Thinking city, writing city

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, n.Q 4 ( 1996), pp. 155 -165 THINKING CITY, WRITING CITY DANIEL GARCÍA EssrG University Autónoma de Madrid Des gares naires, des casemes, des hangars. Les brasseries sinistres qui se succedent Je long des Grands Boulevards, les devantures horribles. Vi lle bruyante ou déserte, livide ou hystérique, ville éventrée, saccagée, maculée, ville hérissée d'interdits, de barreaux, de grillages, de serrures. La ville-charnier: les halles pourries, les bidonvilles déguisés en grands ensembles, la zone au creur de Paris, l'insupportable horreur des boulevards a flics, Haussman, Magenta; Charonne. Georges Perec Hell is more impressive than heaven. When a group of young boys from Cambridge, Massachusetts, were asked to describe their ideal world, they were baffied and even a little bored. When then requested to portray the worst environment they could imagine, they responded with glee and imagination. Kevin Lynch WRITING CITY is my hypothesis. The phra~e bears three senses. 1 shall address in this paper the second and the third senses: • First, asa n ergative phrase. As in «this sweater washes easily», well: this city writes wonderfully. City in this sentence is the syn ta ctic subject; the human agent, however, is only implied-and you can by no means add it. On the other side, there is no detachment of city as theme: all is city. We make do with impure art , an art of performance, of collective authorship. Limited, ephemeral creative acts. • The second sense is transitive: writing the city. On one side, city is selected, 156 Daniel Gar cí a Es sig thrown out, as theme, or objec t. Symmetrically, the role of the agent -the aut hor -is available. Creation, or foundation, is now the center. • In the third sense writing city is a phrasal verb: as in «Baudelaire wrote city Le Spleen de Paris». The agent is still pre se nt --chang ed-but what was th e theme has been absorbed into the predicate. The phrase its elf cannot be pried apart, a nalys ed into its elcments. The theme is absorbed, from two we mak e one, and something new can be added at the other en d. This is an ae sthetics of recirculation, or recycling. From 2 on to 3, this story can be read as history. Sense number 2 is the era of Realist fiction. But 3 is not simply an evolution: it is th e double, always present, always negative, denouncing the timidity of 2. 1'11 now go on to de scribe the transitive s en se. In the beginning, the city was not a theme. What has happened when it has becom e one? I'd say that, in a way, things have fallen into arder. You' ll see the irony here. Two facts: a. the author lives the city, has her place in it. The private voice and the voice in pri vacy; b. the city is inscribed into an axiology: a n eg ative valuation. The city is HELL. There is an asymmetry here, in that the second cornpone nt is rnuch more stringent. And it is prior: the city is condemned before it becomes an object. How did it sta rt ? St Augustine says: «T he first founder of the ci ty on earth was a fratricide». No te that he's not making a narrative statement (he doesn't say, «lt was Cain who etc»). H e's inviting us to make a generalization. And it is an evaluative generalization: Augustin 's so u rce for this, the Hebrew Bible, is ferociously hostile to che city. Augustine himse lf ha s mi xe d feelings on the subjec t: he writes about the fall of Rom e, a recurrent topos which we will often come across, and we must read there the trace of personal anxiety. Wh at in fact he does, however, is condemn the city doubly: one as Hell, the other as a copy, a slave. W e' ll see. Th e bad city has lived on. In the post-theological age, behind the cond emna tion ofth e city, what often lies hidden is the condemnation of Culture as opposed to Na tur e. Th e century ofRousseau is also the time when Hoggarth painted «Gin Lane>>-a p ai nt ing Poe made a reference to in «The Man of the Crowd »: the ear ly period of massive migration to the cities and its attending evils. Or again, sorne fifty years later, the indictment of London in Jane Austen 's Mansfield Park. Why is the city cond em ned? Sha ll we look at it first from Cain 's point of view , the point of view of the founder? According to archaeology and myth, the appariti on of cities is sudden, unexpected. Kevin Lynch in A Theory of Good City Fonn underlines that the apparition of cities is a C(J! Sllr a in hi story. Appropriately then, Cain's action is unmotivated, inscrutable. It is a ma ssive affirmation: of what? Perhaps that is th e origin of the connection between the city and death. Building a city is an attempt to counter death, by erecting a standpoint for dialogue with the gods. The city is Titanic in the most exact sense: its founding is a Promethean gesture against Death. The city is, of necessity, tumed to God. That's why the building ofth e city is always accompanied by « an xiety and guilt» (Lynch, 13 ): becaw ¡e it is dangerously close to pride. It is « tumed to God»: but it is an act of impiety. Thinking City, Writing City 15 7 The city is a «great place», a release, a new world, anda/so a new oppression. Its layout is therefore carefully p/anned to reinforce the sense of awe, and to forma magnificent hackgroundfor religious ceremony. (Lynch 9) More subtly, St Augustine underlines that Cain's act is arbitrary and inexplicable. Augustine says mysteriously that Cain 's act was not motivated by jealousy. All this, and the suddenness of foundation, connects the act of foundation to artistic creation. At any rate, it is an act whose ambivalent meaning escapes us: it has been erased. Nobody has the right to enquire about the origin of the city. We must forget that the foundation of cities is ideological1. Or, as John Ashbery puts it: «These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing I lnto something forgetful, although angry with history» (9). Ashbery's words are uncannily close to Kevin Lynch's tone : In the earliest capital of Shang China, pillared buildings rose on earthen platforms, and there was a human sacrifice under each important building, or even under every pillar. An xiety and guilt accompanied city building. (Lynch 13). St Augustine grafts, onto the Biblical narrative, an alíen Lradition: that of participation in being, a hierarchical ontology. The city is beneath the city of God. Herein, in the integration of the Bible and Platonic ontology, resides the foil thrust of Augustine's position: Cain's act is a copy, and as such, reprovable. But Augustine refrains from stating it overtly, since he has to account for the good there is in the city. The city cannot be of one piece. So he complicates his picture by introducing another level: in Book XV of The City of God we are told that there are two parts to the city on earth. One is the city proper-Cain 's- , the other is the imago of the celestial city. It is an image, and by the same token, in Augustine's words, ít is a slave. Because it is created to signify. The rub here is in the emphasis that it is a shadow, not a representation-he says so explicitly. There is no mimesis: the bad one is silenced, and the face ofthe city which is tumed to God is not the product ofhuman creation. So no mimesis-to admit that there was one would be too frightening: we were supposed to forget, remember? How was the city created, then? Of course, Augustine wrote in a period where the cities were physically disappearing, so he doesn 't both er to avoid the trap. But what 's crucia l in Augustine is the introduction of the touchstone of representation, or imago: the notion will make it easier to pass the buck to the poets. What will happen later, from the eleventh century on? This is the period of ascendance of the Christian ci t y. lt has to be justified, and by two moves: first, bringing in a Platonic distinction between good and bad mimesis, and vindicating the good mil. I wish to thank Professor Cagliero, to whose reflections on Jacques Derrida's Otobiographies this section is indebted. 158 Daniel García Essig mesis (the allegory of the three beds), the craftsman's mimesis (for craftsman, read urbanizer or architect); second, silencing the original foundation (the troublesome one, which is not, of course, the act of an urbanizer). The poet is the defendant, but he will be magnanimously pardoned, on the basis of a deal I'll now comment on. Listen how a poet put it. In lnferno, Dante is shown the premises by Virgil. As pagan poet and, poetically, founder of Rome, Virgil has unlimited access to Hell. But there is a point where Virgil is at a loss, impotent. At the beginning of Canto IX, when they reach «lower Hell», the gates of the city of Dite are closed to them. The scene is comical in the incongruity of its sudden suspense: the Gorgon, the Medusa, looming threateningly over the two poets, is being egged on hysterically by the Furies, who urge her to take revenge-on Virgil and his fellow -traveller-for the action of Theseus. Theseus, you know, carne to Hell to carry away Proserpina. That is, the two poets are suspected of attempting to plunder Hell, which is what they will do, in a way. Dante and Virgil are dumbfounded, they ha ve no idea what to do or say -this wasn ' ton the scr ipt. At that moment, straight from the God of Heaven, in comes an angel wbo gets the ga tes open in the twinkling of an eye. But the angel has no word for Dante or Virgil. He doesn 't even look at them: it is a purely military action. The poets, bearing a warrant issued by God, were detained: the contract must be reaffirmed, because now, in a way, Virgil and Dante are about to enter into a precinct ofthe State , where its worst enemies are confined. What is Dante telling us? Why are the po ets humiliated? This is nota <leal between th e poet and God: it is a contrae! between the poet and the republic. Dante's age is the springtime of the Christian city. lt is a period of crisis, where the limits of the civil and religious authorities are yet to be defined. The Divine Comedy is a defense of the proper sphere of civil government. The poet has been allowed in, but he is in the payroll of the State, and the first thing which must be made clear is that the State has the monopoly of foundation. Th e nature of the first foundation must remain silenced, its contingency must be erased. The State imposes a division between public and prívate: the individual ha s a purely theoretical right to privacy. But wi thout privacy, there is no creation. And this is what the poet gets as his part in the <leal. Let us see what is the experience of privacy in the cit y, and two ways in which the poet breaks th e contract: w e' ll see that she hides, and not content with that, she starts trouble. The concept of public and prívate as a duality has its origins in the civilization of the city. I will attempt now to explain how the duality derives from the spa tial paradoxes whi ch are inherent to th e idea of city (one of which was mentioned above: we don 't see the ci ty as a whole; who claims to see it?). The exploration of the id eas of space and city will lead us to posit two images of the city. There cannot be privacy, or publicity, without space (it is impossible to conceive privacy otherwise than co nnected to the idea of space). Therefore, in attempting to address the duality private/public, we must address space, and try to define what is the space of the ci ty. One thing captures our attention immediate ly : in order to do this, we Thinking City, Writing City 159 need categories, such as EXTERIOR/INTERIOR, LIMIT, CENTER, SURFACE: how do they work in connection with the city? Let us start with «the interior of the city». The phrase is semantically dubious. So we ask, what is blocking the metaphor? Why can we, on the other hand, quite naturally refer to «the interior of a country »? lfwe can, it is because there is a hypermetaphor which can be verbalized thus: COUNTRIES ARE LIMITED SPACES. Limits are here more important than centers: one can perhaps speak of «spaces» ( «areas») without centres («centre» is an ancillary category). Limi ts are crucial: no country without limits. And precisely, it is difficult to determine exactly where the limit of the city is. Another way to put this is by considering the notion of the «outside». If there is a space, there must be an «outside»: the only point of view from which the outside appears to be «visible» -in inverted commas, naturally-is from that ofthe planifier: when there is a plan and no more, an outside can indeed be pointed at. However, even as the city grows away, and something new appears besides the plan, that privileged point of view is no longer privileged, but all the contrary. The city is detached, alienated from its planifier. The plan cannot grow, the city will, encroaching precisely on «the outside». It is dubious that the interface between inside and outside will prove very use ful. What of the notion of surface? On the face of it, it seems even less promising, since then there can hardly be an interface (what shall we call what is not on the surface? where is it?) Yet, it is a fact that layers, strata, appear to be inseparable from our image of cities: in a cit y, you walk on a !ayer, which is on top of another (in the case of archaelogy, this is not a mere metaphor). Archaelogy is digging into the pa s t: exact ly what Joachim du Bellay instructs us to do with Rome in Les Antiquités de Rome, one of the first books about a city. Ata given moment, a city is only surface. Next, I want to take the notion of hiding. Privacy means hiding. We can have our own axiology here, and ask, is a city more or less hider-friendly? We may have pure exterior. In this case, to «City», we append a French adjective which has no exact eq uival en t in English: uni. It does mean «united», but it also means «homogeneous )>, and also, natural, free from artífice or sophistication. Here we meet our old friends nature and culture. Acity where you cannot hide, where you are absolutely visible. All natural, guaranteed aseptic. And everything is controlled by the Eye: you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, as the poli ce would say. It becarne an obsession for planners in the late l 9th century to flatten, erase, the slums, in order to destroy hide-outs (in Haussman 's Paris, for instance, avenues had to be wide enough for policemen on horseback to suppress demonstrations: this was said openly). In the ville unie , everything is public. However, there's no way, really, that even this ideal city will manage to be kept ironed out and starche d. Tension provokes a distortion ofthe plan: th e «v ille unie» will inevitably tend to crumple. Surface has to keep growing faster and faster and spa ce changes fr om two-to three-dimensional -pop ulation always increases at a rhythm 160 Daniel García Essig which the planner cannot foresee. A rumple to hide in is what you have if you manage to dig a hole. Next, you dig a hole within that hole: holes to hide in. A fractal model, and it ali has caved in, as it were. With the proliferation of hollows, we reach a transgression of topology: the surface of the hollow becomes interna!, the hole is detached like a bubble. It is no longer a hollow but an inner sphere (an interna! closed surface). The bubble within the system, if you want. I propose we label this «interna! city», provisionally. It is important to underline both the imaginative appeal and the physical implausibility ofthis interior city: in the best figurations of it, those of Dante, Piranesi and Escher, the impossibl e geometry, the inconsistency of pers pe ctive -the center becoming the way of escape, are hidden behind realism of description/depiction. Creation involves privacy. We 'll leave it at that. No time. Remember that the act of creation was already said to be blasphemous. What else is it that the creator <loes in her sphere which merits such severity? The creator is locked up, away from s ight , in her cell. She's cheating!: the eye of authority is denied access to that innennost recess. It is in the interest in the artist that the cily should be as infernal as possible. The underground escapes control. First breach of contract, first reversa!. An example of this in the top os of light. Artificial light is vital in the interior city. There is no exterior: the interior city is dark; it is illuminated from within and ali the light there is is artificial (originally, the light of fire). It is a realm of shadows, as Rembrandt and Goya well knew. Ali great artists will revel in this lurid light. Notice in this respect the importance of the theme of electricity in contemporary American ficlion (for instance, in Ralph Ellison'slnvisible Man and in the episode ofByron the Bulb in Gravity's Rainbow ). What about the act of reading? The Classical locus of reading is also a s pher e: the reading room. And just as creation was said to be si lence, the Classical form of reading is silent reading. This is a created institution: even Chaucer, at the beginning of The Book of the Duches se, reports suffering from insomnia and having somebody read him a book2. So the institution was not universal in the 14th century. All this business, in prívate spheres, requires a world madc up of bubbles, holes. Literature, after Dante and Chaucer, is thus made possible by the city. The paradox of the city, the other s ide of the coin, is that the more privacy there is , the more solitude. This confirms the infernal status of the city. The play of spheres might be prosaically represented by a formula: PRIVATE-PRIVATE At this point, the contract between th e writer and the State, of which we had an early version, needs to be revised. In the run-up to the period of Realism, it all became a question of anchoring mime sis-to the public good. Since Iit erat ur e requires privacy at 2. Professor Bob Shephard pointed this out to me . Thinking City, Writing City 161 both ends, it contributes to constructing the «private citizen», the citizen as the reader of fictions, as consumer of worlds. It has been made clear to the writer that these ought to be complete, coherent worlds --complete should not be confused with «exhaustive>>-, as opposed to the incomplete worlds of Medieval romance. But you don't want worlds to be as similar to the «real world» that the citizens are misled. At the same time, you are wary of providing ways of escape to the citizens. You are gently told to mind your business. The State to the writer: «you, writer, for God 's sake, keep to your place, make up your mind where you are going to settle down, anddon't wander around». But as long as the authorminds herown business, the number of prívate readers may and will keep growing: bigger and bigger audiences. Slowly, literature, fiction especially, became a matter of public interest, for good and bad. Mi - mesis, however, is still mimesis, the evil one, the reprobate. We reach a point where our formula might be best changed to: PRIVATE-PUBLIC With the city now become like a sponge, surface can be as interior as you want. Here we come up with another reversal: between public and prívate. Hollows in effect are become surfaces. The more hollows there are, the more difficult it is to get from one to another cell -and yet the closer they stand to one another. (This is the paradox of the labyrinth). Proximity and isolation have now to be taken together (thence the famous aphorism that one is never so lonely as in a crowd). Melville 's problem in «Bartleby» -and we '11 see Ellison posing it one century later -is, OK, Jet 's ha ve a story, where am I to stand? how is it possible to tell a story from nowhere? One tends to forget that not only Bartleby, but the narrator, have no place of their own: the lawyer is inextricably bound up in a bundle of incongruent plane s. After introducing himself as a private public man, the narrator goes on to describe in sorne detail the geometry of his office. And a few paragraphs later, he has this fl abbergasting remark: «! procured a high greenfolding screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove himfrom my voice. And thus, in a manne1; privacy and society were conjoined» (Melville 67). «Bartleby», or «things that should happen privately take place in public» - which, by the way, is the essence of Sade 's topology. What happens when, as «Bartleby» 's narrator puts it, we «{throwj open these doors»? It's a honeycomb, what we get when we take away one of the separating cloisons. The secret cell becomes absolutely public. Ponder what «gopher» means, its etymology, its use in American culture, and even its use in Internet: and yet the etymology is from the French «gaufre», Manneken Pis's familiar waffle. So, the secret cell becomes absolutely public. This opening up of the cell gives origin to the most radical irregularity in the city: what is most prívate becoming public, suddenly. «Amazing thickness», indeed: 162 Daniel García Essig The yard was entirely qui et. It was not accessible to the common prisoners. The surrounding walls, of amazing thickness, kept off all sounds behind them. The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upan me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew underfoot. The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein, by sorne strange magic, through che clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung. (Melville 98) What is modem narrative? We find ourselves listening to a voice, and, maybe , we shouldn 't be listening. Was it in tended for us to hear? Take the prologue to Invisible Man: there is no evidence that the invisible man's act ofnarration takes place outside : his voice, it is true, is heard outside. The narrator has left his hide-out, but gone in again, his voice is simultaneously on both sides of the partition. If we have a physical image of the narrator's body at ali, it is rather like the image we have of underground animals shown inside their burrows in documentals -gophers, saywhere we wonder where the camera was placed. What does the act of constructing fictions create? What is this space like? To envision the ideas of absolute privacy and absolute publicity, at one and the same time, one has to open oneself to the notion of «folding» or «fold». According to Webster's New World Dictionary, «to fold» i s: 1. a) to bend or press (something) so that one part is over another; double up on itself ... b) to make more compact by so doubling a number oftimes 2. to draw together and intertwine So, the idea oftwo places at once. Language in fiction, for instance, is something we use daily, yet it is something else as well. In terrns of city, this translates into the «folded city» -folded onto itself- . lt is by this that we have exploded the notion of the old ville unie. What the fiction of the city ushers in is the ville pliée, to substitute the provisional «interna! city» (the reason for bringing in the French is not only symmetry, but Gilles Deleuze's notion of pli in the book by the same title; it is for him a central feature of the Baroque mentality). Fold or layer? One of my favourite versions of th e ville pliée is small and homely: sitting at the centre of World War Two London, Ty rone Slothrop's desk is a city ali of its own: Tantivy shares it with an American colleague, Lt. Tyrone Slothrop ... Tantivy's desk is neat, Slothrop's is a godawful mess. It hasn't been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, ove ra base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea and coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, ve 1y fine black debris picked andflungfrom typewriter ribhons, decomposing litermy paste, broken aspirins ground to powde1: Then comes a scatter of paperclips ... above that a /ayer offorgo tt en memoranda ... an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle ... Tackled to the wall next to Slothrop's desk is a map of London ... (Pynchon 18). Thinking City, Writing City 163 Note that this is our introduction to Tyrone Slothrop, the central character of the book. So, we have two reversals: the reversa! of axiology and the reversa! ofthe duality public/private. Before we move on, Jet us remain poised to see the origin of one central topos of city. In la ville unie, one is always at the same place (everything is the same: change is impossible, and so is movement): we don 't get the feeling that Dante and Virgil travel. So how did the realization of «le voyage» appear? In the city of narrative, which has suffered those inversions, there indeed voyage is conceivable, and in many guises. This travelling must of necessity be tortuous, intestine: the epitome of a ville pliée is that which can be explored through the sewer, like Boston in Gravity's Rainbow. And voyage is at the same time way in, way out. If the paradox can be sol ved, we are in a ville unie. In other words, you can never really escape from a city (this is the basis of the structure and theme of Burroughs 's Naked Lunch). And you shouldn 't: fight on ! But, inevitably, because it is impossible, the yearning for escape is ever present in literature (as we know since Kerouac's On the Road, to mention another Beat). Justas we are about to go on to the third sense, one question about objects. One characteristic of cities is excess, abundance and superfluity: there is more than we can use, at any moment. What happens with these supererogatory objects? Eitherthey sink down and take their place in the jigsaw puzzle, becoming invisible, or they wak.en our attention by themselves. We are arrested, taken in by the object, possibly in more senses than one. There is no ethic judgement in this: simply the generalization of incertitude. The aesthetic of the city? A constant circulation of objects. No hierarchy. Remember which was the first mention of hierarchy? In mimesis. Yes, this directly leads to a third and last inversion. Now we are into the third sense of writing city. If the ethos of Realism is one of exclusion or selection, think of what is «left in». The proliferation of objects in our lives in the cities means that Realism becomes the proliferation of copies. Since those things are themselves ambiguous (they may be emancipated from meaning or utility), R ea listic mimesis ends up enshrining imitations of objects qua objects. In spite of its avowed intentions, Realism becomes a fraud: the pretension of transparency, of «showing» only enshrines the triumph of the simulacra. The author may flinch from the foil implication of this fact, and thereupon cling to the transitive sense. Altematively, if mass consumption runs wild, why shouldn't mimesis? It has always been condemned, suspect. Now it's got the opportunity to really misbehave. The emblern of this is Williarn Gaddis 's The Recognitions, a novel about sham, voyage and creation. And a novel where cities are crucial, although you would rarely find it in anthologies of urban description. Churning out copies: things as things. Exhaustive inventories, worlds so cxhaustive and yet so incoherent, that they end up bending our own snug world. And at this point, the question may well come up, the damning question, which had never been asked: what is the original?