of contemporary atmospheric works becomes apparent when we turn our focus to installation art. The different representational strategies give way to a mutual encounter and a sharing of space with other viewers and to a background that emerges into the foreground. In this context excellent examples to introduce us to the third hybrid nature are the atmospheric installations by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. In his oeuvre, which is abundant, Eliasson has repeatedly emphasised the changed relationship between nature and culture or between the natural and the technological. In many of his installations the so-called natural phenomena have been transferred from outdoors to indoors, to within wellguarded art spaces. The example I want to discuss here is The Weather Project (2003–4), which was displayed at the Tate Modern in London. The work consisted of several parts, including an interview survey of Londoners’ everyday relationship to weather and advertisements with weather slogans, which were distributed in various public places in London. The most noticeable part of the work was an installation in Turbine Hall, where the “climate of London” was created in the exhibition space. The representation of an artificial sun and sky dominated the expanse of Turbine Hall. The artificial inside climate was constructed with the help of technology so that the huge hall was transformed into an odd atmospheric space with soft light and air. Mist permeated the interior space and looked

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as if it were creeping in from outside, although it was only puffing in from the walls. The mist accumulated into a cloud-like formation before dissipating across the hall. At the end of the hall was a huge semi-circular form made up of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps. The semi-circular arc was reflected overhead so that in the vision of the viewers it became a complete “sun.” The mono-frequency lamps used in the work emit light at such a narrow frequency that colours other than yellow and black are invisible (May 2003). The viewers seemed to love wandering around in this artificial climatic space. In an article entitled “Atmosphère, Atmosphère” published in the catalogue of The Weather Project, Bruno Latour (2003) compared Olafur Eliasson to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. According to Latour, what Sloterdijk does in philosophy, Eliasson does in his art. They both ignore the divisions between wild and domesticated, private and public, technical and organic, and replace them with expanded meteorological experiments, in which they focus on air conditioning and pay attention to envelopes, spheres, encounters and ambiences (ibid., 30). Latour was here referring to Peter Sloterdijk’s “spherology,” developed in what the philosopher calls his magnum opus, Sphären (1994–2004). Sphären is a study of the challenges to contemporary man’s being-in-the-world, a study which Sloterdijk develops through three metaphors of different spatial states: the bubble, the sphere and foam. Sloterdijk was working on Sphären in the 1990s when there was a topological turn in cultural theory, but he states that only later did he recognise how his work was connected to the work of contemporaries around the world. He mentions thinkers like Homi Bhabha and Edward S. Casey, but also the installation artist Ilya Kabakov and the architect Frei Otto. Whereas many of these topological theoreticians use notions like space, place, dwelling, locality and territory, which allude to solid ground and habitation on earth, Sloterdijk’s decision has been to use the old word sphere, which stems from Aristotle’s thinking (Funcke 2005). Conscious of Bachelard’s reflections on roundness and further influenced by phenomenology, Sloterdijk wanted to restore shared and spatial being to humanity after the modern age of individualism. This became the central purpose of his spherology, which stems from the idea of a fundamentally communal and local humanity. Being human is always a local matter, being together with and around others, with individuals continually intertwining. This being together, which the modern age has sought to conceal, starts in the embryo, which shares its space with the mother, its shell and the placenta. Although Sloterdijk is somewhat

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concerned about the urological associations of the expression bubble, as well as about the fugitive images that we associate with soap bubbles, air bubbles and speech bubbles, which are non-signifying and non-substantial, his point is to dissolve the metaphysics of substance and of isolated individual things; according to him, these are “representations which, for 2500 years, have blinded Europeans by placing a grammatical mirage over what is called the hard kernel of the real” (Sloterdijk 2007, 138–39). The principal task of Sloterdijk’s spherology is to bring human beings back to the shared spatial existence after the individualism and spacelessness of modern times and find a new vocabulary to define human conditions that will reflect the experience of lightness and relationships. This, believes Sloterdijk, is the challenge of our age. For centuries, philosophical language and critical thinking have interpreted lightness as appearance and heaviness as essence. Today, however, the heavy has become the appearance and the essential dwells in lightness, in the air and in the atmosphere. Sloterdijk encapsulated this argument when he wrote: “Marx argued that all criticism begins with the critique of religion; I would say instead that all criticism begins with the critique of gravity” (Funcke 2005). The fascination of artists with misty spaces corresponds to Sloterdijk’s thinking because such works emphasise that air is not only light, almost without gravity, but also an in-between element, which gathers things together and makes appearance possible. This argument becomes even more apparent in the misty installations by the English sculptor Antony Gormley and the Finnish artist Tanja Koponen. Gormley’s work, Blind Light (2007), was made by and presented at the artist’s solo show at the Hayward Gallery in London. The installation consisted of an eight-by ten-metre luminous glass enclosure filled with a dense artificial cloud that reduced visibility to about half a metre. The room was inside the larger exhibition hall so that the viewers could both see the space from outside and also enter it. Those who entered the vaporous space were visible only as traces or shadows on the glass wall to those looking in from the outside. On the inside, the viewer was entirely enveloped by bright light and cloud. Being inside Blind Light felt like being lost in a thick mist at the top of a mountain. Thus immersed, the viewer became an integral part of the work (Hubbard 2007).

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Figure 13–6. Tanja Koponen’s Unsaid II. Photograph Tanja Koponen.

The installation Unsaid II (Sanomaton II) (2007) by Tanja Koponen was exhibited in Kunsthalle Helsinki. The viewers entered a large exhibition hall, in which the air was thick with a dense fog from floor to ceiling. As in Gormley’s installation, here too viewers were disorientated as visibility was reduced. In addition the space was filled with an odd techno-ambient hum. For many viewers roaming around the installation, seeing the figures of other people created a feeling of comfort in this technologically-created subliminal space. There are various relations at stake in the installations discussed above: relations to other human beings, to technology, to nature, to visibility, to one’s own body and its limits. Another feature of these installations is that the background shifted from being just a background to become a substantial element of the work, an agent of the work. This is a phenomenon that Sloterdijk (2009, 47) described as “explicitation” and “atmosphereexplication.” Sloterdijk sees our history as being less about modernisation or revolution, and more about explicitation. Explicitation is made up of different life-support systems that make our “spheres of existence” possible. Everything that earlier was merely “given” becomes explicit little by little. This means that natural things, such as air, water and land were already present in the background, but now they are explicitated because it is becoming clear that they might disappear—and we human beings with them (Latour 2010, 74). In the works discussed here air has been made explicit. Air has come

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to the forefront as haze and mist and a veil that wraps itself around the beholders. Similarly, in other works, such as Eliasson’s Your Strange Certainty Still Kept (1997), rain is highlighted as the only theme of the installation, whereas earlier in history, rain was kept in the background. (Johansson, forthcoming.) This explicitation of the natural elements happens in these contemporary works, not by emphasising their naturalness, but rather by making tangible just how much our lifesupport element is artificially mediated. This event of explicitation can be compared to Latour’s substitution of the notion of “matters of fact” for “matters of concern.” Latour explains this by using the theatre as an example: a matter of concern is what happens to a matter of fact when you add it to the scenography as a whole, shifting your attention from the stage to the whole machinery of the theatre (Latour 2008, 39; 2004, 232). In Eliasson’s atmospheric installations the scenography is made visible so that viewers can see how the “trick” is done. The technology that produces the phenomenon is itself on display.

Conclusion Sloterdijk’s thinking and the visual works of artists show us the reciprocity between the microsphere, the sphere we share with other people, and the macrosphere, which surrounds earth. It is the macrospace, the atmosphere enveloping our planet that makes us all “students of the air,” as Sloterdijk (2009) writes, borrowing the phrase from the eighteenthcentury philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder. Herder said that air is the substance that binds together the fates of all creatures on earth. For him, air was the supreme teacher (Sloterdijk 2009, 48). I have argued that in recent years there has been a trend to make images out of air. These images, films and installations appear to be an endeavour to recreate the relation to the spatiality of the world and to being-in-theworld. The works I have discussed all ignore the old divisions between wild and domesticated, naturally given and technologically made, and replace them with affective experiments that re-position human beings in their airy conditioned environment.9 Furthermore, these works direct the viewer’s attention to the nearly invisible, to the light sphere where gravity Sloterdijk addresses the artificiality of air and the means that human beings have developed to use air for an atmo-terrorism, like poison gas as a weapon of mass destruction in his book Terror from the Air (2009).

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gives out and the foggy air turns our attention to the act of breathing and to air-conditioning. Simply by focusing on the element of air repositions the viewer in the environment (Bal 2007, 158–58; 176–77). All these installations of spatial being focus our attention on two things. Firstly, on what is self-evident, mundane and necessary: the air that we breathe is the first and the last of our life-support systems; secondly, on the shared, affective space that the works create around them. The foggy installations as well as Gander’s I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise (The Invisible Pull) discussed in the beginning of this chapter constitute a kind of momentary community. These images and films produce images of air that disturb our vision, but they also bring the surface of the photography or film close to the viewer, to the shared space. In this sense installations proceed even further than photographs and films, because they break down the representation, entwine the beholder in a strange fog and transform the artwork into suddenly being in a shared space. Fernando March writes about Gormley’s Blind Light: “The visitors were thus transformed and contemplated each other as if they were sculptural elements” (March 2009, 87). I would argue instead that those who participate in these installations are transformed, not by regarding each other as sculptural elements, but as co-inhabitants of common air-conditioning, as if air were the only democratic link between human beings.

References Adorno, Theodor. (1970) 2002. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum. Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Translated from the French by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Bal, Mieke. 2007. “Light Politics.” In Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn, 153–181. New York: Thames & Hudson, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Castelli, Patrizia. 1987. “Il moto aristotelico e la ilicita scienza: Guglielmo Ebreo e la speculaziona sulla danza nel XV secolo in Mesura et arte del danzare.” In Guglielmo Ebreo da Pearo e la danza nelle corti italiane del XV secolo, edited by Patrizia Castelli, Maurizio Mingardi and Maurizio Padovan, 59–111. Pesaro: Palazzo Lazzarini-Pucelle Editori. Damisch, Hubert. (1958) 2002. A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History

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of Painting. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2003. “The Imaginary Breeze. Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento.” Journal of Visual Culture 2:275–289. ———. 2010. Das Nachleben der Bilder. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. Elger, Dietmar. 2007. “Gerhard Richter: Blurry Landscapes.” In The Abstraction of Landscape. From Northern Romanticism to Abstract Expressionism, 220–222. Madrid: Fundación Juan March. Fermor, Sharon. 1992. “Decorum in Figural Movement: the Dance as Measure and Metaphor.” In Decorum in Renaissance Narrative Art, edited by Francis Ames-Lewis and Anka Bednarek, 78–88. London: Birkbeck College. Funcke, Bettina. 2005. “Against Gravity. Bettina Funcke Talks with Peter Sloterdijk.” In Bookforum, 2–3. http://www.bookforum.com/archive/ feb_05/funcke.html. Hubbard, Sue. 2007. “Heavenly Bodies.” In New Statesman. http://www. suehubbard.com/art_critic/antony_gormley.shtml. Hurttig, Marcus Andrew. 2012. Die entfesselte Antike. Aby Warburg und die Geburt der Pathosformel. Köln: Walther König. Jameson, Frederic. 1991. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Johansson, Hanna. 2005. “Reality Frenzy in Contemporary Art.” In Framework. The Finnish Art Review 3:36–39. ———. 2010. “Liikkuvan kuvan materiaalisuus ja haptinen representaatio.” In Representaatio. Tiedon kivijalasta tieteiden työkaluksi, edited by Tarja Knuuttila & Aki Petteri Lehtinen, 196–213. Helsinki: Gaudeamus. ———. Forthcoming. “Images of Rain between Representation, Technology and Nature.” In Art, Nature and Technology, edited by Jacob Wamberg and Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam. London: Ashgate. Kaprow, Allan. 1996. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Edited by Jeff Kelley. Berkeley: University of California Press. Latour, Bruno. 2003. “Atmosphére, Atmosphére.” In Olafur Eliasson. The Weather Project, edited by Susan May, 29–41. London: Tate Modern. ———. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” In Critical Inquiry 30:225–248. ———. 2008. “What is the Style of Matters of Concern.” In Spinoza Lectures at the University of Amsterdam, April and May 2005. 51 p. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum.

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———. 2010. “A Plea for Earthly Sciences.” Keynote lecture for the annual meeting of the British Sociological Association, April 2007. In New Social Connections: Sociology’s Subjects and Objects, edited by Judith Burnett, Syd Jeffers and Graham Thomas, 72–84. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Leslie, Charles, Robert. (1951) 1995. Memoirs of the Life of John Constable. London: Phaidon. March, Fernando Huici. 2009. ”Thin-Skinned. A Question of Skin.” In Antony Gormley: Between You and Me, edited by Alessandra Bellavita, Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, Lisa Maddigan, Isabel de Vasconellos, 85–89. Salzburg: Galeire Thaddaeus Ropac. Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2002. Touch. Sensous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. May, Susan. 2003. “The Unilever Series. Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project.” In Information Leaflet of the Weather Project. London: Tate Modern. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1960) 2007. “Indirect Language and The Voices of Silence.” In The Merleau-Ponty Reader, edited by Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, 241–82. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Nye, David. 1994. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge: MA: MIT Press. Raff, Thomas. 1978–79. “Die Ikonographie der mittelalterlichen Windpersonifikationen.” Aachen Kunsblätter 48: 71–218. Ray, Gene. 2007. “History, Sublime, Terror: Notes on the Politics of Fear.” The London Consortium. Static 7.1–15. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2005. “Foreword to the Theory of Spheres.” In Cosmograms, edited by Melik Ohanian & Jean-Christophe Royoux. New York: Lukas & Sternberg. ———. (2002) 2009. Terror from the Air. Translated by Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ———. 2007. Neither Sun Nor Death. Translated by Steve Corcoran. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Summers, David. 1987. The Judgment of Sense. Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wamberg, Jacob. 2010. Landscape as World Picture: Tracing Cultural Evolution in Images. Volume II. Early Modernity. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Warburg, Aby. (1893) 1998. “Sandro Botticelli’s Geburt der Venus und

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Frühling. Eine Untersuchung ber die Vorstellungen von der Antike in der Italienischen Fröhrenaissance.” In Aby Warburg’s Gesammelte Schriften (I-1): Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beitr ge zur Geschichte der europischen Renaissance, edited by Gertrud Bing and Fritz Rougemont. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Invisible Worlds and Imaginary Spaces of a Renaissance Magus Lauri Ockenström

At the dawn of the sixteenth century a young German humanist, Cornelius Agrippa, described the principles of astrological magic in the following way: Such is the magnitude, virtue and power of the celestials that not only natural things but also artificial things, when appropriately exposed to superiors, are easily subjected to the most powerful agent and miraculous life, which perpetually bestows upon them wonderful celestial virtue. … Thus, the magicians confirm that not only the applicable mixtures of natural things, but also images, symbols, rings, mirrors and other favourable instruments … are able to catch the celestial illustration and receive certain astonishing things. The animated, living and sensitive rays of celestial bodies bear miraculous gifts and ardent powers within themselves, and imprint miraculous virtues on a single moment and with a sudden touch on images and also less apt materials. … Ptolemy says in the Centiloquium that inferior beings obey the celestials, and not only them, but also their images; terrestrial scorpions obey not only the celestial Scorpio, but also the images of that Scorpio.1 (Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 2.35) I am using Vittoria Perrone Compagni’s edition, De occulta philosophia libri tres (1992). “Tanta est coelestium magnitudo, virtus et potestas quod non solun res naturales, verum etiam artificiales, quando superis rite sunt expositae, subito patiuntur ab agente potentissimo vitaque mirabili, quae ipsis virtutem coelestem saepe mirificam largitur. … Sic magi non modo mixtione et applicatione rerum naturalium, sed etiam imaginibus, sigillis, annulis, speculis et quibusque aliis instrumentis opportunis … coelestem quandam illustrationem capi et mirandum aliquod suscipi posse confirmant. Coelestium enim corporum radii animati, vivi, sensuales, dotes mirificas potentiamque vehementissimam secum ferentes, etiam repentino momento ac subito tactu mirabiles in imaginibus imprimuntur vires–etiam in materia minus apta … inquit Ptolomaeus in Centiloquio quod res inferiores obediunt coelestibus – non solum illis, sed etiam earum imaginibus: sicut non solum scorpiones terreni obediunt Scorpioni coelesti, sed etiam imagini Scorpioni illius….” All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

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Although focused on astrological magic, Agrippa’s excerpt reveals essential features about Renaissance magic and the Renaissance worldview at a more general level. Magical powers filled and controlled the space, and spatial magical influences, such as astral rays, were supposedly able to travel great distances, permeate considerable physical obstacles and penetrate hard materials such as metal and stone, transforming the universe into a huge magical engine. The spatial network was established and made possible through certain ostensible analogies, for instance, the rudimentary similarity between the constellation of Scorpio, the species called scorpion and a picture displaying a scorpion. Together these different entities which shared the form of a scorpion as a common denominator were supposed to establish invisible, yet physically significant connections and nullify the distances between different corners of the universe. As irrational as this might appear to a modern reader steeped in presentday scientific thought, Agrippa’s outpouring is quite characteristic of pre-Cartesian philosophising and intellectually curious minds. In the premodern magical worldview, which was more or less loosely connected with Aristotelian-Ptolemaic natural philosophy and the hierarchies of (Neo-) Platonist metaphysics, the relations of space and place, the apprehension of distances and the habits of perceiving spatial dimensions differed drastically from later, more “rational” and “objective” conventions of space perception, which emphasise features such as measurability and “realistic” expression of three dimensions. But how did a magical worldview—or way of perceiving—contribute to the notions of space and place and to the objects and agents within space and place? In other words, how was the magical space constructed and how did it work? In this paper I explore these issues through the writings of two influential Renaissance authors, each of whom left a remarkable trace both on the evolution of natural philosophy and on Western esotericism. The first author is the aforementioned Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), whose major work, De occulta philosophia (Of Occult Philosophy), written before 1510, revised and printed in 1531–33, has often been considered one of the most far-reaching, dangerous and liberal compendia of magic and the occult sciences ever written (e.g. Walker 1958, 93–96). The other important writer is Marsilio Ficino (1433– 99), a Florentine Neoplatonist philosopher, astrologer and translator, who introduced new, Hellenistic esoteric sources such as Iamblichus and The Corpus Hermeticum to the Latin West and who, in his De vita libri tres (Three books on life, printed in 1489), presented the idea of “natural magic” based on theorems of Hellenistic and scholastic science.

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There are many reasons why Ficino and Agrippa are good choices for exploring the nature of such a vague and slippery phenomenon as Renaissance magic. The obvious ones have already been mentioned: Their opera magna are perhaps the most influential and well-known compilations of the magical knowledge of the era—systematically constructed, easily accessible and widely read by many generations. There are, however, even more relevant grounds for coming to grips specifically with Ficino’s De vita and Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia in this essay. Both treatises are rich in encyclopaedic thesauri of magical knowledge, their authors having tried to collect and combine all magical knowledge available (or at least the valuable part of it) from antiquity through the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, and, despite the great difficulties presented by the disunited material, to re-organise the magical doctrines in order to present magic as a consistent and licit system. As widely educated humanists and men of letters, Ficino and Agrippa also sought to combine magic and its subspecies with predominant intellectual paradigms; in other words, to make magic seamlessly compatible with the natural sciences, religious dogmas and ideas provided by the fields of humanistic cultural history such as mythology, literature and the visual arts. It is this comprehensiveness that ultimately makes their works essential sources in trying to understand how a learned magician, a Renaissance magus, responded to the surrounding universe; how did he perceive the space around him and how was space—whether cosmic spheres, atmosphere or his own sleeping chamber—comprehended, controlled and remoulded? In order to answer these questions, I begin with a short tour through magic and the magical worlds before proceeding to construct the invisible and remote worlds. In the latter part of this study I examine the instruments by which a magician was supposedly able to benefit from the magical universe and contribute to his own surrounding space.

Magical Spaces and Worlds: Analogies and Associations Magic and its sibling, astrological magic, have always been substantially spatial endeavours. Nearly all magical acts require spatial connections between two or more participants. Astrological magic especially utilised long-distance connections established between the heavenly and terrestrial worlds. Astrological doctrines, which later created the basis for European astrological traditions, originated mainly in ancient Babylonia and Egypt, from where they spread all over the Mediterranean world during

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the Hellenistic age. Later the classics of late antiquity, such as Ptolemy’s writings, disseminated the crucial doctrines to the Arabic world and European Middle Ages. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when dozens of treatises on magic bursting with occult secrets were translated from Arabic into Latin, learned astrological magic underwent a vital rebirth in western Europe. Major classics, such as the Centiloquium, the Almagest and Albumasar’s Introductorium in astronomiam, established the theoretical basis for astrological manoeuvres. Meanwhile, shorter treatises, many of them listed and evaluated in the influential Speculum astronomiae, gave more detailed instructions for fabricating magical images and magic potions. The emergence of these new sources resulted in an outpouring of European magical treatises over the following centuries.2 Ficino and Agrippa, who composed their compendia at the dawn of the era, thus could draw on a huge tradition consisting of Greek philosophy, Hellenistic science and esotericism, Arabic astrology (with Indian flavours), Judean cabbalism, Christian mysticism, medieval medicine and practical image magic. Perhaps owing to their humanistic background, they both tended to purify and elevate magic, especially Ficino, who usually restricted himself to Hellenistic magic and to recognised Christian authors while trying to avoid certain features of medieval magic as vulgar rubbish. Agrippa was more tolerant of the medieval treatises. Without qualm he dealt with treatises condemned by all the leading ecclesiastical voices, even those that were judged abominabiles or detestabiles in the authoritative Speculum astronomiae.3 The next excerpt, which illustrates the main features of magical beliefs, is actually a compilation of theories apparent in those “damnable and detestable” works. In the second book of his De occulta philosophia Agrippa describes how to fabricate and use magical images: For love, we make images of two people embracing each other; for discord, two people persecuting each other; for causing calamities or destruction or impediments to human beings, households or towns or other, we make deformed images or images broken into pieces, and in similitude and figures of a thing we would like to destroy or rule. … sometimes they [the images] are used as a pendant or otherwise attached to the body, sometimes buried in the ground or under a river, sometimes hung upon a fireplace in smoke or in a tree to be moved by the wind. Sometimes they are buried For the history of medieval magic and further literature, see e.g. Weill-Parot 2002 and Boudet 2006. 3 For a detailed list of treatises presenting damnable and detestable images, see e.g. Weill-Parot 2002, 41–60. 2

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upwards, sometimes downwards; sometimes they are put in boiling water, and sometimes in fire.4 (Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 2.49)

The effects can be catastrophic: We have read that the magician Nectanabus once made images of ships out of wax in such a way and with such skill that when he submerged the images in water, the ships of his enemies on the sea immediately sank in an identical way.5 (Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 2.49)

The excerpt demonstrates that Agrippa was profoundly acquainted with medieval manuals of magic, but it also testifies to the magical processes required, namely rituals, such as fumigations, prayers, songs and incantations, and technical preparations, such as boiling or heating. Also the physical or otherwise local connection between the item and the target seems to have played an essential role in a magical act. Talismans and images are carried along, buried in front of doors and beneath roads or bridges. Sometimes, however, magic can work from a distance, as in Nectanabus’s case, where the iconic likeness and analogous act—sinking the miniature ships in water—caused the effect. The remote influence created by pure shapes or symbols is more common in learned, platonising magic, which was based on similarity or resemblance between remote things, as in the example of the earthly and the heavenly scorpion. Agrippa’s methodological attitude demonstrates the ways in which the Renaissance sciences differed from present-day science: The remote, spatial connections—and, as a matter of fact, all processes of meaningmaking—were based on associative combinations and fusions of varying resemblances, correspondences or causal relations (iconic, indexical or symbolic, some might say). There have been many modern attempts to analyse this long-term historical, rather enigmatic combination of attitudes and practices, which held an almost paradigmatic position in the pre“... ad amorem fabricamus imagines se invicem amplectentes, ad discordiam se percutientes; ad inferendam vero calamitatem vel destructionem vel impedimentum vel homini vel domui vel urbi vel alteri rei conficimus imagines distortas, confractas in membris et partibus, ad similitudinem et figuram eius rei quam destruere voluerimus vel impedire. … aliquando enim suspenduntur vel alligantur corpori, aliquando sepeliuntur sub terra vel sub flumine, aliquando suspenduntur in camino super fumum vel ad arborem ut moveantur a vento, aliquando capite sursum, aliquando deorsum, aliquando in aquam ferventem mittuntur vel in ignem.” 5 “... legimus Nectanabum magum navium imagines cereas eo modo et artificio confecisse ut, cum ipse imagines mergebant in aquam, hostium suorum naves in mari simili modo mergebantur….” 4

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modern world. Brian Vickers, for example, has argued that the occult disciplines such as alchemy, astrology and magic formed a consistent system with a limitless capacity to absorb new elements. According to Vickers, these processes of transformation were based on arbitrarily created correspondences between divergent elements found in man and the cosmos (Vickers 1988, 265–66). William Ashworth, in turn, has talked about emblematic thought, by which he means the willingness to comprehend reality through symbols and resemblances. This attitude, he argues, was based on the mystical belief that every single thing, whether plants, animals, stones or whatever, had an endless number of secret meanings and invisible connections called universal correspondences (Ashworth 1990, 312). Despite certain differences Vickers and Ashworth draw some similar conclusions, two of which deserve special attention: firstly, the associative plurality and limitlessness of meanings as a method of (re)grouping, and secondly, resemblance and analogy as basic principles of reconstructing spatial interrelationships. The term “associative limitlessness” brings readily to mind Umberto Eco’s provocative and probably deliberately anachronistic suggestions about postmodern “Hermetic culture,”6 where fixed meanings have made way for the boundless plurality of limitless interpretations, and the “dead” author has lost control of his text (Eco 1994, 34–40). Despite its controversial argument, Eco’s polemic offered a useful starting point for Barbara Stafford’s analysis of visual analogy, one of the most comprehensive attempts to connect the emblematic-occult-associative attitude with the development of the arts and visual culture. Stafford emphasises the concept of analogy, which, as an historical phenomenon, she divides into the Aristotelian concept of the harmony of mathematical proportions and the Platonic theory of participation. Both, she claims, are inherently visual (Stafford 1999, 2–3, 8). She defines the tendency to apply Anachronistic in the sense that historical Hermetism never contained the principle of limitless interpretation. In addition Eco’s argument of the strong connection between scientific thought and “Hermeticism,” which “historiography has shown” (Eco 1994, 34) is probably based on the so-called Yates thesis, had been questioned already by 1994. (See Vickers 1988, 280, 288, and Copenhaver 1990.) The pioneers of scientific thought, such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, certainly knew Hermetic texts, but Frances Yates’ s claim (repeated by Eco) that the Hermetic model contributed to the birth of “modern scientific rationalism” is untenable (unless Eco sees “scientific rationalism” in a very peculiar way). In his writing Eco deliberately exaggerates the importance of Hermetism and reshapes it “limitlessly” and “associatively” according to his own purposes, perhaps in order to fool the reader.

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analogies as dialectics “attempting to bridge the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown,” which happens by perceiving the “similarity in difference”—such as scorpions and other terrestrial figures in the firmament of the night sky, to use a simple example (Stafford 1999, 8–9). Stafford’s rich, diversified and multidisciplinary analysis, which actually is an upgraded variant of Goodman’s theory of making worlds by visualising the unseen through discernible things (e.g. Goodman 1978, 10–14), forms, I believe, a useful firmament for exploring and reevaluating Renaissance magic and its capacities for spatial interplay in the pre-Copernican theories. Below, I shall examine how this analogy works in constructing different spatial interactions in the hierarchically structured pre-modern universe.

Inhabitants of Superior Spaces and the Doctrine of Three Worlds Stafford argues that the long-term prevalence of analogous thought (he considers Leibniz to be the last notorious representative of the tradition) was essentially based on primordial psychological needs to recognise the unknown and to possess the not-yet-possessed. These needs (or facilities) originate, if we are to believe recent hypotheses in the field of neuropsychology, in the structure of our sensory organs and predominantly automatic mechanisms of our brain.7 In other words, when we are constructing our personal vision of the world, the properties and functional models of the mind (and of language as well)—for example, tendencies to observe order in disorder and classify things in categories—are transferred to the exterior reality and seen as fundamental parts of its structure. This process of projecting the operative models of inner reality onto the exterior space might be used to explain the analogy-based reasoning of medieval and Renaissance scholars. For them, the harmonies observed throughout creation were not products of any cultural behaviour or neurobiological needs; on the contrary, analogies were seen as parts of the very essence of the universe, its divine order and its absolute hierarchies. Under these Stafford pays more attention to this in her “The Remaining 10 percent,” in which she suggests that “the associative jump to connect resembling, not identical, formal features is enabled because of the deep neurophysiological correspondence between the phenomenal and noumenal systems” (Stafford 2007, 38). See also Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999. 7

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circumstances it was an obvious choice to populate heavenly spheres and the starry sky with familiar shapes and to imagine invisible heavenly entities with visible and recognisable forms. Marsilio Ficino gives an example: there are in the heavens forms which are very conspicuous to the eye, and some which really are just as they have been depicted by many people, as Aries, Taurus, and similar zodiacal figures, and there are those outside the zodiac which we can see. Besides these, up there very many forms exist which are not so much visible as imaginable – those perceived, or at least thought up, by the Indians, Egyptians, and Chaldeans as dwelling throughout all the faces of signs, for example: in the first face of Virgo, a beautiful girl, seated, holding two ears of grain in her hand and nursing a child. (Ficino, De vita 3.18)8

By “imaginable forms” Ficino is referring to the faces of the zodiacal signs, the so-called decan deities, which in medieval astrology were associated with astral souls and appear as anthropomorphic cosmic divinities in contemporary iconography, sometimes in rather intriguing disguises.9 According to a famous manual of magic called Picatrix there are, for example: in the second face of Taurus a man looking like a camel having cloven hooves instead of nails, covered with fractured garments; … a second face of Gemini, a man with an eagle’s face, his head covered with a linen scarf, wearing a leaden cuirass, an iron helmet and a crown in oriental style; … a second face of Cancer; a woman with a beautiful countenance, wearing a garland of myrtle, holding a pole taken from a tree called nenufar, and singing amorous and cheerful ditties.10 (Picatrix 2.11.7, 10, 13)

I have used the edition and translation by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark, 1998 (1989). 9 For further information on decans, see Weill-Parot, 2002, 108–9. The most important iconographical sources for the decans used were the Picatrix, 2.11 and Albumasar’s Introductorium, 6.1–2. 10 I have used the edition of David Pingree (1986): “in secunda facie Tauri vir similis figure cameli, et in eius digitis ungulas habens similes vaccinis, et ipse totus coopertus linteamine fracto. … in secunda facie Geminorum vir cuius vultus est similis aquile, et eius caput panno linteo opertum; lorica plumbea indutus et munitus, et in eius capite galeam ferream, supra quam est corona serica . . . in secunda facie Cancri mulier Formosa vultu, et in eius capite myrti viridis coronam habens, et in eius manu perticam arboris que dicitur nenufar, et ipsa cantilenas amoris et leticie cantans.” 8

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These kinds of astrological images, including stellar personifications, were supposed to attract certain astral influences. The human-like, but invisible heavenly godheads described were allocated in the sphere of fixed stars, which still belonged to the physical world, but this habit of depicting idealised invisible entities in visible forms also alludes to the highest level of existence, the transcendental world. That mysterious hereafter was regarded as the birthplace of existence and the place of residence of exemplary forms by most of the pre-modern intellectual and religious traditions. In Christian theology all of the terrestrial creatures had a counterpart in the hereafter and stood for “other,” mysterious meanings familiar from Christian allegories; in Platonic thought they were reflections of the eternal, ideai dwelling in the mind of God, while in Aristotelian natural philosophy, individuals stood for a species and a substantial form that, of course, had a divine origin. The three-fold distinction into terrestrial, heavenly and transcendent levels of being has sometimes been called the doctrine of three worlds, that is, three grades of being in which the same forms are repeated in taxonomically ordered chains. The doctrine, sometimes attributed to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola or Agrippa (e.g. Gombrich 1972, 152–53; Newman and Grafton 2001, 16), was inherent in the Ptolemaic system and perhaps had its brightest manifestation in Proclus’s late classical neoplatonic metaphysics, where a huge variety of divinities was scattered throughout the mundane, cosmic and hyper-cosmic levels. (Saffrey and Westerink 1968, lxii–lxvii) These levels are more commonly called by their Latin names—terrestrial, celestial and super-celestial—in the following order: Super-celestial: Celestial: Terrestrial:

intelligible beings, ideas, transcendent divinities “visible heaven”: planets and fixed stars an above ground and subterranean world consisting of elements

In this doctrine all terrestrial species and forms have exemplars or ideal archetypes in the transcendent realm, from where the patterns emanate onto the earth through astral radiation. This hierarchical worldview was closely connected to a system of correspondences, whereby all orders of being were attached to each other, for example, in a series of seven or nine categories in every grade of being. In Athanasius Kircher’s tables from the beginning of the seventeenth century the nine orders of super-celestial angels are linked

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to nine celestial spheres, connected respectively to nine orders of terrestrial minerals, stones, plants, trees, animals and colours (Kircher, Musurgia universalis 2:393.l, quoted in Vickers 1988, 275). The structure derives from classical literature, cosmology and theology: several canonised ninefold series, such as Dionysius Pseudo-Areopagita’s nine orders of angels, the nine muses of the Orphic legends and the nine cosmic spheres of the Ptolemaic universe, which had prompted Dante to imagine his Inferno as a nine-layered funnel, also made Kircher organise his world—and likewise the terrestrial species—into a nine-fold series: Transcendent level (angels)

Cosmic level

Mundane minerals

Mundane trees & plants

Seraphim

fixed stars

Salts

bushes bearing fruits

Cherubim

Saturn

Lead

cypress

Thrones

Jupiter

copper

lemon

Dominations

Mars

Iron

oak

Virtues

Sun

Gold

lotus, laurel

Powers

Venus

Tin

myrtle

Principalities

Mercury

quicksilver

apple tree

Archangels

Moon

Silver

bladder senna

Angels

Earth

sulphur

shrubberies

Table 14–1. The universal correspondences according to Athanasius Kircher.

The idea of chains of correspondences was the basic axiom of the astrological magic of the Renaissance: Every stone, metal, animal, herb and even every bodily member had connections to a certain planet and zodiacal sign. By using the herbs and stones as astrologers suggested, it was possible to gain benefits from the heavens. To enjoy solar properties, for example, one had simply to wear a laurel wreath; to profit from Jupiter, one had to eat some lemon. In astrological literature these series were not always limited to fixed groups of seven or nine. Ficino, who offered one of the fullest accounts of these chains, classified silver, jacinth, topaz, coral, crystal, beryl, spodium, sapphire, green and airy colours, wine, sugar, white honey, lamb, peacock, eagle, young bullock, and sanguine, handsome and venerable men in the

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Jupiter series. Contact with any of these could be used to call down the propitious jovial influences. (Ficino, De vita 3.1.) On the other hand, to be endowed with Venusian gifts, Ficino advises sauntering in the “garden of Venus,” picking flowers such as violets, lilies and crocuses, and simply enjoying the vital forces of the colour green and of air and light. Beautiful things, he continues, such as flowers or graceful materials such as gold, silver, amber and silk could not be as beautiful without the benefit of the heavens, which means, he argues, that their very substances contain miraculous celestial virtues (Ficino, De vita 2.14, 3.11).11 The examples illustrate vividly how actions such as lounging on a green meadow, collecting flowers, wearing silk and gold or drinking wine were powerful therapeutic and efficient behaviours with magical meanings, which did not necessarily contain anything illicit. In other words, a picnic with honey, wine and saffron eaten in an exuberantly flowering field on a sunny day while nicely dressed and decked with garlands of flowers was also a magical act in a magical space, which had the power to combine influences from different parts of the universe and connect the wanderer to higher reality through chains of universal correspondences. A human being was not, however, a mere passive receiver of spatial influences. The possibilities for affecting the surrounding space were far more versatile and efficient, as we shall see next.

Imaginary Spaces and Manipulated Places For a Renaissance magus imaginary spaces were real, while real spaces were in turn shaped by the imagination. Transcendent worlds which we regard as abstractions and intellectual constructions were considered real, in fact, more real than the visible terrestrial world. At the same time the discernible realm was not taken to be what it looked like: Visible reality was filled with occult properties, astral radiation, demonic creatures and other invisible, yet tremendously powerful forces. Neither was the visible reality fixed or untouchable: A magus was able to comprehend, grasp, reshape and manipulate his environment, both visible and invisible, by Ficino explains this more explicitly in De vita 3.16. Following the guidelines of medieval philosophy, he suggests that all species and material substances have elemental manifest qualities and hidden occult qualities (virtutes occultae) that originate from the heavens. A useful source for further reading on this issue is Copenhaver 1984.

11

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means of imagination and spirits, his intellect and natural magic. In the pre-industrial era the imagination was not just a romanticised concept referring to artistic capabilities, but a vigorous and effective part of the human soul. According to medieval theories, imagination (Lat. imaginatio, also called by its Greek name phantasia) was the third highest power of the human soul after intellect and reason (Ficino, De vita 3.22; Theologia Platonica. 13.2.18, 16.5.1). Renaissance authors believed it to be a fact that a human being could contribute to the conditions of his immediate surroundings in astonishingly concrete ways through his imaginative capacity, including simply by his gaze. Ficino describes how an evil sorcerer can make his victim fall ill by imagining and staring: The phantasy of a sorcerer, hostile as it is to an infant’s tender little body, gives the child a fever. His imagining the fever arouses his febrile, that is, choleric spirits, just as imagining intercourse arouses our seminal spirits and genitalia. … As soon as these vapors are aroused, like arrows they speed with the spirit to the spot the evil phantasy had intended as its mark. They dart out mostly from the older person’s eyes, like rays passing from and crossing through things made of glass, and go on to infect the child’s spirits and humors. (Ficino, Theologia Platonica 13.4.8, transl. Michael J. B. Allen and John Warden)

The essential catalyst of the process of infecting was the spirit (Latin spiritus, Greek pneuma), which in this case does not refer to any religious entity or demonic being, but to a semi-material medium between soul and body. According to medieval medical theories, which Ficino scrupulously followed, the spirit was “generated by the heart’s heat out of the finest part of the blood and thence spread through the whole body” (Ficino, Theologia Platonica 7.6.1). After being created and moulded by one’s imagination and bodily complexion, the spirits flew out of the body through the eyes and the breath. When these spiritual arrows or spirits reached another person, they affected his or her spirits and penetrated that individual’s imagination, blood and heart, causing psychological and physiological reactions such as love, disgust or enchantment: The sight of a stinking old man or a woman suffering her period bewitches a boy. The sight of a young man bewitches an older man .…the bewitchment is very heavy by which a young man transfixes the heart of an older man. (Ficino, De amore 7.4)12 Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, English translation by Sears Jayne (1985). 12

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Usually, the spirits affected other human beings, but other living objects, such as animals, plants, demons and higher souls, produced spirits as well and were afflicted by them. Actually, the whole universe was filled with spirits, and even dead matter was not safe from the spiritual arrows of sight. In his early work De amore (“On Love”), Ficino recites a pseudoAristotelian legend in which a menstruating woman can soil a mirror with bloody drops by means of her own gaze. This is possible, he explains, because the subtle spirits sink into soft and less dense materials such as cloth or wood, while hard materials, like stones or mirrors, stop the spirit on the surface and draw them together, giving the impression of sanguinary re-incarnation (Ficino, De amore, 7.4). As these examples indicate, for a Renaissance magus the environment was not only comprehensible, but also controllable and changeable through imagination and such physical acts as staring. Higher powers of the human soul, reason and especially the intellect offered still more influential instruments for surpassing physical distances. Through the contemplative skills of the intellect, for example, the human soul was able to reach transcendent reality and comprehend divine mysteries in an instant of revelation. That kind of contemplative gnosis was one of the cornerstones of both Christian and Neoplatonic mysticism, but Ficino reformed the tradition by giving it a strong flavour of worldliness. For him, the ability to reach the hereafter was a sign of man’s divine virtue, his (super)celestial origin and godlike dominion over the lower creation: In justice only a celestial animal delights in the celestial element [fire]: with heavenly power he ascends and measures the heavens; and with his superheavenly mind he transcends the heavens.13 (Ficino, Theologia Platonica 13.3.3, transl. Michael J. B. Allen and John Warden) Furthermore, God is everywhere and is always. But man longs to be everywhere. For he uses the four elements, as we said. He measures the earth and the sky, and he examines the hidden depths of Tartarus. To him the sky does not appear superlatively high—to use Mercurius’s14 words—nor deep the center of the earth. The intervals of time and place do not prevent him from coursing through all that exists in whatever time or place. No wall blocks or checks his gaze; no boundaries suffice for him. He studies to The citations from the Theologia Platonica are taken from James Hankins’s edition, translated by Michael J. B. Allen, 2001–6. 14 “Mercurius” refers to a text of a mythical pseudo-author, Hermes Trismegistos. The whole passage was probably inspired by Hermetic exemplars, especially the Asclepius 6. 13

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In Ficino’s vision an enlightened human mind was able to transcend the borders of worlds and reach the spheres of celestial and super-celestial ideas through mental actions. But just as a human soul was able to ascend to heaven to visit the higher souls, it was also capable of bringing these souls down to earth. One way of doing this, as we have seen in the previous section, was to utilize the acts of sympathetic magic. The universe, although consisting of different realms, was at the same time one immense living entity, the parts of which felt a strong mutual love and attraction for each other. The main intermediaries between the different parts were stellar radiation and the spirit, which was supposed to dwell everywhere in the universe. What a magician needed to do was simply shape his or her personal spirits appropriate for receiving the radiation of a certain planet, which was accomplished, for example, by using plants and herbs belonging to the aforementioned series. In addition mental actions such as those of the imagination and intellect had enormous potential for exceeding the boundaries of the body. In the twenty-first book of the De vita 3 Ficino classifies the instruments of magic into seven subcategories, which, of course, follow the hierarchical order of the seven planets: Instrument

Planet/Divinity

understanding (intelligentiae)

Saturnus (highest)

reason (Rationis humanae discursiones)

Jupiter

concepts of the imagination (Conceptus imaginationis: formae, motus, affectae)

Mars

sounds (Voces: verba, cantus, soni)

Apollo / Sun

powders and vapours (Pulveres & vapores)

Venus

plants and animals (quae ex herbis & animalium membris componuntur)

Mercurius

hard materials: stones and metals (Duriores: Lapides, metalla)

Luna / Moon (lowest)

Table 14–2. The seven steps of magic according to Marsilio Ficino.

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Ficino’s systematised theory of magic had a great impact on debates about magic over the following decades. Almost all authors of magic discussed and quoted Ficino’s De vita, either applying its theorems or denying them or just transmitting the content forwards. Sometimes De vita was also reshaped and refined: Cornelius Agrippa, who usually followed the text of his great predecessor quite precisely, nevertheless made some remarkable additions to Ficino’s exposition of the seven steps of magic. Ficino had placed images in the lowest category (probably in order to make his magic appear innocent) amongst the hard materials, but Agrippa separates visual marks into an independent group and places them at the top of the hierarchy: The eighth grade, the sphere of fixed stars, belongs to images and rings, while the ninth grade, the heaven of the primus mobile, belongs to numbers, figures and characters (Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 3.46). The tendency to appreciate images and shapes can already be found, albeit in a more modest tone, in Ficino, who was more cautious about the dangers of magical images and their connections to illicit magic. (Walker 1958, 95–96) Nevertheless, both Ficino and Agrippa emphasise the power of images, figures and forms as a means of communicating with celestial and super-celestial souls and attracting stellar influences. Images, when properly made, had a direct connection to pure forms and ideas, which, perceived as intelligible beings, were able to “recognise” themselves in earthly objects. (Ficino, De vita 3.16) This theurgic magic, which directly invokes divine souls, transcends the limits of natural magic and was totally illicit from the Christian point of view. It was, however, based on the semi-philosophical neo-platonic doctrines and Hellenistic esoteric sources greatly appreciated by Ficino and Agrippa, who seemingly were too fascinated by the possibilities of theurgy to be able to avoid the subject. The doctrines of theurgy were transmitted to Ficino (and by him to Agrippa) via late classical esoteric sources such as Iamblichus’s De mysteriis Aegyptiorum (Jamblique 1966) and a pseudo-Zoroastrian collection known as Chaldaean Oracles (Majercik 1989). The main goal was the theurgic union, a direct connection between a magus and the divinities, which was reached, as Iamblichus often suggests, through holy and secret symbols.15 At the highest level the contacts between the earthly world and the deities were not created by iconic representations and personification (which was the case with heavenly bodies), but by “pure shapes,” such as mathematical ideas and mysterious “characters,” which are often regarded as the only way to express pure intelligence by earthly 15

E.g. De mysteriis 1.21, 3.31, 4.2, 6.6, 8.7.

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means (e.g. De occulta philosophia 2.22). The latter group, characteres (or karakteres), which Renaissance authors often confused with hieroglyphs, consisted of vague medieval signs and symbols of Arabic origin, familiar from manuscripts on magic listed in the Speculum (figures 14–1 and 14–2). The “real characters” were considered, as Agrippa testifies, as a divine language that only the gods could read properly: Characters are nothing but unknown letters and scriptures that are protecting the sacred names of gods and spirits from the use and reading by the profane. The ancients called them hieroglyphs or sacred letters because they were devoted to sacred divinities only... On this matter, Porphyrios says that the ancients, when they wanted to conceal godly and divine powers, signified invisible things with sensible figures and visible things, as if they had recounted great mysteries with sacred letters and unfolded them with symbolic figures. (Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 3.29)16

“Sunt autem characters nihil aliud quam ignorabiles quaedam literae et scripturae, sacra deorum et spirituum nomina a prophanorum usu lectioneque custodientes, quas literas veteres hieroglyphicas sive sacras vocabant, quia solis deorum sacris devotas. . . . Unde Porphyrius ait veteres, deum et divinas virtutes celare volentes, per sensibiles figuras et per ea quae visibilia sunt invisibilia significantes, quasi sacris literis magna mysteria tradidisse et symbolicis quibusdam figuris explicasse.” 16

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Figures 14–1 and 14–2. Planetary symbols and astrological characters. De occulta philosophia libri tres, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab Nettesheym. Helsinki, The National Library of Finland, The manuscript collection.

Spaces and Places of a Magician When and where was magic practised? There is a great lacuna in our knowledge about learned magic. There are many testimonies about witch trials in which the suspected, usually uneducated peasants and illiterate common people were accused of using simple wax figurines and elementary curse formulas. The practices of learned magic described by Ficino and Agrippa, however, have been more or less concealed from posterity as have their material remnants, such as astrological images.17 Fortunately, textual evidence offers some valuable clues. There was, for example, a rich variety of instruments for catching magical influences, such as in Ficino’s table of seven steps and Agrippa’s nine grades, which included Modern research has been able to recognise with certainty only a few medieval magical amulets. See, for example, Weill-Parot 1999, 893. 17

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material, ritual and intellectual ways of attracting the heavenly benefits. The authors also agreed that the more instruments were used, the more efficient the magic would be.18 In the ideal case the magus was supposed to combine all possible instruments in a single ritual in one physical place. That kind of accumulation of magical means would gather all imaginable magical streams in one place at a given time, thereby providing the ritual with absolute power (Ficino, De vita 3.16, see also note 21). There is one interesting account describing this kind of “total ceremony” in the writings of Ficino’s disciple Francesco Cattani da Diacceto (1466–1522). In his detailed report, to which D. P. Walker called attention in the 1950s, the proper astrological timing is combined with proper costume, colours, herbs, plants, places, furniture, incense, images, symbols, songs, prayers, unguents, animals and proper disposition of one’s own imagination: If, for example, he [the magus] wishes to acquire solarian gifts, first he sees that the sun is ascending in Leo or Aries, on that day and in the hour of the sun. Then, robed in a solarian mantle of a solarian colour, such as gold, and crowned with a mitre of laurel, on the altar, itself made of solarian material, he burns myrrh and frankincense, the sun’s own fumigations, having strewn the ground with heliotrope and suchlike flowers. Also he has an image of the sun in gold or chrysolite or carbuncle, that is, of the kind they think corresponds to each of the sun’s gifts. If, for example, he wishes to cure diseases, he has an image of the sun enthroned, crowned and wearing a saffron cloak, likewise a raven and the figure of the sun, which are to be engraved on gold when the sun is ascending in the first face of Leo. Then, anointed with unguents made, under the same celestial aspect, from saffron, balsam, yellow honey and anything else of that kind, and not forgetting the cock and the goat, he sings the sun’s own hymn, such as Orpheus thought should be sung. . . . To all these he adds what he believes to be the most important: a strongly emotional disposition of the imagination, by which, as with pregnant women, the spirit is stamped with this kind of imprint, and flying out through the channels of the body, especially through the eyes, ferments and solidifies, like rennet, the kindred power of the heavens. (Diacceto, Opera Omnia, quoted in Walker 1958, 32–33)

Unfortunately, we have no records to verify whether such rites were ever performed, but Diacceto’s account reveals a great deal about the ideals of the neo-platonising Italian elite on the subject of magic-religious habits. There is a remarkable ideological change compared to the medieval Christian authors, who, led by authorities such as the Speculum astronomiae and Thomas Aquinas, condemned almost all rituals used in magic, including suffumigations and verbal incantations. 18

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Diacceto also clarifies how ceremonial magic and the condensation of magical influences streaming from different parts of the universe were supposed to work. The natural and material auxiliaries used in the ritual, such as heliotrope, saffron, honey and the cock, contained solar powers, which were the properties specific to them. These auxiliaries were used to channel solar radiation to a sacred place, but also to fill the space with solar spirits and transform the nature of local spirits—and the spirits of the magus himself—into a more solar mood. Other, less material auxiliaries, such as songs, poems, words and images, not only had spiritual functions, but also mental and intelligible ways of functioning. Songs, for example, were effective both through their musical intervals and their texts: The harmonies composed of individual tones invoked the harmonies of the spheres, and the texts worked like prayers and magical words, directed possibly to solar demons, angels and other intelligible beings belonging to the Sun series. Also the personifications of the solar divinity—a crowned man sitting on the throne with an apollonian bird (raven)19 and the figure of the sun (cf. figure 14–1), which probably refers to a symbolic character of the planet—invoked higher, intelligent beings able to recognise their own forms in lower matter.

Figure 14–3. The Saturn and Mars on a throne with attributes and symbols. Albumasar (Albumazar Abalachi), Introductorium in astronomiam (Venice, 1506). Helsinki, The National Library of Finland, The manuscript collection, H N. 1925. 19 The description is based on Ficino’s account in De vita 3.18: “a king on a throne in a yellow garment and a raven and the form of the Sun.” (transl. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark.) Ficino, in turn, had used the Picatrix 2.10 as his most direct model.

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Diacceto’s ritual owes a great deal to late classical pagan neo-platonic sources, such as the writings of Proclus and the solar rituals ascribed to the last pagan emperor, Iulianus Apostata, but, as D. P. Walker (1958, 36, 61, 83–84) has pointed out, it also shares obvious resemblances with Christian practices. Walker pointed to certain ceremonial habits and instrumental aids, such as the use of an altar, proper garments, images, consecrated objects (or relics), songs, prayers, incense and so on. In this sense a Catholic church with its several chapels, relics, holy images and side altars would appear to be an ideal magical space and an intensive point of condensation of spiritual-magical influences. There are in fact some hypotheses suggesting that sculptures, ornaments and symbols carved in medieval cathedrals were based on magical traditions of oriental civilisations or other non-Christian sources and, like their pagan models, served amuletical functions, for example, protection from evil or bringing good luck (Loewenthal 1978). In this sense a church building appears to be a semi-intentionally syncretistic (or, in other words, a broadmindedly Christian) cult centre armed with dozens of magical symbols and objects derived from various European and non-European religious and magical traditions. The non-Christian (or at least, let us say, non-orthodox Christian-Catholic) traditions of magic, especially popular magic and witchcraft, can be seen as some kind of dropouts from the dominating Christian scholasticism, which utilised the same means as the mother Church to gain benefits. In Ficino’s case the dropout had become a serious rival with all its philosophising argumentation and scientific background, which caused the author certain obscure and poorly-documented troubles with the church,20 but also indicate that he saw learned magic and Christian dogma as parts of the same universe and a manifestation of the same natural (and supra-natural) regularities with no insurmountable contradictions between them. The sacred space of a church edifice reveals something more about the beliefs connected to the magical universe, such as, for example, the idea that spiritual influences (this time both in the medical and the theological meanings) were capable of piercing material obstacles (such as the walls and floors of a cathedral) and penetrating closed places. The magical influences­—or to put it another way, the spiritual-like spatial connections and streams—were not limited to the open air, but also worked, and worked efficiently indeed, in closed and heavily covered spaces. In 20 In the Apologia attached to his De vita, Ficino claims to have been accused of heresy because of his magical opus. Unfortunately, there are no further records about the Ficino vs. Catholic Church controversy.

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magical theories this permeability of influences was usually taken for granted. It has already been mentioned that the medical spirits were able to pierce thin membranes, such as eyes, and also some more challenging corporeal obstacles, such as wood and glass. The astral radiation (whose relation to the spirit remains rather obscure) did penetrate even the hardest materials imaginable:21 Ficino confirms that the occult properties of the stars streamed into stones and metals and survived there until the artificial manipulation of a magus awakened them (Ficino, De vita 3.13, 3.16). For Renaissance magicians following a Ficinian framework it was therefore completely natural to assume that magical influences were able to transcend thick walls and massive obstacles and penetrate every corner of the physical cosmos. There are even literal instructions telling how to draw magical influences into interiors. The astral influence was supposedly a constant stream, and the longer a person stayed under a certain stellar influence, the stronger was the effect. It was therefore profitable to imbue living rooms and especially bedrooms with magical influx. With this goal in mind, Ficino gives instructions for building “the image of the world,” figura mundi, depicting a general talisman that was supposed to mediate the benefits of all benign planets simultaneously in one place (Ficino, De vita 3.19). The object Ficino describes is probably an engraving22 carved on a gilded bronze plate, which was tinted with “three universal colours,” green, gold and sapphire-blue, colours dedicated to the “heavenly Graces,” which he identified elsewhere as the Sun, Jupiter and Venus (Ficino, De vita 3.5). The exact appearance of the figura mundi remains unclear, but at least Ficino wanted the heavenly spheres, the fixed stars, the earth and the shape of the universe to be depicted. During the day the figura should be carried in order to collect all benefits in the open air, but at night it should be located in a person’s bedroom in order to fill the interior with beneficial influences:

See De vita 3.16: “. . . the immense size, power, and motion of celestial things brings it about that all the rays of all the stars penetrate in a moment the mass of the earth … and with consummate ease straight to the center. In the center, as the Pythagoreans and Platonists would have it, the rays are the strongest, both because they touch the center perpendiculary on all sides and because they are collected in a confined space.” (Translated by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark.) 22 Ficino’s account is annoyingly confusing and does not offer any exact model. According to different hypotheses, the figura mundi could have been a portable amulet, a large painting or an astrological clockwork. See, e.g. Yates 1964, 75–78; Toussaint 2002, 307–326. 21

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Ockenström The adherent of those things should either carry about with him a model of this kind or should place it opposite him and gaze at it.… Nor should one simply look at it, but reflect upon it in the mind. In like manner, in the very depth of his house, he should construct a chamber, vaulted and marked with these figures and colours, and he should spend most of his waking hours there and also sleep [there]. And when he has emerged from his house, he will not note with so much attention the spectacle of individual things as the figure of the universe and its colours. (Ficino, De vita 3.19, transl. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark)

Although focused on the figura mundi picture, the quotation describes how a chamber or an entire house could become a locus magicus: Paintings, statues, decorations, ornaments, architectural proportions and other shapes, painted and other colours, the materials of the furniture, jewels, mirrors, house plants, herbs, domestic pets and even songs sung indoors had magical meanings and powers, and all could be used to attract, channel and disseminate magical influences to a house and within it. In this sense a Florentine quattrocento palazzo appears to be the embodiment of the magical universe in miniature, filled with magical influences, stellar radiation, occult forces and intertwined co-operative spatial relationships. Ficino’s description might easily appear to be a theoretical ideal case constructed by a philosopher, but there is also some evidence to indicate that theories were put into practice. Since the 1960s, there have been suggestions that certain Renaissance paintings, especially Botticelli’s Primavera—known also as an allegory of spring—were inspired by Ficino’s figura mundi description and used for astrological purposes. Although painted approximately ten years before the publication of De vita, some of Ficino’s letters to Botticelli’s young patron, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici (Lorenzo the Magnificent’s second cousin), reveal that Ficino was closely acquainted with these ideas as early as the 1470s (Gombrich 1972, 36–63, 79–81; Yates 1964, 75–78; Ames-Lewis 2002, 327–38). Although the attempts to amalgamate Ficino’s figura and Botticelli’s complex allegory have not been very successful—one can recognise graces, a few planetary gods and the three universal colours in Botticelli’s mystery, but the painting is apparently not an imitation of the structure of the universe with its celestial spheres and gilded fixed stars— there are still some reasons to assume that the painting was meant to have magical meaning and that it was used for magical and astrological purposes. Not only the planetary personifications and colours, but also the rich flora including herbs, fruits and flowers, many of them forming part of the series of planets and constellations, can easily be seen as representing the same

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tradition of magical practices as Ficino’s De vita. That today we know that the Primavera was located in Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco’s bedroom (Levi d’Ancona 1983, 28), exactly as Ficino instructed the figura mundi to be displayed, means that the Ficinian-astrological interpretation must not be abandoned yet.

Conclusions As mentioned at the beginning, the Renaissance worlds were made (as most worlds are made still today) by reflecting the structures of mind and language onto exterior reality. In this process visual symbols, signs, marks and metaphors were not just signs pointing at something else, but efficient parts of reality itself. They belonged to the world—both seen and unseen, both “real” and “imagined.” The symbols and signs constructed the world, acted within it and sustained its spatial relationships. Artificial objects— objects made by ars, human skill—participated in this universal magical interplay as equals with the objects of nature. Just as a topaz, a peacock, or other natural object belonged to the series of Jupiter, so an appropriately made personification of the planet Jupiter or an adequate symbolic character recognisable by the heavenly soul could be used to channel jovial influences into a certain place, household, room, item or person. The way in which Renaissance authors treated the personifications used in magic, especially Ficino’s planetary amulets and his figura mundi description, reveals something essential about the power that images, symbols and other artificial objects—or in more general terms, art—had in constructing and maintaining spatial networks. Pictures represented and exposed the higher, invisible reality. They were like windows on the hereafter, pre-modern web cameras through which a mortal and earthly being was able to communicate with the highest reality. As Brian Copenhaver (2007, 156–57) has explained, “spirit, rays, and figures all provide physical and cosmological solutions to the problem of action at a distance.” Images brought the ideal down to earth: Through them, the remote higher reality simultaneously became present in this world and found its way directly into Florentine bed chambers, healing exhausted scholars from the scourge of melancholy. For a Renaissance magus, magic was an omnipresent, universe-piercing force and a vivid and interactive framework, as part of which the intelligent and imagining human being reshaped his surroundings by painting, sculpting, constructing, cultivating, decorating, playing and singing—or simply by imagining and staring at it.

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References Agrippa, Cornelius. 1992. De occulta philosophia Libri tres. Edited by Vittoria Perrone Compagni. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Ames-Lewis, Frances. 2002. “Neoplatonism and the Visual Arts at the Time of Marsilio Ficino.” In Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, edited by Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees, 327–38. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Ashworth, William B., Jr. 1990. “Natural History and the Emblematic World View.” In Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, edited by David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, 303–332. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boudet, Jean-Patrice. 2006. Entre science et nicromance: Astrologie, divination et magie dans l’Occident médiéval (XIIe-XVe siècle). Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne Copenhaver, Brian P. 1984. “Scholastic Philosophy and Renaissance Magic in the De vita of Marsilio Ficino.” Renaissance Quarterly 37:523– 54. Copenhaver, Brian P. 1990. “Natural magic, hermetism, and occultism in early modern science.” In Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, edited by David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, 261–301. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Copenhaver, Brian P. 2007. “How to Do Magic, and Why: Philosophical Prescriptions.” In The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, edited by James Hankins, 137–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eco, Umberto. (1992) 1994. Interpretation and Overinterpretation, with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose, edited by Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ficino, Marsilio. (1989) 1998. Three Books on Life. De vita libri tres. Edited and translated by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies in conjunction with the Renaissance Society of America. ———. 2001–2006. Platonic Theology [Theologia Platonica]. 6 vols. English translation by Michael J. B. Allen and John Warden, Latin text edited by James Hankins with William Bowen. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. ———. 1985. Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love [De amore]. Translated by Sears Jayne. 2nd rev. ed. Dallas: Spring Publications. Gombrich, Ernst. 1972. Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the

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Renaissance. Oxford: Phaidon. Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Hassocks: Harvester Press. Jamblique. 1966. Les Mystères d’Égypte (De mysteriis). Translated by Édouard Des Places. Paris: Belles lettres. Levi d’Ancona, Mirella. 1983. Botticelli’s Primavera. A Botanical Interpretation Including Astrology, Alchemy and the Medici. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore. Loewenthal, L. J. A. 1978. “Amulets in Medieval Sculpture: I. General Outline.” Folklore 89:3–12. Majercik, Ruth. 1989. The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Newman, William R. and Anthony Grafton. 2001. “Introduction.” In Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, edited by William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, 1–38. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Pingree, David, ed. 1986. Picatrix. The Latin version of the Ghāyat AlHakīm. London: Warburg Institute. Ramachandran, V. S. and William Hirstein. 1999. “The Science of Art: A Eurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6:15–51. Saffrey, H. D. and L. G. Westerink. 1968. “Introduction.” In Théologie Platonicienne by Proclus, vol. 1, ix–clxv. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Stafford, Barbara Maria. 1999. Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ———. 2007. “The Remaining 10 percent: The Role of Sensory Knowledge in the Age of the Self-Organizing Brain.” In Visual Literacy, edited by James Elkins, 31–57. New York: Routledge. Toussaint, Stéphane, 2002. “Ficino, Archimedes and the Celestial Arts.” In Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, edited by Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees, 327–38. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Vickers, Brian. 1988. “On the Function of Analogy in the Occult.” In Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe, edited by Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus, 265–292. Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library and Associated University Presses. Walker, Daniel Pickering. 1958. Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella. London: Warburg Institute. Weill-Parot, Nicolas. 2002. Les “images astrologiques” au moyen âge et à la renaissance. Spéculations intellectuelles et pratiques magiques (XIIe-

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Contributors Philipp Demgenski is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include urban anthropology, the anthropology of space and place and spatial and social transformation in contemporary urban China. His current research investigates urban development in the Chinese coastal city of Qingdao, with focus specifically on the issue of urban liveability in the context of heritage preservation. Dr Julia Faisst is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt (Germany). Her fields of interest include modern and contemporary US literature and visual cultures, architecture and urban studies, and race and diaspora studies. Claire Farago is Professor of Early Modern Art, Theory, and Criticism at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has written and edited fourteen books and published widely on Leonardo da Vinci’s writings and Renaissance art theory, as well as on historiography, critical theory, and cultural interaction. Her current projects deal with the ethics of scholarship and the various ways in which art and media function in contemporary society. Jason Finch is a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland and Lecturer in English Literature at Åbo Akademi University. His current book project is a topographical history of London slum writing. His main research interest is in the relationship between literature and place. Dr Katja Fält is a postdoctoral researcher in Art History at the University of Jyväskylä. Her fields of interest include medieval visual culture, medieval ecclesiastic art in the Nordic countries, liturgy and art, and the cult of Corpus Christi. Dr Saija Isomaa is University Lecturer in Finnish Literature at the University of Tampere. Her research interests include genre theory, historical poetics and moral emotions in literature.

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Contributors

Dr Hanna Johansson is an art historian who works as a researcher at the University of Helsinki. Johansson’s areas of expertise are the history and theory of contemporary art. Her recent interest has been in contemporary representations of landscape and conceptual changes of the notions of climate, nature and animals from the early nineteenth century to the present. Bart Keunen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Ghent University in Belgium. He is co-director of the Ghent Urban Studies Team and has published books and articles on urban literature and the cultural condition of modernity. He has also published on genre theory, narrative theory and Bakhtin’s chronotope concept. Angela Locatelli is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bergamo, and the director of the Doctoral Programme in Euro-American Literatures. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her main research interest is literary theory. She has written extensively on literary epistemology, psychoanalysis and semiotics and, mostly recently, has focused on earlymodern literature and culture, modernism and the postmodern novel. Pirjo Lyytikäinen is Professor of Finnish Literature at the University of Helsinki and the director of the Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literary Studies. She is an expert on Finnish national romanticism and symbolism. Her theoretical interests centre on genres of literary world-making. Lauri Ockenström is doctoral student in Art History at the University of Jyväskylä. His research interests include Neoplatonic symbolism, western esotericism and astrological magic. Ellen Rees is Associate Professor in Ibsen Studies at the University of Oslo. Her research interests include Norwegian literature from 1800 to the present with emphasis on place, the construction of identity and aspects of visual culture and adaptation.

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Kirsi Saarikangas is Professor of Art History at the University of Helsinki and the director of the Finnish Doctoral Programme for Women’s Studies. She has authored and edited several books and published widely on the relationship of built space and gender, art historical theories and methods, as well as Finnish cultural history. Her current research interests are in urban nature as well as in questions of home, nature and gender in the lived suburban spaces from the 1950s to the 1970s. Dr Maria Salenius is Lecturer in British Literature at the University of Helsinki. Her primary research interests include the religious poetry and prose of John Donne, language and religion, and the metaphor. Renja Suominen-Kokkonen is an Adjunct Professor and Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Helsinki, as well as the director of the University’s Finnish Doctoral Programme for Art History. She has published monographs and articles on the formation of the architectural profession in Finland and on early women architects. Her research includes articles and a monograph on modern architecture, especially on the collaboration between Aino and Alvar Aalto, and an edited volume on the history of art historical research in Finland. Leena Svinhufvud has been the Curator of Education at Design Museum Helsinki since 1998. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Helsinki and has published widely on Finnish textile art and design.

Index Acho of Västerås 232 Ackroyd, Peter 88 Adorno, Theodor W. 279 Agnel, Jean Perrin 170 Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius 293–297, 301, 307–309 Aho, Juhani 170–174, 179 Aikens, Kristina 98 Ainsworth, William Harrison 95 Albrecht, Donald 200 Albumasar Abalachi 296, 300, 311 Allen, Michael J. B. 304–306 Amberg, Anna-Lisa 204, 214 Ames-Lewis, Frances 314 Anderson, Benedict 161, 178 Andersson Wirde, Maja 214 Antas, Axel 277, 278, 281 Anttila, Lauri 278 Aquinas, Thomas 310 Aragon, Louis 63, 76–78 Aristotle 285 Ashworth, William 118, 298 Asikainen, Eveliina 38 Astala, Lauri 282, 283 Astikainen, Riitta 30 Augé, Marc 115, 143, 144, 158 Austen, Jane 86, 90, 148, 157 Bachelard, Gaston xi, 49, 73, 274, 281, 282, 285 Bagehot, Walter 98 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 47, 74, 75, 92 Balmori, Diana 209, 214, 215, 218 Bardon, Geoffrey 4–6, 22, 24 Barrell, John 146 Batty, Philip 6, 7, 16, 17, 20, 22 Baudelaire, Charles 57, 67, 79 Baudrillard, Jean 77, 78 Baulch, Vivian M. 203 Bauman, Zygmunt 60 Beames, Thomas xvii, 86, 91, 100

Bell, Richard 21, 22, 254 Benjamin, Walter xvii, 7, 29, 61, 62, 63–68, 76, 81 Bentham, Jeremy xi Bergson, Henri 46, 47 Berman, Marshall 57 Bhabha, Homi 285 Blausen, Whitney 215 Bø, Gudleiv 127 Bonsdorff, Pauline von 51 Bonyhandy, Tim 22 Booth, Ellen Scripps 199, 206, 208 Booth, George Gough 199, 202–213, 218–220 Booth, Henry (Harry) Scripps 205, 206 Botticelli, Sandro 275, 276, 314 Boudet, Jean-Patrice 296 Boydell, Christine 215 Boyer, Christine M. 75, 76 Bray, David 115 Breuilly, John 169 Brown, Bill 85, 95, 98, 99, 101, 237 Burgwinkle, Bill 235 Butler, Judith 23, 24, 90 Cabanel, Patrick 162, 163 Camille, Michael 228, 243, 244 Carlyle, Thomas 147, 157 Carruthers, Mary 228 Carter, Paul 6, 24 Carus, Carl Gustav 275 Casey, Edward S. xiii, xiv, xv, 168, 285 Cassirer, Ernst xvii, 64–73, 81 Caviness, Madeleine H. 243 Certeau, Michel de xi, xii, 31, 32, 38, 45, 49, 88 Christ-Janer, Albert 206, 212, 219 Clark, John R. 210, 300, 311, 313, 314 Clark, Robert Judson 210, 300, 311, 313, 314 Colby, Joy Hakanson 210

Index Collins, Philip 99 Colomina, Beatriz xiii Connolly, Frances 16 Constable, John 277 Copenhaver, Brian 298, 303, 315 Corbin, Alain 31 Crossley, Paul 228, 244 Damisch, Hubert 276 Danielson, Anna 215 Davis, Mike 86, 115 Debord, Guy 88, 144 Defoe, Daniel 80, 93, 157 De Long, David G. 203, 204, 206, 207 Denford, Steven L. J. 87, 89, 100 Diacceto, Giovanni Cattani da 310–312 Dickens, Charles xvii, 86, 89, 92–101 Didi-Huberman, Georges 274– 276 Dos Passos, John 62, 68 Duncan, Ian 95 Dyos, H. J. 85, 86, 90, 92, 101, 102 Eagleton, Terry 98, 99 Eccles, Jeremy 15 Eckert, Kathryn Bishop 203, 204, 210 Eco, Umberto 298 Edelfelt, Albert 169 Edgeworth, Maria 94 Edwards, Leslie S. 199, 204, 205, 208 Egan, Pierce xvii, 86, 91–94 Elger, Dietmar 278 Eliasson, Olafur 284, 285, 288 Eric of Strängnäs 232 Farago, Claire 3, 6, 11–13, 18 Faulkner, William 185, 186 Ficino, Marsilio 294–296, 300, 302– 315 Flaubert, Gustave 170 Flint, Kate 87, 89–91, 97, 101 Foucault, Michel xi, xii, xvii, 19, 61, 71–75, 77, 85, 125, 126, 135, 140 Freedgood, Elaine 85, 101 Frei, Otto 285 Fridericianum 273, 276 Friedrich, Caspar David 277, 278 Frisby, David 59, 65 Furneaux, Holly 96–98

323

Gander, Ryan 273–275, 278, 289 Garcia Canclini, Nestor 10 Gaskell, Elizabeth 147–150 Gellner, Ernest 169 Gerard, John 200–203 Gilloch, Graeme 65 Gissing, George 89 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von 165 Gombrich, Ernst 301, 314 Goodman, Nelson 299 Gormley, Antony 286, 287, 289 Goss, Glenda Dawn 176 Green, Jenny 19 Green, Nicholas 168 Grosz, Elizabeth 47, 51 Haila, Yrjö xiv, 32, 161, 164 Hamsun, Knut 125, 129, 132, 135–137 Hannerz, Ulf 115 Hannikainen, P. J. 167 Hansen, Maurits C. 125, 129–137 Haraway, Donna 31 Hardy, Thomas 89, 147, 153–155, 156, 256 Harris, Neil 207 Harvey, David 81, 100, 107, 112, 218 Hausen, Marika 200 Hayden, Dolores 47 Häyrynen, Maunu 161 Henitt, N. R. 101 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 288 Hiekkanen, Markus 227, 229, 231, 240 Hobsbawm, E. J. 161, 163 Hogarth, William 92, 93 Holm, Lillian 201, 214 Holquist, Michael 92 hooks, bell 45, 187 House, Humphry 98 Howie, Cary 235 Hudnut, Richard 211 Humpherys, Anne 99 Iamblichus of Apamea 294, 307 Ingold, Tim 38, 50 Ingvarson, Ruth 201, 214 Iversen, Margaret 50 James, Louis 91, 93, 95

324

Index

Jameson, Fredric 279 Jayne, Sears 304 Jeffries, Nigel 85, 89, 91 Jerrold, Douglas 86, 91 Johannes of Uppsala 232 Johansen, Knut 129, 130 Johansson, Hanna xix, 32, 273, 281, 284, 288 Johnson, Charles 186, 188, 190 Johnson, Vivien 4, 6 Jokinen, Ari 38 Juel, Poul 127, 128 Kabakov, Ilya 285 Kahn, Albert 203, 220 Kaprow, Allan 273 Karhu, Hanna 176 Kaske, Carol V. 300, 311, 313, 314 Kervanto Nevanlinna, Anja 34 Kesänen, Juha 30, 35 Kilvert, Robert Francis 147, 150–152 Kimber, Dick 10 Kipp, Maria 215 Kircher, Athanasius 301, 302 Kivi, Aleksis 161, 162, 176 Kleinert, S. 6 Kngwarreye, Emily Kame 18–22 Kokkonen, Jouko 30 Konttinen, Riitta 169, 179 Koponen, Tanja 286, 287 Kristeva, Julia 47, 49 Kuoppamäki, Lauri 214 Kupka, Karel 14 Laitinen, Kai 168 Landry, Donna 144 Langton, Marcia 4 Larsen, Britt Karin 139 Lassila, Pertti 166 Latour, Bruno 50, 274, 280, 285, 287, 288 Lawrence, saint 231 Lear, George 96 Lefebvre, Henry xi, xii, 32, 107, 112, 144 Lehtonen, Joel 174, 175 Levi d’Ancona, Mirella 315

Levine, Steven Z. 177 Lichtenstein, Roy 22 Liebes, Dorothy 215 Liksom, Rosa 180 Lindstrøm, Merethe 139 Linsén, Gabriel 167 Lorch, Emil 206 Lukkarinen, Ville 43, 162, 164, 168, 169, 175, 179 Lyotard, Jean-François xv Lyytikäinen, Pirjo 165, 166, 176, 177 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 147, 157 MacLean, Gerald 144 Magnus II Tavast, Bishop of Turku 232 Mäkinen, Kirsi 38 Mallarmé, Stéphane 175, 177 Manninen, Otto 176–178 March, Fernando 289 Marks, Laura U. 280, 281, 283 Marquis, Samuel 208 Marsh, Joss Lutz 98 Marter, Joan 202, 211 Massey, Doreen xiv, 32, 35, 49, 107, 115, 117, 118 Mayne, Alan 89 McEwen, Katherine 210 Medici, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ 314 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice xi, xii, 73, 276, 277 Meurman, Otto-I. 38 Mikkola, Kirmo 218 Miller, R. Graig 211 Milles, Carl 202–204, 207, 220 Milles, Olga 202–204, 207, 220 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 228, 238 Mitchell, W. J. T. xiv, 17, 32 Mitford, Mary Russell 147–150, 158 Morphy, Howard 7, 10, 14 Morrison, Arthur 89, 94 Morrison, Toni 186–192 Morris, William 210 Munn, Nancy D. 6 Musicant, Marilyn R. 215 Namatjira, Albert 5, 6

Index Neale, Margo 18, 19 Nicolaus of Linköping 232 Niemi, Juhani 170 Nikula, Riitta 162 Nora, Pierre 48 Nummi, Jyrki 170 Nye, David 279 Olwig, Kenneth R. 162 Owens, Alastair 85, 89, 91, 97, 101 Palm-Gold, Jane 91 Pan, Tianshu 115 Papastergiadis, Nikos 24 Parry, Linda 210 Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa 200 Perec, Georges 88 Perkins, Hetti 15 Perrone Compagni, Vittoria 293 Peter the Venerable 231 Petterson, Per 125, 138, 139 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 301 Pingree, David 300 Plato 277, 298, 304 Pollock, Griselda 168 Pound, Arthur 199, 204, 206, 209, 219 Pöysä, Jyrki 33 Presley, Elvis 180 Preziosi, Donald 3 Proust, Marcel 47 Radcliffe, Ann 96 Rastimo, Kaisa 38 Ray, Gene 279 Read, Herbert 147, 155 Reed, Ishmael 186, 188–190 Rekula, Heli 280, 281, 283 Relph, Edward 32 Reynolds, G. W. M. xvii, 86, 95, 96 Richter, Gerhard 278 Riegl, Alois 50 Rilke, Rainer Maria 282 Rivard, Derek A. 227 Rocque, John 93 Rogoff, Irit 31 Roivainen, Irene 33 Rossi, Riikka 170, 171, 175 Rubin, Miri 234, 235

325

Runeberg, Johan Ludvig 161, 164–170, 172, 173, 175–178 Russell family (Dukes of Bedford and London landlords) 91 Ryan, Judith 6, 22, 24 Saarikangas, Kirsi xiii, 33, 210 Saarinen, Eero 200 Saarinen, Eliel 199–222 Saarinen, Loja 199–201, 204, 207–221 Saarinen Swanson, Pipsan (Eva-Liisa) 200, 212 Sandison, Charles 11 Scheffler, Johann (see Silesius, Angelus) 3 Schoeser, Mary 215 Schuré, Edouard 176 Schwan, Anne 97, 98 Sen, Sambudha 92 Shaw, Clement Burbank 165, 166 Shelston, Alan 154 Silesius, Angelus ix Sillanpää, Frans Eemil 180 Silverman, Kaja 38 Simmel, Georg 59, 75, 79 Sinclair, Iain 88 Sjåvik, Jan 130, 132 Slater, Michael 96, 97 Sloterdijk, Peter 274, 282, 285–288 Soja, Edward W. xii, 32, 73, 143, 144, 158 Sommer, Doris 130 Sontag, Susan 24 Stafford, Barbara Maria 228, 298, 299 Stanbury, Sarah 235, 243 Standertskjöld, Elina 206 Steinmetz, George 110 Sterne, Laurence 94 Stieglitz, Alfred 61, 62 Suominen-Kokkonen, Renja 208, 215 Svinhufvud, Leena 212, 215, 216, 218 Swanson, J. Robert F. 206, 207, 212 Syrjämaa, Tarja 51 Tambling, Jeremy 89, 97, 99 Taragin, Davida S. 199, 203, 211, 224 Thackeray, William Makepeace 98

326

Index

Thiesse, Anne-Marie 161 Thurman, Christa C. Mayer 200, 201, 203, 204, 209, 210, 211, 214, 216, 217 Tiitta, Allan 164, 165, 167 Tillotson, Kathleen 98–100 Tjampitjinpa, Kaapa 5, 24 Tomlinson, Ian 88 Topelius, Zacharias 161, 165–168, 173, 177 Toussaint, Stéphane 313 Trismegistos, Hermes 305 Tuan, Yi-Fu 58 Tuomi, Timo 200, 206, 207, 209 Turner, James G. 144 Tysdahl, Bjørn 130 Umbach, Maiken 208 VanderBeke Mager, Diane 201, 203 Vickers, Brian 298, 302 Vickers, George 95 Vidor, King 59, 60, 62 Virilio, Paul 143 Walker Bunym, Caroline 230, 234, 235 Walker, Daniel P. 294, 307, 310, 312 Wallon, Henri 38 Wamberg, Jacob 275, 277 Warburg, Aby 64, 274–276 Ward, Joseph 144 Watt, Ian 79, 80 Weber, Max xvi, 59–62, 75 Weill-Parot, Nicolas 296, 300, 309 Westbrook, Adele 200, 203, 207, 218 Williams, Raymond 79, 143, 144 Winsor, Frederick Albert 93 Winton, Alexandra Griffith 215 Witoszek, Nina 127 Wittkopp, Gregory 199, 206–208, 211 Wordsworth, William 146, 147, 151– 153 Yarowsky, Anne 200, 203, 207, 218 Yates, Frances A. 48, 298, 313, 314 Yeats, W. B. 176 Young, Iris Marion 34 Zhan, Erpeng 116

Zhang, Li 111, 114 Zola, Émile 67–70, 78 Öhquist, Johannes 207, 208, 211–215, 218